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Let's try a little exercise.
Trip A lasts 10 minutes and pays 5 credits/unit.
Trip B lasts 20 minutes and pays 10 credits/unit.
Trip C lasts 28 minutes and pays 12 credits/unit.
Trip D lasts 5 minutes and pays 4 credits/unit.
Rank the trips from best to worst and explain why for each one.
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(10-23-2013, 05:44 PM)Scumbag Wrote: So you are saying everyone should use the same trade route, no matter what id and rp they have?
I never said that. I looked around my trader chars, and as far as I remember, I'm used 14 trade routes really often, back in those days when I traded.
What I wanted to say, that every trading company has their A, B, C and also D trade route, it's only up to you which one do you choose.
When I bored, I just picked my Freelancer Firefly, bought some commoditie, and brought it to the most expensive selling pont.. Sold it, and bought the cheapest commodity on that base.. And the circle continues.
Not so profitable, but I saw really cool things while I flied, met good RP'ers, fight against evil pirates and so on.
It's Freelancer, not Powertradinglancer. Yes, I know everyone want good amount of money in a short time. But, it's up to you what you choose.. RP supply a base, powertrade, or just randomly pick up/sell commodities to travel to every corner of Sirius.
I know, right now I'm living from code selling, ship purchase/selling, giving loans, but hey, it's another option. If the /beginner restart is cancelled, I'll continue my Charity project.
It's not a matter of making money, you can do that, maybe too easy. It's a matter of making the economy part of the game, improve it and work with it to make a more enjoyable atmosphere. It should give you the immersion feeling we are going for with the role play part of the game.
(10-23-2013, 05:44 PM)Scumbag Wrote: So you are saying everyone should use the same trade route, no matter what id and rp they have?
I don't see your problem.
Everybody cannot even use the same route because most people cannot dock at some bases or the commodities do not make any sense.
Just have a look and find one that:
... fits your rp
... is profitable
If you cannot find anything (which is unlikely because of 8 million commodities), make a suggestion about how to change it.
Took me and a few people 1 h to figure out nice and irp realistic trade routes for 3 factions with different reps. Wasn't THAT hard to do.
I am bored of repeating this over and over again, knowing others have repeated it too.
The economy makes or breaks the game. If it's not made with player interaction and rp in mind, you won't have traders and pirates meeting; you will have traders hauling absurd commodities with absurd ships; absurd sell points for commodities; police bored of patrolling systems knowing they won't meet anyone. pirate or smuggler; inflation; a dwindling player base due to boredom of trade and absence of activity for all the factions.
Could you see all of these things happening in 4.86? Cause i did.
LE: I have arguments against this type of economy cause i've seen it fail and this new one is prone to failure even more, because now it's bloated with useless commodities and has even less regard for rp logic.
And to add insult to injury, they had to add another system between Gamma and Alpha because a trade route *needed* to be shorter. WHAT?
(10-23-2013, 04:21 PM)Xoria Wrote: Let's try a little exercise.
Trip A lasts 10 minutes and pays 5 credits/unit.
Trip B lasts 20 minutes and pays 10 credits/unit.
Trip C lasts 28 minutes and pays 12 credits/unit.
Trip D lasts 5 minutes and pays 4 credits/unit.
Rank the trips from best to worst and explain why for each one.
I'm not certain how to respond to this without calling it all terrible, but I'll go on anyway.
A and B tie, if only for the fact there is no single best here.
D comes in next.
C is dead last.
So, why do I have them ranked as such? If I was to compare them to a perfectly simulated Point A to B environment, trip D would, based on numbers, be the best. But I do not base it on that. In fact, the last thing I want is for the economy just to be based on numbers.
I based my ranking on how people have felt is a good route based on time, profit, and potential for interaction. Anything over 20 minutes is generally seen as too long, and from convoys I've ran over the last five (six?) years I've been in Discovery, you always see people dropping out after one or two drop offs.
But 10 minutes is just too short. If you're trading for both profit, and the potential of interaction with pirates or other players, fifteen minutes has been a magical number to allow for things to happen. It's not long, it's not short, and you don't see the same three systems over and over.
And C is in dead last. While this could serve as a braindead, afk-train-for-maximum-profit route, it's boring, uneventful, and the time required to fly it goes up exponentially as you cross more lanes, since 1/3, or sometimes as often as 2/3 are disrupted by NPCs. There's certainly potential for player interaction, but then there's potential for nothing to happen at all, and players are scattered into the nothingness, never bumping into each other, unless they all pursue the same braindead route.
My original post wasn't about just profits. It's about how there's little choice. You either take the few routes your Corporation is capable of, or you waste your time trucking back and forth between three systems, because you know system A and B are so infested with pirates, any kind of interaction would be negative and upsetting to your convoy.
I don't have a choice to set up a long, even massive route that would take me to a few choice points for great profit. I don't have a choice for shorter routes that stay near one house, and trek just inside of the others for just good profit.
There's a few routes that are two stops, all at maximum distance possible, or a bunch of low-profit ones that give you little choice on what to return.
What if we want to bring back some important metal alloy for a construction project? Or maybe this, or that, or...
With the way the economy is set out now, you're forced to treat trading as another job. You have to dedicate hours into it to get what you want.
There's been arguements that people would stop trading if they made money more easily. That they would have no reason to. Mining made many times more in much less time. People still mined and traded after they made billions off of it. I would argue people stop trading because it's the physical manifestation of boredom.
(10-23-2013, 04:21 PM)Xoria Wrote: Let's try a little exercise.
Trip A lasts 10 minutes and pays 5 credits/unit.
Trip B lasts 20 minutes and pays 10 credits/unit.
Trip C lasts 28 minutes and pays 12 credits/unit.
Trip D lasts 5 minutes and pays 4 credits/unit.
Rank the trips from best to worst and explain why for each one.
They're all based on arbitrary numbers and have no grounding in the mod itself.
I can't choose the best one. They're all equally awful.
