UNKNOWN ARTIFACT: the rare commodity price angle

nikos

N
Huros said:
ok so we need more data for a proper analysis. lets reduce the variables. focus on blackmarket only. we need 20 blackmarket prices and their coordinates/planet names in a 50 LY radius from Timocani.

then we might be able to plot the general direction of the reducing value vector. repeat again around the lowest price and do again until we reach a volume of space we can work on. not ignore and passed on my UA last night so we need those with US to step up and do this.
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That's a good summary but I would not exclude normal commodity prices as long as they are marked as such, because we know the exact conversion rate between commodity/black markets.

The reason is that there aren't that many UAs around, we don't want to start excluding those not marked as stolen.
 
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I and I Redeye

I
nikos said:
That's very interesting data! For some reason your "stolen" prices are slightly different (in the lower 3 digits) than the ones I obtained (but not by much).

Also, to iterate: the "source" we are looking for is not the place players picked up the UA (we know which one it is after all!). It is the in-game location where the item was originally "found" by NPCs, prior to it being transported by the fleet in the strong signal source. My hope is that locating this place will reveal something new, either by simply exploring it or by bringing a UA back to it.

Just to make doubly clear: did you get the non-stolen prices from the normal commodity market?
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It can still behave like a rare if we assume the "origin" is not the system players first acquired the UA, but the game location where NPCs supposedly first found it.
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Yeah, I've been thinking this all week.
The npc's collect it from somewhere and can reach it with same drives we have. It's prolly one of the locked off systems somewhere but the location is real.
I wonder, how close are the nearest lock off systems in the general direction we think they come from?
Something to think about anyway.
 

gazelle

gazelle
The galactic average should be the same for commodity or black market. Only the sell price differ.

I'm also not sure we can use the standard rare formula to calculate the origin price. The threshold before the original price becomes greater than the galactic average is 26782cr. The "NVIDIA PROTOTYPE" also didn't follow the standard rare formula, but I don't have enough data to verify this.
 
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RedWizzard

RedWizzard
nikos said:
Also, to iterate: the "source" we are looking for is not the place players picked up the UA (we know which one it is after all!). It is the in-game location where the item was originally "found" by NPCs, prior to it being transported by the fleet in the strong signal source. My hope is that locating this place will reveal something new, either by simply exploring it or by bringing a UA back to it.

Just to make doubly clear: did you get the non-stolen prices from the normal commodity market?
Click to expand...

Yep, realise about the source. I'm just wondering if the price drops off from where it was acquired.

All my prices have been black market. Haven't found a system it's legal in yet.

One more:
Sol/Dadeus (77.2Ly from Timocani)
Stolen: 179973, Non-stolen: 239964
 

nikos

N
RedWizzard said:
Yep, realise about the source. I'm just wondering if the price drops off from where it was acquired.

All my prices have been black market. Haven't found a system it's legal in yet.

One more:
Sol/Dadeus (77.2Ly from Timocani)
Stolen: 179973, Non-stolen: 239964
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That's great. Can you also tell me the galactic average for each?
 

AnnuverScotinExile

AnnuverScotinExile
I and I Redeye said:
Yeah, I've been thinking this all week.
The npc's collect it from somewhere and can reach it with same drives we have. It's prolly one of the locked off systems somewhere but the location is real.
I wonder, how close are the nearest lock off systems in the general direction we think they come from?
Something to think about anyway.
Click to expand...

Except, of course, we don't have persistent NPCs. So one thing they certainly did not do was collect it from somewhere. The appeared 'out of nowhere' pretending to be coming from somewhere (and pretending to be going somewhere, too). So, really, the question is the extent to which FD tried to simulate the back story. If they did a good job, then we may be able to extrapolate backwards. If they didn't, we will just have random data that means nothing, and cannot be used to work anything out.

