Why can we STILL not store cargo?

[Superasil]

Are the devs just to embarrassed to release this feature this late?

Frankly it IS embarrassing that I have to completely sell all my cargo to be able to swap to a ship that doesn't have a cargo hold. You can't just leave cargo in (non-active) ships, you can't store cargo in stations. You HAVE to sell your cargo off or destroy it before swapping to a ship that doesn't have a cargo hold because you can't modify ships that aren't active (to add a cargo hold to it).

How this insane oversight (or "design decision") even made it into release is wild.

[Sam Willet]

Opprinnelig skrevet av spam:

Opprinnelig skrevet av Sam Willet:

Would you pay a weekly subscription fee to be allowed to store cargo at stations?

Bit confused here. My question was directed to @Grumpy Brit's assertion that storing goods would hurt the BGS.

As to the rest, I suspect there are technical reasons having to do with the way the game is coded that prevent the storage of goods. You could also argue that it is a game mechanic to encourage players to purchase a carrier. However, i would be shocked to find that storage costs are the driver. As it stands Carriers generate no direct revenue for Fdev, and it's pretty easy to build a credit pile deep enough to keep the carrier funded through decade long absences.

But you still have to dedicate enough time to the game to earn a carrier, and I'm willing to bet that the people who spend more time in the game are also the most likely to spend on ARX for their accounts.

If ED is still going in 20 years time almost all current carriers will have disappeared (although my main has 35 years of upkeep). But they can get around that by increasing the amount of weekly upkeep.

But in 35 years time they will still be paying data storage for the (approximately) 5 million people who have bought the game so far, vs the 10k or so fleet carriers out there.

[Sam Willet]

Whenever you ask yourself 'why is it done like this?' try thinking like the company trying to make money from the game, not the player wishing for a change.

[jimbalayajones]

Opprinnelig skrevet av Sam Willet:

Whenever you ask yourself 'why is it done like this?' try thinking like the company trying to make money from the game, not the player wishing for a change.

I have never really been one to question how a game works...That is just simply the reality of it...Rather I have asked is there some way to achieve what I might want and what is the fastest route...If there is no way then I look for a work around...Fleet carriers are the goal and the work around for cargo storage...Buy one to store for yourself...Utilize a friends FC to borrow storage space...And if you want to complain that it is unfair, then I will just laugh at you...We all started in the same Sidewinder...We all started with next to nothing...

[spam]

Opprinnelig skrevet av Sam Willet:

Whenever you ask yourself 'why is it done like this?' try thinking like the company trying to make money from the game, not the player wishing for a change.

In this we agree. I just happen to think its labor costs (programming and debugging) vs. other revenue generating opportunities for that labor. These days long term data storage is ridiculously cheap and a player returning after ten years can wait a day or two for their account to be rebuilt.

As to Arx, I would be surprised to see a significant positive correlation between carrier ownership and purchase of Arx. In any case an absent player is not buying Arx, but that carrier is still taking up memory....

[Superasil]

Opprinnelig skrevet av Sam Willet:

Opprinnelig skrevet av spam:

But can't we effectively hold cargo, a largish but finite amount, indefinitely in our carriers already? Seems to me the status quo just makes things harder on new players. What am I missing here?

Frontier paying for server storage is what you're missing.

Fleet carriers have a weekly upkeep. If you don't pay it, the carrier disappears and so does all the cargo. No more server storage for players who never come back to the game.

But if 100,000 players store goods all over the bubble, and 90,000 of them leave the game never to return, that junk has to be stored on AWS servers and therefore - paid for indefinitely.

Would you pay a weekly subscription fee to be allowed to store cargo at stations?

I'll be honest with you, I think this is total crap bordering on lies.

The amount of storage and memory needed for this would be minuscule compared with basically any other function in the game right now. Would it be "more"? Yeah, of course, but not *nearly* as game breaking as you're making it out to be. The universe is already massive and there's already fleet carriers everywhere taking up this space but the game is still fine. It's basically again just more excuses for not having a very basic functionality in the game.

To your other points, yes of course this can be exploited. Anything and everything can be exploited, but that's no excuse to not have it in the game at all. A simple example of a solution would be to put a limit on the amount of goods held in an individual station at a time, or event a limit on *any* station at one time. I'm sure if the devs put their heads together they could come up with something more elegant though.

