Reduce the Prices on Battleships

[FooFighter]

The problem I see when decreasing the battleship prices, will be the lack of traders in the systems. How many pirates make their money with pirating quiet traders? What would happen if half of these trade drones would disappear, due to lower battleship prices?

The whole economy would be destabilized. Not what we want to happen, isn't it?

It worked quite well in .84. Although the trade routes themselves were...of debatable RP value, they yielded nice, fair profits and Battleships, while being quite expensive, were still affordable. Did the number of lolcaps go down in .85 when compared to .84? Locally, yes, but that was mainly because of player faction control (even if you don't allow them to limit the purchase of caps, they can, should and do fight lolcaps by declaring them traitors and shooting them down whenever they dare to enter space, which is a very, very good thing).

Actually, maybe you will get less lolcaps now. But that's mainly because you will see much less caps altogether now since trading was crippled. Only few people have the patience of powertrading for a month just to get a ship that can be taken down by one or two good bomber pilots or a GB with a lot of time and pulse cannons/razors.

Jinx: well, who make up the largest percentage of traders on this server? I once checked the Players Online list when it still was online - about 3/4 of all trader vessels did not even have in-RP names. And when you sit around tradelanes with a pirate char, you will soon learn that most traders aren't exactly the RP-loving type either. It is fact that people who don't value RP very highly make up the largest percentage of traders on this server - most likely because they want their big ships and because, yes, they don't mind powertrading.