Jumphole Overhaul

[Karlotta]

Activity needs to be focused into certain systems, so that players find players to interact with more easily. Travel times towards and between active areas should also be made shorter. This can be done without removing any systems or any other content by changing jump hole connections so they focus travel along certain "highways":

Although this may seem counter-intuitive at first, it's NOT necessary to re-balance any commodity prices before implementing the changed jumpholes into the game:

Okay, first off, disclaimer time: I've not read the entire thread, but I'm going to give my two cents anyway.

Basically, you're dead wrong.

The problem with focusing activity hasn't got anything to do with travel time or amount of jump points. It has everything to do with economics. Activity in FL follows where traders go. In an effort to keep trade routes interesting for traders, commodity prices have been set so that basically no matter where you are, you will always have a variety of commodities to pick from, and they'll always fit within the same tight profit per second range. This is the real cause of activity being so spread out. When it doesn't matter where you start and where you go, players go anywhere, resulting in them being scattered randomly across the map.

What needs to happen is for commodity prices to be completely redone so that trade flows in the following way:

1. Ores are mined in border systems, with the same asteroid giving different types of ores to the miner.
2. Mined ores are then transported to heavily guarded depots within the same system.
3. Mined ores are sorted at the depot into discrete packages of the same types.
4. Traders then haul the sorted ores to smelting facilities in neighbouring House space (Leeds, Colorado, Dresden, for example). Sorted ores from the same source of mined ores can go to different places after they've been sorted, depending on what's needed where.
5. The sorted ores are then processed into alloys at smelter stations.
6. Traders haul alloys to factory planets like Leeds, where they are further processed into consumer goods.
7. Consumer goods are transported to the big population centers (House capitals) within the same House.
8. House capitals primarily produce services such as financial products and cultural goods and services (like entertainment, software, education, art, etc).
9. The services and cultural goods of capital planets are then traded with the capitals of other Houses.

Generally speaking, what you want to be doing is create a flow of goods from the outer system to the inner systems within the same House, with inter-House trading being restricted mostly from capital to capital.

What should be avoided at all costs is the inverse flow of goods from the inner systems to the outer systems, because this is what's ***** up Discovery's economy by making it profitable to haul anything anywhere. Because Freelancer completely lacks any kind of supply and demand mechanic to compensate for bulk numbers, prices should reflect lack of demand and not lack of supply.

To make an example: currently, luxury goods have extremely high prices in border and edge systems. This sounds like it makes sense because it would be expensive to transport those goods there. But, in fact, the opposite is true. Because edge and border worlds are generally low population backwaters where economic activities produce very little added value, they have very little capital to bid up prices. As a result, if they're buying luxury goods at all, they should buy them only at absolute bargain prices that make it economically nonviable for bulk traders to sell 5000 crates of extremely expensive whisky in a space station that has little more than a skeleton crew.

Within the same logic; at no point should a capital planet be buying ores or even alloys, as they have absolutely no use for them. They would have to transport them to where the factories actually are, which is generally in a completely different system. I've personally dropped off hundreds of millions worth of gold ore at New Paris, and it's absolutely ridiculous that I've been able to do that. The only viable thing to do should've been to drop them off at some smelter on the edge of Gallic space.

The main thing to take away is this: activity goes where traders go, and traders go where it's profitable ... which is pretty much everywhere at the moment. This is what needs fixing. Not jump point locations. The end games is that you'll find traders where you'd expect to find them because it makes economic sense for them to be there and not elsewhere. Discovery's commodities prices should be structured in such a way that the vast bulk of freighters fly along the same very busy routes.

Ones you've got the economy structured like that, you can start thinking about further detailing which factions and which kinds of ships are allowed to dock where and which cargo capacities they should have for which types of cargo to maintain a roughly similar profit per second amount without destroying the physical flow of profit.

TLDR: Disco's economic assumptions are wrong and it's wrecking player activity focus. This needs fixing more than anything else. Jump points are fine where they are. They are not to blame.

Now I remember why I didnt reply.

You've missed the entire point of the thread, and answering to long posts by people who obviously didn't get the point is kind of useless and tiring.

The idea is not to make the economy seem more realistic. Even if redoing the entire economy somehow made player interactions more likely (which it could if you reduced the number of attractive trade routes considerably, which I and others have proposed multiple times) the huge economy overhaul in the way you describe would do nothing to increase interactions by itself by simply making the economy seem more realistic.

The idea is to simply to reduce the number of possible routes and travel-through systems so people are forced to bump into each other more often, with as little work as possible, and without removing any game content.

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