Trading - The Hidden (Broken) Mechanics... (Click Bait for Sure!)

Susanna

Susanna
OK - You are here...

You are probably not going to like what I have to say... Especially if you are a Trader... Because I'm going to expose the broken game mechanics so that it can be openly discussed here... These were hidden (certainly, I have to admit, from me!) despite being a ED player for years with many thousands of hours in-game! I have dabbled in Trading, just doing the EDDB trading loops etc in the past, but never in anger with an FC shipping c.20kt of Goods at a time before. Here are my preliminary findings:

So the 'premise' of the trading mechanic is that Stock A at station A has a given quantity of Goodies to sell - as the stock is sold the price goes from Low(er) to High(er) to reflect that the stock is being depleted... No?
Conversely, when you sell your stock A to a Station B which has a demand B, it is depleted and the price goes from High(er) to Low(er) as the demand reduces... No?

No. This is how I thought it worked for many years - until recently when I decided to do some proper trading in my FC as a change from exploring in my Explora account...

So you can find Stock A at Station A with say 20,000 stock for a (very much) below Galactic Average Price (GAP)... You can then buy all of that stock for the same price! It doesn't go up as the stock is depleted! In fact it doesn't change at ALL!

Then you rock up at Station B with your c.20kt of Goodies and their demand is Zero or just a single digit figure (a demand for 2 or 3) and you can sell them your 20kt of stock for WAY WAY over the GAP with NO drop in the offered Buy Price... It simple stays the same while you dump 788t lots of your Goodies at Station B for as long as you have Stock A to sell them!

I've netted 500mil per Buy/Sell Cycle this way... multiple times!

So is the whole trading model broken in some places? These special stations that I've found seem to operate outside the expected trading model completely!

What have other peoples experience of this been - and for how long? I suspect this has been a Thing for Years but only Traders have known about it. I've never seen anything on the Forums about it... and I have been here a while...

I'm not sharing my locations for now as I wish to:
a) keep using them!
and
b) gather other peoples thoughts on this first...
 
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Max Bothin

Max Bothin
there is a reason, some good information is NOT to be found in the forums ;-)

so...there is nothing here to see...just keep on going. go away...:)
 

Susanna

Susanna
Rubbernuke said:
How is this a revelation :D
Click to expand...

It was to me as I haven't done any serious trading before... 🙂

The trading model is 'marketed' as one thing but is in fact completely broken in places...

Edit: btw, that 500mil/cycle is just using an unshielded T9 ... If you are prepared to use medium pads you can make a LOT more than 500mil/cycle as the outposts offer a lot more Cr!
 
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Rubbernuke

Rubbernuke
Susanna said:
Smile at 'wonky' ... :sneaky: Granted I should have paid more attention to Trading in the past - but this was a shock just how broken it is - despite years of getting used to a broken game! Anyone can pay for a FC within a couple of weeks this way!
Click to expand...

Its why in a lot of ideas I try and divorce credits from results, because its easy to build money factories.
 

Rock Hunter

Rock Hunter
Elite Dangerous is riddled with wonky, broken, and off kilter features. So many of the ED specific YouTubers make their entire channels a guide to finding and using those wonky aspects. In such a sprawling game I think players had better accept that, to a degree at least. Unless you’re willing to lose yourself in the wilderness of frustration that many posters here seem to end up in.

What amuses me, and I don’t mean to point the finger solely at you, is this...

Susanna said:
I'm not sharing my locations for now as I wish to:
a) keep using them!
Click to expand...

...I made nearly a billion selling Ceramic Composites [ 82cr - 24’500cr] on the first day I bought my Carrier last week so I’m not judging, it’s my entire point. The market didn’t fluctuate at either trade point until suddenly I arrived to sell more and the sale price had dropped to around the Galactic Average. I didn’t even notice the supposed effect of arriving with 792T per trip, maybe that just works for minerals and metals?

With the game expanding I see virtually zero chance of any change here, Dev time being spent chasing the upcoming bugs Odyssey will no doubt present. So perhaps, for sanity’s sake, just embrace and chase the anomalies....or ignore them altogether with copious ‘head canon.’ :)
 

Northpin

Northpin
Susanna said:
as the stock is sold the price goes from Low(er) to High(er) to reflect that the stock is being depleted... No?
Click to expand...

IIRC there is an increase in price as you deplete the stock at the source station. However it's a rather small increase, but enough to diminish your profit, especially when the margin is not outrageously big.
I'm pretty sure i've seen that while repairing the WHN stations and more recently in the trading CG we had.

And the demand and bulk sale tax is pretty rough on precious minerals, but not quite so on the other commodities (however it is there, albeit very small) - and this inconsistency really miffs me off.
 

