High-end mining material prices seem maybe a little bit TOO volatile

[VR] Mad Mike

[VR] Mad Mike
Moriarte said:
Funny you should say that. Now let's assume everything works as intended with proposed demand changes, so what happens next? Players satisfy painite and opals demand, so next batches will become cheaper and cheaper. At some point serendibite becomes more attractive than both opals and painite, so we switch to that, scoop it all up, drive the prices down too. Switch to the next commodity. Who knows, maybe some day we'll be hauling food cartriges. Result: rapid drop in prices and profitability of trading in commodities across inhabited space.

That is, provided, I interpreted the changes correctly
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That sounds about right...... However that is assuming the demand is sorted everywhere .,... which if balanced properly would not happen.

If for instance we were buying farming machinery to sell to agriculture station , the system selling the machinery would need electronic components and I dunno, aluminium...... So ideally your trade route would go there 1st to pick those up.. but those systems may need bauxite and silicon so you would go there 1st.... Of course those systems would need food which you would get from agriculture , and there you have your trade route... And by the time you have finished your route hopefully that aggreiculture system would be needing more farming machinery as it would wear out and so demand would be increasing.
Iirc in beta the economy worked a bit like this however the pay didn't work (the more in demand something gets the more they should pay for it). Also some players.complained because they just wanted to trade the top of the food chain as that made most money. Rather than balance it properly it seems to be the whole thing got simplified.
Perhaps I am remembering wrong and have rose tinted specs of the economy in beta but I think it worked better then.
 

Go'Gen

Go'Gen
Mad Mike said:
If for instance we were buying farming machinery to sell to agriculture station , the system selling the machinery would need electronic components and I dunno, aluminium...... So ideally your trade route would go there 1st to pick those up.. but those systems may need bauxite and silicon so you would go there 1st....
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... and if more cmdrs would do this production process in a wing, they'd soon drop the price of farming machinery on agriculture station?
Tho', guess whoever played X3: Reunion, would be good at this :)
 

[VR] Mad Mike

[VR] Mad Mike
Go'Gen said:
... and if more cmdrs would do this production process in a wing, they'd soon drop the price of farming machinery on agriculture station?
Tho', guess whoever played X3: Reunion, would be good at this :)
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once demand is satiated then sure...... prices would drop for a time, but there are 1000s of systems in ED tho, I doubt a handful of wings could exhaust all of them. It wiill need a lot of work however.... every commodity in ED should really have a place with potential to make a good profit out of trading imo.

of course those that appear on inara perhaps could get saturated quickly but then the game should give players encouragement to learn to find them on their own imo if they want to make the best money. The entire premise of the economy for ED was that if you find a lucrative route you are protective over it and run it as much as you can before it burns out. it was never the intention to upload the most lucrative routes and share for 1000s of people to hammer for months on end.

in an ideal world over the course of 100s of hrs playing the game as a trader, a CMDR may build up 10 - 20 such trade loops which they find themselves, and build a reputation up in each of the stations in each of the routes, that way rather than saturating one, the player would do a few runs on 1, them move to the next etc etc etc.

this is for those who want to maximise trade profits of course...... the player who is trying to bolster their pet faction however may actually want to keep hitting the same route to help what ever npc faction........ but in which case they need to accept they are not going to be making as much money, which is kind of plausible.
 
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Darth Ender

D
the crux of the issue with making gobs of money is that there is no inflation in the game. If the game priced the cost of modules and ships as a percentage of the player's total asset wealth then the problem would be solved.

The entire point of credits is to be a barrier of rewards. The idea being to limit the acquisition of such things to create a difficulty level and impart a piece of what makes an item valuable. With a scaling % based cost for modules and ships, you accomplish that no matter how much or how few credits you decide to make. Instead of a static absolute cost that only matters at the very beginning of playing the game, you get a cost that matters forever.
 

Ian Doncaster

Ian Doncaster
Moriarte said:
Funny you should say that. Now let's assume everything works as intended with proposed demand changes, so what happens next? Players satisfy painite and opals demand, so next batches will become cheaper and cheaper. At some point serendibite becomes more attractive than both opals and painite, so we switch to that, scoop it all up, drive the prices down too. Switch to the next commodity. Who knows, maybe some day we'll be hauling food cartriges. Result: rapid drop in prices and profitability of trading in commodities across inhabited space.
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Theoretically, yes. In practice, most commodities have high demand levels and fairly fast regeneration of met demand, so it needs a CG to even make a temporary dent in them and a week after that everything's back to normal.

Very roughly I think the current bubble-wide economy could support about 3 million full-time traders and miners (mostly traders) ... though you'd notice shortages of both supply and demand of the most profitable goods a lot sooner than that, especially in popular systems.

