Incarnate said something about the 11-18 supposed to be a cooperative trade effort in this thread:
http://vendetta.guildsoftware.com/?action=postmsg&forum=1&thread=1857

I think the reason we don't see a bunch of trade caravans with varied ships is that only the trading ships will get the money and it's a lot of trouble for someone to play accountant and sort out who gets what. If we want to see caravans, we would need to have some sort of profit sharing system. Like having a group of ships get together in a squadron and any money that squadron makes (trades, bounties, tribute, etc.) gets split evenly among the group. And to prevent abuse it would work well if when one person quits a squad the squad dissolves and they have to put together a new one.

yes! yes!


devs plz read!

Thanks. Good to know someone likes it although these changes probably can't be implemented until somewhere near the 3.4 or 3.5 series.

:(

Also, dedicated pirate bots would encourage convoys... Imagine being ambushed by a pack of bounty 250 bots... 8|

That's something about the 3.3 series bots that I hadn't considered... What if the devs put in pirate bots that chase you from 14 to 18? THen it'd be IMPOSSIBLE for a solo trader. Kewl.

There are enough pirates out there without the need to add NPC ones.

Why would they want to make you be chased all the fscking way across the galaxy?

That's just stupid....no one would trade...not even in convoy.

yeah, we would just be shooting bots or just not do those traderoutes.

Trading with pirates on your back isnt fun, not fun at all. If you put in NPC pirates, then I can guarantee you that the difficult routes dont even get done by convoys. The chance to lose your ship and cargo would just be to great. If you are being chased by pirates, then you are as good as death. They have better boost , aim and ... then any human player can possiibly have in a slow tradeship.

And doing convoys is rather timeconsuming, you have to wait on each other, and while you were able to do the same route on your own, or some easier route on your own, you could do them faster and therefore wouldnt need to trade for the same long time.

cheers

I tried running in a convoy today and it didn't work too well. People kept getting lost and we kept having to wait for people. But I still feel like it could work. I think our problem was just a lack of experience with this trading technique and a lack of organization. Having a squadron would also make this much easier since I imagine there would be a "squadron chat" feature and you would have a squadron leader that everyone can follow easily. Like have a button that auto-targets your squad leader so it would be easy to rally around him. I think this idea could really work once people get used to traveling in groups and communicating.

so.. i guess this wasn't about npc traders/convoys. C'mon, npc convoys :D And adding a nice amount of credits to everyone each time the convoy makes it from point (blah) to Home Base. Question though, is where. hmm...
(Plus, not only are there bounties on these convoys (>:D) but they're also escorted by (random npc)'s. but not enough npc's to stop a group of pirates though, :) )
random npc convoys that go from place to place. eh, probably has been thought of by someone higher.
*runs*

I didn't really understand what you were saying, are u talking about NPC convoys or player ones?

he is talking about NPC ones ;)