As talked about on discord, I want to make a forum thread for people who might not see that. And gather more input in a formal way (and for molp to see it, hiiii).
The extremely quick tl;dr is: Adjusting the price of marketmakers to align with two factors. Difficulty of the recipe, and tier of workforce that is needed to make it. Something which is easy is rewarded lowly, something which is difficult is rewarded highly. Currently, IDC is both easy and highly rewarded. Everything else is substantially worse.
Are these changes good, bad? Are we pushing too much inflation? Is the “spread” between good and bad mm’s too small or too large? Should the price of these mm’s change dynamically once per month according to player demand? Should IDC, due to its reliance, be adjusted slowly to reach it’s new target and give people time to re-adjust smoothly?
Summary of the points for: normalizes profitability making mm’s viable at many different levels and difficulty levels, no longer has 99% of us making the same item, rewards difficulty, no development time from molp needed as there are no new features
Summary of the points against: May cause more widespread inflation instead of being targeted only at FIM & MEA, min\maxers must chose most difficult option, too much economic activity tied to NPC’s, most interesting products should be player-driven only, most likely raises the costs of ships slightly
Since we’re on the topic of marketmakers, there are also some voices who want to adjust the marketmaker suppliers. Bfabs, fuels, OVE, RAT, DW, MCG.
I support the proposal to raise it 10% per month until there is no more economic activity, reserving them for manipulation prevention to preserve the new player experience. This will give time for the market to naturally adjust, as especially for bfabs, there is an enormous natural undersupply in the market.
During the discussion of raising these mm’s on discord, this is the result of a impromptu vote
I personally think that having the chase MM being on a complicated product that competes with other high tier products like ships is a bad thing. It drives development in that sector away from player-driven high tier efforts like ship building and eventually gateways and towards NPC-driven high tier efforts.
Having EDC/IDC as the top MMs allows players to print enough money to keep up with economic growth without disrupting the market for ships/gateways.
If the T1 MMs on B-fabs and consumables were removed their price would increase to balance out the money printed from IDC/EDC, eventually resulting in a stable growing economy. Right now B-fabs are not great for new players to produce since their price is capped near the MM.
Of course, an inflating economy also likely requires an increase in the starting cash for new players.
I disagree with the assessment of complex products. My expectation is that promoting more complex products would create a more robust market for their inputs, compared to the present state where many electronics inputs essentially aren’t available on the commodity exchanges and data cores are produced with less interaction with the broader market than most other goods.
I think these changes would be a great balance boost. With these changes there wouldn’t be a single “chase MM”, which is the best in all situations, instead there are many choices which could be good in their situation.
Someone might have like 3 permits available, and choose moderate returns for moderate complexity, something like POW where you mostly just need LI.
Someone might chase very high returns for something that is very hard to balance, or require 10 permits to produce at the desired scale.
Someone might want to make a MM that also has a use, so they can use the MM as the guaranteed bottom price, but hopefully sell to a shipbuilder who will use it at a higher price.
The best item for someone who wants no inputs might still be IDC, single permit, easy returns.
By enabling the viability of MMs that are used in the rest of the market, such as how LIS is used in shipbuilding will strengthen those industries and make them more interesting. It will enable more people to participate in what are currently niche elements of the economy.
More complicated chains enable players to interact with other players by selling intermediate products on the CX. Maybe you could specialize in WAI for many of those MM goods, or HCC or other connectors for the capacitor bank items. Right now, IDC draws people into silos where they only interact with a small set of workforce consumables.
It would be quite interesting to raise the upper MMs that are constantly hit. Ideally it would raise by 1% dynamically for every x volume traded, so it slowly adjusts.
Similarly when the lower MM gets hit for x volume, it should lower itself by 1%.
Obviously the formula for this is hard, so I am not even attempting to draft it.
Please nerf IDC, whether by scaling the MM down or by introducing input goods. Also give some love to dead MM’s. The IDC issue wouldn’t be as bad if other more complex MM’s were awarded accordingly.
I’m strongly in favour of adjusting the MMs like this, or anything which makes more complicated products more attractive as the go-to inflationary mechanism.
The item CC was mistakenly left off of the list. It has been added.
