Exactly
Notice Notice regarding supply and demand of high-end minerals
- Thread starter Stephen Benedetti
- Start date
Absolutely. It's less noticeable, but it's always been there.
When i trade, it's primarily for bgs purposes, but if (old mate... forget his name)'s guide is still valid, the sweet spot is around 1,000cr/t profit, and i factor that and the effect of bst in whenever I'm shifting goods. In particular, if my only option is a low value good at like 200cr/t profit which i need 600t of for a meaningful effect (because thats the only decent goods for sale) I'm particularly conscious of it because bst could turn that into a loss which is the opposite effect i want. Regardless, it's always at the front of my mind.
There's other suggestions of " it should be the price offered regardless for all cargo"... in which case I'd counter sure, but they also shouldn't buy more than their demand in that case.
When I'm actually playing I don't concern myself with profit from trade that much, odd though it may sound. I only ever really flew A > B trade in CGs anyway, most of my trade is either for missions or from mining (for years, not only recently). I'll fill up space with regular commodities but only if there's something I can sell at a decent profit in the system I'm going to anyway. If I was doing more BGS work I'd have to pay more attention but my main concern is usually my rep with factions, not their overall power position within the system and I can improve that with missions whilst also bagging g5 materials.
I still do rares runs sometimes, I've got three clusters of 5-6 systems bookmarked, goods from any cluster can be sold at any other cluster for best price and I can jump round a cluster in no time in an Asp. Obviously it's no issue for rares prices though.
Regardless I've read lots about the game and its mechanics over the years; just because something might not be central to my gameplay doesn't mean I don't want to have a handle on it and my understanding of the way pricing worked was certainly as you described.
Seems to me that you are trying to create a realistic supply and demand system that reacts to player engagement while ignoring the fact that there is an infinite supply. One can only assume that sale prices can only fall even if you artificially inflate the demand over time to compensate.
I think you need to make hotspots depletable.
You could then use the hotspot spawn frequency as a control to maintain sustained growth, flood and crash the market or increase rarity by increasing or decreasing spawn rates.
Mining will then require more thought and time in regards to tracking down hot spots. People will be less likely to share found locations and commanders will have greater impacts on the market in general.
I think you need to make hotspots depletable.
You could then use the hotspot spawn frequency as a control to maintain sustained growth, flood and crash the market or increase rarity by increasing or decreasing spawn rates.
Mining will then require more thought and time in regards to tracking down hot spots. People will be less likely to share found locations and commanders will have greater impacts on the market in general.
They could hire an economist instead of shooting in the dark for 5 years too.
First of
The minerals will be plenty, but the cost/expertise in another hand will be what will set the prices based on how much the civilization needs x mineral or z mineral.
Only one station that ED have probably needs Bilions/trilions of TONS of minerals to construct, the demmand they have set has a placeholder now its not even close of what a HUGE civilization that humans are on ED will require.
In theory supply is (Virtually) ilimited on terms of asteroid mining, expecially on a galactic cilvilization that humans are on ED.
The minerals will be plenty, but the cost/expertise in another hand will be what will set the prices based on how much the civilization needs x mineral or z mineral.
Only one station that ED have probably needs Bilions/trilions of TONS of minerals to construct, the demmand they have set has a placeholder now its not even close of what a HUGE civilization that humans are on ED will require.
All seems okay to me. I understand why they have done it for high value mined commodities. You can't get a loss from these, they are just pure profit whenever you sell so they had to do something, otherwise nobody would bother mining anything else.
Sure it's not perfect, but it's better then the ridiculous way it worked before.
Sure it's not perfect, but it's better then the ridiculous way it worked before.
The problem isn't that nobody bothers to mine anything else because the high-value commodities are too valuable. The problem is everything else pays so badly you can never reach return of investment. When I buy a piece of equipment with the purpose of making profit, I expect it to pay for itself, and then some. And in most cases in Elite: Dangerous, the ROI is so crud it's insane. Take bounty hunting. Pulling 10-30 mil/hr (on the high end, with stacked missions and conflict zones) in a high-risk scenario with a ship that might cost 300+ mil... Means around 10 hours of game play to recoup the cost. In something that's supposed to be enjoyable, as it's a game. That's neglecting the additional time sink of engineering, which some ships (Mamba, Courier come to mind) really require to even be useful.
The main reason I'm upset isn't that there's yet another nerf in the interest of balance. It's that the scale of balance is so disproportionate, in my opinion, that it takes too much effort to really get anywhere in Elite, making the whole experience diminished. I don't feel we need more nerfs. We need a few small buffs, to make it worthwhile to bounty hunt, to make risking your ship actually worth something. Exploring doesn't pay enough either, making it so few people leave the bubble other than "cuz it sounds fun." I'm not saying Void Opals and LTDs weren't selling too high -- it was a little insane, especially after tricks were learned to faster identify the crackable rocks. But if there was other ways to earn credits, it wouldn't have been such a huge rush.
