I have Eve-Online in mind, rightly or wrongly, having been in the beta and the first few months. Here pirates drop the really good equipment, which cannot be brought from NPCs. This is done presumably to promote PvE play.
Proposal Discussion Economy - limited credits
- Thread starter Yellonet
- Start date
I have Eve-Online in mind, rightly or wrongly, having been in the beta and the first few months. Here pirates drop the really good equipment, which cannot be brought from NPCs. This is done presumably to promote PvE play.
Eve - not quite the root of all evil but not far off
my understanding would be that the player economy is not envisaged to be anything like the depth of EvE's.The Economy exists to facilitate gameplay not be the gameplay itself.
(Could be wrong, quite often am to be honest.)
That's why I keep asking for a bid/ask system. Players should be able to trade with each other and NPCs on the open market, even if I'm just sitting in the same station doing it.
The reason I keep advocating for it is because it will handle undertraded and overtraded goods much more efficiently. If an agricultural world isn't exporting any food, a surplus should develop, and prices should crash to almost nothing. If the nearby high tech world isn't importing food (everyone kept bringing consumer goods, say), it should be starving, and prices for food should be escalating.
But with the prices floors/ceilings, we never get there. You can't set your own price for buying or selling, and you're not really linking up with willing buyers. As such, the risk of any loss on a proper trade run (where, say, you move pesticides to the agricultural world where they need it, even if there's a huge surplus because of overtrading), is zero. You'll always make a profit!
Take the price controls off, and let players and NPCs via trading algorithms determine buy and sell prices -- utilizing supply and demand mechanics already in place -- and I think you'll have a truly dynamic trading environment. No sure things, you might even lose money if you're trying to sell into a saturated market, and yet, if you play smart, you can identify previously undertraded goods and make a handsome profit.
As it is, when player to player trading comes online, there's a risk that because of the price controls, it overtakes the commodities market because there's a free market there. Or if there are not more profits to be made between players thanks to the price controls, simply nobody will use it. Which, I think would be a shame.
Now's the time to let the trading system loose during testing and see what happens, and what the limits are to expansive features. Not find out post-launch that it's broken and then you have to do surgery a year or two down the road which is reportedly what happened to EvE in its early going (the problem then was unbridled inflation whereas I fear we're in for stagnation). Now, it's a $65 million a year operation.
There's a huge market there to tap into, but it's hard to envisage the economy on display in Beta can match what I've read about Eve's, which I believe will make competing on this count hard. Not that I want to play Eve. I love the dogfighter style of Elite. The Kickstarter compelled me to get a gaming computer. I want to see it succeed, but I think trading right now is very much the weakest link.
It would be utterly unrealistic to force settings that a few hundred thousand/few million people in a universe of ~1 trillion humans cannot all become wealthy. It is completely irrelevant that the NPCs are not fully simulated economic actors. The total wealth that players will ever have based on the tools provided (all labor and trade oriented) will never total more than a minute fraction of galactic GDP. No player will be able to act in the way that the financial elite in the real world make their vast fortunes.
The key to limiting wealth is to introduce money sinks, things that you spend money on. It doesn't matter that there is no real player-driven economy and industry like in Eve, money sinks work the same.
So far I know of:
-fuel costs
-ammo costs
-maintenance costs
-station hangar rental costs
-fines
Stuff that could realistically be added, for extra gameplay:
-taxes (transaction taxes, which is basically on top of whatever buy/sell orders you do at a station and could be influenced by your standing towards the faction that operates the station/system)
-operating fees, for example docking fees at busy starports, berthing fees, space lane tolls (that you can evade, heh heh), cargo transfer fees (or did you think those cargo canisters will unload themselves?) etc.
-crew paychecks (you hire crew for small boosts in efficiency of your starship, but you have to pay them daily - quality crew costs more to hire and keep)
All of the above can be made such that it sets a natural limit to how much money a player can make. Busy systems may offer great prices for traders, but require more overhead in form of tolls and fees. Players not interested in maintaining a lucrative high-stakes career can operate in less busy fringe systems with fewer/lower fees and lower taxation. They can fly single-seater ships to cut down on crew costs. And so on.
The main point is to create a sort of intrinsic soft-cap on how much money you can make. So that it is relatively easy to rake in cash when you're flying a small, cheap ship, but as you go up in the world you have to get more and more creative in order to maintain that kind of progress. Eventually you hit a limit, but not a hardcoded one - your profits never hit a wall, just taper off.
So far I know of:
-fuel costs
-ammo costs
-maintenance costs
-station hangar rental costs
-fines
Stuff that could realistically be added, for extra gameplay:
-taxes (transaction taxes, which is basically on top of whatever buy/sell orders you do at a station and could be influenced by your standing towards the faction that operates the station/system)
-operating fees, for example docking fees at busy starports, berthing fees, space lane tolls (that you can evade, heh heh), cargo transfer fees (or did you think those cargo canisters will unload themselves?) etc.
