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issues.frontierstore.net
In PowerPlay 2, in acquisition and reinforcement, you can earn merits for trading in commodities with a greater than 40% profit margin. The most impactful of these trades is high value metals, so buying gold or silver from infrastructure failure refineries for 4000 cr/unit and selling to an industrial station produces high merits... as long as you sell the items one by one. Selling a 792 t Cutter by hand takes about 90 minutes, and will earn around 12,000 merits. If you sold all at once, you might be lucky to get 700 merits. In this time, you cannot play the game. This is game breaking design.
Here's me selling 792 units of cheap metals in 1 h 26 minutes.
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vps3eTDxIeY
This was extremely tedious to make, and extremely tedious to watch.
The game loop should value the player's time by encouraging them to trade more, not less - by going out and finding the hard to find infrastructure failure refineries with sufficient supplies, heading back and avoiding the pirates, and then selling the goods, and then repeating that loop. Instead, the current game design only values sitting at a station and repetitively selling goods one by one. This is not playing the game, it's cheesing a broken mechanic.
Prior to Update 6, BGS had this exact same issue, where the only useful BGS trade loop was to find cheap gold, store it on your carrier, and sell it to systems one by one. This was a terrible time, because the groups with the most gold "won". The game evolved to demand-based trade, so 1x1 trade no longer worked. This was a huge improvement in the game design, and encouraged players to find high value trade loops. It made BGS work properly, by allowing bidirectional trade for the first time to boost influence and stopped one by one trade breaking BGS's design.
The argument that low merits for big sales helps new Cmdrs by making a Cobra Mk III just as effective as a Cutter is simply wrong. A new player will not know about the 1x1 sales cheese. The more experienced Cmdr in the Cutter knows about the 1x1 cheese, and they will be 10-20x more effective than the new Cmdr in the same sized ship. Please fix this to allow new Cmdrs to earn the same merits as more experienced Cmdrs by eliminating the cheese.
Please make selling all at once deliver maximum merits (so one cheap gold gives 52 merits, 100 cheap gold gives 5200 merits, etc). This will encourage players to actually play the game, find the hidden refineries, and avoid / kill pirates, and not sitting at stations.
Issue Tracker
issues.frontierstore.net
In PowerPlay 2, in acquisition and reinforcement, you can earn merits for trading in commodities with a greater than 40% profit margin. The most impactful of these trades is high value metals, so buying gold or silver from infrastructure failure refineries for 4000 cr/unit and selling to an industrial station produces high merits... as long as you sell the items one by one. Selling a 792 t Cutter by hand takes about 90 minutes, and will earn around 12,000 merits. If you sold all at once, you might be lucky to get 700 merits. In this time, you cannot play the game. This is game breaking design.
Here's me selling 792 units of cheap metals in 1 h 26 minutes.
This was extremely tedious to make, and extremely tedious to watch.
The game loop should value the player's time by encouraging them to trade more, not less - by going out and finding the hard to find infrastructure failure refineries with sufficient supplies, heading back and avoiding the pirates, and then selling the goods, and then repeating that loop. Instead, the current game design only values sitting at a station and repetitively selling goods one by one. This is not playing the game, it's cheesing a broken mechanic.
- With mining, you can sell all at once and earn maximum merits. This encourages the mining game loop.
- With donations, you can only complete all at once, and you earn maximum merits. The encourages the donation game loop.
- With trade, you have to sell one by one to earn maximum merits. This encourages not playing the game. This is broken.
Prior to Update 6, BGS had this exact same issue, where the only useful BGS trade loop was to find cheap gold, store it on your carrier, and sell it to systems one by one. This was a terrible time, because the groups with the most gold "won". The game evolved to demand-based trade, so 1x1 trade no longer worked. This was a huge improvement in the game design, and encouraged players to find high value trade loops. It made BGS work properly, by allowing bidirectional trade for the first time to boost influence and stopped one by one trade breaking BGS's design.
The argument that low merits for big sales helps new Cmdrs by making a Cobra Mk III just as effective as a Cutter is simply wrong. A new player will not know about the 1x1 sales cheese. The more experienced Cmdr in the Cutter knows about the 1x1 cheese, and they will be 10-20x more effective than the new Cmdr in the same sized ship. Please fix this to allow new Cmdrs to earn the same merits as more experienced Cmdrs by eliminating the cheese.
Please make selling all at once deliver maximum merits (so one cheap gold gives 52 merits, 100 cheap gold gives 5200 merits, etc). This will encourage players to actually play the game, find the hidden refineries, and avoid / kill pirates, and not sitting at stations.