Additionally, upon further reflection, I feel that it’s not “that much” harder to combine AIR\WF into LIS. It was too much of a jump from its constituent components. I have nerfed the suggested price as a result.
I think the dynamic market makers are an excellent idea, and they would provide real economic incentive for players to not just skip the fundamentals. It would be important for players to collaborate to maintain a healthy economy.
However, monthly increases to the MM prices of items like B-fabs would be an excellent way to incentivize production.
Thank you very much for the input! We’ll look into adjusting MMs soon. While the general directions outlined in the spreadsheet seem very sound, I can’t promise we’ll be quite as “aggressive” as the suggested numbers, at least in a first step. Apart from a few MMs we previously introduced specifically as “economy boosters” we really want to avoid MM prices competing in any way with actual cases of players finding an item useful enough to pay for it. Some of the items we’re also hoping to make more useul via other updates / features sooner or later. That said, overall inflation, some outliers and the now very long-term reign of IDC/EDC do make a call for changes seem very reasonable.
I think especially for the larger changes like idc nerfs, or bse/rat buffs, they should be done slowly. I think one suggestion people made is 10% per month. To reduce major economic shocks.
For the items which nobody is making, like lis or cc, we can be much faster.
Thanks for taking a look, hope to see some changes soon.
I see no reason to nerf IDC/EDC any further. As it is, inflation seems to be bringing the profitability of other things closer to parity with those items. Right now, my IDC/EDC bases are not even in the top 10 of my most profitable bases. In fact, I have three simple gas taps that are more profitable.
There’s also the concern that if profitability drops much more many IDC/EDC bases would suddenly disappear causing significant disruption to bases making engineer/scientist consumables as well as to the price and availability of those goods.
I do like the idea of dynamic MM prices that adjust (up & down) based on supply and demand.
In any event, adding uses for items is a better way to go than having an MM for items that have little (or in some cases zero) use.
It’s only bringing “some” items to parity. The items which are directly funded by IDC. MEA, FIM, HER, DDT, RSE, RBH, etc, etc.
Not in the top 10 of profitability because you are only looking at the first line of profitability because MEA is expensive right now. That is an incomplete picture of the supplychain. Per unit area, IDC is enormously more profitable than any item in the game. By at least 2x.
I have proposed we adjust the prices slowly for IDC and pioneer mm’s. 10% per month. This gives time for people to adjust. Additionally, the new “best” items are LIS\CC\WR\AIR. These require significant quantities of WAI. There will still be a very strong need for Scientists. Additionally, many people won’t switch over to the more complex supplychain for a variety of reasons. Too hard, not enough permits, etc, etc.
I also like the idea of dynamic mm’s.
Well, we need mm’s to inject money into the game somewhere. So having it spread out among a ton of different items to me, is more good as it spreads the utility out across the whole economy and encourages production diversification across a large swath of goods. I believe this vastly superior to everyone in the game making IDC and only IDC, which has no other use.
It’s true that MEA has doubled in price over the last couple months eating away about $130k/d in profit from a full IDC base (I don’t have any full IDC bases. I have one that is 50/50 IDC/EDC so I am going off of PrunPlanner). If MEA prices return to their former level (which there is no guarantee that will happen) an IDC base would generate about $280k/d of profit. I can make the same amount with an N or AR base at their current prices. I suppose we’re comparing apples to oranges here since those have MMs far below their current price. (Then again, my ORC doesn’t produce apples OR oranges so maybe I’m too confused to make sense of any of this).
I think adjusting the MM by a small percentage each month is a good compromise if that percentage were smaller than 10%. However based on the devs’ history with MM adjustments we are more likely to see a one time 10% cut instead of multiple months of 10% cuts.
Take a look at the image description - these profitability per areas take into account the entire production chain, of all inputs and repair materials. It’s not just the final profitability of the final step like you would find in prunplanner. This is a entire from the ground of profitability calculation including all steps in all production chains and averaging that all out to a $ per unit area average.
I would rally behind having the monthly economic report being the time when mm adjustments are also made too. Should be able to be automated to a large degree as well. Run report of total sales, put them into the formula, get output of new prices, apply human sanity check, apply new prices.
