There should be a mission, similar to how you can hire a squadron where you can hire a Constellation class ship to transport all the goods you have in the station you hire it at, to another station destination (so long as it's not in an opposing nation state).

This would generate a convoy that warps in to the station sector, transports all your selected items to the connie, and has a contigent of fighters as escort. Players and guilds can of course augment that escort. (Keys are shared for the duration of the mission between the purchasing player and the npc convoy)

Upon reaching the destination, the convoy transports the goods to the station under the originating player's account.

Ships can't be transported, since they can't be dropped in the event of an attack that destroys the connie.

There should be different levels that cost different amounts. A cheap trident convoy. And a more expensive constellation class transport. These would be missions that can only be taken once every X amount of hours or days and require maybe completing some escort type missions (endearing you to the captains of these transport ships).

This is an excellent way to make convoys matter to gameplay as you never know if it's a player's convoy or not (until they hit their destination). It also allows players who dont have a trident at their disposal to more realistically move their goods. It can even be used for regular trading. And it will give pirates something to actually exist for other than griefing new players into paying some nonsense amount of credits to not get shot at.

you mean like this:

http://www.vendetta-online.com/x/msgboard/3/28857

?

there's a search feature in these forums ya know --- up there ^

Ever tried to kill a connie before it reaches its destination?

-1

Unless you want to let me hire a Teradon to follow me around and chew up anything I designate? (Which would have to include some updates to the mission system so that a player's target can be passed on to NPC ships. It would also need a way to do the same for their turrets, because currently missions cannot control NPC turrets in any way.)

-1

I used to support this request that has been made countless times. However, we now have player owned tridents, so I now think that this would undermine the need to work with other players to accomplish a goal.

I dont see how it is undermining the need to work with players any more than the other missions that allow you to hire npc's to help a player vs finding human players to take up the task.

The game already has such missions, so incorporating the same type of feature in the other roles of the game aside from combat makes sense for those players who have chosen to go down those non-combative roles.

There may be player owned tridents but they're a subset of an already small population of actually logged in players at any given time. Maybe if the game got populated enough that you could be guaranteed to have a number of such players on all the time to conscript for service but that's not today's reality.

A way to augment the small player population is what we need today to fill the gaps left by a sparse human player-base in areas of the game that most veteran players (the players you'd have sought out) have lost interest in.

The difference is, those missions are you escorting the NPCs while they transport their own goods.

If you could hire a Constellation, you can move a colossal amount of cargo and rest assured that it will pretty much be guaranteed to reach its destination unharmed. That's why I asked: "Ever tried to kill a connie before it reaches its destination?"

I wouldn't exactly call the amount of cargo a connie holds "colossal". Especially since it's 200cu less than a player trident.

The Connie will obviously never happen. I'm thinking back to the many iterations of this suggestion that mostly wanted to use the traditional Behemoth Heavies to do the job. To which I still give a -1.

Unless you are building a trident, the need for such external transport is really negligible. As far as I can see, the only reason to ask for this is to 1) bypass the work required to build player standing by running procurement missions or 2) quick and easy profits by having npc's run fletchets between buy and sell stations. If you are building a trident then you are going to run in to people that own them fairly regularly.

Connie was just an example. The particular ships you'd be able to hire would be reached by weighing the needs, cost, and effects on gameplay. But the reason you only see large amounts of goods being transferred around only for trident building is because all you can do that offers anything worthwhile as a goal in the current universe is build a trident. Moving huge amounts of goods for any other purpose is relegated to only trident owners, as it's too tedious and risky to go back and forth with an xc unless you're deep in your own nation's space.

Being able to hire npc's to move large amounts of cargo en masse allows for traders to actually have a significant role without having to invest in the multitudes of things required to build a trident. You would have players who are true traders, making millions, moving vast quantities of goods across the system paying players to escort or for safe passage. But they're dependent on npcs. Trident owners have their own advantages. etc.

The potential to expand the usefulness of trading and mining exist only within building a npc framework to support the game while it exists in the state it currently does. Get rid of it once it's purpose is complete and we're all complaining about how the server wont let us connect because it's always full.

