Market search or better contact/planet filters on mobile

[jonek]

The current playthrough is a scavenger on normal. Due to the random way I end up with valuable cargo, I'm often stuck with a big stash of many different goods I'd like to shift, often stuff with low legality. The mobile interface isn't great for finding places to sell goods without spending a lot of time scrolling through displays.


Finding the right place to sell the stuff can take a long time. I have 20+ smuggler contacts, so I probably have someone I could sell this stuff to. But, scrolling through those many smugglers to find one on a planet that actually wants these Kloxian med bays is a pain, because the planet type isn't visible without scrolling for contacts with 7+ service options.

Trying to find a legal market is much worse, from a UI perspective: trying to browse the galaxy view, going into the system atlas for every system, and then scrolling through every planet, scrolling down the planet description until I can read off trade law from the list of 7 landing zone scores, until I finally find the right combination of zone type, trade law, and faction.

Some extra filter options could go a long way here. I'd like to be able to:

• filter the contact list by landing zone type 
• filter the system atlas by trade law and zone type
• highlight the galaxy map by trade law, zone type, and faction, so I can quickly find a system where that combination exists.

But an even better approach and one that'd help a lot with the new player experience in particular is allowing us to search for a market for a specific good. Using this market search UI, we could pick a good (e.g. Basic Medical Supplies) and immediately get back a list of planets where you could sell or buy that good. The list would of course only include planets whose trade law is known from a previous visit, and would reflect rumors that change trade law only if those rumors were known. We could filter by "price grade", to only look for planets where you could sell (or buy) at e.g. a B- or better price. If it got fancy, you could add a checkbox to include known smuggler contacts.

This would help new players who enter the game and want to start trading only to be confused how they're actually supposed to be able to sell their load full of Spice. It'd help a ton with "Buy and deliver this thing" missions--when I see one of those missions, I know I might have 5-10 minutes on my hands of searching the galaxy map before I can even decide if I should take the mission. And, it'd help with situations like finding medical supplies for plague planets.

A market search does make trading "easier" in the sense that there's less barrier to finding a profitable trade, but the barrier it removes is just the tedium of searching the information you already have. If you're concerned about it making it too easy, lock it behind Merchant and Smuggler talents. If it were only available through contacts, please put it on every contact who give "buy this" missions.

[fallen]

jonek - thanks for the feedback! We definitely don't intend to conflate game difficulty with UI challenge.

We have resisted adding any filter types that could have so many options because we too agree that search would be a better way to go about this.

I think you're also suggesting a different type of interface, but I can't follow it in what you've said. Perhaps you could lay out a 1, 2, 3 suggestion of what inputs you'd enter and what you'd expect to see / get.

[jonek]

Sure, let me try to give an example drawn straight from my current game.

1. I see in my current stash I have a bunch of narcotic spice. 4 legality is pretty tough to sell, and even harder if I want to sell it in a zone where the price is decent.

2. I open up the "market search" UI pane and select "narcotic spice" from the list. Perhaps instead I can long-press or right click on the narcotic spice in my cargo/stash. I choose "sell" from a toggle switch between sell and buy (similar to the sell/buy switch at an exchange).

3. I see a sortable list of landing zones where narcotic spice can be legally sold. Any LZ in the galaxy shows up in this list if I have visited it (and so know the trade law), the trade law is 4 or less, and if I have a level 1 or better permit with the local faction. I can waypoint to those planets. The list displays the sale price at each zone if I know it. Info in this list may be out of date if unknown rumors are in effect.

4. I decide that I don't want the closest legal market, which is an orbital and so has an "F" price for narcotic spice. I also don't want the highest sale price in the galaxy, which is 15 jumps away. So, I use a UI element to filter by "price better than C+" and now see there's a tradeway 3 jumps away with an OK price and other convenient features. Yay! Off I go to sell my spice.

5. Maybe I have a bunch of smuggler talents and know a lot of black market contacts. Another UI element lets me add the known black markets to the list of markets where I could sell narcotic spice. I keep my "good price" filter and see that 2 jumps away there's a smuggler who will give me a better price than than 3-jump tradeway. If I was trying to sell artifacts instead of spice, the list of black markets would shrink since I need a contact who will let me in "as if principal trader".
(but maybe I want to be able to toggle whether I check for sufficient level of access, since maybe I want to know whether there's a nearby black market contact who would be amazing if I onoy raised their effective rep or influence)

[grävling]

I like this idea. Because buying should be symmetrical with selling, here are a few additional points.

If the list you are picking the good from is a list of icons, then they should be sorted alphabetically so that I don't need to know what 'Narcotic Spice' looks like if the thing I want to do is buy it.

Keep track of places where a good is usually in stock but currently out of stock, so that I don't fly back to a place I just emptied.

Display as clickable blue circles any landing zones that have rumours. If the only reason I can sell/buy something is due to a temporary lowering of trade law, then I need to decide if I should race over there before the rumour ends, or decide that it isn't worth the trip, as the rumour will likely be gone by the time I get there.

Give me a filter for 'include planets I have never visited that might take these goods (correct planet type, unknown trade level)'. If my problem is that my pirate hold is full of hard-to-sell loot, I might be willing to check out possible markets along the way to a distant one which is the closest place I know I can sell them.

[fallen]

Thanks for the great detail and the procedural 1, 2, 3 example. Really helps show exactly how you'd think about finding what you need. I've bookmarked this thread for another day and linked it to the issue in our system.

[fallen]

Would suggest trying out the new range filter and the search option!