Raise supply of Insulating Membranes!!!I found the CMM Composites we’re fairly easy to find; it was the Insulating Membranes that neatly drove me insane (cue for a song of some kind)
screams
Supply and Demand or just plain greed?
- Thread starter jason 55
- Start date
screams
They don’t trust us?
I am not sure I trust us for that matter.
I am slightly curious about the wording of the thread title as it seems to imply an either or situation, why can’t it be both?
The game is intentionally designed and advertised with the slogan "cutthroat galaxy". Everyone is free to ignore any business that doesn't meet their moral compass, but won't get to avoid competing with those who don't adhere to the same standards. If this is not good enough, there are other areas and activities available where these concerns don't apply. Which is what I choose most of the time, even if for other reasons than real-world moral scruples in a simulation game.
All of this becomes much easier when people stop referring to in-game credits as "money" at all. It makes me cringe every time I see someone stuck in this mental hole. The stuff doesn't meet the criteria for such a definition, not even close. Stop worrying about it. You play the game any way you like, credits come in automatically. Unlike real life.
All of this becomes much easier when people stop referring to in-game credits as "money" at all. It makes me cringe every time I see someone stuck in this mental hole. The stuff doesn't meet the criteria for such a definition, not even close. Stop worrying about it. You play the game any way you like, credits come in automatically. Unlike real life.
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That was my thought. It happens in every game where players can sell stuff to each other: start with an astronomical price and gradually lower it until the stuff starts shifting. The reason this is possible is that in a game you don't need to eat and you won't die if you run out of credits so you can be patient; there's no economic imperative to make a deal. Not greed; gameplay.
Agreed with all of that: "player driven economy" implies "other players can stop you doing stuff" which - see every time it's ever happened, intentionally or otherwise - is generally not popular with the players who get stopped. There were more than enough CMM Composites in the original pre-4.1 economy for a player to build an Orbis with. Just not for everyone to do it at once...
And in the other direction, player-per-inhabited-system density was pretty low even before this week, and is rapidly falling further now. So even in a purely cooperative mechanism, anything which depends on other players already having done something so you can use the result of that to do the next step probably fails because there isn't another player doing that, and if there is you can't find them. Someone offering a few million per tonne for Tritium, 10000 LY from the bubble? Huge risks on both sides due to the really long travel times - the buyer might never attract the attention of a seller; the seller risks hauling the cargo all that way only to find that someone else got there first.
There's also of course the very likely risk that it ends up with a really complex supply-demand system to understand ... or you can just take your Corvette to a RES and kill the infinite pirates for the same earnings in credits, materials, merits, etc. So it ends up in a bit of a mess where the commodities have an intrinsic non-credit value in terms of being able to do things with them, but the only thing you can pay other players for them with is credits which don't. [1]
Thinking about CMM Composites, what it probably needed for an actual player-participant economy (rather than people buying up the existing supply to try to sell on to someone else, which doesn't really scale and is only fun for the seller) was more routes to obtain it.
- commodity mission rewards are already an option, but getting 5000t that way is impractical. Adding the option for missions to have 500t commodity rewards ... probably still not massively convenient for the person trying to build a station, but someone specialising in them could keep a carrier topped up at whatever above-market rate things settled on
- the other bulk cargoes are on the Refinery Contact. Steel and Titanium are still a bit scarce at local suppliers, but if they actually run out I can turn Haematite and Rutile into them, and if they run out I can mine them. So adding something like Carbon + Lithium as a CMM recipe would fit its in-game description, have interesting interactions with materials, and again let someone choose to make a source of them separately
- add some NPC CMM transports and allow stolen cargo to be delivered
- let people trade in Building Schematics to take 100t per unit off a cargo requirement of their choice
etc.
[1] A sale price of 500k/tonne, assuming a 200M/hour credit earning rate from renewable sources (pretty easy from certain mission types, I think), seems like a massive price-gouge ... but if it takes more than an hour to gather 400t (which it probably would have on the original supply) they're actually being forced to underprice it by the carrier limits.
It's not the fact that players are making profit, it's that the amount being charged for some items is pure greed (example : Insulating Membrane average galactic price 11,208 Cr being priced at 250,055 Cr isn't profit making it's pathetic greed and they deserve to be named and shamed then, hopefully, left with cargo they cannot sell)
especially when, with a little checking, all items can be found easily at average price.
Although as you say some will pay any inflated price, well not this commander !
That's not greed. It's just playing a space trading game. CMM Composites don't actually exist.
One of two things will happen. Either the carrier owners will get paid the high prices showing that they pitched their offers right, or they won't get paid and they'll have to drop the price or keep the stuff.
If you think the prices are too high, buy your stuff somewhere else.
Remember that they can always sell it to NPC markets for a bit over 20,000 Cr, so there's very little risk of them making an actual loss on the deal from their perspective, other than the opportunity cost of not using their carrier for something more profitable. So if they put it at 250kCr and someone with more money than sense buys it, then it was clearly worth that much to someone. And if no-one buys it, no harm done.
And in this case, there's plenty of Insulating Membrane on the NPC markets - likely regenerating faster than anyone is actually going to be using it, because it's not needed at all for surface builds, and only required in fairly small quantities (comparable with Polymers or Copper) for orbital ones - so they're not going to sell it at that price unless they've positioned their carrier such that someone is willing to pay a massive premium not to make a 100-LY round trip to get it from NPCs.
So right now it's a silly price and there's no need for further punishment beyond "no-one buys it, they eventually have to haul it over to an NPC market".
But let's say that in a year's time the various colony chains big groups are running have got a bit further out, and you want to build a colony out in NGC 7822 or something. It's now a 4000 LY round trip to the nearest suitable station to get your 300-ish Insulating Membrane for your outpost. Or ... you could pay someone 75 million (i.e. one Stratum exobio sample) to have it hauled out on their Fleet Carrier. It's going to take you a lot less time to get that Stratum sample than it is to fly to the bubble and back. It's a pretty good deal at that point, especially if the carrier has the exobio service on board.
So it's not automatically an unfair deal just because it's 250k above the NPC market rate.
Sounds like a nice business opportunity and I’m hoping I end up having g some time to get in to it! Looking foeward to helping people who have plenty of credits but limited time get their stations built.
I’d also like to be one of the select who gets to decide where the line between acceptable profit and “greed” is in a space trading game! Let me know who anointed you so I can sign up too!
I’d also like to be one of the select who gets to decide where the line between acceptable profit and “greed” is in a space trading game! Let me know who anointed you so I can sign up too!
My last line says that, i have no intention of buying with inflated prices just to build.]
Ahhh the obligatory sarcasm, just pointing out the pitfalls of human greed if it gets you all upset to be part of that then there must be a reason.
Not upset, this sounds like a great opportunity!
My point was that if someone thinks that the prices offered by carriers are too much, then there are alternative sources for the same resources that are sold for much lower per unit prices. This was the case even before FDev decided to bump up the production rates of CMM Composites twice in a row.
So it's not as if we have no choice but to pay silly prices.
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CMM are super easy to find. It's not an issue anymore. The new issue are insulating membranes, which I finally have secret spots for, emergency cells and all refinery and extraction based materials; H.E. Suits, bioreducing lichens, robotics...