High-end mining material prices seem maybe a little bit TOO volatile

[Deluvian]

Ok, but if it is based on quantity you're bringing, one thing I cannot understand (keep in mind I am trying to learn how to use Commodity Map to find the best market), and that one thing is: why the hell do I see in Commodity Map an attractive price and when I land there it drops drastically? What is the map showing? I thought it'd be also the price based on my cargo.. but it does not look like.. if it was at least consistent this way, the "wonderful update" would be digestible.. For now - it sucks for me

oh, and I downsized from T9 to Python to get a better price - the relative is the same and finding the market is just tedious (or I just cannot get it). The problem with this though is, not much changed: it is the game that you cannot really learn easily much about the game, you need to learn it from outside sources and primarily experience of hundreds of other commanders

o7

 

[babelfisch]

The more obvious logic is that the opinions on display on these forums are not represntive of the wider community. And that's hardly surprising, as it's the same few individuals posting the same opinion over and over, post after post.

Nothing new there then...same old forums.

Are your subscribers representative for the wider community though?
Anyway, even if they are, it just means that people like lots of money. That doesn't mean that lots of money is good for the game though.
A stupid real life analogy would be to ask everyone in the world if they want a million dollars. Everyone says yes and due to inflation their money isn't worth much anymore.
Of course that doesn't translate well into the game, but it shows how our answers and wishes aren't always in our best interest. A game with a print money button isn't well designed and not much fun in the long run.

 

[TheSisko]

I wonder... if we are addressing this as a single issue, when maybe it's a couple (or more). Cost fluctuations and the appropriate price for commodities are two separate issues to mining/trading. I agree that volatility should be considered, and I would add to that, pilot's ability to track that volatility in-game.

Still trying to figure out how you launch a game with an "economy" and no way to actually view sell/buy costs of prospective markets -- so bad that players had to build their own tools to collect market data until updates (about 2 years later?) started sharing market data in-game. And my experience with the in-game market tools seem to always lead me back to the player-created ones (like eddb.io, etc.) However, like the OP observed, if the data accessible on the market is outdated by the time a ship full of goods can reach it, then it becomes a bit of a crapshoot. I hope this isn't FDEV's way to slowly make player-based market tools obsolete, and force the playerbase to use the in-game tools; not without significantly changing the way the in-game tools work.

I'm not sure the in-game tools are 100% accurate any more. Suffice to say I had a real struggle trying to sell Battle Weapons for a profit the other day. Went to 3 markets that would usually pay me a profit and according to in-game tools, they would when I got there 5 minutes later, and....yeah, in the end I gave up and sold them for a 1M CR loss. Had the same situation while attempting to sell Narcotics. I suspect the figures given in-game are not taking the current demand figures into account, at least, not all the time.

Everyone knew about the mining changes for this release but there was no mention of general demand changes for everything else, not in the patch notes and not for the beta.

Seems like the majority of my recent gameplay focused on gaining credits to purchase a unicorn...eh...sorry...Fleet Carrier (to each their own.) So when weighing options between trading/ mining/ bounty hunting/ piracy, VO mining best fit my playstyle/ RL time constraints/ goals. Nothing even came close to the CR/hour. Call that un-balanced if you want, call it a feature if you want. I could see why people are ed. But we live/play in FDEV's world (galaxy), something they seem to remind us of every time an update comes around. If they want stations to buy VOs for 1CR/ton they can set that, and the playerbase will then adjust -- or stop playing. "Gold rushes" be they passenger missions, skimmer missions, or VO/LTD/Double Painite mining, seem to have been a way of life in this place for a long time and will probably continue. Who knows maybe the next get-rich-quick scheme will involve buying Biowaste at Jameson Memorial, where we know the supply is always high...

Yeah, its Frontier's bed and we lie in it, and I too grabbed that extra half-a-billion while I could because I'm thinking ahead and thinking long term about Fleet Carriers and probably, Personal Bases - both of which won't be cheap.

But the fact I haven't done a Mining Mission from 3.4 to now is telling. I'm all for Gold-rushes but surely being able to go from Sidewinder to Condy within a day is...... detrimental to the game, or at least, a player's understanding of it. Cue those players rage-quitting because they haven't learnt the basics of how to defend their Harmless Corvette from a DBS.

It took me months to get a Condy and my personal narrative to get my first Cutter was epic. Looking back, I wouldn't change a thing, and I'm glad that the economy (back then anyway) forced me to take that journey.

