Mind numbingly boring hauling

Peter Mannion

P
System colonisation needs some supporting features such as:
  • The ability for us to setup our own missions/contracts for other players to complete (e.g We could say haul X amount of Steel to Colony ship in Y location for reward Z)
  • The ability to reliably hire NPC's/Players to do hauling.
All carrier to colony ship hauling has to be done by the system architect as we cannot set sufficient price delta to incentivise other players - click here for context figures. Colonisation's grind is so high (without the necessary frameworks to support it) that it leaves system architects very little time to do anything other than hauling.

Alternatives:
  • At least some long requested QoL features such as configurable key-bind for supercruise assist and faster way to load up cargo onto ship from carrier storage would ease the lobotomy inducing grind.
  • A cheaper alternative (from a dev POV) is reducing the material requirements for system col ... but that will enrage certain pro-grind sections of the community 🤷‍♂️

Either way - something needs to be done to balance this. System colonisation has the potential to be so much more than reskinned hauling
 
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tomalus

T
They can build more in the same time if the req are reduced. Its a win win for everyone.
Normal players who dont have time to haul 16 hours per day can complete their one system and have fun.
Grinders who play 16 hours per day can colonize more in the same time.
 

DjVortex

DjVortex
Not every type of gameplay is for everybody. You could just as well say "fishing is mind numbingly boring", and for many people that would be quite true. However, other people like it, and do it regularly. Some people will sit there with a fishing rod for hours even if they don't catch a single fish, and be content. Most people who go fishing don't even care if they catch any fish or not. Sure, it's a nice bonus if they do, but that's not the main reason to go there.
 

Peter Mannion

P
DjVortex said:
Not every type of gameplay is for everybody. You could just as well say "fishing is mind numbingly boring", and for many people that would be quite true. However, other people like it, and do it regularly. Some people will sit there with a fishing rod for hours even if they don't catch a single fish, and be content. Most people who go fishing don't even care if they catch any fish or not. Sure, it's a nice bonus if they do, but that's not the main reason to go there.
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Typical forum response 101 of "if you don't like it don't play it" - I have to disagree

Good and complex game design is creating features that can by enjoyed/interacted with by more than one gameplay category/loop.

Using your analogy - this is why in society we have the ability to hire fisherman to fish for us. This turns the act of fishing from a 1 dimensional action into an industry - allowing for the creation of fishmongers, restaurants, supermarkets etc.

System colonisation needs this to be enjoyed by more than the diehard haulers (a minority % of the playerbase)
 
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S0rkvild

S0rkvild
Loading a carrier with materials. Unloading a carrier (way slower). Repeat dozens of times. Fingers on keyboard move in an automated manner. You slowly count how many courses are left. Anything else is more exciting than this.
At current point I quit colonization game. Tired of building stations and outposts that do not produce anything. Everything is too vague, not clear, lacking of documentation. Hauling more to see how things work - sorry but no. Instead of getting a really interesting system that should keep our enthusiasm and attention they delivered pretty boring mechanics and the only thing that is supposed to keep our attention is figuring it how things works, by building more and observing.
 

vicwarrior

vicwarrior
Theres a feedback thread in news & bulletins, if i may take the opportunity to shill my post, please do check it out here. Yeah, monoactivity grind is absolutely unnaceptable 10 years into the game, i really expected better after they released pp2.

On a different note, if helldivers has taught me anything is that another way of making your feedback hit the corporate KPIs is the steam reviews.

Looking forward to colonisation 2.0, hopefully this time it doesn't take 9 years to get fixed.
 

Weps

Weps
Peter Mannion said:
The ability for us to setup our own missions for other players to complete
Click to expand...
Allegedly this is exactly what the summer (August?) Vanguards update is going to provide. As a squadron leader you will be able to find interested players (not sure how that is going to work, but was hinted at in the stream), put rewards in a bank that they will have access to, and set up goals which are essentially mission objectives.
Peter Mannion said:
All carrier to colony ship hauling has to be done by the system architect as we cannot set sufficient price delta to incentivise other players.
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Out of curiosity (not doing colonisation at this time), what is the minimum % you can price on the carrier and what is the fixed % set on the colonisation ship? What's the actual margin?
 

Peter Mannion

P
Jmanis said:
Everything's impossible when you just don't try. Players will help, you just need to motivate them.
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Let's not build a delusional narrative on this.

I can't accept "community spirit" and charity as genuine concrete ways for players to haul for you. Unless you're well known or already part of a large group, convincing this charity work is unrealistic - especially when most people have their own colonisation objectives to worry about.

As the 4 week deadline looms, the number of unanswered desperate calls for colonisation help I've seen in the numerous discords I'm in supports this.
 
