Cheap commodities being...useless?

[Deleted member 110222]

Am I the only one who follows supply & demand in the game and trades what people want?

Then again, I RP hard. I'll haul anything as long as it's legal.

Helps I have the only ships I care about too, the Cobras & my Sidewinder.

 

[Barmatyr]

Make profit or not, valuable or not, trade or not trade, no matter in Elite so go on !!!

The question is, is there something usefull in Elite ??? Shoot them up don't care too much about anything than destroy and shoot ship, go on !


NB: I think pathetic to call anything trading in Elite, trade need economic system. Is there in Elite ???

 

[Ignition]

Yes, cheap or tier 1 commodities are worthless. Its even worst when you think there's no economy chain at all.

 

[Banana's_Are_Good_For_You]

Yes, cheap or tier 1 commodities are worthless. Its even worst when you think there's no economy chain at all.

They're only worthless in terms of credits and even then they can be used to get to one of the more lucrative routes so a player doesn't lose money. If everything rewarded the same, or even with only a small margin of difference, things would get tired really, really fast.
Some also have other uses but they seem lost on many because there is no instant gratification so they don't see the effect they can have, especially if efforts are co-ordinated.
I don't profess to understand everything about how certain good's can affect other factions, both in a good and bad way, or even when they might be at their most useful but I see enough in the game for me to hunt about and try different things, checking out their States and Governments among other things to keep me amused.

Prices rise and fall all the time in this game. You trade a low cost item too much and the price can skyrocket.

Players just want to do it the easy way these days. Back in the original games it was all about the learning and that's one of the main reason people played it so long.

I'll be honest and say it's not all it could be but I think a lot of what is in the game currently is being overlooked because a lot of players think that it's all about farming credits as fast as you can and that will get the rewards you seek, when it's not all about the money.

They said in the recent Trading live-stream that they're looking into ways for prices to be more dynamic which would be great, especially if tied to a disaster, may it be a basic famine or something affecting the supply of some good.

 

[iFred]

So I was thinking about all the cheap stuff that we have at our disposal, and how literally nobody trade it thanks to laughably little value per ton. Currently only very expensive commodities make sense while doing point to point hauling.
What if commodities were not measured in strictly 1 ton per unit, but had different mass for every specific commodity.
1 unit of rare ore can take over full 1t cargo space, but cost alot. At the same time 1 unit of very cheap commodity could be 0.1 or even 0.05 ton, so you could fit 10-20 of those in 1t cargo space and bringing profit/t more in line with the most attractive goods.
I understand that it's very easy to mess up this system, by equalizing all goods and making trading even more boring. But something should be done, there's just no point in having so many commodity types. It's a wasted potential.
Thoughts on proposed solution?

Useless for the pilot, yes. Egoism-like-players don´t see the demand and supply for the factions.

 

[Bazorlag]

There are no real bulk traders in game yet. Considering the scale of things, you´d probably want something like that to shift goods that have low profit per tonne but are also in constant demand.

 

[Jezzah]

I've always felt since beta that the trading goods were very lack lustre. I don't dispute that a certain amount of them should be there for various reasons but it occurs to me that all these systems in the bubble should have their own special commodities. Like rare goods maybe a system only produces 1 sort of thing but others could have multiple.

These goods might do something particularly well, and would be useful in combating or strengthening various aspects of the states of systems. For instance a system might be experiencing famine...yes you could use general food items from the standard table and get a decent price for it but if you fly to hurgleburgle you can get hurgleburgle meat expander which will net you a great price on the famine state planet.

Something like this gives a place for the standard commodity table, but for the trader that wants to go a little deeper and make some more money for his effort and business sense then this could be interesting.

 

[Vasious]

For Goods to be in supply, they should have demands met, ie to encourage an Industrial station to produce more computer components, they raw materials need to be fed in, those computer components then are fed to high tech worlds in order that the Tech goods can be supplied, etc etc

Stations should need a certain quantity of essential goods based on their economy type to help trigger positive economic effect, or avoid negative ones for their minor factions, and the economic effect drastically effect demands, so a boom would call for luxury foods and consumer goods, expansions requiring equipment and supplies.

 

[Han Brannigan]

If trading expensive commodities is more of a risk ( esp with things like the T6/7/9 ) commanders will go back to trade cheaper stuff...

 

[Barking_Mad]

I was asked to transport food cos people were hungry. I was doing it for the faction reputation increase, but as well as taking the mission I bought some extra food and took it with me. End result was a (small) loss when I sold it to the starving masses.

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Clearly not everything can make a big profit otherwise we'd be having the "why does everything pay so well" conversation. But a bit of nuance would be nice, unless I'm missing it

 

[SirAdelaide]

If there was a background simulation, the sell price would react to number of traders. If no one shipped fish, buy price would drop and sell price would rise, until the profit was similar to trading Slaves. Then people would trade the fish, and price would stabilise. This mechanism would lead to stations at great distances paying high prices, making them worth visiting.

Unfortunately, there is no background simulation.

 

[Bokugo]

For Goods to be in supply, they should have demands met, ie to encourage an Industrial station to produce more computer components, they raw materials need to be fed in, those computer components then are fed to high tech worlds in order that the Tech goods can be supplied, etc etc

Stations should need a certain quantity of essential goods based on their economy type to help trigger positive economic effect, or avoid negative ones for their minor factions, and the economic effect drastically effect demands, so a boom would call for luxury foods and consumer goods, expansions requiring equipment and supplies.

