Implementing Space Commerce: A Design Proposal
http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=lightspeed&message.id=28832
2004/07/02
INTRODUCTION
I believe that SWG and Jump to Lightspeed will be more fun with features that support space-based commerce -- in other words, space needs to have features to support both combat and commerce.
To this end, I've put together a number of ideas to support commerce in space. Some of them I've already discussed in other threads, some are new. The main new idea I get to toward the end of this message. If you're terminally impatient (heh) you can skip to the "SHIPPING TERMINALS" section, but I hope you'll try reading through the preliminary comments first -- they'll help the rest of this message make more sense.
SPACE EXPANSION: THE COMMERCIAL GAME
I put together a fairly detailed list of ideas to support space-based commerce in my thread "Space Expansion: The Commercial Game" (Core Systems thread #17565). This discussion wasn't so much about how to implement ideas for space commerce as it was to talk about what kinds of commerce the Space Expansion ought to have. It was a pretty good discussion, but I wouldn't mind giving these ideas a little more exposure -- if anyone thinks it might be useful to repost that thread over here in the actual Jump to Lightspeed forum, let me know.
The core of that thread that relates to this one is the list of three main types of space-based commercial service:
So how can we get these features?
PLAYER CONTRACTS
There's an idea I had a while back that would support space-based commerce without needing to implement any other new features. This is because it's a major new feature itself that goes well beyond supporting just space-based commerce.
This is the concept of Player Contracts. I've designed a contract system that would allow players to establish long-term and repeated contracts with each other to securely perform many different kinds of economic transactions, from the basic goods-for-money trade we currently use to crafting, repair, guard duty, player bounties(!), and even in-game marriage contracts.
If you'd like to check out the details of this idea, you can read the messages in thread #4421 in the Core Systems forum ("Player Contracts: A Design Document") -- there's also a somewhat shorter version ("Player Contracts: The Short Version") in thread #15183 of the Core Systems forum that gives you all the details in one message. (Admittedly, it's not all that short.)
A couple of the contract types I propose are Transport and Delivery. Transport contracts allow you to make deals with players to move items or players to a specified location; Delivery contracts let you agree to give specific items to another player.
If just these two types of player contracts were available, we would have a formal, game-backed way to perform two of the most requested space commerce services: passenger service and freight delivery service. There's nothing preventing us from doing these things informally the day that JtL ships... but it doesn't appear that there'll be any features to reliably support doing those things, either. And without a formal in-game system that protects the players who agree in good faith to make contracts with other players, these kinds of commerce just won't happen -- it'll be too easy to cheat the other guy by taking his money or goods or services without providing the agreed-on payment.
A game-implemented contract system would be exactly the kind of formal system needed to be able to make trustable deals. But how would this actually work in practice?
One feature of player contracts that would make a freight delivery system practical would be contract terminals. As a freighter pilot, you'd be able to go to a contract terminal near your favorite starport, find a delivery mission that suits you, accept the mission, take "delivery" of the item (I put delivery in quotes because you never actually see the item in your inventory -- it's put in a special contract account to prevent theft), travel to your destination, and have the item "transferred" to the delivery terminal, at which point your bank account is credited with the freight delivery fee offered in the contract.
Sound like it might work?
It must be said that although the developers have discussed the idea of implementing some system supporting player missions (which really is what my player contract system winds up being), they haven't mentioned it publicly in months. Nor do they show any signs of considering implementing anything like a player contract or mission system.
So is there some other way to support space-based commerce? Is there some other relatively simple feature the developers could implement that supports not just freight delivery but cargo sales?
SHIPPING TERMINALS
Having gone through all the background details, let's cut to the chase. What we need is this: Bazaar terminals that can be placed inside starports, and that have been enhanced in two ways: to allow players to enter "want ads," and to provide automatic payments for delivering selected items to selected off-planet destinations.
(In what follows, remember the distinction between freight and cargo: freight is stuff you carry for someone else for a predetermined fee, while cargo is stuff you buy in one place and carry to sell in another place in the hope of making a profit between the two transactions.)
What we need is a new type of terminal -- a Shipping terminal -- that works just like a Bazaar terminal but with a couple of enhancements and a restriction:
When you offer an item for sale on the Bazaar terminal, you have the option of marking it for delivery to another starport. If you take this option by selecting a Delivery Location starport from a pulldown list, you're prompted to enter a (non-zero) Delivery Fee as well. If you don't enter a Delivery Location, the item is listed for sale just like items are listed currently. Otherwise the delivery fee is immediately deducted from your bank account (if you can't pay it, you aren't allowed to mark the item for delivery) -- that way when someone delivers it they are assured of payment. If you later cancel the offer, the delivery fee is credited back to your bank account.
