PP2.0 Trade Merits is broken, and gives vastly more if you trade one ton at a time.

[DemiserofD]

Found something very odd today. If you sell one unit of trade goods at a time, you get a huge bonus - and I do mean huge.

Example? I sold 320 tons of Imperial Slaves, and got ~200 merits. Then I sold 1 ton, and got...11 merits.

So if you painstakingly sell 320 tons one ton at a time, you get ~3500 merits. If you sell them as one trade, you get 200.

 

[St0rmFury]

 

[Rebel Yell]

Playtesting did go well.

 

[galahad2069]

So if you painstakingly sell 320 tons one ton at a time, you get ~3500 merits. If you sell them as one trade, you get 200.

Well deserved reward for your hard work I guess.

 

[zimms]

Well, I assume this is by design. Elite has always had a "bulk tax".

Yes, I'd love to see it gone, but Frontier's stance is that this will keep small ships relevant.

 

[metatheurgist]

Same thing used to happen with arx (dunno if it's still the case). Except that's like each 1M transaction or something. For the people that say you can't get arx mining.

 

[Tifu]

Confirmed the trade merit bug. Carried 48 tons of a distinctly ordinary product to an orbital station in a Mahon stronghold system - got the following stats:

1 ton = 4 merits
2 tons = 6 merits
3 tons = 7 merits
4 tons = 9 merits
5 tons = 10 merits

Selling 48 tons at 1 ton per transaction would have netted me nearly 200 merits

 

[Ian Doncaster]

1 ton = 4 merits
2 tons = 6 merits
3 tons = 7 merits
4 tons = 9 merits
5 tons = 10 merits

That looks like 1.5 merits per tonne (rounding down) plus an extra 3 merits for the transaction.

I don't see why Powerplay needs a per-transaction bonus.

Well, I assume this is by design. Elite has always had a "bulk tax".

Yes, I'd love to see it gone, but Frontier's stance is that this will keep small ships relevant.

Bulk tax is slightly different - you get a reduced cargo price based on your hold contents, on the assumption that you will sell the entire hold at once, to abstract the price-per-tonne changing as you sell up and fill the demand (a more concrete simulation would have a bunch of "I bid 1800cr/t for 60t", "I bid 1780cr/t for 20t" orders in the background which you fill one at a time as you sell - perhaps even offered by different minor factions! - but that's far too fiddly for the purpose trade serves in Elite)

You don't get less bulk tax - having arrived at the station with a full hold - if you only sell 1t at a time, unless you take the extremely tedious process of waiting 10 minutes for a market refresh between each tonne.

 

[WhiteHaulerMan]

Found something very odd today. If you sell one unit of trade goods at a time, you get a huge bonus - and I do mean huge.

Example? I sold 320 tons of Imperial Slaves, and got ~200 merits. Then I sold 1 ton, and got...11 merits.

So if you painstakingly sell 320 tons one ton at a time, you get ~3500 merits. If you sell them as one trade, you get 200.

Shakes head

Oh the multiple interactions yields better returns than one exploit.

You'd think after dealing with this multiple times over the last decade, they'd have been prepared for this.

 

[rootsrat]

Used to be the same for trade leaderboards.

Ugh.

 

[Aleks Zuno]

I find that the bounty-hunting Merits ought to be a bit more that way, as with those trade Merits:

• Loosely it is one Merit per 10000 voucher credits, with a very slight gradient to increase it below and reduce it above ~50000, but otherwise it follows that very closely.
• I can find a big, slow Anaconda worth 1.1 million before Kill scan and 1.6 million after, and remove it for ~160 Merits in a few seconds regardless of rank.
• A high-rank Sidewinder is much more difficult to hit and can keep me occupied for quite a bit longer, but is worth only an average ~55000, barely enough to match the 5 Merits for scanning it. The lowest-known elite Sidewinder bounty recorded at INIV is 35000, which is a paltry 3 Merits.

Well, I assume this is by design. Elite has always had a "bulk tax".
Yes, I'd love to see it gone, but Frontier's stance is that this will keep small ships relevant.

1. Where did Frontier claim that selling cargo by single units keeps small ships relevant?
2. Where else has Elite ever had a bulk tax?
   • Reduced market demand is the opposite; if anything, it rewards selling as much as possible in one transaction.
   • Diminishing returns on per-day Influence is entirely separate to how much base Influence actions give.

That looks like 1.5 merits per tonne (rounding down) plus an extra 3 merits for the transaction.

Salvage does something similar but without the transaction bonus, with something like 62.5 Merits per Black Box after noticing I get 125 Merits for two. All of these actions really, really need changing to be integer rewards!