-crew paychecks (you hire crew for small boosts in efficiency of your starship, but you have to pay them daily - quality crew costs more to hire and keep)
All of the above can be made such that it sets a natural limit to how much money a player can make. Busy systems may offer great prices for traders, but require more overhead in form of tolls and fees. Players not interested in maintaining a lucrative high-stakes career can operate in less busy fringe systems with fewer/lower fees and lower taxation. They can fly single-seater ships to cut down on crew costs. And so on.
The main point is to create a sort of intrinsic soft-cap on how much money you can make. So that it is relatively easy to rake in cash when you're flying a small, cheap ship, but as you go up in the world you have to get more and more creative in order to maintain that kind of progress. Eventually you hit a limit, but not a hardcoded one - your profits never hit a wall, just taper off.
As for Eve economy, that's a totally different beast that what we will have here. You cannot have that kind of economy without players running the industry behind it. Which is why CCP made their game practically revolve around player-driven industry and markets. Yeah, pew-pew gets most of the attention, but it all happens because players run all those factories, mine those asteroids and haul goods.
Interesting tidbit - it didn't happen overnight. Economy in Eve was largely NPC-driven at first. You need to have an established and healthy playerbase to be able to transition to a fully player-driven economy, so who knows - maybe it'll happen for Elite down the line. But initially it's better to have a regulated, stable NPC economy that players can work with, than one or two trade hubs and a bazillion ghost stations with zero stuff to sell or buy.
Interesting tidbit - it didn't happen overnight. Economy in Eve was largely NPC-driven at first. You need to have an established and healthy playerbase to be able to transition to a fully player-driven economy, so who knows - maybe it'll happen for Elite down the line. But initially it's better to have a regulated, stable NPC economy that players can work with, than one or two trade hubs and a bazillion ghost stations with zero stuff to sell or buy.
This part of Toebs' post is the most pertinent to me. I think the majority of the economy problems in the game which may crop up could be solved by having a stronger focus on player-driven economies, and this in turn being achieved by making a crafting system where highly sought-after products are limited in resource and decay over time. If I have 100 Billion credits in the game and Player X creates a beam laser with 20% more firepower than anything else on the market, but only has enough resources to make 10 of these, then by gosh I'll spend a huge portion of those billions on that laser so that I'm 1 in 10 in the galaxy who has 20% more firepower than anyone else. The economy then self-rights; if nobody buys your product, you drop the price. If you're rich, then you'll go the extra mile for the elite equipment. Make craftable items decay with use, maybe in larger chunks when you die, and there you have a good working model for an economy that responds to supply and demand.
For this to work, you'd need a decent crafting system in the game unlike those you see in the likes of WoW or whatever (where everyone can basically make or acquire the same gear).
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True - but it'd also be true even in a noddy econcomy. Spending must be financed, so the level of economic expenditure upon military effort is ultimately driven by player productivity, all that varies is how productive players can be.
Hmm. My experience of it (beta and first few months) was that this was because it was the quickest way to make money. You could mine, craft, etc - but the entire economy reset at 2pm GMT every day, NPCs reset their quanities and prices, and in the hour or two after that you could make a killing - the in-game equivelent of about 400 USD (as prices were in those days).
This of course eventually became well known enough it became hard to make really good money. There were one or two long distance NPC-to-NPC runs which were shockingly profitable, but you could only do one a day.
CCP then made travelling pathethically easy by adding in tons of hyperspace shortcuts. Before, if you hauled say cargo extensions from an NPC 20 jumps away to where people were buying, you could make real money. After the shortcuts were added, it became a three hop journey. They gave it away, and the game was worse for it.
Those wonderful two words - regulated, stable. Regulation isn't much use if your regulations produce a lemon. Lemons are stable, but they aren't nice if you bite into them.
You're basically saying "an economy that works is what we want, rather than one which is broken", and that "regulation" will achieve this. Problem is, *what* regulation, exactly?
*That's* the problem!
Does the game not have this? how do prices vary? NPCs must at least have an offer system, to be able to sell?
In a free market, prices also lead to changes in the amount of production of goods. In the absence of that mechanism, the market will not clear; there's nothing to stop there being vast excesses or vast shortages of food, or computers, etc. All that is happening is one part of the market, the setting of prices - the consequential setting of production is not.
Yup. They just can't work, flat out. It's a no-brainer, and if this is what happens, then the economy has not been taken even remotely seriously and it'll be hyperinflation all around (due to a range of closely and loosely related factors).