Wow. You really suck at trading, huh? Go learn how to do it instead of making silly threads like this.

yea, cuz forcing any player who wants to trade or mine to have to undertake the extremely tedious path of building a trident to move any appreciable amount of goods is way better than offering other avenues with their own pros and cons.

The idea is to do away with players who have to (and can) do everything (trade, mine, combat) and to make differentiating the role you play in the game integral to the gameplay and make those roles able to benefit the gameplay for everyone.

The only reason why you can move around grey space un-impeded in a weaponless ship and even in weaponed moth is because nobody is logged on in any significant number. I mean if you're fine continuing to play that kind of game where a handfull of people are logged on outside of a few dozen mobile players who most dont get out of the tutorial stage then great.

I dont think that's the kind of game the devs are aiming for. A populated game server would never work for a trader in a single ship traveling through grey space and a non-populated one doesn't make anyone want to be a trader.

I dont expect to convince players who have a vested interest in keeping the status quo. But when everyone is spending their time just shooting people because that's the only thing left for them that's fun then the game fundamentally in a broken state. I'm just fishing ideas to get the other 2/3 of the game out of the back seat and make them on-par with combat participation.

No. You wouldn't. Until the economy is finished, trade is for all practical purposes dead. Yes, I can make 10 million trading my way through Sercoland from one end to the other.

Unfortunately same system trading is still the best way to make credits fast, which allows me to make that 10 million far faster in a XC traveling through mostly safe nation space (Grey space generally sucks for trade in my experience) far faster than some escort system would allow. Even worse, the best profits and the slowest profit decline come from weapons trades, which undermines the whole point of trading.

Besides which, escorts still pay out well enough that players (included a character or two of mine) have made nice fortunes doing nothing else. Or you can camp a wormhole in nation space (the Dau / Nyrius wormhole works very well) in a rag, take out iirc 2 behemoths and a taur if you target an incoming voy correctly and swing back with an XC to clean up the loot- which as long as you don't attack a UIT voy, you can do free of faction loss.

But there are easy profits of $300,000+ per XC load in one jump if you can fly a heavy ship and you know how to look.

Did I mention that trade is dead? And even if it wasn't, which it is, I would still disagree with the OP. A player should be limited by their investment. If you don't want a trident because it requires too much to build, then you shouldn't be able to move that amount of freight at minimal risk / cost to yourself. Right now, the only items worth protecting are extremely rare bot drops like aggregators or queen cores as well as manufactured items. Also, what is the point? One or two XC load pretty much tanks most commodities. if something like this were implemented, it should be expensive. Want a voy with a Trident? I'd start that at 500,000 cr. 50,000cr per Heavy and maybe 10,000 cr per taur or atlas. And maybe even a cost for the ships guarding the convoy. 25,000cr per WTD and 10,000cr per vult / cent. That is going to cut well into any profit margin.

Just because we disagree with your suggestion doesn't mean we want to maintain some 'status quo'. Or that we like playing in a lightly populated game because that makes us big fish in a small aquarium. It just means that we disagree with this particular suggestion being something that would add meaningful content to the game. I say we, however, it could very easily just be me. I shouldn't assume.

"yea, cuz forcing any player who wants to trade or mine to have to undertake the extremely tedious path of building a trident to move any appreciable amount of goods is way better than offering other avenues with their own pros and cons."

No. You don't need to do any of that. You just suck at trading so much that you think you need a Trident. But you don't. And it's clear from everything you've written in this thread that you have no idea what you're doing.


"The idea is to do away with players who have to (and can) do everything (trade, mine, combat) and to make differentiating the role you play in the game integral to the gameplay and make those roles able to benefit the gameplay for everyone. "

This doesn't do that. If anything, it lets people hire NPCs to do their trading for them while they go off to fight people, which is the opposite of what you're claiming you're trying to do here. Not that what you claim to be wanting is a good thing; the only reason a miner should be worse at fighting than a fighter (assuming they put away their mining ship and grab a fighter craft) is that they spend less time practicing. The end. This is a skill based game.


Trade should be based on skill as well. Right now, it's pretty meh. It requires some basic common sense that you seem to lack, but it's not hard. Just lame. And ordering NPCs to trade for you does not increase the skill involved in trading. It just increases throughput while decreasing personal risk and time investment.

