Multi-player Resource Trading/Vessel Interactions

[Jcklemme]

6 minutes ago, darthgently said:

There has been enough engagement to let the KSP community know that they've been listened to very carefully from what I can tell.  At a certain point just have to trust a bit

I see this point made consistently by some people but I've never seen anything that makes it seem true to me.  The show-and-tells & dev videos seem like they were planned back in 2019 to me.  Trusting is difficult for me as the new studio that has taken over has no track record as far as I see in making a game like KSP.  If the original Squad team was working on it I would have no problem just believing that they will deliver, but with publisher demands, a majority different team, different team management, and no pedigree for the studio I can't see how you can have any expectations of what the final product will look like.  I'm not trying to hate on Intercept, I'm sure they care about what they're making, but I don't know them.

[darthgently]

3 minutes ago, Jcklemme said:

Trusting is difficult for me as the new studio that has taken over has no track record as far as I see in making a game like KSP.

New company, mostly the same developers.  Some of the team members are from the mod community itself.  Look on youtube not just for the official videos, but also interviews with Nate about KSP2

[Vl3d]

I know it's a little of topic but my heart is pure and we need the mutual encouragement.

The game's going to be amazing guys. Nate and everyone on the team understand the game and the science. There has been close collaboration with Squad. The devs have been looking over our suggestions. They will add the best solutions for our problems and more.

My issues are with the communications and marketing strategy. It's been black-ops for years. Even the newest feature video doesn't answer any of the important questions. Really, if the game is going to release in a few months, we should get at least something newer than 2019 info.

What kind of trade are we going to have? What kind of vessel interactions?

We don't know. We just see the pitch flow and the grass grow.

[Bej Kerman]

1 hour ago, Vl3d said:

You can't have a solar system / galactic market with just your 3/7/11 other friends that maybe only play once in a while.

KSP doesn't need a solar system market, and with multi-year communication times a galactic market would be unreasonable.

[darthgently]

2 minutes ago, Vl3d said:

My issues are with the communications and marketing strategy

You know how when you mother was making a holiday dinner and you kept wandering into the kitchen lifting pot lids and looking inside and asking when it would be ready and she would chase you out of the kitchen and tell you that you were just going to have to wait?  I think it is like that

[Jcklemme]

7 minutes ago, darthgently said:

You know how when you mother was making a holiday dinner and you kept wandering into the kitchen lifting pot lids and looking inside and asking when it would be ready and she would chase you out of the kitchen and tell you that you were just going to have to wait?  I think it is like that

This analogy doesn't work because I had my mom's cooking hundreds of times prior to this holiday dinner.  This is the first holiday dinner Intercept has ever made for me.

[darthgently]

8 minutes ago, Jcklemme said:

This analogy doesn't work because I had my mom's cooking hundreds of times prior to this holiday dinner.  This is the first holiday dinner Intercept has ever made for me.

I'm hungry!  When is it going to be ready!  It better be good!  This is taking forever!  Those potatoes better be made just the way I like them!  I can't wait!  I'm starving to death here!  Why can't the cook just come out every 5 minutes and tell us how it is going in there?  Why can't we get a detailed description of every dish ahead of time?  How do we know there is even any food in there?

Love you guys, but yer killin' me, lol

[Jcklemme]

6 minutes ago, darthgently said:

Love you guys, but yer killin' me, lol

I get your point lol.  I think this is going to be the state of KSP2 discussion though as long as they maintain radio silence.

[Pthigrivi]

To extend the analogy we’re in a simmer right now waiting to lift the lid. Maybe it will need some salt, but from the effort I think we’ve seen between the lines we’re unlikely to get something wildly underdone or inedible. 
 

Back OT, some of this comes down to core gameplay. Our time is best spent building and flying. If we’re building a unique mission to harvest a rare resource and establish deliveries to a friends base in exchange for something they have, great! Im not playing KSP to sift through and exploit interplanetary commodities markets though. 

