Discovery Economy Reformation

[mjolnir]

Disco is slowly becoming a grind fest. Many people will simply leave this server if this trend continues. They are asking for a fix before they reach that point because they enjoy this community/mod.

This rather pathetic proclamation has a few issues:

What do people need a lot of money for?
a) capships with expensive armor
b) many characters

Both of these are optional, you don't need either of them to "be somebody" in disco or to be able to play.

A lot of new players that join will always see getting a big ship as the ultimate goal when they start. For a determined mind like that it's not a problem (and never was) to get a Battleship during a week of normal playing. (btw. Battleship prices are exactly the same as 2 years ago in 4.84)

So we focused the group that needs a lot of money to at least a bit experienced players who either want a bigger ship/armor or more characters. Neither of these is going to leave the community because it takes them long time to buy cap 8 or buy their 20th VHF. Simply because neither of these does in a significant way limit their ability to play. But yes they are going to whine about it.

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Some things for the devs and the community at large to ponder on:

1. Is it justified to penalize players with credit-intensive RP ambitions, who also have limited game time?
2. Is an economical system (low profit, high expense), that encourages OOC grudge matches (i.e. an hour of work negated by a 5-minute pew-pew bonanza), necessarily a good thing?

1. How are those players penalized compared to other players?
They aren't.
It's their own will to want something that costs a lot. I'm sure any player can think of something that he could use a lot of money for and come come with good reason.
There's no direct way we can make that will make some people earn much more than others easily. Because the others will simply use it as well.

For this reasons we have (or used to have), prize competitions for best RP story etc. Eventually now you can try to submit SRP that gives the character/faction the money he needs.


2. For pirates to actually pirate (and not just pew pew) there needs to be some bonus (= money to get), for traders to actually care about being pirated, they need to fear to loose something. If each pirate asked for 10 credits, then any trader would pay without trying to escape/shoot/bargain => nobody will pirate.

I, however, do agree that there should be some sort of limit as to how much a pirate asks for in the server rules.

How much it should be is another question, I'd say it should actually be cargo size related. For example 500 credits per cargo unit.

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We need traders, otherwise pirates will hang around Manhattan just to pick a fight with lawfulls and the game will turn into cops vs robbers.

As mentioned before, trading keeps the server alive. Give everyone 200 mil per hour profit.. and 99% of all player interaction will be pvp in fixed locations.

The issue is not that making money takes time. The issue is that making money should be fun and encourage player interaction.



There are now at least 4 ways to make money:

- trading
Dunno how to make it more fun, any ideas?
The fact that more trader ships (eventually with escorts) are safer does encourage interaction. The fact that traders can actually be pirated does that as well.

- mining
Again dunno how to make it more fun, open to your proposals on that.
The current system does encourage player interaction, because mining in team gives much better profits as well as being safer.
Note also that mining as a way of actually making money is something new in 4.85.

- NPC cargo pirating
Maybe increase NPC defenses to make it more fun?
It encourages teamplay, because when one is shooting the transports and another taking goods away the profit increases. Also you get better profit when landing on bases that are hostile to you, so it encourages Pirate-Junker interaction.

- missions
I'd say it's rather fun as long as you can actually die doing them.
Encourages interaction because only anti-cap missions give you reasonable ammount of money and those are very hard to do alone.
Here I'd say the profits can be increased a lot so it offers a real alternative.

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@ Maggot

People like interaction with other people. That's why they play online in the first place. When on server with very low population they have to trade a lot, which means flying trough empty space, it would be boring.
On the other hand if you give them a lot of starting money, they would have little reason to stay logged on the server because getting anything will be easy. So it's rather very hard to start a new server.

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Igiss says: Martin, you give them a finger, they bite off your arm.