Susanna

Susanna
Rock Hunter said:
Elite Dangerous is riddled with wonky, broken, and off kilter features. So many of the ED specific YouTubers make their entire channels a guide to finding and using those wonky aspects. In such a sprawling game I think players had better accept that, to a degree at least. Unless you’re willing to lose yourself in the wilderness of frustration that many posters here seem to end up in.

What amuses me, and I don’t mean to point the finger solely at you, is this...



...I made nearly a billion selling Ceramic Composites [ 82cr - 24’500cr] on the first day I bought my Carrier last week so I’m not judging, it’s my entire point. The market didn’t fluctuate at either trade point until suddenly I arrived to sell more and the sale price had dropped to around the Galactic Average. I didn’t even notice the supposed effect of arriving with 792T per trip, maybe that just works for minerals and metals?

With the game expanding I see virtually zero chance of any change here, Dev time being spent chasing the upcoming bugs Odyssey will no doubt present. So perhaps, for sanity’s sake, just embrace and chase the anomalies....or ignore them altogether with copious ‘head canon.’ :)
Click to expand...

I'm not saying that it per sec should be fixed - we are all looking for how to turn some coin after all... But I'm surprised at the scale of it! ED has some pretty serious game mechanic flaws in it...

Before FCs this was probably largely a minor issue - 20mil per run here and there made with Cutters flying back and forth... But since FCs and whole sale mass transport of goods? It's become a Thing! While I have never been into Trading much (Euro Trucker in Space wears thin pretty soon for me - more so than mining!).

When FCs came the meta was mining... Then I got into exploring in my FC Alt Account.
I only even noticed this because I thought I'd do some Trading for a while as a break from other activities... Funny how you can play a game and never realise what is under your nose!
 

goemon

goemon
second part of your observation is more nuanced since one of the last patches:
  • Commodity markets will offer the average price rather than minimum price when selling in bulk. This will affect all commodities.
    Click to expand...

ANNOUNCEMENT - Game Balancing

Greetings Commanders! Game balance has been at the heart of many discussions around Elite Dangerous, for a long time, and rightly so. At its core, Elite Dangerous is about blazing your own trail and we want all Commanders to feel fairly rewarded for whichever path they choose. To this end, we...
forums.frontier.co.uk forums.frontier.co.uk

it was much more unlikely to make profit fullfilling demand before that.
 

Tikanderoga

Tikanderoga
This isn't a new mechanic, this has been broken since day 1.
Supply is still broken, except for Tritium. That's the only one where supply diminishes as you buy it.
Demand is only "fixed" for LTDs and Painite. The rest is still a bottomless pit in terms of demand, as long as the good in the cargo hold do not exceed the 10% of the demand.
 

Susanna

Susanna
goemon said:
second part of your observation is more nuanced since one of the last patches:

ANNOUNCEMENT - Game Balancing

Greetings Commanders! Game balance has been at the heart of many discussions around Elite Dangerous, for a long time, and rightly so. At its core, Elite Dangerous is about blazing your own trail and we want all Commanders to feel fairly rewarded for whichever path they choose. To this end, we...
forums.frontier.co.uk forums.frontier.co.uk

it was much more unlikely to make profit fullfilling demand before that.
Click to expand...

Yeah - I get you, but what I'm talking about is stations with No Demand but offering WAY over the GAP for goods ... Like 10 times more than GAP! And stations selling goods for WAY under GAP even when they have a very limited stock that isn't impacted by the Station stock levels i.e. I can empty a station of 20k of stock and pay the same price for the first shipment as the last which is way below the GAP price.
This doesn't comply with that update at all...
 
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goemon

goemon
Susanna said:
This doesn't comply with that update at all...
Click to expand...
oh yes, it does.
1. average price in that update is not galactic average price (i thought so first, too - but it is not) - it's the average price of that commodity at such-and-such station.
exampel given: the average price of wine at rackhams's peak is far above average price of wine at any other tourism economy (as it is manually set), and it is far above galactic average.

2. average price is affected by states.

in effect of this update you will always get a better than galactic average price of e.g. performance enhancers at a station with any use of e.g. performance enhancers (so with a "potential demand", even if the demand is currently fullfilled) - as the "average price" for e.g. performance enhancers is above galactic average at that station - if bought cheap and/or if sold in a state increasing the demand price of performance enhancers (Ian D.s impressive work list those effects here: https://cdb.sotl.org.uk/effects/c/43 - civil unrest, expansion, investment and terrorism increase the demand price of performance enhancers, while boom, civil liberty, famine and pirate attach decrease the purchase price of performance enhancers). so - if you find a station in supply of performance enhancers in boom and civil liberty, and you export them to a station in investment, you will always make profit - no matter how low the demand is.
 
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