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Fleet Economics: A New Approach
dkeith2011
Member Posts: 595 Arc User
To any Devs who happen to be reading this and find it interesting and/or useful, I offer it freely for use in any way.
Here is my idea for a new approach to the Starbase economy.
The goal is to create a balanced system that is equally fair to all fleet sizes and avoids the massive grinds for specific items that the current system is overloaded with.
1: Throw the current contribution system and all of its requirements out the airlock and forget about it. Project durations will be maintained however.
2: Place a Fleet Resource Coordinator (FRC) on the base.
3: Donate any and all items, DOffs, BOffs and select currencies to the FRC to be converted into Fleet Resources (FR). The amount of FR generated will depend on the quality/rarity of the donated item(s)/currency and the total available is stored numerically in the Fleet Bank in the same manner as ECs.
4: Players receive Fleet Credits (FC) for donations to the FRC. The amount of FC generated will depend on the quality/rarity of the donated item(s)/currency.
5: Reset all projects to use FR rather than the specific items currently required.
6: Any fleet member normally able to contribute to fleet projects can allocate FR to a scheduled project.
This system will remove bottlenecks created by specific item requirements.
The broader base of items/currencies available for donation would allow smaller fleets to achieve development goals more quickly and easily.
The retained time-gates on projects will maintain advancement balance regardless of fleet size. Small fleets will still take longer to complete projects simple because they have fewer donations overall in comparison to larger fleets.
Thoughts anyone?
Here is my idea for a new approach to the Starbase economy.
The goal is to create a balanced system that is equally fair to all fleet sizes and avoids the massive grinds for specific items that the current system is overloaded with.
1: Throw the current contribution system and all of its requirements out the airlock and forget about it. Project durations will be maintained however.
2: Place a Fleet Resource Coordinator (FRC) on the base.
3: Donate any and all items, DOffs, BOffs and select currencies to the FRC to be converted into Fleet Resources (FR). The amount of FR generated will depend on the quality/rarity of the donated item(s)/currency and the total available is stored numerically in the Fleet Bank in the same manner as ECs.
4: Players receive Fleet Credits (FC) for donations to the FRC. The amount of FC generated will depend on the quality/rarity of the donated item(s)/currency.
5: Reset all projects to use FR rather than the specific items currently required.
6: Any fleet member normally able to contribute to fleet projects can allocate FR to a scheduled project.
This system will remove bottlenecks created by specific item requirements.
The broader base of items/currencies available for donation would allow smaller fleets to achieve development goals more quickly and easily.
The retained time-gates on projects will maintain advancement balance regardless of fleet size. Small fleets will still take longer to complete projects simple because they have fewer donations overall in comparison to larger fleets.
Thoughts anyone?
Post edited by dkeith2011 on
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Comments
Frankly, the current set-up is extremely clunky and not overly user-friendly. Opening up the donation possibilities would really benefit everyone in my opinion.
Vice Admiral T'Phal
Commander, USS Heinlein
I'm sitting on a bunch of common DOffs waiting for an appropriate project to open up. It would be nice to just contribute them to the system and be done with it.
It would also make it much easier to increase the item types acceptable into the system.
STO Forum member since before February 2010.
STO Academy's excellent skill planner here: Link
I actually avoid success entirely. It doesn't get me what I want, and the consequences for failure are slim. -- markhawman
* signed *
+1
The universe has a wonderful sense of humor. The trick is learning how to take a joke.
Getting the balance right would be a delicate business, but I think the end result would be well worth the effort.
The only problem that I see is that it's againsj the developers' stated policy of making smaller fleets have to grind harder to earn the upper fleet ranks.
If this system or something similar was adopted I believe players would be more attracted to the fleet system because it would be more open and accessible.
In a reasonable world, getting more paying customers in your game should trump enforcing a punitive policy just to avoid admitting that you were wrong.
Sadly though we live in a Perfect World.
But I do like the idea, and that is why we can't have it. It makes too much sense. Yes some balancing would have to go into it but it shouldn't be that hard. Their current FC values for various items can be adapted and changed with little effort.
I think it is an elegant solution that would solve a ton of problems.
STO Forum member since before February 2010.
STO Academy's excellent skill planner here: Link
I actually avoid success entirely. It doesn't get me what I want, and the consequences for failure are slim. -- markhawman
In my opinion, Fleet Marks and Dilithium should be the first and second most valuable items to donate.
Note that I did not say valuable; certain items have essentially no significantly useful purpose, such as data samples; others have very limited purpose, such as doffs, especially common ones; and others are extremely restricted and quite valuable, such as refined dilithium.
The way the projects are set up now, the devs can carefully balance how they want players to spend resources on those projects. This takes away all of that ability to tune and replaces it with a much more general ability to tune the relative contribution value of each type. That's a very much more blunt method of tuning, though.
The idea that the devs are 'bad' for 'herding' people into specific content to get specific rewards is silly. Taken to its logical conclusion, you should get everything for free and be able to play whatever content you like, but that's not really a game so much as it is a fantasy win button that people will pick up for a day or two, get their jollies off on, and then put down again. A game needs some kind of contribution of effort, some challenge, some difficult to obtain reward commensurate with that challenge and risk. I honestly don't think that the challenge is the issue in that respect: I think that people ultimately are more rightly concerned that the reward is where things fall down flat.
Very true.
In game metrics show the players are doing what the Devs want them to do, but not the reason they are doing those things.
They are doing those things because it is the only option. If you want X you have to do Y.
That could work and would still be an improvement over the current system.