How to support trading factions

[Elsdragon]

Honestly, unless trading is fun, you arent going to see as much of it as you'd like, much less organized

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No longer a slave to the man!

[n00bl3t]

Increase profits when identically tagged vessels are in a convoy?

I would support this idea.

Honestly, unless trading is more profitable than it is now, you arent going to see as much of it as you'd like, much less organized

Fixed.

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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.

[Unseelie]

Honestly, unless trading is fun, you aren't going to see as much of it as you'd like, much less organized

Yes. (oh here we go again)

What's fun about this game, though?
If you want to encourage people to trade, you can raise prices, but that's just increasing the amount of grinding needed in the game. Grinding certainly isn't fun, and that...is because its grinding. A lot of people will argue discovery is fun, and I'm more than willing to get onboard with that. Unfortunately, I do my discovery before my trade run, or during, but it definitely doesn't occupy even most of the time I spend engaged in trying to earn credits...because once a route is found..its found. Eventually they're all found, and you're still grinding.

I'd suggest facilitating this discovery, the ingame sort, by offering sales of regional maps in bases. Rather than info on one base, info on, say, six or seven. Info on an entire ingame route, for example (can one npc offer the info/location of many places?).

After that, we like customization. So lights are fun (yay cannon). So would, for instance, a variety of cargopods(at the same time, the Ktrain and the Rtrain could get mountable cargopods), and faction local weapons/shields.

Still, these aren't exactly constant fun. This is the sort that quickly wears away, after discovering three routes or showing off your cargopods a few times. The core of fun is...well, fighting and RP. I've argued before that the fighting is about feeling like you have a chance to win, not just a chance to get away. The RP is, in a lot of cases, about being able to stay in an area.

RP in this game doesn't stretch from Alpha to NY to London to Delta in a coherent fashion over the span of a few hours, but only over days and weeks. The minute by minute RP is very much in one system or another, where groups of people are locally, and publicly, interacting. Because of this, routes that force transports to travel across Sirius lead to these transports getting only snippets of the RP. A solution would be to include medium-good (20 million cr/ hour) routes inside systems, so that traders can feasibly stick in an rp for...up to the hours some of the best last for.

Oh. And something that could be done with FLHook magic: A toggleable Ironman trading option, where fuel, food, port fees, lane fees, and gate fees are assessed, so that being a transporter actually means a struggle to stay afloat, rather than grinding to amass cash. Not sure how much fun that would be, but I, for one, would at least like to try it.

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[Rudo]

"Honestly, unless trading is more profitable than it is now, you arent going to see as much of it as you'd like, much less organized"

Fixed.

Then we just have the solo miners situation happening again. Plus if you make trading too profitable, then people earn money too fast, thereby eliminating trade in the long run.

The profit system is fine.

I personally propose that transport shielding, weaponry and agility get a buff to gunboat-caliber. In RP, merchant vessels should evolve to deal with pirates as their ships grow to not only match military-calibre hardware, but frequently surpass it.

Corporations must at this point be looking at reports of pirate tactics (ignore the escorts, focus on the slow vulnerable transport with feeble point defense) and saying to themselves, "We need to beef it up".

Make transports dangerous, and people will play them more.

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[Cannon]

I haven't talked to wodka about the /escort idea. I don't intend to use the HC version but rather use the HC idea as inspiration.

I'm interested in other ideas too.

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Proud member of "the most paranoid group of people in the community"

Old Avatar #2 | Old Avatar #3

[Thexare]

Oh. And something that could be done with FLHook magic: A toggleable Ironman trading option, where fuel, food, port fees, lane fees, and gate fees are assessed, so that being a transporter actually means a struggle to stay afloat, rather than grinding to amass cash. Not sure how much fun that would be, but I, for one, would at least like to try it.

Honestly? I would build an unofficial faction around this if it were implimented.

As an option of course, as you said.

(edit: clarity)

[n00bl3t]

Then we just have the solo miners situation happening again. Plus if you make trading too profitable, then people earn money too fast, thereby eliminating trade in the long run.

The profit system is fine.

I personally propose that transport shielding, weaponry and agility get a buff to gunboat-caliber. In RP, merchant vessels should evolve to deal with pirates as their ships grow to not only match military-calibre hardware, but frequently surpass it.

Corporations must at this point be looking at reports of pirate tactics (ignore the escorts, focus on the slow vulnerable transport with feeble point defense) and saying to themselves, "We need to beef it up".

Make transports dangerous, and people will play them more.

Funny how trading activity was higher in 4.84 with a route that provided higher credits and the general cost of things being lower.

Try again?

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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.

[Rudo]

Funny how trading activity was higher in 4.84 with a route that provided higher credits and the general cost of things being lower.

Try again?

Yes, and that route provided a lot of entertainment for the player group whose base played host to every single pirate who preyed on that route, I assure you. The roleplay was excellent, player happiness was higher across the board and there were much less rules being broken on all sides.

Again I give you the single power-profiting miner scenario. Trust me, it fits with the diamond-niobium route too. All those higher profits resulted in was more caps to less worthy players. We do not need more of that.

Trade needs to be entertaining. By that, it's possible that the ships just need to be fun to fly and not feel so impotent when faced with people that might actually do more harm to you than themselves.

<strike>Troll again?</strike>

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[Dusty Lens]

Observations on trade by Dusteh Lenz.

1) Trade factions which only trade die when their members have money. Increased profits = Bad.

2) Trade factions which have a secondary purpose, usually one involving pulling the trigger, in addition to actively seeking obstacles to overcome generally thrive.

I have spent a lot of time in a transport. When I have simply been trading the long term fun is only there with good company. When I have been flying about in trade ships with secondary combat roles, such as D: pirating when we cooled on hauling ore, knocking over cardamine traders with my Cryer or flying about with a group of, again D:, looking for Hessians to kill the fun was extremely abundant in a more traditional sense.

If you want trade factions to be fun Cannon you'll want to consider that the trade factions should do one of two things.

A) Get their S together and make their own fun.
B) Ask for the tools they think they need to have fun.

Most will ask for something which lets them make more money. That's not more fun, that's more money, more money is less trading.

Escort defenses sounds cool on paper. In practice I dunno. Kinda hard to kill a fighter escort before your target can fly 30k. Kinda hard to deal with a nearly invulnerable perch that's shooting you in the face because he's pirating you while his escort shoots you in the ass.

Funny how trading activity was higher in 4.84 with a route that provided higher credits and the general cost of things being lower.

Try again?

Citations needed.

Well.

They would be if you were being sincere.

[Reacher]

I sense Dusty has WIN!

;)

Agree with all of the above.