What I want is for all stations to produce (automatically and internally, not via player-run manufacturing, though that would be a nice and related thing) their items out of raw materials and/or sub-components. These materials would need to be delivered and moved around. Stations would have supplies of whatever they happen to have at the moment, and demand for more materials to make more of whatever they produce. Various trade and mining missions would automatically be generated based on supply and demand. Missions that go too long without being taken would automatically be snatched up by NPCs and performed with minimal competence, so that even with a low playerbase, goods are moving around and stations are producing items and gear. But since the NPCs take a while to take the missions and are not very good at doing them, a human could come along and do a better job, making a profit.

Supply and demand should impact prices, obviously. Stations wouldn't necessarily have to have finite supplies of stuff to sell, but they should at least have a virtual supply that influences the price and which changes as you sell things to them.

One result of this is that blockades, hive, and piracy would have meaningful impacts on prices and availability of goods. Large battles would also deplete local supply of equipment, thus impacting prices and trade missions all along the supply chains for the local stations.

This would create an environment where somebody who keeps track of what is going on where, and the supply chains of the various stations, would be able to use this knowledge to predict good trade routes at any given time far more reliably than somebody who just loads up some cargo and wanders around looking for somewhere that will buy it for more than they paid. They'd also be able to try to influence events via economics, or influence economics by impacting events (for example, instigate a battle somewhere, then make a pile of profit by resupplying those stations with cargo; or you could go wipe out the hive so that NPCs can mine more, dropping local prices so that you can buy stuff cheaper to sell elsewhere/later).

In short, it would make the economy much more interesting and leave much more room for player skill to impact things.

A miner wouldn't be able to go pick up a fighter ship, because a fighter ship would only be available to military personel and military personel wouldn't have access to miner ships because they'd only be available to people who sign up with a mining company. Etc.

That's the kind of role requirements you need to make any particular role matter. Making them simply skill based isn't enough because there's not a lot of skill that you can embed in a game to make anyone not capable of doing all of the roles after a short amount of time. Forcing you to sacrifice access to role specific craft to achieve access to any given role enhances that player's investment in practicing and honing their skills with those particular ships and aspects of the game. Your licenses can be skill based so that you dont have to grind back from 0 everytime you switch careers. But 1 character, 1 role, 1 faction enforces specialization and that's what you need to fill niches that players who otherwise defaults to the only thing that nets instant gratification, pvp.

But in the end, this is all just mental masturbation. Gameplay changes aren't scheduled to even be considered anytime soon and that's soon(tm) as defined by VO. There will be dozens more threads rehashing this by then, and none will be right because whatever ends up getting done has already been decided. It's nice to pretend like most of /suggestions that will never come about. At least it'll give Pizza something to troll during the workday.

Death Fuffy. I agree the economy should be completed first. In fact, Rin and I always argue for the same thing - a consumables based economy, as implementing one (even a simulated one) would generate most of what people are looking for in VO.

I would add to your expensive argument (and it should be expensive). Instead of costs per cargo type, determine cost by cu, adjusted by the carrier type. So a cu transported on an XC would be cheaper than on a Trident, which is cheaper than on a Connie for example. The adjustments would be made relative to the perceived survivability of ship. That way, the better protected ships are even more expensive than the cheaper ones.

-1 We don't need content that basically makes Player owned Tridents and your interacting with owners of them useless.

If it's only the Trading you want to do then a Behemoth XC is good enough for that. A Trident doesn't even enhance Trading much further. I tested trading with my Trident and quickly found out that the loot from the Trident doesn't even count towards the Trading badge anymore for various reasons.

I like the idea of hired convos with Behemoths with low armor though which has been suggested a while back. That'd probably make piracy worthwhile again provided the offer is used by Players frequently.

I'd prefer a smaller cargo ship like the centaur with 44 or 48 cu hold. I could see it being useful for shipping crap like ore but not useful for trident assemblies.

But since this won't happen, remember Harpo's cargo service, reasonable rates for friends and allies, unethical gouging rates for others. :)

"A miner wouldn't be able to go pick up a fighter ship, because a fighter ship would only be available to military personel and military personel wouldn't have access to miner ships because they'd only be available to people who sign up with a mining company. Etc."

That just isn't how things are ever going to work here. Go play EVE.

Makes me want to shoot Rin cos he looks like a trader