Forums » Suggestions
so, what a practical implementation of this would be? Maybe I misread, but seems that most of what you are asking already exists in game, despite not quite profitable:
1. Desired items list in every station's welcome screen. Quite usefull, but since nearby produced items compose most of it and no values displayed, most players tend to ignore it due low profit and no reason to cross borders.
2; Trade news ingame, inside news. Things like "Station X needs urgent repairs and pay Mc per Item crate". This one gives good profits, but is almost hidden.
3. Locally produced items are supposed to be much cheaper than elsewhere. But as it is now this is not true, sometimes non-locally produced items are sold cheaper in neighbouring stations.
Those could be improved to collectivelly achieve what you request, i.e, economic reasons to cross borders maximazing the usage of existing ingame features:
1.a. Develop market making stations desire already existing rare items, as Sedina Chocs. I.e., Not request items sold nearby, in local system/nation. This would be enough reason to trade across borders.
1.b. Add regular/now price tags, to display its profit. Or a +X%.
1.c. + 2c. Bring the best offers from trade news as the 1/3 last lines displayed in desired list.
2.a. Use the bar chat as an "black market BBS" automatically by NPCs/game engine. Maybe allow players also do the same.
2.b. Spread trade news as bouties are, or compact bounties in news. Add a button to it in welcome screen.
3.a. Major redistribution of items, many times requested. More items only produced in grayspace and valuable in nation space. And vice-versa.
3.b. Add NPC voys (Escort missions) from nations into gray, and from gray into nations. There are only very few. And increase reward when blockade is present!
And finally, non-existing but quite fun and direct reason to cross borders would be contrabanded items, drugs, etc... maximizing profit and risk.
1. Desired items list in every station's welcome screen. Quite usefull, but since nearby produced items compose most of it and no values displayed, most players tend to ignore it due low profit and no reason to cross borders.
2; Trade news ingame, inside news. Things like "Station X needs urgent repairs and pay Mc per Item crate". This one gives good profits, but is almost hidden.
3. Locally produced items are supposed to be much cheaper than elsewhere. But as it is now this is not true, sometimes non-locally produced items are sold cheaper in neighbouring stations.
Those could be improved to collectivelly achieve what you request, i.e, economic reasons to cross borders maximazing the usage of existing ingame features:
1.a. Develop market making stations desire already existing rare items, as Sedina Chocs. I.e., Not request items sold nearby, in local system/nation. This would be enough reason to trade across borders.
1.b. Add regular/now price tags, to display its profit. Or a +X%.
1.c. + 2c. Bring the best offers from trade news as the 1/3 last lines displayed in desired list.
2.a. Use the bar chat as an "black market BBS" automatically by NPCs/game engine. Maybe allow players also do the same.
2.b. Spread trade news as bouties are, or compact bounties in news. Add a button to it in welcome screen.
3.a. Major redistribution of items, many times requested. More items only produced in grayspace and valuable in nation space. And vice-versa.
3.b. Add NPC voys (Escort missions) from nations into gray, and from gray into nations. There are only very few. And increase reward when blockade is present!
And finally, non-existing but quite fun and direct reason to cross borders would be contrabanded items, drugs, etc... maximizing profit and risk.
I love eager, clueless, verbose nooblets - they're the unintentional comedians of the VO forums.
@Alloh: nope you have it completely backwards.
What I am suggesting and have repeatedly suggested here, is:
(1) All existing commodities that are "locally produced" would have their polity of origin sored with their quantity when purchased. (if you don't know the word "polity" that would be, for example "Itani")
(2) All stations would have a "hunger" for goods from other Polities. This hunger would be a floating point value and would heat-and-cool as such goods were delivered. For game-play reasons he current hunger at a station would _not_ be available at the welcome screen, but it would be applied as a multiplier to the money received for any given sale.
(3) such sales would would cause the hunger to cool off so that smart traders would know that they had to change things up.
