A simple way to increase traders and fighters to work together would be to give them incentives right?! How about an "escort" systems. Where by the trader calls out for an escort, the fighter then responds that he/she is interested. The trader /invite escort "fighter", in turn the fighter type in /accept escort "trader". When the convoy reaches there destination, trader makes transaction, and the money is devided ({70/30}{60/40}{50/50}????) and the fighter gets a point towards a badge for escorts, and recieves a small amount of C/L/H/-/-. The details need to be ironed out but what do you all think???? Perhaps when you get the badge you get a better escort style weapon or ship.

hmmmm, i kind of like that idea. make it so that it only works if the trader has taken a mission tho, otherwise it could be exploited far too easily.

elaborate on how it could be exploited, if by stimulating grouping then yes, otherwise I dont' see how?

If it's not tied to a mission, then you could just exit and dock from the same station over and over again.

Perhaps make the xp tied to number of jumps(wormhole, not intersystem) and profit. So (example only): Combat XP = (Num Jumps * 50) + (.01 * Profit). I escort someone through two systems, where they make a profit of 10000c. I get (100) + (100) = 200xp. Since you're never going to get a profit from selling to the same station and won't be jumping, you'll get negligible XP from it.

The escort must remain within the same sector of the trader at all times, with maybe a ten second buffer to cover load times and to allow the escort to go first through wormholes. This eliminates the case where someone just sits in a station as an "escort" while AFK and gets XP.

Yah, your right, and in my head that's what I was imagining. I like your equation too for the xp. I really think that more people would do this if something like this was put in place.

mmm while i just posted something to this effect, and it iss a litte bit bett then what you wrote (no offence, but i gave more illaberation to mine)

IT's the same idea so we both get credit for it.

honestly I think what you just came up with was after what I did, but in any case, your idea is command line heavy to me and I honestly would not take the time to do that, what I suggested was simple for a reason. I've sure there is a medium point somewhere between the two of ours that would be a better solution to this idea. Though most of these never go anywhere anyway.

true but the part to after mine, i have been typing it for 30min (i am at cabrillo right now, waiting for my final project to render in maya 5, and am constintley getting up every 5 min to check the other computers.)

true it is command line heavy, but with a simple interface (like the jetesson cargo one, it chould be just as easy, just press (Shift-m) or (Shift-e) and it brings up a GUI type thing, that lets you do it all frome there

unfortunitly the command line thing is somethign we will have to endure forever because this game runes on command lines, (j) is the same thing as typing some command

I'm not even going to start a conv. about the command system here. Needless to say, we both had roughly the same idea (great minds think alike =P), whether it's /escort or /merc I honestly don't care, but to be able to group up and get some xp and cash for it is what I was trying to impart, hopefully the devs will actually implement something like this soon as it's needed.

perhaps an additional part of this could be the trader voting on how much the escorts helped. for instance, trader invites three escorts, two fly all the way, knock out a pirate and a couple mean bots, one was barely in the same sector as the trader the entire flight. at the completion of the mission, trader is asked to rate each escort on a scale, (1 to 5, 1 to 10, whatever works) and money/exp. is doled out on this (as well as WH jumps, distance traveled, etc.) this would leave things up to the play a little more. dynamic, in that, a trader could ask for an escort, and then purposefully give the escorts a score of one so they got the least cut of his cash, no matter how well they performed. the escorts would then know not to escort for this particular (greedy) trader anymore

I personally would rather avoid the greedy trader route and make it a standard split, if the escort/trader is bad they know not to group up again.

These commands make good sense. I don't know if the profit equation would work very well. Instead, I'd suggest a fixed pool of XP that is shared out as outlined below. (It seems complicated but it really is not.)

I also think the commands should be generalized into a command set for group trade missions. That way you can leverage the regular group functionality.

/escort <trader>
This command simply joins the group, but flags you as getting combat pilot xp instead of trade xp, and defaults you to getting a half-share of the loot (i.e., half of one share, so if there is 3000 credits earned you will get 750 credits). Needs a group invite first.

/setshare <pilot> <number>
This command sets <pilot>'s share of the spoils from the trade mission. In a group of two, having one share apiece means splitting loot 50-50. Traders default at 1 share; escorts default at 1/2 shares. Possible share denominations are: half, one, two, and integers upward from there. I'd suggest an English parser as well as a numeric parser, so that '/setshare Spellcast half' is the preferred way of specifying a half-share, but '/setshare Spellcast 5' also works.

(The shares methodology is necessary to accommodate people joining and leaving the group. Percentages won't work.)

