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

[Danieros]

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...

The trade model worked fine at release. However, as they buffed prices without taking a look at the state modifiers that multiply such prices, such... peculiarities started happening.

I really want to see those issues exposed so we can have a trade rebalancing that makes sense - the commodity market and this supply/demand model is precisely the first reason that ever got me interested in this game. The first time I stumbled into one of those infinite trade routes into zero demand, I actually took a break from the game. Trading touches so many other activities, but their rebalancing almost never takes into account the effects on trading.

1. Agronomic Treatment at boom+ state may be the best commodity to sell at a location, despite there not being even a demand for it (sometimes that station even PRODUCES it).
2. Demand bugs for mining commodities which lasted for years, infinitely regenerating the demand. The station only wants 2000 of this precious rare ore, a player could sell 500 of it and then it gets almost instantly fully replenished back to 2000. I won't be surprised if quadrillions were generated due to it - most of the LTD/Painite rush were caused by this as someone could scout the best prices and have the entire playerbase dump their stock on it.
3. Pushing factions into good states will often increase both the import AND export prices for their stations. This will often kill profits exporting from it.
4. Frontier never worked a non-exploitable way to reward the station that is exporting stuff, which if you think about it, would be the most important factor for the station wealth success. Influence/reputation only gets awarded to the location you sell to since it's only looking at the profit of the commander - so the "balance of trade" concept is completely inverted in Elite Dangerous.
5. Recently, the mining rebalance pushed at least half a dozen of commodities into the same problem as 1 (agronomic treatment). You'll often see stuff like Pyrophyllite, Cryolite, Silver and Gold being very profitable trades even into a zero demand station.

 

[Susanna]

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.

Thanks for this explanation! So I guess 'working as intended' - Wow!

I need to reflect on that for a while...

 

[Susanna]

The trade model worked fine at release. However, as they buffed prices without taking a look at the state modifiers that multiply such prices, such... peculiarities started happening.

I really want to see those issues exposed so we can have a trade rebalancing that makes sense - the commodity market and this supply/demand model is precisely the first reason that ever got me interested in this game. The first time I stumbled into one of those infinite trade routes into zero demand, I actually took a break from the game. Trading touches so many other activities, but their rebalancing almost never takes into account the effects on trading.

1. Agronomic Treatment at boom+ state may be the best commodity to sell at a location, despite there not being even a demand for it (sometimes that station even PRODUCES it).
2. Demand bugs for mining commodities which lasted for years, infinitely regenerating the demand. The station only wants 2000 of this precious rare ore, a player could sell 500 of it and then it gets almost instantly fully replenished back to 2000. I won't be surprised if quadrillions were generated due to it - most of the LTD/Painite rush were caused by this as someone could scout the best prices and have the entire playerbase dump their stock on it.
3. Pushing factions into good states will often increase both the import AND export prices for their stations. This will often kill profits exporting from it.
4. Frontier never worked a non-exploitable way to reward the station that is exporting stuff, which if you think about it, would be the most important factor for the station wealth success. Influence/reputation only gets awarded to the location you sell to since it's only looking at the profit of the commander - so the "balance of trade" concept is completely inverted in Elite Dangerous.
5. Recently, the mining rebalance pushed at least half a dozen of commodities into the same problem as 1 (agronomic treatment). You'll often see stuff like Pyrophyllite, Cryolite, Silver and Gold being very profitable trades even into a zero demand station.

Agronomic Treatment is certainly one of the offenders... I haven't explored yet what other commodities have this broken trade model but I'm sure they exist as you mention - its a more systemic issue that just a couple of commodities being out of whack.

 

[wenkman]

...

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

...

that broken trade thing is utterly ridiculous! but i need to seed that myselft to believe it.

can you post the name of the buy/sell Systems? (private message only, asking for a friend)

 

[goemon]

I'm personally not so much against the current situation, that you can make profit by selling even goods produced at the very station - it's a grim reality that you can deliver milk or steel with profit to a country producing milk or steel, if you can undertcut the local price.
I'm more worried about certain goods due to their increased average profits being almost always the most profitable to export-import. Plus the weirdness, that currently many "raw" commodities are more costly (e.g. bauxite) than the metal produced from it (e.g. aluminium).

