No, I actually fully acknowledge the increased demand on the markets. It's simply something players haven't had to deal with, which is why I've written that guide and trying to show people how to do it.@Jmanis I see what you are saying about using in game tools to find insulating membrane.
I do think you are glossing over the change in market pressures created by colonization and FC commodity hoarding. A commander that has an FC, and has plans to build multiple structures in a system is not just going to take what they need for the current project, they are going to exhaust all of the high-demand resources within the shell of the bubble closest to expansion.
If you take nothing else out of this comment, take this: I hope these new dynamics are the impetus for FD to finally do the economic and UI rework that people like me have been asking for for at least 6 years now.
All the complaints I see which almost always stem from "I did this search in Inara and found nothing" are an artefact of never having to deal with market turbulence in the game before. It's new... change is hard, but this is a good thing.
Which is, bluntly, now in the hands of the players, thanks to this. If we want more sources of these goods in the universe, we're now empowered to make them.If there were true market forces at work, prices in that shell would skyrocket - they have not. This is a game, and to keep things balanced for all players, it may be appropriate to cap per player the number of resources purchasable at a site for a given resource over a given time period IF FDEV wants everyone to access the mechanic. Stores in RL definitely have caps on purchased quantities of high demand items to prevent hoarding. The alternative is to increase production, which is a natural market response to increased demand.
As I said before, a player driven market (like many have been seeking) requires player driven demand. We now have player driven demand because NPCs can't keep up with that demand. I firmly disagree the fix to that is to buff NPC production rates.
I acknowledge your suggestions about RL things, but this is a game. The challenge here is logistics and the sourcing of both readily available goods in bulk, scarce goods in low volumes, and also a blend of those two causing things like CMMs and Insulating Membranes. These all pose different challenges to source effectively and efficiently.
But if we just buff everything, suddenly this is all homogenous. The challenge is gone. It's like removing all the different types of ships in the game and just having one ship.
Does price really matter that much on this occasion? We're talking a maximum price differential if you were building, say, an Orbis, of just 3 million credits (being generous). A single assassination mission would award nearly three times that much... so if you're having to take an inordinately longer period of time to get the cheapest goods instead of just picking them up from a more expensive location(and, when scarcity exists, items hold much higher value than their purchase price may suggest... noting if we want to tie back to your RL examples, businesses are also generally prevented from price-gouging during scarcity events, but individuals aren't tethered to that)I was able to find the insulating membrane doing a rank order search by quantity, and with the pre-engineered SCO and FSD booster the 200+ ly trip to pick them up in my Cutter wasn't too bad. If I hadn't used inara though, doing a price evaluation search with in game tools at those ranges would have been unpleasant.
What commanders hording goods to resell for max profit will find is, if they are hording, they aren't readily selling them, because they can't stem the continual tide of these things respawning in their thousands, across tens of thousands of locations, they simply won't be able to sell them for a good enough price. Contrast against something like TDCs, where there was a much more genuine scarcity, and so pricing of 40m credits per unit was entirely achievable.
On it being unpleasant, is that because it genuinely is (and to some degree, it is, the UX is definitely not great), or simply that the techniques are mismatched with your expectations, creating discordance that can be eased just through further use? i.e you're so used to "search X in inara" that doing it another way feels unnatural?
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