I don’t know what the credits reference is that’s not in my mind- ok, I’m tuning guitars while I write this but- I’m Elite in Trade and Exploration etc. and looking for something new- the base building process is that and could be tied to any ingame activity via existing mission system but haulage donations are an easy benchmark to monitor for the game engine.
OK... so to be clear, this discussion between us started with
this post.
I made that in response to someone essentially saying "Why can't we just pay credits to NPCs to do it for us?".
Credits are a very broken and unbalanced resource in the game, for a
huge variety of reasons. Externally, each "trade" has it's big earner... internally they are totally unbalanced. Massacre Stacking, Gold Trading, LTD mining, they're all kinda equivalents in terms of earnings. But Pirate Activity sites vs Massacre Stacking... Fruit and Veg hauling vs Gold Hauling, Methane Clathrate mining vs LTD mining.... they're all no-brainers... they're simply not good activities to do for credits, or really any reason for that matter. So they just don't get done.
Haulage to the same locations for the same contextual game story gets repetitive. It’s better when there’s a system state in the balance and even with a comic book face asking for help or better an animated contact in a station promenade. In the same way Robigo gets repetitive but moving from region to region with different backstories and destinations can be engaging. So, FDev has to do a bit better for some, me etc.
I totally get what you're saying here, but the simple reality is that there's countless CGs with literal billions of tonnes of cargo delivered over the course of a week, all the same cargo, to the same location, that suggests there's sufficient players in FD's assessment to warrant "repeated hauling to the same location". Current colonisation mechanic is very similar to the pre-war repair of stations damaged by thargoids... they'd have a public shopping list and people would go fetch... plenty of people did that too.
So I still get it... hauling the same thing repeatedly to the same location is a bit naff.
I actually hate that too. What I
like about Colonisation though is not the hauling aspect, it's the logistic challenge of sourcing disparate materials, some in bulk, some not, and some with a scarcity challenge, and it's not simply "for profit"... and that's an important part of this.
Going back to the credits thing.... hauling Steel or Titanium for profit isn't a great value proposition. Hauling Gold/Silver or whatever is a much better option for credits. So if credits are an option to "hire NPCs to haul", then Colonisation, which is literally a logistics game problem, suddenly becomes irrelevant, as people
don't do that, and instead just do the flavour-of-the-month activity to earn boatloads of cash and, instead of work out that logistics puzzle.. throw credits at it.
Thus, my greivance with that as a concept.... why fight the Thargoid war, when you could just pay NPCs to do it. Why haul materials for colonisation when you can just hire NPCs to do it......
why play the game when you can just get NPCs to do it.
...
Hundreds of hours of haulage followed by hundreds more; even if the land bases and stations have great associated gameplay that grind wall is only surmountable, satisfying for a certain type of ‘gamer’ , so, that’s many here on the forum but many games find a way to a bigger audience by pleasing, er, satisfying different gamer archetypes.
I don’t mean casual versus hard core- DCS is difficulty driven hard core, Elite is reasonably complex but still difficulty causal relatively but the time sink levels are Hard Core Insane—-the experience of being in a future space flight and colonization VR galaxy is wonderful but the well known grind limits the player base. That’s the games’ future issue for Frontier to consider. Vanguard may make all this moot- it provides teamwork options to share game assets so maybe that’s a way for light weight, easily bored me.
I’m still thankful that the servers are up and content is dropping, I’ve invested a lot of time and pc/ hardware/ Vr money but I’ll definitely wait until after this beta , can’t throw up 40-50 hours of repetition, it’s not work like combat, of exobiology ( the 3 samples might have been 15 samples in earlier Elite eras) or travelling the galaxy defending your Faction. Well it’s all fantasy , I just don’t like obvious repetition and am totally in the minority here but not in the “content is king” gaming industry as a whole.
So game growth and all that- haven’t started up Star Citizen since the new Elite content started releasing; wish Elite had their $700 million.
Star Light out:
... So as you probably saw in the other thread, I have no problems with "options" here. I'd love to see:
- Cashing in rep with an on-foot contact to obtain scarce materials, or do a one-off NPC shipment of 50t of goods with a one-day cooldown on that service, per NPC
- Cashing in rep for the location of a pirate cache with a bunch of the materials
- Support activities that reduce the required amounts by a small amount
But my point is; if Colonisation and buildout of a whole system is
currently 200 hours of effort... then it should be 200 hours of diverse activity options
including hauling as
one option... not just 2 hours of massacre stacking and then going "Right, NPCs go to it because I know the credit loopholes".
I personally do see options here already though. Working with others directly... savvy FC buy orders... sheer marketing of your colony for others to help passively... but they're all intangible in the game to a degree... some more tangible options would be useful.
So tl;dr I do agree doing the one thing an infinite amount of times is a problem... but the solution simply isn't "make it go away with credits" imo.
