(11-19-2023, 02:40 PM)Haste Wrote: To get a number representing the "amount" of cargo a ship moves purely cruising, disregarding lanes, we can multiply cargo capacity by cruise speed. To keep things simple we'll disregard cruise charge time, as ultimately while it is a relevant variable the Barge still spends the vast majority of the time cruising in these scenarios, and not charging cruise.
30,000*100 = 3,000,000
Cargo*cruise for 5k transports:
5,000 * 350 = 1,750,000
The number itself doesn't really mean a whole lot, but it does tell us that if we do account for acceleration, the inconvenience caused by the Barge's size, cruise charge time etc. that the Barge is going to end up (slightly) on top when it comes to moving cargo in remote regions. The Barge still has a niche.
Proposals for changes to the Barge have generally had a variety of issues, the biggest of which is generally that they were elaborate coding changes taking a substantial amount of time from our coders, creating potential new issues for us to solve (everyone who's been paying attention knows how much time Aingar has had to spend resolving a variety of FLHook-related issues and crashes), etc. Refinery modules for example would have to take into account the fact that a Barge cannot be permanently destroyed, unlike a PoB, meaning there would have to be major drawbacks in place to even the playing field. The likely end result would just be that the Barge would be a bad, inefficient version of a PoB, which would probably result in Barge owners being upset (again) as simply buying refined HRCs from NPC stations would be just as profitable. The biggest issue in reality is probably the fact that tying an entire plugin or set of plugins to just the Barge would be rather unreasonable given how niche the ship is (meant to be). We're struggling to squeeze enough performance out of the server as is.
We're willing to offer partial refunds to Barge owners if requested. Full refunds are unreasonable -- we're not refunding players who invested into Bustards to jump-trade broken-as-hell Kidnapped VIPs either.
I'd love to know what "being proven wrong" means in the context of the Barge. I went through the absolute agony that is running a variety of Barge trade runs last patch to time them and see how much more effective the ship was at moving cargo and making profit than a 5k. Even in the runs that involved very limited amounts of tradelane use the Barge handily beat 5ks. People posting "Ok but I managed to fly my Barge much slower than you" doesn't prove me wrong. At best it means they're just really bad at pressing Shift-W or F3 (sometimes F2). At worst it means they're lying to try and keep their money printer.
You don’t need hands to count how many players would have purchased a barge if they knew it was as useless as it now is.
Nobody has bought Meph’s barge even at a discount rate as it’s useless.
Full refund please. Any other barge owner who wants a useless ship which sunk them 15 Billion is fine and they are good to be happy with it.
