So, a constructive thread about balancing the economy...

[DrewCarnegie]

Intentionally bypassing the Flag system would result in a save reset

How is anyone going to know?

[BL1P]

How is anyone going to know?

Would be good to test those things during the test phase.

[iFred]

I said it from day 1 of the Alpha and I will continue to say it: As Long as we have instances in the way they are implemented now we will never see a proper economy.

Here are the top reasons why:

1st: Every new instance has the potential to create stock (commodity market is asynchronous, means: Availability of goods is not real-time).
2nd: NPCs dont trade (they should regarding the description of the BGS, but in fact they don´t, just the results of a virtual trade are going into BGS sim - therefore no Dynamics in the commodity market)
3rd: Factions have endless funds of Money (community Goals just as one example)
4th: too many 50+ billionaires in the playerbase (well.. wipe?)

and so on.

In my opinion it´s impossible to change it to a real economy, and I am not Talking About chinese Gold Farmers, cheaters and all the other stuff that can happen (dreaming of production chains and so on...)

[Vasious]

I believe the issue with the Economy is due to the cost of ships and outfitting.

Payments and earnings have inflated due to the price of the largest ships.

As people have obtained bigger ships they have expected higher payments to give a reasonable return on their investment, but given the vast scale ships goes from, you end up with a nonsensical economy where there are missions to carry messages that pay more than the cost of a Sidewinder, Eagle or Hauler, trade missions that pay many multiples of the value of the goods, and Economy class passenger missions paying more than the price of a Dolphin



Of course I don't really have a solution and just accept it as part of the game, as it is too late to rescale prices of everything.

If big ships were not so much more than small ships, then the need for them to have massive earnings to justify their costs, purchase and outfitting, would have been lessened.

I mean look at a Class 2 Cargo rack, that ~costs 3000CR, and carrys four tonnes, so running coffee from the average agri world to the average high tech world yields a profit of say 500 CR so 6 tonnes worth of trade to pay for the cargo rack, or 1.5 full trips

But a Class 8 cargo rack that costs ~3,450,000 CR, and carries 256 tonnes, rather that benefiting from any economy of scale actually requires 6900 tons of coffee on the same route to pay for itself or 27 full trips.

This seems the opposite of how it should be with the large ships costing less to tonne of cargo shifted, but carrying more vs small ships costing more per tonne, but with the economy set up so that small ships then focus on a fewer high value items chasing the booms, and the larger ships being able to make more steady profits on the more plentiful cargos.

This was where running costs also came in to play, when there was such a thing that differentiate ships.
Currently fuel costs are on average below the market average of hydrogen fuel on the commodities market
That is like the Petrol station selling you fuel for less than they buy it for in bulk.

Take the iClipper and the Type 7

The Lakon Spaceways Type 7 should thrive in the high security systems moving bulk amounts of low value but high availability items, on regular trade runs, where its low runnings costs play inot this as a Lakon ship has low crew, are easy and cheap to maintain and fuel.

Where as the more high end Gutamaya Imperial Clipper is more costly to run, but is fast and well armed, so could thrive moving high value cargos in lower security systems, chasing booms and other system states that offer greater profits per tonne, as the Clipper has higher maintenance and running cost.

Smaller ships can do regular trading, but shine in the go for missions, where a faction needs a certain good now! based on states and import and export.

And Mining if ships and outfitting was so insanely priced, would be profitable regardless of ring if a refinery wasn't worth the same as 400 tonnes of gold or half a ton of gold for the cheapest refinery, and if even Bauxite and Rutile are offering a reasonable return on costs, if you could pay off a mining ship buy mining that in a reasonable time, then the Painite and such would be wonderful finds.

Anyway, but at the moment, bulk trading, and most mined materials makes no economic sense as the need return on investment on ships is insane.

Would too be wonderful to see extra market trading expanded on and bring back and build upon the trading signal sources, as not every faction has a market and missions can be unreliable.