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Peter Mannion

P
Weps said:
Allegedly this is exactly what the summer (August?) Vanguards update is going to provide. As a squadron leader you will be able to find interested players (not sure how that is going to work, but was hinted at in the stream), put rewards in a bank that they will have access to, and set up goals which are essentially mission objectives.

Out of curiosity (not doing colonisation at this time), what is the minimum % you can price on the carrier and what is the fixed % set on the colonisation ship? What's the actual margin?
Click to expand...
Didn't put 2 and 2 together on this. Maybe Vanguards will help! However, again this is only locked to the squadron leader id guess? Would be nice for solo/non leader players to set up their own missions/contracts potentially.

Shipping my own commodities from the carrier (price 0) to the colony ship in a cutter nets around 3.5mill per trip i've found. Peanuts compared to what traders could earn abundantly elsewhere.
 

Peter Mannion

P
SteveWW57 said:
The sell price can be set very low so that the hauler earns more than they otherwise would.
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Still, it's nothing compared to what haulers could earn elsewhere. Even if I gave away the commodities for free from my carrier, it still wouldn't be enough to incentivise other players to haul for me.

For context: On a recent carrier buy order I put in I had to set a profit/ton of around 25-30k to incentivise a single person to haul for me. The maximum people would make hauling to the colony ship is ~5k/ton ...
 
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Titler

Titler
DjVortex said:
And that's why other players, who are ok with hauling, can help you colonize a system.
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Outside of organised guilds though, and the initial system capture, they really aren't doing that. Because the financial rewards for taking it straight to the construction site are so pathetic, even negative in a lot of places if the market at the originating station has collapsed.

Hence the need to be able to set up your own market for goods.

And before anyone says "Fleet Carriers!"... the issue is the time spent hauling; and due to the way flight time tends to compress (you can boost across great distances to shorten it, but will always have the 7 second slow down malarky at the end no matter how short or far you've flown), delivering it from a carrier, or from a nearby system isn't really all that different. The grind is still there, and largely the same time sink. You'd be spending more money but still having to do roughly the same amount of work in delivery.

Carriers only really make sense when the resources are so far away you can't really shuttle them without multiple hops, with a possible refueling docking along the way back when loaded. But in those cases, everyone else's fleet carrier is there too and everyone grabbing at the same resource have broken the market. And are losing time until the resources respawn in tiny amounts. Until FDev boost the spawn rates of resources, and now you can also get it locally again so faster to just deliver directly, rather than two hops, one to the carrier and dock, and one off again...

When people talk about wanting "Realism" in games, they aren't really being honest; in reality, human behaviour messes up even the most well designed system. Games need to be designed for a certain amount of unreality to allow fun. In this case, insisting upon the socially disconnected, in game grindset model is now distorting the market to the point that it's having to be artificially set just to make it even playable... Give us mechanisms to play as we wish, and let us spend the money to drop the colonisation grinds.

I've suggested elsewhere NPC hauling fleets, using your own ships and NPC crew that otherwise sit around and eat your profits for no real gain; but there are lots of other ideas. Right now though, it's just not working as you state, and any student of human nature could have predicted. People aren't really delivering to other people only to lose money in doing so.
 

metatheurgist

metatheurgist
The problem is the game mechanic does not fit the game. In a proper god game/command and control game you don't do stuff like this personally. You send and direct resources and minions around to do your bidding with a click of a mouse and the game you play is the strategic game. Supply, conflict, resource management because that's the fun stuff. The manual schlepping of crap from one end of the universe to another is not something anyone wants to do. But that's what happens when you keep shoehorning the wrong game mechanics into a game about manually flying a spaceship. The game was never designed to do this rubbish, that's why it's clunky as hell. 🤷‍♂️

I don't know what game Frontier have made but it's not Elite.
 

Peter Mannion

P
metatheurgist said:
The problem is the game mechanic does not fit the game. In a proper god game/command and control game you don't do stuff like this personally. You send and direct resources and minions around to do your bidding with a click of a mouse and the game you play is the strategic game. Supply, conflict, resource management because that's the fun stuff. The manual schlepping of crap from one end of the universe to another is not something anyone wants to do. But that's what happens when you keep shoehorning the wrong game mechanics into a game about manually flying a spaceship. The game was never designed to do this rubbish, that's why it's clunky as hell. 🤷‍♂️

I don't know what game Frontier have made but it's not Elite.
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Interesting alternative take.

I love god games and, on paper, colonisation should be my favourite feature this game has ever released. If they just finished the gameloops so that colonisation can be played as a god game/resource management it would be perfect imo.

Instead it is half-baked and doesn't have the features it needs to support itself. As a result an argument, like yours, can be made that is whether this feature is even suited to the game. Is it too conflicting from the core of Elite? Would the introduction of hiring NPC's/players and creating missions ruin existing gameloops? Is this why they didn't develop the supporting features?
 
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