 

[Gunther_Bladderburst]

Last week I bought a dozen of eggs. The last ones I bought suddenly were more expensive.

 

[Vandaahl]

Phew... thought it was something else

 

[Ouberos]

Wait until you figure out how to get those zero cost purchase prices.

(Although purchase is probably the wrong word)

 

[Mr_Foxhound]

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...

since day one

 

[Susanna]

Phew... thought it was something else

I don't doubt that there are even more seriously broken trade mechanics than zero demand stations selling for many times the gap and that fdev turn a blind eye on these issues, assuming they are aware of the issues. But I've only been looking into trading for a week or so... Something I should have done a long time ago! So I'm not up to speed with these yet. Do enlighten us (or pm me) please. I'm curious to find out further flaws in the trading mechanics of this game...

(imo) The introduction of FCs has magnified what were trivial issues before into significant ones now that trading is being conducted by the 10s of thousands of units.

 

[Flimley]

@Susanna. How long does it take you to load up a fleet carrier, then off load it again?

Flimley

 

[Ian Doncaster]

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.

In practical terms this is true in that very few goods are traded heavily enough to move off the supply/demand caps.

But they did fix the outstanding bugs in the December patches so that it is at least theoretically possible at other stations.

I don't doubt that there are even more seriously broken trade mechanics than zero demand stations selling for many times the gap and that fdev turn a blind eye on these issues, assuming they are aware of the issues. But I've only been looking into trading for a week or so... Something I should have done a long time ago! So I'm not up to speed with these yet. Do enlighten us (or pm me) please. I'm curious to find out further flaws in the trading mechanics of this game...

Broadly speaking there are two completely separate things affecting price:
- the BGS state
- the supply/demand level as a percentage of the local cap

For almost all commodities in almost all circumstances the BGS state effects massively dominate over the supply/demand effects, especially since with over a billion tonnes of supply/demand being generated bubble-wide every day almost every good is at its supply/demand cap.

In terms of producing interesting and varying trade routes as viewed from the perspective of the cockpit, the BGS state effects do a much better job than supply/demand would, given the scale of the bubble and the relative size of its trader base.

The occasions where supply/demand does dominate over BGS state, or even plays an equal role with it, are generally accompanied by mass whining on the forums, bug reports, criticisms of Frontier's ability to design a game, etc. So it's clearly not a popular thing and it's understandable why they make it play a relatively minor part in the trade game. It'd be very easy for Frontier to make it more noticeable but this wouldn't make trading any more fun.

The BGS state effects need more tweaking (especially as the rebalancing has thrown Extraction economies way out of line with everything else) but it's not a bug or misfeature that you can get rich off them.

(imo) The introduction of FCs has magnified what were trivial issues before into significant ones now that trading is being conducted by the 10s of thousands of units.

Equally, the introduction of FCs has meant there's an actual need to get ridiculous quantities of money in the first place, now that there's an asset that costs 6 billion(ish) to fully outfit compared with the 600 million(ish) of a large A-rated ship.

There is no practical balancing of earnings possible anyway when prices vary across that large a range, so just enjoy your credits. It's only a way of keeping score at how much you understand the trading mechanisms, so set challenges for yourself (e.g. how much profit can you make if you never revisit a station and never use the same trade good twice in a session?) to make it more fun.

 

[Susanna]

@Susanna. How long does it take you to load up a fleet carrier, then off load it again?

Flimley

Taking your time, about 2.5 hours to load and then the same to unload, so 5 hrs total or circa 100mil/ hr.

 

[Susanna]

In practical terms this is true in that very few goods are traded heavily enough to move off the supply/demand caps.

But they did fix the outstanding bugs in the December patches so that it is at least theoretically possible at other stations.


