ANNOUNCEMENT January Update - Patch Notes

[Mordhar]

Then you shouldn't receive any "price" for what you can sell for until after you give them a number of what you are looking to sell.

What do you mean?
You sell certain amount of commodity for unknown amount of money and see the price after deal is closed? IMO it is complete ***.

And if you DO see price before pressing “sell” button it changes nothing, just adds unnecessary complications. Which means you need to “offer” some commodity, see price, then abort trade and repeat process at different station.
It also opens possibility to an obvious exploit: do not sell 100t at once, instead sell 1t 100 times (actually, it is the “correct way” to sell if you want to influence BGS and being this way for years).

The only solution that I can think of is making sales delayed.
You put certain amount of commodity on sale, than wait for demand recalculation tick at which time you get your money. Market shows “approximate price” calculated from current demand and your offer, which is TOTAL amount of commodity you placed at market (even if you done it in 10 runs).
Good on paper. But again requires effort to implement and comes with additional server load.

As a result, the best solution is to not fix what is not broken.

 

[Darth Ender]

What do you mean?
You sell certain amount of commodity for unknown amount of money and see the price after deal is closed? IMO it is complete ***.

And if you DO see price before pressing “sell” button it changes nothing, just adds unnecessary complications. Which means you need to “offer” some commodity, see price, then abort trade and repeat process at different station.
It also opens possibility to an obvious exploit: do not sell 100t at once, instead sell 1t 100 times (actually, it is the “correct way” to sell if you want to influence BGS and being this way for years).

The only solution that I can think of is making sales delayed.
You put certain amount of commodity on sale, than wait for demand recalculation tick at which time you get your money. Market shows “approximate price” calculated from current demand and your offer, which is TOTAL amount of commodity you placed at market (even if you done it in 10 runs).
Good on paper. But again requires effort to implement and comes with additional server load.

As a result, the best solution is to not fix what is not broken.

No, that's not what was stated as a suggested alternative. What was stated was there are no listed prices. You goto a station and start saying you want to sell x number of Painite for instance. Then the market responds saying for X number of painite, we'll give you Y. Then you get to decide if you want to say OK and make the deal. But prior to your telling the market in-person what you are willing to sell, the only thing you are aware of is the "demand level" of the commodity.

 

[CMDR Big Mike]

No, that's not what was stated as a suggested alternative. What was stated was there are no listed prices. You goto a station and start saying you want to sell x number of Painite for instance. Then the market responds saying for X number of painite, we'll give you Y. Then you get to decide if you want to say OK and make the deal. But prior to your telling the market in-person what you are willing to sell, the only thing you are aware of is the "demand level" of the commodity.

Well that sounds like no fun

 

[Mordhar]

Probably there is a language barrier problem.
But how THIS:

No, that's not what was stated as a suggested alternative. What was stated was there are no listed prices. You goto a station and start saying you want to sell x number of Painite for instance. Then the market responds saying for X number of painite, we'll give you Y. Then you get to decide if you want to say OK and make the deal. But prior to your telling the market in-person what you are willing to sell, the only thing you are aware of is the "demand level" of the commodity.

…is different from THIS? (self quote):

...
And if you DO see price before pressing “sell” button it changes nothing, just adds unnecessary complications. Which means you need to “offer” some commodity, see price, then abort trade and repeat process at different station.
...

I do not meant to be disrespectful; I honestly want to understand what I missed in your explanation.

 

[[PS4] Filthymick420]

Absolutely Mick, but look at the price of fish/cereal/clothing now and in the ED future, and look at the price of a Suicidewinder, I said from day one that FDev should have spent out on an economic team for the Basic Economy, material costs, labour costs, expected profit margin and a tax system, and when introducing stuff like VO's look at effort and reward.
Who's gonna be the first pilot to post "trillionaire" and what are they gonna do with it?... FDev have their very own snake chasing it's very own tail.

a quick check on the interweb gives us
Cod £5000 ton
Wheat £6-700 ton
Textiles £1000 ton (tricky one to get an answer to but I used cotton)

They could really easily ignore that in a science fiction video game the economy doesn't need to be realistic. The only thing necessary for a video game is it be enjoyable. this is not

 

[Darth Ender]

Probably there is a language barrier problem.
But how THIS:

…is different from THIS? (self quote):

I do not meant to be disrespectful; I honestly want to understand what I missed in your explanation.

it's different because you then follow up with this idea that it can be exploited by selling at 1ton increments. You wouldn't. The price you get is based on the count of how much of the demand will be removed by the sale. So the price follows a curve.. If you sold it 1 ton at time and nobody else was doing anything in the game to change the situation, then you'd end up with the same total money as the system calculated when you told it you were going to sell it 100 units. Because as you sold each 1 ton, the offer they would give you would decrease. So same end result, just one took longer.

