sound_spawn wrote:
I think you'll find you can make a great deal of money and not get burned out from constantly running the same route.
Well, in some ways, that's the attraction of having a program find the most profitable loops for you. It would find loops that you had never considered. You could use a different run every day if you wanted. You could swap to a different trade circuit when you encountered an intersecting loop. When you're armed with more trade loops than you knew before, it's
easier to keep it from getting boring, not harder! When I wrote such a program it was actually a
problem because it found so many slightly different variations on the best loops that you had to sift through them to actually find the totally distinct loops you were really interested in. I couldn't use a "top 10 list", I had to use a "top 200 list", and sift through it for really disparate routes. You were presented with so many different options, you really could tweak your normal runs and still end up with about the same amount of cash when you were done. You could choose a different loop that fit the amount of time you had free before you had to get in the car and go to work, etc.
In summary: More options is actually the solution to the boredom problem. A program that gives you more options is therefore helpful.
sound_spawn wrote:
I know there may be a "most profit/sec" in a repeatable loop, but that will likely be a ridiculously large loop that ends up taking you to all corners of the map, or something incredibly dangerous. The best closed circuit for me would have to be low risk (enemy ship presence and level, including multiplayer pirates who you can't consider via coding) and I'm not sure how a program can help weigh that any better than just trying some runs with high profit/sec and sticking with ones that felt good.
The program absolutely can't respond to such dynamic conditions without a hook into the server itself to identify locations of people you consider dangerous. So about all you could do is watch out for enemies on the trade run you're currently on, and be ready to switch to a different route as the situation called for it. Again, you can't do that if you don't know of all the possible lucrative alternate routes. See previous comments.
Obviously I can see the merit of such a program, since I went to the trouble of finding a way around the mathematical difficulties involved, and I can't fault Brutos for wanting to do the same thing. But I can see wiz0u's point about the "best" loops losing their attractiveness through overuse.