2020 Mining Overhaul, Phase 1: Price and Sellpoint Adjustments

[Sava]

Different? No. Motivating? No. Lack of sell points is a lack of commodity consumption or use. Removing sell points for a majority of commodities from a majority of places? Welp guess nobody outside houses need anything anymore. It's clear that there is 0 care about propogating activity for regions killed by the previous staff, and yet wish to worsen the case by removing opportunities for new and veteran players to go to regions like the Omicrons or deep Omegas. Why bother? Everything you'd need is in the houses. Why go to Omicron/Omega space with a load of ore when you're literally paying money to a miner with no gain so you can roleplay your organization and/or character properly? But it's obvious the devs don't care about it, because the only places that matter to them is house space.

The change is indeed aimed at prioritizing certain systems, regions and routes over others. However "unfair" it might look to you, it's a forced step, we do not have enough players to equally populate EVERY corner of Sirius and still keep a reasonable number of encounters between them.

The players will enjoy it when the system encourages them to meet each other more.

[DarkTails]

You don't care to understand because you don't care about anything except credit/s, because the dev team couldn't give a crap less about regions aside from, "Hmm, lets condense everything into one boring, bland same route for almost everything worth carrying in a transport, that sure does bring up the activity." Maybe, when you have literally no where else to go because the staff only care about cutting quality, removing opportunity for a dynamic environment, only caring about coralling everyone into single locations to force activity, as opposed to having to be creative to encourage it. But that would be too hard for you, obviously.

Edit to Sava: No. It's a stupid step, cutting corners from other regions. Yes, lets force players to leave regions they enjoy playing in, that'll surely make them invest credits they've already invested elsewhere, rather than just say, "whats the point?" and not participate at all when the region favored changes on arbitrary decision by 2-3 people base off how they feel where activity "should" be.

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[Vulkhard Muller]

Some of you are acting as if

a) one of the primary buyers isn't a Freeport accessible to everyone
b) the houses don't have two fences that should be accessible to almost everyone and were buffed in price
c) it's physically impossible to trade anything other than ores as a faction looking to fly transports

Karst you are completely missing the mark.

1- The primary buyer being a Freeport in Theta makes no sense for an Outcast. Why would an Outcast trader sell Military Salvage to the Freeport knowing full well the Zoners will in likelihood sell it to the Corsairs? It's stupid and makes no sense.

2- Again, fences, this is assuming people are cargo pirating which, in case you haven't noticed, doesn't happen all that often. In all my time trading on EFL/Junker (even back in my IC and [ALG] days) Never have I ever seen anyone actually demand cargo always credits or some thinly veiled "You are going to die because I want your cargo".

3- Seen this one mentioned a lot between you and Snak3, and its a super simple answer here, maybe if the basic economy wasn't the physical embodiment of a soggy end piece of bread maybe we'd actually want to touch it. There is hardly any Rp in that thing, it's arguably worse than this change. You all are looking at Balance before Lore, which in turn is going to kill interest in doing these routes for many people. You say that the old system has thinned players out too much. The way this looks and you and Jammi's constant ominous "System Changes" lines make me see a future here in disco where we end up with a map looking like Karlottas idea of all travel going through one bottleneck. As a person who has traded for years this is not the way to encourage activity. People will slowing stop playing, why? Because, their is not variation like @xenomorph said:

...Indies, including me, done routes like these to avert myself from trade lanes and house space I often find, boring, uninteresting. Routes I mentioned before, were a nice example that passage through pretty systems can be fun, especially to me. I find certain Omicrons, Sigmas, Omegas I often pass via, beautiful. Worth mentioning that -some people don't like long trade routes-, like myself.

House space is boring, this change forces everyone along the same five or six routes. It becomes much like "You did one you did them all". I have bitten my tongue for a while on this because I thought that maybe it was just me who preferred RP sell points over balance clearly not. Sure, some logical Rp is there for "Junkers selling to the Freeport and Coalition buying it from there" but why would the Coalition sell it to the Freeport only to send another transport out there to pick it up? They don't have that kinda H-Fuel access they cannot just squander fuel all willy-nilly.

