Market Makers (MMs) are currently the primary method of turning goods into currency in PRUN. They are somewhat good at providing currency during the early universe and providing a defined goal to the market system. They are inherently poor at managing inflation though requiring near constant dev intervention to prevent significant price increases. In the current universe we are currently seeing the MM system drawn out to it’s limit as runaway inflation begins eating at players bottom credit.
What alternatives exist then?
One alternative could be player controlled money supply. By taking the money supply out of the hands of the dev and putting it into the hands of some player elected council there would no longer need to be artificial MMs for money to be created. Money could be destroyed through planetary taxation. This would function somewhat similarly to fiat currency does in the real world, but would also fall in some of the same pitfalls. The reliability of those in control of the currency would be in constant question and corruption would be likely. That might be good for a game about politics but this game feels to me more like a game about economics and logistics with the bare minimum of political mechanics layered on top. This makes this a poor choice for PRUN in my opinion.
Another option is that currency is simply produced from nothing in some mechanical way. For example, every player may get some stipend every day which they can spend buying goods from other players or, eventually, buying goods from vendors (market makers who only sell goods) where the credits would be deleted.
The stipend could also be granted to planetary governments at some rate relative to their permits or their population. As such governments would receive money through both taxation and from ‘printing’ and they would buy goods from the player base in order to maintain the infrastructure of the planet. Again, money would be created from nothing and be consumed through vendors.
These options would have several potential benefits. For one, the effort of some of our best players would no longer be directed toward producing goods for market makers which have little to no effect on the game universe, instead they could produce goods for more interesting useful or impactful endeavors like making ships, colonizing and expanding planets or building gateways, creating a more dynamic and interesting universe with more ‘stuff’ happening. Another benefit is that every item you make as a player eventually will be consumed by a player in doing something you can point at rather than simply getting sent to a NPC to get turned into a credit line.
I hope it is clear which of these options I prefer, though I am open and eager to hear what ideas others have for how and where money could be produced from and where it could be destroyed.
My opinion: either move the bid MMs to the faction so that the faction gov buys the wares from the CX and sell it to the dynamic MMs to control the amount that is sold as the price goes up/down depending on supply. The faction gov would serve as a protective layer against manipulation and the demand could depend on the population and population classes of the faction planets. The max sell amount would be 1,5x or 2x the “stable” amount to prevent rapid price falls because of mass sells (and mass money generation).
Or: Move them to the planets so that they become more than a chore to manage but have a strategic value to make politics over. Again dynamic pricing and demand depends on population (as it is a consumer market).
The devs could still control inflation through a multiplier for the amount of wares bought.
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But anyway, first the waves of the soon dynamic ask MMs should calm down and then this would be the next topic.
Disagree that inflation is running away. The CPI increase we’ve seen over the last year is driven by one primary factor
the proliferation of the profit per 500 area metric.
We had far, far, far more profitable market makers in the past. Which were in the tune of 300-400k per permit, instead of the 160-180k per permit that currently exist. But this was broadly before the 500 area metric was used, so a huge swath of goods were radically underpriced where they should be - impacting enormous opportunity cost onto the $ income of anyone who didn’t participate in the market maker chain.
Now, we see the market prices normalizing to this new metric. The revised market makers have far greater distribution across the economy, and the 500 area metric is the normalized metric at this point. We’ve seen most markets in this game rise in price, due to the demand floor set by the market maker bids. Once that floor is met, I expect CPI to dramatically slow down once the broad spectrum of bases in the game reach 100-140k\day in profitability.
Currency supply inflation, in our specific closed economic system, does not mean price increases. We’ve seen over a 1000% growth in the currency supply over the last 2 years, but nowhere near that in terms of CPI rise - and most of the CPI rise has been due to undervalued goods finally rising to prices in which make them competitive in terms of opportunity cost relative to other items. For a long time, HERFIM\HAL\CL\EPO were chronically underpriced - among many others.
Centralized entities will always underperform a free (ish) market
stipend every day
This is a closed loop credit system quite similar to the one which currently exists, except instead of outputting anything productive you just have airdrops of both credits and materials. Worse IMO. Even though the current system has the final end item being bought and destroyed to introduce currency, these items are at the ends of very long and complex supply chains. We’ve seen an enormous proliferation of player trade in the intermediate goods that these marketmakers touch. Some markets are one or two orders of magnitude more traded - which IMO is the metric to maximize here, in terms of the “gameplay loop”. Player trade, cooperation, planning.
Now to the question - can the universe exist without marketmakers? Well, to answer that, you need to define the economic model you need to go with. Currency velocity, along with GDP, influence how much active currency is “needed” in circulation to maintain stable prices. The availability and lending rates of money also come into play here too.
So any replacement system, to the current market makers, needs to have a mechanic which introduces (or destroys) currency to balance out theses needs. It’s a pretty complex problem - even at this scale - and I honestly don’t have any answers which are less-worse than the current system.
Any solution will require magic’ing in money via some NPC airdrop or marketmaker.
I did insinuate, maybe poorly, that I don’t like the idea of a player controlled currency. You say you think the stipend is worse but I want to understand better why? The current MM goods do have other uses and markets would exist for them without the MMs so your long complex supply chains continue to exist, it’s just that instead of going to MMs and being deleted the supply chains terminate at some natural sink, whatever the player base wants as determined by the flow of the money in the market, if players want more ships then the price of ship parts will rise and there will be more ships produced. If players want to colonise then resources needed for colonisation will rise in price and be produced. I think that is a more interesting economic simulation than the current system which is bounded and chained to artificial NPC sinks.
