Autotrading may be cool – Starfighter General

Hello,

I’m only about 1 patch away from putting my old research level networking code in to be full mmo. The patch I need to do before it is buying and selling at stations… But I thought, the user could save a lot more time if they in their inventory labeled the minimum they’d accept for selling items like iron or ship augmentations or gasses, etc. Then all they’d need to do is drive by a station and it auto sells with a pleasant tween animation +X $ or credits and a nice sound.

Players could do this with other players too:

Autotrade buy item X for y$ or z credits.

Autotrade minimum sell item A for B$ or C credits.

Pass by a player, ching ching ching, auto trades!

A skill could even be had called negotiation: where you can get edge case deals in your favor. One player with negotiation says I’ll sell iron for 4$ another player says I’ll buy iron for 5$, you pass by, and instead of buying for 4$, you buy for 4.25$ because of a good negotiation roll by seller.

What do you think about a system like this? It’d save time flying around, it could get complicated with trading, but it could do weird popular zone mechanics… Like some players would be just flying their ships around everyone hoping for auto trades. When you scan a ship, it could show their auto trade tables so you know values… Kinda like an auction house, but decentralized… Sounds cool, eh. I should do it eh?

I just thought of it and want to sleep on it, let me know what you think.

Starfighter General has a realistic true economy where vendors don’t buy stuff unless they sold product and have liquidity. https://www.starfightergeneral.com/2022/08/true-economy-stations-to-sell-buy-rob/ All the players on an entire server is not selling one poor businessman tons of luxury yachts to get billions. It’s a buy/trade economy from different systems that ends up balancing prices due to supply/demand and trade route impacts.

2) Networking that pushes the envelope where no networking has gone before. People laugh at this like it is impossible to innovate, but I marketed it to Midway in 2003, and they laughed too. Meanwhile it was working in house as a Tekken style(3d fighter) MMO with part of what today is known as rollback code. Midway’s manager was mocking what is today’s standard thinking rollback and such was impossible. Infinite action players same zone, limit only by video card and other hardware, networking ain’t a limiting thing anymore.

4) First MMO designed for late game. Everyone enjoys mmos until power capped and then get bored.
There is no power cap to begin with(just a log log logarithmic progression), but there are many many many other end game design elements to make it so want to keep playing end game! The grind is there, but better and more fun things are around too! You can build up a super big fleet and it get destroyed to pieces and you start over again. You have a power floor level that you can’t go below so you’re always building permanent power, but temporary spikes of power surges and galactic dominance for fleeting moments give a rush. The larger the fleet, the larger the fleeting moment.

8) PVP bounty system. Everyone can PVP at all times. Stakes are low if your ship explodes. If you get attacked without declaring aggressive mode or an opponent to duel, the aggressor gets a bounty on their head in accordance with the damage dealt to you. If this bounty gets high enough, and they get caught, they will be put in jail. When they log on for the next few hours or days, their character can play only in jail, and visitors come see him and such. Enjoy roleplaying being a prison inmate, or just use a different crew member on your account. Developing many crew members is a thing for when you fly capital ships.

10) Omnipotent roleplay: Earn your right into a a movie anime by great roleplay! Live game masters in about 6-12 months after the content updates roll through. We bias people with Founder’s RP tokens some and good manner role players who stay in character(we have chat logs and even game logs). This promotes good role play even when not live GMing. Who doesn’t want to bring their friends to a movie and surprise em with their own character in it? So stay in character for a better game! https://www.starfightergeneral.com/live-role-play/

Punky-Pulpy action, Levels, stats, skills, talents, items, fleet amassing, and great apocalyptic space plots, trippy Lewis Carrol level Mad Hatter humor along the way. It’s really weird to see how this synergizes from a game design standpoint. Players naturally want to level up and power up… That’s the twink min maxer in all of us. So when humor, plots, intrigue, or NPCs getting your blood boiling to action vs them happens, you get stoked, rewarded, happy and tossed off your axis. Then when resolved, you look back and get serious about powering up. The core of a RPG gamer is always powering up, it is something we can’t get rid of, but the core of a game designer is to get you out of a spreadsheet mindset temporarily… And then you appreciate both more. So tacky humor, along serious pulp action and serious leveling up game mechanics… It is like a symphony of fun.