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unity200 wrote:
mining facilities, factories etc, would be nice, and create a 2nd universe in space.

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I agree -- one point I didn't make in my initial post was that it would be even more fun to be able to do freight and cargo shipping if we had access to space-based shipping terminals.

I'd like to see shipping terminals on space stations! And in seedy cantinas carved into the side of airless and barrenasteroids. Heck, why not have shipping terminals aboard freighters?Then we couldlet ships that are nearby in space "transfer" cargo between each other by just moving it from one ship's manifest to another. That way you don't even have to implement a docking feature.

So many possibilities, so little pull with the developers....

--Flatfingers

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LAR wrote:

Player Contracts I'm pretty sure won't work. You'll have people breaking/abusing contracts left and right because there's no way to enforce them without letting people abuse them from the other side of things.

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I've always thought that some kind of droid 'proxy/contract' feature would really solve this situation.


The credits/items are entered into the droid and it's used to oversee/control the transaction. The owner is unable to access the item inventory until the contract is filled.I'm sure there are larger issues with this but it seems a reasonable way to secure a contract type system.

Note: Part of my desire to see this is so that it might lead to players being able to play Sabaac and bet any items (deeds, weapons, armor, whatever) and the droid acts as the proxy and cashier to the winner.

It's setting the terms of 'success' (and completion of the contract to both parties satisfaction that's the sticky part, methinks).


Nice thread, by the way...I linked it in the Corr boards.


/bow

Respectfully,

Message Edited by WillinB on 07-14-2004 02:41 PM

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TulasiKid wrote:

First, as to the shipping/delivery of player goods, I really don't see why anyone would want to have their goods shipped someplace if they can it do by themselves already. Especially once we get our yachts and other multi-player ships. I suspect you'll be able to carry lots of stuff in there. Unless player inventory capacities are reduced, there's not much need for paying someone else to ship something.

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Thanks for the thoughtful comments!

I actually don't disagree with you about freight shipping. You're probably right that most players wouldn't need to ask someone else toship freight for them. (Although there is the Smuggler angle, which you mention later.)

What I'm mostly thinking of freight shipping for at this time isNPC missions for new JtL players. Basically they'd get paid to ship NPC freight from one planet to another. Since the "freight" would only be a line in a shipping terminal manifest, and not a real item, there's no competition with crafters; the only impact to the economy would be the addition of freight shipping payments to players.

Is this featurereally valuable enough to have code to support it? Possibly not. And I could live without freight shipping. It's just the other features that couldbe allowed by a freight shipping system that I hate to give up on. I haven't thought of any personally, but I don't want to underestimate the creativity of my fellow SWG players in dreaming up creative uses for game systems.

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I would make an exception for smuggled/illegal goods. Now that would be a situation in which you might need someone to ship your goods , say a smuggler. The smuggler would have the best chance of getting past Imperials, Rebels and criminals without getting inspected and then boarded in space or stopped at a starport. I think other players should be allowed to try, but they should face a much higher risk of interdiction than smugglers.

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As to the idea of player contracts, this is tricky. How do you enforce them? With bounties? With financial penalties? In the case of bounties, let's say a bounty gets put on you for failing to complete the contract or violating the terms of the agreement. What happens after the bounty hunter tracks you down and kills you? You just clone again. Yeah, maybe the other player doesn't lose any money from your failure to complete the mission or lose any goods that were to be shipped, but the player does lose valuable time. This seems to be tantamount to griefing.

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These areall reasonable objections, which is why I've spent a lot of time addressingthem from the very first time I worked up the idea in a design document. I think there are reasonableways to make contracts secure enough that players will trust them -- not perfect, but good enough so that the system as a whole will be trusted enough to be used.

I wouldn't mind discussing it further, but this "space commerce" threadprobably isn't the place for those details. If you're curiousto seehow your concerns about these player contract issuesmight be addressed, I hope you'll check out my threads on this subject over in the Core Systems forum. Thread # 15183 ("Player Contracts: The Short Version") is probably the best place to start. If you're really, really interested you can check out the full design document in thread # 4421.

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In my opinion, the best way to enforce player contracts would be to have a public register of contracts that have been undertaken and whether they were completed. That way, if a player welshes on a contract, their name at least shows upon the register as an unreliable participant in business deals. Maybe you could also post a register of those who have defaulted on contracts and then were owned by bounty hunters. The best way to stop, or at least prevent, griefing and dishonesty is by having transparency and public shaming.

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You're definitely onto something there. The single most important requirement to establishing trust in any economic system (real-world, game, whatever) is information -- if you can't recognize the people you're considering doing business with, and there's no way to know how they've behaved in past transactions, then there's no reason to trust anyone. (Robert Axelrod's work on the "evolution of cooperation" is a phenomenally good resource on this question.)

One of the suggestions that was made in previous discussions was to have something like the eBay rating system (or this forum's "star" system), where you could rate other participants. Given the subjectivity of some people (like the occasional one-star ninjas around here), I can't say I like that suggestion as-is... but there's a variation that might work.

How about letting the system itself keep track of how many contracts a person has entered into, and how many of them that person has defaulted on? If I have the choice of signing a contract with Person A who has a 98% success rate out of 72 contracts signed, and Person B who has a 20% success rate out of5 contracts signed, I'm probably going to assume that Person B is just a griefer and give my business to Person A.

So would something like that work for you?

...

At any rate, I think a general system of player contracts (player missions, if you prefer) would do a lot to support not just space commerce but commercial activity in SWG as a whole. But if we can have 'em, then let's at least have some in-game feature to support cargo shipping where we can buy low on starter planets and sell high on adventure planets!

--Flatfingers

WillinB, I actually read your thread earlier today, and noticed as you did that we seemed to be on the same wavelength.

Maybe the developers will take this as a sign that there's a consensus amongthe people playing SWG that something like a shipping terminal for space commerce would be sufficiently fun to be worth implementing!

--Flatfingers

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lore7 wrote:

can we please get a dev post on all the new info out today TH pretty please with a cherry on the top?

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