Factions in a war setting up distinct Trade beacons in a system where they buy at a good profit all manner of weapons, and it actually supporting their war effort.

Wars with civil unrest, having the rebels set up Trade beacons to buy arms, increasing the unrest

Busts triggering Trade beacons to sell beer, wine, liquor, bootleg liquor, narcotics and tobacco, (and rare good drugs) increasing unrest and the bust

And have the Famine and Medicine Trade beacons accept any food and medicine (and rare good foods and medicines?) and actually decrease the famine and outbreaks.

For booms bring back the old Galactic comestibles, the Mineral Magpie, Ariel, Dangerous Waste Collection and Tech Acquisitions et al to have the option of selling high demand goods by economy type during a boom to private markets .

Adding an incentive to follow around different faction states.

I used to love buying up masses of Battle weapons and flying them to "Weapons wanted" Signal sources in systems with the war state, but outside the CR, it never effected the outcome.


My one disappointment with the EDRPG was it kept the same price scheme, and am working on a much compressed one to remove the oddities like


Scanners going up massively in price and power usage for minimal increase
A D rated KWS costs 3 times the E, & uses twice the power for a 25% increase
An A rated KWS costs 81 times the E & uses 16 times the power for twice the range!
Even the step from B to A is 3 times the price and twice the power for a 15% increase in range.

The cost in credits and power per output increase in outfitting is absurb

Fuel scoops another exemplar

anyway I think I am rambling now

[Jayridium]

...Credit sponges are always necessary in any grindfest mmo with poor management of BGS driven economy.

If you look at other mmo's out there, there is a PLAYER driven economy based on authentic resource scarcity.

ED is set up so that localities produce unlimited resources of a specific type, and it is simply the task of moving those resources to another location where those resources are not produced. This is a stupid structure...

The game isn't playing the game, the game is playing the game BGS flaws.

So now you have players with lots of credits and someone is either jealous, uptight, or wants to force players to play the game.

For the record I, the OP, am more closely aligned with the third of these options, I want this to be a game with depth (bare in mind that in my eyes depth does not mean grind) and "IMMURSHON" rather than mindless cheese.

We have to do something about these players with all of these credits! Most games develop credit sinks like guild halls (as Grax suggests). FDEV is so dumb donkey about their approach to this. You have to be part of a group to get a fleet carrier. OK this instantly wipes out a juicy credit sink for all of those individual player billionaires.

Wouldn't letting the exploiting individuals control fleet carriers further the divide between haves and have-nots, thus encouraging more exploiting by making it the defacto way to "keep up (or catch up) with the joneses"? So what about giving multibillionaires the option of sponsoring a capital ship? Perhaps they simply get to name it, or maybe they can delegate it to a chosen BGS faction, and on occasion they can log in and dock with it and order the gunners and fighter squadrons in a CZ? But the latter part of this gameplay is made available to anyone of 100% allied and top naval rank with the corresponding superpower without having to spunk up X billions to put their name on a e-peen destroyer?

So in summary, FDEVs decision to have a BGS driven economy instead of a bubble wide supply and demand economy is problematic. FDEV's decision to have factors such as system state, ls proximity, and economic type be the primary factors in defining mission offerings is problematic and allows smart humans to find optimized paths to earn obscene credits.

[Sylveria]

"Rar!!! Balance the economy!"
"Rar!!! Nerf Missions!
"Rar!!! Moar credit sinks!
"Rar!!! It should be harder to earn credits!"
"Rar!!! People shouldn't be billionaires!"

"But what do we do about all the players that are already space rich?"

*crickets*

[Schmack]

Just give me a gold rush now and then. I haven't taken the road to riches but I would do that and not feel bad about it. Eventually it comes down to what do you want to do in the game vs how long do you have to do it. Not everyone here has a lifetime to get to their desired gameplay.

