Introduce: Inara + Market Connector and player advertising in discords
Are you new?
This would be irrelevant anyway if we could create our own missions
Mind numbingly boring hauling
- Thread starter Peter Mannion
- Start date
Are you new?
This would be irrelevant anyway if we could create our own missions
"You need to be near a range of supply chains all of which have slightly different issues and you'll have to think about more than one thing at once and do a bit of data-driven looping" is entirely real. It also appears to be the piece of this that people realllllllly don't like.
I never bothered with the 3rd party stuff, I know how to trade. GG.
You yourself pointed out earlier it's impossible to advertise these effectively.
If you're going to invoke the Efficient Market Hypothesis you need to include the "perfect information" assumption, otherwise you are writing, to use your earlier coinage, a nothingburger.
I like INARA and EDMC them a great deal. Not to make credits, but to find commodities. And other info.
Players in the <5 Billion part of the spectrum don't remain there very long. A player motivated to do pretty much any activity in ED can become a credit mega billionaire doing whatever activities they enjoy.
Examples:
Exobiology Elite Rank = 8.4 Billion.
Exobiology Elite V Rank = 30.5 Billion
Community Goals: I paid for my fleet carrier with a single hauling CG.
Various Thargoid Events (during war) - anybody could rake in mega billions. Combat, passengers, hauling, etc.
Powerplay 2.0 - I didn't count, but I think I got maybe
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What game have you been playing??? What the heck do you think all those cargo racks that have been around since the start of the game are for? Could it be the MANUAL SCHLEPPING OF CRAP FROM ONE END OF THE UNIVERSE TO ANOTHER? Trading has always been a huge part of Elite. To get Elite trading status, you have to schlepp billions of credits worth of goods from one end of the universe to the other. Only difference is now, you not only get extra credits, you also add stations in your own budding system.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.
Outside of elite there are several games whose goal is simply schlepping stuff from place to place. Don't pretend that just because you don't like it that there's no appeal and doesn't draw players.
You gotta admit the hauling for Colonisation is different than trade hauling previously in this game.
When I used to do lots of trade there was a fair amount of thought that went into it. Figuring out good trade routes, optimizing my load as I travel from one station to another, etc. I actually had spreadsheets and a notebook! Whereas hauling stuff for colonisation is pure 100% non-thinking grunt work. It is like doing Robigo runs, only x100.
What social options exist to 'ask them nicely' in the game? If you haven't already friended them you can't ask them anything. Not all have large discord groups.
You can't set the delta high enough to get Inra commanders interested. I can get deliveries to my carrier to some degree with about 50K per unit on most commodities. But there is nobody that's going to be doing that from carrier to site. You'd also have to pull your pants around your ankles to even develop the delta which will leave you to be robbed blind by someone (and you'll have no way to know who).
Now if we could set the same for our construction market as we can for the carrier where I can offer 50 or 100K per unit to get it delivered that would probably allow at least some of it to happen and some wealth might even move around between players.
Offering a refinery contact at player carriers would even allow players to help supply the tight markets through mining if a less obnoxious 3/2 ratio was was used for conversion and a reason to even look at rocky rings. With it being limited to almost only ground bases or outposts its basically useless because the turn around time is too high and the loss is really horrible. Your far better off just hunting up an outpost refinery than hauling from carrier to ground then ground to construction with 50% converted load.
But as always the "That's the way it was and we we liked it brigade have arrived" to denounce any suggestion it could be better.
I do have a notebook for this. I have a list of goods common to each construction type and unique ones. Which nearby systems have the best supply of each. Distance from each other. Backups for steel and insulating membranes since they seem to run out and have supply issues. Best routes to maximize stock without leaving empty space and minimize jumps. Plus theres emergency power cells which are only sold 200+ light years away. It's only steel and aluminum that require no thought (minus needing 3 backups for steel) because they take several trips each. Tourist settlements are a fun alternative since their steel and aluminum requirements are loooow while having lots of food and booze requirements at weird amounts.
Of course it works. Any Inara commander that docks at that market and feeds the data, the architect being one, that becomes a searchable place to sell your load of Insulating Membrane. I know it works because my carrier has been filled by players in systems nobody is in unless they are filling my carrier. Now in-game only, that's true. No way you would know it's there unless it showed up in a nearby "Also consumed by" list. Which it should.
