004 Travel Costs

One thing I have noticed about players over the years in the JTS community is that most are willing to pay token fees to travel about the game grid given a couple conditions:


 * 1) The costs are consistent given things like distance/range traveled. One is fine with paying 5 credits to make a run within a planetary grid, for example, and one is also fine with paying up to 750 credits for a shuttle to another world. It fits, and it makes sense to most players who accept it.
 * 2) The costs to travel the grid are not excessive. It is important to consider how often one must travel on a game grid, and how much the average character earns in a week. If most characters earn 250 credits worth of coded money each week, then charging 200 credits for a single trip on a single world is perceived to be a scam.

Token fees have their place, they emphasize that things in the game world cost money, and for some make it more 'real.' The problem comes, in my experience, when the token fees are not token fees. An example of this is Sivad on OS:NJ, where it can cost between 20 and 200 credits for a single trip to a destination on the planetary grid. For some characters, this is a token fee (those who have made a great deal of money in the past, for example), for new characters, these fees did nothing more than help create a sentiment that avoiding 50% of the planetary grid was not just a good idea, but desirable.

This would not be an issue if it were not for the fact that the upper end of the intraplanetary grid range was also very close to the high end of some of the shuttle systems that existed at the time. Most ships could make a jump to a planet for 250 credits worth of fuel, the automated system was in about the same range. Other intraplantetary grids cost between 5-10 credits for intragrid transit. In other words, the cost was incongruous with what it was perceived it should be.

Travel costs are not bad, but they need to reasonably consistent as a system and relatively low cost. Failure to do this tends to stifle roleplaying, rather than encourage immersion.