Notice Notice regarding supply and demand of high-end minerals

I can see the logic for basing pricing on what's in your hold, since the station is predicting change in demand. It's not ideal but I can somewhat understand it.

I can guess some people wouldn't mind toning the variation in price down and raising the floor a tiny bit.
Except, why wouldn't it change based on how many I try to sell? If I'm trying to go system to system unloading my 700 painite why couldn't I get full price for 50 at a time?
 
Last time I check on the real stock market they didn't look in my portfolio and show me a lower price because I had a lot of shares. Fair enough changing the price and giving less if I flood the market, but stopping me selling at the market price because I might flood the market is ... weird. As I said :D
That's the shortcoming of the current implementation. The bulk tax itself makes sense, but it should be based on what you sell and not on what you have in your cargo hold. But what if you decide to sell your complete cargo in chunks of 10t? So we would need a system that keeps track of everything you sold over the last few transactions.
 
But what if you decide to sell your complete cargo in chunks of 10t? So we would need a system that keeps track of everything you sold over the last few transactions.

Well, there is a value there in the sell screen named: demand.
They only have to subtract what you sell from the demand and adjust the price based on demand.

Isn't all this storm about a market based on supply and demand? or is it based on cargo size?
 
There sould be no bulk tax, no taking into account how much of a commodity I have in my hold. FDev have implemented demand numbers to deal with large trades. Anything within demand should sell at an advertised unit price.

And if they want Supply & Demand then both the advertised price and the demand number should update at the server tick. It's dynamic enough that way without idiotic fake values being calculated on the fly.

Like the majority of unhappy people on this thread, I'm NOT against the LTD nerf, they were selling for stupid money. I'm against this really quite ludicrous fake mechanic.
 
They should simply pay the price advertised.
For up to the amount they need.
Then not buy anymore.
The price is already based on supply and demand.
It is obviously stupid to base the price on what you have - post hoc.
I sell 512t at x/n (n>1, x advertised price)
Someone then imediately sells 100t at x.
And no doubt:
Someone then imediately sells 100t at x.
Someone then imediately sells 100t at x.
Someone then imediately sells 100t at x.
Someone then imediately sells 100t at x.

Daft.
 
Well, there is a value there in the sell screen named: demand.
They only have to subtract what you sell from the demand and adjust the price based on demand.

Isn't all this storm about a market based on supply and demand? or is it based on cargo size?
Both.
 
This ... is so weird. I'm glad my local shops don't base their prices on what cash I have ...

It's not weird, what's actually happening is, the station has a demand for an amount, and as each unit is sold to it, the demand decreases, as you don't sell the items individually, this is ore calculated as though they were.

What would make this more clear however, is if it told you the original price based purely on demand, then showed some kind of representation of the value of your goods going down as they are sold.

I mean .. I guess it is weird, really, on an intuitive level.

What would probably be ideal, is if the station bought everything you had at the current demand price, then instantly updated the demand based on what you just sold, However, what if you have more than the demand?

The demand is ten, you have 700

Should you get the same price for the demand being ten, for other 690 that they don't really want?

That's the crux of it.
 
So I've been out for my walk and I was thinking about this, and I now think that what Frontier should have said to us at the outset is something like this:

"Folks, we think that mining profits have gotten way out of hand, so we're going to tone them down substantially. But we're worried that if we reduce them the right amount for players in large ships, players in smaller and medium ships will be unduly penalised.

"So we're going to introduce a Thargoid War Tax on Excessive Profits, where Commanders who can supply a significant percentage of a station's demand for a commodity are obliged to donate a substantial chunk of their profit to the War Effort - the exact amount being determined by the ratio of the Commander's supply to the station's demand. Like PAYE on salaries, this tax will be taken before payment for goods so all the Commander will see is the after-tax rate. Inevitably this tax will fall most heavily on wealthy Commanders with large ships, but in wartime that's only fair.

"Now some of you players may recognise this arrangement as the bulk sales fee of old, but by representing it as a tax we will spare you fruitless speculation as to how it may relate to actual laws of supply and demand. (It may not look particularly fair to you as a tax, but when did taxes ever look fair to the people who pay them?)

"We hope that players will see this as the fairest possible way of adjusting the current mining profit situation in a healthy - and, of necessity, downwards - direction."

