Most of the ED economy only makes sense if you presume that the activities we see are just a small slice of the economy. This is as it should be, I think - the game setting is pretty explicit about the fact that, no matter how rich and respected/feared we PFed types may be, we're still a few thousand weirdos in a galaxy with trillions of humans.
Fundamentally disagree on that point. The player experience (i.e the reason someone purchased a game) must be the primary motivation for all mechanics put into a game.
This is not to be confused with "making the player the center of the game"... it's entirely reasonable to have the player be a forgotten unknown within the universe
and have an enjoyable play experience, but that enjoyable experience must be front and center to the mechanics which support it. Conversely, delivering mechanics which
don't contribute to that experience or are made easily redundant is a bad idea. This is one of those cases.
Take Papers Please as an example. It's UI if objectively bad. You could argue that it's because it's a dystopian setting... but that alone simply isn't good enough. Instead it's also central to the underlying game loops. It gets in the way of your effective progress... you can buy upgrades to work around that but at the cost of potentiality saving your family and yourself in the future. It's an active, considered choice of how you deal with that.
Cheap, mining- only minerals take the same effort as expensive things to move, and maintain their cheap value despite having no available supply on the market.... let's suggest it's because of big mining giants squeezing us out. So what? Can i fight back? Can i exploit this? Is there alternate use for these goods? Can i do anything that has meaningful impact to my play experience with this?
If there's no answer beyond "flavour", then it's just bad game design.
So in the case of mined commodities, you have to assume that the published prices are telling you something real, and work backwards from that. MMCs are demanded in huge quantities but command a very low price. What this tells me is that the ton-by-ton laser mining we are equipped for is NOT the primary source of MMCs on the market. Imagine for example that those big extraction bases on icy moons are digging it up by the megaton and shipping it directly to industrial consumers in those ubiquitous bulk hauler megaships. And therefore it really IS irrational for independent miners to waste their time extracting them, and it's economically fine that nobody bothers trying to satisfy that published demand. Except in a special case like this where moderate quantities are needed from a non-standard source on a short lead time - in which case the offer price is much much higher to compensate. In contrast, LTDs have low demand but extremely high prices, which tells you that the available supply is quite small. Individually prospecting and mining out asteroids probably IS the only source for these gems.
Except this is provably not the case, as there is no market supply of these materials in the game.
I don't take the same issue comparing say, Indite and it's low value, versus that of Gold, since there
is market supply of Indite (although that has other game impacts). This exists entirely because there
are these "unseen operators", and that is how they're observed. You could argue that "they must deal directly with consumers", but likewise you could argue not all producers can find consumers, or some producers have supply overrun that they have to offload on the markets.
This is the problem with "magic" as explanations, because suddenly everything including dissenting considerations are possible because "magic"
The truth is far more simple though; the market implementation is naive, and just presumes value is (inversely) proportional to supply/demand. Cheap products must be in common supply and demand, expensive products must be in scarce supply/demand (notwithstanding BGS state modifiers). It's as simple as that, but it breaks down as soon as you look at mining for goods that have no supply, but magically have substantially different values despite equal opportunity costs.
And I think this principle really works in a lot of cases - the economic role of independent pilots is to supply and move stuff that the megacorps won't, because it's hard to get in the bulk quantities they deal with, or needed today not next billing cycle, or illegal. That isn't to deny that there's also a lot of economic absurdity, especially when it comes to mission rewards, ship and equipment prices, and so on. Not to mention that NPC miners always seem to be going for water or bauxite or something, when this model tells you it should be just as irrational for them to be bothering with such materials as it is for us.
I don't think irrationality of the system is a justification to maintain irrationality elsewhere. There's no denying the entire economy needs a from-scratch do-over, but the reality of that is buckleys and none, so the need is to work within what's possible in the current mechanics to adjust.
It doesn't matter how rare a material is, markets work on what someone is willing to pay for them.
Yes, and if you think about what the motivations of what someone is willing to pay for something, it's
- How badly you want it (Demand)
- How much of it there is (Supply)
- Opportunity cost; and
- Available funds
Available funds is virtually not a consideration for players and definitely not NPCs, and Opportunity cost only relates to mining as an activity. That leaves just supply and demand being the motivators. And that's the naive system FD delivered, but mining is clearly an afterthought in this.
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