Or perhaps makes the other things like grandiderite feasible too.
Exactly this. The general market rule for a long time was "Higher price, higher profit margin", and that was pretty much the only rule, supply and demand didn't really impact price considerably. This meant you'd only ever export/import the most expensive good needed for the target system. This meant Water would buy for 20-odd credits, and sell for 30-odd, if you were lucky.
That changed eventually and we got
- Higher profit margins
- State-based "surge" prices
- Greater variance resulting from supply/demand values
... so now items like Biowaste and Water are viable with 600cr profit margins, compared to Palladium, which can swing as high as 2,000cr under normal market conditions, and low enough to create a loss, depending on supply/demand. There's never been enough to promote diversity in trade goods, and any steps to promoting other commodity types is a good thing.
Anyone here from the Beta who can comment on the price drops?
The "High" price of core minerals is
exactly the same as current live builds.
I wasn't able to test the "low" pricing because FD's fatal flaw was the advertised places where high mineral prices were in effect, were also high pop systems w/ 10,000 demand for the various minerals, and FD didn't place an "out of test" market where you could buy these minerals for, say, 1cr and tank a nearby market, rather you would have had to spend 10s of hours getting enough of a single mineral to tank a market, virtually on your own, in a one-week beta.
So, can confirm, max achievable price is completely unaffected, it's just
As far as was possible to tell in Beta:
1) Find a system with a high sell price, likely to require the same BGS states as now.
2) ...before anyone else does (this is the new bit)
Which is exactly how
normal trading currently works.
Find a good profit route, and exploit it. But you can only exploit it for so long before supply/demand dries up and your profits tank to nearly 80% of value, if not turning it into a loss. This is how core minerals should work also.
I'd also add, the other option is "create your own conditions for good sale, in an unknown system, then fill your boots.
I'd take a moment to also remind anyone who thinks these problems aren't outrageous, that this "cash cow" was the first nerf FD ever introduced, and no substantial costs have been introduced in the game which didn't exist back then... and FD actually
removed mechanics to do this.
Realistically, we're only having this discussion
yet again[1], because FD took so long rebalancing something they should've nipped in the bud much sooner. Even if the overall effect was to nerf, say, voipal prices down to =~700k (more than half)... if that was the original launch price of voipals, we wouldn't even be complaining about it. When voipals first launched, people raced off to get them because 700k for a voipal (INV + Civil Lib) was absolutely amazing income compared to anything else, and people
ABSOLUTELY ADORED that price point.
Then the first Pirate Attack happened in one of these Inv+CL systems which knocked the pricing up to 1.6m, and people went even crazier for it. Even if this was a wholesale nerf down to 700k (which i'm not advocating for), core mining would
still strip shreds off any income spinner in the game.
Knowing FD though, I'm anticipating the "demand" impact to dull the price of voipals down from 1.6m to something inconsequential like 1.4m, 1.3m if we're lucky.
[1] Just like what happened with Mission Stacking, Robigo Runs, Seeking Luxuries and selling stolen goods back to the owning station. They were mechanics which FD took too long to fix, and so when they proposed a fix, people had these gameplay styles resulting from bugs and edge cases too ingrained in their playstyle to accept it.