Discovery Gaming Community

By playing Freelancer with my friend, I asked me if Freelancer got only two ways to play the game. One the one hand there is the trader who trades goods from one planet to the other (mostly the same route). He makes a lot of money, the afford is as lesser as his commendation (my friend watches movies besides). His money increase exponential and so he gets the biggest ship in relative short time.
One the other hand there is the missioner (a player that mostly makes missions at the space stations etc), his money increases more slower because at the beginning the affords is as higher as the commendation and he needs more time to get a better ship.

In my opinion trading is a little bit boring, because some people only take one or two routes and making their money. It is written in many forums which trading routes are the most profitable and by this information they fly their couple of routes. As I see it, it would make more fun by adding an active trading system.

I dont know the possibility of the Game-Engine, but when I played DarkStar-One (a single player space simulator); I was very fascinated of its trade-engine. If you buy something at one station, your ship takes the good and the station looses its good quantity. By this the price at the space station for this good is going to rise. When you sell the good at another planet, the price for this good is going to go down at this planet and the quantity of the good rise.

Would it make more fun to trade, by adding this system or a similar one?

In my opinion it would become more difficult for a trader to get the most profitable routes, but it would make the game longer in time to make money and buy a bigger ship.

Im not one of these guys who are envois to the players who own the biggest ships on server and want to make the game more difficult for them. Im one of the guys who played the game as a trader and dont saw the sense in flying two routes and accumulating money but not knowing what to buy from your 1 200 000 000 Credits.

So thats my opinion I am very interested what your opinion is about?!
Is the actual trade system ok, or do you thing that it has to become more optimised, too?

I believe its not possible to have a dynamic trading system in Freelancer, so I'm afraid this is not a viable
situation. Boring as it may be, trading will have to stay the way it is.

Hoodlum

Agreed Hoodlum, i think Igiss may have comments here also

Cheers

Actually, dynamic trading (or a variation of) is possible, but Igiss has said multiple times in the features requests forum that it will NOT ever be implemented in Disco.

Can be done, yes, but causes more problems than it is worth, and would probably need disco to be rebuilt from the ground up: Not worthwhile.

To make it work, you have to:

1. Automatically track what gets bought and sold (and where).
2. Feed this data into a system that will readjust prices.
3. Essentially update the mod on the client every day/week/whatever.

I don't know how tough #1 is.
#2 is a straightforward machine learning problem, although to keep the game fun and balanced you'd want a human supervising the process (so that the economy doesn't flatten out over time).
#3 is the biggest problem, I suspect. It's a royal pain to make people update that often. A dynamic economy certainly isn't worth it to me.

Dynamic trading is already being done on at least one Freelancer mod (sorry, I can't remember which mod).

' Wrote:To make it work, you have to:

1. Automatically track what gets bought and sold (and where).
2. Feed this data into a system that will readjust prices.
3. Essentially update the mod on the client every day/week/whatever.

I don't know how tough #1 is.
#2 is a straightforward machine learning problem, although to keep the game fun and balanced you'd want a human supervising the process (so that the economy doesn't flatten out over time).
#3 is the biggest problem, I suspect. It's a royal pain to make people update that often. A dynamic economy certainly isn't worth it to me.

#3 is done automatically on one or two Freelancer mods. I know of one mod that the creator updates two or three times per week. When players connect to that mod's server (the mod only has one server), the players' files are automatically updated, so I imagine that's a pretty painless process for the players.

I'm going to put forward, that what disco needs, instead of a dynamic economy, as far as the economy goes, is to have the guard systems actually join the economy like real people.....but..thats just me.

I know one mod where the commodity prices changed based on the stock market. Used some wierd hash function to modify prices every where.

' Wrote:I believe its not possible to have a dynamic trading system in Freelancer, so I'm afraid this is not a viable
situation. Boring as it may be, trading will have to stay the way it is.

Hoodlum

Don't those people on the Evolved mod have dynamic trading? I havn't played it but I have a freind that did so I'll ask him.