I understand. It's highly frustrating for a lot of people, and I'm lucky to have avoided being personally affected by the worst of it. I highly encourage you to file a player request to have the relevant changes reverted and make your stance heard via more official channels. If you're interested in trying to bring back Ageira~ despite these setbacks, I'd encourage you to message me on Discord so that we could organize joint trade convoys and/or relevant RP. In the meantime, remember the sandwich rule and try to enjoy the loads of cool stuff this update did bring.
While I disagree with the way Snak expressed himself I wholeheartedly agree removing a ton of sh*t wasn't necessarily a good call. The multitude of commodities was a really good tool for roleplay.
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This update overhauls a lot of existing systems in a "from the ground up" way. Jumpdrives, cloaks, docking modules. PoB "crafting". The economy is no exception. Saying we "removed" commodities is genuinely inaccurate -- we worked from the ground up and if something is missing it simply wasn't re-added.
It isn't fully finished. Far from it. Quite frankly, many of the other overhauls didn't have a flawless launch either. The update got larger and larger and at some point we simply had to "ship it" to be able to start chipping away at problems.
The economy needs much more fleshing out. But just a single glance at its current state shows that even with a limited number of commodities, the routes for said commodities are incomplete. Adding more commodities would not have solved this problem. We'll work on it and improve it as we go, and we will undoubtedly re-add a good number of removed commodities. In fact, I have an idea for a "mimic" flag of sorts that allows copies of commodities (let's say Synth Paste or something) that mimic other commodities (in this case, Food Rations) in terms of consumers and resellers, but have unique points of production. This would allow us to have more commodities without significantly increasing the upkeep of a system that historically has been very difficult to maintain.
Great, you will do what shouldn't have been done to rectify the issue in the first place. Maybe next time just listen, slightly, to concerns raised by people who do almost nothing else than trading on the server, how those changes will (and did) ruin the whole thing.
I've only seen a few of the story changes, but so far I like them. However, I don't like balance changes. Caps have, subjectively, become boring to me, and my reflexes aren't quick enough to fly snubs. I don't see anything left to do for me here but RP on the forums and facepalm at Reddy's puns. Thanks for the effort, though. You guys have spent so much time working on this, I should try to find a way to appreciate it.
(10-07-2023, 12:04 PM)SnakThree Wrote: Great, you will do what shouldn't have been done to rectify the issue in the first place. Maybe next time just listen, slightly, to concerns raised by people who do almost nothing else than trading on the server, how those changes will (and did) ruin the whole thing.
The game was unimaginably bloated with commodities. Every house in the game had its own food item that had the same infocard. Pristine Ice was called commodity_copper internally. There were so many of these weird issues. It was necessary to strip it down to the bare essentials to get everything working so we can add stuff back in later. I understand your frustration but buying a commodity on one base and then selling it on a different base doesn't automatically make you an expert on how to make a previously extremely sterile (and broken) economy into something interesting and more importantly, functional. Every commodity in the game now has value. Previously, in the economy with around 300 unique and awesome commodities, the majority were worthless. It was simply unfeasible to even begin to try and properly implement the dozens of silvery-white metals and insane amount of player faction commodities.
(10-07-2023, 12:04 PM)SnakThree Wrote: Great, you will do what shouldn't have been done to rectify the issue in the first place. Maybe next time just listen, slightly, to concerns raised by people who do almost nothing else than trading on the server, how those changes will (and did) ruin the whole thing.
The game was unimaginably bloated with commodities. Every house in the game had its own food item that had the same infocard. Pristine Ice was called commodity_copper internally. There were so many of these weird issues. It was necessary to strip it down to the bare essentials to get everything working so we can add stuff back in later. I understand your frustration but buying a commodity on one base and then selling it on a different base doesn't automatically make you an expert on how to make a previously extremely sterile (and broken) economy into something interesting and more importantly, functional. Every commodity in the game now has value. Previously, in the economy with around 300 unique and awesome commodities, the majority were worthless. It was simply unfeasible to even begin to try and properly implement the dozens of silvery-white metals and insane amount of player faction commodities.
Using italic doesn't make you an expert on what value unique commodities provided to factions that had those commodities for years. What value does commodity have if there is no feasible trade route for it? Monetary value, sure. Tangible value for bringing activity to server, zero.
For what it's worth, I had absolutely no say in the removal of 200 commodities (yes, we used to have 288 and now we have 88), and as soon as I found out about it, I had Strong Words™ with Haste about this decision. @Karst can attest to this, as he was there on VC at the time as well. While I understand the train of thought that was behind these changes, I personally think the concept of trimming down commodities went way, way too far, and I am actively lobbying for the return of most of these commodities, based solely on design considerations, whenever the opportunity presents itself.
Furthermore, Detroit Munitions has suffered from the mass commodity removals too, although not nearly as much as other trade factions -- the merger of Side Arms (a Daumann product) into Light Arms (the Detroit product) is something that makes no sense from a lore perspective, economy perspective, or even a developer maintenance perspective.
Your insinuation that I'm behind this, with nefarious and selfish motivations, is quite uninformed; the entirety of my involvement with the economy was adding commodities to resellers, making sure that random bases sold at least something rather than nothing, that bases resold commodities they should inRP both buy and sell, et cetera. Beyond that, I provided input to the new POB crafting recipes, wrote a couple dozen infocards, and got a musician/sound designer from outside the community to graciously agree to do some atmospheric sound fx design for us. Please at least try to gather relevant information before slinging mud like this.
So is there chance of these commodities that are now missing but important to people are returning?
Also why does Haste decide literally everything? Don't you have like an Econ head?
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What is important is that the economy is worked on and more fully finished. That undoubtedly includes adding "missing" commodities. I doubt we're putting the 24 Silvery-White Metals™ back into the game, though.
Look at the routes that are there. The economy is a barebones minimum. A "skeleton". No: we couldn't have kept the old economy in a patch that changes this much about systems.
While I was involved in the econ rework it was mostly handled by some players from the community and @Mephistoles , who did the bulk of the work. One person setting up what every base in the game buys and sells from scratch is a lot of work. Therefore the economy is incomplete. Adding 250 more commodities would not have magically fixed this: instead you would've had 300+ commodities with zero routes between them.
I suggest looking at the actual gameplay changes of the economy, and also considering that a lot of the changes are PoB-centric and not currently available while PoBs are in holiday mode. Give us some time.
I'd also like to note that an announcement was made in the official Discovery Discord that we were looking for community members interested in helping, and many people were invited to help. A lot of people saw the sheer size of the econ_bases document however and immediately bounced back out. It's easy to say "Just ask more people for help" while ignoring the fact that we did exactly that and it often resulted in people realizing this isn't a small task and giving up immediately. There is also the issue of "too many chefs spoiling the broth" in these instances where cleaning up erroneous entries starts taking longer than, well, doing the work with fewer people would.
There is no Head for Economy currently, and Haste is Lead Developer so yes he has say over everything, regardless of Department.
The econ reform was made possible due to a code Haste wrote that can automatically generate the economy provided the input parameters are set, so Haste has leadership on the fundamentals of how the economy operates at a base level.