The Economy: it's time we talked about it

[Lemon]

The only really active and used zones are
1) Cortez
2) Omicron Zeta by nomads.

Gallia+Taus got a big hit with the moving of farm zone to Lorraine - besides one guy nobody uses it anymore, a lot of PvE and PVP was lost because of this and nerf to payouts where "standard" PvE zones were made unviable unless you shoot all factions or it's Cortez one. My proposal is to have cortez treatment to all so native factions can farm them, and then have one (One) zone bi-weekly or monthly with boosted payouts for cap multiplier in the system at old levels for shooting smaller stuff. You could add Rewards plugin on top and have a huge lucrative battleground system.

Speaking of Gallia - cutting ores any further would get boring. Something happened to 23 ore route and nobody mines it anymore, but Mil Sal, Molybden and 53 ore whatever that is are cool for flavour and easy to contest and used by unlawfuls. (first one is 22k from unlawful base, second one is in a pure bottleneck system with one JG and bases on one side only, and third one is pretty far from dockable stuff with no closeby PoBs)

How to concentrate activity

Simple. Take old Delta, use it as an ideal way to concentrate activity
1) ALL factions had goodmissions. Including Nomads
2) Freeport with awesome Mission ranges for everyone
3) Circular design with overlapping mission zones in the middle, and no obstructions and open space

=> I was baffled by that change then, and I am still baffled by it now. And now we have to re-invent the wheel.


EDIT: Azurite needs a big buff as you are raiding iota every time you mine
I'm talking Double normal CSU numbers, and you can make NPCs stronger.

[Ash]

I didn’t quite expect this post to attract such attention, especially given it’s size. So kudos to those that read it. Seeing some of the replies has brought forward some thoughts about what i’d like people to take away from this. And the general principle i wanted to convey was this:

The economy has been adapted to compensate for the fact that Disco has no core fulfilling activity. The economy exists as a progression ladder to late game features. But when players climb this ladder and pull back the veil on these features, they realise that not only is the reward disproportionate to the grind, but does not allow them to do anything very fulfilling. For as long as i can remember, the standard response to this issue been to introduce more prizes in order to keep people grinding, and therefore active.

The fact that players must grind before they can access the game’s core features is just completely backwards. For those features to be unfulfilling anyway is just the kicker.

Basically, for anyone to see any improvement in any aspect of playing this game. The perspective of design needs to shift to the viewpoint of the most enjoyable activity.

Then, and only then, should you start reshaping the economy to fit around this activity.

---

[CommodoreShawn]

... The economy exists as a progression ladder to late game features. ...

Completely agreed, this only serves to incentivize silent power traders focused just on earning money to use on other characters. It doesn't reward RP at all.

I just had an idea, though I'm not sure how technically feasible it is.

Change the bounties given by hunting NPCs based on where they are. For instance, if you kill a pirate NPC that spawned along a trade lane you get a larger bounty than if you kill one in the middle of some asteroid field. If there was a real incentive to go out and patrol, then we might see more players actually doing that instead of relying on trading characters to make them money.

[LuckyOne]

I don't think there's really a way to incentivize people to patrol that way. They would just camp where the rewards are the best, no?

However you might be onto something, but it would probably be painful to pull off, considering the backwardness of the old engine and might get some people upset.

Basically, replace the current trade lane disrupting NPCs with a bit more dangerous ones, generic Pirates with bombers that are after ores and will target and destroy any ore carrying transport. These could bring a hefty reward (and since they are "random" instead of countinously spawning people would be incentivised to escort traders instead of hunting the NPCs exclusively).

You could give them big shield DPS but low hull DPS so they drain transports health slowly and arm them with CDs. That way we could "replay" vanilla Mission 1 every time a friendly silent ore trader gets jumped by them

Plus it would make nanos/batteries/hull damage a small credit sink the traders need to occasionally pay for.