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Current Market Greatly Reduces Playable Time


Gideon77

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Problem:

Most players that play games like this, play until such time as they have done everything that they want to, and then they get bored and leave. Therefore the amount of time needed to accomplish their tasks, also determines the amount of time that they play the game. Currently it costs me 107k quanta worth of stuff to build a large basic atmospheric engine, but it currently sells in the market for 8,000 quanta. That means that players can buy stuff for 13 times less than what it costs to build it. That also means that players can build whatever they want in 1/13 the amount of time. This in turn means that the game will average 1/13 the number of players. (I grant in advance that some quit immediately, and some will stay forever regardless. I am referring to the main stay players that play the game to completion and then move on.)

 

Solution:

Have the game (NPC) be the only thing that you can sell to at the markets, and have it pay a fixed price that produces a profit (perhaps10%) for new players over the cost of the parts that are used to make the item. This is easily calculated with a simple spreadsheet based on ore prices. And also have the game sell all items to the players at the market for twice what it buys them for. This allows anyone to buy anything, and makes building anything more profitable than selling the ore. This in turn encourages all players to build large factories, which takes time to build, which in turn keeps them playing for longer.

 

A side benefit of this is that it also prevents "mega factories" from slaughtering the market by overproducing (which has been threatened by the larger players in the past), because it basically limits players to only building what they can get ore to produce, while still allowing anyone to buy the few items that they need and can't (or don't want to) get for some reason or other. Since they can't make a profit if they buy the ore, they are limited to whatever they get from their mining units plus whatever they choose to mine from asteroids. Thus profit would no longer be basically free to get. Everyone needs to work for any profit that they get. And the market prices become stabilized, just like they are in real life due to the number of people in the market in real life.

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I agree that the market is oversaturated right now and that the present situation provides avenues whereby new players can skip ahead. I also agree that elongating the gameplay loop can help with player retention but I honestly think there are better and more direct ways to accomplish that. Your idea however, has merit as a tool for balancing the economy. It places upper and lower bounds on goods so that in the event supply far exceeds demand that excess product gets erased via NPCs or conversely created if demand far exceeds supply. This type of system is normal for most established MMOs but its hard to implement right now because the initial conditions are already quite skewed. More specifically, there are players currently sitting on mountains of assets/quanta that could see drastic changes in value. Also the setpoints for those NPC orders are heavily dependent on the overall player population which is likely to change upon release. We actually had the system you described earlier in development but new features and gameplay changes were constantly disrupting the economy balance and the playerbase requested that the NPC orders (aka the economy safety rails) be removed. I expect they will be re-installed at some point down the line after things stabilize.

 

Also just a note, I think NPC buy orders should not generate a profit under this system, it needs to be material cost or below to stimulate industry competition. With that said, I am not an expert on the topic so maybe I am overlooking something here.

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2 minutes ago, Msoul said:

Also just a note, I think NPC buy orders should not generate a profit under this system, it needs to be material cost or below to stimulate industry competition. With that said, I am not an expert on the topic so maybe I am overlooking something here.

The problem with the buy price being the cost or below is that it removes the player's desire to build factories since the player can buy everything cheaper than they can make it. That in turn removes factory building from the time a player plays the game, which leaves only mining and ship building. And a lot of players buy their ships, which leaves you with only mining and buying left. And mining gets old fast if that is all that you do. It will be very hard for DU to develop player interest in a game where they basically only mine. You want the players to want to build factories, and the only way to do that is to make it worth their while to do it. Nobody will want to pay for the privilege of building a factory, in order to pay even more for the privilege of building the item. If there is no profit in building, then there will be no building, so you might as well remove building from the game.

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2 hours ago, Gideon77 said:

That means that players can buy stuff for 13 times less than what it costs to build it. That also means that players can build whatever they want in 1/13 the amount of time. This in turn means that the game will average 1/13 the number of players.

 

I get what you mean, but don't think it's so simple.

 

Clearly, making something 13 times harder doesn't mean players will stay around 13 times as long -- it depends on a lot of factors beyond "difficulty".

 

In DU's case, is the effort required actually engaging and interesting? Or does it merely mean waiting around 13 times as long for auto-miners to spit out ore...? Or running more slowboat missions? 

 

Longer loops don't mean more engaging ones automatically. If the grind isn't fun, making people work harder is likely to reduce retention, not increase it.

 

DU's grind isn't fun, it's a waiting game (either via missions or AMs), which means anything that requires quanta (factories need schematics) only demands more grind.