Is this _REALLY_ that hard to understand?
This has _nothing_ to do with station demand for particular kinds of good.
Now once that is all in place, at a trivial cost computationally and programmaticly, at the harrowing cost of one enum in the cargo description structure and by my count four floating point numbers in each station, the scene is set to get people to trade ACROSS THE BORDERS
What I am suggesting and have repeatedly suggested here, is:
(1) All existing commodities that are "locally produced" would have their polity of origin sored with their quantity when purchased. (if you don't know the word "polity" that would be, for example "Itani")
(2) All stations would have a "hunger" for goods from other Polities. This hunger would be a floating point value and would heat-and-cool as such goods were delivered. For game-play reasons he current hunger at a station would _not_ be available at the welcome screen, but it would be applied as a multiplier to the money received for any given sale.
(3) such sales would would cause the hunger to cool off so that smart traders would know that they had to change things up.
Is this _REALLY_ that hard to understand?
This has _nothing_ to do with station demand for particular kinds of good.
Now once that is all in place, at a trivial cost computationally and programmaticly, at the harrowing cost of one enum in the cargo description structure and by my count four floating point numbers in each station, the scene is set to get people to trade ACROSS THE BORDERS
(one accidental accidental enter later).
There are _NO_ "unique items" or even "rare items" in this scheme. It is all normal stuff. Just like a car is a normal thing, but a foreign care is more rare, and parts for foreign cars are more expensive.
There is substantial reason for a trader to cross the border instead of staying inside the systems of his home realm. All of the current stuff you mention currently _fails_ to encourage me (most people) to go anywhere meaningfully dangerous under non-quest circumstances.
Once every kind of "locally produced" particular commodity has a source origin in its data structure then the _game_ can put out short-term bounties for particular cross polity items. If you don't understand this mechanic, well "Railroad Tycoon" is a good example where it would say "Albany will pay $xxxx for a delivery of mail from Boston if it arrives before August"). In VO terms, having this go out "over the air" on a chat channel means that if an announcement "Itani Capital wants UTI consumer electronics within the hour" goes out, it could trigger flash mobs at Itani Capital, the UTI stations that locally produce consumer electronics, and key border wormholes in between.
Do you see how all this is _different_ than what the game currently does? Do you see that it would be somthing between "easy" and "tivial" to add these features. (game-play tuning for frequency and multipliers and cool-downs is less trivial, but such is the burden of running such a system.)
NOTE: THERE IS NO "REDISTRIBUTION OF ITEMS" as the mechanism would apply to ALL GOODS that, in the current implementation, list for sale as "locally produced". Its very ubiquity acts to keep routes changing. Everybody is going to think one-hop trips between stations on either side of a border will be profitable at first, but those will cool down fast, so on the average a wily trader will want to go everywhere, penetrating all polities deeply. The GOAL is to get the traders to run the borders in their fast ships full of valuable cargo IF THEY DARE.
NOTE: CONVOYS ARE NOT DESIRABLE in this usage. We already have border wars and such for people who want to have attack/defense-in-depth encounters, e.g. slugging matches. We want the one-shot pirates and the one-shot traders to have a reason to interact, and so on.
NOTE: THE BAR and THE NEWS are too slow/persistent to achieve the desired effect for the bounties but ALSO NOTE that "the bounties" are "possible version two" improvements and not germane to deciding about the three-part basic enhancement being suggested.
So each of 1.a, 1.b, 1.c, 2.a, 2.b, 3.a, and 3.b of your points and ideas are indeed old suggestions that I am, in fact, not making.
@Dr. Lecter: where is _your_ easy to implement suggestion for improved game play and getting the deep polity traders to mix with the combat types?
Space is supposed to be dangerous and so far I have found eccentrically shaped asteroids full of delicious Xithercite to be the most likely danger I will encounter in the course of normal business.
