As the release date of the maintenance release draws closer, Michi talks about fixing bugs, improving FX trading and more.
You can find the full issue of the development log here.
To find the right rate limit, it would be interesting to hear from you how you use the LMs and what the limit should be, so your workflows will not be affected by the limit.
Tie the overall limit\ratelimit to the rating of a company. Higher rating = higher limits
However, a caveat is that it would also require more granular rating system to truly be effective as it’s currently too easy to get an A.
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I think rating should also consider amount of partners, 100 contracts with 3 partners is arguably not as good as 100 contracts with 15 partners
I think if players start at a lower level than this system fixes both problems. For example:
- let’s say a player starts at P. We’ll take that to be a lower middle rating, say equivalent to a D.
- I’ll make up some numbers. Each of these is how many contracts you can have in a 7d period. F: 2. E: 5 D: 7 C: 10 B: 20 A: unlimited.
- Thus an early player can only have 7 contracts at a time. This will limit how quickly they can get an A rating.
- I’d also propose linking the advance in rating to number of contracts fulfilled per unit time. I think a reasonable number would be 2 weeks of at capacity trading. Thus a player with a D rating needs to complete 14 contracts to advance to C, 20 more to advance to B, and 40 more to advance to A. That restricts an A rating to companies who are established (minimum 6 weeks to get there) and are regularly trading with the community.
Edit: For losing rating it would take half as many as the previous level. For example, a player with an A rating would need to breach 10 contracts to drop to B, from B breach 5, and so on.
Obviously all numbers are for sake of example, don’t take them literally
Shipping contracts are often posted in increments of 500t/m so that they can be picked up by starter ships. That means that to fill an HCB with just Shipping conts it can take 10 LM ads.
Also, people sometimes post lots of small shipping ads for base construction, repair, or resupply. So a rate limit would be better than a cont limit for people who do a lot of long loan conts, not as good for people who do a lot of shipping.
Maybe the ability to bundle more than one item into a shipping ad would solve that and see more use of LM shipping ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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How do we feel about linking contract limit or frequency to HQ upgrade? This would be somewhat similar to the way HQ upgrades increase production queue limit, for example. A player with a few upgrades under his belt should be expected to be much less likely to engage in antisocial behavior than one less invested in the game.
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There appear to be several approaches for contract limits that will work. They all boil down to - “The more engaged/invested someone is in the game the less likely they are to abuse things and cause problems.”
My preferred method would be to tie it to their rating. But that assumes that the rating system is improved. My suggestion a while back (and I think others have said something similar) Is for the initial rating to go from P to C then gradually up/down based on their performance fulfilling contracts. Only the most reliable players get an A rating and only the least reliable get an E. Everyone else is B, C or D. The rating distribution should look something like a bell curve with B being the top of the curve.
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If the contract limiting system would be linked to in-game equity/assets, then it should and must include all equity/assets as a whole. A counterexample for your HQ proposal is me: 4 bases (no longer in production), HQ level 12, but runs 5 WCBs and 4 LCBs. Value of my bases and accumulated HQ upgrades only contributes about 6% of total assets, it’s a terrible representation of my true scale.
I agree, and think that any limiting system should not be based on equity at all. It’s too easy to inflate (loans etc) and is really subjective, not only based on play style but also on markets
In terms of offering things on the LM, I will sometimes create a batch of 15 contracts, breaking up a large volume of things I want to sell into marketable parcels.
Sometimes, someone actually wants to make a bulk purchase and they’ll buy up to 5 of those parcels at once.
“Cash on delivery” contracts would be nice. Which I guess would be roughly equivalent to storefronts. But the friction involved with LMs is too high, even if you do trust everyone involved.
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