Unless that is, the demand was increasing more rapidly than your sell rate. But that's not an exploit that would work in your favor due to the time spend just sitting there. You'd make far more money just selling for the lower per-unit price and going to get more and sell more else where.

 

[[PS4] Filthymick420]

the only point I'm trying to make in all of this is I used to be able to do something without it being a massive waste of time I cannot do that anymore with the amount of time I have to do it in

 

[Darth Ender]

The only thing necessary for a video game is it be enjoyable. this is not

You haven't been playing elite for long. If that was a real rule, then the 1:1 implementation of the galaxy would have been tossed out as soon as it was stated that 99.9% of the systems would be empty of any content...probably forever and serve no other purpose other than being an obstacle for players to travel from A to B.

 

[Mordhar]

it's different because you then follow up with this idea that it can be exploited by selling at 1ton increments. You wouldn't. The price you get is based on the count of how much of the demand will be removed by the sale. So the price follows a curve.. If you sold it 1 ton at time and nobody else was doing anything in the game to change the situation, then you'd end up with the same total money as the system calculated when you told it you were going to sell it 100 units. Because as you sold each 1 ton, the offer they would give you would decrease. So same end result, just one took longer.

Unless that is, the demand was increasing more rapidly than your sell rate. But that's not an exploit that would work in your favor due to the time spend just sitting there. You'd make far more money just selling for the lower per-unit price and going to get more and sell more else where.

There is a BIG problem with that.

For such system to work demand recalculation needs to be instant (you press “sell” button and demand figure changes accordingly). For every market and every CMDR in Galaxy.
If it work this way, NO additional steps to balance/change market behavior would be necessary.

Unfortunately, demand is recalculated in quite long intervals to decrease server load. And between “ticks” you can sell ANY amount of commodity with same demand figure shown.
This is why FD tried to imitate instant demand changes by implementing their (quite questionable) “fix” in the first place.

 

[Darth Ender]

you dont have to care about everyone else between update intervals of the bgs.
Just the player in question. Between intervals, the only thing that matters is the player(s) in the given instance. So the calculation is going to run thru the client who's acting as the server for the shared instance if there are any other players... and give you a on-off change in demand that is not seen by any other players not sharing that instance.

So think of it as a global demand (the bgs intervals) and the demand of your trade point of contact (which you dont have control over) ... with the point of contact responding instantly ...but getting re-based by the global bgs each interval.

 

[[PS4] Filthymick420]

You haven't been playing elite for long. If that was a real rule, then the 1:1 implementation of the galaxy would have been tossed out as soon as it was stated that 99.9% of the systems would be empty of any content...probably forever and serve no other purpose other than being an obstacle for players to travel from A to B.

9w 1d 22h 28min. Thats long enough. Im on console so it was pretty much brand new to console when i started. In that tim ive only mined for $627,717,030. I never exploited how fast money came with mining because i only mined when i needed money for something way out of my price range. As ive stated before my game time is mostly consumed with squadron responsibilities.

 

[Darth Ender]

The point wasn't that you have been having fun. ..but that you think it's a game rule that the game needs to be fun when it's obvious that it's not a game rule that fdev has followed at all in the game. Otherwise basic building blocks of the game would have never been implemented because they had no plan on how to make it fun. So if you've been playing 9 weeks, it's unclear how you still think that's a game rule. A rule not followed isn't much of a rule. What it proves is that elite dangerous players can make their own fun, despite the best efforts of a game.

 

[Tikanderoga]

No, they did not ruined mining. They fixed it.

They didn't fix anything.
They just took the option from the players to sell to meet the demand. Instead of capping the amount the station accepts, they just nuke the price it pays. That's not a fix, that's a classic FDev.
"we heard what you want, we won't give that to you, just something similar".

When you go to a pub and ask for a beer, steak and chips, instead you get fanta, chicken schnitzel with mashed, what do you do?
That's not what you ordered. The waitress might have understood "A yellow drink, meat and potatoes". But that's not what you said.
We have a classic example of this here.

 

[Mordhar]

They didn't fix anything.
They just took the option from the players to sell to meet the demand. Instead of capping the amount the station accepts, they just nuke the price it pays. That's not a fix, that's a classic FDev.
"we heard what you want, we won't give that to you, just something similar".

