Greetings Folks!
Introduction
This is a fairly long post about Community Goal profits compared to regular trading, especially with reference to the most recent one at Diso. You may not care about the details, in which case jump to the conclusion at the end. You may not care about maximizing your profits at all, in which case ignore this thread completely. Otherwise, read on.
The Data
Here is the important part of my spreadsheet analysis:
I assumed a 7-minute one-way time (14 round-trip) for the circuit. Note that this isn't just flight time, it's buying the goods at Station A, flying out of mass lock range, hyperjumping to Station B with only 1 hop in between, flying to the station, landing, selling the goods, buying the return goods, flying out of mass lock, returning to the station, and selling the goods... the whole 9 yards. So 7 minutes is pretty generous, it may take many people longer than that. Remember this point because if it takes you even 1 minute longer to do the route, the most profitable Tier (70%, Tier D) drops by 1.5 million profit / hr.
I gathered the REQUIRED TONS (to reach each tier) from the Active Community Goals thread. They are estimates only; if you think you have a better number I will update my sheet accordingly and repost the numbers if they represent a significant change in the resulting analysis.
My cargo space at the time was 528, but the analysis applies to everyone since it's about maximising credits per ton per hour. If you have less cargo space all that means is that it will take longer to reach each tier and your net profits per hour will be lower, but they will still be proportionally the same.
Some people might be confused by the "DIF. INCREASE" (difficulty increase) column. What this means is that (for example) to reach Tier D you had to work 3.03 times harder than you did to get the Tier E (100%) reward. For Tier C, you had to work 2.5 times harder than you did in Tier D, and so on and so forth. As with PAY GAIN, the second column is a comparison to baseline (Tier E, 100%).
What This Means
Looking at the data above, we can see that the resulting profit per hour (including both trade proceeds and final payouts) decreases as you go up in tiers. Here's a pretty graph which shows the same thing:
What this is suggesting is that on a perfect day, the time you spent reaching Tier A (5%), you would have earned the same overall profit per hour had you just stayed with a decently profitable trading route. In the graph I show a modest 6.5 million credits per hour route as my comparison. For those of you who have 8 million cr/hr routes (I've never found any, but I've seen people claim they have such routes), you are effectively losing money if you even try to get to Tier B (15%) when you add in the adjustments below.
What you must understand is that the profits per hour listed above are for those who hit the exact cutoff only and don't go any over. It would be equivalent to hitting a Tier and immediately stopping — but most people work a little more in the hopes they don't get bumped down a tier. Since working extra to reach a comfortable spot in the middle of a tier does not increase your end payout, you will lose potential profits very quickly if the circuit profit/hr amount for the community goal is low.
Adjustments
To reiterate, the data above shows profit per hour in a perfect world. We don't live in a perfect world last I checked, so this section is where I explain other factors that we must take into account. The biggest of these I already mentioned above: the "overkill factor". Every ton submitted to the community goal which does not directly affect your final standing results in a drop in profits equal to the difference in profit/hour rate of your normal route compared to that of the CG route. In Diso's case, the difference was about 50% (in other words, my regular route was about two times as profitable per hour), which is quite significant. I will use my own case as an example:
Diso was the first Trading CG I participated in where I wanted to see if I could get into the top 5%. I wasn't exactly sure where the cutoff was, even when I reached it around 9000 I wasn't sure where it would be by the end. I ended up submitting 23,760 tons, about 10,000 over the required amount for 5% (silly me). In that extra time I spent (~4.4 hrs), I only earned $14,720,000 from trade profits (with obviously no additional final payout benefit). Under my normal route, I would have made $28,348,274 in that time, so I effectively "lost" $13,628,274 that I could have potentially gained if I stayed on my normal route (3.1 million per hour). For Tier A achievers, we effectively break even with a 6.5 million credits/hr (~12,900 credits/ton/hr) route right as we hit the 5% Tier.
Let's look at other tiers: Since the top 15% (Tier B) resulted in a profit of $8,610,925.71 per hour, that's $2,168,136 more than I would have made on my normal route. When you put these two pieces of information together, it means that if one works just 42 minutes extra to get comfortably over the cutoff point, you will have effectively broke even with the profits you would have made from you previous trading route, and that's not even taking into consideration any of the other factors below.
If your regular route is approximately twice as profitable as the CG route:
For Tier A (5%): You have already starting losing profit per hour if you reach this point.
For Tier B (15%): You break even at 42 minutes.
For Tier C (40%): You break even at 1 hour 55 minutes.
For Tier D (70%): You break even at 2 hours 38 minutes.
