The Economy Map Filters have been turned near-useless

[Ulon Yuanshi]

Just now I was in that situation where I actually wanted to locate a nearby high-tech space port (for simple outfitting). I did not want to use a third party tool to locate just the module I needed, because any high tech port would suffice.

I only now realized that in Odyssey, the ground settlement economies are now counted for the Galaxy map economy filter, turning thousands of systems into agricultural and high-techs. Locating "proper" agricultural systems (with earth-likes), or high-tech ones (for outfitting) using the filter is now basically impossible.

Odyssey settlements are so numerous (with many systems having nearly all economy types represented) that this feature is not worth the trade-off. Either a secondary filter is needed for settlements and space-ports, or the change needs a reversal in favour of space ports.

This issue could have been avoided, had Odyssey settlements only been spawned according to pre-existing economy types by the way. I never understood why that was not the case. Anyhow....
I believe this issue is dramatic, especially for new players not using third-party-tools (or older ones who refuse to do so - I know some of them).

Please get on this quickly!
(Issue report pending)

 

[Ulon Yuanshi]

I will include this one in my UI summary for now

[Summary Thread] Removed and Missing Information in Elite: Odyssey

Last Author Review 22/07/2022 (Update 12) Removed and Missing Information / UI Functionality in Elite: Odyssey Preamble Greetings Commanders o7 In light of the upcoming narrative and recent announcements about the future development plan for Odyssey and Elite: Dangerous in general, I have...

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[Dragsham]

As a VR player I'm not able to constantly take hmd off search inara or whatever to find a space station selling or buying what l have or want.
I've HAD to use the ingame tools in the galmap and system map.
I've just grown accustomed it.

For example I wanna buy 500+ ton of gold locally cheap to sell at my home system for influence.
Takes me a few minutes to locate a place exporting the gold. Doesn't tell you ship size but I use a python hauler so mebbe a few runs.
Or mapping I'll use galmap constantly.
It's not 100% grant you.
But it works.
Searching for a particular ship or module to purchase yes I always use inara.
You have to. I don't think there is a ingame tool to find em. If there is I've never used it.
Fact is for most complex searches you do have to use 3rd party tools which is a shame.
But it nothing new. World of warcraft is a good example of that. 20+ external appz just to have a decent UI

 

[Ulon Yuanshi]

As a VR player I'm not able to constantly take hmd off search inara or whatever to find a space station selling or buying what l have or want.
I've HAD to use the ingame tools in the galmap and system map.

The game is already too dependable on third-party tools. Making it more dependable must be avoided. If anything, it needs to be less dependable. That needs to be a design focus.

 

[Dragsham]

Agree totally.
They (fdev) have their work done for em. I guess they'd argue its not designed to give that info. Thus making finding stuff too easy?

 

[xzanfr]

The only decent thing about the UI is the system name search, everything else is an ugly, unusable, underdeveloped mess.
Like so many other situations it's a case of having to use external tools - at least they seem to be created by people who know what they're doing.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

I only now realized that in Odyssey, the ground settlement economies are now counted for the Galaxy map economy filter, turning thousands of systems into agricultural and high-techs.

Yes - although, an individual Odyssey settlement has a tiny economic size, so you need a lot of them - or a very small initial population - to overrule the economy which the primary systems generate. It's counted on total economic size for each economy, not on number of stations.

If you're looking for Agricultural or High-Tech, both of which tend to be fairly substantial populations (especially Agri), adding a population filter of >5 million alongside the economy filter should mean you only pick up the ones where there's a large primary station.

Equally ... if you're using the economy filter to look for trade goods, then a system with a hundred Odyssey agricultural settlements probably has a decent quantity of any agricultural good you're after, so showing the primary Extraction station might lead you to miss an easy source mission solution. For trade use, the current behaviour is probably more correct.

Just now I was in that situation where I actually wanted to locate a nearby high-tech space port (for simple outfitting). I did not want to use a third party tool to locate just the module I needed, because any high tech port would suffice.

I'm not going to dispute that there's a serious UI problem with the outfitting interface in terms of searching for modules, but that they need to fix by improving the outfitting interface directly, not the ability to search for second- or third-order proxies for it.