I think Open should have its own economy. Everyone should be relegated to the same BGS controlled by the same people in the same instances doing things you can support or undermine, and if you want gold rushes in Open you have to work to get your faction to that level.

In Solo and group though it's anyone's guess what you'll want to do. You own the galaxy. Who cares if you make 500m for one haul? It's the ability to switch back and forth between the modes that creates the issue with galactic economy imbalance.

When the BGS creates imbalance, hand of god corrects it. That's the problem with the economy. There's no reason to have forced economical stratification other than shelf life of the game. Even in a global economy you can find some odd trends where money can be made quickly if you get in soon enough. There's no universal Alan Greenspan to come and adjust the interest rate.

[Jayridium]

I think a simple model based on user activity in various roles.

Let's say there are three core commodities:

A, B, and C

The cost of a ship should be a linear function of these commodities like 100*A + 4000*B + 20*c= cost of ship

Then the value of A, B and C should be based on supply and demand by users. Users mining A, B and C will determine supply and users buying ships and fuel would be the consumption. Supply and consumption will determine the value of A, B and C and thus ships.

The key here is the activities people do least should dynamically increase in value. If no one is mining then mining payouts keep increasing because demand is growing without supply.

The key tennet of your suggestion from what I read is greater holistic player interactivity and could be tied into the BGS states as well, if noone is bountyhunting the number of NPC pirates increases and security level decreases (ie cops take longer to turn up at reported crimes as they are stretched thin). Famine, if noone starts moving i food, population decreases(starvation) and the controlling faction loses influence (unpopularity in the wake of the starvation). If noone keeps the medicine stopped up in a system an outbreak occurs and so on and so forth...

However to stop the game becoming a really large scale version of simcity where every commander is obligated to pander to the needs of the imaginary citizens of the games vast galaxy, some of the logistics could be undertaken by NPC's which in and of itself highlights two other shortcomings of the game:

Yes. NPC traffic (abstractly!) returns the supply/demand levels back to a baseline amount (this can take a few days if there's been a really big trade)

Changes in supply/demand due to BGS states are then overlaid on top of this - those can in practice actually be more significant, and can give quite an impression of randomness. (As, of course, could other players trading the same few profitable goods in the same system)

This is a major problem with requests for "more realistic supply+demand" in Elite Dangerous - the total demand across the Sol bubble now stands at approximately 400 billion tonnes. A popular trade CG shifts a mere 10 million tonnes. So well over 99.99% of the trade is being carried out by NPCs - at that point, it might as well be as abstract as it is, because players aren't going to (directly) move things much anyway.

2nd: NPCs dont trade (they should regarding the description of the BGS, but in fact they don´t, just the results of a virtual trade are going into BGS sim - therefore no Dynamics in the commodity market)
3rd: Factions have endless funds of Money (community Goals just as one example)

I have seen a video by Kornelius Breidon where he stalks a few NPC'sand their jumping / docking unravels the minute he put them under a microscope so its obvious they aren't the real underlying driving force of the background sim, which they ought to be, only NPC's can truly be affiliated with or belong to a faction, we the players only opt-in as adhoc spot hires for the odd mission or as unsung annonymous sponsors through either donations or transactions that are targetted to benefit those factions we are at that minute supporting.

[BlackSpaceCowboy]

The key tennet of your suggestion from what I read is greater holistic player interactivity and could be tied into the BGS states as well, if noone is bountyhunting the number of NPC pirates increases and security level decreases (ie cops take longer to turn up at reported crimes as they are stretched thin). Famine, if noone starts moving i food, population decreases(starvation) and the controlling faction loses influence (unpopularity in the wake of the starvation). If noone keeps the medicine stopped up in a system an outbreak occurs and so on and so forth...

I was suggesting something more basic. If people aren't mining then the cost of raw materials increases and the cost of ships increases. But then the payout for mining increases.

I guess with bounty hunting, the value of bounties would increase if nobody is willing to do these missions.