It would be cool to see a station's "quota" for the week/month. Like a mini CG with no extra rewards just system advancement/decline

 

[tomalus]

guys dont waste your time, trade the high profit goods only, the cheaper goods are only in game for missions and to stifle player piracy. Also if you are in smaller ships (below 200 cargo) bounty hunting or smuggling is much better profit these days then bulk trade.

 

[Snarfbuckle]

I would really like if they started to treat commodities as RARES in regards to the closest market.

So a system far away from it's closest Agricultural System would pay more than another system closer to the same system due to range.

So ferrying goods to Robigo Mines would be VERY profitable but the return trip would not since there are closer markets nearer the core.

So add a +1% increased price per LY a target system is from a selling system.

So Robigo Mines would be 300 LY from the nearest agricultural market and give a +300% profit on all Agricultural goods.

Inside the bubble it would be more of a challenge to find trade routes and the galactic average would stay mostly the same but it would at least have markets and distance MEAN something.

 

[Boomer Kay]

You keep believing that.
Keeps y'all off my highly profitable trading route (per hour, not per turn .. yea, trading tools don't give that info might require some testing and math ).

And .. yea .. every economic transaction has an influence on your reputation and the BGS.
499 barrels of scrap in the hold, 499 barrels of scrap. Pull one out, sell it cheap, 498 barrels of scrap in the hold ..

 

[Soliluna]

You might find this interesting.

Everything You Need to Know About Trading
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-td2wGThBQA

Thanks for linking that.

God is it terrible, no offence to the guy with Ed but he sucks at explaining and is a really terrible person to be used to explain anything in a video. More so he just seems to draw attention to the obvious problems with the trading system and yet offers no workable solution despite there being such simple solutions possible. And his constantly saying "yeah?" is so frustrating.

(can't literally quote something so poorly communicated) "People are talking about how useless cheaper commodities are so to address this we are making high security less profitable and low security more profitable".

A solution that does nothing to address the problem communicated, I'm not sure if he was using it as an awkward segue into communicating a change or whether they actually think that addresses the issue.


Such a simple problem to fix. Make all commodities have the same thresholds (max and min) so that supply and demand actually determines the cost of the goods. All that would need to be tweaked is the ratios that determine how much supply and demand is required to push the cost up and down. Not only would this make all of the commodities worthwhile it would make a hell of a lot more sense.

You would have goods with stable prices (high supply/demand, therefore low effect on price through trading) and goods with unstable prices (low supply/demand more easily effected by trading). This would encourage people to search about while trading - knowing that they could rely on the stable commodities for income between certain station types but also find rare stations offering more lucrative trades that remain lucrative until their stocks or demand have dwindled.

At the same time they should stop with the bull of arbitrating supply and demand during BGS refreshes.

 

[Jukelo]

Prices rise and fall all the time in this game. You trade a low cost item too much and the price can skyrocket.

No they can't. That's the issue. Each good has a baseline price, and then hard limits as to how high or low that price can go anywhere in the galaxy. This means that even selling low value goods from a station at the lowest price multiplier (high supply) to another station at the highest price multiplier (highest demand), you will make way less money than selling gold, resonating separators, palladium, (imp) slaves and the likes, which are found pretty much everywhere in the bubble, even at only moderate supply and demand levels. In that situation, you end up with just what is happening right now, nobody has a serious incentive to trade in the low value goods.

 

[Boomer Kay]

No they can't. That's the issue. Each good has a baseline price, and then hard limits as to how high or low that price can go anywhere in the galaxy.

When was the last time you bought a frozen pizza for more than 5 bucks at a supermarket? And how high do you think the profit margin on that 1,99 Pizza really is?

In that situation, you end up with just what is happening right now, nobody has a serious incentive to trade in the low value goods.

Well, the incentives are not obvious.
If you don't consider them serious enough to bother with .. as I said .. nothing to see here, move along. ;p

 

[Derath]

If there was a background simulation, the sell price would react to number of traders. If no one shipped fish, buy price would drop and sell price would rise, until the profit was similar to trading Slaves. Then people would trade the fish, and price would stabilise. This mechanism would lead to stations at great distances paying high prices, making them worth visiting.

Unfortunately, there is no background simulation.

Actually this is a common misconception about the system, everything you are saying about the background sim is true but only if its a small scale system, it isn't, players account for like 0.01% of the traffic at a major port which is why you don't see price changes on any real scale.

Taking your example, if nobody trades fish what happens? You'd think the price for fish would increase, but actually fish is still being traded an enormous amount by the background sim just not by players. The only place you see major changes in prices is extremely fringe ports which genuinely receive very little sim traffic either.

This is why (at least from what I understand) the prices at release were so tight, profit margins were tiny in the range of 300~ max because there was even more background trading than there is now. Once they toned this down you get the current values.

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When was the last time you bought a frozen pizza for more than 5 bucks at a supermarket? And how high do you think the profit margin on that 1,99 Pizza really is?

probably 1 to 1.5. Profit margins are almost always higher than people expect them to be unless its a highly competitive market/high tech. Televisions for example have relatively low profit margins on the bottom range models and it increases as you get towards the better sets.

But Coca Cola costs a fraction of a penny per litre and has an astronomical profit margin (for selling delicious brown water)

 

[Han Brannigan]

Actually this is a common misconception about the system, everything you are saying about the background sim is true but only if its a small scale system, it isn't, players account for like 0.01% of the traffic at a major port which is why you don't see price changes on any real scale.

Taking your example, if nobody trades fish what happens? You'd think the price for fish would increase, but actually fish is still being traded an enormous amount by the background sim just not by players. The only place you see major changes in prices is extremely fringe ports which genuinely receive very little sim traffic either.

But then why do those simulated traders trade in fish if they could make 10x the money trading in gold ( for example )