[Question: Would we want to allow items to be delivered to starport Shipping terminals on the same planet as the source Shipping terminal? Or should the pick list of possible delivery starports exclude all starports on the same planet where you're placing the item for sale?]
Only operators of multi-player ships would be able to accept freight delivery missions from the Shipping terminal. Starfighters will already have plenty of cool things that only they can do; they don't need to be able to haul freight or cargo, too.
To prevent the theft of freight, you never get the actual freight items in your ship -- you just get a ship's manifest that lists the items you're moving from one Shipping terminal to another. When you take a freight delivery contract from a Shipping terminal, the item is marked and displayed as inactive to anyone viewing that item in a Bazaar or Shipping terminal. If you get killed in space, the item is marked back to active. Only when you successfully land at your destination and redeed your ship is the item removed from the source Shipping terminal, added to the destination Shipping terminal, and the delivery fee deposited to your bank account with an in-game email message telling you about the transfer. (It might also be nice to send an in-game email message to the person who offered the delivery fee to let him or her know that the item has been successfully delivered.)
[Note that if piracy and docking are ever implemented, having a ship's manifest of items being delivered would be a good source of items for pirates to steal.]
[Additional enhancement: What about allowing anyone to mark an item for delivery, even after it's originally been added by someone else to a Bazaar terminal? That way if you're on Lok and you need 1000 units of Resource X and someone is selling it on Dantooine, you can offer a delivery fee for someone to bring it to you. The only catch is that the person who placed the item for sale would have to authorize the delivery, otherwise you could have people griefing merchants by having their products shipped to undesirable locations.]
Finally, there would also be a new button next to the "My Sales" button on the Bazaar terminal -- this would be labeled "Wanted". Pressing it would allow you to create what would essentially be want ads. You'd enter text into two fields: a short Subject line (probably with something like a 30-character limit), and a Details text entry box. You'd briefly describe what you want to sell (or buy!) in the Subject line, then provide any other necessary information in the Details box. When you hit OK, this would create a new "item" that's only shown when you click on the "Wanted" category on any Bazaar or Shipping terminal. All Wanted items would automatically have, say, a 3-day lifespan, but you'd be able to cancel Wanted messages in a way similar to how you cancel sale offers on Bazaar terminals currently (the only difference being that you wouldn't get an actual physical item to retrieve, since there was never one to begin with).
SHIPPING EXAMPLE
So how would all this actually work? Let's try an example.
Congratulations! You're now the proud owner-operator of a YT-1300 -- she may not look like much, but she's got it where it counts, and you're ready to start earning back what you paid to buy her.
You walk into the Coronet Starport with your YT-1300 deed in your inventory. Set amid the ticket stations are several new terminals -- they look sort of like Bazaar terminals, but seem to have a few more blinking lights.
You access this new Shipping terminal, and click on the "Resource" category. On the right side of the terminal screen, the usual list of resources for sale appears... but you notice that there are two new columns: one for "Delivery Location" that for some resources lists the names of starports on various planets, and one for "Delivery Fee" that shows some number. All the resources marked as having a Delivery Location also have a Delivery Fee listed.
There's one item that shows a 500-credit delivery fee for taking some Radioactives to Theed Starport. You were already thinking of heading that way, so you mark that item and click on the "Deliver" button. You notice that there are two other items whose owners want them delivered to the Shipping terminals at the Theed starport, so you click on "Deliver" for them, too. Now all three items are grayed out on the Shipping terminal display.
You deed your ship, travel (uneventfully!) to Theed starport, and redeed your ship when you get there. As you stand on your two feet again, you notice that your email icon is blinking. When you click on it to bring up your Email window, you see that there are three messages waiting for you, each one telling you that the appropriate delivery fee has been credited to your bank account.
"All too easy!" you think with a grin. Then you realize that while you were in Coronet you could have checked the Wanted category for Bazaar terminals on Naboo to see if there were any items you could have bought in Coronet to bring to Theed in the hope of making a profit.
You figure you'll head back to Coronet, so you access the Theed Shipping terminal and select the Wanted category for Corellian terminals. Someone is looking for Lokian leather; someone else wants as many crates of Muon Gold as you can offer (but you're not desperate enough to try smuggling spice -- yet); and -- hey! someone wants Nabooian Fiberplast. You click on the Resources category, and sure enough, someone is selling 1000 units of high-quality Nabooian Fiberplast for 6000 credits. That seems a bit steep, but the person who left the Coronet want ad says he'll pay 8 credits per unit. That would be a 2000 credit profit, which would definitely pay the electric bill for a few days.