[Sam Willet]

Opprinnelig skrevet av spam:

As to Arx, I would be surprised to see a significant positive correlation between carrier ownership and purchase of Arx. In any case an absent player is not buying Arx, but that carrier is still taking up memory....

Fair enough, but there are many customisations for carriers, from the traffic controller voice to skins to engine and landing pad colours. Even the entire design (victory class, etc).

The price usually puts ship skins and paints to shame.

You only have to visit a few player carriers to see the amount they must have spent.

[Sam Willet]

Opprinnelig skrevet av Superasil:

Opprinnelig skrevet av Sam Willet:

Frontier paying for server storage is what you're missing.

Fleet carriers have a weekly upkeep. If you don't pay it, the carrier disappears and so does all the cargo. No more server storage for players who never come back to the game.

But if 100,000 players store goods all over the bubble, and 90,000 of them leave the game never to return, that junk has to be stored on AWS servers and therefore - paid for indefinitely.

Would you pay a weekly subscription fee to be allowed to store cargo at stations?

I'll be honest with you, I think this is total crap bordering on lies.

Were you there for the livestream where they finally announced that bookmarks would be expanded from 180 per commander to 200, and then they said 'and that's final'?

If storage cost wasn't an issue, why not give everyone 10,000 bookmarks? Why a meagre 20 extra after all those years?

Also, why can we only have 200 modules? Why not 5000?

Why only space for 40 ships on our carriers?

Did you know AWS charge 10 cents per 1000 requests for data on their most basic plan?

Let me see, an estimated 30,000 concurrent players (recent estimated peak across 3 PC stores, not to mention consoles) playing for a couple of hours a day, retrieving market data, mission data, bookmarks, star systems, etc. 5000 data requests each player per session doesn't seem too high, not if you examine the network logs and journal files for a session. 50 cents times 30k players is $15,000 per day which is an awful lot of ARX sales.

Let's say it's only 1/3 that, or 5k per day. It still runs to two million bucks per year, and if I could shave 200k off that and hire 3 more programmers by restricting player bookmarks from 250 to 200 you can bet I would do it.

[Rolder]

Opprinnelig skrevet av Sam Willet:

Opprinnelig skrevet av spam:

But can't we effectively hold cargo, a largish but finite amount, indefinitely in our carriers already? Seems to me the status quo just makes things harder on new players. What am I missing here?

Frontier paying for server storage is what you're missing.

Fleet carriers have a weekly upkeep. If you don't pay it, the carrier disappears and so does all the cargo. No more server storage for players who never come back to the game.

But if 100,000 players store goods all over the bubble, and 90,000 of them leave the game never to return, that junk has to be stored on AWS servers and therefore - paid for indefinitely.

Would you pay a weekly subscription fee to be allowed to store cargo at stations?

This reasoning makes zero when you look at all the other data they already store. Ships, materials, exploration data, codex entries, engineer stuff, factions standings, powerplay info, I could go on. ALL data that is stored forever. Some cargo would be a drop in the bucket,.

[Superasil]

Opprinnelig skrevet av Sam Willet:

Opprinnelig skrevet av Superasil:

I'll be honest with you, I think this is total crap bordering on lies.

Were you there for the livestream where they finally announced that bookmarks would be expanded from 180 per commander to 200, and then they said 'and that's final'?

If storage cost wasn't an issue, why not give everyone 10,000 bookmarks? Why a meagre 20 extra after all those years?

Also, why can we only have 200 modules? Why not 5000?

Why only space for 40 ships on our carriers?

Did you know AWS charge 10 cents per 1000 requests for data on their most basic plan?

Let me see, an estimated 30,000 concurrent players (recent estimated peak across 3 PC stores, not to mention consoles) playing for a couple of hours a day, retrieving market data, mission data, bookmarks, star systems, etc. 5000 data requests each player per session doesn't seem too high, not if you examine the network logs and journal files for a session. 50 cents times 30k players is $15,000 per day which is an awful lot of ARX sales.

Let's say it's only 1/3 that, or 5k per day. It still runs to two million bucks per year, and if I could shave 200k off that and hire 3 more programmers by restricting player bookmarks from 250 to 200 you can bet I would do it.

Frankly, that's all their problem to figure out, assuming any of that is accurate in any way of course. Find a way to make the data, calls, information more efficient, fewer calls, fewer requests, branch out where data is hosted from. There's plenty of different options and solutions, they just have to actually work toward them and commit.

At the end of the day a pittance of storage in stations is STILL only a fraction of all the other information surrounding commanders.

