Is a life as a trader viable?

[Falkenherz]

trading

Viable, definitely. See my summary here:

http://falkenherz.blogspot.de/2014/08/trading-methodology.html

It is the beta, and I excpect a lot of things are going to change still. Hoping my comments over there get taken into consideration by sb at Frontier.

 

[CalUKGR]

Wow - so many great replies. I think I got my questions well and truly answered. Good to hear that life as trader in this amazing sim is definitely possible. I've had a good introduction to ED - mainly because of you guys. Also, the help I got with setting up my Thrustmaster HOTAS-X from another thread here was invaluable and has brought the whole thing to life for me.

I will definitely check out The First Great Expedition - that sounds amazing.

Thanks again to everyone. I hope don't have to bother too many of you with more n00b questions - but I'm very new to this and it is a huge galaxy out there...

*salutes*

 

[CMDR Charybdis]

If there's any kind of document that lays this all out I'd appreciate a link - any advice welcomed and appreciated.

Hi there!

This post summarises all of the design documents that describe Eliteangerous: http://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php?t=25164

 

[OlFart]

By around 5-10 times in comparison to other methods.

You are off by a pretty wide margin there. My Viper can earn about 20,000 per 30 minutes or something in a distress call. In my Type-9, I could probably in 1-2 million in the same amount of time. So... 100 times more, pretty much.

 

[ICDP]

Earning money by trading is laughably easy. I got sick of losing fully loaded Vipers hunting pirates. Even if you killed 10+ pirates you would not break even. I ended resetting my save to see how lucrative trading could be.

In 2 evenings I earned 400,000 credits starting from a Sidewinder. It took one evening to go from a Sidewinder to a Hauler, then the money started flying in. A very short time in a Cobra got me enough for a Lakon type 6. It is possible to make well over 100,000 credits per run in one of these ships.

I stopped playing because making that kind of money per run in absolutely zero danger was/is boring. In every ship I bought the first thing I did was loose all weapons. I have been flying in and out of anarchy systems with complete impunity. Just boost away and engage Frameshft, even in a Hauler I never had any problems outrunning NPC Vipers.

FD have a lot of balancing to do, one of the biggest ones is to reduce profit form trading by a factor of ~20. They also need to increase the danger by a factor of about 100. If I enter an Anarchy system with a Hauler full of expensive cargo and no weapons, I should absolutely expect to die and lose everything. Conversely if I stick to safe systems my profit margins should be much, much lower.

 

[trekman]

I just wondered, because I'm terrible at combat and don't really want to become an ace pilot; I'm more interested in life as a for-hire cargo pilot. Is this possible? I'm a n00b round here (only got the sim yesterday, as matter of fact), but I really enjoy just collecting delivery run missions, seeing them through and pocketing the profits. I'd quite like to get into some trading, perhaps eventually running a business with several transports on the go.

Trading is definitely viable way to make money. I've been watching a guy on twitch fairly rapidly make over 7 million credits just trading and not doing any mission,bounty hunting or pirating. I'm not sure if you'll be able to have several transports on the go though any time soon since I havent seen that feature mentioned although I could be wrong.

Anyway if you're interested that twitch stream that I mentioned can be found at www.twitch.tv/fireytoad its a really good, friendly stream and a lot of fun.

 

[dumbo]

FD have a lot of balancing to do, one of the biggest ones is to reduce profit form trading by a factor of ~20. No that is not an exaggeration.

The problem is not profit but scaling.

You trade goods in a sidewinder, you carry 4 at a time. Profit is 4x.
You trade goods in a hauler, you carry 16 at a time. Profit is 16x.
You trade goods in a lakon-6, you carry 100 at a time. Profit is 100x.

No other activity scales in such a crazy manner.

 

[VR jefranklin18]

The problem is not profit but scaling.

You trade goods in a sidewinder, you carry 4 at a time. Profit is 4x.
You trade goods in a hauler, you carry 16 at a time. Profit is 16x.
You trade goods in a lakon-6, you carry 100 at a time. Profit is 100x.

No other activity scales in such a crazy manner.

But that has always been the case. The profit runs in a Panther clipper in FFE were borderline insane. I suspect/hope ED will offer more for the trader, but I intend to make millions trading before going on a deep space exploration.

 

[Dr.Dag]

But that has always been the case. The profit runs in a Panther clipper in FFE were borderline insane. I suspect/hope ED will offer more for the trader, but I intend to make millions trading before going on a deep space exploration.

Ah yes, the Panther.

"If you can afford it, why do you actually work?"

I loved that beast. I did the same, make loads of money, then go out there and explore.

Dag

 

[Mooncusser]

In essence, trading is the core of the Elite franchise. The original's premise was that you were a trader making your way in some sort of a "wild west" space atmosphere (yes, I get the oxymoron) where you needed to be a decent gunslinger to survive the occasional attack.

This will be the first installment of Elite that really allows the freedom for a player to be something else - like a pirate or bounty hunter (or miner or explorer).

My hope is that they expand trading greatly, from simply moving goods from one location to another, to really engaging in the development of the world(s). After a while, that will provide a much greater incentive to trade and move goods than just making profit. (It would be much more interesting to foster the growth of a colony or the development of an anarchy mining colony into a truly developed system.)

That said, in Elite, you have to be a bit of a Jack of all trades. Maybe you won't want to be a full time gunslinger - but you're sure going to have to know how to handle a gun just to survive the occasional attack.

Also, as a trader you will be a bit of a target for many of the more armed players out there. There's nothing wrong with that as long as you accept the role and realize that, just like in a game of tag, you're probably eventually going to get caught...

 

[CalUKGR]

Trading is definitely viable way to make money. I've been watching a guy on twitch fairly rapidly make over 7 million credits just trading and not doing any mission,bounty hunting or pirating. I'm not sure if you'll be able to have several transports on the go though any time soon since I havent seen that feature mentioned although I could be wrong.

Anyway if you're interested that twitch stream that I mentioned can be found at www.twitch.tv/fireytoad its a really good, friendly stream and a lot of fun.

Thank you - I can't seem to find the particular stream you mention on that link. Any chance you could put a direct link to the video in question? Much appreciated.

 

[Fenris Wolf]

The problem is not profit but scaling.

You trade goods in a sidewinder, you carry 4 at a time. Profit is 4x.
You trade goods in a hauler, you carry 16 at a time. Profit is 16x.
You trade goods in a lakon-6, you carry 100 at a time. Profit is 100x.

No other activity scales in such a crazy manner.

It works that way in real life as well...

If I buy 16 apples at 40p per apple it costs me £6.40

I sell them at 65p, that is a profit of 25p per apple = £10.40 (£4.00 profit)

Now, if I have a larger car and I can buy 100 apples (£40) and sell them at 65p each then I get £65, or which £25 is profit.

It's not crazy, it is just normal

 

[heartorhead]

Trading could be solved more like in Port Royale 3 game. You buy/sell many cargo units price rises/falls when there is shortage/abundace of cargo.
I think right now there are too many units of traded cargo at stations.

Another thing is that right now we how zero cargo loading times. Loading/Unloading 100 tonnes of cargo in an instant? FD should add some time to cargo operations like 1 second wait per 2 tonnes of cargo load/unload.

 

[Mysteron]

Lakon type 9

At one point I was flying around in a Lakon type 9 trying to trade up enough cash for an Anaconda. I was making around 500,000 credits per run with the Lakon's belly full of cargo. I was flying my Anaconda within days.

 

[Patrick_68000]

I just wondered, because I'm terrible at combat and don't really want to become an ace pilot

Make only trade will not prevent you from becoming Elite

 

[VR jefranklin18]

Ah yes, the Panther.

"If you can afford it, why do you actually work?"

I loved that beast. I did the same, make loads of money, then go out there and explore.

Dag

I equipped mine with double plasma accelerators and went into the anarchy systems for a little Elite rating boosting

 

[Mikkel Toxwenius]

It works that way in real life as well...

If I buy 16 apples at 40p per apple it costs me £6.40

I sell them at 65p, that is a profit of 25p per apple = £10.40 (£4.00 profit)

Now, if I have a larger car and I can buy 100 apples (£40) and sell them at 65p each then I get £65, or which £25 is profit.

It's not crazy, it is just normal

The problem right now is that there are no risks or challenges with trading vast amount of goods, but I hope that is just because of beta. In the final game I hope the risk will increase the more volume you trade. For example, a large cargo vessel would be much more susceptible to attack by more and stronger pirates or enemies (both npc and players) because of the large cargo being worth a huge amount of cash + the owner of said cargo ship can be expected to be much richer and thus will be easier to extort for higher amounts of cash (will it be possible to transfer cash between players directly?). also, while big cargo ships should be able to defend themselves, they should have considerable penalties to combat, like slower turn rate, slower max speed, slower acceleration; they shouldn't be able to perform like true battleships. But I am a fan of tradeoffs so it would be nice if you could exchange cargo space for outfit upgrades. Like install an extra shield generator, but sacrifices 50 tonnes of cargo space etc. kinda like how it worked in Escape Velocity (but also kinda like it worked in Frontier Elite 2, where you could install a huge amount of shields on the panther clipper to make it a heavily armored tank in space).