Other factors that should be taken into consideration:
- It takes time to travel from our current trade route to the Community Goal station. When we are done putting in our work there, we have to travel back to where we were. Furthermore, when the Community goal ends, we have to travel there to pick up our reward, and then back again. This can take some time if your normal route is far away. If the total time to do those two back and forths takes you 30 minutes and you earn 6.5 million credits per hour with your route, you have to subtract $3,250,000 from whatever profit you earned from the community goal.
- The profit per ton will diminish over time with so many people doing the same routes during a Community Goal. Conversely, with less people doing a normal route (because they are partaking in the CG), the profit per ton at your regular trade route may actually go up.
In Open play, there are further risks introduced:
- Your risk of getting interdicted increases enormously.
- During peak times, landing platforms can become congested, increasing the time it takes to run circuits and decreasing overall profit.
Conclusion
At this time, from a profit standpoint it makes sense to participate in community goals but only until you get comfortably into the top 40% (Tier C) bracket if your regular trading route is significantly more profitable. This is because the gains from the payout do not scale with the required effort to reach the higher tiers. In fact, there is an inverse relationship between the profit you gain per hour and the time spent achieving the goal as soon as you hit the first real tier cutoff (70%). In other words, the more you spend contributing to the goal, the less you earn until eventually you start earning less than you would have if you had stuck to a decently profitable commodity trade route.
Note that this is just based on my analysis of Diso data, but I looked over past Trading CG's and found similar payout scales, most often much lower because the max tiers were not reached in several of them. In fact I believe this is the highest payout we've seen so far for a Trading CG, but I could be wrong about that. So unless the payout is increased for the upper tiers in future CG's or the routes themselves are more profitable, it will remain true that it does not make sense to participate in them beyond the middle tier.
Also note that by me releasing this information, less people will try to reach the top tiers, making their cutoff points relatively easier to reach (thus making them more profitable). We can't fully know how this post will affect CG participation in the long run... (but probably not that much).
Cheers,
stoicfury
P.S. I just lost ~$16,000,000 in the time it took me to write this post. But seriously, I do want to remind people this game isn't just about making the most money, it should be about having fun (for a lucky few people, those are one and the same). Indeed, it's fun for me to crunch numbers and expand human knowledge, so I hope you find this useful. It was interesting and fun to find this stuff out.
Introduction
This is a fairly long post about Community Goal profits compared to regular trading, especially with reference to the most recent one at Diso. You may not care about the details, in which case jump to the conclusion at the end. You may not care about maximizing your profits at all, in which case ignore this thread completely. Otherwise, read on.
The Data
Here is the important part of my spreadsheet analysis:
I assumed a 7-minute one-way time (14 round-trip) for the circuit. Note that this isn't just flight time, it's buying the goods at Station A, flying out of mass lock range, hyperjumping to Station B with only 1 hop in between, flying to the station, landing, selling the goods, buying the return goods, flying out of mass lock, returning to the station, and selling the goods... the whole 9 yards. So 7 minutes is pretty generous, it may take many people longer than that. Remember this point because if it takes you even 1 minute longer to do the route, the most profitable Tier (70%, Tier D) drops by 1.5 million profit / hr.
I gathered the REQUIRED TONS (to reach each tier) from the Active Community Goals thread. They are estimates only; if you think you have a better number I will update my sheet accordingly and repost the numbers if they represent a significant change in the resulting analysis.
My cargo space at the time was 528, but the analysis applies to everyone since it's about maximising credits per ton per hour. If you have less cargo space all that means is that it will take longer to reach each tier and your net profits per hour will be lower, but they will still be proportionally the same.
Some people might be confused by the "DIF. INCREASE" (difficulty increase) column. What this means is that (for example) to reach Tier D you had to work 3.03 times harder than you did to get the Tier E (100%) reward. For Tier C, you had to work 2.5 times harder than you did in Tier D, and so on and so forth. As with PAY GAIN, the second column is a comparison to baseline (Tier E, 100%).
What This Means
Looking at the data above, we can see that the resulting profit per hour (including both trade proceeds and final payouts) decreases as you go up in tiers. Here's a pretty graph which shows the same thing:
What this is suggesting is that on a perfect day, the time you spent reaching Tier A (5%), you would have earned the same overall profit per hour had you just stayed with a decently profitable trading route. In the graph I show a modest 6.5 million credits per hour route as my comparison. For those of you who have 8 million cr/hr routes (I've never found any, but I've seen people claim they have such routes), you are effectively losing money if you even try to get to Tier B (15%) when you add in the adjustments below.
