Economy bottleneck solution - Improve Buy / Sell Contract Visibility

[Fenris]

12 minutes ago, Intrepido said:

RvR at that time was far more epic than now, with operations of 6 PBs at the same time. The competition of which alliance would finally win the match or take all the strong hull regions was quite interesting in my opinion.

And, if im not mistaken, peak was over 700-800 players in our server. Right now, we are around 500-600. And most important, we always have something to do, something to organize.

6 PBs at the time were possible, because of alliances, war supplies, and easy hostility grind, those battles were closed.

and 700-800 players is not much, considering the numbers at OW introduction.

[Kiefer Cain]

On 5/4/2018 at 11:07 AM, Marcus Corvus said:

...The bottom-up view on this is that the inability to see contract activity without visiting a port creates a functional bottleneck in player economic activity.  It is probably not an issue with high server populations.  But in a low population environment, either on the server as a whole, or in a particular region, it is going to be a game killer.

The effect on PvE is that a player very rarely can get a contract filled outside of a national capital.  At any price.  It is a feedback loop.  Since since the econ activity is in the Capital, that is where you do the contracts, and resulting in very little buy/sell activity outside of it.  Which means a PvE player really can't get very far from a national capital if they are interested in at least some interaction with other players.  I circuited Cuba scouting the area (from Charleston) and the Caribbean region was pretty much a player desert.

My opinion, is that at a minimum, player buy/sell contracts need to be on equal footing in the trader tool with the port stock.  I watch port stock looking for reasonable consistency in availability before I spend time sailing any distance.  The same thing ought to be true of buy / sell contracts rather than the current complete crapshoot.  It would be nice to see the same thing with ship sales but making contracts visible would remove the bottleneck.  The econ activity would be present elsewhere to actually support shipyards outside the green zone.

In the PvP environment it is possible to kludge around the problem by maxing out outpost permits.  But addressing contract visibility would help here as well.  Player activity would start to spread out beyond the green zones and at least some of the argument about green zone mechanics and OW incentives would become irrelevant.  Including the argument over taxes.

Would like at least a yes, this is on our radar, or we have this alternative in mind, or no.  An explanation would be nice, but I can live with a flat no, and I will not quibble with that, or any explanation you offer.  I suspect this is not a trivial coding project and it is your game.

 

8

Haven't played in a wee while (maybe for the reasons you state above... maybe not, lol...).  I can't like your post due to some error message, so I will quote and +1 it that way.  Been saying this in one way or another for a long time, too.  

+1 from lil ole Kiefer. 

Edited May 6, 2018 by Kiefer Cain

[Fenris]

11 hours ago, rediii said:

Alliances didnt had such a big role because nations still had to grind ports themselves

Wrong. Sweden could grind any enemy port, and any coalition member was able to attack it. Same on defense, every time a member of coalition had to defend somewhere, there were always other coalition members in defense PBs present.

And if a coalition had 4 countries, and any nation grinded 1 port at the same time.....et cetera et cetera...

 

Edited May 7, 2018 by Fenris

[Fenris]

11 hours ago, rediii said:

15 people and you flip most ports in 3 missions

Depends on BR of the port.