Player Features and Ideas Discussion

For a very long time before I started playing EVE (and currently, I might add) I have played this wonderful game called Escape Velocity, and its other expansions. It's basically a 2D single-player version of EVE, and I'm guessing quite a few of you know of it. One of the main money-making features in-game that EVE doesn't have are trade routes; namely planets or stations that had commodities being sold low in one place, and higher in another.

The idea I have in mind both revitalizes distribution missions in this game, and provides an interesting new gameplay and profession for hauler pilots. Here's how it goes:

The consumer goods, passengers, etc all get their pricing changed as part of a new algorithm. Hisec stations will have miniscule differences in pricing to the point where it's not profitable to trade items compared to missions in terms of isk per hour, but there is consistantly a higher demand for all good in lowsec, and occasionally in hisec you have events happen, i.e. "Plague in Elonaya raises prices for vaccines, doctors and medical equipment. Prices for passengers and refugees drop." where you have a set amount of goods that need to be fulfilled to help stem the tide of the plague and move goods and people around until the crisis is passed.

Basically it would emulate real-world disasters and crises, so while a good static income can be made transferring goods from one place to the next form high to low, a decent side of cash can be made from running goods in and out of event systems; more from high/low, and quite a bit from high/null events. This gives the person who has trained up a hauler alt, or has a jump freighter or normal freighter with nothing better to do with it, the option for participating in an active, living pve mechanic.

Say the Sansha have an incursion going in a hisec constellation. The price for civilians in that system drops sharply for the duration of the engagment, and medical supplies, marines, etc. skyrocket. There's a tidy sum to be made, and I'm sure incursions can be tweaked a little bit to increase the spawn number and rate on gates somewhat to compensate to make it a little more difficult for people to get in and out.

How it would work is that you have a (very large) number of goods like the ones mentioned earlier that spawn in the systems and stations affected for the duration of the crisis. Sure, it would go by quickly in a hisec system because everyone would be scrambling their freighters to make a quick buck, but the risk remains that since these events are broadcasted publicly (ex. news ticker in captain's quarters, fixing the concord billboards to display ongoing info like that instead of just the news window from the website), they run a risk of being caught by suicide gankers (the inflated price tag for passengers and medical supplies would scale appropriately in the kill mail towards the higher price, making for some horrible billions-plus lossmails of refugees/medical supplies for freighter kills. Same would go for low/null events where people think it's a good idea to drop loads of jump freighters in publicly broadcasted events).

Events would scale commodity prices based off of how many goods are actually being transported per spawn batch in the duration, and would drop rapidly if people blitzed them with freighters. This would make the hisec events pretty smash and grab for the few people who get in and out for the first few runs and spawn batches, but for the low and nullsec ones, pilots in t1 and t2 industrials or JF (if they're daring enough or they have friends), can make a tidy profit for the duration of the event.

Distribution missions would completely change; the LP scaling will go up a bit for individual missions, and here's a breakdown for how the lvl 1-4 mission remap would work.

-Distribution agents would have a back-and-forth mechanic where when you pick up an agent of a certain level outside the event, he will direct you to one inside the event system or constellation (yes, there will be new constellation-level events much in the same way we have incursions), who when you complete, the agent he sent you to will turn in the mission you just did, and offer to send you a different set of comoddities back out. These will all be special non-market named commodities that will overall pay out slightly higher than just buying low and selling high for bulk transfers, along with giving out faction LP and standing. The idea is that while you could make more profit running a DST or freighter/JF into low for general trade or events, you would be running at a higher risk since you're carrying huge amounts of goods at a sacrifice to your personal safety.

-lvl 1 agents give out 0.1-5000m3 of cargo to give to a current hisec event, and along with the extra money made on top of that, the agent can be repeatedly farmed for the same systems for pick-up and drop-off.

-lvl 2 agents give out 5000-15000m3 of cargo to a current hisec event and follow the same mechanic as before, except at increased returns.

-lvl 3 agents give out 0.1-5000m3 of cargo to or from a current lowsec event, and have a higher profit margin than the lvl 2s, due to higher risk and potential distance.

-lvl 4 agents give out 5000-15000m3 of cargo to or from a current lowsec event, and have the highest profit margin due to the fact that you always have to fly them in an industrial ship, and risk your own safety transporting goods.