So you buy the fiberplast (before someone else can) and send an IM to the guy who wrote the want ad -- no response. You send an email, then jump in your ship and head back to Coronet.
When you get there, there's still no reply to your email. Now you have to make a tough choice -- do you hang on to the fiberplast in the hope of selling it to the person who wrote the want ad? Or do you put it onto the Coronet Bazaar yourself to try to make back what you paid for it (and maybe a little profit in the bargain)?
Welcome to the exciting life of a freighter captain. J
QUESTIONS
So -- would this work, or have I missed some obvious flaw?
Are there other features that would improve these ideas?
Would this be too hard for the developers to implement?
Is there some other entirely different (and better) way to get space commerce?
2004/07/02
Thanks for the comments, folks -- they're appreciated.
In fact, they've reminded me of a few additions I ought to make, or at least suggest.
1. Limit the number of items that can be concurrently taken for delivery. We don't want someone coming in and taking every single freight item from a Shipping terminal -- would 5 items (no more than 2 from any one terminal) be enough?
2. Delivery from Bazaar terminals. Suppose you're using a regular Bazaar terminal in a player city with no starport. Does that mean you can't offer an item for delivery (since there's no way to pick which Shipping terminal the item should be shipped from)? Should the rules for how items are deposited be changed so that you could pay a fee (in addition to the delivery fee you're offering a freighter captain) to have your item transferred to the nearest starport's Shipping terminal when you put it up for sale on your Bazaar terminal? Or should we make players have to go to an actual starport Shipping terminal to be able to mark items for delivery to other worlds?
3. NPC delivery missions. We want to be careful with these. If it's just a matter of delivering freight, it would probably be OK to have "fake" items to be delivered from one planet to another -- freight items (per my original suggestion) are never tangible items; they're just marked on a ship's manifest. What we don't want is NPC cargo missions, since that suggests that there'd be NPC-created items on Bazaar/Shipping terminals that we could actually purchase... which would corrupt the entire player-crafting economy of SWG.
4. Smuggling. This probably deserves a thread all to itself! I've never played a Smuggler, so I don't know how this profession currently does its thing. But given the hugely iconic nature of Han Solo's character to the Star Wars literary universe, I can't imagine that the developers don't have some new features in mind for Smugglers in a post-Jump to Lightspeed world. So I don't want to go too crazy with suggestions here, but it certainly seems that smuggling ought to be involved somehow in shipping as I've described it so far.
My suggestion is to have Imperial ships in space be able to scan freighters (in normal space). Imperial ships within a certain distance would be able to "see" your ship's manifest. If you were carrying something illegal, that would give you a TEF to them and they'd be able to attack you. Or perhaps Shipwrights will be able to craft smuggling holds on certain ships (*cough*freighters*cough*) -- smuggled items wouldn't show up on your ship's manifest, but Imperial or Rebel ships that got close enough to your ship and had the necessary sensors (see my thread "Sensor Ops and You" in this forum) could perform a cargo scan. If the scan turned up any items that weren't on your manifest, or that were obviously illegal, or if the scanning ship was Rebel and the scanned items were clearly pro-Imperial, boom -- TEF time.
2004/07/03
Shipping Terminals
I actually mistyped my post earlier, I should have written �buy orders� not �sell orders�. Essentially the problem I see is that if players are given the ability to say �Hey I want this item, I�ll pay you this much, have it delivered to me� is that you�ve now put every store out of business. You underestimate how lazy people can be. Once a system is put into place to allow people to request items they want it�s all they�ll use, especially with how frustrated people already are about empty vendors, small selections, etc, etc. That�s why I say it�ll kill the Merchant profession.
Now that being said, if you�re instead talking about a player buying an item from a bazaar that�s located on another planet and then saying that they�d like to have it shipped to their current location, that I could see working because it�s fostering additional player involvement without taking it away from someplace else.
Let's be clear about what I'm suggesting here. I'm proposing two new features: 1) delivery as freight of an item from a starport Shipping terminal on one planet to a starport Shipping terminal on another planet, and 2) delivery as cargo of an item that someone requested in a Want Ad into the Bazaar terminal where the ad was placed (which would include Shipping terminals).
