Since Elite is a defacto MMO we are missing some stuff (much around player-trading, which the Devs had said was coming soon in 2014).
So despite the fact that we don't even have credit training (haven't learned to walk in my metaphor): I'm going to talk about running and bring up a player exchange and how to do it without unbalancing the game.
Now: obviously any player market place is going to make certain hard things easy. Perhaps we don't want to allow (for example) meta-alloys. But I don't see that as game breaking.
What would be game-breaking is using the marketplace to instant-teleport goods to wherever the player happened to be. So here's my suggestion:
Step 1:
Add in-station storage. Limited, unlimited, globally limited (you can only have X stored at all stations combined): give us a way to fly to a station and store goods there. Limit the volume and hording shouldn't be an insurmountable issue.
We need this feature regardless because of the Engineers expansion (see the many threads on this).
Step 2:
Create an interface for players to advertise stored goods and set prices.
This is pretty straight-forward; every MMO does this... but because goods are at a specific station, there should be a filter on the "buy" screen that lets you filter offers by things like "how far away is the system its stored in" or "what faction".
Step 3:
That's about it. When someone (person A) purchases something offered on the exchange from someone else (person B), the something should stay right where it is at whatever station it is at, but be moved from player B's storage to Player A's. Player A can fly out and get it.
The fact that it doesn't move will prevent most obvious exploits related to trading, as well as prevent someone from farming some rare thing half-way across the galaxy and selling it to people who aren't there.
This really does nothing that couldn't be done by pilots coordinating on a website somewhere and getting online at the same time and jettisoning boxes. someone still has to fly to where the other is; but it prevents robbery, and adds convenience.
So despite the fact that we don't even have credit training (haven't learned to walk in my metaphor): I'm going to talk about running and bring up a player exchange and how to do it without unbalancing the game.
Now: obviously any player market place is going to make certain hard things easy. Perhaps we don't want to allow (for example) meta-alloys. But I don't see that as game breaking.
What would be game-breaking is using the marketplace to instant-teleport goods to wherever the player happened to be. So here's my suggestion:
Step 1:
Add in-station storage. Limited, unlimited, globally limited (you can only have X stored at all stations combined): give us a way to fly to a station and store goods there. Limit the volume and hording shouldn't be an insurmountable issue.
We need this feature regardless because of the Engineers expansion (see the many threads on this).
Step 2:
Create an interface for players to advertise stored goods and set prices.
This is pretty straight-forward; every MMO does this... but because goods are at a specific station, there should be a filter on the "buy" screen that lets you filter offers by things like "how far away is the system its stored in" or "what faction".
Step 3:
That's about it. When someone (person A) purchases something offered on the exchange from someone else (person B), the something should stay right where it is at whatever station it is at, but be moved from player B's storage to Player A's. Player A can fly out and get it.
The fact that it doesn't move will prevent most obvious exploits related to trading, as well as prevent someone from farming some rare thing half-way across the galaxy and selling it to people who aren't there.
This really does nothing that couldn't be done by pilots coordinating on a website somewhere and getting online at the same time and jettisoning boxes. someone still has to fly to where the other is; but it prevents robbery, and adds convenience.
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