Quality of Life

You guys put up thread over a year ago, asking for suggestions for Quality of Life features, and even had a poll! But, it seems almost none of these suggestions have been implemented into the game, and most of us have no idea why they haven’t been. QoL features are desperately needed in this game, because some of the mechanics are just laborious and unnecessary. Now, some of the things asked for have been implemented! We all thank you for those, such as Repetitive Orders, More Q Slots, Blacklist, etc… But there are still many features that would really make the game so much easier, and more enjoyable, to play. I’m not going to list things that I know you are already working on, like Planetary Governors, which has been a long time coming, and is so much needed!

  • Unload All Button. This has been asked for by many people, many times. I’m not sure why this would be so hard to implement. It would save every player so much time!

  • Unload Upon Arrival. This is so needed for those of us that actually have to work for a living. I’m tired of my production lines stopping for half a day, because my ship arrived 15 mins after I have already left for work, and all of my supplies are sitting in my ship, and my workers are too stupid to go and get them off the my ship. And NO, some of us do NOT have access to the game while we are working!

  • Move X amount. Why is there no Number for moving items? This should be simple to implement as well. If I want to move 38 of X to/from my ship, I will need to go through this process 11 times, to get to that number (3x10, and then 8 1’s), which is absurdity personified. When you want to move something, you should have a number box pop up, in which you can just enter 38, and it’s done. This will save an insane amount of time, and will also ease server usage by an untold magnitude of unnecessary activity.

  • Cargo Shipment. We should be able to create 1 box for multiple items to be shipped, instead of 12 different shipments.

  • Base Consumables. There should be a base consumable sheet, so we can see how many day’s supply of each item we have. We shouldn’t need to flip between our Workforce screen, and our Storage, and need to break out our calculators, to figure out how long our supplies will last. There should be a simple sheet for it. It can even be added to the Workforce sheet.

  • Corporations. There is so much that can be done, to make a Corporation actually FEEL like a corporation, instead of just throwing a Corp tag on our names, and calling it done. Corporate positions. Corporate taxes, Corporate trading. Corporate warehouses. Corporate leaders having the ability to give funds to individuals, for loans, payments, etc… There is SO MUCH that can be done here!

  • Personal Trades. We’ve all been asking for this feature since I’ve started playing.

  • Refuel Button for Ships. One button refueling.

  • Auto Supply LM Orders! Once the other person pays, the order is automatically filled from your storage or warehouse. And have it labeled as such! This would also save so much time and effort!

  • Cancel Contract. Sometimes you make a mistake. If neither party has fulfilled their side of a contract, you should be able to cancel it, and then delete it, just to get it off your list.

  • Building Limit for Queue. Limit the number of buildings in a production Q to 10, or maybe 15. Or better yet, let the player have the ability to put in order their own buildings. If someone has 5 FP’s, there is enough open Q slots to set production for each of them. But when they have 30 FP’s, you only have 5 Q slots to try to organize all of them. If you don’t have PRO, this is a friggin nightmare! (You need 5 or 6 HQ upgrades to gain an additional 2 slots, I believe it is) If you could have 3 groups of 10, then it can actually be manageable. And you won’t need to scroll forever to figure out what’s what.

  • Automation for ships. I know that you want to limit this, so people can’t Bot the game, but it would make life a lot easier if we could.

  • Out Of Stock Notifications! I get hundreds of notifications about stuff I produce, all day long, but what is REALLY needed is an Out Of Stock Notification! When you have a lot of planets, all producing a lot of different things, sometimes you don’t notice that you ran out of something, and your production line stops. Having this pop up in your notifications is 1000 times more useful than a notification that I produced another 10 RAT’s, for the 50th time today. Make your notifications selectable, like the LM’s are.

  • Banner Ads. Yeah, no one likes these, but they do help pay for the game. PRO users will have them turned off. Basic players will have them limited. Free players will have to suffer through them. But, Free players will also be able to accept shipping contracts, and trade on the LM’s (In a limited way). This way free players can actually play the game, and the game will get a little extra funding through the banner ads. Not being able to use the LM’s is crippling for free players, and it makes joining a Corp almost useless. Corps are run on the LM’s, and having zero access to them means that your involvement in the Corp is just a game tag in front of your name, and nothing else.

  • Currencies. I still don’t see why there are different currencies in the game. If they were different, and gained and lost value, like real world currencies, I can see why you would have them. But they do not. The MM’s for each currency is exactly the same on the different exchanges. So this means that each currency is worth exactly the same as any other. So it’s meaningless to have different currencies. The value of them doesn’t change, so all it does it force the player base to jump through a couple hoops to trade in different regions. It’s a weak mechanism to make the game a little more difficult, for no other reason than to make the game more difficult. Is this really needed? No. No it’s not.

Not all of these suggestions are mine, and I’m sure I’ve missed a few good ones, but this is a pretty good list of some of the major changes that really need to be implemented. Most shouldn’t even be too hard to do, and would go a long long way in helping us players out. Thanks for taking the time to read through all of this, and comments are welcome

2 Likes

I agree with most of these. They have been mentioned time and time again. I just want to touch on a few points:

  • Building limit for queuing is intentional - there has to be some motivation for players to pay for PRO. I don’t mind the system as it exists now - hence why reoccuring orders were so important (and I can’t believe they are a somewhat recent implementation)
  • Ship automation kind of defeats the purpose of the game. The point is the manage logistics\economy.
  • Out of stock notifications would be great - but what is badly needed is the ability to disable production notifications entirely. I don’t care my base made 56 H2O for the 17th time today. My NOTS is flooded with these, cluttering out the ones which actually do matter (contract status, ship arrived, etc). Why, years later, do the filters for email notifications work but not apply to the ones in-game?
  • Currencies do add value because it segments each different region, promotes specialization and also encourages inter-region trade. People are incentivized to import needed goods from Moria to Benten so they can get CIS. If there were one universal currency, the arbitrage differences between different CX’s would be even more pronounced and there would be worse shortages. And there are a few other reasons why they help the economy as well but I can’t remember\think of them if I’m honest.
  • While I have my soap box, the ability to see the fulfillment status of a shipping contract before you accept it is also critical. Multiple times I’ve accepted contracts where the person hasn’t provisioned the goods, and my ship must leave at that specific time and that person has gone to bed (or doesn’t answer DM’s because the notification light for DM’s is broken). And I have to abandon their shipping contract. It’s a terrible experience for both people.

I hate to trash on good work that was done - but the MAP rebuild was a huge waste of time. The features it adds are already implemented by 3rd party tools built by the community. Yet core gameplay features that only the Dev’s can do remain unfixed for well, years at this point for many of them.

I also agree with most of the points raised so far, especially the filtering of NOTS, but here are some where I do not:

Actually you could do this in 6 clicks - move 4x10 to the destination, and then move 2x1 back to the origin.

If you have more than 100 units you can do it in 5 clicks - move 100 to the destination, move HLF back to the origin, then 1x10 and 2x1.

In practice I find that most transfers of sizes I frequently use in game can be attained in around 4 moves, and I see it as a kind of fun mini-game to transfer goods with the fewest number of clicks.

I disagree. I’ve been playing the game on the free tier and I don’t feel particularly disadvantaged by not being able to use the LM.

So pay for PRO then. Or organise your bases better, so that you don’t have 30 FP’s in one base. The whole point of the game is working out how to manage these kinds of logistics.