So this is something I've been pondering for a while.
Money has taken more and more time to get (I ranted about this before too, but more specifically on the economy)
While this might seem as a great way to buffer people from trading out battleships in a day or two, it causes a few problems.
First, the people who are not long-time veterans with massive bank accounts tend to avoid hostile interactions, both with their ordinary craft, and their transports. They don't want to lose more money, because it's taken them THIS long to get how much they have now.
With the increased drain on ones free time, people are worried about losing one thing even more than money. Their time.
What am I trying to say?
People get upset when their time is wasted. Mad, even. Despite the sandwich rule, people tend to lose it when hours, days, or even weeks of their time are lost. No one wants to lose a base. No one wants to lose expensive ammo on a ship.
So traders avoid pirates like the plague, and a lot of us avoid having stupid fun (such as throwing ourselves at the huge fleets that've been appearing in New York recently) No one wants to spend more time trading.
I don't know about the rest of you, but in 4.84, and even 4.85, money was almost never a concern for me. It came by fairly easily, and I could fund most of what I needed in a reasonable amount of time. Now, not so much. Even I'm finding myself doing EVERYTHING to avoid pirates when I'm trading. It's not healthy for the pirate playerbase, and it's not healthy for the server in general.
But I digress.
What do you think the connections are? Am I right? Am I stupid to think they're related?
I've always thought that upkeep costs are what we need. Not so much making money hard to get, so that people have to trade for ages to earn their ships, but making it hard to KEEP, so everyone, even vets, have to continue trading, every now and again.
After all, if newbs can get a taste of the good stuff earlier, it might make em keener. And we want to have vet traders too, cos its nice to have traders that RP. Myself, I havnt had to trade since the 85 gold rush, and having more money than I could ever need has taken the risk and fun out of it, the effort, goal and struggle. Thats why I do the hardcore charcter thing.
P.S: Poll master race.
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If getting credits is easy, you pull yourself out of the trader-pirate-lawful chain sooner, if it's hard, you try to pull yourself out of it whenever you can. Trying to survive is a natural instinct, no matter how easy it is to get your cash, you still put effort into earning it, thus you won't want to lose it.
Though raising prices is only a temporary solution to keep traders in the game, some sort of regular upkeep for ships or a minor death penality would maintain the presence of traders with more success in my opinion, as it would pose a more permanent money sink. I believe a death penalty for ships which requires a regular trade route for each 5-6th death for smaller, 3-4th for bigger ships should be okay.
While, I agree, that ships, especialy large ones, should requere some money for upkeeping like "maintenance" inRP, however, Im not a fan of death penalty, because, most of people will tent to avoid any contact with others even more.
In same time, there are a lot of stuff, disappearing from your ship after it goes boom. Make it even more expensive. That would be ok as alternative to death penalty. Amo, CMs, B/B, this could const a bit more, but players would still use them, and wont' be as much upset, rather than to actual death penalty.
The fact that one fighter resupply costs more then one transport resupply is annoying but more annoying is that one nova bomber resupply cost more then battleship and cruiser resupply.
I think that people would value more their stuff if there were more costs upon death.
The traders would always avoid pirates even if you set something like 2 m for maximum pirate demand.
Why? Because our brains work that way. I wont go deep into topic but search for prospect theory if you are interested. You would find out that we grief more about small potential losses compared with lost change for huge gains. The concept of loss even minimal is burning our brains in situations where you must react fast, this is life saving mechanism.
No matter what you do this wont change.
If we increase the maintenance costs people would play more cautious inclusive pirates. It could sound strange to do the opposite of your proposal to achieve the same goal but this is how it works.
(10-09-2013, 10:51 AM)Knjaz Wrote: Official faction players that are often accused of elitism, never deploy them and have those weird, immersion killing "fair fight/dueling" suicidal hobbies. (yes, i've seen enough of those lolduels, where house military with overwhelming force on the field willingly loses a pilot in a duel. ffs.)
Well if players are more cautious to die they will interact more with RP rather then saying 2 sentences of RP then going straight to pew.But building money,trading and buying/selling is also what makes the game a challenge and fun.If it was too easy players will get easier bored and we will see also less traders.So balancing act
The problem with death penalties is going to be that I already see players trying to completely avoid any hostile interaction in order not to potentially lose money. This goes especially for traders.
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