Fester Addams
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Posted - 2003.09.19 10:26:00 -
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In short, what has to be done is to separate PC market from NPC market.
PC market:
minerals, ships, ore, skills... in shor everything but trade goods
NPC market:
Trade goods
In my opinion the two should be given separate tabs in stations, the PC market can work as it does now with buy orders, sell orders and so on.
The NPC market should be drasticly changed:
Firstly, the only PC trade in this section would be if and when PC owned stations come into the game.
The most important change of the NPC market would be
A: no placed orders, you have to hands on go there and sell or buy when the price is right and
B: no massive infuse of supply/demand at downtime.
I will get to this later.
In order to be a miner you need the mining skills, in order to be a fighter you need gunnery skills, in order to be e builder you need the building skills, just as with thise I think you should need the trade skills to even be allowed into trade goods (please note trade goods, not all trade).
The basic trade skill should be changed to represent what trade you have access to,
at lev 1 you have access to low cost trade goods such as soil and frozen food... ie: low end of profit.
as your skill increases you move through the different levels of profit, up to the cream of the crop at lev 5 (ie robotics, plutonium and so on)
Naturaly the trade occupation would need a set of skills just like all the others, 5 pure trade skills not counting bartering and black market would be good.
examples:
Trade: this skill would be rank 1 and limit your access to trade goods.
ecconomics: rank 2, prerequisit trade 1, this skill would argument your sell price, lets face it, 5% per level is too much, I would divide it into 2 separate skills, this would be the first, it would give 2% per level.
Profit margin: rank 3, prerequisit ecconomics 4, trade 4, this would be the boost for ecconomics, gives an additional 3% per level profit for sales.
Cargo efficiency: rank 3, prerequisit trade 5, gives a 2% bonus to cargo per level. This bonus would only affect industrials.
Convoy: rank 3 prerequisit spaceship command 4, leadership 3,this skill would allow industrials to form a convoy to pass through dangerous space, all members in the convoy will have to have a skill of equal to or grater the number of ships in the convoy. The effect of flying in a convoy is that the ships fly closely huddled together and protect each other.
If the convoy is attacked then the attacker may not target specific ships but rather the convoy as a whole, in effect the ships in the convoy may pool their shields and armour as a damaged ship takes refugee behind unfdamaged ones increasing their survivability. All ships in the convoy will move at the speed of the slowest and they will all fly in a close nitted group.
This skill may only be used for industrials as the traders have developed the tactics as a desperate meens of defense.
Now then, back to infusing the market and buy/sell orders
Thise things are killing the trader occupation.
As is alot of people not interested in the trade occupation are doing trade because it is very simple to do it as a number of variables in the market have been fixed.
Firstly, by allowing buy and sell orders to last for months you can effectively block trade for other players, true I could start placing buy orders as well but as rich players and corps have huge buy orders in place odds are I will never find out where the good buys are (they are gobbled up in the first 20sec of upptime).
The players who do this are mostly not interested in the trade profession, they are interested in the fast profit allowed by the flawed system.
This is all compiled by the fact that every day at downtime shops are restocked and demand is reset to some extent, this gives the order traders the perfect system to set up close to automatic buy/sell deals, to tell the truth it would not suprise me is some players have set up bots to handle this.
For this reason I want two things,
1: No buy/sell orders for trade goods, buy/sell orders are a neccesity to make a PC market work but as the trade goods market is designed to be strictly 1 player vs NPC they are not needed rather the oposit infact, they should be removed.
2: No downtime infuse of the market, a minor reason for this is that alot of people do not have the luxury to be able to play at the moment the game reboots but the main reason I want this is because at the moment trading is a strict after boot thing, trading occures for a short period of time after boot after wich good trades are too few and too far between to bother with, sure at times one can find a good run worth a few milion but more comonly you will make alot better cash hunting NPC's or mining. We need the infuse to be spread out over the 24h period so that one could always find good runs if one looks.
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