Pa or any other traders with an opinion, what is your take on my position of minimizing same system profits while maintaining the overall profitability of nation space? Do you see this as diminishing the fun of trading?

@ Alloh, yes.

It would not do anything for grey space except make fewer players interested in actually trading.

As a former trader, I can say that the main reason I stopped trading is that trading in nation space is beyond boring where as trading in Grayspace was exciting but not worth it.
[EDIT] Grayspace is currently as safe and dull as nation.

Lowering in nation trade profits and raising nation to nation profits and drastically increasing the profitability of Gray trading would fix this. The only objections are going to come from traders who want to trade with the 99.9% physical and financial safety of nation space.

Let the traders begin their excuses, complaining and general idiocy in response... now.

Put in a different way Trading needs to be fun in order to attact people to it.
Money is simply the measure of our success. Small profits are just not... sexy.

Moving a high value cargo through grey is a lot of risk and usually for very little profit.
Those that will remain in Nation space are gonna do so no matter how little profit you allow.
The basic goal of any trader is to get as much profit as possible with as little risk as possible.

While all these things are true none of them will in fact create a thriving trade in grey.
In order for trade in grey to happen on a level that will benefit the game,
it must be an integral part of the game. Anything else is just a boring un-fun diversion from pvp.

Money is simply the measure of our success. Small profits are just not... sexy.
Almost agree.
However, you cannot buy much in VO for them. Better ship and equipment. OK.

For example I am trading just to make money for ships I need to buy when I die (and I am dying constantly). Maybe I am not good example of it, because I am not natural trader.

However, is there one thing you can buy, for example, if you want to spend 10 millions? Nothing.
Profit is useless if you have nothing you can buy for it.

Maybe simply add another 10% to all commodities prices in grey?

Oh, I can blow 10 mill easily enough. Few of my favorite ship loadouts can be bought in a single station, unless I go with sub-par versions of the weapons. So I have to haul in weapons in advance. And I have to haul in a lot of them so that I have enough of a cache at the stations where I hang out that I don't have to worry about running out. That can be expensive. A mothload of gauss mkIII costs more than a million credits.

Long PVP sessions with the high-end ships can also burn through millions of credits.

Some people also buy rare gear off other players. I haven't done this yet but I doubt it's cheap.

Sometimes you can also pay people wads of money to get them to do your menial labor for you (hauling those weapons around, getting your procurement goods, collecting gear for manufacturing missions, etc.).

Also, hosting events with nice prizes isn't cheap. I'm burning 10 mill a week on Nation War (donations welcome :)).

But anyway, real traders don't care if they have anything to spend the money on, they just want to make it, and maybe swim in it a little. Reference this picture my spies have obtained of Ecka frolicking in his vault:

Upping prices is not gonna fix this issue. I honestly think if the subscriber based was increased these problems would not exist just like many problems in VO. Think about it, if there are twice as many people in the game that means nation space will be overpopulated and excessive trading will push down profits which will only force people to seek better profits in dangerous portions of space (*cough* grey space *cough cough*). This would also work the same with mineral resources and could even make some seek out outright control over valuable locations.

Think about it...

Folk that play a lot end up with a lot of stuff.

Really it is that simple......

I don't think 10% across the board addresses the underlying problems with Grey trade. There may be a lot of members to trade guilds like TGFT or PA, but quite a lot of the time the active members are doing other activities. In fact, I'd wager some of them are just trading their time away until there's something or someone to shoot at. Back before the devs made the mistake of taking down the APL, I was able to make some observations of who was online. Discounting all the bots, typically during the times that I was auditing, somewhere around 20% + of the active players were known pirates or griefers. Now, this percentage seems to be to be a bit high, and I'll warrant that things do ebb & flow with the player base. However, lets face it, most players want to shoot at stuff and the most interesting stuff is usually other players. And since the Itani & Serco can't get their timing right, that means piracy.

I've addressed the issues with trade in Grey elsewhere in this thread. Bring back the premium proc routes at maybe 1/3 to 1/2 their former payouts and require bulk shipments from Grey to Nation or from Nation to Grey. This is the best option to get more players trading in Grey imo. And for the love of turnip greens, make the damned things require the expensive items!

Note to Whistler or the devs: Perma ban both of my accounts from these forums within one week or I will start posting porn.

Pizzasgood@
Oh ok, when you can blow up 10M does not mean that all players can and DO. Devs, can you say how much credits are in players hands?
I have 8/8/x character, and I have some spare credits, which only purpose is buying back ships I lost in PvP. That is simply not enough, even when I love PvP and despite the fact I am sucking in it!
This (paid) game has such possibilities and all I can buy is a ship and weapon?

Off-topic:
THIS IS EXACTLY the reason, why people are plying VO, then are year inactive and are returning then back. AS I DID.
Reason is flat: there are plenty of areas of entertainment (pvp, mining, trading, ctc, border wars) but all is on the surface (except combating), you cannot do much in all of those areas ... and if so, just on almost epic levels...

There is minimum of national objectives of the week/month (ala CtC). There is almost no WIN condition set (as already Ghost wrote). And that is not enough.
I don't play as UIT CtC, so I cannot say more than I see it as the step in the right direction. Just thinking of why UITs do not have something like that.
There should be a system of possibly opposite factional loss/win objectives mimicking CtC mechanism.
More, more if them!


Alloh@, PaKettle@:
first of all, very good item tree must be created, mostly adapted to VO current internals. It can be extended and broaden with particular unimportant stuff later (i mean ... it is not important what it is, but what route will it affect and possibly create).
Then define producers and consumers by their location ... and adjust ratio of player/mission/npc contribution
to satisfying producers and consumers needs.

default@:
-1 to ruining national trade
-1 fixed percentual adjustment of

I am just wondering why I bother to write all of this? Nobody really cares..

Lots of people care. But many of the topics that turn up in these suggestion threads have already come up plenty of times. Everybody basically already knows things are nowhere near as good as they could be, and knows that plenty of good ideas have already been described. So a lot of them don't feel very interested in debating much about it anymore.

The developers can only work on so much at once. People have been whining about the lack of player-owned capships for years, so getting that running is one of their main priorities right now, besides the android stuff. So they aren't working on the economy right now. They'll get around to it. Also, capships will give you traders something to spend money on. Eventually there will likely be a way to construct stations as well, which will give you another money sink.

Me? I'm happy to blow things up, or be blown up myself, more often than not. I've run and contributed to enough projects to understand that often things just don't happen as fast as you'd like, let alone as fast as your users would like. So I'm not worried about it. I'm happy for what we have, and happy as it improves. If there's something missing that I really need, I just go do something else to fill it, then come back here when I want to cruise around blowing things up. No one game is a panacea.