The raw material trader has major flaws.

[Darty]

I made a post about this during beta, which is here. The short version is this: The manufactured and encoded material traders are structured to respect the rarity of the materials they trade as well as how they are used in blueprints. This means that if one of these materials is used in a lower grade of a blueprint, chances are you will be able to use one of the ingredients of a higher grade to trade for that material at a gain. For example DD g5 uses CIF while DD g4 uses MCF, and 1 CIF gets you 3 MCF at the material trader. This has a few advantages. One, it makes sense. You trade firmware for firmware and the high grade the firmware the more valuable it is. It also means that (generally) if you have the materials for g5 rolls, you can trade them for lower grade rolls are a reasonable rate.

Unfortunately the raw material trader doesn't follow either of these conventions. Not only are it's categories completely removed form any engineering lineage (for example chromium is usually before selenium in a blueprint's grade, and cadmium follows selenium), but it also ignores the a rarities of raw materials. The best way to explain it is with this image from the other thread. As far as I am aware nothing has changed since the lase beta other than the devs demoted Arsenic to a common rarity.

This is what the raw material trader looks like when you change the rarity icons of the materials to reflect their actual (except for arsenic because they changed it's rarity in 3.0) rarity, and with a line drawn for every time one material is used as a replacement for another in a recipe. (See the original thread for more details)

As you can see, there is no rhyme or reason to this system. Grade 3 materials are more valuable than grade 4's, grade 1's more valuable than grade 3's, and in EVERY case except ONE (carbon to vanadium), materials that are commonly used as replacements are in different categories.

This makes the raw material trader far inferior to the other two traders, because it's inconsistent with everything else in the game. I suggested in the other thread that they change it's exchange rates to follow the image below. As you'll see it makes a lot more sense (I have drawn lines to represent recipe progression but only one per relationship, with the size of the line being proportional to the frequency of the relationship)

PLEASE frontier give this suggestion a consideration, or at-least explain why you have chosen to go the route you are going with the raw material trader.

 

[Hellakitty]

You have far too much time on your hands.

 

[Darty]

You have far too much time on your hands.

It took me like 5 seconds to realize the raw material trader was messed up. I've only gone through this much trouble over it because they haven't responded to my feedback over the course of a month.

 

[Dima112211]

Interesting indeed

 

[Komrad Toast]

I didn't get to play the beta, but with my few stops at the Raw trader I could already tell something seemed funky.

 

[Oldric]

Yep saw your rather sensible post during beta. Its not ideal at the moment but I have feeling its all gonna be quite academic in a few days, for example with the manufactured materials, if most people are letting their collector limpets run riot as I have they are not gonna be struggling for mats.

Hope you get some FD acknowledgement for the effort you put in though Darty.

 

[Darty]

Yep saw your rather sensible post during beta. Its not ideal at the moment but I have feeling its all gonna be quite academic in a few days, for example with the manufactured materials, if most people are letting their collector limpets run riot as I have they are not gonna be struggling for mats.

Hope you get some FD acknowledgement for the effort you put in though Darty.

Yeah I'm not too worried about being unable to get elements, it's going to more be a matter of convenience when I run out of one material while engineering. For example, if I am trying to roll a new dirty drives and I run out of selenium for the g4 rolls but I have plenty of cadmium for the g5. With encoded and manufactured you would usually be able to trade the g5 resource for several of the g4. In this case its a ratio of 36 cadmium to 1 selenium.

 

[Kayweg]

You have far too much time on your hands.

Not nearly as much time as FD had to think it through as thoroughly as he did.

 

[Limoncello Lizard]

if most people are letting their collector limpets run riot as I have they are not gonna be struggling for mats.

Two hours mining last night, and I'm now close to the limit on several mats.

 

[Cmdr Eagleboy]

Not nearly as much time as FD had to think it through as thoroughly as he did.

