Thread to discuss the heated topic of discussion in the discord-Market Makers!
As to not clutter the OP I’m going to list a few options for Market Makers.
Option 1:
Market Makers for Everything, but limited to 1-days worth of production, i.e for a PP1 you’d be able to sell 4 BSE/day. Just enough to get the foot in the door, but not to make a PP1 megabase.
Option 2:
Each player has a “market maker” limit that can be bought or sold to other players. Ideally you’d want a higher limit as you go up the tiers.
A MM limit might look like:
Tier 1: 100k/week.
Tier 2: 250k/week.
Tier 3: 500k/week
Tier 4: 1 mil/week
Tier 5: 2 mil/week.
This would encourage players to naturally move up the tiers, and new players could “sell” their Tier * access to older players.
Another variation would be to have a market maker “coin” that could be exchanged at different rates i.e 1:1 for tier one 1:2.5 tier two etc.
Option 3:
Have the players be the Market Makers.
To do this you’d have a building for each tier MM1 etc, that would turn resources into currency. The currency created would be backed by the resources consumed and the work put into converting the resources into currency.
As to how to balance this building, i’ve been playing with increased area, cost etc, because what shouldn’t be happening is a single player producing resources and feeding it into the Market Maker building.
The best idea would the make the building HUNGRY . How hungry? 1 Base’s worth of resources/day Hungry. Say a dedicated PP1 base could support 20 PP1 buildings, a MM1 would eat 80 BSE/day to produce currency!
This would make a player who decided to create currency rely on other players, rather then do it all themselves. 4 MM1’s would require at least 4 bases, or 4 players to support. It would be self-balancing as build too many Market Maker buildings and inflation would cause cost to spiral out control and make the building unprofitable.
I like option one - or at least as a limit to the MM offer (we all need an RAT supplier of last resort regardless of size). This gives all new players a chance to survive a market fall. At least this way you can get into the game, survive and shift to a new market (and maybe stay in the original one long enough for it to rebound).
Barring a new mechanism, I really think some form of MM is critical to supporting new players as the universe expands
I do like option one for its simplicity-just enough MM to enter the market, but not enough to build a megabase without a market. A new player building their first PP1 or SME would be able to sell enough to expand and learn the game.
There is some danger in allowing players to sell any product to the MM. Players will, as in the past, find a way to “farm” these MM. When you can sell materials that are the primary output of a recipe, you will have player build their empires around selling things to the MM.
In another thread, I built on an idea by @Gladi099 for the introduction of waste products.
When a recipe completes, there should be a chance of producing a “waste” material. This material can then be sold to the market maker for a small amount - something like 25 currency per 1m3 / 1t.
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This allows for players at every stage of development to sell things to the MM and introduce currency to the game.
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It prevents people from farming the MMs because “waste” is never a primary output.
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It allows the developers a single-point-of-control for monetary policy - they can change the price of “waste” to control how much currency is put into the game.
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Creation of new funds is intimately tied to overall production rather than specific production.
I’m in favour of temporary (a few weeks) MMs providing basic consumables and the above “waste” product MM buying “waste”. We have enough players for the economy to be reasonably stable now.
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Basic consumable MM’s are always needed.
Case in point: mad bought up the entire prom RAT market a week ago driving prices up to the 100’s. Without the MM he could locked new players out of getting consumables.
With the addition of faction contracts, I wonder if factions could subsidize players who act as market makers. Factions would pay some credits per day to a player who keeps open a minimum number of buy and sell orders within a price band (say 10%).
This would decouple currency creation and destruction from the price of the material (somewhat), and stations would no longer magically replicate and disintegrate items.