Players could avoid it yes, but I was thinking more of NPCs
Does Elite Need a Market Reform?
- Thread starter Gleitfrosch
- Start date
Yes - the extra point here is that in the context of a game, this is a good thing, or at least better than the alternative.
All in-game economic activities need to be at least somewhat profitable, or people won't do them. Furthermore, there needs to be a tier of activities which are profitable even for complete beginners, so that they can get started. So obviously more established players have a wide range of options which are "can't fail" in terms of making money.
Whereas in a real economy, there's absolutely no guarantee at all that if you do stuff for five years you'll end up better off than when you started. But the real economy can get away with that sort of poor design because you can't opt out of it and play No Mans Sky instead until they change their mind.
So if everyone succeeds, anyone who has been playing for a while is of course going to get pretty rich - I've been playing since the 1.1 release, and while most of that play has been horrendously suboptimal from the point of view of "make money fast", it did still almost always make me more credits than it cost. So now I have a Fleet Carrier, a fleet, and several spare billions in cash. And that's on average earnings even now of only 50M/week, which someone even vaguely optimal could make in well under an hour.
There is certainly plenty to think about, but frontier could still do some rather limited changes to make things more realistic. A small example: I sat outside a refinery settlement and scanned the T7s as they landed and then took off shortly after: they had raw minerals as they arrived and the same raw minerals as they left :-(
It despawned anyway at some point - those minerals are never really delivered. It's just for show.
To add an entirely unhelpful addition to the discussion..
I must be playing incredibly sub-optimally
I've been playing since the early Betas and have no where near enough for a Fleet Carrier I do have a small fleet of ships parked in various places but if I sold everything I'd still be short a good ways.
Still, been fun though.
I don't mind people being rich or getting rich (relatively) quickly, I'd just like things to make a modicum of sense in terms of relative costs and what/where/how you can trade stuff.
Make everything buyable and create those needed credit sinks because (imagine a Homer Simpson Voice): "Money can be exchanged for goods and services"
You don't want to farm Engineering Mats? Buy them! Every G5 Material only 50 Million credits!
Where is my Odyssey Settlement that I can buy to create Odyssey Engineering Mats over time? Only 2 Billion for a small Mining one, but don't underestimate the costs of raiding. Better buy a command settlement in the same system for only 8 Billion that protects your other settlements. Better have an insurance too, only 10 million per week and settlement!
You want to stay in space?
An Coriolis Star Port built in Alcor every 2 weeks via an permanent community goal: Only 150 Billions for Produktion and 2 Billion for every 10 Lightyears transport.
You want no cheap Coriolis, you want the Ocellus: 800 Billions with 4 weeks global production time but better buy now, because the waiting time is already 4 Months!
You don't want to farm Engineering Mats? Buy them! Every G5 Material only 50 Million credits!
Where is my Odyssey Settlement that I can buy to create Odyssey Engineering Mats over time? Only 2 Billion for a small Mining one, but don't underestimate the costs of raiding. Better buy a command settlement in the same system for only 8 Billion that protects your other settlements. Better have an insurance too, only 10 million per week and settlement!
You want to stay in space?
An Coriolis Star Port built in Alcor every 2 weeks via an permanent community goal: Only 150 Billions for Produktion and 2 Billion for every 10 Lightyears transport.
You want no cheap Coriolis, you want the Ocellus: 800 Billions with 4 weeks global production time but better buy now, because the waiting time is already 4 Months!
I've said it before and will say it again, I actually like that fleet carriers cost me money to own, whether or not I'm playing, as it adds a little bit of challenge / motivation to making net positive credits. I haven't played in months, during which time my carrier has been eating away my credit balance, and I'm totally fine with that. It gives me a reason to play again someday (once the new Horizons bugs have been fixed), and when I do play, I'll feel like I'm accomplishing something other than just incrementing a score (ie - my credit balance). If anything, I would introduce even MORE costs into the game if I could - docking fees, much higher repair fees, rebuy costs that equal the ship's value (where rebuy is basically an easy "build me a new ship just like the last one" option), more expensive fuel (balanced with longer scooping times), removal of synthesis, etc.
Maybe what Elite needs is a realism slider, so everyone can have what they want: ARCADE ====================[]=== SIMULATION
To expand upon what @Jmanis wrote above, here's how the economic sim worked in Alpha 4, before Frontier took a chainsaw to it to satisfy those who wanted a guaranteed trade profit of 1000 credits/ton.
1) First, markets in ED are per station (or planetary port or settlement) only. The prices in one station won't affect the prices in any other station of the system, let alone with neighboring systems or human space as a whole. As Jmanis said, the "galactic average" price is simply a global variable to determine what local prices are.
2) The "supply" and "demand" values of commodities in any particular market is determined by a variety of factors, such as economy type and the size of population served by the market. This apparently isn't the size of the system's population, unless its the only market in the system. These are the "maximum" values, which the market started at when the game began. The buy and sell prices in the market are determined relative to "supply" and "demand" a per ton basis. This is the source of the so-called "bulk tax." It isn't a "tax", but reflects the difference in price between the first ton you sold, and the last one.