 

[Ian Doncaster]

Salvage does something similar but without the transaction bonus, with something like 62.5 Merits per Black Box after noticing I get 125 Merits for two. All of these actions really, really need changing to be integer rewards!

I can understand some things being sub-integer - with Powerplay cargo being one merit per tonne (or slightly higher with an ethos bonus), trade cargo being generally <1 merit/tonne makes sense because otherwise why bother with the Powerplay cargo. But it needs to round down rather than up to stop this sort of thing.

(That, or make Powerplay cargo 5 merits per tonne or something. It'd still not be all that efficient at that rate but it'd be worth carrying)

 

[Cmdr. Numa]

Well, I assume this is by design. Elite has always had a "bulk tax".

Yes, I'd love to see it gone, but Frontier's stance is that this will keep small ships relevant.

Which is made completely irrelevant by 1t trading....

 

[Brrokk]

Really? They've done this again? :-(

(I haven't tried PP yet, I'm waiting for the bugs and balancing to dissipate).

 

[galahad2069]

Really? They've done this again? :-(

(I haven't tried PP yet, I'm waiting for the bugs and balancing to dissipate).

No need to wait imo. Bugs will never dissipate, balance does not even exist so it cannot possibly dissipate.

The only things that can and most probably will dissipate eventually are the good merit making gold mines.

 

[Aleks Zuno]

(That, or make Powerplay cargo 5 merits per tonne or something. It'd still not be all that efficient at that rate but it'd be worth carrying)

Indeed that is another disproportionately low case, especially given the half-hour restriction; I had hoped that my combat-and-salvage Python 2 loadout would serve also for carrying small amounts of Power cargo into an Undermining system where salvage is useless, but that would need to reward closer to 30 Merits per item to do that rather than change everything for more shielding and a better Interdictor!

Similarly and despite carrying an Operations limpet, the Holo-screen hacking time is not worth the ~24 Merits by far.

 

[St0rmFury]

Similarly and despite carrying an Operations limpet, the Holo-screen hacking time is not worth the ~24 Merits by far.

I built a silent running dolphin intending to hack stronghold FCs, but real life got in the way & hadn't got the time to try it yet.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

Similarly and despite carrying an Operations limpet, the Holo-screen hacking time is not worth the ~24 Merits by far.

I find the key for that to be Outposts - with the right positioning of the adverts, launch the limpets then dock, and you're still in range so they can hack the screens while you sort out station stuff. It's not a major bonus but since I've got the controller anyway it'd be leaving free merits on the table not to do it.

Can be done at a Coriolis too but only if they offer you a front pad...

 

[DemiserofD]

That looks like 1.5 merits per tonne (rounding down) plus an extra 3 merits for the transaction.

Selling Bertrandite at 16k/ton profit, I got

1 ton: 11 Merits
2 tons: 16 merits
3 tons: 21 merits
4 tons: 24? merits

So 11, then 5, 4, 3, and so on. It did not stop at 1 either, as selling 320 netted me ~200 merits.

I'm not inherently against a bonus for smaller trades, but any bonus needs to be set up to not be easily gamed like this.

 

[Aleks Zuno]

I find the key for that to be Outposts - with the right positioning of the adverts, launch the limpets then dock, and you're still in range so they can hack the screens while you sort out station stuff. It's not a major bonus but since I've got the controller anyway it'd be leaving free merits on the table not to do it.

I had wondered whether that would work! Upon seeing the low Merits I decided against it either way, though:

• In a Reinforcement system, returning to a port with limpets remaining for potential docked hacking still would be worse than one more Wreckage drop to convert them into another Black box (62.5 each) and Occupied pods (~40 each).
  • Maybe if returning with exactly one limpet, but in that case it would have been as well to use it upon a Damaged pod or even a Wreckage component.
• In an Undermining system there is no returning to a port after accruing a local bounty, such that I would do it only if delivering a little Power cargo becomes worthwhile (~20–30 ¹) on the first visit and one Holo-screen beats nine cargo units to account for the limpet controller.
  • For non-combat Undermining I imagine it works well though, such as if the purpose of the system visit is a low-value market flood delivery.

1. To be clear for others, the possible imbalance of 20–30 Merits per Power cargo is beside the point; below that much, it is better for me to remove all cargo, fit more shielding and gain Merits more effectively with combat instead.

I'm not inherently against a bonus for smaller trades, but any bonus needs to be set up to not be easily gamed like this.

An easy suggestion from me is to give one transaction bonus per visit, or per docking!