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No. Bid-ask is where, say, the price of grain at Eranin is 65 CR a ton, but I want to buy grain at Eranin for 60 CR a ton, so I put in an order for grain at that price. I'm betting the price will drop slightly and a willing NPC seller will compete on price to move the grain faster than his competitors.
Or, I arrive at Aulin to sell the grain, and it's listed at 120 CR a ton. But I want 125 CR a ton, so I put in a sell order for that price. I'm betting the price will rise and a willing NPC buyer will pay a little extra to move the goods right away.
I would note that once we get to the planetary landings expansion, such a system will make a *lot* more sense, and could include PC transporters moving goods to and from the stations. Right now, we're not seeing the true beginnings and ends of the supply chain.
But, in summary, bid-ask would be a mechanism where I either will not make a purchase or commit to a sale unless it's on the price I'm bidding or asking for, respectively. Players will then be competing against each other, and NPCs on price. This would de facto eliminate the price controls, and markets would respond efficiently to supply surpluses, demand spikes, and their inverses. Such a system would also automatically include player-to-player trading, since players who just purchased commodities then might be able to sell it back on the market for a very slight mark-up.
(This is where critics will allege that players will engage in day-trading and speculating, ignoring the fact that every seller needs a willing buyer. If no PC or NPC is willing to pay the price a speculator is attempting to sell at, guess what? That seller will be waiting for a very long time, holding cargo and waiting at a station when he could have already moved it to a profitable destination.)
Again, I think the economic simulation could easily take that into account.
Or, effective deflation, where players accumulate such an amount of credits that no insurance is too high, no cargo purchase is beyond reach, no equipment is out of the question, etc. and meanwhile, prices have never responded in an upward direction.
The only way you'd get hyperinflation with the above is if the artificial price controls resulted in massive shortages, forcing PCs to rely on player-to-player trading to stock up, and prices behaving accordingly. In a real economic environment, this is what would happen with the price controls.
However, the supplies of commodities appear to be instantly replenished at production ends and exhausted at the consumption ends in the current simulation. So we've not even seen shortages (or true surpluses for that matter) as of yet, because the simulator keeps "correcting" supplies.
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How do we get hyperinflation with ceilings to the NPC market and no effective player market?
Yaffle
Volunteer Moderator
I'm at fault for using the word loosely - I really meant to say, the economy will become distorted. The rate of growth in currency will exceeed the rate in growth of real wealth, and the buy and sell prices of NPCs will not change, so NPC prices become increasingly small in real terms.
I agree with the last two posts. I was noting before, inflation would only happen if the price controls result in shortages, and then players have to fall back on to the player to player trading system to acquire commodities and prices exploded as a result (which is not yet available but was planned for in the design discussion process). But, because the supplies appear to be replenished almost instantaneously* (see spoiler note below) I agree, there is little risk of hyperinflation.
At that point, we might disengage discussion and suggest such an outcome is an intended consequence of the design. After all, there's no inflation, right? That's a good thing, because, as we know, inflation is a bad thing, right?
Frontier stated in its final proposal that "Each commodity has a baseline price" from which the values are modified based on market conditions and upon system characteristics like economy type. And, "There are caps on prices to prevent unrealistic extremes," and adds that there can be "no negative values."
So, what we see currently in the beta reflects the proposal more or less. The consequence is that prices are somewhat responsive to shifts in supply and demand.
But once the minimum price is reached, that's it, even if the supply continues to pile up. And once the maximum price is reached, that's it, even if demand is still really high. As players, there is no negotiating with the buyers on the market via bid/ask.
The result is that traders have already identified the trade runs where the greatest profit margins are to be generated in the context of those price controls. As an example, using Slopey's trading tool for reference, we discover one of the more profitable trade run remains progenitor cells from Aulin Enterprise to Azeban City at 788 CR per unit (although the trading tool is out of date, as progenitors are no longer available to buy on the Aulin market). Best way to move gold is from Freeport to Dahan at 534 CR per unit. And so forth.
And because of the price controls in the current build, I wouldn't expect those profit margins to change one iota, despite the fact that in the current build these are highly traded routes, and I would argue overtraded.
For me at least, this is an undesirable outcome, since it generally means markets are *predictable* and thus, boring. Players don't even need Slopey's trading tool.
As such, while there is little risk of hyperinflation, there is also little interest, in my opinion, in trading. Keep trading the same run, and the profit margin remains exactly the same every time!
*
An additional note on automatic replenishment: This appears to occur at the end of the supply chain but not the production end. So I noticed that buying 4 canisters of grain from Azeban at 65 CR a pop, the supply at the market reduced by 4 units from 72,132 to 72,128. I went out and back into the commodities market to check, and the supply was still at 72,128.