If everyone is doing skimmer missions then the value of skimmer mission payouts would drop.

So, it would be a self-balancing economy. Goldrushes would be momentary and the economy would rebalance itself soon after a gold rush. It would also incentivize activities people don't do because those would pay a ton of money.

[Jayridium]

A proper economy that runs galaxy wide seems like it would require a lot of CPU resources server side.

Given most games are mainly GPU intensive rather than CPU intensive, with many being optimised more for clock speed than core/thread count, wouldnt it be possible to run alot of the BGS work on a thread on players PC's? Think distributed computing like seti@home. Initial concerns I can foresee arising from that would be the limitation some of the lesser PC's can make available, which could be countered by limiting CPU usage for BGS work thread to a small percentage of CPU utilisation, and players running local hacks to cheat, this could be countered by anonymising the BGS data packets the client works on, and or encrypting the data being processed. If they used a rolling cypher where every day at midnight game time, bgs data for processing used a new set of aliases, with a completely different set of aliases so as to avoid old processing packets being assigned to the wrong faction(ie one now using the alias previously assigned to another faction on a previous cycle tick) for the factions being processed on the players computer, which included a validity period, to stop someone logging out for three months and uploading old bgs data corrupting the galaxy.

I know theres a lot of cavaets in there but the preparation involved in coding these simple checks in would pay off many times over by preventing the BGS getting screwed up. Does anyone remember the debacle that kicked off around the advent of 2.1 where the first powerplay cycle thereafter ticked later than normal allowing some playergroups to react to snipes (last minute handing in of undermining merits) and some players were able to tip the balance of the prep wars for certain systems a couple of hours after the cycle was meant to tick? It was a real biowaste storm in the powerplay forums.

[Jayridium]

I was suggesting something more basic. If people aren't mining then the cost of raw materials increases and the cost of ships increases. But then the payout for mining increases.

I guess with bounty hunting, the value of bounties would increase if nobody is willing to do these missions.

If everyone is doing skimmer missions then the value of skimmer mission payouts would drop.

So, it would be a self-balancing economy. Goldrushes would be momentary and the economy would rebalance itself soon after a gold rush. It would also incentivize activities people don't do because those would pay a ton of money.

That makes sense, I like your idea, so much so that I was taking what I understood to be the key concept of it and moving it beyond supply & demand of commodities affecting market prices, but tacking on supplies of other services and commodoties to interface with BGS faction state which would inturn feedback to the economic supplies and demands.

[Jayridium]

Three step plan


Step 1: Fdev decide on a max credits per hour(mcph) they think players should ever be able to make per hr legitimately. Have a flag and report system set up to warn Devs if a player reaches or goes over the mcph.
Have a cap built in to stop all incoming credits to a player above the mcph. If the reports are constant E.G a player or group of players is constantly sending mcph flag reports, as soon as possible shut down the offending exploit, while it is shut down fix it.
Do not leave it running and fix it. Remove it from game and then fix it and then place it back in game.
Have a system in place to Green light legitimate Fdev designed Gold rush special missions or special events that will allow the player to gain more than the mcph while doing those missions or events. without triggering the flag reports.
Give a disclaimer that any player attempting to intentionally bypass the Flag reports will have his save reset.

Step 2: Calculate a players total possible credit limit taken as hrs in game/2 multiplied by the mcph, remove all credits above that amount and if necessary place players in arrears. Divided by two because you can never always be earning mcph from hour zero.

Step 3: Implement this on a Test server as a beta and run for a few months to iron out bugs and correct the amounts. Add some Lore then implement it into to Galaxy.
The idea would be that the flag reports would be very hard to trigger playing as intended and would mainly only ever trigger from exploits.
The test period would allow Fdev to balance this correctly.

I like this basic idea's core, but some of the criticisms and edgecases presented as counters have merit, such as the learned Ian Doncasters comment about explorers, and IIRC bounty hunting was also raised for potentially being a couple of days melting every criminal in a haz res, then coming in and manding in multiple millions, or wing missions or or or....