Wow, to think I book marked 3 locations for 95% of the commodities I ever need. And I brainlessly fly back-and-forth. The other 5% I simply follow the nearby systems INARA tells me to fly to and that's pretty much it. For the smaller facilities I kept track of the commodities on paper, but the bigger ones don't matter, the quantities are just so big. I wouldn't call building a Coriolis or Orbis a "high level thinking activity". Edit: I suppose similar to some of the other ED activities.
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Yikes.
i've been in the <5billion (spare cash) for several years. This is the reality of the casual player, a community that seems to be ignored in this forum/thread
We must be in different parts around the bubble. And who said anything about a Coriolis or orbis? Those are group efforts. I wouldn't really try to complete them on my own in any sort of serious fashion, I just use my orbis construction site for overflow.
You do know there are dozens of other things to build, yes? You can exceed the benefits of a Coriolis with a few cheaper settlements and a single colony planetary outpost.
a) Yes I have built a reasonable collection of facilities.
b) I have watched a silly amount of late-night shows in the last two weeks while space hauling.
c) Tell me the great benefit you get from your planetary outpost port? I'm not really basking in the benefits of mine.
d) A Coriolis is for the large orbital pad, shipyard and population. (or much better an orbis).
e) Assuming a decent colony, I'm not sure how some cheeper settlements exceeds the benefits of a single Coriolis. Certainly the settlements are needed to make the Coriolis function better.
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In summary on this post so far - the only arguments i've seen against these concepts are the following (in order of least delusional to most imo):
- "This will waste dev time. They should spend time on other features. Bigger priorities." (reasonable nerds)
- "This feature wont work because credits are worthless. Nobody will haul for credits." (ignoring that carrier p2p carrier economy exists) (in denial ultra-rich speculation nerds)
- "Its lazy if you dont haul every ton yourself. You don't deserve colonisation if you dont haul everything" (angry hauling/realism nerds)
- "This feature isn't needed because we have hopes and prayers that all of our hauling will be magically completed if we're all kind" (spiritual/religious nerds)
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IMO there are better improvements that could be made to colonization. This isn't a 'bad' idea, it just wouldn't be high on my list.
Not 'nobody'. But not a huge amount. Look at how awful the last CGs were. I did a couple loads for each and was in the top 50% in both. And those CGs had an actual benefit to human kind and the gaming world! Some cmdrs hauled a bunch because they thought it was important, but overall.... meh.
I haven't read through the whole thread, but I am guessing this point is more directed at the idea of NPCs hauling on behalf of the cmdr. Possibly AFK or when logged off. I can see this not being popular.
Ha ha!
No need even for extra mats. Missions already have a value of rewards attached, for example basic credits. Colonisation ship / Construction buys commodities with fixed prices. Missions have a UI/Logic for selecting rewards. Combine all that - player fixes some problem for an NPC (completes a mission) -> NPC delivers specific commodity of the same value as credits reward for the mission to Colonisation Ship / Construction site.
To simplify implementation - Colonisation ship and each Construction site has it's own mission board, and completed missions count for that specific project progress. Mission generation can even pre-select commodities rewards based on what else is left on the list.
Players can haul, can do missions, other players in the game can also have extra reason/rp/interest to do missions in new systems for a different reason than in established system, etc.
There could be an obvious problem - it could be hard to spawn missions with only undevelloped systems around, and it could also impact variety. But that could be solved by introducing a longer range missions of various types/activities, or it could be used to slow down / restrict this approach so it won't overperform the main hauling option.
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We should also be able to reliably hire NPCs to do bounty hunting and CZs for us. Some of us would like to accumulate bounty vouchers and win wars without having to engage in combat.
And exploration! We should be able to explore the galaxy by sitting docked in a Coriolis (paid for with credits) while our NPC minions go out and do all the game loops for us.
We can just sit there and watch the numbers go up and down: bounties, bonds, items to deliver, systems colonised, ELW discovered, plants scanned, neutron stars jumped..
Maybe our NPCs can bring back snapshots of battles they fight and the exotic systems they find.
This is the kind of compelling gameplay we all need; the arguments are irrefutable!