You’re taking on risk by waiting for a fill, which transforms to profit on the long term, but it’s high variance. You’re essentially taking on 2 roles, producer and liquidity provider even if it’s a single side only. Sometimes I’m waiting days for a fill and end up giving up because the ship must depart. It’s definitely not as stable and can ruin a plan easily.
We’ll see when the dust settles after Steam release. Prices have been trending down, so I would expect them to settle at a bit under what is necessary to produce these high-tier MM products.
I agree with your general premise that liquidity is a problem in this game, but I disagree with your conclusions here. Money is one of the most valuable resources in this game, because money is flexibility. Having free cash allows you to put up buy orders at low prices, and place sell orders at high prices, and wait until those orders are filled. Playing market maker on resources when spreads are 20,30, even 50% can be a huge source of income for the savvy investor. Trading should be a vital part of this game, and it is the one best way to get rich. I should know, because it is a large part of why I am one of the largest and richest players in the game right now. I generally don’t trade as much as I once did, but I still try to supply certain markets and put up buy orders for things that I need so that I am still participating in the economy - without that, I’m not sure what the point of this game would be.
Unfortunately it seems like the vast majority of players either don’t seem to understand this, or don’t want to interact with the commodity exchanges for whatever reason. A lot of players try to become self sufficient at the small scale, which feels nice and safe but in terms of productivity it greatly reduces your own output, your profits, and ultimately your growth. Other players will trade exclusively within their own group of friends or corporation. This can be nice, and can help players achieve more efficiency, but by bypassing the markets it causes liquidity issues and leaves new players high and dry.
Right now due to the new player influx a lot of demands have been created for basic resources, of which there is not sufficient supply to fill it yet. This will balance out over time, but it does raise a fundamental problem with the game - that certain professions are not well represented by the starting packages. There are 2 farming packages and farming worlds in each of the four starting regions, but construction while essential is only really viable for new players in MOR and the other starting areas face a significant deficit of prefabs. Given how essential prefabs are to player growth, this is a serious problem.
I don’t profess to have the solutions to these problems, especially in the current universe, but I do think it is a problem worth considering. The solutions to these problems will likely need to come from multiple sources - both from the devs to make construction more easily accessible, and from players to actually interact with the markets more.
Yes, that’s also something I do. Everything I need I will leave a bid on the markets to catch impatient players and it’s generating as much or more money than deployed resources. Although I don’t do it to get more money, but to get more resources since my faith in money is low. Risk of that trade is related to how close spot price is to MM’s orders. And it also scales to infinity since it isn’t bound by plot sizes.
Money is only as useful as how accepted it is. Being able to teleport it across the universe is a significant advantage over actual products that require shipping, that’s true. Like was said, what backs money in this game is the ability to instantly conjure any quantity of anything a MM provides. After that it’s backed by the faith players have that other players will have faith in the money when they want to convert it back to resources. It’s a positive feedback loop that takes a while to build and is at risk of crashing proportional to the amount of money in circulation vs available and deployed resources.
We saw it in real life since the pandemic with materials going through the roof. The same thing happened on Steam release. We might see it again in the future if players keep burning resources selling stuff to the MM to increase the money in circulation more than the value of materials in the universe, then want to convert it back to resources in the face of absent liquidity.
When someone sells 1 IDC for 20K, they’re actually converting it, at worst, for 833 FF, 165 DW or 12.9 BSE redeemable at that CX at any point in the future that doesn’t require any storage. It has utility, but it’s not something that grows the economy.
In that case just sell to the buy order or buy form the buy order?!?! people are definitely over thinking this. i’m a trail player, I have no issues with the CX
One thing that could be done to encourage players to use the CX, would a cheap and easy implement of eve online margin trading. Placing a buy order with a deposit rather then full amount would give a huge advantage.
Even if the player has to put money in escrow, and all individual orders can’t be more then 50% of the total escrow.
The only floor or problem would every so often buy orders fail.
I am a trail users and I have my orders filled with a day, mostly I sell to buy orders. The biggest issue is no uses because no one uses it. People need to bite the bullet and use it more.
To the people comparing it to eve online, Eve definitely does have the same “problem” it just depends on the item or station. Big alliance in null puts a huge effort in to keep all the Isk within Thier own alliance though contracts and outposts. You don’t notice as much because eve is bigger and everybody used jita. I used to trade in hek or rens, which was mostly quite other then pvp items.
Every corp I have been always had thier own ore buyback, or the alliance kept thier r64 moon to them selfs, before the moon mining changes.