There are _NO_ "unique items" or even "rare items" in this scheme. It is all normal stuff. Just like a car is a normal thing, but a foreign care is more rare, and parts for foreign cars are more expensive.
There is substantial reason for a trader to cross the border instead of staying inside the systems of his home realm. All of the current stuff you mention currently _fails_ to encourage me (most people) to go anywhere meaningfully dangerous under non-quest circumstances.
Once every kind of "locally produced" particular commodity has a source origin in its data structure then the _game_ can put out short-term bounties for particular cross polity items. If you don't understand this mechanic, well "Railroad Tycoon" is a good example where it would say "Albany will pay $xxxx for a delivery of mail from Boston if it arrives before August"). In VO terms, having this go out "over the air" on a chat channel means that if an announcement "Itani Capital wants UTI consumer electronics within the hour" goes out, it could trigger flash mobs at Itani Capital, the UTI stations that locally produce consumer electronics, and key border wormholes in between.
Do you see how all this is _different_ than what the game currently does? Do you see that it would be somthing between "easy" and "tivial" to add these features. (game-play tuning for frequency and multipliers and cool-downs is less trivial, but such is the burden of running such a system.)
NOTE: THERE IS NO "REDISTRIBUTION OF ITEMS" as the mechanism would apply to ALL GOODS that, in the current implementation, list for sale as "locally produced". Its very ubiquity acts to keep routes changing. Everybody is going to think one-hop trips between stations on either side of a border will be profitable at first, but those will cool down fast, so on the average a wily trader will want to go everywhere, penetrating all polities deeply. The GOAL is to get the traders to run the borders in their fast ships full of valuable cargo IF THEY DARE.
NOTE: CONVOYS ARE NOT DESIRABLE in this usage. We already have border wars and such for people who want to have attack/defense-in-depth encounters, e.g. slugging matches. We want the one-shot pirates and the one-shot traders to have a reason to interact, and so on.
NOTE: THE BAR and THE NEWS are too slow/persistent to achieve the desired effect for the bounties but ALSO NOTE that "the bounties" are "possible version two" improvements and not germane to deciding about the three-part basic enhancement being suggested.
So each of 1.a, 1.b, 1.c, 2.a, 2.b, 3.a, and 3.b of your points and ideas are indeed old suggestions that I am, in fact, not making.
@Dr. Lecter: where is _your_ easy to implement suggestion for improved game play and getting the deep polity traders to mix with the combat types?
Space is supposed to be dangerous and so far I have found eccentrically shaped asteroids full of delicious Xithercite to be the most likely danger I will encounter in the course of normal business.
/me Begins to wonder if WhiteRC is in fact PoL.
Or you really did not have played the game enough so far and have no clue on how its economy/engine works, or you are proposing that foreigner commodities worth more than locally produced simply because they are imported?
Why a serco-purchased crate of "Steel" or "Xirite Alloy" would worth more in Itani than a locally produced, or another from Orion, in grayspace?
Why a serco-purchased crate of "Steel" or "Xirite Alloy" would worth more in Itani than a locally produced, or another from Orion, in grayspace?
@Dr. Lecter: where is _your_ easy to implement suggestion for improved game play and getting the deep polity traders to mix with the combat types?
Lower the XP and credits received for the same goods/missions executed in nation space based on a sliding scale that penalizes those with higher levels (i.e., a 1/1/1/1/1 pilot who mines 1cu of heliocene in nation space and sells it at a nation space station gets 20 mining XP and 2400 credits; a 5/5/5/5/5 pilot who does the same thing gets 5 mining XP and 240 credits; Ecka does the same thing and gets 1 mining XP and 20 credits).
See how easy that was?
Lower the XP and credits received for the same goods/missions executed in nation space based on a sliding scale that penalizes those with higher levels (i.e., a 1/1/1/1/1 pilot who mines 1cu of heliocene in nation space and sells it at a nation space station gets 20 mining XP and 2400 credits; a 5/5/5/5/5 pilot who does the same thing gets 5 mining XP and 240 credits; Ecka does the same thing and gets 1 mining XP and 20 credits).
