Maybe it's just cause I've played a lot of mmorpgs, but I don't find the money grind that tough or boring. Time consuming sure, but we still want people to earn their ships. We want them to learn the ways of roleplay before they jump into their first fighters and capital ships and go shoot stuff.
And honestly? The money grind for Disco isn't even that bad comapred to some games I've played. One game it litterally took me about two months to get from level 1-8, possibly even longer I don't remember.
Cutting the price of armour would cut the set up cost dramatically....
if you think that making money is "work" - you miss half of the games fun. - only if you think of trading the very same you think of upkeeping the law or pirating - you ll have fun.
this has nothing to do with the availability of ships nor their prices. - if you get down to it that trading is indeed roleplay and just as much worth being online as anything else you do with your chars - you ll start to be content.
we could make the ship prices 1 credit - so that a roleplayer really just had to "choose" and aquiring a ship would not be associated with the feeling of having accomplished something - and people would still complain.
as long as players think that making money is just an annoying necessity - it will always just be an annoying necessity. - 4.85 introduced changes to the traders - no, not RP traderoutes... but more factionized traders ( no, not playerfactions, but the much much more important npc factions )
roleplaying a poor guy is as exciting as roleplaying a filthy rich one. - you can roleplay a char that is a billionaire - but doesn t mention it to everybody or you can RP a rich guy that just brags about it. - you can RP a poor guy that just pretends to be rich or anything
- money is JUST another tool to roleplay. and you don t even need much of it to make 90% of all characters become believable and logical.
First, you have the trade system itself that was nerfed to encourage more varied and extended trading, since the powers that be felt that we needed traders as the bottom of the local food chain. Me, I think that we didn't need to nerf them at all, just mix them up and make a larger variety of profitable ones. We didn't have a problem with an insufficient number of traders in 4.84, we just needed to RP them up a bit.
Second, the ship prices were increased to keep people in smaller ships for a longer period to increase the variety of ships seen throughout the server. The prices of Capital ships were also increased to make them more difficult to get a hold of.
What I think's happened is that the trade route group wasn't talking to the ship pricing group, and we ended up with lower profits and increased prices. In 4.84, I usualy had about 100-200 mil lying around from casual trading, which was more than enough to fund my characters and make whatever new ones I wanted. I had to work for it a bit if I wanted a cap, but it wasn't too bad. Now, in 4.85, I've barely got enough credits sitting around to keep my ships alive, and even raising the credits to set up a new bomber, let alone a cap, is a chore and a half.
Something really needs to change, I think. I don't like to grind for hours on end, as I find trading rather dull if done too long.
Ivan is correct, and furthermore, its not to do with dealing with caps; though its an oft touted reason, the devs realize that raising prices does not actually keep lolcaps away, it doesn't at all adress any issue. High prices of transports are to create more use of the midrange transports, and to add diversity. High prices of Capitalships? Because they're big objects. High prices in general? Because, in part, as els has said, Xoria led a pirate faction.
1Yes, you need money to buy things.
2Yes, things are 'expensive' (as compared to what?)
3Yes, the focus of the game is RP.
4Crisis is not spelt with a y unless you're talking about a specific game...
Point three rather explains point one and two: The RP of the server, I mean the grand cycle, is very much a food chain. Piracy works much better as an RP act, and is really only sensible other than fun by bullying, as an RP device, the foundation of the RP device of Disco. We're playing Cops and Robbers...with a couple complexities tossed in, of course, but at its base, cops and robbers. Lots of extra make believe, cause that's what we're intersted in, and because we're not juvenile, an extra couple groups of cops with their own policies and rivalries. We need, to make this work, people to be robbed, and robbed a lot.
We're not 100% make believe. We're not pretending to be robbed, and then pretending to be robbers, we're actually assuming the role. Military and Police are actually defending the traders from the actual and dangerous pirates or terrorists, and its all based on the traders.
In a forest stream, fish eat smaller fish eat insect eat FPOM or CPOM(leaves n such). The insects, there, which form the bottom of the food chain because there's not actually enough light to do much photosynthesis (trees above the stream block the light and drop in CPOM, mostly, and some FPOM (doesn't matter). Now, in a stream, the insects eat the stuff and turn it into other stuff, to survive. In the game, we provide encounters, which provide other ecounters, and so on, and are rewarded with an admittedly smallish ammount of credits. In a stream, the organizms die if they're not rewarded enough. In disco, people leave.
The flipside for disco is this: if you make trading reward more, then there's less traders, less food for the rest of the RP ecosystem, because -traders don't reproduce-.
That said, there's other ways to reward and encourage traders. Giving them a fairish fight, for one, by balancing their ships in such a manner that a bomber or a GB doesn't just clean house against the actually much more expensive transports...Make transports, for PVP people. Rather than being a pirate or a lawful, imagine being a transport. Finding a group of pirates on the character list...and purposefully heading toward them, to fight them. Sure, you're a transport. Sure, you're trading. But the player, beyond RP, is going in for that pew-pew, just like the pirates or the militaries or whomever else, in what is essentially a pew-pew game.
As far as actually RPing traders...traders, tradeships, in general, should be struggling to survive, as a basic cost/demand in a market thing....but nobody but me likes flying transports, so I wont even try to pitch that curious idea.
If things were cheap, everybody would trade, say, 2 hours a month. So there would be no traders and pirates lost their occupation, also escorts. Probably cops too. So it just would not work very well.
Still there is a problem - those who traded in previous versions are in much nicer position. Also those who earn money by making sigs, modeling systems or ships on request.
I do not complain, just give me couple of billions someone:P
Ps. Trading sucks hard, because that time could be used to get laid and smoke something etc
' Wrote:If things were cheap, everybody would trade, say, 2 hours a month. So there would be no traders and pirates lost their occupation, also escorts. Probably cops too. So it just would not work very well.
Umm...I trade like 10 hours a month. Quite enough to feed my three ships!
...
Anyway... I think there is NO crisis. Yes it is difficult to start over, but most of us came thru it. Do you have any idea how damn happy I was when I finally earned enough credits for that Ryuujin? Exciting. I even find things like capitals too cheap. I mean, come on, Storta has the same prize as my Ryuujin? War stuff is expensive
I think the real problem isn't that trading is to boring or stuff is too expensive. It is just the lack of different possibilities to earn cash. If i want to buy a new ship, i've got to spend a certain amount of hours trading to get the money i need. There is no other time effective way to do it. Mining takes longer and so does piracy. Not to mention bounty-hunting or escort service for traders.
Sure trading can be fun, but i don't like it to be the only way to earn money.
' Wrote:Too long for what?
I find my 140 hours played and billion earned with piracy extremely fun.
It depends in what NPC faction you are in i guess. Sure if you pirate hotspots you can earn a lot of money. On my LWB, i have to wait an hour until a trader passes Stuttgart. And 50% of those whine about already being pirated by the OPG :P