While everyone is focused on the definitely worse situation in Colonia, where Carriers simply cannot move at all unless they spend hours mining per jump, I feel that the repeated comment of “At least in the Bubble you can buy it” is overlooking the fact that, at current prices, there doesn't seem top be a use for personal Fleet Carriers in the Bubble.
Let’s recap a bit: either as a stratagem to make upkeep seem more palatable after “graciously agreeing” to lower costs, or because the designers have never been in the same zipcode as a person actually playing the game, FDev originally came out with a certain planned budgetary distribution for Fleet Carriers. It took about five minutes for people to crunch the numbers and realize that the things would serve virtually no purpose at those costs. Fleet Carriers failed at even the most rudimentary function of carrying your fleet, given that it was both cheaper and faster to have your ships transported individually.
So they lowered the costs. Fleet Carriers launched with a slew of the expected bugs and remarkably little polish, but at the very least these giant metal penises fulfilled some basic functions, most significantly allowing you to have your whole fleet all neatly arranged in one place, which you could then move together for a perfectly fair price.
And yes, “fair”. We never had “cheap” Tritium, we head “cheaper” Tritium. Let’s say you’re jumping around the Bubble, and for simplicity’s sake let’s assume a distance of 250LY. That’s about 50 tons of the stuff (again, simplifying by not also factoring weight). At 4k per ton that’s was 200,000 credits. A full tank would round to about 4 million, for 20 jumps. To that of course you add the 10-20 million per week for maintenance plus repairs. I pay 10 million a week for my installed modules, meaning fuel was an extra 40% of costs if I could make a full tank last a week.
That was fine. That was within the scope of what made sense to pay for the convenience of having all my stuff together, and being able to engineer ships for combat while disregarding jump range. I liked that.
Then FDev screwed the pooch with LTDs, and in their haste to kill the gold rush, did what they usually do and implemented something without thinking of its wider repercussions. So now the cheapER Tritium is impossible to get unless you’re super lucky.
Let’s say a ton goes for 40k now (and that’s being optimistic) and revisit those numbers.
Wages and Maintenance: 10 million/week.
Fuel: 40 Million/week.
At 2 million PER JUMP (still assuming you’re taking conservative, 250ly jumps) a Fleet Carrier that moves around enough to justify its own existence will cost FOUR TIMES its maintenance budget in fuel only. Jumping once at half distance costs the same as the reward for killing a Cyclops, or slightly less than an average Elite mission. For reference, with the modules I have installed, that is higher than the original planned expenses for Fleet Carriers. That is, the ridiculous ones from the first Beta that FDev slashed.
No. That was not the sales pitch. They told us we could buy it. They made it buyable at reasonable prices even in the Beta. We had a nice calm month of stable prices that gave everyone the very reasonable assumption that these were the costs. These are effectively tacit promises that this is how it was meant to work, and it was under those assumptions that a lot of these carriers were bought. There was never a clear statement that the purchase of a carrier came with a mandatory hour of busywork per jump. That’s ANOTHER post-beta improvement (the reduction in time for jumps) that has now been slashed back, replacing wind-up time for mining time.
Then there is no use for these things. 14~ million a week is a reasonable cost for the relative convenience of a Carrier. Almost three times that is not.
I am playing WITH a Fleet Carrier, not playing TO HAVE a Fleet Carrier. The Carrier was ostensibly a tool meant to be used in the game, not the objective OF the game.
Telling me that I can make the money in a couple of profitable Massacre Missions that can be completed in 1.5-2 hours or so is simply another way of saying “You need to do busy work for 1.5-2 hours to even use your Carrier“. That’s a day’s game session gone exclusively into paying for fuel. It’s a chore, not a game.
The logical behavior is trying to avoid unnecessary chores, which brings me to crunch the numbers for how much it would cost to just move the ships individually, and realize that it’s cheaper do that. The Fleet Carrier thus becomes useless at carrying fleets.
Thank you, Señor Strawman, you would be endearing if you didn’t have so many real life referents here ready to make these exact same arguments with complete honesty. First of all, none of these things were apparent or, indeed, even in the game when I bought it. The Carrier was very much a nice fit for my playstile when I dumped a fortune on it originally. I would like to know whether this sudden bait and switch is intended or not.
The other problem, you useless bootlicker, is that if your response to every issue in the game were to tell people to not use it or just not play the game, then all you’d have are abandoned features on which you dropped precious development resources and time only for them to be regularly used by naught but a miserable dozen players or so. But enough about CQC. The purpose of bringing attention to these problems is to seek a solution, which once in a blue moon FDev deign themselves to provide.
So, the question would be, are these prices final or not? Because if they are, I’d like to know sooner rather than later so that I can sell that now useless hunk of metal that can no longer fulfill its primary function. The bare minimum one should be able to expect is to know what conditions in the game are a bug, and which are a feature, so that we can make choices accordingly. Did FDev MEAN to drive Tririum prices through the roof and thus severely neuter the usability of Carriers, or is this just another screwup that we can hope might or may not be fixed somewhere within the next Maha Yuga?