One way around that would be to add a simple check to that algorithm that takes note of the time of the last credits transaction, and how much game time the cmdr has logged since then to calculate the average credits per hour over the period from last transaction. A cavaet I'm going to put on that is one exploit strikes me straight off, griefers are known to leave their computers running overnight to let notoriety settle down, why exploiters wouldnt do the same to massage their credits per hour average. So to counter that I'd suggest it has to be active flight time recorded, as denoted by the game receiving direct x inputs and screening the logs in the background to check for patterns evidencing scripting at play.

I know when I start tacking on security measures like the one above, it starts to make the task of incorporating this into the game sound more onerous than it did at first, however I'm trying to highlight pitfalls of solutions and how we can put measures in place to make sure the solutions we are coming up with in this thread arent simply going to move the meta explout, but completely erradicate the exploits.

[Trollymctrollerson]

I think somebody mentioned the monumental improbability of the BGS getting a meaningful update to its "economy". I agree, that change sounds like it would provide Frontier a poor return on investment, even if somebody in Management has the ambition to make it happen. The OP is right about missions. Not only do they frequently make no sense financially, they don't even make sense logically. Credits aside, I'v known people who quit ED because browsing the mission board was like a room of mirrors in the twilight zone. In regards to credits, none of it ever makes sense. The only constant players have noticed is some pay alot, others pay very little. Of course a rational person chooses the more rewarding of the options available in the chaos. When the boards remain chaos but rewards are reduced people are annoyed because they have to start over trying to make sense of something nonsensical. Haul 6000 tons for 3.1 million credits or scan a random data thingy for 2 million credits? It's like a weird hallucination of logic. People would probably tolerate modest rewards if their was some semblance of coherence to the requirements and return.

[Jayridium]

Vasious, excuse me for putting the quote of your very enlightened and well thought out post in a spoiler tag, it is y no means a disrespect of your contribution to this conversation, but it is a long post and replying to it with a direct quote would inturn make this post a "wall of text".

I believe the issue with the Economy is due to the cost of ships and outfitting.

Payments and earnings have inflated due to the price of the largest ships.

As people have obtained bigger ships they have expected higher payments to give a reasonable return on their investment, but given the vast scale ships goes from, you end up with a nonsensical economy where there are missions to carry messages that pay more than the cost of a Sidewinder, Eagle or Hauler, trade missions that pay many multiples of the value of the goods, and Economy class passenger missions paying more than the price of a Dolphin



Of course I don't really have a solution and just accept it as part of the game, as it is too late to rescale prices of everything.

If big ships were not so much more than small ships, then the need for them to have massive earnings to justify their costs, purchase and outfitting, would have been lessened.

I mean look at a Class 2 Cargo rack, that ~costs 3000CR, and carrys four tonnes, so running coffee from the average agri world to the average high tech world yields a profit of say 500 CR so 6 tonnes worth of trade to pay for the cargo rack, or 1.5 full trips

But a Class 8 cargo rack that costs ~3,450,000 CR, and carries 256 tonnes, rather that benefiting from any economy of scale actually requires 6900 tons of coffee on the same route to pay for itself or 27 full trips.

This seems the opposite of how it should be with the large ships costing less to tonne of cargo shifted, but carrying more vs small ships costing more per tonne, but with the economy set up so that small ships then focus on a fewer high value items chasing the booms, and the larger ships being able to make more steady profits on the more plentiful cargos.

This was where running costs also came in to play, when there was such a thing that differentiate ships.
Currently fuel costs are on average below the market average of hydrogen fuel on the commodities market
That is like the Petrol station selling you fuel for less than they buy it for in bulk.

Take the iClipper and the Type 7

The Lakon Spaceways Type 7 should thrive in the high security systems moving bulk amounts of low value but high availability items, on regular trade runs, where its low runnings costs play inot this as a Lakon ship has low crew, are easy and cheap to maintain and fuel.

