Has trading been nerfed?

[-Ice]

I used to have a couple of trade runs doing at least 1,200Cr per ton bringing Gold one way and then at least 900Cr per ton on the return trip bringing Resonating Separators or Progenitor Cells or whatever. Using my Type-9 or Anaconda, I could easily make 1.5M Cr profit per round trip.

Revisiting these routes under Horizons, it seems that the profits have been seriously nerfed. I've never seen a 1,000Cr per ton profit, most often it's 600-900Cr per ton. A round trip would make only around 500K Cr profit using the same commodities. Changing cargo would up the profit by maybe 200K Cr per round trip, but this is still just over half of what it used to be.

The supply and demand for the commodities seems to be less than I remember as well.

Is anyone else seeing these numbers?

 

[MottiKhan]

Commodities fluctuate and as other players buy and sell, the prices are affected. I've recently seen better than 3k/ton round trip profit on a trade route for my alternate CMDR. It's gone from about 3k, down to about 2.5k and back up to about 3.5k now. I assume the other CMDRs got discouraged and stopped trading when it fell.

 

[Valethar]

Things were 'adjusted' when 2.0 released. You aren't the only person who noticed, judging by some other threads/comments I've seen since then.

 

[Banana's_Are_Good_For_You]

Commodities fluctuate and as other players buy and sell, the prices are affected. I've recently seen better than 3k/ton round trip profit on a trade route for my alternate CMDR. It's gone from about 3k, down to about 2.5k and back up to about 3.5k now. I assume the other CMDRs got discouraged and stopped trading when it fell.

Non-existent BGS at work?
Seen similar involved with a minor faction focusing on certain things like trade, and even though there are outside influences affecting things like systems becoming anarchy's (smuggling most likely), the highest profit legit trade routes where the first to go.
I'm not against this btw...I like it.

 

[-Ice]

My routes are not very popular with human players. On all my stations, traffic of human players are in single digits so no way are the commodities "drained" by player activity.

What is BGS?

 

[TomP]

My routes are not very popular with human players. On all my stations, traffic of human players are in single digits so no way are the commodities "drained" by player activity.

What is BGS?

Background simulation/simulator.

How can you be so sure about other human involvement on your trade route?

 

[-Ice]

Thanks!

In every station, it'll show you ship activity for the past 24 hrs. Like I said, this was in single digits.

 

[TomP]

Thanks!

In every station, it'll show you ship activity for the past 24 hrs. Like I said, this was in single digits.

Fair enough.

 

[DragonIV]

There's no real BGS with prices. I've been trading since before the game was released, and prices fluctuate between only a few set values (generally between a particular high and low for a given station). After most of the major updates, these high/low points got moved in many places, destroying existing trade routes but generating others.

I'm now doing a route in a python ferrying imperial slaves one way (from a platform) and beryllium the other, and it is about the same profitability as I made with my T9 doing gold/cells between two very close stations.

So, new routes are out there--the economy is pretty much static, still--and trading didn't so much get nerfed as simply shaken up and redistributed quite a bit.

 

[-Ice]

Thanks for that info, dragoniv!

I, too, have been trading for a while and have only taken the last few months off due to RL pressures. It's nice to know that the profit numbers are still put there. Never traded in slaves before... That's in Imperial space, correct?

 

[Swordfish_01]

I just saw a 3600 trade today,,,, one way I didn't check the other but hey. They are out there, things have just changed up.

 

[Banana's_Are_Good_For_You]

Well, it confused me and made life difficult but I don't use any tools.
Are people using the same routes or are you changing in accordance to updated info?

 

[Sapyx]

The BGS does change the profitability of trade routes, if enough CMDRs keep using it. So if an external trader site (or a forum post) says "Hey, go from XXX to YYY and back", and hundreds of traders start grinding that route, then that trade route will become unviable within a week.

Routes do eventually recover, though the harder they are hit, the longer time it takes to recover. Do you remember the original Bast plague CG? They forgot to fix the demand for Medicines when the CG started. Thousands of CMDRs dumping millions of tonnes of medicines, in one place, collapsed the demand; the CG had to be finished by people actually taking a loss from the sales. I was back in Bast a couple days ago; demand for medicines there is still zero, six months later.

This also explains why experienced CMDRs, when asked by newbie traders "C'mon, tell us your good trade routes", keep silent and don't share. High Cr/tonne trade routes is one part of the game where sharing is bad for you.

 

[-Ice]

What were you trading at 3600?

I do indeed use tools but it's just for data-capture and analysis. I don't use crowd-sourced info.... I used to refer to it just to compare my routes with others but since most data is now pre-Horizons, that info isn't valid anymore anyway.

 

[dryjoy]

Things have definitely changed, and not because of other players trading routes out, though I don't believe there has been a deliberate 'nerf'.

One factor I believe has come into play is that with Horizons has come new surface ports with commodities markets, and these have upset many trade routes with additional economies. For example, the system I used to sell imperial slaves to now produces them on a planet, so there's no demand any more. I don't think that's the only thing going on but I am sure it is a factor.

Do you have Horizons? If so you could do worse than to check out some surface refinery economies. My new route includes commodities only available from surface markets and is more profitable than my old one before it went belly up.

The only thing is, I don't think routes reliant on surface trading are going to stand up to use by other players, as surface markets always have very low supply and demand numbers.

 

[HeavyGroovez]

I used to have a couple of trade runs doing at least 1,200Cr per ton bringing Gold one way and then at least 900Cr per ton on the return trip bringing Resonating Separators or Progenitor Cells or whatever. Using my Type-9 or Anaconda, I could easily make 1.5M Cr profit per round trip.

Revisiting these routes under Horizons, it seems that the profits have been seriously nerfed. I've never seen a 1,000Cr per ton profit, most often it's 600-900Cr per ton. A round trip would make only around 500K Cr profit using the same commodities. Changing cargo would up the profit by maybe 200K Cr per round trip, but this is still just over half of what it used to be.

The supply and demand for the commodities seems to be less than I remember as well.

Is anyone else seeing these numbers?

I didn't think anybody traded regular commodities since the Powerplay release.

Get yourself over to a Torval control system and fill your boots with Imperial Slaves.

Sell them on a Delaine black market.

 

[Cmdr Eagleboy]

There's no real BGS with prices. I've been trading since before the game was released, and prices fluctuate between only a few set values (generally between a particular high and low for a given station). After most of the major updates, these high/low points got moved in many places, destroying existing trade routes but generating others.

Regular experience begs to differ. There is real BGS and prices change. Yes, price mins and maxs are defined - but again trough BGS simulating NPC trade. Horizons introduced marketplaces on planetary surfaces. Also BGS code gets big updates each time, and most likely some markets change for good.

 

[Urbanski101]

I noticed this as well

Another reason could be that some planets have their own economies which can influence the supply and demand for a system.

One station I used to sell metal at saw a huge price drop, turns out one of the planets in the system has a refinery so the need to import metal has dropped. Makes sense...though it could be coincidence and I'm reading way to much into the economics of ED.

 

[-Ice]

Yes, I do have Horizons and I did think initially that planet-side trading was an option. Being in an Anaconda, there's no way a planet-side station could support this type of trading.... unless there's a massive planet-side station somewhere that has a very big supply/demand level. From what I've seen, most of these have supply/demand levels on-par or less than outposts.

 

[d8veh]

I just did a quick check at a couple of local systems and I found a 1300 per ton difference for palladium.