[Sam Willet]

Opprinnelig skrevet av Superasil:

At the end of the day a pittance of storage in stations is STILL only a fraction of all the other information surrounding commanders.

Assuming that's true, do you think they won't let us have cargo storage because they're just mean and hate the playerbase?

[Superasil]

Opprinnelig skrevet av Sam Willet:

Opprinnelig skrevet av Superasil:

At the end of the day a pittance of storage in stations is STILL only a fraction of all the other information surrounding commanders.

Assuming that's true, do you think they won't let us have cargo storage because they're just mean and hate the playerbase?

More so because of some lazyness and ♥♥♥♥♥♥ up priorities imo. There's plenty of quality of life features missing in this game, from storage here to how broken VR seems to be to how difficult it is to get an actual physical (human) crew member in your ship. I know they don't hate their playerbase because honestly the games the best it's ever been, there's just some really glaring issues that have persisted for a long time and this is one of them.

[0Samuel]

It's one of those bold choices people come up with when trying to figure out how to make a good game; the ones where they say "games are a series of challenges for players to overcome, so if we take one of the things we assume we have to do and then don't do it, what sort of interesting and unique challenges will that produce?"

The natural assumption when you make this sort of game is that yes of course you have to be able to store stuff in stations; back when they were first making the game, they decided that making it so that you couldn't store cargo would produce interesting challenges, and also build up this feeling of what a CMDR is, the itinerant spacefarer, at home in every star system but never with one in particular.

And I would stand by the argument that it makes Elite Dangerous more unique and interesting game than the hundred other space sims where being able to store cargo in stations is just a given.

The thing is, though, that they decided to let you store ships. Ok, sure. Honestly I'm really not sure the game could work, at least not well, without that. And once you are storing outfitted ships, storing modules just makes sense- because otherwise people would be buying sidewinders just to stick things on them. But once they'd done that the not storing cargo decision looked a little shakier, and was always going to be harder to justify.

And then they came along and caved and added fleet carriers, betraying that original vision- but only with the fleet carriers. So now the whole thing just looks hypocritical and silly, and they can't really go back and make the original argument any more because of all the hundreds of hoarders in their fancy arx-buckets that they don't want to piss off.

I don't really think the not storing cargo thing would be what made or broke the game if they'd gone the other way; but I do think this is a little bit like fast travel- not having it is annoying, but strangely enough including it means having less of a game. I think we only notice it when it bothers us, and not the way it helps to build up the atmosphere of what makes the game special the rest of the time. But, on the other hand, I'm really not certain this was the right game to make this particular bold choice for, and I think there's a good chance that they could have made things work- and work better- if having storage be a thing was the assumption from the very beginning.

If they were to add it outside of fleet carriers, with the game as it is now, I think they'd need to balance the capacity somehow. Maybe make it a shared cap with module storage. Something where it's a convenience for switching ships but can't be used effectively for market manipulation.

[Truckin' Tom]

Opprinnelig skrevet av The Dweller:

Some almost astonishing mental gymnastics in this thread.

Yes, particularly by the OP who asked a question and has argued with everyone who has tried to answer it.

Here's the simple answer: Players cannot store personal cargo at public stations because it's not part of the game. Period. If you want to know why, when or if that'll ever become a feature, there are several ways to ask FDev directly. Steam Discussions is not one of them. Period.

[jimbalayajones]

Opprinnelig skrevet av Truckin' Tom:

Opprinnelig skrevet av The Dweller:

Some almost astonishing mental gymnastics in this thread.

Yes, particularly by the OP who asked a question and has argued with everyone who has tried to answer it.

Here's the simple answer: Players cannot store personal cargo at public stations because it's not part of the game. Period. If you want to know why, when or if that'll ever become a feature, there are several ways to ask FDev directly. Steam Discussions is not one of them. Period.

That is indeed the just of it Truckin' Tom...

[Jeebs]

I'm gonna be the villain here and say that I think they should remove storing goods in your carrier as well. While I don't care about them anymore, I hated them for a LONG time. After they came out, cargo-based CGs became unbalanced. You can fly a T-9 and work diligently to earn a top spot, only to see the carriers roll in on the last few days and beat out those who were working hard all week.

Kinda breaks the whole reason they didn't want cargo storage in stations to begin with, in my opinion. Mind you, I never liked the idea of FCs to begin with and think the game is objectively worse with them than it was before they were introduced.