4) Each commodity sold by a market has a "baseline production" value, which basically represents baseline NPC trading. Every fifteen minutes, aka the market tick, the market adds this "baseline production" to its level of supplies, and also adds the commodity's "ingredients" from demand. This repeats until "supply" and "demand" reaches their maximum values.
5) Each commodity sold by a market also has a "maximum production" value, relative to its "baseline production" value. Between market ticks, the market would produce as much of the commodity as it could, up to "maximum production," assuming that it had "ingredients" to do so. For example: tea in an agricultural market would be produced if it had stocks of crop harvesters, pesticides, and biowaste available.
6) A market also "consumed" certain commodities, such as food, consumer goods, coffee, tea, and luxuries, at a fixed rate, based on its population and wealth.
7) A market will always buy a commodity, even if there's no demand for it.
Alpha 4, when the economic sim was introduced, only had five stations, which covered the five basic economy types in one form or another: high tech, industrial, refinery, agricultural (land and sea IIRC), and extraction. With only a handful of stations to trade from, a high number of eager alpha-testers, many of whom rushing to get the biggest ships, the inevitable happened: between dwindling supplies of high-value goods, and dwindling demand for the same, the most profitable trade goods soon bottomed out. Where players were filling their increasingly large ships with 1200-1500 credit/ton luxuries, those same luxuries were selling for several hundred. Given that at the time there were operational costs for ships, which were proportional to their size, trading those luxuries in large ships were often at a loss.
Certain commodities, such as gold from Freeport, tea from Azaban City, or performance enhancers from Beagle 2 Landing, returned to a more profitable 400-500 credits/ton, thanks to demand in the other stations far exceeding the limited baseline production. Which led to quite players camping those stations, "F5-ing" the commodity screen on the market tick to fill up their cargo holds. This process took several hours, and was likely macroed so the tester could watch TV or sleep.
After all, if you were going to spend all that time traveling in Supercruise in the blue zone, which was the "forum recommended" ( 
) technique at the time, before they discovered the seven second rule, you should have a full cargo hold to make a profit!This situation was intolerable for many of those big ship testers. Who, incidentally, were far more plentiful than they should've been thanks to one alpha-tester discovering a literal gold duplication bug, who graciously showered whole Type-9 loads of gold canisters upon anyone who wanted it at the back of Azaban city.
Now, it was possible for a commander to make a constant profit, at a rate of over 300,000 credits/hour in a Cobra Mk III, if you could:
- Play during off-peak hours
- Diversify your outgoing cargo load
- Travel to a less "popular" station
- Bring the "low value" ingredients back
- Complete the entire cargo run before the market ticks again
If there seemed to be another player using a similar strategy when I was playing, I also had Dahan Gateway <-> Beagle 2 Landing as an alternative trade route. Slightly less profitable overall, but it had the advantage that each trip was much more consistent, thanks to Dahan being able to fully supply the "ingredients" of what I wanted Beagle 2 Landing to produce. I also had an Eranin -> Dahan Gateway -> Beagle 2 Landing -> Eranin trade route I could use if it seemed that there was low player activity the night I played.
It was this need to make my cargo runs in under 15 minutes that was the origin of me "Buckyballing" it everywhere. I wasn't about to "play it slow and safe" when there were profits to be made... not to mention how much fun it was to "thread the needle." Or dodging around player Type-9s at dangerously high speeds.
And then Premium Beta One hit, with its "improvements" to supercruise (which actually took longer for me to get most destinations, thanks to how much longer it took to brake at my destination) and its "improvements" to the economic sim, when baseline production levels were adjusted upwards so much, that most of the time most markets are functionally the same as those from Frontier: Elite 2!
Overnight, I went from having to pay attention to the dozen or so commodities I was trading, at three different stations, and adjusting my strategy accordingly in response to what I saw, to being guaranteed a larger profit by trading only one commodity from each of the three, in a circular three-hop route.[sarcasm]Yay! Progress![/sarcasm]
I believe that this system, at least for commodities that existed in Alpha Four, is still there. There's been a couple of CGs where I feel like I was able to "boost" production at an allegedly "depleted" nearby station enough to always fill my Python's hold by returning with the "ingredients" I knew. But I only know a few "recipies," and the situation is so rare it might as well not exist.
No, everyone and their mother just cheeses and exploits the game because only few can endure the glacial intended pace. Now they have billions, think it is the normal way and claim it's too easy and need nerfed. Expect to be the first to get shafted with any rework.
Well you don't have to cheese or to exploit to have billions. The activitys either pay too well, or there is just nothing to buy.
Let's say you like mining. Every now and then you relax with some nice musik and go laser some roids. You are in no hurry or rush but you will still make 100 millions per hour.
Overall you are mining two or three hours a week and after some time you wonder: what am I doing with those credits? I Like mining, why do I need to search for engineering mats with an explicit playstyle? Why can't my way just be unefficent but on the long run I will still get my mats? Wouldn't it be great if those credits were like....MONEY?!?!?!