So yes, I think I represent a good chunk of the community unhappy with this change when I say "Bring back the old system". This system is boring, uninteresting, and throws RP out the window in favor of cold hard numbers. You don't get people to come and play a 15 year old space simulator by forcing balance, you do it by encouraging Rp Logic. If I want to RP a Communist Trade captain with an identity crisis who has the need to make billions supplying his revolution then that should be something we support. Him flying to some freeport in the middle of godsforsken nowhere does nothing for that RP itch. This current trade set up is heavily catered to Junkers/Hogosha/UC and Corporations with not even the slightest glance at organizations like Crayter Republic who's inrp economy is still there sure but their traders have no reason to ever go back to Crayter space instead you'll likely see them running around between Bretonia and Rheinland/Kusari.

I'd argue most of the community would love to stop hauling ores, unfortunately over the years the price of ores have been inflated so much it's the only viable thing to haul. Realistically certain "End Market" commodities should have profit margins near the current ore prices. Things like Engine Components, Ageira White Boxes/EFL Blue Packs, DT Fuel, or even Holo Sculptures all should be far more expensive them their current prices.

I have been a very strong proponent of creating a process in where PoBs consume ores and spit out the end market equivalents (Gold/Silver/Diamonds ect). That however has run into a glaring issue, that being no one is willing/able to code it into the PoB plugin. I myself have been trying to learn a bit of coding so I can try to do it, but admittedly it is slow going.

I could continue ranting on but at this point I would just be repeating myself. Suffice to say: You need to find a way to balance RP and Balance, the current method weighs to much in favor of balance and shafts years of RP in the process.

/RantOver

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[LaWey]

Some of you are acting as if

a) one of the primary buyers isn't a Freeport accessible to everyone
b) the houses don't have two fences that should be accessible to almost everyone and were buffed in price
c) it's physically impossible to trade anything other than ores as a faction looking to fly transports

a) For omega ores in Kusari, you made GC Fence (specific enough faction), Hogosha Fence (another very specific faction). Why no Dragons sellpoint for it?
b) No, GC+Hogosha in Kusari case dont make it " accessible to almost everyone and were buffed in price"
c) Pretty possible dont play at all, i agree.

I also see that sigmas and omicrons sourses going throught Omicron Gamma, and right near with Omega-52, why it cant consume and vote reptilian, i dont know.

In really i only think that routes setup slighty boring, too much consideration of pirate's gameplay, too little consideration that trader shouldnt vomit from routes first. Well, powertraders wont notice any changes anyway, since Gold-Alu same.

[Reeves]

a) For omega ores in Kusari, you made GC Fence (specific enough faction), Hogosha Fence (another very specific faction). Why no Dragons sellpoint for it?

Factions like the Blood Dragons are meant to, in-lore, rely on the GC for things like supplies and rest stops on their way to Kusari. You can't have your cake and eat it too. It's got to be one or the other. Otherwise this entire thing just isn't interesting and we create a lot of faction redundancies for the sake of people wanting to have everything with no compromises.

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On indefinite hiatus because the current state of gameplay sucks - ping me over discord if replies are needed

[Strichev]

What I see is RP being used as an excuse. A lot of things in Disco don't make sense in RP but when the said things suit factions and individuals it's all perfectly fine. Because the norm in disco seems to be; gameplay first when I gain and RP excuses for when things I don't like happen. For example:

- Cloaks and jumpdrives being produced in some random POBs by factions that should barely know how to cobble together a ship, not to mention the very widespread use of said technologies in a world where tech develops incredibly slowly (same old lane and JG tech for a few centuries?). People are ok with that. (Muh nomad tech is the excuse)

- Every damned rookie pilot knows about advanced tech. It's common knowledge now.

- Everyone knows about the Nomads and the Nomad War. There was no indication that the info got out after the end of SP. People are also ok with that.

- According to vanilla lore it takes weeks if not months to travel to the edge worlds and days to travel between houses. Folks pretend that inRP travel times are much shorter when it suits them. That's also fine.

Changing the economy so that people get to spontaneously interact with traders is utterly unimaginable, though. The economy has always been far detached from any sort of RP reason and changing it so that it generates interaction is an improvement.

[Karlotta]

I'm going to address a few points that were raised here (some by multiple people) without direct quotes because I have the feeling that as always, writing here will be a total waste of time because you already did what you did before having the "discussion". So forgive me for paraphrasing out of "laziness".

