Trading needs to be harder | Ideas

[Purify]

Why is the largest and slowest trade ship in the game also the best trade ship?

To fix trading create a new ship or change some useless ship's specifications so that it is faster, weaker and better than the PSF. The best traders will always use the best trade ship and thus they will be trading more often and be 'easier' to kill.

And Freon can still be happy because those newbie guys who just start out trading will still have the PSF to use.

Everybody wins!!

In summary:
New trade ship that is faster, has less cargo space and is weaker and better for XP than the PSF. Let the players choices fix your problem.

[JettJackson]

Kard, I think you're forgetting a couple of things, first of all most players are much more careful when trading now, second most people all have fast internet connections rather than just a few (sure there are a couple still on slow ones, but they are the minority). Not to mention there is less incentive to hunt as targets are few and far between so you spend even more time doing nothing, and trading is pretty boring if you never have to worry at all about dying, so making it a bit harder isn't a problem.

Edit: Yea, this is essentially the same as JJ said, I feel dirty

nothing wrong with agreeing with me

[Kard]

Some really good ideas in this thread. The ones that I especialy like are:

1-Remove PSF
2-Make a easier to kill trad vessel, that is more efficient then PSF(however, now ATM isnt top trader, you have to balance to many things) which brings me to a new idea base on that one
3-Change the PSF to have less defence, with more turns and less holds, but same efficiency, so traders have to trade more often and be in open space longer.
4-Remove the CPL/have it only viewable at HQs (another idea base off this one which is similar but doesnt remove cpl completely is below this one)
5-have CPL only update periodicaly, like every 60 seconds.
6-have people fall off CPL faster/5 minutes or 3 minutes till falling off CPL
7-remove the view stats feature that allows you to track when someone is using turns (way too much intel. In draft round, we knew when not to engage, base on how many we had vs how many of them were moving. My first round I ever played where this was a feature.)
8-Instead of losing exp, have an exp debt system, so its hard to get to the next level. (one problem with this is, it is a PVP game. One person could trade to 300k or 400k inside a planet gal, then ship up, die numerous times, and still have a giant advantage over the player who keeps killing them, and has been in a warbird all round, and has died periodically, in fleet fights and such.)
9-slightly more exp from killing/maybe 1.5 times the current exp


If I had to pick from these I would choose

1 or 3
5 and/or 6
7
9



All in favor of a newer, better, and improved SMR say AYE

All oppose, go roll down a steep hill



*SIDE NOTE

Hunting isnt something you do dailey, and get 2 or 3 kills a day. If traders are using mines making it to hard to kill them, then for a few days in a row, you kill their mines. They then have to keep repleneshing, which means using turns not trading OR decide to trade every now and again, without mines, creating an opening. Also, you shouldnt get a trader every time you get IS with one. Sometimes you will only get 1 or 2 triggers, or you will get 3 or 4, but will be misses. You should only kill traders when you trigger 3 times in 2 seconds and get lucky accuracy rolls. You shouldnt win just because he was IS longer because his connection is worse. Im glad everyone has a fast connection now. Even playing field.

I think the biggest issue is people expect kills every time they hunt. Rounds last 3 months. If you got kills every day, or hell every other day, you would have 60-120 trader kills a game. That is obsurd IMO. to get 60-120 trader kills in one game.

Hunters need to have patience, set up kills over times, and come to terms that 4/5 traders will get away.

[JettJackson]

Some really good ideas in this thread. The ones that I especialy like are:

1-Remove PSF
2-Make a easier to kill trad vessel, that is more efficient then PSF(however, now ATM isnt top trader, you have to balance to many things) which brings me to a new idea base on that one
3-Change the PSF to have less defence, with more turns and less holds, but same efficiency, so traders have to trade more often and be in open space longer.
4-Remove the CPL/have it only viewable at HQs (another idea base off this one which is similar but doesnt remove cpl completely is below this one)
5-have CPL only update periodicaly, like every 60 seconds.
6-have people fall off CPL faster/5 minutes or 3 minutes till falling off CPL
7-remove the view stats feature that allows you to track when someone is using turns (way too much intel. In draft round, we knew when not to engage, base on how many we had vs how many of them were moving. My first round I ever played where this was a feature.)
8-Instead of losing exp, have an exp debt system, so its hard to get to the next level. (one problem with this is, it is a PVP game. One person could trade to 300k or 400k inside a planet gal, then ship up, die numerous times, and still have a giant advantage over the player who keeps killing them, and has been in a warbird all round, and has died periodically, in fleet fights and such.)
9-slightly more exp from killing/maybe 1.5 times the current exp


If I had to pick from these I would choose

1 or 3
5 and/or 6
7
9



All in favor of a newer, better, and improved SMR say AYE

All oppose, go roll down a steep hill

order at which i would place these

1
3
6
9
2

the other 4 would hurt hunting too much and actually help traders.