This is probably one of the biggest issues with the two "economies" - i.e. "the economy of how quickly players can get stuff" and "the in-universe economy represented through the markets and related activities".
The in-universe economy clearly could have more done with interesting supply-and-demand scenarios that apply more than a couple of times a year. The problem is that most such scenarios would result in a reduction in average payouts compared with the "equilibrium" state, and this would probably only get worse the more players were active and trading.
But the other aspects of the game - combat, exploration, most missions - aren't subject to supply and demand. The pirates don't run out if you shoot them [1], leading to bounty hunters needing to move on ... and fortunately so or they'd have gone extinct years ago. Cartographics doesn't say "sorry, we've had enough ELWs today, got any ice balls?". Factions don't run out of messages needing couriering or crashed probes to investigate if another player does them first.
By and large that's probably a good thing. Player activity fluctuates very significantly by the standards of a "real" economy (which operates on a much lower frequency). Weekends are 50% or so busier than weekdays. Peak weekends are probably well over 100% busier than low bits of weekdays. The money-making-meta shouldn't be "play at 6am on Wednesday and hope Frontier really messes up Update 10".
So the supply-demand sim in the markets probably needs a different purpose than affecting how much money people make by hauling from A to B, and if they can find one (perhaps connected to the political BGS) there's perhaps room to implement something more complex again.
[1] In fact, in some circumstances they can get more plentiful if you shoot them due to the way the Security State slider interacts non-linearly with the low-to-high system security level.
....right so it IS rubbish then, gotcha
... which was never my point.
My point was an economist wouldn't fix that. You seemed to take exception to that.
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which was besides the point....I was emphasising that the ED market was rubbish....suddenly the topic of convo was about an "economist" and how this particular type of job description was incorrect. WOW THIS FORUM IS AMAZING AND PICKS UP ON ALL YOUR MISGIVINGS FOR YOU....
So then Genius.....what would fix the market rather than shooting down ideas how about you come up with one??
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Which is kinda funny, since I never actually replied to any of your post. You took it upon yourself to kick this one off
Oh I've got plenty, and I've talked about them for years on this forum. Are you going to actually read them? Or are you just going to just hear "blah blah blah" again?
No no....not directly... but I can still see your snobbish belittling remark of comparison, so it still indeed counts as a response to my post.
If is was at all worth reading... I would have continued reading it. After your petty snobbish remark, you think ANY of your posts are worth reading now....
I started reading your posts with an open mind thinking, yeah this guys actually knows his beans, but since you get off on making others feel stupid...I'm not really interested in what you have to say, its a simple as that.
I'm more than willing to go back through this thread and gather those suggestions and form them into one post....shall we count them together...get this back on topic?
Someone said "Why would they (hire an economist)"... I responded with my opinion. Unsurprisingly, someone else out there (yourself), had a different opinion. That happens
Then you called my comment snotty, whatever. I stuck to talking about the game and the state of the economy. And yeah, this comment was a bit on the nose, because you went off on one before that. Now you're calling me snobbish, belittling, "getting off on making others feel stupid"... I dunno who dropped one in your coffee today, but it wasn't me.
Hope you've got whatever it was off your chest now.
Yeah I got that bit, an economist wouldn't fix the market problem and you gave your reasons and truth be told I learned something. Sorry if I perhaps overreacted - it just felt like more of an attack at me for proposing the idea - than the idea itself. It's not coffee; its the negative stigma that comes when after making a suggestion - when it was just an idea.
I do struggle to grasp the concept that "some kind" of knowledge in the "economy" wouldn't have "some kind" of benefit... yes I know its all a bunch of code that a programmer can write - but (outside the bounds of common sense) do they all know for arguments sake why Oil is priceless in modern countries but useless in poverty countries (this is a cough crude? example I know but one can see my point?)
Edit;
My suggestion in short, if the aim is to improve the market, then why not simulate a real market. Wouldn't that achieve a "better" ED market experience....food for thought
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I don't think a market needs to be 100% realistic in a video game (the more I played Elite over the years, the more I realized it has more in common with an arcade game than a simulator), but I do think there is fun gameplay to be had in at least simulating a high school understanding of markets, supply chains, and a global (or in this case, galactic) economy. I'm sure X4's economy lacks all sorts of realism, like the endless supply of ores from a tiny asteroid belt, but it's "good enough" to entertain a noob like me. When the economy is so bad that even non-economists like myself sees the glaring issues, that's a weakness IMHO.
I will also grant you that many games don't come anywhere near Elite's current level of "markets", games like Elder Scrolls Online (my latest addiction). But on the other hand, ESO does not have a trader profession, so a game like Elite that does ought to be a bit more realistic in simulating this, even if it takes liberties for being "just a game".
Again, in my humble opinion, of course, and it is a humble opinion because I'm not an economist and I'm judging Elite's superficial economy on a mix of X4 gameplay and IRL visits to the hardware store (where I can buy iron but not palladium).
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