See how easy that was?
Okay, now you are in the game of making suggestions...
So...
Will get people to hop one station across each border. You have enlivened something on the order of 12% of the map. This leads to what secondary features? This evolves the game and seeds the code base with what expandable paradigms? Is it a straight percentage or a curve? How do you tune it for game balance? In what non-arbitrary way does this make sense to have a penalty-for-experience paradigm make game play more immersive?
I don't decry your suggestion. I do imply that the measure is shallow and monotonic. It statically moves hot points but doesn't give a reason for deep penetration into other polities. In My Humble Opinion of course.
So you have attacked my suggestion with Ad Hominim, but you haven't told me what is wrong with my suggestion, in your humble opinion of course.
So...
Will get people to hop one station across each border. You have enlivened something on the order of 12% of the map. This leads to what secondary features? This evolves the game and seeds the code base with what expandable paradigms? Is it a straight percentage or a curve? How do you tune it for game balance? In what non-arbitrary way does this make sense to have a penalty-for-experience paradigm make game play more immersive?
I don't decry your suggestion. I do imply that the measure is shallow and monotonic. It statically moves hot points but doesn't give a reason for deep penetration into other polities. In My Humble Opinion of course.
So you have attacked my suggestion with Ad Hominim, but you haven't told me what is wrong with my suggestion, in your humble opinion of course.
Cool story, bro.
Lecter, I believe this picture is necessary: 
Maybe I'm missing something but...
"THERE IS NO "REDISTRIBUTION OF ITEMS" as the mechanism would apply to ALL GOODS that, in the current implementation, list for sale as "locally produced"."
As it stands now, without redistribution most stations carry most of the items found in game. The only reason to travel between stations is to find the best price.
With redistribution... Station A carries items A,B,C and D but not E,F or G. Due to local (sector) production. Whereas Station B a few sectors away carries items E,F and G but not A,B,C and D.
"There are _NO_ "unique items" or even "rare items" in this scheme. It is all normal stuff."
So, no redistribution... The Itani/UIT will pay more for items they make... just because it comes from Serco space?
"The GOAL is to get the traders to run the borders in their fast ships full of valuable cargo IF THEY DARE."
"Every station would have a "hunger for exotic goods"
Which translates to unique/rare items. Common goods produced basically everywhere will not fetch a better price just because they are made some where else.
"THERE IS NO "REDISTRIBUTION OF ITEMS" as the mechanism would apply to ALL GOODS that, in the current implementation, list for sale as "locally produced"."
As it stands now, without redistribution most stations carry most of the items found in game. The only reason to travel between stations is to find the best price.
With redistribution... Station A carries items A,B,C and D but not E,F or G. Due to local (sector) production. Whereas Station B a few sectors away carries items E,F and G but not A,B,C and D.
"There are _NO_ "unique items" or even "rare items" in this scheme. It is all normal stuff."
So, no redistribution... The Itani/UIT will pay more for items they make... just because it comes from Serco space?
"The GOAL is to get the traders to run the borders in their fast ships full of valuable cargo IF THEY DARE."
"Every station would have a "hunger for exotic goods"
Which translates to unique/rare items. Common goods produced basically everywhere will not fetch a better price just because they are made some where else.
If humans were logical that would be true. There are a lot of idiots though who actually would pay more for the same stuff if they think that it's exotic somehow. And theoretically, the items that, say, Serco create could be slightly different than the ones the Itani make, despite basically being the same thing.
The only way I'd accept that though is if the goods were prefixed by the nation, e.g. "Serco Civilian Textiles" and "Itani Civilian Textiles".
The only way I'd accept that though is if the goods were prefixed by the nation, e.g. "Serco Civilian Textiles" and "Itani Civilian Textiles".
