The whole and only point of this idea is to ensure that when a party selects to auto-provision for a contract, it is provisioned, so that the accepting party has a guarantee that when they take this contract they can immediately start fulfilling it.
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Okay. But I still don’t see why there needs to be a distinction between “block” and “soft block”. If I’m understanding the explanations right, the only difference is that in one case the contract has been accepted (BLCK) but in the other case it hasn’t (SBLK) so in the latter case if you cancel the advert yourself then the inventory is immediately unblocked.
This seems like a trivial distinction to me. Is there a scenario where you want to be able to auto-provision, but you don’t want the inventory reserved immediately? If not, then I think that instead of having additional blocked types, the devs could just change auto-provisioning so that the relevant inventory goes into the BLCK state immediately when you create the contract, instead of only becoming BLCK’d when someone accepts it.
On the hauler side, just show an indication of whether the inventory is present at the collection location - it still doesn’t need a new special “soft block” status:
- Create a contract with auto-provision
- Relevant inventory items become BLCKed
- Required goods not available yet? They become BLCKed as soon as they enter the inventory by whatever means.
- Cancel the advert → goods are unBLCKed
- “Why can’t I unblock these goods?” → “Someone accepted your contract and is on the way to pick them up. Request termination instead.”
- LM advert shows: “Warning: Shipment is not currently present at the pickup location” for any advert where the goods are not already BLCKed.
As I said, I don’t use contracts much, so maybe I’ve missed some glaring flaw. Are there any issues with this alternative proposal?
SBLK - the goods are ready to be provisioned, but nobody accepted the ad yet, you can cancel anytime and the stuff returns to your inventory immediately
BLCK - your ad was accepted and a contract with the second party is closed; the goods have been provisioned, they’re waiting for pickup and you cannot cancel easily
Profit? One look at your inventory and you can get a rough visual assessment of the situation. With your proposal I have to manually click every BLCK to see which ones are for closed contracts and which ones merely waiting for potential partners.
This topic was started because a hauler was frustrated that he can’t tell whether goods are actually available to be picked up or not. The solution to this doesn’t actually require any change to how BLCK works - just indicate on the contract screen whether sufficient materials are present in the inventory to fulfil the contract right now, or not.
The SBLK suggestion is because it may also be convenient for the contract-maker to see which of their goods is earmarked for a contract, and which is currently available for base consumption or for their own ships, etc.
Does the contract maker really need to know in detail which parts of their inventory are in accepted contracts, vs which parts are in unaccepted contracts? Genuine question, because I don’t use contracts much myself, so I don’t know how players who use lots of contracts usually play. But it seems that you could find out this information by looking at your LM adverts - some of them will be accepted and some not. The ones that are not you can cancel to unBLCK the goods.
Alternatively, if this would actually be counter-productive for some reason, then don’t change the way BLCK works - just have the “inventory is present” message for contracts.
The ad owner’s inventory can change at any time. SBLK is guaranteed to be constant (for the duration of the ad).
Why does that make any difference? If I’m considering accepting a contract, then I only care about whether the auto-provisioned goods are in the inventory right now. So a real time indication of “present” or “not present” seems sufficient.
I’m assuming that if the materials are present, and auto-provision is on, then as soon as I accept the contract, the materials become BLCKed. If that’s not what happens, then I guess I don’t know what the current BLCK status means, and I apologise for wasting everyone’s time trying to explain it to me.
- I have three ads up to ship 250 RAT.
- How many can you accept and ship now?
In chat, there was the suggestion to add an indicator showing if the person has selected auto provision. That isn’t sufficient for the hauler to be able to determine if, when they accept the ad that they can ship the goods immediately.
- I have 700 RAT in my inventory.
- I had 750 RAT in my inventory when I made the ads, but because of production cycles and consumption cycles, some got eaten. I have 749 now. I will have 753 in 45 minutes.
- Without doing inventory lookups and math and checks against all of my outstanding LM ads, how many of those ads can be immediately provisioned?
