Maybe someone should bug report that and have it expire due to lack of confirmations? Obviously I can't be bothered - the bug tracker has succeeded in deterring me.
Well, not any more than now.
Newcomers will still have as options:
- get the materials yourself
- be donated the materials from a friend
- buy the materials cheaply from a philanthropist / someone who is just offloading spares
That will probably put some downward pressure on the price - sure, there probably are people who'd buy Settlement Defense Plans at 100 million each, and in raw credits/hour equivalent-effort terms it's not an unfair price, but I'd expect them to be cheaper.
Allowing free setting of prices might even make it easier for newcomers to find them - I'd like to sell my spares, and not at price-gouging rates, but I equally don't want to sell them for 1 million to someone who's just going to privately resell them for 100 million so they need to be expensive enough to discourage that too.
Equally, newcomers could potentially make credits by selling data to Bartenders - or at least, more than they would by selling it to the NPC ones. Sell data for a few million credits now (when you're weeks away from unlocking an engineer that would let you use it), buy it back at a similar price when you actually need it.
Eventually, yes. But I wouldn't expect that sort of saturation to come for a while. Still plenty of existing players who haven't really touched Horizons engineering, for example.