 

[Hossi]

Okay, here is my take on it.

Mining profits were way to high. Don't get me wrong, I like easy money. Who doesn't? I've erarned billions in mining.
But the mining profits were unbalanced.
Unbalanced against all other activities. And unbalanced against all costs as well.
Not only made the 150MCr/h of Vopal mining all other activities irrelevant in respect to income, it also completly removed cash scarcity as a gameplay element. If you can earn an A-rated cutter in less than 4 hours, money loses all its meaning. This maks immediatly 80% of the ships and modules in this game obsolete.
So yes, a nerf was required.
The problem with this kind of nerf is, that it ruins the entire trade system.

There are 40000 populated systems in the bubble. How do you find systems to buy or sell from or to? With Inara or EDDB, or by guessing based on the system state.
The ingame tools are completly inadequate. And they got even more useless with the recent update, they don't reflect rapit demand changes.
When I started playing, I googled 'elite dangerous how to find xyz' about once every 30 minutes. I stoped googling once I bookmarked Inara and EDDB. I consider these tools essential to playing this game.
But these tools require player input data to work with, and this data is often several days old. Weeks or months are not uncommon. With prices changing in seconds, they cannot work.
I think its time to add a 'search market' tool to the game.
And please, don't make the same mistake like you did with the 'service' filter on the Galmap and limit it to an arbitrary range (for whatever reason) thus making it completly useless.

 

[Northpin]

Just shows 49% have no interest playing the game, just win it quickly as possible.

You really think that having 20bn mean i won the game and i should stop playing?

 

[babelfisch]

Okay, here is my take on it.

Mining profits were way to high. Don't get me wrong, I like easy money. Who doesn't? I've erarned billions in mining.
But the mining profits were unbalanced.
Unbalanced against all other activities. And unbalanced against all costs as well.
Not only made the 150MCr/h of Vopal mining all other activities irrelevant in respect to income, it also completly removed cash scarcity as a gameplay element. If you can earn an A-rated cutter in less than 4 hours, money loses all its meaning. This maks immediatly 80% of the ships and modules in this game obsolete.
So yes, a nerf was required.
The problem with this kind of nerf is, that it ruins the entire trade system.

There are 40000 populated systems in the bubble. How do you find systems to buy or sell from or to? With Inara or EDDB, or by guessing based on the system state.
The ingame tools are completly inadequate. And they got even more useless with the recent update, they don't reflect rapit demand changes.
When I started playing, I googled 'elite dangerous how to find xyz' about once every 30 minutes. I stoped googling once I bookmarked Inara and EDDB. I consider these tools essential to playing this game.
But these tools require player input data to work with, and this data is often several days old. Weeks or months are not uncommon. With prices changing in seconds, they cannot work.
I think its time to add a 'search market' tool to the game.
And please, don't make the same mistake like you did with the 'service' filter on the Galmap and limit it to an arbitrary range (for whatever reason) thus making it completly useless.

Just guessing here but maybe the limited range of filters isn't there to annoy us but simply to reduce network traffic.

 

[Northpin]

[/QUOTE]

Just guessing here but maybe the limited range of filters isn't there to annoy us but simply to reduce network traffic.

now the network traffic is compressed.
maybe they should increase the range?

 

[babelfisch]

now the network traffic is compressed.
maybe they should increase the range?

As I said above, it's just guessing. The question is how they store market data and such things, if it's somehow related to the procedural galaxy (I hope not), how much needs to be calculated in order to retrieve that data, and how much traffic that creates.
There are like 100000 stations with hundred goods which change their values dynamically each second based on player action. Getting all that information is certainly not impossible, I don't know how efficient their system is designed though.

 

[lenna]

Just guessing here but maybe the limited range of filters isn't there to annoy us but simply to reduce network traffic.

Probably, not just network traffic but also server load. The latter could still be a concern even with data compression libraries.

 

[Oldviboy]

Demand today began to increase in several systems, I have been mining and the prices of VO and diamonds are already 1,200,000, do not take it bad guys, but there are many speculations around here.

 

[lenna]

Demand today began to increase in several systems, I have been mining and the prices of VO and diamonds are already 1,200,000, do not take it bad guys, but there are many speculations around here.

Sounds about right, but if people keep mining loads of the stuff and try to offload it faster than the economy can absorb there will be continued complaints about market volatility.

