the trading does not suck - its fundamentally the same as the Elite series, where the only fluctuations in price were due to (random) nonavailability of items or (more usually) items being in demand at that planet - best shown in Frontier by taking the soft option of hauling robots and computers from Barnards' Star to Sol and hoping someone on the BB wanted to buy them off you at double the cash because Sol never had enough of them (the same thing worked between any Imperial mining colony and Facece btw).

Identifying routes was the only way of making money in both Elite and Frontier and, judging by the demo, its the only way to do it in this as well - everyone else seems to have found the Boron route between Pittsburgh and Manhattan as a way to make easy money, and there are bound to be more in the full game.

Honestly I wish people would stop making out the Trading system to be inferior to the Braben games, because its virtually identical. Or would youse all rather have a barter system like IWar2?

agricola

ps: its actually better than in Frontier, because the neuronet generates price comparisons for you, which wasnt the case in Frontier - you had the map, until you were actually in-system and then u had to pay $1 for the priviledge

Interesting to read the replies to my message. It seems that there are many like me who remember the rush of publicity when this game was first announced and all the claims that the Roberts brothers were making for it, and subsiquently wern't aware that many of these features had been removed.

I will probably still by Freelancer and keep my fingers crossed. But it seems that the game has fallen foul of the dumbing down syndrom (don't alienate the majority of your customers by making the game slightly difficult so that they may not complete it), which is present in games these days, especially those of the Major publishers.

I mean if in 1984 in a few Kb of memory they could have a rudimentry dynamic trading system, they are now telling is that 19 years later that it is to difficult to impliment, what do they take for fools (of course they do).

How difficult could it be to implement simple passenger missions.

And finaly Starlancer let me look out of the side windows so that I could admire the view whilst on autopilot, and now I am denied even that simple pleasure.

Oh well, I here X2 is out soon perhaps that may come closer to the "impossible dream" of a modern day Elite.

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Personally, I've never understood the whole trading phenomenon in space sims... find demand, go here, get X, go there... where exactly is the fun?

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Let me give youa scenario I read about X2 that is coming out. The guy talks about seeing a ship that is bringing some supplies to a factory. Now, the reason this ship is bringing these goods to this factory is because the factory actually uses it to produce something. See, the game is made so that the trading involved in the game has a real purpose. So, this factory is very far away from where this ship is, but the ship is going there anyway. Why? Because it knows it will make a better profit than going to a factory which is closer.

Now, here comes the cool part. In the X games, you can build your own factories. So, what you as a player can do is build a factory that produces the same thing that the other factory does. The difference here is that this factory is closer to this ship. So, this ship will now go to YOUR factory instead of the others. Also, other ships will come here as well. What did this do? It just changed the dynamic of the game. You just affected the universe of this game by creating a new place for ships to go to sell goods.

I don't know about you, but that sounds pretty interesting to me.

I realize that Freelancer doesn't do this and I am not bashing it for not having this kind of economy. What I am doing is presenting a scenario which is pretty darn cool and you can see why people might want a dynamic economy in Freelancer.

Another example of a cool feature of a dynamic economy would be destroying a huge freighter with tons of stell on it. You destroy that and sudenly the supply of steel in the area has gone down sharply. WHat is the result? The price of steel goes up and if you have some, you will now fetch better prices when you sell it.

So you see, this is the fun in a dynamic trading system.

If i wanted to build stuff like buildings and suck, id play age of empires.

Thanks for the tip on X2, that game looked sort of interesting, but I found X-beyond to leave me with quite a sense of "loneliness", in that I felt "detached" from any sort of culture I could relate to. If they can somehow make the series closer to "Earth" (which I think it's about an Earth invasion or something isn't it?) I might check it out.

But in any event, many games have the intention of having this or that feature then the feature is cut due to time/money constraints. Unless something like that is in X2 and working extremely well, it'll be something that will either take lots of manpower to code or will get cut.

As for Freelancer, I compare Freelancer mainly to Privateer. In Privateer, commodity prices didn't fluctuate either, so this issue isn't a big deal to me. It is sad to see that cargo delivery missions aren't in Freelancer, it would have been extremely easy to code in stuff like that. Maybe some smuggling random missions too? :\