Let’s recap a bit: either as a stratagem to make upkeep seem more palatable after “graciously agreeing” to lower costs, or because the designers have never been in the same zipcode as a person actually playing the game, FDev originally came out with a certain planned budgetary distribution for Fleet Carriers. It took about five minutes for people to crunch the numbers and realize that the things would serve virtually no purpose at those costs. Fleet Carriers failed at even the most rudimentary function of carrying your fleet, given that it was both cheaper and faster to have your ships transported individually.
So they lowered the costs. Fleet Carriers launched with a slew of the expected bugs and remarkably little polish, but at the very least these giant metal penises fulfilled some basic functions, most significantly allowing you to have your whole fleet all neatly arranged in one place, which you could then move together for a perfectly fair price.
And yes, “fair”. We never had “cheap” Tritium, we head “cheaper” Tritium. Let’s say you’re jumping around the Bubble, and for simplicity’s sake let’s assume a distance of 250LY. That’s about 50 tons of the stuff (again, simplifying by not also factoring weight). At 4k per ton that’s was 200,000 credits. A full tank would round to about 4 million, for 20 jumps. To that of course you add the 10-20 million per week for maintenance plus repairs. I pay 10 million a week for my installed modules, meaning fuel was an extra 40% of costs if I could make a full tank last a week.
That was fine. That was within the scope of what made sense to pay for the convenience of having all my stuff together, and being able to engineer ships for combat while disregarding jump range. I liked that.
Then FDev screwed the pooch with LTDs, and in their haste to kill the gold rush, did what they usually do and implemented something without thinking of its wider repercussions. So now the cheapER Tritium is impossible to get unless you’re super lucky.
Let’s say a ton goes for 40k now (and that’s being optimistic) and revisit those numbers.
Wages and Maintenance: 10 million/week.
Fuel: 40 Million/week.
At 2 million PER JUMP (still assuming you’re taking conservative, 250ly jumps) a Fleet Carrier that moves around enough to justify its own existence will cost FOUR TIMES its maintenance budget in fuel only. Jumping once at half distance costs the same as the reward for killing a Cyclops, or slightly less than an average Elite mission. For reference, with the modules I have installed, that is higher than the original planned expenses for Fleet Carriers. That is, the ridiculous ones from the first Beta that FDev slashed.
No. That was not the sales pitch. They told us we could buy it. They made it buyable at reasonable prices even in the Beta. We had a nice calm month of stable prices that gave everyone the very reasonable assumption that these were the costs. These are effectively tacit promises that this is how it was meant to work, and it was under those assumptions that a lot of these carriers were bought. There was never a clear statement that the purchase of a carrier came with a mandatory hour of busywork per jump. That’s ANOTHER post-beta improvement (the reduction in time for jumps) that has now been slashed back, replacing wind-up time for mining time.
Then there is no use for these things. 14~ million a week is a reasonable cost for the relative convenience of a Carrier. Almost three times that is not.
I am playing WITH a Fleet Carrier, not playing TO HAVE a Fleet Carrier. The Carrier was ostensibly a tool meant to be used in the game, not the objective OF the game.
Telling me that I can make the money in a couple of profitable Massacre Missions that can be completed in 1.5-2 hours or so is simply another way of saying “You need to do busy work for 1.5-2 hours to even use your Carrier“. That’s a day’s game session gone exclusively into paying for fuel. It’s a chore, not a game.
The logical behavior is trying to avoid unnecessary chores, which brings me to crunch the numbers for how much it would cost to just move the ships individually, and realize that it’s cheaper do that. The Fleet Carrier thus becomes useless at carrying fleets.
Thank you, Señor Strawman, you would be endearing if you didn’t have so many real life referents here ready to make these exact same arguments with complete honesty. First of all, none of these things were apparent or, indeed, even in the game when I bought it. The Carrier was very much a nice fit for my playstile when I dumped a fortune on it originally. I would like to know whether this sudden bait and switch is intended or not.
The other problem, you useless bootlicker, is that if your response to every issue in the game were to tell people to not use it or just not play the game, then all you’d have are abandoned features on which you dropped precious development resources and time only for them to be regularly used by naught but a miserable dozen players or so. But enough about CQC. The purpose of bringing attention to these problems is to seek a solution, which once in a blue moon FDev deign themselves to provide.
So, the question would be, are these prices final or not? Because if they are, I’d like to know sooner rather than later so that I can sell that now useless hunk of metal that can no longer fulfill its primary function. The bare minimum one should be able to expect is to know what conditions in the game are a bug, and which are a feature, so that we can make choices accordingly. Did FDev MEAN to drive Tririum prices through the roof and thus severely neuter the usability of Carriers, or is this just another screwup that we can hope might or may not be fixed somewhere within the next Maha Yuga?
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when sadden they will have no-arx sales ... or even better - refunds on carriers.