This is a suggestion for a mechanism to extend the functionality of auto provision to also soft block the goods for the duration of the ad so that a person looking to accept a LM ad can see which ads are available for immediate provisioning. This would mean that the game only needs to look up “is there a SBLK goods item associated with this ad?” which is set once when the goods are soft blocked and does not need to do any introspection of an inventory (or lookup of are there 2 or 3 LM ads that have already been processed).
As a hauler, you don’t know if something is available for immediate pickup until you accept the ad. That is important for reducing the risk of doing contract hauling and accepting LM ads. You’re working with multiple contracts and deadlines and someone not having the gods to auto provision when the ad is accepted can significantly impact timetables and miss deadlines.
A BLCK’ed good is associated with a closed contract. This proposal is to add SBLK to be associated with an advertisement (there is no contract yet) that changes into a BLCK once the advertisement is accepted. BLCK vs SBLK is an implementation suggestion for how to do it because often trying to make one thing be associated with two different activities (having it be associated with an ad or a contract) can lead to unnecessary complexity. If you click on a SHPT or a BLCK currently, it opens up the contract. Having BLCK associated with both an ad and potentially a contract would make the question of “what loads when you click on it” a harder one to code and reason about.
This proposal is to try to make the two questions asked something that a hauler can answer by looking at the local market ads.
Under my suggestion, all three contracts would show “Required materials available”, since 749 is greater than 250. If two of the contracts were already accepted then the third one would switch between “Materials available” and “Materials not available” as the remaining available inventory fluctuated between 250, 249, and 253 in 45 minutes.
If people are able to select and accept multiple contracts in a single click, then this wouldn’t work, but if you have to click to accept contracts sequentially, then I still think this mechanism is sufficient.
Except perhaps for edge cases where you click on accept at the exact same time as workers eat some of the RAT. For guarding against that, yes, I think you have to change the way that provisioning works. But I’m assuming that this whole separate “soft block” mechanism isn’t being suggested just for that rare scenario.
In terms of what is easiest for the devs to develop, that’s for them to answer, but my expectation that it would be:
- Add an indicator to show whether required inventory is already present (easiest)
- Extend existing BLCK status to start as soon as inventory is available, rather than after the contract is accepted (medium work)
- Add an additional SBLK status (most work)
I think you are mistaken in the way you are explaining that indicator. If I was ordering to ship 3x100C, then having 100C w’d make all 3 ads show “materials available”, but then someone comes for them or starts accepting contracts - the other 2 w’d turn to “materials not available”. The blocking proposed in thread doesnt have this problem.
Either you put goods for shipment aside and 100% guarantee them for the hauler or you don’t, everything in between is a gamble, a half-measure
Yes, you would have pay attention when accepting contracts.
But given that currently the indicator doesn’t exist at all, wouldn’t it be an improvement?
@Ficks_Dinkum Dude, are you trying to take up the trolling baton after @lukeskye dropped it?
Yes, you would have pay attention when accepting contracts.
Which could be translated to “hehe it would be also faulty, not as obviously faulty as the current lack-of-a-solution, just in a surreptitious kind of way so that you can still get screwed a little bit - tough luck lol!” While the proposal you’re commenting on offers a 100% rock solid guaranteed certain foolproof solution that doesn’t fail.
You people should seriously like, maybe play the game for a while before commenting on suggestions and actually understand the issues rather than demonstrate your ignorance so verbosely.
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As noted, the indicator to show if there is sufficient inventory for this ad’s fulfillment isn’t useful information for a hauler by itself.
The easy or hard is something that I’ll leave up to the devs for how to do it. I’m just describing a possible implementation. BLCK or SBLK - that doesn’t mater - it is a tool for describing the functionality of what would be done so that that functionality can be discussed without encumbering it with the existing functionality of BLCK.
My suggestion is based on what would be useful for a hauler when planning a route and the necessary prerequisites for that useful functionality to happen by making sure that the goods are not just ‘auto provisioned’ but also pre-allocated for that advertisement that is not yet a contract.