Broadly speaking there are two completely separate things affecting price:

• the BGS state
• the supply/demand level as a percentage of the local cap

For almost all commodities in almost all circumstances the BGS state effects massively dominate over the supply/demand effects, especially since with over a billion tonnes of supply/demand being generated bubble-wide every day almost every good is at its supply/demand cap.

In terms of producing interesting and varying trade routes as viewed from the perspective of the cockpit, the BGS state effects do a much better job than supply/demand would, given the scale of the bubble and the relative size of its trader base.

The occasions where supply/demand does dominate over BGS state, or even plays an equal role with it, are generally accompanied by mass whining on the forums, bug reports, criticisms of Frontier's ability to design a game, etc. So it's clearly not a popular thing and it's understandable why they make it play a relatively minor part in the trade game. It'd be very easy for Frontier to make it more noticeable but this wouldn't make trading any more fun.

The BGS state effects need more tweaking (especially as the rebalancing has thrown Extraction economies way out of line with everything else) but it's not a bug or misfeature that you can get rich off them.


Equally, the introduction of FCs has meant there's an actual need to get ridiculous quantities of money in the first place, now that there's an asset that costs 6 billion(ish) to fully outfit compared with the 600 million(ish) of a large A-rated ship.

There is no practical balancing of earnings possible anyway when prices vary across that large a range, so just enjoy your credits. It's only a way of keeping score at how much you understand the trading mechanisms, so set challenges for yourself (e.g. how much profit can you make if you never revisit a station and never use the same trade good twice in a session?) to make it more fun.

Agreed that the credits have become rather silly and are no longer a meaningful currency compared to engineering mats for example. Balancing is almost impossible now with everything from Rares in a Cobra to tens of thousands of tons of goods being traded in FCs. But - I'd hate to have to earn it all over again... I did that already with my alt account.

 

[bootsam]

Why do I never find these money making escapades?

 

[goemon]

Why do I never find these money making escapades?

i'd assume:
a) either because you are not looking at CR at all
b) or because you are not engaging in a broad variety of activities.

as i am playing the backgroundsimulation with my bubble commander, which means doing it all a bit and checking in at stations regularly, i can say i have found a bunch of those escapades before reading on them on the forums.

in most cases good knowledge of the backgroundsim let you directly project a change from patch notes to test run.

exampel as per this thread: if you read demand not affecting prices that much, and you know how purchase price of a commodity is composed, you know what kind of trading just got more profitable (low demand trading), and also that it is a minor buff to smuggling/piracy (as black market always has a low demand)

 

[bootsam]

Youre right. I dont play for credits anymore since I became Elite shifting paladium from a to b many yrs ago. I kinda stopped trading and now I just fart around. Generally dying in CZ's or grinding engineers till I got bored. So I naffed off to Sag A. I'm back and looking to find something to do.

 

[Danieros]

The occasions where supply/demand does dominate over BGS state, or even plays an equal role with it, are generally accompanied by mass whining on the forums, bug reports, criticisms of Frontier's ability to design a game, etc. So it's clearly not a popular thing and it's understandable why they make it play a relatively minor part in the trade game. It'd be very easy for Frontier to make it more noticeable but this wouldn't make trading any more fun.

I'd wager their frustration comes more from seeing that a station has a supply of 3000 on a website (or another critical information that makes them decide to go all the way there), then after spending all the time getting there, finding out it's already been depleted or the price is completely different.

There are many flaws with how the 3rd party data feeding works that only become an issue at those extreme scenarios of low supply/demand:

1. Prices are based on your cargo amount, so the uploaded info may be from an empty hold will be higher than if you arrive there with a full hold of that commodity.
2. Data gets sent when you dock. It doesn't get send when you trade/undock, so any market changes you did won't get uploaded at that moment - only when there is another docking.
3. As the tick comes, if there are important state changes, a lot of the data becomes automatically outdated due to their instant impacts on price/stock percentage.
4. Folks not using the tool to upload data, whatever the reason (there is value in hiding a good deal, but the deal might be already known and in this case you're helping it show outdated good numbers). If a person with a tool + a person without a tool dock at a station, this can already be a 1500 ton discrepancy. As far as I know console players can't even do this uploading.