When figuring XP and cash rewards, you just have to add up all the half-shares in the group, divide the pot, and hand it out according to how many half-shares each person has. Example: a trade group of 2 Centaurs and 2 Vultures successfully completes a mission, and they are rewarded with a pot of 6000 credits and 1200 XP. Assuming default shares, there are six half-shares, for 1000 credits and 200 XP per half-share. Each trader gets 2000 credits and 400 trade XP; each combat pilot gets 1000 credits and 200 combat pilot XP.

As to how to make "group" trade missions (aside from implementing these commands): just increase the cu of goods necessary to transport into the range of 75-200.

I think I understand your share method and it would work. But I don't think this style of command should have to be based on taking a "group trade mission". The original idea was concieved in an effort to figure out a way to get people to help each other out. It started with the whole WH ganking thread and this would make it so that an individual that has some ore that they have mined and stored at one station but wants to transport it to another station for trade can hire people to escort them through grey space or through another nations system. In either case this is NOT a trade mission, this is purely for profit, BUT, it gives the opportunity for xp because of the risk of getting attacked by PK'ers and Pirates alike.

I do however think that it would also be good for group missions and so it should be able to be use for both. Perhaps with different amounts of xp to be gained per each use type. But, there does have to be a way to intice people to want to help someone other then money, cause it's easy enough to do a few trade routes yourself and make money. It's much harder and boring to have to go bot to get xp for combat.

And I have yet to see anyone add in the other great idea (at least I think so) about giving out a medal for those who have succesfully completed x number of escorts. This again gives people incentive to want to help out on those long trade routes.

The medal idea is a good one. Actually, it's very good, because medals are a great way to get high-level people to participate.

As for the mining issue, I really think ad hoc mining experience should be reduced, and mining missions should be added. It adds goals to mining and would put the proper structure on group mining missions. Mining suffers from the same problems -- there's no reward for cargo ships and escorts in group mining activities -- and this could be solved with a mission structure.

you took me too literally, I ment that if trader has X at station A and wants to transport it to station B without loosing any of his/her cargo they would be able to acquire an escort, who in turn could game a small amount of xp & money, but would also get escort points towards a badge. The badge being the more attracting feature as your not going to give out tons of xp/money if there was no action the whole time.

There most definitely needs to be more mining oriented content in regards to missions and shipping it from point a to b.

What if players could put up their own trade missions? Put up the cargo, a destination, and a money value for doing it. If you want to take your own mission, click a "Post and Accept Mission" button instead of simply "Post Mission."

Of course, this would be far more useful if weapons and equipment could be treated as cargo. Shipping hoarded guns/batteries/etc. to a particular station would be a valuable service to some people. It would incidentally solve the mining stockpiling issue too.

[edit] I would like to withdraw this idea, as it is pure lunacy. [/edit]

the only issue I see about putting up your own player generated missions is that, 1) If you log, the mission goes away, since they would not have access to your stuff unless your online; and 2) If you are online and no one wants to take the mission your just sitting around waisting your time, when you could have just done it yourself.

today i hired 3 escorts to take me from grayspace to UITspace when i was selling ore from mining. when there is a big profit to be made in grayspace, escort hiring becomes justified automatically without special missions etc.

ananzi: I'm guessing you and those pilots had an exciting 90-second journey back to UIT space, and that was the end of it. It was also a pretty isolated incident -- you can't turn all the traders into heliocene miners.

We're talking about installing a structure that always yields a benefit for traders/miners to group and hire escort pilots.

Perhaps we could go strictly on a cash basis for this behavior if the shipping of commodities (a) was much more critical, so that a failure to deliver plasma core to the manufacturing station means no more plasma devestators; (b) had a much higher risk/profit level in general. Even then, I still think the game would benefit far, far more from a system that makes trade and mining groups worthwhile all of the time, not just when a single miner strikes it rich.

johnhawl218: I wasn't really trying to debate a mechanism for posting missions. Rather, I wanted to point out that the problem of shipping your own mined ores is not a flaw in restricting escort XP rewards to missions. As Spellcast pointed out, escort rewards for personal ore shipments will be /severely/ absued. There's probably no way to do this other than ananzi's cash on the barrel method.

last night, someone hired 4-5 people, myself included, to help transport 800 units of a certain cargo from one grayspace system to a nation-space system where the price was 50% higher. he payed us 10,000c per run. we went in a sort of convoy. this mission lasted at least 30 minutes. i reckon we moved about 1.2 million c worth of goods across 2 wormhole jumps.