[Page]

What would be quite cool is to increase exp gained from killing either when in a hunting ship, or when killing someone in a trading ship.
The PSF needs to be sorted out and something I've wanted to do for a long time, the concurrent games recently has made this more difficult as I don't want to change the PSF once people have already shelled out for out for it, and all games share the same ship list.

The view stats feature is easy enough to toggle to not being able to track people from other alliances, however it has a side effect of giving people something to do when they can't be trading/hunting/raiding (which, lets face it, is quite a lot of the time). Personally I am pretty indifferent on this "feature", it's there somewhat by design (I knew it would be used this way when it was added) but not because I necessarily think it is either good or bad, I do think it is good however to have lots of stats tracked because most people like being able to see stats in general

[Edgecrusher]

I still say invisible scouts could potentially help a trader more than it hurts them, regardless of that does everyone agree that more shooting of traders is a good thing for the adrenaline of both hunters and traders, regardless of whether the number of actual kills changes at all?

Not when only hunters can use invisible scouts. They wouldn't replace normal scouts, they would be an extra type of hardware, that I think should be quite expensive (say 500K per scout).

The reason that people lose as much xp as the killer gains is that there has to be some balance, otherwise there will be an xp inflation.

I like the suggestion of having only killing traders give you more experience, but I would rather have it that killing *in a hunter* gives you more xp. Say, if I kill an FU with my Carapace (that has happened), I still get more xp than I do now, even though the FU isn't a trader. That will maybe motivate people to fly hunters instead of just the biggest and baddest ship.

[Pickles]

• Remove CPL to planets and HQs and remove the online/offline status from the player info when searching for them.
• In current sector list only friendly forces and the value of the enemy force scan. Attacking forces would choose a random enemy stack.
• Remove the PSF.
• No safe sector set until someone actually hits forces. Trialled this in beta, there was much killing.
• Force a 10 second delay for "loading/unloading" cargo at ports.
• Have bars sell information on who is trading at nearby ports.
• Force-cloak for hunting ships - like a cloak but only works on forces (this is an old idea of mine).
• Fed protection only for the race of the HQ contained by the Fed (neutral space fed only for Deputies).
• Restrict fed space to only the single sector containing the HQ and make it so that offline & protected players don't show in sector at HQ.
• Make it so that Fed protection requires you to stay in sector uncloaked for 5 seconds before becoming active.
• Put an attack button right there on the current sector page next to the "examine" button (this might actually be fun for Salvene).
• Drop DC price to 10mil.
• No 500 newbie turns at the start of the game unless you are a newbie. If not a newbie you get the same starting newbie turns as after a pod.
• Newbie turns after a pod to drop based on user ranking from 100 as Newbie to 5 as Master. (100, 80, 60, 40, 30, 20, 10, 5)
• Allow players to select a friendly ship to follow. They will automatically move as the leader moves if they have turns/jump equipment.
• Reduce cargo holds by 50% across the board and double trade ships' turn rate thus doubling the length of time the trader is exposed.
• Remove scout drones and mines from all trading ships.
• Reduce mine expiry to 30 minutes across the board (can't have people trading safely in their alliance's galaxy).
• Increase mine damage by a factor of 10 and give mine kills to the owner of the stack.
• Increase fed protection rating to 10 + (alignment/150). There are valuable hunting turns being used rearming.
• Reduce shields/armour on all trade ships so that they take a maximum of 2 average shots from an ITACC to kill (excluding ATM which can take 3).
• Make the HoF update real-time and have a "track" option where the current xp/turns used of the tracked player are displayed continuously just above the player's ship info.

There we go. That combination should make hunting sufficiently easy that anyone with a pulse can get kills. Of course it makes trading suicidal so there won't be any traders to hunt but let's not look at that part of the equation.

Oh, and change the name of the game to Space Hunter since apparently that's what people really want.

[Purify]

The PSF needs to be sorted out and something I've wanted to do for a long time, the concurrent games recently has made this more difficult as I don't want to change the PSF once people have already shelled out for out for it, and all games share the same ship list.

Are you saying that when there are not two simultaneous games running... trade ships will be changed?

[RCK]

Kinda sounded like he was hinting at that.... first ive heard of it though

[Infinity]

They wouldn't replace normal scouts, they would be an extra type of hardware, that I think should be quite expensive (say 500K per scout).

For hunter class ships.

Lazy to quote...

Edge is right about hunting, it just doesn't pay off and even with a fastest ship it's hard to cover enough galaxies to get any kills. He is also right about his suggestions.

I am utterly against removing the PSF. I am trying to state that whenever possible, I think that reducing armour to 800 and raising it's price would suffice (25 mils?).

Puri, he wants to do such major changes when no round is running. We've had games going in parallel for a while.