Marketplace: Ship Sales

[MacThule]

Add a tab to the new marketplace/trade network feature allowing expedient sales of ships (all ship entites; including turrets).

Owned ships currently docked to the entity the shop is on could appear in a list, similar to selecting new fleet members. Once selected, the shop owner could set their asking price (5M, 45M, 115M, etc). If anyone with permission undocks or alters the ship before it is sold, the sales offer is deleted. Otherwise, anyone visiting the shop or using the trade network can puchasee the ship with credits using a simple button + confirmation dialogue, and the ship's ownership will be instantly changed to [P]rivate property of the buyer. Buyer can then undock the ship and fly off, or fly out to get it if purchased remotely.

It would also be fairly viable to allow players shopping ships to "preview" the ship. The ship could be selected on the list, the player clicks PREVIEW and is sent to the same virtual test dimension used for shipyards, with an unfactioned virtual copy of the ship at their disposal to explore, dissect and test.

Obviously wise shipbuilders wouldn't want to sell their state-of-the art models this way since they could be previewed or acquired by an enemy, but the functionality would not require difficult development work and simple transfer of entity ownership regardless of online status is long overdue in a game that is all about designing, sharing, and blowing up a vast variety of craft. There are probably many ways this could be implemented, but I think it could be done very simply and just the ability to put a bunch of turrets up for sale and allow players to buy them assembled and ready to go (at a hefty markup, of course!) would be extremely helpful. Especially if the buyer is able to get real knowledge of the ship or turret through virtual posession first to HELP prevent getting ripped off.

 

[splatthecat]

I have thought about this too but I was going to use a shipyard where purchasers could buy a design and it would be built for them. If logic could interact with the shipyard computer to automatically undock the ship and using a combination of pick-up and basic rails, move it out of the shipyard and move it to a collection point.

Having a remote method of paying for items rather than dropping money at someone's feet could also mean that a shipyard could build a ship and then send it to the clients sector using fleet commands? The trade system could allow for money to pass hands for non physical items like that. The guild could take their cut.

Some simple banking would be useful too! A faction account and a personal account and maybe a way of making simple, automated payments (wages) would add to the whole faction experience.

 

[PLIX]

i suggested adding a paid permission module where it would take credits and give it to the entity owner so you can access faction modules and shipyard with it

 

[MacThule]

I have thought about this too but I was going to use a shipyard where purchasers could buy a design and it would be built for them. If logic could interact with the shipyard computer to automatically undock the ship and using a combination of pick-up and basic rails, move it out of the shipyard and move it to a collection point.

Having a remote method of paying for items rather than dropping money at someone's feet could also mean that a shipyard could build a ship and then send it to the clients sector using fleet commands? The trade system could allow for money to pass hands for non physical items like that. The guild could take their cut.

Shipyards could be made to do it, but I feel like it would take more work on the programmer side to make that happen than to simply add a page to the shop that visitors already use and allow the seller to add docked entities to it using nearly the same code currently used to select ships from a list (forming fleets). On the other hand, I've been hoping they fix shipyards and would love to see yards improved to allow them to autoproduce ships based on logic interactions and have produced ships immediately join a "rally" fleet and adopt its orders. Perhaps some combination of shop-based ship sales and future shipyard logic could allow both the simplicity and intuitiveness of buying ships in shops (where we buy other things) combined with the supply-side convenience of shipyards producing sales items on demand? Good notion about sending ships to the remote purchaser, but I think that would have to be a purchaser option because it entails certain danger to their new property so the option to keep it docked would be desirable. Some fleets vanish without a trace, lost forever in deep space.

I'm open to any kind of implementation, really, but having sold several ships live on MP servers I know that right now it takes about 1/2 hour just to complete such a transaction regardless of how small the ship, and since a miner can earn 20-30M over the same period, it means it's not even worth selling ships under 10K mass, in terms of use of time. Sadly, that is the only class of ships that really need to be sold at all right now, because newer or struggling players need functioning ships. Once you get to larger ships, the clientele mostly could just upload a comparable BP and build it themselves in less time than it takes them to purchase it from you (currently).

i suggested adding a paid permission module where it would take credits and give it to the entity owner so you can access faction modules and shipyard with it

I've seen suggestions for a pay block before and at the time found the idea compelling. That would work, but I feel like it would be far less intuitive to implement a whole separate means of buying things than to simply bundle entity sales into the existing shop & trade network interface. The advent of the trade network makes me think that would be the best venue for any kind of entity sales. I also feel that adding blocks is more difficult for our coders/developers... and therefore less likely to happen, but who knows? Perhaps a sales block would offer some functionality that shop sales would not, I just don't see it right now.

I'm really wondering if there's a way existing features could be tweaked to allow not only ship, but stations, planets, and perhaps even star systems, to be sold...

 

[Sachys]

Perhaps some combination of shop-based ship sales and future shipyard logic

I see the future, and it is... the SHOPYARD!

* * *

Yeah, this is a feature I could get behind - though I do think it would be a better idea / see more reasoning for its connection with shipyards, as opposed to simply a shop block.

EDIT:

Though - shop blocks could sell filled BPs of stations and take a corner share of the manufacturing market that way.

 

[spocklin]

This could be an interesting feature.

 

[MacThule]

This could be an interesting feature.

Thank you. I see so many factions with "shipyards" or something similar in their name, and many intend to sell ships until they find out it takes 20-30 minutes to broker a single ship sale and you have to be there doing pretty much nothing else the whole time. For maybe 10-20% markup over materials cost.

Sure, we can download community content and upload and fill the BP, but it's easier once a faction is set up to produce certain ship classes to make extras and sell them to the other server members. It's just the actual transaction is messy, tedious, and easily cheated.

 

[Batavium]

This is in the game if you think out of the box. Shops have a server option where you buy blueprints with credits.

If Schema were to add buying filled blueprints with credits to shop blocks then it would enable you to sell ships. This has to be a different setting from the normal in game shops since very few server owners want buy blueprint with credits.

For it to work there needs to be a limit on type "no stations". And a way to link the virtual blueprint to actual blocks in the shops cargo. Right now buy blueprint with credits completely negates any shop inventory. This to avoid abuse and create a credit ship spawn storm without there being any real blocks to back it up.

 

[aceface]

Was about to make this very same suggestion.

I like this suggestion because I can see this enabling big industry guys to bulk produce certain ships with specialized factories and earn quite a lot of money. You could build a specific shipyard + factory combo to very quickly produce a specific type of blueprint. If many factions on a server did this youd have a constant stream of constantly refined ships being sold for credits instead of being manually filled by people with less advanced factory complexes.

 

[GnomeKing]

a more formalized way to buy/sell direct from player to player - rather than trusting cbill/block drops or cbill donation would facilitate 'trade' roles beyond the shop module.

a 'market place' of ships for sale could also work, even as a server specific solution.

bear in mind though that fully automated factory + auto bluprint filling + auto shop trade + auto 'ship trade' might have impact on things like 'interaction', 'homebase', and 'turtle', (for good or bad) etc...at what point does automation remove role of active player ? does that even matter ?