Let’s say that 70% of player activity goes toward producing goods which eventually end up being sold to market makers. That’s 70% of player activity which is not going toward actions which actually effect the gamestate and instead are mostly just absorbed into large bank accounts. What my suggestion would do is release that 70% of player activity to have real impact on the universe and would provide a more concrete connection between player activity and outcomes. It is far more compelling to me as a metallurgist to hear that my metals are going into gateways or colonisation or ships or even just planet and base upkeep than to hear that it is going into MMs. The game has plenty of natural sinks for goods, we don’t need NPC’s as a sink for goods.
It doesn’t quite work like that. Because the universe is growing, and GDP is going up, the excess liquidity is mostly absorbed for that fact.
I think this is a far more interesting point because then you need a closed-loop consumption of all produced goods. There needs to be a final end state for them, otherwise you just get a gult of produced items. This means compressing the “yield” of all items in the game, to where there’s a destination for everything. But you still need a faucet\drain for currency.
P.S I think the total economic activity that is sunk into the mm’s is about 10-20%.
Any glut of produced items would just tend to lower the price of those goods, which means that players will find new uses for those items that weren’t economically viable before. Colonise planets which were marginal or unprofitable before. If an item already has some use then I don’t think it would need to change, just remove the artificial demand on MM goods and the prices will adjust to produce what the players actually want.
I would be interested to see stats, if any could be made, for how much productive activity goes into MMs. The metric I’d probaby use is MM active permit hours/total active permit hours.
I think this comment is very much harsher than deserved.
The mm are there to prevent systemic collapse of the game, particularly required at universe start. Now they are less required and so are being reconsidered but insinuating the devs are clueless is underserved.
Earlier instances of the games didn’t have any market makers. I recall hearing about one of them that failed because of runaway collapse of materials.
You’re running low on the production rate for food because the FP needs to be repaired. To repair it you need some BFabs. However, there aren’t any BFabs on the market… so it runs slower and slower as repairs get delayed.
At the same time, the person making BFabs is only running at 50% because they can’t get RAT regularly to them… so they’re not making BFabs at a rate to be able to keep up with demand. Build more PP1 isn’t the answer because you need BFabs to build that and there aren’t any on the market.
This had a feedback loop that caused fewer RATs to be produced which meant that fewer BFabs were produced which meant that fewer RATs were produced and eventually no one was producing anything because there was nothing on the market to be able to buy to repair the buildings or feed the workforce needed.
Market makers in the next restart of the game were so that there was a way to bail the game out of that systemic collapse of materials. You could always get some if you had money. You could always sell things for some small amount of money.
The game isn’t a perfect real world economic simulation. It’s a model of economics used in many game economies known as a faucet / drain economy. I would suggest a read of https://mud.co.uk/richard/DesigningVirtualWorlds.pdf or the other works by Richard Bartle.
This isn’t communism. It’s an economic model that can be programed and tweaked. As it isn’t the real world, trying to apply real world economic models to it is not entirely appropriate.
RAT is already tight profit market, and price cap only screwed it more.
it doesn’t need any market intervention. Nature is self-correcting/governing/regulating.
farmer buys for higher price if something is available, or wait for better price. Sells oversupply for price someone willing to pay.
manufacturer either waits for miracles, or builds own farm.
it is self-reinforcing loop that brings more business people in the economy until oversupply hits on.
observing the real world, communism never worked. Let it “live” on its own, it is real people playing aka PvP, not PvE based on some imaginary theories.
I would rather work on more important improvements such as ship HW (well known issues for long time) where is lots of issues, and various configs bring very little difference
liquid, oversaturated markets with tight margins…all screwed up…it gives incentive to stop making stuff, because virtual companies do it for better price with zero losses
The market maker prices are moving to dynamic rather than developer tweaked values.
In a previous iteration of the game, the supply of RAT ran out completely. There was none being produced in the universe. That meant that there were no working factories to make BFabs to be able to repair the FRMs and FPs that had broken down.
The self reinforcing virtuous cycle exists - and yes, that’s a good thing. But without market makers, the self reinforcing vicious cycle also exists and the game teeters on hyper inflation (and money being worthless) and catastrophic collapse (where nothing is produced). The market makers provide for the economic model of the game (not communism) to allow for a shortage of necessary materials in the game for the very basics of the game to work.
As shagie explained, the mm in their current state are an unoptimal solution for
when the universe had to sparse a population to ensure an efficient market
avoid a single player destroying the universe with enough cash.
You seem to be missing that the efficient market hypothesis isn’t universally applicable and requires some conditions to be effective. In an early universe, that wasn’t the case.
Now, with the current state of the universe, the situation as changed, hence why the devs are reworking them.
But in no case are the mm stemming from not understanding economics
Also, you seem to be confusing communism and command economy…
if you have no players to make stuff, there will be no goods. Economy/life 101 It may be good starting point before enough players play. Now, it is pointless, and discourages players to play if you have not much left to manufacture.
when I started, I bought what was available. Then I made my own. Once, high-tech era started, I stopped to bother, because there were enough players selling basic stuff. I focus only on high margin stuff.
This intervention makes me think about to quit…what is point of economy game if there is nothing left to manufacture with profit.
It is not possible in the economic model for profits to vanish. There are too many goods being destroyed by a variety of mechanisms, resulting in a constant demand for items.
The idea behind MMs was not to supress prices but to provide the basics (and liquidity) early universe and now in a advanced universe their task is to catch spikes.
The current supressing only happed because they weren’t moved often enough to keep them away from the actually traded prices.
This comment and your earlier comment baffle me. You have been with the game for nearly 2 years, and the MM have been in place the whole time - yet you act like you would leave now because of the MM?
No additional goods are getting MM, and the ones that have them (at least to buy from) will be increasing based on other people not making them - thus increasing the profit margin.
I really don’t understand the negativity you are aiming at people who are working to remove the MM, which from your post you would seem to agree with? I am very confused.
free market, price discovery.