 

Is it more difficult? Sure, but only because it's more monotonous...not because grinding quanta involves any activities of interest or skill. 

 

Players already have such limited agency in DU, a change like this would (IMO) make the core design issues even worse. With this change, players have even less control -- it'd be really puzzling how (and why) a game with no NPCs managed to make an economy run by bots. 

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29 minutes ago, Gideon77 said:

The problem with the buy price being the cost or below is that it removes the player's desire to build factories since the player can buy everything cheaper than they can make it. That in turn removes factory building from the time a player plays the game, which leaves only mining and ship building. 

You misunderstand. I am talking about the NPC buy orders not the sell orders. The scenario I am describing is one where the NPC buy orders are $10/sprocket and sell orders are $100/sprocket respectively. If it costs you $5 to make that sprocket then regardless of what happens to the economy you will always be able to make at least a $5 profit. Yes that sounds great from a player perspective but that assurance of value actually detracts from the intended purpose of economy balancing. You ideally want the price of goods to be able to drop below manufacturing costs to help correct for supply and quanta imbalances. That way if some rich org decides to overproduce sprockets  they are actively punished for this behavior as it costs them quanta to do it. Once they run out of funds the price will again stabilize near the manufacturing cost , opening the door for other industry players to jump back in. Tweaks to this system are made via modifying gameplay sinks/sources that affect sprocket destruction/creation so that a preset amount of sprockets are always needed. Under this model the NPC orders are just safety rails and are only ever used in the event of a problem.

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What you see as a market failure I see as a market working as expected in the case of basic elements. Nobody wants basic large amto, and everyone has them, or as the ability to make them (and a lot of them with a very cheap factory).

 

Moving up the tier, to territory scanners, an uncommon elements...  Yes these also sold for below costs for a long time, yet they took longer to produce, after the removal of mega nodes for the new mining units, people lost their demand after they found their unlimited ore pools, and then sold off their scanners. Lots of people also made them, I had 6 lines, gottchar had 10s of them, and we sold near ore costs. And the market was saturated long before the demand fell off.

 

Moving on the advanced tier. Engines, especially those that are used in the popular ships have mostly been profitable. Depends on what NQ is saying about a wipe, lots of players have been leaving so the overall demand is down, which means the price is near cost, but rarely this tier will go below ore cost.

 

Rare, is hit or miss depending on what elements your selling, but that's because of the server pop and the demand. Things like MUs went for 10x ore cost until the market saturated. Now your lucky to break even, but that's mostly due to the rare ore supply having a massive jump in supply.

 

Exotic, almost always profitable but slow to move, again due to the limited demand.

 

The game could use something like element recycling, so that basics are at least worth 1/3 their vaule but I don't see NQ giving that a priority.

 

Honestly my thoughts are they need to limit and reseed mining units every 12 weeks but they have more important things like pvp at the top of their priority list.

 

tldr: no market demand means no profit, surplus of ore also means no profit

 

ps: Run missions if you want to make money

 

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Spaceman hit most of it.  He did not talk about how allot of engines came onto the market when ships became abandoned during the no long term parking at markets thing. And more recently inactive accounts had all there things become abandoned. 

 

Everybody started out with those engines. As newer engines came into the game and as people could afford better engines they took those engines off and put better engines on. The old engines got placed on the market. Except no one wants those engines at that price. because they too are getting better engines at that price. So the price drops to a point that people will actually but them. which is a loss for that item. 

 

Also if its costing you 107k to make. you dont have max skills. so your trying to compete in an over saturated market producing at inferior rates. Which is not going to be profitable. would not think you need to be an economist to figure that one out. 

 

 

 

 

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22 minutes ago, RugesV said:

Spaceman hit most of it.  He did not talk about how allot of engines came onto the market when ships became abandoned during the no long term parking at markets thing. And more recently inactive accounts had all there things become abandoned. 

 

Everybody started out with those engines. As newer engines came into the game and as people could afford better engines they took those engines off and put better engines on. The old engines got placed on the market. Except no one wants those engines at that price. because they too are getting better engines at that price. So the price drops to a point that people will actually but them. which is a loss for that item. 

 

Also if its costing you 107k to make. you dont have max skills. so your trying to compete in an over saturated market producing at inferior rates. Which is not going to be profitable. would not think you need to be an economist to figure that one out. 

 

 

 

 

Basic parts where already below costs, but yes the salvage really increased the supply while demand is down at least 50 percent due to the wipe talk causing a mass exit.

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