Fingers crossed FD did a decent job, here ...
 

nikos

N
RedWizzard said:
I've never seen them in the commodity market. They've been illegal everywhere I went.
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:) I know, but you said you have a stolen and a non-stolen UA. I presume the prices you quote for the non-stolen are from the normal commodity market, not the black market, right?
 

gazelle

gazelle
nikos said:
You mean for both commodity and black market the galactic average is the same?
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The galactic average should be the same on both markets. That's what I have recorded while I was carring illegal rares.

edit: Maybe you get 100% for illegal goods on the black market and the penalty only applies if the good is stolen. I unfortunately never came across a system with two stations where the rare was not illegal on one station and illegal on the other with an black market.
 
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nikos

N
gazelle said:
The galactic average should be the same on both markets. That's what I have recorded while I was carring illegal rares.
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Thanks for clearing this up, it's very confusing; normally I'd expect a difference of 75% just like the selling price.
 

nikos

N
Research Proposal

The galactic average is exactly 220k.

Assuming the UA behaves as a rare, we can use the formula in this post to calculate the buying price at origin, which comes out as 300,811Cr (NB buying price means how much you would pay to buy the item, which makes no sense for the UA because you cannot buy them; bear with me here).

According to that same post, selling price at origin is exactly half the buying price, thus 150,406Cr.

Now, since UAs are illegal and can, thus, only be sold in the black market which has a 25% price reduction, the target selling price at black markets is 112,805Cr. In other words, if a player with a UA finds this price they have found the system that originally spawned the UA.

Now, why do all this? Two reasons:
  • Moving towards systems offering decreasing prices will lead us to the source system.
  • We might be able to use this post to actually calculate the distance of the source system from known ones, and with some trilateration :D, find its coordinates. I have started playing with the math, but it's not entirely simple.

Any help appreciated!
 
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RedWizzard

RedWizzard
nikos said:
:) I know, but you said you have a stolen and a non-stolen UA. I presume the prices you quote for the non-stolen are from the normal commodity market, not the black market, right?
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No, only the blackmarket. There are two flags that make a item only saleable on the blackmarket: "stolen" and "illegal". You can have a regular commodity that has been stolen and therefore can only be sold on the blackmarket (e.g. gold from the SSS trap). You can have a regular commodity that is illegal in the system you are in, but not stolen (e.g. tobacco obtained from the commodity market in a system where it is legal and then taken somewhere where it is illegal). Or you can have both, which is the case for most of the salvage-only goods (e.g. antiquities, artworks, etc). All of my UAs were illegal everywhere I took them but one of them somehow lost it's stolen status.

I think that if you just jettison a stolen item and re-scoop it, it will still be marked as stolen. But obviously there are ways to "clean" them. I had a cargo hatch failure at one point and a bunch of stolen items fell out (battle plans, artworks, ancient relics). When I re-scooped them those ones were no longer marked as stolen. I don't know if that's intentional behaviour or not. I don't think it's what happened with the non-stolen UA anyway, I'm not sure how that one got clean.

Unfortunately I don't have my UAs anymore. I must have had another cargo hatch failure that I didn't notice. So I'm out of the research business until I can find another one.
 
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Palidin

P
It looks like the source is in the direction of Kali. But if the peregrina price is correct, our hidden system is still way out in uninhabited space. And it makes it worse if the peregrina price is a black market price.

But with the new data it looks to be in the direction of Timocani to Kali, but Kali is the only piece of data that is not in the general area of Timocani.

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Assuming this acts like a rare.
 

Palidin

P
I can only work on this on and off: here is some of the math I used to figure some of this stuff out (I think my rare distance calculations are slightly off)

New Learnings:
-Formula for Rare Pricing from nikos's links: A=FLOOR(0.7051*B + 7898), where A=galactic average and B=buy price at origin.
-Expected Sell price from origin is 300,811 credits. Link to Wolfram A solution.
-No sale has been anywhere close to double the Galactic average (Which is the expected max sale price of a rare)
-No sale has reached even the buying price of the rare
-With the Given data, the prices are not changing anywhere near the acceleration at which a rare should be changing
-Kali is 65LY from the other systems, but the rate of change is only a few thousand credits. Where it should change ~3k per ly.
-It is possible that both Kali and the other systems are equal distant from the origin..... But I find it very unlikely.