I think it would be interesting if Frontier did tune the economy so that those happened more often - a tenth of the demand and a tenth of the regeneration rate would make things quite a bit more varied in terms of what the right goods to trade were.
 

Kayvan

Kayvan
Well, gotta say that I find it rather silly that the most sought-after, highest price mass (!) commodities is are gems intended for jewelry. If at least the flavour text described them as required for some SF hi-tech, like FSDs or whatnot, that would be a different story. In short, if the highest-profit resources were some kind of Macguffinite that runs the universe.

However, consider the ratio of independent space traders vs human population as a whole. Doesn't the federation alone have like 700 billion citizens? Probably as many for the empire, and then some Alliance and Independents? I'd say we're probably looking at something like 2 TRILLION people that want to be provided with stuff.

That said, after being rather anxious of my Elite Trader grind devolving into an extremely tedious affair, today I actually made more money from a single run than before, so I reckon I'm relaxed. (Also, I really do this only for the rank, so I guess about 3 more runs or so and I should be there, and then I plan to never touch a mining laser again in my life.)
 

uncle bulgaria

uncle bulgaria
Mad Mike said:
That sounds about right...... However that is assuming the demand is sorted everywhere .,... which if balanced properly would not happen.

If for instance we were buying farming machinery to sell to agriculture station , the system selling the machinery would need electronic components and I dunno, aluminium...... So ideally your trade route would go there 1st to pick those up.. but those systems may need bauxite and silicon so you would go there 1st.... Of course those systems would need food which you would get from agriculture , and there you have your trade route... And by the time you have finished your route hopefully that aggreiculture system would be needing more farming machinery as it would wear out and so demand would be increasing.
Iirc in beta the economy worked a bit like this however the pay didn't work (the more in demand something gets the more they should pay for it). Also some players.complained because they just wanted to trade the top of the food chain as that made most money. Rather than balance it properly it seems to be the whole thing got simplified.
Perhaps I am remembering wrong and have rose tinted specs of the economy in beta but I think it worked better then.
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It was like that in early days post full release. I found a little cluster that was that loop, food to extraction, ore to refinery, metals to high tech and tech to agricultural, was a nice little earner when I was in a Cobra Mk3. The trick to trade routes was short supercruise distances rather than number of jumps

I've not mined for a good few weeks but it sounds like the changes make sense, demand and price should tank if someone drops off 150 tonnes of painite somewhere, how much of the stuff could a system really need?!
 

Fenwe

F
Darth Ender said:
this argument that as long as you're having fun it doesn't matter only works for single player games. For better or worse, that's not what elite is.
having an unlimited supply of credits means everything that is balanced by credits is pointless and moot. So things like BGS manipulation that is heavily credit balanced is now open season. Things like power play that is heavily credit balanced is now no different than if everything was free. Access to certain things based on ranking of elite (where that ranking can come from trade) is now pointless. Etc. Everything based on credits is now the same as if the cost of those things are 0.

That completely changes the dynamic of the game for everyone who cares at all about the bgs, power play and essentially the shared universe aspect of the game.

this isn't about "back in my day it was harder to do xyz" this kind of income makes credits meaningless and doesn't replace it with any other barrier. That's almost never the intention of any game to make the rewards free and remove all risk. That's what has been done here.
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One of your posts said that the game had been 'normalized' at 1-3 million credits per hour. Math isn't my strong suit, how many hours of game play would it take to earn enough to buy this or this at that kind of rate?

On the reverse side, if you 'normalize' according to mining income, is that the mining income provided by a sidewinder, a python or a cutter? At that point you are going to force everyone to mine? Does that make sense to you?

I understand that their should be more of a balance between virtual incomes. Be aware though that the complexities involved aren't going to be easy to solve.
 

Darth Ender

D
Fenwe said:
One of your posts said that the game had been 'normalized' at 1-3 million credits per hour. Math isn't my strong suit, how many hours of game play would it take to earn enough to buy this or this at that kind of rate?

On the reverse side, if you 'normalize' according to mining income, is that the mining income provided by a sidewinder, a python or a cutter? At that point you are going to force everyone to mine? Does that make sense to you?

I understand that their should be more of a balance between virtual incomes. Be aware though that the complexities involved aren't going to be easy to solve.
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10 hours would be 30 mil. 100 hours would be 300 mill. in the high end case. That amounts to maybe two months of playing for 1-2 hours a day. That's perfectly reasonable for top end most expensive ships in a game that intends to last for a decade with tons of players having played for a significant portion of that.