The spawn rate for events is quite high, as they would be set to have at least a third or more of any of the hisec/lowsec constellations have something going on at any given time. General trade routes would remain mostly a highsec/lowsec, highsec/null, or low/nullsec fixed price supply and demand, i.e. tama will always higher demand for medical supplies and marines, and a low base cost for refugees and whatnot. Prices might have the option of shifting over time with activity.

Discuss!

I had a similar idea a while back, obviously I think yours is very good. ;)

Here's something I would add to your proposal:

In a station where these trade goods spawn, they are listed as new sell orders every few minutes.
If not bought out by capsuleers, new sell orders are listed at progressively lower prices.
Once the sell orders reach a certain level (maybe 90% of the initial price) 'NPC traders' start to buy them.
NPC hauling ships, e.g. bestowers, spawn at the station. Since these traders have no capsuleer skills, they only carry about 3000m3 each. They would then have to spend 2-3 minutes getting up to speed to warp off. They would follow the trade routes to the station with the best buy orders.
If they arrive safely, their cargo is sold to that station, removing the appropriate number of units from the best buy order available.

So if capsuleers don't get involved, the trade goes ahead. If they do, they can haul more, and faster, than the NPC traders. Or pirates along the route can blow up these haulers and deliver the loot themselves.

I think you answered your own question there. Players can already shoot NPC haulers, and sell the goods. It's just that (as far as I know) those haulers don't tie into any overall system of trade routes. The system the OP has proposed might as well incorporate the NPC hauler spawns, don't you think?

I think the circular reasoning not to include hauler pilots in this would be that capsuleers are mostly the only ones willing to take the goods out into space because the civvies are scared sh*tless of the pod pilots outside after their friend Bob the Badger pilot got his ass blown up. It would kind of neatly explain everything, don't you think?

You get enough goods for all the mission volumes from a couple of haulers with 5-10 shot NPC for 0 ISK and can sell them for 100% profit.

I won't even start on the camping of these "trade routes" ...

I would not support NPC haulers in ANY instance with this. The hauling of goods MUST be carried out by other pilots, and the cost and effort has to scale appropriately for the returns, just as much as the risk involved with getting there. It would force hauler pilots to be more creative and patient with how they complete them, and reward those among us who are...slippery.

EXACTLY! It focuses on the risk/reward paradigm that makes this game work, and rewards those who put in the time and effort to be smart about it. It's a major boon to piracy, since the system would weed out the blockheads who think that they run their freighter into these, no prob. At most, the freighters could make a good buck off of plying longer static trade routes, but still run the normal risks of flying a giant freighter thru hisec. And don't get me started on all the potential mayhem with jump freighters this could cause...it makes me tingly...

I take your point. I think that if your suggestion were implemented, the NPC haulers should be rolled into it. You are saying that the NPC hauler system be removed from the game, and leave it to capsuleers to haul the same goods. Hard to know either way which is better.

I should point out that my initial idea for changing the NPC haulers was to simply have them travel along trade routes through low sec. The point of it was that, as I see it, player pirates in low sec shouldn't really be ratting while they wait for fights with other players, it just doesn't seem like what pirates should be doing. NPC rats are there for 'good guy' players to shoot, but there are no 'good guy' NPCs out there for 'bad guy' players to shoot. And even if they were, they shouldn't have bounties, the only benefit to shooting them would be whatever loot they dropped. I thought maybe this could all be absorbed into the same 'trade routes' system.

NPC trade goods that can be bought and sold for profit elsewhere actually do exist in EVE, and as someone who played Elite, it's how I first made my ISK. NPC corps have buy and sell orders that can get filled, have fluctuating prices. and take a while to reappear. It was fun figuring out profitable roundtrips, and there were a number of amusing anomalies like intra-system trading between stations that I happily exploited. It was an exciting period, slowly getting better skills for more cargo volume, and slowly building my capital.

However, it didn't take long for even a noob to figure out that player driven markets had much higher profit potential and handy features like buy and sell orders, and as soon as I had made myself enough starting capital with NPC trade goods, I did the same with player items and became a billionaire in my first month of playing.

EDIT: I think you realise that the volatile, event-connected price fluctuations etc you describe are readily present in the player-driven markets, and hardly need duplicating in the NPC realm.

If they were in lowsec I would be fine with that, but I'd recommend they get a suspect timer or something. But the hisec ones would HAVE to go, because I do believe that would be an exploit in the proposed system.