 

[Felix DiCestria]

Just now I was in that situation where I actually wanted to locate a nearby high-tech space port (for simple outfitting). I did not want to use a third party tool to locate just the module I needed, because any high tech port would suffice.

I only now realized that in Odyssey, the ground settlement economies are now counted for the Galaxy map economy filter, turning thousands of systems into agricultural and high-techs. Locating "proper" agricultural systems (with earth-likes), or high-tech ones (for outfitting) using the filter is now basically impossible.

Odyssey settlements are so numerous (with many systems having nearly all economy types represented) that this feature is not worth the trade-off. Either a secondary filter is needed for settlements and space-ports, or the change needs a reversal in favour of space ports.

This issue could have been avoided, had Odyssey settlements only been spawned according to pre-existing economy types by the way. I never understood why that was not the case. Anyhow....
I believe this issue is dramatic, especially for new players not using third-party-tools (or older ones who refuse to do so - I know some of them).

Please get on this quickly!
(Issue report pending)

Were you out in the fringes of the Bubble by any chance?
The 'Hi-tech' systems out here have always been iffy going back way before EDO.
As another poster indicated if you head in a bit so the population comes up it becomes more reliable. There a a few Horizons systems with high population but no orbital starports that can give false economies.

 

[Ulon Yuanshi]

Yes - although, an individual Odyssey settlement has a tiny economic size, so you need a lot of them - or a very small initial population - to overrule the economy which the primary systems generate. It's counted on total economic size for each economy, not on number of stations.

If you're looking for Agricultural or High-Tech, both of which tend to be fairly substantial populations (especially Agri), adding a population filter of >5 million alongside the economy filter should mean you only pick up the ones where there's a large primary station.

Equally ... if you're using the economy filter to look for trade goods, then a system with a hundred Odyssey agricultural settlements probably has a decent quantity of any agricultural good you're after, so showing the primary Extraction station might lead you to miss an easy source mission solution. For trade use, the current behaviour is probably more correct.


I'm not going to dispute that there's a serious UI problem with the outfitting interface in terms of searching for modules, but that they need to fix by improving the outfitting interface directly, not the ability to search for second- or third-order proxies for it.

The population filter is a work-around that works for me.
This situation is still a problem. Since the game will never give players this top, so this may be causing a lot of players some frustration.

Odyssey settlements and regular ports should have their own filter for this for gameplay reasons.

 

[Danieros]

If you're looking for an economy due to the services/missions/commodities it may offer I think it makes sense to have a selection for the type of asset you're looking for - starport, outpost, planetary port, settlement.

 

[Sapyx]

The Economy filter "works" - IF you don't actually try to use it as a filter. Simply switch all economy types "on". Systems where the primary (controlling) starport is a High Tech will show up as High Tech.

Sure, there might be a closer and more convenient High Tech station, in a non-high-tech-dominant system. But at least you shouldn't get any false positives from settlements, or those annoying secondary starports that don't actually have a commodity market.

 

[[Diplomacy] Carnegie]

Equally ... if you're using the economy filter to look for trade goods, then a system with a hundred Odyssey agricultural settlements probably has a decent quantity of any agricultural good you're after, so showing the primary Extraction station might lead you to miss an easy source mission solution. For trade use, the current behaviour is probably more correct.

That's all very well if you actually OWN Odyssey, but given that Horizons shows the same incorrect economy type without including the settlements themselves, it really needs fixing.

Systems listed as Agriculture while containing only a single extraction orbital are no use to anyone.

Edit:
The right response from FDev would be to allow two settings for the filter - one for the primary economy (which should be based on the controlling station), and one for 'is present in the system'.

While they're doing that they can fix stations with no commodities market showing the 'trading' icon on the Nav panel.

Note:
I don't expect either of these things to happen

 

[V'larr]

I can't recall a period where the ingame economy filtering has been of any use, in the first place. The only reliable source for finding systems to shop or trade in has always been through the ROSS/EDDB/Inara system.

Once other more pressing problems with the game are handled, this is certainly an area they need to improve in.

 

[Banana's_Are_Good_For_You]

I can't recall a period where the ingame economy filtering has been of any use, in the first place. The only reliable source for finding systems to shop or trade in has always been through the ROSS/EDDB/Inara system.

Once other more pressing problems with the game are handled, this is certainly an area they need to improve in.

