Please tell me this is not a series of bot placing?

[Alpinesun]

Looks very uniform and so I'm guessing these are all bot placings on the market?

 

So not only did the industry paralyse the new players, it looks like an artificial pricing structure is now in place, thus killing any natural market movement and novation and once again crippling the ability for a true supply and demand situation between players? Honestly you can't make this up if this is the case!

 

You've broken it already, let the natural order occur!

 

 

[Orangeferret]

What am I looking at?

 

There have always been bot buy orders for ore, outside the daily login bonus it's the only source of quanta in the game. This isn't new.

[Rimezx]

It has been like this from the start. That is how they injected quantas into the economy in the first days of the beta. With their new schematics prices this is required if enough money is to somehow get generated in order to buy expensive schematics (which are sold by bots meaning the quantas disappear from the economy). It could work without bot orders if they only relied on the daily 100/150k from the start and let the players trade with those. Market prices would be according to that, money would have different value and problem solved. But now that people already posses large capitals there is nothing to be done. 

 

The problem with this approach is that mining (world resources) vanish from the universe and they do not respawn. At start they had bots buying all elements which is like a country printing money out of thin air and paying everyone. If they add those again money value slowly changes and money becomes worthless. That is why everyone was keeping ore instead of money.

 

What can be done is to remove those orders from the player market and add them to a separate npc market. Doesn't really make any difference. These are equivalent to vendors in other games. They just dictate the value of the currency. Although changing their price immediately alters the value of held capitals from all players, that is why they need to be careful.

 

As i said in another post they need to hire a real economist. Seriously. This game's economy is obviously too complex for the devs to handle correctly. The economy is totally unstable. Worst kind of conditions for someone to make an investment.

[Revelcro]

Natural order was not allowing virtually anyone to buy schematics, like at all.  The economy didnt just crash, it evaporated within hours.

 

Their fix was doubling the T1-2 bot orders.  But meganodes were gone.  They fixed that finally and now people are slowly making a bit of money to buy schematics.....very slowly.

 

We just now got a fourth warp cell line running, and we are probably the largest guild on Madis.  We may be able to get some T4 factories going tonight for replacement engines and cores.  Maybe.

 

As I said before in places.  This patch really hurt us, as a huge guild.  But it destroyed a lot of players smaller than us.  People are actually trying to sell things other than ore but nobody has any money right now, at least not any they want to spend on anything besides schematics.  Give it a few weeks and the ore selling/buying might go back to something closer to than what it was.

[Daphne Jones]

Is that bauxite? It's a lot easier if we know what you're looking at.

 

Yes, those are bot orders. They're there temporarily until other cash faucets, e.g., missions, get in game. Without them there would be no way to make money in the current patch.

 

There have to be cash faucets that keep up with the value of the market or the market will deflate and fail.

[Alpinesun]

So firstly I'm new to the game so a lot of the in-game market activity and dynamics are new to me.

 

So you're telling me that most of the supply and demand factors are artificial and price fixed? IRL its illegal across all the free nation markets and people go to prison for it and for good reason.

 

The most important function or concept of 'free pricing' (a fixed price not regulated) is its ability to serve as an indicator of the scarcity of a commodity, and more importantly then ration or offer to the highest demander. As long as the price of an item is allowed to fluctuate and match the supply demand there will be neither surpluses nor shortages and market equilibrium is met. This factor is important to Dual Universe as a game concept to allow industry and the market place to be truly gamer driven and dynamic. Fixed/artificial pricing removes the equilibrium for the game and creates supply chain issues. This is even more critical to DU as the complexity of sourcing items to create and supply items is actually very simple compared to real life. IRL if one item isn't available or over priced, then an alternative can generally be sourced to replace it (this happened globally in the 1970's when copper became scarce and aluminum was used in electronic items instead), in DU that cannot occur. 

 

What's even more alarming is that the fixing is done on the very first element of the supply chain, ore. The above example is Bauxite (sorry I should of been clearer on my OP). Price fixing the first initial element in the supply change sets a dangerous precedence for the following matrix of goods and items that follow it. It generates a false market recession in later supply chain items due to the mismatching in component costs. So if bauxite is set artificially high/low then aluminum should follow suit as a refined product of bauxite, as should Al-Fe Alloy as it's directly related to Aluminum and so the chain of price precedence continues. Now that's 100% not happening and killing market freedom and player interaction. The fixing is allowing ore to be sold at a high price (IMHO). More people are mining their way out of the current depression, so ore supply should be high which should drive a lower cost to allow other people to then cost effectively create the follow on elements such as metals and finished alloys in order to make the follow on items such as pipes into hydraulics and so on at the correct and competitive cost point. Right now the system (bot) is buying up that ore and not allowing the real players take advantage of the market balance. As an example, Al-FE Alloy is pretty much being demanded at 1Q. Bauxite is 25Q per liter as per the fixed/artificial bot price, however the demand for a third stage follow on item is insanely low! That everyone is broken game economics on a massive level that will never stabilise unless either:

 

(a) Fixed/artificial pricing is introduced at a considered price point for all items with the consideration of it's base components. A horrible horrible concept that removes any chance to generate a true player economy and any form of 1-2-1 or 1-2-many trading situations (which I'm guessing NQ wants right?!) but generates a fair market price structure in the supply chain end to end. Still horrible though!

 

(b) Allow free market activity. Remove the bots and let the market self-regulate, driving player supply/demand elements and allowing everyone to make the right levels or margins across the supply chain for the real economy to breathe and flourish! This could also introduce more advanced market elements such as futures trading based on known or predicted events in the game.

 

Sorry for the long and (potentially) boring post. It's something that's close to my heart, and something that's been bothering me about this game and the future of it. I really really like this game but the recent patch has in essence destroyed any chance of new players getting ahead (I've stopped playing and instead just logging in to collect my daily bonus until my sub runs out). This attached with the price/market fixing has absolutely removed any chance of getting ahead and making any form of player profiting unless you want to spend all day underground mining.

 

"We who live in free market societies believe that growth, prosperity, and ultimately human fulfillment are created from the bottom up, not the government down" - Ronald Reagan.

[Emptiness]

19 minutes ago, Alpinesun said:

IRL its illegal across all the free nation markets

Tell that to the diamond cartels.

[Alpinesun]

1 minute ago, Emptiness said:

Tell that to the diamond cartels.

Not saying it doesn't happen, my god it happens everywhere and in every market we interact in. Energy pricing for example is something we all have to live with IRL. It is however illegal