Why can't all station shipyards just sell everything?

[[VR] Mad Mike]

The solution seems obvious to me. The ships we buy should be 2nd hand. We don't get to choose their spec and each and everyone is priced accordingly.

Small shipyards won't have everything you need but large ones could order parts in for premium using the ship delivery menchanism.

IF you want you can buy brand new ship that you can spec to any level you like for a premium and at a limited number of official distribution centres

 

[Tarman]

The solution seems obvious to me. The ships we buy should be 2nd hand. We don't get to choose their spec and each and everyone is priced accordingly.

Small shipyards won't have everything you need but large ones could order parts in for premium using the ship delivery menchanism.

IF you want you can buy brand new ship that you can spec to any level you like for a premium and at a limited number of official distribution centres

Okay I'll take this too. Please combine this with tiered cockpit appearances and repair work so our beaters and clean or refurbished rides look appropriate inside and out.

 

[Lily from anim.o.v.e]

because buying and getting delivered is so 21st century, and the future wouldn't be the future if it wouldn't be different.

Guess what? S.P.A.Z.2 did exactly that, after peopel aksed for, why not let us order parts, and so they implemented that rather quick.

 

[Tentacle Love]

Why doesn't every Wal-Mart sell every version of every product?

Yes, but you don't have to drive around to dealerships at random trying to find a car. They have this new thing, called the "intertubes" where you can find out what they have in stock, w/o actually having to travel there! Apparently that ability has been lost sometime in the next 1,000 years.

Are you actually serious?

I own a Toyota Scion iA 2016 model. in Red.
The day I came in to purchase it, they had sold the red one. So I had to wait for mine to be shipped in.

You literally DO have to do that exact thing. And even when you do, they might have sold the one model you wanted that was in the color you wanted. This is what happens in real life.

 

[BlackSpaceCowboy]

I've gone upwards of 2 hours flying from high tech to high tech highly populated systems looking for specific parts and never found them.

That's my point. Good game design allows the player to spend his time having fun playing the game. We already spend time making the credits we need to buy stuff. There is no need for the additional hassle of having to search systems for the stuff you want to buy.

It seems like the game designers think that searching for things is fun. It used to be that we had to search USS's for missions. Searching for POI on planets. Searching for commodities.

Imagine how brutal this game would be without sites like eddb.io

A fundamental question is: What if you gave the player all the stuff in the game, would he still play? If the answer is no, he would be bored, then there is something wrong with the game. The player should be motivated to keep playing by challenging and engaging gameplay objectives. A lot of games take the carrot on a stick approach where the player is motivated by a desire to unlock game items.

 

[[VR] Mad Mike]

A fundamental question is: What if you gave the player all the stuff in the game, would he still play? If the answer is no, he would be bored, then there is something wrong with the game. The player should be motivated to keep playing by challenging and engaging gameplay objectives. A lot of games take the carrot on a stick approach where the player is motivated by a desire to unlock game items.

Hardly any games do this, upgrading stuff as you play is the meat and spuds of most games

 

[Elyssaen]

I think the use if 'realism' as a defence for gameplay mechanic left the room when instant teleport 'holograms' were introduced :/.

Maybe, maybe not. The game isn't truly realistic – it never was, and it never should have been. I love science fiction, but completely realistic science fiction is often a drag.

I don't understand why telepresence was the big realism breaker for so many people. Why isn't it top speed? Why isn't it ship combat being done by humans and not algorithms? Or shielding? Or the completely non-physical economy? What about the scaling of ship volume to ship power output / internal space?

Realism literally didn't extend to basic physics, basic geometry, basic economics, basic psychology, etc. from day one. And that isn't even really an insult: that space operas deviate from true science for the sake of story is well understood.

So what's the big deal with telepresence? The setting already has instantaneous across-galaxy communication. The only realism problems are a) the bandwidth situation, and b) why anyone is ever in a ship. Neither feel like the biggest unrealistic things in the game to date, and I think both were problems already in the 'verse as is.

But anyway, yep, as my post was saying, realism is not an argument for such limited availability. The argument for that is gameplay. And contrary to someone's "I agree" earlier, I wasn't saying everything should be available everywhere. Saying it's realistic != saying it should be so.

Hardly any games do this, upgrading stuff as you play is the meat and spuds of most games

He does have an interesting point though. Games shouldn't give you everything maxed out at the start, but something important can be told about a game from whether people would want to play if they had all the goodies already.

It's the whole topic of addiction-based gameplay. Jeff Vogel wrote an excellent pair of articles about this.

 

[Nalessa]

Would be nice if the game at least added ingame locations of ships sold that you can punch up.

Or maybe like you're at a station with a shipyard, any ship can be viewed here, but the ones that can't be bought are greyed out, and it will say the nearest station where you can buy one of those.

 

[thirstyfish]

Clearly the stations don't have an inventory of all these ships physically stored in the station. So, you're really just placing an order. So, why can't you order whatever ship or part you want?

Having to find stations that sell what you want doesn't add anything to the game. It's just a hassle.

I wanted to buy a Fer-de-Lance. I went to the shipyard in Gandii, they didn't have it. I went online and the suggestion was to go to "high tech" systems. I found a high tech system, docked at the station and no FDL. I went online again and found eddb.io. Found a station that sells FDLs and traveled there.

1. How are you supposed to find the ship you want without resorting to an external webpage?
2. Why can't you just buy what you want at any shipyard?

It's not really a shipyard anyway. It's a station where you place an order for a ship.

P.S. The shipyards don't properly display the ship hardpoints and compartments. It only lists installed components. You can't compare ships based on that. I had to leave the game and find a website.

Why not have everything everywhere? Answer: variety. Why do you need instant gratification?

1. Just go to high population, high tech or maybe industrial and military depending on what you want.
2. Like I said variety. Would you expect to be able to find an FDL and high-grade weapons in a mining system? No, you would not. Would you expect to find mining lasers and refineries in a tourist economy? Nope again.

Just think through it with just a little bit of logic and a little less entitlement.

 

[ratchet5000]

You wouldn't be able to build a new PC by going to Nowhere, Oklahoma, you'd probably want to go over to Texas and Dallas. Low population systems that have less stuff makes sense.

Granted, given the game occurs 1300 years into the future, you should be able to search in game GalNet for where you can get a certain module or ship. But what do I know?

If you manage to get all the way to Elite in one of the Pilot Ranks though, you get the Shinrarta Dezhra permit, a system that sells every module and every ship at a discount. It makes outfitting much less of a pain, the system has a nice central location in the Bubble too.