Why is galactic average prices so low?

[cmdr borschtl]

I remember the averages being a lot higher. These low averages don't make sense. Why is galactic average for all these commodities so low?

 

[Codger]

I was able to buy water for 8 credits per ton.

 

[Jmanis]

Averages are actually way higher than they used to be... also don't confuse median with average. One or two stations buying, say, ltds at 1.5m doesn't change the fact 50,000 are buying them at 100k.

Also, galactic average is used when calculating many mission rewards. Since they're capped at 50m for (some reason[1]) if it's a good where the average is too high it'll create bad missions.

[1] specifically, higher than 50m creates missions which crash the board when you try to accept/ submit.

 

[Sapyx]

It should be pointed out that the "galactic averages" aren't actually calculated as an average price across the galaxy. Rather, the calculations work backwards. The "average price" is a number pulled out of thin air by FD and assigned to the commodity. Actual prices at a station are then calculated by taking the average price and running it through the BGS market algorithms.

If most of the galaxy were in Boom (as it was a few updates ago), then the actual "average galactic price" would be considerably higher than the reported average.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

Actual prices at a station are then calculated by taking the average price and running it through the BGS market algorithms.

Not even that - when they updated the average prices for various goods a few patches back, the actual prices didn't change (the changes that the average updates were reflecting having been made months or years previously)

The average price appears to be a hand-set value for the purpose of giving a nominal value to goods of that type not obtained from a real market.