Where as the more high end Gutamaya Imperial Clipper is more costly to run, but is fast and well armed, so could thrive moving high value cargos in lower security systems, chasing booms and other system states that offer greater profits per tonne, as the Clipper has higher maintenance and running cost.

Smaller ships can do regular trading, but shine in the go for missions, where a faction needs a certain good now! based on states and import and export.

And Mining if ships and outfitting was so insanely priced, would be profitable regardless of ring if a refinery wasn't worth the same as 400 tonnes of gold or half a ton of gold for the cheapest refinery, and if even Bauxite and Rutile are offering a reasonable return on costs, if you could pay off a mining ship buy mining that in a reasonable time, then the Painite and such would be wonderful finds.

Anyway, but at the moment, bulk trading, and most mined materials makes no economic sense as the need return on investment on ships is insane.

Would too be wonderful to see extra market trading expanded on and bring back and build upon the trading signal sources, as not every faction has a market and missions can be unreliable.

Factions in a war setting up distinct Trade beacons in a system where they buy at a good profit all manner of weapons, and it actually supporting their war effort.

Wars with civil unrest, having the rebels set up Trade beacons to buy arms, increasing the unrest

Busts triggering Trade beacons to sell beer, wine, liquor, bootleg liquor, narcotics and tobacco, (and rare good drugs) increasing unrest and the bust

And have the Famine and Medicine Trade beacons accept any food and medicine (and rare good foods and medicines?) and actually decrease the famine and outbreaks.

For booms bring back the old Galactic comestibles, the Mineral Magpie, Ariel, Dangerous Waste Collection and Tech Acquisitions et al to have the option of selling high demand goods by economy type during a boom to private markets .

Adding an incentive to follow around different faction states.

I used to love buying up masses of Battle weapons and flying them to "Weapons wanted" Signal sources in systems with the war state, but outside the CR, it never effected the outcome.


My one disappointment with the EDRPG was it kept the same price scheme, and am working on a much compressed one to remove the oddities like


Scanners going up massively in price and power usage for minimal increase
A D rated KWS costs 3 times the E, & uses twice the power for a 25% increase
An A rated KWS costs 81 times the E & uses 16 times the power for twice the range!
Even the step from B to A is 3 times the price and twice the power for a 15% increase in range.

The cost in credits and power per output increase in outfitting is absurb

Fuel scoops another exemplar

anyway I think I am rambling now

Picking up on your last point first, you were far from rambling...

I knew ship modules offered an elemnt of diminishing returns, but damn I never realised it was such a steap tail off as your well researched figures indicate. I like all of the ideas you presented, in particular I liked the somparison of the T7 to a clipper. I also feel the game would be richer if we could create more niches for the different ships, but being the sort of man I am I tend to hit things with an oversized hammer and pretty broad strokes. But coming at this problem from another direction I recently started another of these theorycrafting threads, yes I know these are my normal contributions to the forum just now, about bringing ship diversity by moving big ships towards naval battle ships combat roles and small ships towards a fighter bomber role and implementing some subtle under the hood changes on weapons.

https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showth...21#post6779121


Your passenger mission example echoes a point I made in the opening post of this thread, so again I'm on the same page as you, albeit possibly interpreting it differently. Thanks again for your input, you and some of the other AIE guys conduct on this forum are one of the main reasons I joined your discord (where I'm more of a lurker) and do a lot to prop up your BGS.

[MrFailfactory]

Some of the things I have seen posted in this thread just don't make any sense; if the game was made to be (or changed to be) that way, within a year we would be left with nothing but the Sol system, and everything else would be dead Anarchy systems because we would need about 100 million more players (at least) to support the Bubble as we currently know it.

Every single idea about changing the economics in this game has to pass the scale test - none so far presented seem to have even been considered in this light.

Riôt