Well, since apparently nobody else has responded I guess I will. I think these sound like great changes that will solve the vast majority of contract issues. I'm ok with failing missions and being penalized provided I'm not cutting myself off from being able to come back in the future.

I haven't played the game more than a few hours but I don't get a great sense of the amount of time that's passing as I travel. There's a clock in the PDA but with it being so critical to the contracts it might help to have it more prominent. This could take the form of a clock on the wall in the background or something in the corner of a screen, or on the higher end maybe even an expensive upgrade to your navcom that gives the autopilot an ETA for your current route.

I only got this game recently and I wanted to get some time in before giving my feedback.

I think a license suspension is a great way to go about it when you fail a contract completely and run off with the merchandise, though maybe make the punishment a little more severe than just the cost of mechandise plus a little on the side.

The contract system is a big part of the game and I think could use some more granularity in general. For example if you were in very good standing with the company failing a mission could just be punished by simply downgrading the level of jobs you're able to take, or for some companies with a "Do this job for us and we'll forget about what you owe" kind of mildy sinister email with a contract that might involve a bounty mission or one of the hack missions you plan to impliment.

It might be worth considering giving players the option to send an email saying you were attacked by pirates, at which point the company response would probably be based on how your player has behaved previously and what your standing with the company is. A high standing might lead to a response along the lines of, "your ships registration and a list of the involved cargo has been forwarded to our insurance adjuster, here is compensation for your damages." and a low standing might lead to a result of, "The only pirate here is you."

A late fee seems like it might be reasonable as well. Where you can turn in a contract a few hours late instead of it being an outright failure, but you also might not get the same increase in standing you would normally get with a company for the contract and take a substantial hit to your earnings. Blacklisting could stay around, but it should be a punishment for not just running off with goods, but also failing to reply to any of the companies attempts to reach out through email.

I agree with wanting players to think about the contracts they take but I feel a lot of mechanics already push in that direction. Instant blacklisting doesn't need to be one of them. You already need to be licensed with a company which reduces the contracts you have available, you have limited cargo space and need to allocate it intellegently, every station you dock to has a cost, and contracts often don't pay particularly well unless they're for high value or large quantities of goods. There are so many things pushing the player to consider what jobs they take that blacklisting just seems out of place. Both in terms of gameplay and in terms of realism. Likewise rather than pushing me to be careful about contracts the risk of blacklisting just made me never want to invest too much time in a particular company. So I never cared who I was working for.

Even if you don't like the idea of adding the kinds of varied outcomes to contracts that I've mentioned before I think dialing back punishements in general is important. It doesn't feel good to fail a mission because time is extremely tight and you didn't know where in the system the station you needed to get to would be, or just because you didn't realize that three hours in-game-time would pass so quickly, or because you didn't realize your shielded pod was in use by a bunch of plastic that doesn't need it. The more harsh the punishement is the more player frustrations at other aspects of the game can build and ultimately this isn't a rouge-like and doesn't have the alleviating factors that make such harsh punishements make sense.

Something to consider as well along that line is that you may never really have a truely bug free game. The harsher the consequences for failure are the more those kinds of things will matter to a player. Nobody minds if some woman in Skyrim randomly dies by walking into the sky, it's just an amusing bug. If the punishement for that was getting blamed for murder, banned from that town forever, and being attacked on sight though then feelings would be different. By making the punishement for mission failure something like blacklisting with no recourse you make it so that any bug or quirk of the game that causes the player to lose just a few seconds of time or fail a mission could have permanent consequences which are likely to upset almost any player.

I like the proposals as you have there, I think you possibly need to look at some other games that use contracts or trading quests.

It doesn't make much sense for you to buy your own goods to ship on a contract unless it's along the lines of "We require 'x' amount of 'y' and will pay you 'n' for it, please complete the contract before 't'"

So you would need some trading knowledge and go and fetch the items, otherwise you're a courier and you'll take a product somewhere, so it should be auto-loaded to your ship, provided you have enough space.