If they'd done that at the outset most of us with large ships would, I like to think, have gone, "Grumble grumble oh well, I suppose yes it is sort of fair." And we would have been spared a quite unnecessary couple of weeks of FUD and annoyance.
 
When selling minerals at a station, the price that is offered is based on the amount currently in your Cargo Hold..

This is beyond stupid and that is not how supply and demand works. The price doesn't change because a guy holding a lot of shares walks into the pit of the stock market.

All this does is punish people for using certain ships and spending more time mining. The exact opposite of what it should be.
 
Last edited:
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.
Or ... just a thought ... one could recognize that there are multiple kinds of value in the game, and the various "professions" are effective at reaping different kinds of value.

For credits, mining is the one activity that delivers credits but almost nothing else of value. Exploration earns credits, but also the pride of having your name on bodies in the game. Missions can be a good way to earn credits, but can also be a good way to get materials and are the most important source of BGS effects. Combat is rarely a high-profit activity compared to any of these.

On the other hand, for getting materials, high-end combat can be a highly effective method for vacuuming up bulk quantities. Farming HGE USSs might be faster, but that doesn't deliver any credits or BGS effects or adrenaline rush. And completely different activities are needed for raw materials and some types of data.

Other things of value include BGS influence and conflict control, faction reputation and superpower rank, powerplay effects. You might even count unlocks (permits, engineers, tech broker modules) as things of value with their own associated gameplay. In the end, there's no one activity that does everything. And frankly, if you're doing combat for the credits, in most cases you're doing it wrong.
 
Well, there is a value there in the sell screen named: demand.
They only have to subtract what you sell from the demand and adjust the price based on demand.

Isn't all this storm about a market based on supply and demand? or is it based on cargo size?
Supply and demand is fine if it works, but it doesn't. We had market demand for 9165 LTD's in one of our smaller systems. So we decided to blockade the lone station to see if demand for LTD's increased. In 24 hours we prevented delivery of 2000+ tons of LTD's. Which in a working market would increase demand. Our blockade had exactly the opposite effect. Demand dropped to 5200!
 
  • When selling minerals at a station, the price that is offered is based on the amount currently in your Cargo Hold.
    • While this has always been the case, we've passed the feedback on to the team for consideration for a future improvement of the feature.
We believe that this change will allow for a much more realistic and dynamic system, where the economy responds to player input and provides a much more meaningful affect on galaxy. As always, we will continue to monitor your feedback and work together to develop our ever expanding galaxy.
So what exactly does this mean?

If I have exactly ONE VO in my Sidey, then will I get 1.5 million credits v. 100 VOs in my Krait for 15,000 credits?

I have one VO and find the only stations with 1 million + demand are 40+LY away. On arrival I find the demand was reduced to minimum during the trip. How does that affect the original 1.5 million credit that was originally offered for that one VO in my hold? e.g. the amount of station VO demand is say 0/100, and that resulted in a max demand of say 1.5M credits. But if on arrival, that demand was been reduced to 99/100 (with storage demand for only 1 VO) how does that affect the original 1.5M credit price I was being offered?

Will the market pricing dynamically change in the Galaxy map while flying en route to a station? Can you jump several star systems, re-check the galaxy map and dynamically see whether station demand is being meet by other Cmnders/NPCs en route to the station? Basically does this also mean we can now get dynamic updates of commodities prices in game without having to resort to using external 3rd party sites like eddbio?
 

Deleted member 192138

D
Supply and demand is fine if it works, but it doesn't. We had market demand for 9165 LTD's in one of our smaller systems. So we decided to blockade the lone station to see if demand for LTD's increased. In 24 hours we prevented delivery of 2000+ tons of LTD's. Which in a working market would increase demand. Our blockade had exactly the opposite effect. Demand dropped to 5200!
Can't blockade solo play
 
Dev.1 in the office: players say the economy is bad in the game, we must fix it

Dev2: they really only complain about the high prices of some goods

Dev3: let's lower the prices of only those goods and say that we fix the economy

Dev4 ( hold my beer) let's just lower the prices again and this time we say that we have reviewed the economy and the market again but that something is wrong for a long time that we will not review now, in the future it will be even better. It does not matter, some players do not appreciate when we try to help them and others will not know when we lie them, they will make their own spreadsheets and speculate something that not even we really know. 🤷‍♀️ 🍻🍻
 
Back
Top Bottom