Even assuming that a Want Ad system designed to promote interplanetary cargo shipping would additionally be used by some people to to try to avoid having to walk around to find desired goods (and I agree that it would), I don't think there'd be as much damage done to Merchants as you suggest. In the first place, just being able to ask for something (as in a Want Ad) doesn't imply that you'll always get it -- people will still have to get up and go looking for some things from time to time.
In the second place, why is it good for players to be frustrated by having to walk around for hours only to find empty vendors? If players can use the Want Ads to post a message saying, "Bring Item A to me personally and I'll pay you X credits for it," how is that worse than the current pointless searching of vendors, some of which will be empty?
Finally, and most importantly, we currently have the situation of people going to the nearest Bazaar terminal to look for Item A, but never finding it because no one realizes that someone wants that item. A terminal-based Want Ad system would in fact expand economic activity by allowing sales that would otherwise never happen. Far from putting Merchants out of business, it would expand their sales opportunities. The ability to easily see what people actually want (instead of spending the resources to make a bunch of things most of which no one ever buys) would make Merchants more profitable, not less.
As someone who's played a Merchant, that sure seems like a good thing to me. J
2004/07/15
WesBelden wrote:
for it to have any chance of succesfully being implemented in my eyes, a limit
on what can be transported by players on public transport (ie, what's currently
in the game), or a heavy charge for carrying such things (resource containers
going up by number of resources in each one, crates etc.) would have to be
implemented. Similarly, the amount one can hold while in a fighter class ship
would also have to be limited.
Agreed, and it's an excellent point.
I grumbled some time ago about wishing that SWG had implemented an "encumberance" system, since 100,000 units of steel taking up exactly the same amount of inventory space as Goru Rainstealer's calling card just makes no sense whatsoever. If encumberance was factored into carrying capacity, then the problem of freighter space (not to mention vehicle trunks and mount saddlebags) would automatically be solved.
Failing that, I suppose that there would have to be a rule in place that items could only be transferred from shipping terminals to ship "manifests" with X number of spaces (based on the size of your ship and available space not taken up by other ship systems like weapons or engines), and from ship manifests to delivery shipping terminals.
Of course, that does nothing to prevent someone from simply buying an item from a shipping terminal and placing it in their personal inventory, getting on a ship and going somewhere else, then placing that item for sale on another shipping terminal. So maybe this is another place where we need to make the distinction between freight (something you ship for someone else but that doesn't belong to you), which could use the terminal->manifest->terminal system, and cargo (something you buy yourself and take elsewhere to sell at what you hope will be a profit), which people will certainly transport in their personal inventory.
IgescaStorm wrote:
Flatfingers wrote:
[... The only catch is that the person who placed the item for sale would have to authorize the delivery, otherwise you could have people griefing merchants by having their products shipped to undesirable locations.]
Why? If i bought an item from the bazaar, my money was sent to the seller. Now i can say another player, he shall bring it to me... Where is the grief?
IgescaStorm, the original suggestion didn't include buying the item first; it was just about offering to buy an item after shipping it. You're right that if the item is purchased first, then it would be fine to allow the new owner to authorize delivery.
The key is to insure that only the owner of an item is allowed to determine what happens to that item.
Rykith wrote:
I was thinking that maybe the alot of these things can be tied to the Merchant
profession. It would greatly enhance that profession.
I was thinking that, too. J
Just imagine if creative Master Merchants could be as powerful in their part of SWG as TKAs or CM/Pistoleers are in theirs....
TulasiKid wrote:
I haven't read Axelrod's work (was that something I was supposed to read in
Macro Econ 1?) ...
You do NOT want to get me started on this subject! (You just think some of my other messages are long....)
Although Axelrod's work has applications in Economics and other human-related fields, it's probably best known in Poli Sci circles; in particular it's directly relevant to Conflict Resolution studies.
Basically he used computer simulations to show that cooperative behavior can evolve even in a crowd of people who take advantage of other people, as long as certain rules are in place:
If those rules are in place in a multi-person system, then it turns out that a very simple strategy (known as "Tit-for-Tat") can create an island of productive cooperation even in an ocean of advantage-takers.
I'll leave it at that; if you're interested (and this stuff really does turn out to have some fascinating resonances with designing multiplayer games), you can find a lot more information on the Web.
TulasiKid wrote:
... but I do know that in the 19th Century American economy, businesses and
investors faced these very same kinds of problems owing to a lack of a
regulatory infrastructure for enforcing trade and commerce. Reputation was an
important aspect of doing business, because there often was nothing else for
investors to rely on.