What you must understand is that the profits per hour listed above are for those who hit the exact cutoff only and don't go any over. It would be equivalent to hitting a Tier and immediately stopping — but most people work a little more in the hopes they don't get bumped down a tier. Since working extra to reach a comfortable spot in the middle of a tier does not increase your end payout, you will lose potential profits very quickly if the circuit profit/hr amount for the community goal is low.
Adjustments
To reiterate, the data above shows profit per hour in a perfect world. We don't live in a perfect world last I checked, so this section is where I explain other factors that we must take into account. The biggest of these I already mentioned above: the "overkill factor". Every ton submitted to the community goal which does not directly affect your final standing results in a drop in profits equal to the difference in profit/hour rate of your normal route compared to that of the CG route. In Diso's case, the difference was about 50% (in other words, my regular route was about two times as profitable per hour), which is quite significant. I will use my own case as an example:
Diso was the first Trading CG I participated in where I wanted to see if I could get into the top 5%. I wasn't exactly sure where the cutoff was, even when I reached it around 9000 I wasn't sure where it would be by the end. I ended up submitting 23,760 tons, about 10,000 over the required amount for 5% (silly me). In that extra time I spent (~4.4 hrs), I only earned $14,720,000 from trade profits (with obviously no additional final payout benefit). Under my normal route, I would have made $28,348,274 in that time, so I effectively "lost" $13,628,274 that I could have potentially gained if I stayed on my normal route (3.1 million per hour). For Tier A achievers, we effectively break even with a 6.5 million credits/hr (~12,900 credits/ton/hr) route right as we hit the 5% Tier.
Let's look at other tiers: Since the top 15% (Tier B) resulted in a profit of $8,610,925.71 per hour, that's $2,168,136 more than I would have made on my normal route. When you put these two pieces of information together, it means that if one works just 42 minutes extra to get comfortably over the cutoff point, you will have effectively broke even with the profits you would have made from you previous trading route, and that's not even taking into consideration any of the other factors below.
If your regular route is approximately twice as profitable as the CG route:
For Tier A (5%): You have already starting losing profit per hour if you reach this point.
For Tier B (15%): You break even at 42 minutes.
For Tier C (40%): You break even at 1 hour 55 minutes.
For Tier D (70%): You break even at 2 hours 38 minutes.
Other factors that should be taken into consideration:
- It takes time to travel from our current trade route to the Community Goal station. When we are done putting in our work there, we have to travel back to where we were. Furthermore, when the Community goal ends, we have to travel there to pick up our reward, and then back again. This can take some time if your normal route is far away. If the total time to do those two back and forths takes you 30 minutes and you earn 6.5 million credits per hour with your route, you have to subtract $3,250,000 from whatever profit you earned from the community goal.
- The profit per ton will diminish over time with so many people doing the same routes during a Community Goal. Conversely, with less people doing a normal route (because they are partaking in the CG), the profit per ton at your regular trade route may actually go up.
In Open play, there are further risks introduced:
- Your risk of getting interdicted increases enormously.
- During peak times, landing platforms can become congested, increasing the time it takes to run circuits and decreasing overall profit.
Conclusion
At this time, from a profit standpoint it makes sense to participate in community goals but only until you get comfortably into the top 40% (Tier C) bracket if your regular trading route is significantly more profitable. This is because the gains from the payout do not scale with the required effort to reach the higher tiers. In fact, there is an inverse relationship between the profit you gain per hour and the time spent achieving the goal as soon as you hit the first real tier cutoff (70%). In other words, the more you spend contributing to the goal, the less you earn until eventually you start earning less than you would have if you had stuck to a decently profitable commodity trade route.
Note that this is just based on my analysis of Diso data, but I looked over past Trading CG's and found similar payout scales, most often much lower because the max tiers were not reached in several of them. In fact I believe this is the highest payout we've seen so far for a Trading CG, but I could be wrong about that. So unless the payout is increased for the upper tiers in future CG's or the routes themselves are more profitable, it will remain true that it does not make sense to participate in them beyond the middle tier.
Also note that by me releasing this information, less people will try to reach the top tiers, making their cutoff points relatively easier to reach (thus making them more profitable). We can't fully know how this post will affect CG participation in the long run... (but probably not that much).
Cheers,
stoicfury
P.S. I just lost ~$16,000,000 in the time it took me to write this post.
But seriously, I do want to remind people this game isn't just about making the most money, it should be about having fun (for a lucky few people, those are one and the same). Indeed, it's fun for me to crunch numbers and expand human knowledge, so I hope you find this useful. It was interesting and fun to find this stuff out.
Last edited:
