I'll have a go here with an idea. Kim please read this whole post there is a revenue opportunity here for the planets and for MA plus we can solve a few problems at once.
First though I want to say: who gives a shit about the hangar bay. When you guys bought your ships you paid to have the ability to take passengers into space and charge them a fee for doing it. You still have that ability.
The building itself is a glorified house and nothing more so for now, who cares if you cant land in it. Landing your privateer on the planet will do a sum total of ZERO to help your bottom line. This is about PED, right?
When the ships were first sold by MindArk they sold on auction for about 10K each. Currently the base value for a Privateer is something around 40-50K plus whatever SI upgrades you have made. Also that Hangar building is still worth 10K or more. Plus hanger owners were given an unlimited thruster for free. That all amounts to 5-6 times the value of when they were first sold. Yes I understand people had to gather all the parts originally to get the ship to fly but they also had years worth of earning ability. During that time the prices skyrocketed, like a lot of things did, and some people who sold made a killing and some who paid a high price from those people got burned really bad. That's not MindArk's fault... that's the end users, both the buyers and sellers.
Its not MindArk's fault that end users made unwise speculations and paid too much. Its also not the fault of the end users... it just is what it is and that's how things go some times. MindArk owes you nothing. They had to make choices for the sake of self preservation and also for the betterment of the game as whole. EU revolves around Hunting, Mining, and Crafting... not space travel.
Meanwhile I'm trying to help a friend buy a hangar bay at a reasonable price because he wants to use it as a house but every time we put forth an effort, other people step in and start spreading the rumor that some big hangar upgrade is imminent and as a result the prices are going to skyrocket. Really? All this does is get people whipped up and pissed off and encourages more baseless speculation on values.
The problem here is not that you cant land your ship in your hangar bay... who cares.
The REAL problem is that there aren't enough paying passengers to support all of the privateer and mothership owners at once. When the demand for space flight exceeds the capacity of available pilots, at that point the prices of Privateers and Motherships will start to go back up and then Pilots can go back to bitching and moaning about each other instead of bitching about MindArk.
As I stated in my previous post, we need more players and that's easier said then done but MA is making progress with that. MindArk and the planet partners have higher priority problems than the hangar bays and seemingly a lot of those problems are unrelated to pilots. Problems are opportunities and sometimes you can kill two birds with one stone.
One big problem MA is having is the inability to get the trade related economy off the ground on the other planets. People loot things and come back to Calypso to sell and people take Calypso stuff to those planets to use themselves. Its complete dysfunction. At the moment there is 1014 pages of items on the Calypso auction, 23 pages on Cyrene, 37 on Rocktropia, 8 pages on Next Island, and 158 on Arkadia. If you want to go to another planet, you better bring everything that you need but if you are an (L) item user, like most people, well good luck getting your stuff that you need there. Most people don't have the budget to buy multiple weeks worth of (L) stuff up front for an adventure on another planet, as a result, they spend their time on Calypso, even if they originally spawned on another planet.
We have the ability to browse the auctions of other planets from any planet however we can not bid and we can not purchase those items. We can only view what's happening. There are times when I want something that's on another planet but I'm not going to screw around with flying all the way there just to get it. Moreover, there are a lot of things on other planets that never see the auctions because first they wont sell on that planet and second the person doesn't want to screw around with coming to calypso. So that stuff either hits the TT or it sits in storage for weeks or months.
There once was a time when we paid an extra fee to buy items from other locations.
And here is the opportunity to kill a few birds with one stone.
First, with economics, you have to understand that supply creates demand. Its the same concept as "if you build it they will come" and so with an active auction system on each planet, a healthy vibrant economy will start to emerge. One would think that by giving people a way to buy and sell items on whichever planet through the auction system it would reduce space travel. That's just not the case. Its counterintuitive but it would INCREASE space travel because no one wants to fly to a dead planet and also a strong trade economy on each planet will increase interplanetary trade between all of the planets.
As I slowly build up my collection of various RockTropia Cocktail drinks when they get listed on the Calypso auction, I've often wondered why I cant just pay a fee and have them shipped from RockTropia. Listen, I was born in 1980, its currently 2013, and this is the internet. I need immediate gratification, like most other internet users my attention span lasts for a matter of minutes. I'm a customer and that's just reality.
Please explain to me why I cant just pay an extra fee so I can get my RockTropia cocktails on Calypso immediately. ...A few of you maybe figured out where I'm going with this.
Supply creates demand. At the moment, most pilots don't even bother to move their ships. They sit in space collecting dust. With more active pilots, it will cause more interplanetary travel. Maybe MA could give them a reason to be online and flying from planet to planet continuously.
Remember when hangers first launched? Space was completely imaginary. This is a video game... some degree of imagination is required here from the end user.
Why cant a Privateer or Mothership owner check a Terminal at the Space Station for "cargo containers" that are waiting to be delivered? MA could make an actual physical Cargo Container that can be picked up at one Space Station and dropped off at another. When a pilot has completed that simple task, they get a share of the fee I paid and the fees others pay to get their items shipped from planet to planet.
Also, if I need to take some stackable items from one planet to another planet... why cant I have a way where I can send the items there ahead of me completely risk free of being looted? Why cant I, as a customer, pay for that service? As it is now, for safe travel, people just log out while in flight. Any game model that encourages people to LOG OFF is completely flawed from the onset.
You, as the game developer, will never stop me, the end user/customer from logging off of your game if I need to. What you can do though is create something that gives me an alternative method to safely get my items from planet to planet and charge me a fee for doing it.
Fees that range between 1-10 ped (depending on TT value) are reasonable.
This can be a very simple system to create. For example: as I write this, there is a small stack of Pina Colada Cocktail on RockTropia. The buyout is 45 Ped and there aren't any others across the whole universe. I want them but I'm not flying to RockTropia to get them. Im also not going to bug my friends to get them for me. Im very happy to pay a few PED to get these Pina Colada Cocktails if I can have them right now, or at least within an hour.
Meanwhile, that few ped fee that I paid could be split between MA and a Cargo Container that spawns on RockTropia Space Station. Whichever Privateer or Mothership pilot gets there first can grab that Cargo Container from a special terminal and fly it over to Calypso Space Station. Upon doing so and dropping it off at the Cargo Terminal here on Calypso, they will get paid their share of that fee.
At no point do my Pina Colada Cocktails need to physically go from RockTropia, to the Space Station, into a pilot's inventory, to Calypso Space Station, and down to the planet. Instead, lets use a little imagination and put a 1 hour wait for getting the items so we can have a coherent theme and function regarding interplanetary shipping. It should not matter when a pilot actually picks up and delivers that container, who cares. We don't need to over think this, lets just keep it simple. If I want to send items ahead of me to Arkadia, the system could work in the same way.
This does not have to be complicated.
Meanwhile, MA and the Planets have a new revenue point, pilots have a new money source, pilots have an incentive to be more active and flying around, passengers have more access to pilots, passengers no longer need to log off when flying, each planet can have their functioning economy, we can have real interplanetary trade, planets wont lose new people due to it being completely dead, pilots can go back to fighting with each other, etc etc.
We do not need to create a whole new system where this monster Privateer enters the planet and lands. Can you imagine the lag? ...and for what? What does it accomplish? Nothing.