However, when I arrived at Aulin to sell the stock, it said there was zero supply, and demand was 7,304. I sold it at 120 CR a pop, and yet, demand remained at 7,304. Shouldn't it have dropped to 7,300? Nor had the available supply increased to 4. It remained at zero.
In neither case did I notice any change in prices.
However, when I arrived at Aulin to sell the stock, it said there was zero supply, and demand was 7,304. I sold it at 120 CR a pop, and yet, demand remained at 7,304. Shouldn't it have dropped to 7,300? Nor had the available supply increased to 4. It remained at zero.
In neither case did I notice any change in prices.
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I also wanted to take issue with the idea put forth by Frontier that "There are caps on prices to prevent unrealistic extremes" in the sense that, even if removing the caps produced price volatility and temporarily, highly profitable trade runs, then so what?
A trade run might be exploited, but players (and presumably NPC traders) would fill in the gap, demand would be satiated, and prices would and should stabilize.
If the concern is that traders might make big profits in excess of the progress that say, bounty hunters, pirates, or explorers might make, I would note there appear to be no similar caps on bounties (correct me if I'm wrong).
So, trading profit margins are kept within "safe" boundaries because otherwise, the outcomes *might* be allegedly unrealistic. The unintended consequence is the in fact unrealistic outcome of similar profit margins being made every single trade run, no matter how much stock is moved.
A trade run might be exploited, but players (and presumably NPC traders) would fill in the gap, demand would be satiated, and prices would and should stabilize.
If the concern is that traders might make big profits in excess of the progress that say, bounty hunters, pirates, or explorers might make, I would note there appear to be no similar caps on bounties (correct me if I'm wrong).
So, trading profit margins are kept within "safe" boundaries because otherwise, the outcomes *might* be allegedly unrealistic. The unintended consequence is the in fact unrealistic outcome of similar profit margins being made every single trade run, no matter how much stock is moved.
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I may be wrong but I suspect, for all the FD talk of the relative size of NPC trade to player trader (i.e. players are unimportantish), NPCs won't actually trade. The movement between the upper and lower limits will only reflect player activity.
This may be an anathema to some, but to those focused on the good old SP game of youth, it's peachy. Anyone trying to structure a "better" economy would do well to remember that the majority of players won't have a clue what they're talking about and won't want anything other than buy low, avoid pirate, sell high.
EDIT: BTW, in case it sounds like I'm condescending, I include myself in the clueless category.
This may be an anathema to some, but to those focused on the good old SP game of youth, it's peachy. Anyone trying to structure a "better" economy would do well to remember that the majority of players won't have a clue what they're talking about and won't want anything other than buy low, avoid pirate, sell high.
EDIT: BTW, in case it sounds like I'm condescending, I include myself in the clueless category.
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I may be wrong, but I perceive it as an implicit and possibly unrealised acceptance that a managed economy is not inherently stable, and so requires various arbitrary limits to ameilorate the extremes which otherwise occur.
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I wonder are good's actually used to produce other goods? Wouldn't that take care of influx of new ores?
I feel it might be part of the problem if it isn't now in.
If good's are needed and consumed for production of higher level good's. And their price included in the end price it should keep the system balanced. If every production chain lead's to a sink to vanish into.
Like food getting consumed by Population. Harvest tools breaking in production in Food. Microchips leading to weapon and engine production used by ship production. And ship destruction taking care of that chain.
I like to restate that the game Victoria 2 has a economy system with finite money (well gold mines produce more money but other part's take money out of the system later).
Also every population has need's that need fullfilled and work in mines, farms and factories to produce those goods and in turn buy them with the money earned.
I hope there will be production chains in Elite to help simulate the economy. Leading to natural price development's. Wages taxes and all the stuff factoring into prices of goods.
I want to see a system that can break and will lead to interesting event's. Not just artificial event triggers. But short supply of farming equipment leading to famine and worker shortages resulting in uprisings.
Well i can dream at least.
I feel it might be part of the problem if it isn't now in.
If good's are needed and consumed for production of higher level good's. And their price included in the end price it should keep the system balanced. If every production chain lead's to a sink to vanish into.
Like food getting consumed by Population. Harvest tools breaking in production in Food. Microchips leading to weapon and engine production used by ship production. And ship destruction taking care of that chain.
I like to restate that the game Victoria 2 has a economy system with finite money (well gold mines produce more money but other part's take money out of the system later).
Also every population has need's that need fullfilled and work in mines, farms and factories to produce those goods and in turn buy them with the money earned.
I hope there will be production chains in Elite to help simulate the economy. Leading to natural price development's. Wages taxes and all the stuff factoring into prices of goods.
I want to see a system that can break and will lead to interesting event's. Not just artificial event triggers. But short supply of farming equipment leading to famine and worker shortages resulting in uprisings.
Well i can dream at least.