[t_v]

39 minutes ago, Pthigrivi said:

Back OT, some of this comes down to core gameplay. Our time is best spent building and flying. If we’re building a unique mission to harvest a rare resource and establish deliveries to a friends base in exchange for something they have, great! Im not playing KSP to sift through and exploit interplanetary commodities markets though. 

reasons to avoid markets like that are that a) they are very unstable and incentivize playing for many hours checking and riding the markets (an experience I never want to repeat) and b) these markets are more suited for economy simulators, and we already have a lot of big space economy simulators. 

[Jcklemme]

1 hour ago, Pthigrivi said:

Back OT, some of this comes down to core gameplay. Our time is best spent building and flying. If we’re building a unique mission to harvest a rare resource and establish deliveries to a friends base in exchange for something they have, great! Im not playing KSP to sift through and exploit interplanetary commodities markets though. 

 

55 minutes ago, t_v said:

reasons to avoid markets like that are that a) they are very unstable and incentivize playing for many hours checking and riding the markets (an experience I never want to repeat) and b) these markets are more suited for economy simulators, and we already have a lot of big space economy simulators. 

I agree.  Ideally, for me, it would boil down to you have a resource I want, I have currency or a research you want.  I give you cash and then dock with wherever you're holding said resource, transfer it to my ship, and bring it back to home base/wherever I want it.

Maybe on Kerbin itself the transfer could be instantaneous, but I like the idea of having to go pick it up, transport it, and deliver it to my base.  

I guess this begs the question, will we continue to have infinite access to fuels and materials whilst launching from/building on Kerbin or will we need to manufacture them like we would on a planetary base?

I really do like the idea of having to deal with the logistics of resource transportation.  It would be fun to deliver fuel to another player's base and charge for the delivery as well, charging more if I have to deliver into an atmosphere maybe.  I have no idea how robust the "economy" of KSP2 will be, but assuming it at least allows you to transfer funds, everything I would like to do is achievable.

Edited April 16, 2022 by Jcklemme

[darthgently]

On 4/15/2022 at 8:49 PM, Jcklemme said:

I really do like the idea of having to deal with the logistics of resource transportation.  It would be fun to deliver fuel to another player's base and charge for the delivery as well, charging more if I have to deliver into an atmosphere maybe.  I have no idea how robust the "economy" of KSP2 will be, but assuming it at least allows you to transfer funds, everything I would like to do is achievable.

Not to open up a can of worms, but it will be interesting to see if supply routes can be set up between players in multiplayer

[Jcklemme]

3 hours ago, darthgently said:

Not to open up a can of worms, but it will be interesting to see if supply routes can be set up between players in multiplayer

It would be pretty easy as long as they just made automatic mission targets player agnostic.

[SciMan]

I mean, I sure HOPE the communications network thing is something we can all benefit from without having to pay for it.

But I have a different, and potentially larger idea for what "trade" could mean in multiplayer.

You know how you have ships, and they have ships, and they have ships that don't look like your ships? What if that didn't have to be the case?

What if you could BUY the production rights from them, for their designs, for a one-time payment, and then you'd be able to build and fly them as much as you want or need to?
(One time payment is intended to keep things EXTREMELY SIMPLE, because "royalties" becomes too much like the dang music/movie industry, but my want to avoid that whole cesspit belongs in a whole different rant in the Off Topic section of the forum).

So not only could you trade the RESOURCES you extract, you could trade your DESIGNS as well!

That would make it so that someone that's good at designing craft but perhaps not great at flying them, could indeed still play KSP 2 and get enjoyment out of the experience instead of becoming incredibly frustrated with the whole thing and give up on it.

I mean with KSP 1 we already have a way to share craft on the Steam Workshop. This could be just an extension of that kind of system, implemented into KSP 2.

Running short on resources, but know how to engineer things well? Design a craft (or series of craft) that get players to the point where they have an orbital VAB around Kerbin being supplied from the surface maybe? Probably lots of people wanting to skip to that point, right?
It's like blueprints in Factorio, plenty of people are good at one area but not great at another.

Under this system, the first player to come up with a "standard-issue" well-optimized design for a particular task would be handsomely rewarded in-game.
And if you're a content creator already, and your designs become famous on YouTube or whatever, then you could put them up for distribution and be rewarded with the (in-game) resources to make even more fantastic creations!