"We cant reduce the number of routes without reducing sell points nor can we focus routes the way we want without making system changes."

Then make those system changes already. Jump Overhaul

All it takes is to remove/reroute some jump holes. How many more years and personell changes is it going to take for devs to accept that this is necessary? Doing this would have been both easier and less detrimental to existing rp/gameplay than removing and rebalancing multiple sell points.

"We want to move sell points (which we think corresponds to activity/interactions) away from factions and their systems, and into houses"

Most of the activity (time spent) with an ore does not happen when selling it, but along the way and in the mining field. Yet some mining fields are still scattered across remote locations like Bering, Sigma 59 and gallia, (jeeze I wonder whose factions benefit from that). It would be better to move what ever kind of junk is mined in Bering to about 10k from Rochester with a possibility to build a junker pob attached to Rochester, if player interactions is really what you want to create.

Having a sell point 1 system away from a busy route is less harmful to interactions than making such a route lead through 3-4 remote laneless systems, where traders can just make a 180 as soon as they have a red on scanner.

If by "moving away sell points from factions" you mean stop faction from monopolizing certain ores, having 1 or 2 houses monopolize ore sales achieves the opposite.

"Reducing sell points focuses activity onto the remaining sell point"

What you also do by reducing the number of sell points, is take away trade options to places that are on or near highways. A high number of trade options is good for gameplay as long as they lead along the same busy routes because they leave people more options to do what they want to do.

For example, people who want to recruit noobs for their faction by collaborating with them in mining will want to have something to ship to and from Liberty to where ever their faction resides.

In another example, people that ship stuff to their pob will want good return trade routes to various places (goes for other commodities too, not just ore).

All this is a reason to focus people along the same routes, not to one specific sell points, as long as the sell points dont really stray from those routes much.

"If you cant do what you want with your faction just play another faction"

Playing a faction you like is more fun than playing a faction that you dont like playing. It's basically telling people to have less fun in disco, and is just as dumb as "love it or leave it". Interaction is not enhanced or made more frequent by telling people how to play.

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[James Greed]

Reaching dangerous levels of harvest dawn once again.

Personally, I don't mind things being shaken up a little in the mining department. shrug

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Greedback

[Lanakov]

I want it to be clear that this system was made to streamline MINING which badly needed it because of how it superseded absolutely everything else. Mining is an actual job done by miners which is NOT every faction. It really isn't that hard to understand and integrate within RP. So many factions (look up the definition of faction, it certainly doesn't mean nation state) needed inRP to rely on others to provide them with resources and raw materials, which mining does. Production and trade of finished goods is a whole different arrangement to shipping ore in bulk and many factions who had no inRP business doing it, did. It resulted in everyone and their mothers demanding sell points of their own. Well, flash news ; not everyone is interested in buying your several tonnes of raw materials they have no use for. How novel. So get used to this system, which is both entirely more rational and also much better balanced.

For what it's worth, this is only the beginning of work on economy, we're mostly dealing with new terrain here. As you've noticed, Disco economy has been mostly stagnant for a decade and it's not going to be fixed by half-measures, or overnight. Trading will get looked after eventually as well. In the meantime, the team has accomplished a lot of hard, exacting work while being as fair as possible and with specific goals in mind that were not "let's try to please everyone at once, coherence and balance be damned". I accept the ruffling of feathers, I very much welcome all the feedback you have to share with the team, but ad hominem attacks, insults, "oh woe is me" and assorted unproductive babbling are not productive and very disrespectful to the many efforts of everyone who was involved in these changes. Please consider what that message you're typing is going to add to the discussion and how much we can use it to make this better. If it's just bile, please refrain or take it to Flood. The old system isn't coming back. Move on. I'm fairly angered at having to issue such evident reminders to act with civility and patience (I almost said kindness, but that seems to be a primer these days) with a volunteer staff that's trying to change things at last.

To all of you, who've been providing intelligible remarks, comments, concerns, feedback and otherwise are testing out this new system - thanks. Keep it coming, we can't make this work without you.

Cheers.

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Feedback, insults, marriage proposals and declarations of fealty

If everyone was a bit more like Lanakov, the entire world would be more positive. Including pregnancy tests.

[NOVA-5]

I've been looking for something to say but
i think someone should look up the definition of Bollocks.