It is highly possible they went trough several prototypes and iterations and tested them actually and decided it just might be this is best thing they can get for now.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

The short version is this: The manufactured and encoded material traders are structured to respect the rarity of the materials they trade as well as how they are used in blueprints. This means that if one of these materials is used in a lower grade of a blueprint, chances are you will be able to use one of the ingredients of a higher grade to trade for that material at a gain. For example DD g5 uses CIF while DD g4 uses MCF, and 1 CIF gets you 3 MCF at the material trader. This has a few advantages. One, it makes sense. You trade firmware for firmware and the high grade the firmware the more valuable it is. It also means that (generally) if you have the materials for g5 rolls, you can trade them for lower grade rolls are a reasonable rate.

Unfortunately the raw material trader doesn't follow either of these conventions. Not only are it's categories completely removed form any engineering lineage (for example chromium is usually before selenium in a blueprint's grade, and cadmium follows selenium), but it also ignores the a rarities of raw materials. The best way to explain it is with this image from the other thread. As far as I am aware nothing has changed since the lase beta other than the devs demoted Arsenic to a common rarity.

One of the other differences: data or manufactured in a particular category are mostly (except sometimes the Very Rare) collected in exactly the same way, perhaps with minor differences of detail. Raw materials all (the few new mining-only ones aside) come from the same broad source, with the pattern of which ones are on which planets being very different and not related to the engineering categories. So your collection of them is far more randomised than it is of data/manufactured in the first place.

I do like your proposed alternative ... though maybe a slight adjustment. Yttrium and Polonium clearly should go after Arsenic in that scheme - they're all hyperspace-related elements - and that leaves the three new (space mining) elements out on their own.

I assume the reasons Frontier didn't do that are:
- didn't want to leave the three new ones on their own in a separate group
- raw material collection doesn't really have a G5 equivalent (when it started in 2.0, there were only 4 levels of rarity) so it does make more sense to have a 4-level trade rather than a 5-level one. The way its setup lines up exactly with the 3-2-1 rule for planetary mineral generation, which I assume is important to Frontier.

 

[Kayweg]

It is highly possible they went trough several prototypes and iterations and tested them actually and decided it just might be this is best thing they can get for now.

Yes that is possible, but OP still didn't deserve the "too much time on his hands" comment, when clearly he put a lot of thought into his post, and offered that constructive criticism instead of a rant and discontent.
There sure are "too much time on their hands" sort of posts to be found around here, but this isn't one of 'em'.

 

[Darty]

One of the other differences: data or manufactured in a particular category are mostly (except sometimes the Very Rare) collected in exactly the same way, perhaps with minor differences of detail. Raw materials all (the few new mining-only ones aside) come from the same broad source, with the pattern of which ones are on which planets being very different and not related to the engineering categories. So your collection of them is far more randomised than it is of data/manufactured in the first place.

I do like your proposed alternative ... though maybe a slight adjustment. Yttrium and Polonium clearly should go after Arsenic in that scheme - they're all hyperspace-related elements - and that leaves the three new (space mining) elements out on their own.

I assume the reasons Frontier didn't do that are:
- didn't want to leave the three new ones on their own in a separate group
- raw material collection doesn't really have a G5 equivalent (when it started in 2.0, there were only 4 levels of rarity) so it does make more sense to have a 4-level trade rather than a 5-level one. The way its setup lines up exactly with the 3-2-1 rule for planetary mineral generation, which I assume is important to Frontier.

Yeah someone mentioned that in the other thread. Makes sense to me, I only put them where they are because I didn't know what to do with them (I don't have THAT much time on my hands ).

As for why frontier didn't go with my alternative, I think the first reason is rather silly and if it is true is just another example of frontier forcing people to use new content at the expense of overall gameplay because they don't think that anyone will use it if it's just optional, and for the second, that may be true, but the current system has changed to include g5's. Also, it doen't really align with the 3-2-1 rule since for example tin is almost half as common as selenium (based off of EDDB) yet below it.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

Also, it doen't really align with the 3-2-1 rule since for example tin is almost half as common as selenium (based off of EDDB) yet below it.