If I were FD, I would have probably introduced an update to scale NPC assassination attempts in accordance with bank balance of the target - those with excessive amounts of credits would then be constantly hounded by NPC assassins and pirates regardless of whether they were carrying or not - and I am talking waves upon waves of them. Not the odd one or two we usually see IME.

 

[Oldviboy]

Sounds about right, but if people keep mining loads of the stuff and try to offload it faster than the economy can absorb there will be continued complaints about market volatility.

If I were FD, I would have probably introduced an update to scale NPC assassination attempts in accordance with bank balance of the target - those with excessive amounts of credits would then be constantly hounded by NPC assassins and pirates regardless of whether they were carrying or not - and I am talking waves upon waves of them. Not the odd one or two we usually see IME.

according to what I have seen, I have really been visiting a lot of systems, the old prices that are still marked are false, you must revisit the stations, once you do this, you can already keep track of the stations you have visited , all the data we had so far does not work .... what I did was land a lot of times in several stations, now I can follow the market of those stations, but really what I always do, is to sell every time in different stations , there are so many systems and stations that I don't think I only affect the market, you worry too much about it, everything is quite volatile if you don't do bgs.

 

[gorankar]

Deleted by user

 

[Oldviboy]

[QUOTE = "rlsg, publicación: 8251717, miembro: 95075"]

If I were FD, I would have probably introduced an update to scale NPC assassination attempts in accordance with bank balance of the target - those with excessive amounts of credits would then be constantly hounded by NPC assassins and pirates regardless of whether they were carrying or not - and I am talking waves upon waves of them. Not the odd one or two we usually see IME

[/ CITAR]

Just for the sake of doing a more complicated activity than flying in a straight line ?why you didn't try it? - today I did it after months, I'm not a regular miner.
Some users should understand that it is a heavy activity, (deep mining, no painite), and therefore it is logical that it is better rewarded than simply jumping from one system to another, how can it even be similar to mining to transport passengers or materials? , we must look for asteroids, exploit them, collect them ... what is the difficulty of jumping from one system to another? in those missions we should be persecuted not by waves of pirates, but yes by thargoids enraged.

 

[Jmanis]

As I said above, it's just guessing. The question is how they store market data and such things, if it's somehow related to the procedural galaxy (I hope not), how much needs to be calculated in order to retrieve that data, and how much traffic that creates.
There are like 100000 stations with hundred goods which change their values dynamically each second based on player action. Getting all that information is certainly not impossible, I don't know how efficient their system is designed though.

When any more than 100 missions causes the mission servers to timeout and crash, I'd suggest that trying to get that much info real-time would bring the game to it's knees.

 

[lenna]

according to what I have seen, I have really been visiting a lot of systems, the old prices that are still marked are false, you must revisit the stations, once you do this, you can already keep track of the stations you have visited , all the data we had so far does not work .... what I did was land a lot of times in several stations, now I can follow the market of those stations, but really what I always do, is to sell every time in different stations , there are so many systems and stations that I don't think I only affect the market, you worry too much about it, everything is quite volatile if you don't do bgs.

Sounds like it should have been in the first place - you do not have to visit every system by the way, you can always purchase trade data for a system from the galaxy map - not sure how complete it will be.

As of 3.6, it seems the rate of consumption may be more realistic thus if enough people try to do the mining meta with too much cargo on a regular basis - 200+ VO/Painite for example then the markets will naturally be volatile since they will be burst flooding the market. Given maximum demand levels for these commodities (at least VOs) seem to be of the order of about 20k units/T per station it would not take many players doing this to cause the described effect (c. 50-100 players per station - that is not alot of players when you consider that is across all platforms).

There is no real case for the levels of earning some were making doing mining pre-3.6.

 

[Oldviboy]

Sounds like it should have been in the first place - you do not have to visit every system by the way, you can always purchase trade data for a system from the galaxy map - not sure how complete it will be.

As of 3.6, it seems the rate of consumption may be more realistic thus if enough people try to do the mining meta with too much cargo on a regular basis - 200+ VO/Painite for example then the markets will naturally be volatile since they will be burst flooding the market. Given maximum demand levels for these commodities (at least VOs) seem to be of the order of about 20k units/T per station it would not take many players doing this to cause the described effect (c. 50-100 players per station - that is not alot of players when you consider that is across all platforms).

There is no real case for the levels of earning some were making doing mining pre-3.6.