I honestly think that the pricing does not go by the rare formulas due to the last point. But if you are interested to see how it should act, go to the 2nd tab to my spreadsheet.

The plus side is, if it is treated like a rare. The system should be within 150ly of Timcani given the sell and buy prices we have determined.
 
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nikos

N
RedWizzard said:
There are two flags that make a item only saleable on the blackmarket: "stolen" and "illegal".
Click to expand...

Thanks for clarifying. So does this mean the markdown in the black market depends on these two flags of the item, and each flag effectively adds 25% markdown? This would explain the discrepancy between the stolen/non-stolen item.

In any case, what I'm trying to figure out here is the relationship between the selling price and the galactic average. In other words, is the galactic average a hypothetical price that the item is sold at when it is neither stolen nor illegal? Because in that case we would have to halve the computed numbers (see the "research proposal post") to correlate them with the prices seen at black market.

I'll fix the OP regarding commodity/black to read non-stolen/stolen.
 

nikos

N
Palidin said:
I can only work on this on and off: here is some of the math I used to figure some of this stuff out (I think my rare distance calculations are slightly off)

New Learnings:
-Formula for Rare Pricing from nikos's links: A=FLOOR(0.7051*B + 7898), where A=galactic average and B=buy price at origin.
-Expected Sell price from origin is 300,811 credits. Link to Wolfram A solution.
-No sale has been anywhere close to double the Galactic average (Which is the expected max sale price of a rare)
-No sale has reached even the buying price of the rare
-With the Given data, the prices are not changing anywhere near the acceleration at which a rare should be changing
-Kali is 65LY from the other systems, but the rate of change is only a few thousand credits. Where it should change ~3k per ly.
-It is possible that both Kali and the other systems are equal distant from the origin..... But I find it very unlikely.

I honestly think that the pricing does not go by the rare formulas due to the last point. But if you are interested to see how it should act, go to the 2nd tab to my spreadsheet.

The plus side is, if it is treated like a rare. The system should be within 150ly of Timcani given the sell and buy prices we have determined.
Click to expand...

That's a good try! There are a few question marks:

  • You need to halve the buy price at origin to get the sell price at origin.
  • Given the UAs are illegal and most of the times stolen, do we need to adjust the galactic average by 50% as opposed to 75%? (probably)
  • There seem to be two tiers of prices in what's been reported so I would only use those reported by me and Red Wizzard and only those that have the UA as stolen (but I see that you also treat them differently in your spredsheet).
  • Still, the systems with these prices are in some cases far apart thus so little price variation seems to contradict the "rare" theory.
  • It may still be the case that following the price gradient points somewhere.

Here's my analysis, which was aiming to get trilateration data.
 
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gazelle

gazelle
@Palidin:

You made some assumptions which might be wrong:

  • A=Expected Sell price: I don't think you can use that formula. The turning point, when the sell price becomes greater than the average, is ~26780 (Link to Wolfram Alpha solution). It wouldn't make much sense to have a lower average then sell price. NOTE: The "half the sell price" is only valid for distances < 5ly from origin. It can NOT be used for the lower asymptote of the formula, because the price jumps up after the 5ly rule. The NVIDIA Prototype also didn't follow this rule (Link to Wolfram Alpha solution).
  • K=double the Galactic average: I have to less rare-data for this, and again, the NVIDIA Prototype didn't fit this (buy: 19350, avg: 31272, sell at 215ly: 42949)
  • Q=v=1; B=0.07: My data do mostly fit with this but it's not written in stone.
  • M=120: That's pure speculation
 
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