However, Selenium is definitely a "one of 3" element, and Tin is definitely a "one of 2" element. It lines up perfectly with that old classification.

It's not impossible that there are still more Tin-giving planets than Selenium-giving ones ... but I *suspect* there may be some significant sampling bias in EDDB there: my impression is that Selenium is more common on icy worlds, and they're far less likely than metal-rich or HMC to have the Detailed Surface Scan needed to get their mineral content into EDDB.

 

[Stealthie]

Just been directed to this thread...

The thing some people apparently haven't realised is that this "eccentricity" DOES have a negative impact on players.
By categorising G5 mat's as "G4" at the trader, it would seem we're getting screwed-over if we want to trade down to lower tier mat's.

If you had a heap of, say, Tellurium and you wanted to trade some of it for Tungsten then you'd expect the multiplier to be based on 2 levels (G5 > G3) whereas the game's only treating it as a 1 level multiplier.
Basically, for every lump of Tellurium you trade, you're only getting 3 lumps of Tungsten instead of 9.

 

[Deleted member 38366]

Hm, isn't that "Grade 5 fields are all blank and many Elements are incorrectly classified" a simple and straight-forward Bug with the Raw Trader ?

Sure looks like it.

 

[Darty]

However, Selenium is definitely a "one of 3" element, and Tin is definitely a "one of 2" element. It lines up perfectly with that old classification.

It's not impossible that there are still more Tin-giving planets than Selenium-giving ones ... but I *suspect* there may be some significant sampling bias in EDDB there: my impression is that Selenium is more common on icy worlds, and they're far less likely than metal-rich or HMC to have the Detailed Surface Scan needed to get their mineral content into EDDB.

I'm talking about the % of the planet that the material is, not how many planets have any of it. The highest tin concentrations are nearly 3% while the highest selenium are nearly 5%. You would THINK that tin should be treated as more rare by the material trader (since it IS more rare and has a higher rarity) BUT the material trader puts tin as less rare than selenium. There's also the issue that you would expect selenium to be in the same category as cadmium and chromium based off of the fact that it is used i the same engineer mods as those materials, and that tin would be placed with niobium, iron and germanium for the same reason, yet tin and selenium are together.

It literally defies all reasoning.

 

[Winterwalker]

It literally defies all reasoning.

Aren't you assuming the material trader doesn't charge anything, for the service of exchanging mats?

You might not be handing over any cash but I don't think it's unreasonable for him to take a cut for himself. He's going to have to rent space on the station and pay his taxes? To avoid the charge, you collect exactly the materials you need from natural or mission sources but use a broker, and he takes a percentage?

What happens in your analysis, if you downgrade materials? Does the dealer still win?

 

[Darty]

Aren't you assuming the material trader doesn't charge anything, for the service of exchanging mats?

You might not be handing over any cash but I don't think it's unreasonable for him to take a cut for himself. He's going to have to rent space on the station and pay his taxes? To avoid the charge, you collect exactly the materials you need from natural or mission sources but use a broker, and he takes a percentage?

What happens in your analysis, if you downgrade materials? Does the dealer still win?

If I trade selenium down for tin, I get 3 rares for 1 standard. And since on one in their right mind is going to trade 6 tin for one selenium, that basically means the mat trader is always trading at a massive loss compared to what he could be getting if you respected material rarities. Same thing for zirconium and boron. 1 very common gets ME 3 standards, meaning the mat trader is trading at a massive loss once again and is never going to make that back since no one is going to be trading 6 zirconium for 1 very common material.

It just doesn't make any sense. The other material traders can afford to trade mats in a logical way, why can't the raw material trader do so as well.

 

[o2thaZ]

Hm, isn't that "Grade 5 fields are all blank and many Elements are incorrectly classified" a simple and straight-forward Bug with the Raw Trader ?

Sure looks like it.

This.
Also last time i checked i could get something like 1287 c1 material for a 1 c4.
Whuuuut? Cant even store that! Obviously someone fell asleep on their keyboard.