No, it definately did used to work well as i used to trade a lot and it was always was right.
Can't speak for it now though as i don't know.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

That's all very well if you actually OWN Odyssey, but given that Horizons shows the same incorrect economy type without including the settlements themselves, it really needs fixing.

True

The right response from FDev would be to allow two settings for the filter - one for the primary economy (which should be based on the controlling station), and one for 'is present in the system'.

Similarly and popularly requested with the BGS States filter, which neither shows non-controlling factions nor all the states on the controlling faction. As you say, it would be the right solution.

No, it definately did used to work well as i used to trade a lot and it was always was right.
Can't speak for it now though as i don't know.

The in-game tools work perfectly fine and if anything have been made considerably easier since 1.0 (when they also worked fine) - the market screen gives you a list of which economies will import the commodity being sold here / export the commodity being bought here and a set of comparison prices from nearby importers and exporters (station and system).

They don't tell you on a single handy screen "for optimal profit, go to system A and trade B to system C" and the comparison prices are of limited range so won't pick up the super-profit opportunities unless you get lucky, but for basic Elite-style trading without losing money they're more than adequate.

Even in 1.0 they were giving way more information than you got either in-game or in the manual in Elite, and a substantial amount more than in FE2/FFE ; had Frontier stuck to the relatively small number of trade goods of those games rather than sticking in hundreds of mostly superfluous sub-varieties it'd probably have gone better.

 

[Jmanis]

They don't tell you on a single handy screen "for optimal profit, go to system A and trade B to system C" and the comparison prices are of limited range so won't pick up the super-profit opportunities unless you get lucky, but for basic Elite-style trading without losing money they're more than adequate.

The one thing I'd clarify there is that the comparison tools are all but broken for systems with large amounts of FC in them. There's no way to filter out the potentially-dozens of FCs in a system, and the UI overflows so if you happen to stumble upon the station you were interested in, you can't tell what position it was in.

#removeFCs I guess

 

[Darkfyre99]

I can't recall a period where the ingame economy filtering has been of any use, in the first place. The only reliable source for finding systems to shop or trade in has always been through the ROSS/EDDB/Inara system.

Once other more pressing problems with the game are handled, this is certainly an area they need to improve in.

No, it definately did used to work well as i used to trade a lot and it was always was right.
Can't speak for it now though as i don't know.

It still does IMO. I've never bothered to use third party sites to play the game myself. Heck, I can usually find nearby untapped CG sources in-game thanks to people relying on third-party sites doing their thinking for them. I might have the occasional failure, due to not paying attention to the system's state, but those occasional failures frequently provide other opportunities, and makes success all the sweeter.

But I understand that for some people, even a 1% failure rate would be way too high.

 

[Ulon Yuanshi]

It still does IMO. I've never bothered to use third party sites to play the game myself. Heck, I can usually find nearby untapped CG sources in-game thanks to people relying on third-party sites doing their thinking for them. I might have the occasional failure, due to not paying attention to the system's state, but those occasional failures frequently provide other opportunities, and makes success all the sweeter.

But I understand that for some people, even a 1% failure rate would be way too high.

I do it depending on my time and motivation available. And of course depending on the difficulty of the task. Finding a high-tech port was quite easy and totally sufficient for some basic outfitting choices. This is what I hope to see fixed when I made this post.

 

[Ned Flandalorian]

As a VR player I'm not able to constantly take hmd off search inara or whatever to find a space station selling or buying what l have or want.
I've HAD to use the ingame tools in the galmap and system map.
I've just grown accustomed it.

For example I wanna buy 500+ ton of gold locally cheap to sell at my home system for influence.
Takes me a few minutes to locate a place exporting the gold. Doesn't tell you ship size but I use a python hauler so mebbe a few runs.
Or mapping I'll use galmap constantly.
It's not 100% grant you.
But it works.

In Horizons or Odyssey? In Odyssey the commodity filters are close to unusable; the galmap has the same dialog on both the left (to find systems) and right (to find individual stations), but they aren't linked - so you have to manually enter the same information into both, and they constantly reset back to defaults when they lose focus. In the system map the commodities filter can only be used after selecting a port/settlement rather than being used to locate a port/settlement. And don't even bother attempting to use them for fleet carriers, any item that a carrier trades will be listed for 2cr regardless of its actual price.