Too much trading

[AshHill07]

POBs are the only thing I'll do tradeing for anymore. I like to know my efforts are achieveing something other than "Look, more virtual money." atleast with POBs you get "Look, your helping other players with thier projects." Litterally the only transport I use now-a-days is Century, and thats used to supply both Melbourne and Long Island Stations, whether they ask me to or not.

---

\\ CDR David Roberts \\ CAPT Steven Eversman \\ VADM Ash Hill // RDML Chris Murray // CDR Mick Connors //
\\ SFC| Patrol-7 \\ SFC| LNS-California \\ SFC| LNT-Century // SFC| LNS-San.Francisco // SFC| Patrol-5 //

[tothebonezone]

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.

---

User was banned for: https://discoverygc.com/forums/showthrea...tid=202684
Time left: (Permanent)

[n00bl3t]

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.

This.

We need more hotspots. And we don't need them based around mining.

---

Anything I say is not intended as offensive, and to try and deliberately misinterpret it as such would be an attempt at trolling via misrepresentation.

It's not a conspiracy, it's localised bias. They're not intelligent enough to form a conspiracy.

[Lunaphase]

Inclined to agree. Then theres the "no traders means no interaction".... well, letting everything and its mother huck whatever at tradeships and yet reducing their profits/raising prices constantly, is leading to not many people WANTING to trade.

More people would be willing to do it if it just dident flat out suck. This is a roleplay server, people, in theory, come here to roleplay, not go A,B,C and back with the occasional pay or die moment.

I would personally suggest: Increasing cargo hold OR cost/profit of goods, meaning each load above 3600 cargo is worth a pretty hefty chunk. This would give traders incentive for risk/reward runs (such as nuke devices or smuggling), and give potentially more role for escorts since the trader could afford to pay them more than pocket change, making it a viable way to earn cash.

Primary reason there are no escorts or very few: it sucks. Pirate usually has better kit than you anyway, if not outright a ship you cant scratch, for very little reward. Trader makes only about 10m profit meaning 2 mil is 20% of his, still paltry sum for both.

Trading also sucks because of tradeships being balanced as straight up suck machines, while they now have to deal with even cruisers firing at them. 12 type 3 tradeship guns is one cruiser cerb. cruisers do 4x the output of any transport, with 4x the hull and sheilds.

Another way to make trading fun: Larger heavyer ships, very well armed but slow, almost cruiser strength, bristling with turrets. (think about 22 turrets on somthing the size of a heavy cruiser, a true trade galleon) This makes pirating an interesting and fun encounter, as well as lets the trader actually be able to defend their asses, somthing which is sorely lacking against anything not a LF or HF. (Roleplay wise theres just no way to justifiy corporations not upgunning and up armoring their stuff with piracy this rampant, its just common sense to make ships able to actually survive whats become standard)

Mining mobile refinerys: Must remain stationary, latches on to a large asteroid. larger cargohold but no thruster, making mining ops viable again.

Research ships: Ships with lower cargo but higher speed or firepower for defence, making them poor tradeships but good at roleplaying roles. (similar to yacht, but non-suckified.) Think junker salvager here, able to defend itself decently but not as good as a straight up warship.

---

[Lonely_Ghost]

Another way to make trading fun: Larger heavyer ships, very well armed but slow, almost cruiser strength, bristling with turrets. (think about 22 turrets on somthing the size of a heavy cruiser, a true trade galleon) This makes pirating an interesting and fun encounter, as well as lets the trader actually be able to defend their asses, somthing which is sorely lacking against anything not a LF or HF. (Roleplay wise theres just no way to justifiy corporations not upgunning and up armoring their stuff with piracy this rampant, its just common sense to make ships able to actually survive whats become standard)

Sounds nice, at least, pirates with cruisers or bombers could have a challenge to beat transport.

[Curios]

POBs are removing the hotspots, add this to the list of what must be reworked so you can't build it at where pirates used to hit miners\traders.

Also on galleons: It's bullshit. Stop pls. Traders are making a shitload of profit and pirates are not supposed to battle a lone trader like it's a capital ship for their tiny 2 mill. Also traders are 75% silent F3 bots so being blown alot must teach them how to fly carefully.

---

[Jack_Henderson]

Sorry to say, but:

If you do not enjoy flying your trade ship character, don't do it.
There are other means to get money.
And: sustaining existing ships is really cheap enough so that not much "grinding" is necessary.

In my opinion, we need...

... more trading
... more (centralised) traffic in the lanes
... more centralisation (to main systems, via bottleneck systems) in general
... more players that experience what trading on a transport is like
... more players that find themselves on the receiving end of the gun regularly

Everybody should have to trade/mine.
It would be good for the game.

Therefore the money/hour rate should not be increased.
There is too much money in the economy already and hardly any way of using it reasonably.

---

+ IMG| DISCORD: https://discord.gg/TWrGWjp
+ IMG| IS RECRUITING: Click to find out more!

[Hone]

Shiuploss on death would encourage people to trade to replace their ships.

---

User was banned for: Griefing others
Time left: (Permanent)

[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.

---

[n00bl3t]

Shiuploss on death would encourage people to trade to replace their ships.

I'd probably make an EVE account at that stage.

---

Anything I say is not intended as offensive, and to try and deliberately misinterpret it as such would be an attempt at trolling via misrepresentation.

It's not a conspiracy, it's localised bias. They're not intelligent enough to form a conspiracy.