Sirius under an economic crysis?

[Unseelie]

Ivan is correct, and furthermore, its not to do with dealing with caps; though its an oft touted reason, the devs realize that raising prices does not actually keep lolcaps away, it doesn't at all adress any issue. High prices of transports are to create more use of the midrange transports, and to add diversity. High prices of Capitalships? Because they're big objects. High prices in general? Because, in part, as els has said, Xoria led a pirate faction.

1Yes, you need money to buy things.
2Yes, things are 'expensive' (as compared to what?)
3Yes, the focus of the game is RP.
4Crisis is not spelt with a y unless you're talking about a specific game...

Point three rather explains point one and two: The RP of the server, I mean the grand cycle, is very much a food chain. Piracy works much better as an RP act, and is really only sensible other than fun by bullying, as an RP device, the foundation of the RP device of Disco. We're playing Cops and Robbers...with a couple complexities tossed in, of course, but at its base, cops and robbers. Lots of extra make believe, cause that's what we're intersted in, and because we're not juvenile, an extra couple groups of cops with their own policies and rivalries. We need, to make this work, people to be robbed, and robbed a lot.

We're not 100% make believe. We're not pretending to be robbed, and then pretending to be robbers, we're actually assuming the role. Military and Police are actually defending the traders from the actual and dangerous pirates or terrorists, and its all based on the traders.

In a forest stream, fish eat smaller fish eat insect eat FPOM or CPOM(leaves n such). The insects, there, which form the bottom of the food chain because there's not actually enough light to do much photosynthesis (trees above the stream block the light and drop in CPOM, mostly, and some FPOM (doesn't matter). Now, in a stream, the insects eat the stuff and turn it into other stuff, to survive. In the game, we provide encounters, which provide other ecounters, and so on, and are rewarded with an admittedly smallish ammount of credits. In a stream, the organizms die if they're not rewarded enough. In disco, people leave.

The flipside for disco is this: if you make trading reward more, then there's less traders, less food for the rest of the RP ecosystem, because -traders don't reproduce-.

That said, there's other ways to reward and encourage traders. Giving them a fairish fight, for one, by balancing their ships in such a manner that a bomber or a GB doesn't just clean house against the actually much more expensive transports...Make transports, for PVP people. Rather than being a pirate or a lawful, imagine being a transport. Finding a group of pirates on the character list...and purposefully heading toward them, to fight them. Sure, you're a transport. Sure, you're trading. But the player, beyond RP, is going in for that pew-pew, just like the pirates or the militaries or whomever else, in what is essentially a pew-pew game.

As far as actually RPing traders...traders, tradeships, in general, should be struggling to survive, as a basic cost/demand in a market thing....but nobody but me likes flying transports, so I wont even try to pitch that curious idea.

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