Just some feedback for Frontier from a new user who joined the community at launch. I see many posts and threads to the effect of "trading tools like Slopey's, TradeDangerous, EliteOCR, yada yada are cheating". Or "....I feel bad when I use these". Just posting my sentiment that tools like these are good for the health of the game, because they enable an entire class of players to actually enjoy the game, keep playing it, and keep supporting it.
I'm a long-time gamer (from the days of the very first space sims and 4X type games). I'm a "hard-core" casual player. I play a lot (20+ hours per week), but also have a work/family life. My gaming time comes in short 30-90 minutes windows and my time has to count. I need to feel like I'm making good progress towards whatever progression the game offers.
Why make the above points about my gaming style? Because I'm representative of a _large_ chunk of the total market. And this market chunk will in large part be turned off by the in-game-only tools for market trading. Let me put it this way: I'm drawn to E
because it's a very "hands on" and "action oriented" type of space sim. I want to spend my precious gaming windows on flying, maneuvering, dog-fighting, hunting, etc. I want to play _actively_.
What I don't want is to spend a large chunk of my precious gaming time making handwritten notes, maintaining spreadsheets, and staring at colored symbols on the galaxy map (which are often misleading) to determine where to buy and where to sell so that I can earn credits at a reasonable/good clip. I need credits to build my fleet of ships to enable me to play actively. And what turned me off so BAD about E at first is the same thing I see many complaints about by other new users: "It's too hard to earn credits; it's too hard to figure out the market".
Enter tools like Slopey's BPC. (I tried pretty much all the others, but this is by far my favorite.) This third-party bit of kit has all by itself turned me into a person who wholeheartedly enjoys E without reservation. Before finally finding a good tool like Slopey's to do some of the heavy macro/micro-economic computation for me, E was just too much of a drag, a chore.
Again, I'm not knocking anyone who likes to watch the market fluctuation and find good trade routes for themselves. I'm just saying that activity and time-sink is too boring for a large chunk of the market, a chunk that can significantly help to make the game prosper.
And even from a pure RP perspective: If I operated in a future where I can fly starships through the galaxy, it's totally reasonable that traders and freight captains would pay for a _crowdsourced_ network of current trade data. Frankly, I think even the hand data-entry to update market data in tools like Slopey's is too much of a drag. Why couldn't my ship computer automatically upload the latest station data to the network of market data? That type of thing would indeed be automated in a future like this. Captains wouldn't need to employ an onboard economist to figure out how to earn money: they'd use software made by a few companies to crunch the data for them.
Hell, this isn't even a _future_ scenario. It's happening right now on Terra. I work for a software company that does this type of quadratic optimization of transaction data and "big data" to do things like recommend best prices and sales rep guidance in complex B2B industries.
So anyway, please don't hate on the app creators like Slopey, et. al., because they are _helping_ the game to thrive by helping to keep players active who would otherwise turn away because "making money is too hard". And don't hate on the players who create the demand for tools like these, because such players are paying a large chunk of the bill for helping the game to thrive and grow.
Frontier, please consider allowing tools like these to auto-scrape data when you land at a station. Provide an API for such tools. For a _lot_ of players, the dynamic market and the constantly changing prices makes it too hard to make money without some software augmentation.
Final thoughts: I _hate_ EVE. Most of my gaming associates also _hate_ EVE, because it's just boring "spreadsheets in space" to players like us. E might also have become a "meh" game like EVE for me and people like me, except that tools like Slopey's etc. exist to reduce that type of "boring pain" for us. Suddenly, E is FUN, because we can focus on the aspects of the game we find fun, and we have a way to work around the boring, not-fun aspects of the game (the economics).
I'm a long-time gamer (from the days of the very first space sims and 4X type games). I'm a "hard-core" casual player. I play a lot (20+ hours per week), but also have a work/family life. My gaming time comes in short 30-90 minutes windows and my time has to count. I need to feel like I'm making good progress towards whatever progression the game offers.
Why make the above points about my gaming style? Because I'm representative of a _large_ chunk of the total market. And this market chunk will in large part be turned off by the in-game-only tools for market trading. Let me put it this way: I'm drawn to E
because it's a very "hands on" and "action oriented" type of space sim. I want to spend my precious gaming windows on flying, maneuvering, dog-fighting, hunting, etc. I want to play _actively_. What I don't want is to spend a large chunk of my precious gaming time making handwritten notes, maintaining spreadsheets, and staring at colored symbols on the galaxy map (which are often misleading) to determine where to buy and where to sell so that I can earn credits at a reasonable/good clip. I need credits to build my fleet of ships to enable me to play actively. And what turned me off so BAD about E
at first is the same thing I see many complaints about by other new users: "It's too hard to earn credits; it's too hard to figure out the market".Enter tools like Slopey's BPC. (I tried pretty much all the others, but this is by far my favorite.) This third-party bit of kit has all by itself turned me into a person who wholeheartedly enjoys E
without reservation. Before finally finding a good tool like Slopey's to do some of the heavy macro/micro-economic computation for me, E was just too much of a drag, a chore.Again, I'm not knocking anyone who likes to watch the market fluctuation and find good trade routes for themselves. I'm just saying that activity and time-sink is too boring for a large chunk of the market, a chunk that can significantly help to make the game prosper.
And even from a pure RP perspective: If I operated in a future where I can fly starships through the galaxy, it's totally reasonable that traders and freight captains would pay for a _crowdsourced_ network of current trade data. Frankly, I think even the hand data-entry to update market data in tools like Slopey's is too much of a drag. Why couldn't my ship computer automatically upload the latest station data to the network of market data? That type of thing would indeed be automated in a future like this. Captains wouldn't need to employ an onboard economist to figure out how to earn money: they'd use software made by a few companies to crunch the data for them.
Hell, this isn't even a _future_ scenario. It's happening right now on Terra. I work for a software company that does this type of quadratic optimization of transaction data and "big data" to do things like recommend best prices and sales rep guidance in complex B2B industries.
So anyway, please don't hate on the app creators like Slopey, et. al., because they are _helping_ the game to thrive by helping to keep players active who would otherwise turn away because "making money is too hard". And don't hate on the players who create the demand for tools like these, because such players are paying a large chunk of the bill for helping the game to thrive and grow.
Frontier, please consider allowing tools like these to auto-scrape data when you land at a station. Provide an API for such tools. For a _lot_ of players, the dynamic market and the constantly changing prices makes it too hard to make money without some software augmentation.
Final thoughts: I _hate_ EVE. Most of my gaming associates also _hate_ EVE, because it's just boring "spreadsheets in space" to players like us. E
might also have become a "meh" game like EVE for me and people like me, except that tools like Slopey's etc. exist to reduce that type of "boring pain" for us. Suddenly, E is FUN, because we can focus on the aspects of the game we find fun, and we have a way to work around the boring, not-fun aspects of the game (the economics).
