People seem to forget that, supposedly, ore refineries for bases is coming sometime in the future?
The issue here is ores selling prices.
People use the Barge to trade ores because there is HUGE profit involved, and I'm not sure why that is.
One thing for sure is that for POB refineries to be functional, ore prices will have to come WAY DOWN. As long as there are payouts of 10k plus per unit of ores, ores are what people are going to trade. Greed is a product of human nature.
One can sell unrefined Iridium Ore for over 10k, but Processed Iridium sells for 299 in Delta?
How can refineries possibly work with these prices? Either ore has to come way down or their metals products way up. Especially since refineries will have a processing loss where it takes 5k ore to make 4k refined metal. It's untenable.
The source of the problem here is that the profits for ores are Hella outrageous.
Making the best sellpoints dockable by only smaller ships would suck, but it the only really viable way to fix the issue. Of course, a large ship with a docking bay could carry a small freighter as a work-around but then that fat, juicy target would spend a long time hovering and vulnerable while being off loaded much to the delight of pirates.
I have a Barge, but have never yet used it to haul ores. And that's from a player who has always RP'd as a Bretonian metals and ores carrier. Metals being a specialty of Bretonia, it just made sense.
And, yes. My Barge was paid for by hauling ores for months on end in a 5k.
But again, I'm specifically an ores carrier, since way before mining was something worth doing. (2012)
Taking the ridiculous profit out of ores would resolve this problem, and needs to happen anyway to make refineries usable. Also, making refineries capable of making the Metals and Alloys used by POB's for repairs and their factories would generate a more realistic supply and demand for these products, increase that type of traffic exponentially to the benefit of increased inter-POB RP, inter-faction RP, more profitable routes for traders, and more potential targets for piracy.
Yes, it would also spread out the traffic and possibly make pirates actually have to work for their money for a change. But can we please stop limiting traders so that pirates can camp a few sweet spots and pretend that piracy is the only worthwhile RP to be had? It's literally rage-inducing in the pirate types to even suggest such actions. It's currently so ridiculous that a trained monkey could successfully pirate in Disco.
Opening up the map of Sirius to activity and RP possibilities cannot logically be a bad thing. People complain about "silent traders" and "power-trading" as though it's not caused by the current state of the mod.
Give us things to do other than carry ores and get pirated or kwitcher b*tchin.
User was banned for: Possibly compromised account.