There are also the in-game resources but they have so many more issues, though a complaint may come from someone trying to use them.

Trying to think about how to at least mitigate those issues, so I don't just show problems without potential solutions:

1. Journal could have two values, one that considers your cargo hold (and gets displayed in-game) and another that doesn't consider it (the one that will be useful for uploads).
2. Changes here are extra traffic on the websites, so optimization would also be required and even then it's not necessarily worth it. One sell/buy event may not be the only one for this docking session, and not every undocking had market changes. So extra events being sent would need to be carefully checked on the client side to see if it's relevant enough to get uploaded and enough time elapsed to look like it's not going to be a spam of trades.
3. Changing how the faction states effect the market so it has a gradual effect instead of an instant one. Supply/demand no longer gets instantly and magically changed to meet percentages, only the regeneration gets changed to it naturally heads towards the new caps. Price multipliers also not instant, instead just scaling with the supply/demand as they reach the state-exclusive amounts. Fundamentally this will more closely link price to supply/demand, preventing those crazy zero demand profitable trades aswell. Example:

1000t (100% stock) at 1000 credits and 10t (1%) regeneration - None state.
State change comes, at the current system for this example they're supposed to be multiplied by 3 (simplifying it for this example - everything is multiplied by 3).
Old system: Instantly changes to 3000t (100% stock) at 3000 credits and 30t regeneration. 2000 tons appear out of thin air, rather than natural renegeration..
Suggested system: Stock and prices remain the same, but the extra regeneration kicks in. As it regenerates above 1000t, the price would naturally rise (so it's as if the market has been changed to scale up to 300% values). The same happens when the state ends, so their changes don't produce instant effects either.

4. There's nothing to be done about this one, it's up to user choice. In fact, the changes from 3 will make it even more valuable to not update the market if you find a good deal - you may find a market in none state that is still offering prices from a previous state stock that hasn't been touched by any player. Perhaps a decay would be needed to make markets slowly head back towards their 100% states.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

I'd wager their frustration comes more from seeing that a station has a supply of 3000 on a website (or another critical information that makes them decide to go all the way there), then after spending all the time getting there, finding out it's already been depleted or the price is completely different.

Agreed, but I think it's even more fundamental than that: with any individual player contributing a tiny fraction of the trade volume, the odds are extremely high that hundreds of others will have got there first ... if the commodity is heavily-traded enough to fall off the cap at all, of course.

So commodities basically end up with only two states:
1) Normal: supply/demand is irrelevant because regeneration keeps the goods at the cap faster than players are moving them away.
2) Zeroed: regeneration is slower than player usage, so it drifts to zero over time. And then it basically stays there (e.g. Tritium or Palladium in Colonia [1])

...and these states tend, the supply effects of trade CGs aside, to be long-term stable, so either supply/demand is unnoticeable or it makes the good basically untradeable, neither of which is a very interesting state to be in.

Trade CGs, where it creates a very temporary and very large departure from equilibrium, so supplies drop over a large and growing region, and then bounce back ... much more interesting. Solutions which make supply/demand more dominant probably need to find a way to duplicate that effect more generally - your idea for focusing state variation of regeneration rates I think is in the right direction but would need the BGS states themselves to be much less stable than currently, which would have its own issues.


[1] Which do at least have the option of several alternative sources. But if it was something like Gallium or Power Generators that got zeroed, you'd be pretty stuck as they're not minable, and are very rare as mission rewards.

 

[N3rd Murd3r3r]

Taking your time, about 2.5 hours to load and then the same to unload, so 5 hrs total or circa 100mil/ hr.

Ah I can stop checking this thread out in case someone spills the beans now, obliged and good DAY to you all carries on with a bit of Robigo