My own two American cents.
At the next paid expansion FD will release, don't forget to tell us how many copies do you have so we can offer a realistic price.
thanks
I really loved this GAME.
I don't care about this so-called "plausible" and "realistic economy". I don't want to work up my way through the different ships or be able to compete in PvP (aka jousting past one another and hoping to hit with a minor set of maxed-out builds). I don't even enjoy mining, but it was a feasible way to get the required credits for my favored style of play.
I worked my ass off to grind through federation and empire to unlock their ships. Ditto with engineering. Ditto with guardian modules. Every aspect of this game is a grind.
As I said: I love(d) this game. I bought cosmetics and even the stupid fake currency (aka ARX). I was hyped for fleet carriers and more content, but the interesting stuff gets delayed again and again. The only thing happening on a regular scale is the big nerf hammer. So it seems that customers aren't allowed to have any fun.
The "fix" to mining is another of the same, even if they originally said it was working as intended.
I want to PLAY this game, not WORK it - it is not my day job.
So yeah, consider another one of your paying customers lost.
I don't care about this so-called "plausible" and "realistic economy". I don't want to work up my way through the different ships or be able to compete in PvP (aka jousting past one another and hoping to hit with a minor set of maxed-out builds). I don't even enjoy mining, but it was a feasible way to get the required credits for my favored style of play.
I worked my ass off to grind through federation and empire to unlock their ships. Ditto with engineering. Ditto with guardian modules. Every aspect of this game is a grind.
As I said: I love(d) this game. I bought cosmetics and even the stupid fake currency (aka ARX). I was hyped for fleet carriers and more content, but the interesting stuff gets delayed again and again. The only thing happening on a regular scale is the big nerf hammer. So it seems that customers aren't allowed to have any fun.
The "fix" to mining is another of the same, even if they originally said it was working as intended.
I want to PLAY this game, not WORK it - it is not my day job.
So yeah, consider another one of your paying customers lost.
How can you not reach return on investment when there are no costs involved? You already have your ship. You are not in any debt.
It actually makes sense. I just ordered some tiles. Price for 1m2 is 20 EUR. I needed 120m2 and the price dropped to 17 EUR per m2.
The problem in Elite is that you can't just sell 10 units of the stuff and move on to the next market for getting maximum profits because the market always assumes you are going to sell it all and adjusts prices accordingly. Fixing that behaviour is kind of complicated.
I have the ship I paid 50 million credits for. That is 50 million credits out of my available assets, that I expect that ship to earn in a reasonable time. It's even worse in the case of my (now retired) mining 'conda. 200 million spent on the ship, which pre-January "patch," earned its worth over the course of about four hours. Now I wouldn't even bother because since it's main purpose was mass core mining, and having more ores now is much worse than having fewer, it's just extra cost for less profit.
The cost of the ship is the "debt" that the ship itself needs to pay off to have value to have been purchased, equipped, and god forbid engineered in the first place. If it's not gaining me credits, than in a game where credits are the single limiting factor in what I can do in said game, it's setting me back and useless.
In the current balance of the CR earnings in-game, if I spend 1 bil+ on a combat Cutter for PvE, I will need to spend at the very least 30 hours, and more likely approaching 100 hours, in combat, in that ship, in order for that ship to recover the cost I spent on it. My argument is that is obscene, for a video game.
And this would matter because......?
If it's either the game going in the right direction or DunkleAura leaving the game... Bye...
I agree that the system needs some refinement (like basically everything in Elite) but the outrage about it is quite ridiculous.
That doesn't matter. You already paid for that from doing something else. What you are saying is ridiculous.
That's not debt. It's an asset.
I disagree I find it obscene you can recover those huge costs in a game like ED which is meant to be played over a long period of time in such a short amount of time. Surely that is all part of playing the game.
If it's all handed to you on a plate. What's the point. You might as well.have a credit button that refills your credits whenever you want. Oh yes we had that with void Opel's. Thankfully FDev have fixed the ridiculous way it worked before. It's still extremely good though, just not as good as it was.
Because it makes those parts of the game pointless. No point in having them in at all. Might as well remove them.
Where are you going in elite to need more money than you already can make? You PvP to rebuy in cutter on daily basis, or maybe you attack stations in corvette, you transfer big ships to Colonia? All expansive ships are best in generating more money than anything else, so i m curious.
Nope, afaik the bulk sale tax is there to make small ships more viable. I personally would love to see it gone, it makes no sense in my opinion (muh immersion). Furthermore it's not mentioned or explained anywhere so I'm sure 99.9% of players don't know of it (as this thread shows).
Not including LTDs obviously was an oversight and needs to be fixed. All in all a good response.