"...if the goods were prefixed by the nation, e.g. "Serco Civilian Textiles" and "Itani Civilian Textiles"."
Agreed, but... I think if it'd done this way that it should not be at all stations.
For example one station may be inhabited by pretentious imbeciles who feel it is hip to buy foreign (perhaps they think its exotic) or folk who honestly believe that despite the items being identical to what they sell... that foreign is superior. These would likely be capitol and commerce stations.
Whereas, barracks, research and mining stations would likely be inhabited by more practical people who would understand that Serco, Itani, UIT and Gray Space stations all produce steel/Xith/escape hatches the exact same way.
Agreed, but... I think if it'd done this way that it should not be at all stations.
For example one station may be inhabited by pretentious imbeciles who feel it is hip to buy foreign (perhaps they think its exotic) or folk who honestly believe that despite the items being identical to what they sell... that foreign is superior. These would likely be capitol and commerce stations.
Whereas, barracks, research and mining stations would likely be inhabited by more practical people who would understand that Serco, Itani, UIT and Gray Space stations all produce steel/Xith/escape hatches the exact same way.
Agree with RR... and since OP thinks different, let's take these suggestions out of here.
All the words count.... All "locally produced" items.
The reason you don't need to "redistribute" the items that exist is that the (presumably steep) cool off of the "hunger" by station requires the smart trader to move around a lot. Repeating a run would have a sharply diminished return etc.
The reason this scheme is "better" than Dr Lecter's depreciating value proposition is that the locally produced items keep their origin when you blow up the person carrying them etc. This encourages "reasonable predation" (e.g. a good instead of arbitrary reason to pirate) over griefing.
Sum up all my posts and you will find it is a simple to implement and pervasive basic mod that lends itself to evolutionary improvements.
The reason you don't need to "redistribute" the items that exist is that the (presumably steep) cool off of the "hunger" by station requires the smart trader to move around a lot. Repeating a run would have a sharply diminished return etc.
The reason this scheme is "better" than Dr Lecter's depreciating value proposition is that the locally produced items keep their origin when you blow up the person carrying them etc. This encourages "reasonable predation" (e.g. a good instead of arbitrary reason to pirate) over griefing.
Sum up all my posts and you will find it is a simple to implement and pervasive basic mod that lends itself to evolutionary improvements.
"Agree with RR... and since OP thinks different, let's take these suggestions out of here"
I didn't disagree with that suggestion... I _made_ it... I just put the origin last "Consumer Electronics (Itani)" etc.
In terms of tuning the stations values for hunger etc, that was in there too.
All the words count.
I didn't disagree with that suggestion... I _made_ it... I just put the origin last "Consumer Electronics (Itani)" etc.
In terms of tuning the stations values for hunger etc, that was in there too.
All the words count.
I guess I am out... if the developers want to hear from me they can ask.
If you people want to keep making overly complex suggestions that will never be implemented, and make them again and again in thread after thread so that none of the reasonably suggestions get through, I have no way to stop you.
If you are going to "decide" that since you illicit the same frustration in multiple people those people must secretly be the same person, then you are delusional.
So far the game is not worth my continued paid patronage, largely because of the vitriol and the repetitiveness.
Your behavior has largely taken my money out of VO's pocket.
Grow up before you join whatever community you decide to ruin next.
Share and Enjoy... 8-)
If you people want to keep making overly complex suggestions that will never be implemented, and make them again and again in thread after thread so that none of the reasonably suggestions get through, I have no way to stop you.
If you are going to "decide" that since you illicit the same frustration in multiple people those people must secretly be the same person, then you are delusional.
So far the game is not worth my continued paid patronage, largely because of the vitriol and the repetitiveness.
Your behavior has largely taken my money out of VO's pocket.
Grow up before you join whatever community you decide to ruin next.
Share and Enjoy... 8-)
Don't let the doorknob tear your asshole on the way out, sweetcheeks.
So we're done here.