In Powerplay 2.0, one of the levers to acquire or reinforce a system is to trade for at least 40% profit. At the start of Powerplay 2.0, this lever was very overtuned and thus quickly disabled before returning with a much lower merit rate. Unfortunately the new formula behind this lever is fundamentally flawed and heavily favours bots and script users, while making the lever so bad for regular players that people who like trading are better off trading elsewhere, and then using those earned credits to do donation missions. This seems counter-productive, so I'll try and outline the problem and some possible solutions to this problem.
tl;dr The Large Profit Trade lever favours trading small amounts of cargo to such a ridiculous amount, that it is only a feasible lever for bots and people breaking TOS with scripts. The formula to calculate merits should not punish bulk trading by normal players, but rather properly cap per commodity merit gain so everyone can enjoy this lever.
Where X is some magic number for that specific commodity for that specific station. It is the amount of merits you get for trading a single ton of cargo. It is irrelevant for this post, as everything scales with the latter half of the formula. T is the amount of tons of goods traded in this transaction.
So for example if you trade 1 ton of a commodity worth 5 merits, you would earn
The total amount of merits gained through this lever is ultimately something like:
The loop to sell cargo a few tons at a time is not fun. Instead of flying a spaceship around you are doing a mindnumbingly boring task of fighting with the trade ui to sell small chunks of commodities a hundred times. The loop to sell cargo in one transaction is so uncompetitive that it feels like a waste of time, and that is the opposite of fun as well.
Unfortunately, not really. For an arbitrary trade loop where going to the source station and then back to the target station takes 10 minutes (600 seconds), the merit factor looks something like this:
Say it takes us 5 seconds to do a single trade, the optimal merit rate is achieved by doing 97 trades with 8 tons of cargo for a little over 8 minutes straight. At the cost of several points of sanity for a legit player. A legit player selling their cargo in one trade would need to do 5.5 loops, or 65 minutes worth of loops, to compete with the player or bot selling their cargo 8 tons at a time every 5 seconds.
This does not even change meaningfully if we instead take 20 seconds per individual trade. The 'optimal' merit rate is achieved by doing 24 trades of 33 tons for 8 minutes straight. <sarcasm>Fun!</sarcasm>
Let's say we take our same ship, but do loops that take only 5 minutes for a roundtrip. It still requires a ludicrous amount of 48 trades of 16 tons of cargo for 4 minutes straight to get optimal rates, and 3.9 roundtrips to compete for a regular player.
If we take our trusty shieldless Type-8, we have the exact same issue. Optimal merit rates are in the area of selling 4 tons of cargo for almost 8 and a half minutes straight.
Not even switching to a ship that has 100 tons of cargo capacity will do the trick. Now our meta is to do 1 ton trades for 8 and a half minutes. Note that it still takes about 5.5 trips or 65 minutes for a normal player to compete with someone selling 1 ton at a time here. Our merit rate has plummeted to a factor of 327 where a Type-9 on a similar trip time has a factor of 913.
Since shorter trip times favours doing larger individual trades, and taking longer to do a single trade favours doing larger individual trades, lets equip our ship with a mythical Frontier Inc. Teleport Drive, that teleports us from pad to pad and allows us to make a roundtrip in 60 seconds. Obviously impossible in the game. Let's also look at the case where it takes us 20 seconds for each individual trade, where most people will do just fine in 5.
Even with this best-case impossible scenario, the best strategy is to do 3 trades of 33 tons. Arguably the merit rate will not be that much higher compared to bulk trading, but it is still higher. If we can do trades every 5 seconds, which most people should be able to accomplish, we are already down to 12 trades of 8 tons again.
In fact, with how the plot of
Plot of square root of T over T=0 to T=780. Not that the higher T, the fewer actual trades you do. To look at how many merits we get from each ton of cargo we sell with larger and larger amounts of cargo per transaction, let's look at
The amount of merits per ton fall quickly for larger and larger transaction sizes before slowly flattening out.
The solution to this problem is to not limit the latter part of the formula, but to limit the first part of the formula. Putting any kind of curve on T applies a bulk trade tax that incentivises to break up a trade in smaller transactions to avoid quickly diminishing returns.
One solution might be to not award merits based on profit and profit percentage, but rather based on demand. It makes sense that the people of a system are equally happy to receive silver or medicine if they need both, even if one or the other produces more profit. "Demand" can be a value between 0 (not in demand) and 1 (fully in demand), and the formula would then be something like:
Another solution might be to use the current profit-based calculation, and simply apply a minmax/clamp function on it. This will allow players to find the 'best' routes, while making sure that merits do not exceed a certain maximum threshold. The formula would be something like
Both these solutions do not give an inherit benefit to someone using scripts, or outright botting, while similarly allowing Frontier to limit the number of merits that are awarded for the activity for regular players that just want to trade. Both these solutions would also provide a solution to people that like to fly large trade ships as this niche is currently absent for the sane.
tl;dr The Large Profit Trade lever favours trading small amounts of cargo to such a ridiculous amount, that it is only a feasible lever for bots and people breaking TOS with scripts. The formula to calculate merits should not punish bulk trading by normal players, but rather properly cap per commodity merit gain so everyone can enjoy this lever.
The Formula
The formula to calculate merits for the Large Profit Trade lever in Powerplay is as follows:X * sqrt(T)Where X is some magic number for that specific commodity for that specific station. It is the amount of merits you get for trading a single ton of cargo. It is irrelevant for this post, as everything scales with the latter half of the formula. T is the amount of tons of goods traded in this transaction.
So for example if you trade 1 ton of a commodity worth 5 merits, you would earn
5 * sqrt(1) = 5 merits. If you trade 780 tons of a commodity worth 5 merits, it would be 5 * sqrt(780) = 5 * 27.9285 = 139 merits.The total amount of merits gained through this lever is ultimately something like:
X * Factor, where X is our magic number from before and Factor is sqrt(T) if you would trade in a single trade, or N * sqrt(T/N) if you trade N times equally sized batches of commodities. The Factor in this formula is the one listed below.What is the problem?
Regular players generally buy some commodity somewhere, then sell it for a profit elsewhere in one transaction. In the example above we were selling 780 tons of cargo worth 5 merits each, and only got 139 merits. If we instead sell the commodities in 780 separate transactions, 1 ton at a time, we would instead earn5 * 780 = 3900 merits. Or in other words: a whopping 2793% of what we would get when selling in a single transaction. Or in even other words: we earn a meagre 3.58% of what you could have earned if you sacrificed a few points of sanity to sell your trade goods one ton at a time over doing a bulk trade of 780. Or said even differently: To compete with a player or bot selling 780 tons of cargo in 1 ton increments will take 28 loops when a normal player is selling cargo 780 at a time, at least if we assume trade does not take time.The loop to sell cargo a few tons at a time is not fun. Instead of flying a spaceship around you are doing a mindnumbingly boring task of fighting with the trade ui to sell small chunks of commodities a hundred times. The loop to sell cargo in one transaction is so uncompetitive that it feels like a waste of time, and that is the opposite of fun as well.
But trading takes time
Surely this is not really a problem, right? Trading takes time after all, and doing 780 trades will take a significant amount of time.Unfortunately, not really. For an arbitrary trade loop where going to the source station and then back to the target station takes 10 minutes (600 seconds), the merit factor looks something like this:
Say it takes us 5 seconds to do a single trade, the optimal merit rate is achieved by doing 97 trades with 8 tons of cargo for a little over 8 minutes straight. At the cost of several points of sanity for a legit player. A legit player selling their cargo in one trade would need to do 5.5 loops, or 65 minutes worth of loops, to compete with the player or bot selling their cargo 8 tons at a time every 5 seconds.