A suspension of your licence seems like a good idea but, as Bird of Many Birds above says, I think you need a standing with the company and you can take a hit to that instead, with various punishments looking at your standing and the scope of your failure.

All I have time to write just yet, sorry.

Sounds like a good deal to me. A reputation with each company might be good where your bonus is dependent upon completing them adequately. It's not like your bonuses seem huge to begin with so it could be 0% change to bonus at first contract. Complete it well you get a 5% bonus value, so that your next contract completed well you get paid 105% of the value +5% bonus for a total of 10% on your next contract. Contract failures decrease your bonus value 10%, but you can dig yourself back out of that hole 5% at a time with more successes. This could be to a maximum of 200% and to a minimum of 50%.

The auto fill the hold with the item sounds like a good plan i just failed a contract because I flew off after talking to a npc without the requisite item... my fault yes but bam there is a burned bridge over a few units of whine erm wine.

Also as pointed out elsewhere... I don't seem to get paid. There is also some sort of wierdness with double contracts for the same item to the same station.

Make impossible to accept contracts bigger than the free cargo space in the ship.

I like adding cargo to ship by myself. Until you got fully upgraded pods, you can take multiple contracts and arrange cargo how you wish (by taking it in order). I'm afraid, you'll need to take contracts in correct order without preview of your cargo pods, so some normal cargo won't end up in your shielded pod, blocking it for another contract. It would be nice to have a tickbox in options for that (Auto Load Contract Cargo On/Off).

For contracts with buying stuff yourself, as mentioned above, it would be nice to see them when you need to search for cargo on your own, in multiple systems (or if you know the market you go where you need to go), so they could pay more and be set to longer deadline (maybe 24 hours+).

As for blacklisting - it needs to go in favour on new system, but it should still punish player. Just a little extra for a failed delivery doesn't seem much. I think some big 'fine' would work if you'd like to work for a certain company again (although, who would pay big money IRL if he had to complete multiple contracts to get even?). Something to think about.

There should probably be some stevedores or longshoremen that could rearrange your cargo for you.

I have to agree wholeheartedly with Bird of Many Birds. The more I read the more I kept nodding.

These are good suggestions. I think the only thing really missing is a "minimum time calculation" or something to that effect if you left straight away. Ive had issues with contracts being offered that are simply not achieveable with the current hardware I have in play even with a direct route and left imediately. I know the game offers for more old skool contrivances. So if there was a way of checking the time, as well as time between jumps so the player can know if they would fail. That would be amaing.

Request option to rebind Chat / Interface up/down/left/right *away* from cursor keys please. Either that or make the mouse a viable control option (right now it's not, it doesn't interact with the chat interface).

Save after jump. Having to get to a station to save risks losing huge chunk of progress in the evt of crashing, especially on long expeditions. Save after jump doesn't change the balance since you've commited to jump already. And most likely you are at a determined state

@flyfire2002 It could make issues in rare occasions. If you mess up with loadout in some way or you're barely alive after jump cause stuff happened in last system. It could be optional way of saving to change in options, but I prefer the default one. Also makes it more exciting if you need to go to station and makes you weighting risks.

I would argue to make such changes optional. So a player can activate or deactivate this things maybe even in an already running game or at least during the game start in a game difficulty screen. Some like it hard, other soft. Some like it, to feel stupid after forgetting to pick up the delivery befor leaving to the target station, for other this is a game killer.

Make it optional.

Are there any plans to expand the terminal gameplay features? I especially love this gameplay mechanic and would LOVE to be able to place buy/sell orders with space stations via comms or terminal commands that would be executed upon docking or cancelled if you leave the system?

Originally posted by Broms:

Are there any plans to expand the terminal gameplay features? I especially love this gameplay mechanic and would LOVE to be able to place buy/sell orders with space stations via comms or terminal commands that would be executed upon docking or cancelled if you leave the system?

Like this idea a lot.