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MoonSugarTravels,
Although you have accused me of trolling, I am guessing that you simply do not understand my argument and do not know any other way to express this ignorance, since I have provided detailed explanations and evidence, and shown the difference between internal systems and external guarantors. So I will provide another piece of evidence: that of payment.
When any contract is closed, be it advertisement, loan, or purchase, there are no holds placed on the funds, and no sure guarantee of payment for the receiving party. Instead, it is the responsibility of the paying party to ensure the funds are present in their account at the agreed-upon time. This is not a ‘minute detail’, it’s a core feature of the game: deciding which players to trust with your contracts, and how much to trust them.
- Lucas
Hi Shagie,
I just realized that one of the root issues here is the reputation system. If a player agrees to auto-provision in their contract, and then fails to do so, they should be the one to receive a strike against their reputation.
If this were implemented, then there would be no need to expose the actual contents of another player’s inventory, much less to require a soft-block of their goods. The reputation would be the indicator.
Lucas
I must admit I’m a little confused now.
The original problem, as stated, was this:
My interpretation of this is that - if there was an indicator which showed whether or not the inventory was present at the time of accepting the contract, then the issue would be solved. You would know at the moment you clicked on “accept” that the goods are available, and would either be immediately transferred to you, or would be BLCKed until your ship arrived at the pick-up point.
Maybe this only happens if the contract-poster selected “Auto-provision” - is there an indicator of that when you accept the contract? If not, then yes, the indicator needs to show “auto-provision enabled AND inventory present”.
This seems like it would solve the problem as stated, which is that you don’t know whether the inventory is present or not.
It’s not useful information? Your initial post was saying “I wish I had this useful information!”
No, I’m trying to work out why you all seem to think that an indicator of whether the inventory is present wouldn’t solve the problem of not knowing whether the inventory is present.
It seems clear to me how it would work. Let’s say there are three contracts to ship 100 units, but there are only 100 units available. All three contracts would show “inventory available”. You accept the first contract and get the goods. The other two adverts status now changes to “inventory not available”.
So… don’t accept them.
I don’t see why this is controversial. Do you also complain when the market shows 100 units for sale at a certain price, and while you’re looking at it, someone else buys those 100 units so the price changes? “hehe the market is faulty - tough luck lol!”
No, that’s just how the display of things for sale works.
This would just be how the display of available contracts work.
What’s the actual issue with the proposal?
You don’t see it because you’ve been always playing on FREE and have never ever completed a single contract, shipping or otherwise. To be perfectly honest, I don’t really see why are you participating in this conversation in the first place, since you don’t have any kind of experience with the mechanism being discussed. But okay let me explain the glaring flaw in your idea anyway.
My ship is at HRT and I’m considering whether to fly to Boucher now or next week. But I see a few yummy shipments on Boucher LM to haul water from Boucher to HRT with a 3 day deadline (to the blissfully unaware FREE players among us: those 3 days count twice: once for pickup, again for delivery). All of those shipments light up green because your system “works”. I would like to bring them all to HRT and make a profit. Ideally, I’d accept them all now, fly to Boucher, do the pickup, fly back. So I accept the first one - now I’m obligated to fly to Boucher and back with this package. BUT THE REMAINING SHIPMENTS ARE NOW RED. So instead of bringing 6 packages home, I can only bring one - and I HAVE TO do this because this is now a signed contract. Try to imagine why this sucks.
Analysis of this scenario if @shagie’s proposal was implemented is left as an exercise for the reader.
That’s a pretty good explanation, thanks. I agree that the plain indicator isn’t so helpful in that scenario. If people would be this clear about their objections in the first instance, I wouldn’t need to “troll” in order to get the answers.
There was also pushback on my “just extend BLCK so that it takes effect immediately instead of waiting for someone to accept the contract” suggestion. But the only concrete objection that I saw was “what happens when you click on the BLCK’d goods - does it take you to the LM advert screen or to the contract screen?”
I don’t see the issue with it taking you to either, depending on whether the contract is accepted. And in any case, this seems like a minor UI issue. Nonetheless, is there any “this really wouldn’t work in X situation” type of scenario, similar to what was outlined in the above post, which applies in this case?