I'm regularly trashing/vendorizing the items needed to upgrade the plasma and laser weapons while slowly acquiring the items needed for kinetic weapons. Being able to trade stuff effectively with other players would help everyone. As it was until this past Tuesday, you had to make posts on the forums and arrange meetings with other players to trade/dump mats. I know... I did it several times.
Agreed, I was likewise hoping the Carrier bar would at minimum be a nice QoL improvement for the activities players are already pursuing in the materials exchange threads. That said...
What is particularly sad about the Fleet carrier bar is:
- It costs a huge amount of funds (in relation to what you'll earn back) just to install it. I don't understand why it wasn't free like the ship based commodity trading.
I'm not concerned about this. You get the module cost back if you uninstall it, and there's no "carrier rebuy" to worry about, so the cost is a simple deposit that shouldn't be a big hardship to any player that could fund a carrier to begin with. Likewise the upkeep cost does mean you're not very likely to break even on bar sales, but that's true of essentially all the FC services. Carriers make money with the commodity markets (or maybe UC in deep space), which don't cost anything. The rest is essentially conveniences that, again, should be unproblematic costs for someone able to fund a carrier in the first place. For my part, I was happy enough to tie up the 200M just to have the additional windows for pretty picture purposes.
- The price cap on selling items is ridiculously low. It's also galling when there aren't similar price caps for other things you can sell. For example, I have bought Meta Alloys and a Thargoid heart (for the bobblehead) from other fleet carrier owners. They were able to set their price without exceedingly restrictive caps.
It is low - although your comparison with Meta Alloys doesn't hold. Those also have prices capped at 10x galactic average, it's just that the GA cost is high enough to make it reasonable. Odyssey materials just have really low GA prices for their rarity. But that's a global Odyssey issue, all the prices and earning potential on foot are quite low compared to earning rates available via ship-based activities.
- The 100 limit cap on items that can be sold at a time hinders trading. It would be bad enough if it was 100 per category, but it's just a flat 100. ARE YOU KIDDING ME?! I can meet a player on a planet and pull out 30 items, 60 assets, and 20 data from my SRV/Ship to my Maverick suit and then chuck that on the ground for them to pick up. And then turn around and do another batch. It's not as safe - either one of us could shoot the other, the items could get lost if there is a disconnect while they are laying on the ground, etc. - but it is faster.
This is the big one, yes yes yes! The capacity is so low, it's actually less micromanagement to continue meeting on planets and passing things hand to hand. That's an absurd result. At a baseline, capacity equal to your on-ship storage (i.e. 1000 of each category) is about the minimum I'd consider worthwhile.
