I have this feeling since I started to play this game (a couple of months), but I don’t see it bothering others. I am curious why and who this develop in previous worlds.
My assumption:
Some corps are just a way to relate with each other, but each company works independently in the market.
Mostly of corporations work together. Each member produces a product of the chain. They keep the price between themselves at production cost. As self-sufficient, they are not affected negatively by market prices, and can produce in volume and price that any independent company can compete.
For instance: In Katoa the RAT price is on 50-60, while corporations are trading in LM still on prices of 30-35.
For someone that is paying the market prices, I will never be able to sell it at the same price as corporations. You normally need to wait a couple of weeks until their 500 stock gets clean up to sell your 10 units, other option is just sell in very small profit. In both cases just cutting any progress, you do in the game.
PS1: I am sure someone will point name A or B from previous world as independent company success. Don’t matter, this do not represent average company experience.
PS2: I am aware many players try to move to upper layers and give room for new players, but I consider “player good will” some too fragile to bound on it.
Bear in mind that every transaction has two sides. If members of a corporation are selling to each other at low prices, then while this is good for the buyers, it is bad for the sellers. Whoever is selling RAT for 30-35 on the LM is making less than they would make by selling on the CX for 50-60.
So I don’t think that corporations break game balance. Their main effect is to partition off some of the player progress behind a walled garden. So some players in corporations may have access to higher tier materials before players who aren’t in corporations. But that could happen anyway if players are friends and co-ordinate between themselves - corporations just make the process easier, and formalize it a bit.
Also, there’s nothing stopping you from joining a corporation…
@Ficks_Dinkum I don’t think is a loss for the seller because he will buy they stuff a cost price too. Just stay in the “parition” economy. In a big corp there are few reasons to have “real” money, and you can always sell any excess with huge profits.
People have different interest in the game, for some, join a corp is not what drive you to the game.
I don’t think that argument works though. For an example, if a corp member is mining LST, then yes, maybe he can buy DW/RAT/OVE cheaper, at fixed prices. But then he also has to sell his LST cheaper, at fixed prices. In the end, is he much better off than if he bought and sold those things on the CX? I don’t think so.
You might argue that he only has to sell half his LST at the corp price, and can sell the other half on the CX “for huge profits”. But in that case he is only contributing half his output to the corp, yet buying all his inputs from the corp? This doesn’t seem fair on the other corp members. And I don’t think you can argue that everyone in the corp can operate that way, because then there aren’t enough inputs to go around.
It probably does happen to some extent, maybe the corp as a whole sells 20% of its outputs on the CX for “real” money? But anyone who integrates vertically is doing roughly the same thing, so I don’t think this breaks game balance in any way. Plus if the corp is dumping excess materials on the CX then it will just drive prices down until they aren’t making a bigger profit than anyone else. They might even be making less profit, if the CX prices of their inputs dip below the corp prices.
Also, FYI - I don’t play in a corp, but I haven’t noticed that the average corp member is doing much better than me. I don’t think there is some secret way for a corp to get ahead, ultimately they have all the same buildings and production costs as we do.
As a member of a corporation who was probably making those trades, here’s our philosophy. Our prices (AHI) are set to be such that everyone has an equal ROI. Because we buy almost everything in corp, we can lower prices arbitrarily low and still be just as profitable. But of course, it means that all the excess we sell to the market we make great profits on. So if you’re just selling in corp, you don’t really come out much better than the market, but if you sell to the market, you end up much more profitable.
@Ficks_Dinkum Looks like all of this would require a sheet
If you buy and sell exclusive in CX or in CORP, this tend to be the same, just more stable. For instance, the LST miner could sell high on CX, but need to buy RAT and BDE high too! On a corp, he will sell low, but have RAT and BDE cheaper. All the same. But any excess you have, and you always will have some, you can go to CX to have your extra.
In am tending to think that it is not a really game breaking because the game is about snowing-ball into the production chain, cash is secondary, it is all about whats way I can expansion faster.