When you go to a pub and ask for a beer, steak and chips, instead you get fanta, chicken schnitzel with mashed, what do you do?
That's not what you ordered. The waitress might have understood "A yellow drink, meat and potatoes". But that's not what you said.
We have a classic example of this here.

FD has a long history of removing fun and good working parts of gameplay in endless attempts to prevent players from getting “easy money”.
Most importantly, they NEVER roll-back features when they not work as expected. And never try to balance things in small increments.
If some feature gives the opportunity to get large amount of money – it either completely remade or removed, along with dozen other things that worked fine.

Long ago, I really liked to play as “ground attack” pilot. Made a ship specifically for that role and had a lot of fun by flying to ground installation and destroying skimmers by unguided missiles.
Do you remember that Horizons teaser where ships attack ground targets?
It worked well until FD made an “improvement” to game mechanics that allowed getting a lot of money by stacking skimmer missions.
They reacted quickly by making ground attack gameplay completely impossible.

After that, they made an improvement to mission payment based on distance travelled.
Another “gold rush” happened with people stacking passenger missions.
Another nerf followed aimed to “balance income” and “prevent exploits”. It affected other types of missions which never being used for “exploit”. But who cares?

I liked mining and was doing it for a couple of years, started when it was worst paying activity in game.
FD made a big announcement about improvements to mining. They tried to finally make it profitable.
So now is time to nerf it, because it allows people to get too much money…
And naturally solution to “balance and prevent exploiting” requires breaking some other things.

 

[Darth Ender]

balancing the game to not make a lot of money is in the best interests of the game. Unfortunately, having fun engaging mechanics in order to draw out the time it takes to make money is also in the best interest of the game and is missing from this one. That's why players whine about how long it takes and whine about how far things are and look for any way to reduce both ... Well all of the gameplay in the game exists within those two things ..so everytime you reduce it, you reduce the game. The problem is, there's not much game anyway, so the ends tend to justify the means.

At some point though, fdev might get around to putting more game into the game and then you'll want...need... that distance to be long, for that thing to be expensive... but it'll be too late for most of us.

 

[Skip Rockbounder]

They didn't fix anything.
They just took the option from the players to sell to meet the demand. Instead of capping the amount the station accepts, they just nuke the price it pays. That's not a fix, that's a classic FDev.
"we heard what you want, we won't give that to you, just something similar".

When you go to a pub and ask for a beer, steak and chips, instead you get fanta, chicken schnitzel with mashed, what do you do?
That's not what you ordered. The waitress might have understood "A yellow drink, meat and potatoes". But that's not what you said.
We have a classic example of this here.

Yeah, we wanted to 'chum' up and sit in our mate's ship and go flyin with them... we got telepresence.
we asked for Crew... we never see them
We wanted to land on planets... we got dustballs and ice rocks
we asked for a deeper exploration process... we got a fixed 'all in one' unit
We asked for launchable fighter/sub craft... we got em but they can't go further than 30 km.
What do you think will happen with Fleet Carriers? I bet there'll be a good few down turned mouths,
Predicting 'elite feet' and Atmo's in the same vein

I ask my kid to wash up... he soaks the place and doesn't complete the task... mayhaps he could get a job in Cambridge

 

[gasp10]

Well spotted! Did you log it on the issue tracker? It's more of an enhancement than a bug, but still worth logging imo.

added a post on suggestion some time ago, but no response

 

[Jermanicus]

Void Opal mining is not quite the same now, I spent hours trying to find a decent price, only to find there no longer is due to the update.

Agree, I discovered this just now. Looking for the best price which was previously around CR1.6million, now the max is around CR750,000. So looks like that's VO mining nerfed.

 

[aRJay]

Agree, I discovered this just now. Looking for the best price which was previously around CR1.6million, now the max is around CR750,000. So looks like that's VO mining nerfed.

Yes down to a mere 100,000% profit or thereabouts depending on how many expendable were used.

Keep in mind all the greedier miners will have stopped reporting where the highest prices are now that markets are volatile so finding the places prepared to pay insane prices will be where the skill will shift to.

On the plus side mining is as much fun as it was so those with a genuine need for credits can get twice as much fun for same payment.

 

[Sniffy75]

27 pages of replies, and nobody has yet expressed curiosity over this line:

"Added names for a selection of systems in the Witch Head Sector "

Names imply purpose, does no one wonder what fDev have hidden over in an area that is largely surrounded by permit locks?