That normalized amount is not mining alone, it was roughly what you get with combat and trading and mining. Exploration was lower ...no idea what that amounts to these days.
The normalized amount makes a rough amount of sense. Then if you convert the cost to a scaled percentage, you can retain that level of distance between what is cheap and what is expensive no matter how much credits someone has or makes. That is the most important thing that would need to be changed ... otherwise credits only have any meaning and only matter for beginner players. That's not a good game economy.
 

Deleted member 182079

D
Checked the market in HR 1185 just now, which indicated that various minerals I had in my cargo (Alexandrite, Serendibite, Musgravite) were selling for say 400-600k a ton at Arc's Faith in HR 1183 next door.

Even purchased the trading data just in case, still the same, so I immediately launch and head to Arc's Faith.

Upon arrival, demand is zero for all of them, prices around 120k. To be fair, the system has seen some traffic (~400 ships in the last 24h) so it's possible that one or more players dropped a whole Conda-load of those minerals just before I arrived, but...hmmm.

I'll see if I can try this another time in a more quiet part of the bubble maybe, given that the Pleiades is quite a small bubble in itself. If this is the new normal then yeah, mining will be a bit more tricky to get rich fast with (which I kind of like, at least on paper - if demand stays down for long periods this could become a bit of a pain though).
 

Moriarte

Moriarte
Ian Doncaster said:
Theoretically, yes. In practice, most commodities have high demand levels and fairly fast regeneration of met demand, so it needs a CG to even make a temporary dent in them and a week after that everything's back to normal.

Very roughly I think the current bubble-wide economy could support about 3 million full-time traders and miners (mostly traders) ... though you'd notice shortages of both supply and demand of the most profitable goods a lot sooner than that, especially in popular systems.

I think it would be interesting if Frontier did tune the economy so that those happened more often - a tenth of the demand and a tenth of the regeneration rate would make things quite a bit more varied in terms of what the right goods to trade were.
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Don’t underestimate elite miners! A day has passed and now eddb reports that highest bid for painite is at 568k. That’s compared to 800k standard we had for years. Void opals are falling as fast. Rare minerals markets tend to have low demands, which are easy to satisfy. Some backwater moon has stellar prices right now, you have to know where to find it.
 

Red Anders

Red Anders
Moriarte said:
Don’t underestimate elite miners! A day has passed and now eddb reports that highest bid for painite is at 568k. That’s compared to 800k standard we had for years. Void opals are falling as fast. Rare minerals markets tend to have low demands, which are easy to satisfy. Some backwater moon has stellar prices right now, you have to know where to find it.
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We have not had '800k standard' for painite for anything even vaguely resembling 'years'.
 

Jmanis

Jmanis
Repeating myself from another thread... seems like it took a while for the new prices to sink in. One outpost had voipals at 1.4m with 0 demand and boom/cl/pa for a good 12 hours... i then checked back, states and demand the same, but price dropped to 500k.

So ther inconsistency just looks temporary
 

Tikanderoga

Tikanderoga
Darth Ender said:
the crux of the issue with making gobs of money is that there is no inflation in the game. If the game priced the cost of modules and ships as a percentage of the player's total asset wealth then the problem would be solved.

The entire point of credits is to be a barrier of rewards. The idea being to limit the acquisition of such things to create a difficulty level and impart a piece of what makes an item valuable. With a scaling % based cost for modules and ships, you accomplish that no matter how much or how few credits you decide to make. Instead of a static absolute cost that only matters at the very beginning of playing the game, you get a cost that matters forever.
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Nope, not even then.
Because in that case, anyone who starts off in a sidewinder, with 1000Cr would be able to buy an A rated Anaconda for 500cr.
Because... well... % of nothing is - nothing!

And it is still a barrier to many. Not everyone goes out there and mines for billions of credits. Not everyone enjoys that, others prefer to blow up Thargoids or visit Hutton Orbital twice per day. New players still have to earn their wings. Not everyone gets 20t of VO or LTD dumped in front of them and start off with an easy life.
 

LOSBOT

LOSBOT
Darth Ender said:
the crux of the issue with making gobs of money is that there is no inflation in the game. If the game priced the cost of modules and ships as a percentage of the player's total asset wealth then the problem would be solved.

The entire point of credits is to be a barrier of rewards. The idea being to limit the acquisition of such things to create a difficulty level and impart a piece of what makes an item valuable. With a scaling % based cost for modules and ships, you accomplish that no matter how much or how few credits you decide to make. Instead of a static absolute cost that only matters at the very beginning of playing the game, you get a cost that matters forever.
Click to expand...

We get it. You love the idea of taxing the crap out of the wealthy players. Tell us again. ;)
 
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