Exactly right, and that's highly relevant to SWG and other MMOGs.
I wrote a background essay on this (in the old [now archived] Discussion forum, thread # 938113) called "Advanced Economic Systems in Online Games". The key point was that online games, including SWG, are basically stuck at a prehistoric level of economic activity. If you think about it, about all we can do are make one-shot deals with each other, either through the Secure Trade Window or Bazaar/vendor terminals.
And isn't that similar to the limits to economic activity in the 1800s, when you pretty much only did business with people you knew personally and/or locally? When there's no reason for you to trust some distant person, why do business with that person?
The vendors, Bazaar terminals, and Secure Trade Windows are all extremely valuable economic tools in SWG because they are sufficiently trustable to allow players who don't know each other to trust each other in business deals. But are they enough to really unleash the creative potential of players who enjoy making business deals with each other?
To encourage more advanced economic activity in SWG, we need more advanced economic features. I tried to imagine what the most important of those features might be, and the most crucial concept by far was our notion of enforceable contracts.
The idea that people can agree to some exchange, and that all parties to this exchange agreement can trust the entire legal system of their culture to effectively enforce all the (legal) terms of the agreement, is probably the single most crucial advance in economic history. This is because an enforceable contract system allows potential contractees who don't know each other to trust each other, because they can trust the system to require the other person to hold up their side of the deal. And that opens up more new economic opportunities than any other economic tool we humans have ever dreamed up.
So yes... I sort of would like to see a good, enforceable player contract system in SWG. If the theory behind it is correct, then the question is whether it's technically feasible. I think it is... but that question is better addressed in the other threads on this subject.
BattledroidStrider wrote:
It encourages Freighers to be running around ...
That is a great way of putting it!
The truth is, we don't require player contracts or shipping terminals or any other new game mechanism to move cargo in JtL; we can do that informally the day JtL launches. But allowing players to do some thing is not encouraging players to do that thing.
Although there might be some diehard merchant types trying to make a living through freight shipping and cargo speculating in JtL, why bother when the game clearly isn't designed to support commercial gameplay? A set of in-game features to support freight and cargo shipping would take nothing away from combat gameplay -- in fact, they would enhance the purpose of combat beyond just pwning the other guy or levelling up. With commercial gameplay included, combat can also be about defending a merchant convoy from bloodthirsty pirates, or helping carry a crucial schematic to one's faction HQ or PA hall, or keeping the trade lanes safe from marauding creatures -- you get the idea.
In short, features to support space commerce are necessary to create the backdrop of everyday life before which the heroes of the Star Wars saga can play their roles.
As much fun as combat in JtL will be, it should be about more than just combat. As I've asked before: When only heroes can play, who needs heroes?
nasafan2 wrote:
increase the pay for illegal goods, spice/sliced weps, armor etc, but also make
it a harsh punishment for getting caught with em. Being found out on the ground
is not as bad as if the imps found out you were trying to actually transport
the stuff! Puts a little risk in the game of spice running for all you
smugglers out there.
I'm up for that.
Seriously, out of all the possible commercial enhancements that JtL might bring, the most obvious would seem to be letting Smugglers be better than anyone else at using their personal starships for smuggling.
Currently Smugglers are on the board for a revamp after JtL goes live. If I were a Smuggler who wanted smuggling in space to be a part of that revamp, I'd already be coming up with ideas for how to implement that... (hint, hint).
Lasek wrote:
if a player were to grab a delivery mission, mark it as delivered (nobody else
could take it).. And then log out or simply not go to the delivery location. He
wouldn't be able to access or use the items, but he would be able to grief by
not delivering them to the wanting person.
Good point, Lasek. You're right; a freight delivery system would probably have to have some kind of guaranteed delivery period. One day might be excessive; how about two-hour delivery? If you haven't stashed it in the receiving terminal within two hours, it's yanked out of your ship and restored to "available" status on the shipping terminal.
If we really wanted to get complicated with it, we could charge "overdue fines" -- every hour beyond the two-hour limit, you lose 20% of the delivery payment. If the fines chew up all the delivery payment, then the item goes back to the original shipping terminal.
This still doesn't entirely address the problem of someone who takes a delivery item but doesn't deliver it... and then keeps taking it, over and over again, just to keep someone else from buying the item. If freight delivery is just NPC mission stuff, no problem, but if we're talking about delivering player freight, then that's a problem.
We probably also need to have some kind of counter that "remembers" whether you've taken some item, and doesn't let you select that particular item for delivery more than once per day.
