Too much trading

[Ash]

It doesnt matter how much you make, thats all relative, its how centralised it is. 86 focussed on spreading out activity, and that proved to be a mistake, as the galaxy is too big to be highly populated everywhere, resulting in everywhere being lowly populated, being less fun, discouraging people to log on, becoming even more lowly populated, vicious cycle.

I respectfully disagree. Even in .85, despite the reduced size of the mod there was a lot of dead space. I'm not saying that the increase in size of the mod in general hasn't contributed to this problem, but players still centralised around systems that were more interesting than others like Tau 23 & Tau 37 for example. So this problem isn't necessarily linked to trading as such. Pirates were drawn to areas where trading was hottest, this spurred activity in policing forces and everyone has a ball.

Conversations like this always go back to the standard reasoning and activity "circle" argument of "we need traders to keep trading so pirates can keep pirating so police can keep policing", even though that's not a circle, and that's a chain, which can easily be broken if the trading part becomes too annoying, which it's getting there, imo.

Actually, the whole traders>pirates>police thing is flawed. Not sure who came up with the idea that this is how it HAS to be, and if we don't, the mod will explode. But yes, if you make trading easier, and you make money easier to get, even though it will cut down on trader activity, those credits are going to be put into things which cause activity.

Whether it be POBs, which require coordinated effort from numerous players to maintain and build, or new pirate/military/police/PvP characters, which leads to players getting into fights with other players or at the very least, grinding missions with other players. Or, in rarer cases, the money gets put into competitions and things, as prizes, which also leads to player interaction, even if it's on the forums, and in turn, the won money gets turned into one of the things like above, which all generate player interaction.

So yeah, when you make getting credits easier, it really stimulates the activity of the server, it doesn't hurt it, contrary to popular belief...

Although I disagree with your initial point that the chain is how it has to be I agree with the majority of your opinion there. Wars, fights and RP need sides as well as money to continue. Pirates don't need to pirate, they need a trader character on the side to earn the money.

I'm sure no one cares about my opinion on trading, but it's always been terrible. In 4.84, you had a few golden power smuggling routes that could, at least, get you your ships in a couple of days. Now you're stuck to EXTREMELY normalized routes. Even smuggling isn't worthwhile now. It's roughly 5% more profit/hour to do slaves/cardi than it is to trade legally, and that's not including the lawfuls (like me) who know most of the smuggling routes and will shoot an obvious smuggler down with no remorse.

It's less about RP now, and more about balance as a videogame.

Trading for a battleship is like grinding for that end-game epic on every MMO ever. Not RP at all.

This is what i'm talking about. The acitivity of trading characters have gone through the roof. Trading is the most boring aspect of the game to the majority of people. People are losing interest since all they're doing is trading for an unnecessary amount of time and are being forced to play a game they're not having fun playing to eventually get what they want. The question being - is what we eventually get correlational to the amount of time we've spent working for it? Judging by what I've seen I'm guessing the answer is no.

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