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Thread: Implementing Space Commerce: A Design Proposal
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.]
These ideas in conjuction with Green Marines Smuggler ideas and I am will be a very happy Player/subscriber.
I was thinking that maybe the alot of these things can be tied to the Merchant profession. It would greatly enhance that profession.
Again Awesome!!
/applaud
Neeban Ialir, Kettemoor
Flatfingers wrote:
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.
Thanks for the thoughtful comments! Thank you for opening up your very well developed ideas for scrutiny. That takes guts on these boards.
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. Oh, sorry. Guess I misunderstood. Yeah, that might be a good type of mission for new players and veterans. And your idea about "ghost" goods would alleviate any concerns about competition with player merchants.
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.
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.
This sounds exactly right to me -- I'd like to see freight shipping work just like this.
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.
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. OK, you sold me. I'll read it.
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.
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.) I haven't read Axelrod's work (was that something I was supposed to read in Macro Econ 1?), but I do know that in the 19th Century American economy, businesses and investors faced these very same kinds of problems owing toa 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.
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. Yeah, I think we're in the same ballpark idea-wise. Maybe you could either look up the person by name, or you could search a database by type of contract or date or whatever. I like the idea of people having to put up earnest money in order to be accepted into certain recognized player merchantile associations (which would be separate from normal player guilds). That way, there is a collective stamp of approval on a player, perhaps. I think the economy could evolve much more if there were ways to lend money and invest it without getting screwed by other players. Full disclosure of business dealings (at least whether the terms of the deal were honored) would help mitigate dishonesty.
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? Yeah, that might work. Probably needs some tweaking, but I'd say you're headed in the right direction.
...
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
Should I like... kneel or something?
Thunderheart wrote:
This is a great post
This is a lot of stuff and would definately be a different expansion, but I've sent the link to the space team and kept a copy of the proposal
So basically you're saying there is nothing like this in this expansion and the core of SE surviving will be on players wanting to go out and shoot down other players.