TheHomicidalVerpine wrote:
For the npc cities: give players a higher reward for say running missions that
take them from obscure locations to obscure locations.
This is another idea that just makes good sense. One of the greatest game mechanics ever invented is the one that ties reward to risk -- that way players get to choose the level of risk with which they're comfortable, and they are rewarded commensurate with that level of risk.
And just to make it an even better idea, THV's suggestion also has the advantage of encouraging players to visit new places -- something SWG's developers have always been interested in encouraging.
Finally, this idea ties in well with the notion that cargo bought in a big city on a "safe" planet should sell for the most money in outposts on "adventure" planets. Again, link risk to reward, and encourage players to go places they haven't been.
AuleyDavyds wrote:
What do you think of the recent addition of the "Auction" chat
channel? ... The advantage of this system is that it solves the expediency
issue I mentioned earlier: someone seeking to buy something can type a request,
and *if* the right smith/seller/merchant is on and sees it, the response can be
immediate.
I agree -- my first thought on seeing Q-3PO's announcement of the Auction channel was, "Well, there's the first version of the 'Want Ads' feature I was asking for -- dang, these guys are quick!"
It's not quite as useful as a "persistent" message that can be searched for on a shipping terminal. It's also less convenient than a message that lives in the same place (i.e., on a shipping terminal) as the merchandise to be shipped. But it's a great starting point, and I'm delighted that the development team took the time to implement it.
AuleyDavyds wrote:
... a player who has a large amount (or any amount really, I guess) of
high-quality resouces from a planet (let's say Talus), lists them as available
on this new "shipping bazaar" system, and then a crafter can purchase
them. When exactly does the delivery take place though?
I think of it like this: Items are "in-transit" when the shipper accepts the delivery, and "delivered" to the destination starport shipping terminal when he redeeds his ship upon landing.
But if there's a better way to accomplish grief-free but productive shipping, I'm listening!
(Personally I'd rather players were able to stay in their ships in landing bays and do their commercial transfers from a shipping terminal aboard their ship, but we've probably flogged that dead horse enough at this point.)
AuleyDavyds wrote:
Should the crafter be able to see listings over all planets, and then purchase it,
hence creating a contract for a player to move the goods from one location to
another?
I'd actually prefer to see something like that as an advanced skill in an Industrialist (or revamped Merchant) profession.
AuleyDavyds wrote:
The result for the shipper is a question, though: does he get a cut of the
price the miner paid to the crafter, is there an increased fee (say add 10-15%
depending on travel time and the danger of the route) added to the cost that
the crafter pays, or are credits generated for the shipper, leaving the
original contract as is?
If it's player-generated, I'd say make shipping payments additional credits. The seller would have to factor the cost of shipping into his price for the goods he's trying to sell, but the point of player shipping is not to add money to the system but to spread it around more.
If OTOH we're talking NPC-generated freight shipping, then there'd probably need to be some function that calculates the delivery fee (AKA "mission payout") based on the difficulty of reaching the destination terminal. (The cost of the item would actually be irrelevant, since as an NPC-generated item it wouldn't actually exist and therefore could not be purchased.)
AuleyDavyds wrote:
the important question is timing: Does the shipping occur before the sale (the
miner asks to move stuff from Talus to Coronet in hopes that it will sell
better there) or after (the example I gave above).
As I replied to IgescaStorm above, only the owner of an item should ever be allowed to determine the disposition of that item.
So if I place an item for sale, I have to authorize delivery if it's OK for the item to be delivered someplace else before it's purchased.
However, if you place some item and then I buy it, it would be nice if I could pay to transfer that item (which I now own) to a shipping terminal for delivery to the starport closest to me.
MayRee wrote:
Maybe people who move frieght for the misisons could have a "freighter
rating". The Rating could be based on how many successful transport the
person has completed. A low rating could get the freighter on the BH terminals
(smuggler or not). A higher rating could get the freighter higher missions.
Hmmm... that's an interesting idea. I like the way you've worked it up so that players have good information about who they might do business with.
The only concern I can think of is that this might wind up preventing lower-level freighter captains from competing with established players. I'm not suggesting that everyone should be "equal" -- that just eliminates any reason for entrepreneurial creativity -- but at the same time I wouldn't want the established players to get all the shipping business. That's the kind of mercantilist exclusivity that just inflates prices; we want to be sure to have commercial competition so that every freighter captain can fill a useful niche.
How can the rating system help achieve that goal?
mistermackey wrote:
jeez how did you think of all that stuff?
ph34r my excessive free time. J