Yes, I know, but I think that you cant buy the data of a system you visited before, so after the update it forces you to visit them again. (I really don't know how the data purchase works, sometimes I don't see them or I haven't seen them in a while )
But honestly, I stopped using or seeing trade tools and data long ago in the game, when I was only transporting merchandise, with deep mining I simply jump from system to system and sell it to whoever pays me the most.
And since I do mining quite relaxed, sometimes it takes me 2 game sessions / 2 days to fill an opals ship, so everything can change and I don't keep track of the market.
playing alone there is no time to analyze so many things or so deeply, I am just jumping, or looking at inara, I will not lie to you, in case there was a station nearby, I do not use more third-party tools.
but before I had enough trade data in the bubble, now all that disappeared after the patch I think, I'm visiting a lot of systems now to leave them updated, if that's how I think it works.


Edit:and if I'm not mistaken, today they had to retouch something, yesterday in many stations the demand for opals was close to 0 in many stations I visited, I don't know if it's due to the players or fdev.

 

[lenna]

Yes, I know, but I think that you cant buy the data of a system you visited before, so after the update it forces you to visit them again. (I really don't know how the data purchase works, sometimes I don't see them or I haven't seen them in a while )

They seem to be limited by range from your current location - not sure exactly how many Ly but it is not that far - if I were to guess <30 Ly possibly <15 Ly.

Either way, the overriding point still stands - those that got used to higher incomes from mining are just going to have to suck it up and diversify. Just don't be surprised if your profits get squeezed even further in a future update. FD have done similar things in the past, pre-v3.x.

 

[Oldviboy]

They seem to be limited by range from your current location - not sure exactly how many Ly but it is not that far - if I were to guess <30 Ly possibly <15 Ly.

Either way, the overriding point still stands - those that got used to higher incomes from mining are just going to have to suck it up and diversify. Just don't be surprised if your profits get squeezed even further in a future update. FD have done similar things in the past, pre-v3.x.

I am not one of those who got used to it, I slightly increased my account with it, I got almost all my ships before knowing the mining ,repeating missions of passengers and merchandise, but believe me, mining can be easy money, but after filling an opal python you don't want to do it again,
it seems to me even to a sacrifice .... another thing is to undermine pain with lasers which is somewhat less complicated.
People who made videos making records and stuff, I don't think they enjoy it too much.
I like to do several things, give more money or not. But having money gives you the opportunity to focus on other activities such as finding materials for engineers and others. My money usually goes for the transfer of long-distance boats, or buy them and leave them in a place far away for future activity.

 

[lenna]

mining can be easy money

Mining has always been easy money if you are sensible in how you go about it, the only real issues are that it typically is a repetitive process with little by way of actual skill and typically a mining ship has to have it's combat capability sacrificed at least a little too which can make fighting pirates a bit interesting. Pre-3.x I had mainly focused on mining Gold and lesser materials with only one session mining Painite (IIRC?) specifically to unlock one of the Engineers.

For some, the pre-3.x mining mechanics (mining laser) were more than adequate but some others complained about a lack of investment in it hence the addition of deep core mining and abrasion blasters in 3.x. One of the biggest mistakes FD have made with the new mechanics is their implementation of analysis and combat modes. This split has generally made gameplay on the whole more tedious and irritating.

Pre-3.x, I had a few ships geared up for mining (Cobra Mk IV, Python, Anaconda) and was generally happy to take them out on occasions to engage in a bit of mining (Gold and some lesser materials normally) but TBH the 3.x changes overall (primarily the FSS+DSS changes though) so badly impacted on my overall enjoyment of ED that I have not played ED as much as I used to pre-3.x. To date, since the introduction of the mining changes I have not engaged in any more mining and if anything the claims about Deep Core/Abrasion blaster mining being high yield money trees put me off doing any more mining in general. Similar things can be said about various other money earning exploits that FD had eventually put a cap on.

Only fairly recently (sometime last year - 2019), did I retool my pre-3.x mining craft (CM4, Pyt, Ana) with at least some of the new tools but I have yet to build up the gumption to do some test mining sessions in them (so I can tune their builds appropriately). I still find the gameplay changes of 3.x irritating in the extreme but ED is one of the few games with both a decent VR implementation and a general universe setting I like.

FD have generally speaking made numerous errors in judgement over the course of the 3.x updates BUT the 3.6 changes give some hope that FD are perhaps getting back on track.