This does not even change meaningfully if we instead take 20 seconds per individual trade. The 'optimal' merit rate is achieved by doing 24 trades of 33 tons for 8 minutes straight. <sarcasm>Fun!</sarcasm>
Surely trip time/cargo capacity changes this, right?
No, trip time or cargo capacity does not change this 'meta'. For all ship sizes and all trip lengths this is an issue.Let's say we take our same ship, but do loops that take only 5 minutes for a roundtrip. It still requires a ludicrous amount of 48 trades of 16 tons of cargo for 4 minutes straight to get optimal rates, and 3.9 roundtrips to compete for a regular player.
If we take our trusty shieldless Type-8, we have the exact same issue. Optimal merit rates are in the area of selling 4 tons of cargo for almost 8 and a half minutes straight.
Not even switching to a ship that has 100 tons of cargo capacity will do the trick. Now our meta is to do 1 ton trades for 8 and a half minutes. Note that it still takes about 5.5 trips or 65 minutes for a normal player to compete with someone selling 1 ton at a time here. Our merit rate has plummeted to a factor of 327 where a Type-9 on a similar trip time has a factor of 913.
Since shorter trip times favours doing larger individual trades, and taking longer to do a single trade favours doing larger individual trades, lets equip our ship with a mythical Frontier Inc. Teleport Drive, that teleports us from pad to pad and allows us to make a roundtrip in 60 seconds. Obviously impossible in the game. Let's also look at the case where it takes us 20 seconds for each individual trade, where most people will do just fine in 5.
Even with this best-case impossible scenario, the best strategy is to do 3 trades of 33 tons. Arguably the merit rate will not be that much higher compared to bulk trading, but it is still higher. If we can do trades every 5 seconds, which most people should be able to accomplish, we are already down to 12 trades of 8 tons again.
In fact, with how the plot of
sqrt(T) looks like, it always makes sense to do smaller and smaller trades until it takes too much time and it would make more sense to do an extra trip. Unfortunately, with typical trip lengths and the aggressive curve that sqrt(T) applies to merit rate, this amounts to an obnoxious meta where it pays to sit on a pad rather than to fly a trade ship around.Plot of square root of T over T=0 to T=780. Not that the higher T, the fewer actual trades you do. To look at how many merits we get from each ton of cargo we sell with larger and larger amounts of cargo per transaction, let's look at
sqrt(T)/T instead.The amount of merits per ton fall quickly for larger and larger transaction sizes before slowly flattening out.
A solution
Let's put the merit formula here again:Merits = X * sqrt(T)The solution to this problem is to not limit the latter part of the formula, but to limit the first part of the formula. Putting any kind of curve on T applies a bulk trade tax that incentivises to break up a trade in smaller transactions to avoid quickly diminishing returns.
One solution might be to not award merits based on profit and profit percentage, but rather based on demand. It makes sense that the people of a system are equally happy to receive silver or medicine if they need both, even if one or the other produces more profit. "Demand" can be a value between 0 (not in demand) and 1 (fully in demand), and the formula would then be something like:
BaseValue * Demand * T, or even Demand * T.Another solution might be to use the current profit-based calculation, and simply apply a minmax/clamp function on it. This will allow players to find the 'best' routes, while making sure that merits do not exceed a certain maximum threshold. The formula would be something like
min(10, max(0, X)) * T. Note that T cannot be within this minmax function or we would have the same issue, and that merits are limited to 10 * T in this example regardless of what kind of trades we do. This solution would be along the lines of "Great that you found a trade route with a profit of 3000%, but we will only reward you until 1000%", which I think would be a valid strategy as well.Both these solutions do not give an inherit benefit to someone using scripts, or outright botting, while similarly allowing Frontier to limit the number of merits that are awarded for the activity for regular players that just want to trade. Both these solutions would also provide a solution to people that like to fly large trade ships as this niche is currently absent for the sane.
