The price for jumping to the head of the line is often less than 1% of the price and inconsequential to the overall price of the item.
Then if BigCorp repositions at 190, this repeats again within a day at 189, 188, 187, 186.
The proposal:
You can always delete a CX offer within 1 hour.
When posting a new low sell (or high buy) price, you must wait 7 - (price difference % from previous) days to delete a position.
If the reposition is more than 7% different from the previous, there is no wait.
If a company position something at less than 1% different from the previous low price, the company is going to need to wait a week to be able to delete that CX listing.
If a player wants to undercut a price and be able to reposition it again quickly, the player will need to bid (or ask) 7% or more different from the previous price.
This calculation is done when the order is placed and is not recomputed if the previous position is deleted for any reason. In the above example, ‘Again’ is going to need to wait a week to reposition those 67 units since the difference of 197 to 196 is less than 1%. To be able to ensure that it is able to be repositioned immediately, the price would need to be posted at 183.
However, if Again had posted at 197 instead of 196 (‘behind’ YACT in the order book), and someone undercut at 195, Again would be able to reposition immediately since Again would have not been the lowest offer (‘behind’ YACT) when posting the material at 197.
This would also apply to the bid (in green: I would like to buy 100 units at 120) side of the order book, though the penny wars are less common there (though they still happen).
It is less than 1%, but at least more than 0,1% (which was possible a long time ago).
There is also a system in place to prevent permanent replacing of their orders: you can only delete some (5 or 6 iirc) orders per day, for every one after that you have to pay a pretty high fee.
But tbh it is a rather complicated solution for a rather minor problem (by some even considered part of the game design), even more so in the future with more market activity which will make the market even more fluid so a price is more about how fast one wants to sell/buy as there will be a lot more orders and movement on the CX.
The way it’s implemented now, aka basically no limitation* to placing and removing orders, I think that the objective is to minimize the convergence time to an equilibrium price.
Personally, I would suggest the simple and tried solution that EVE uses: a percentage fee on every order. If you cancel the order, the fee is not refunded.
It would limit penny wars, which can get annoying
It would remove people posting sell orders at absurd prices as free storage, which should be considered an exploit. This also has the added benefit of making S/D values not useless
People would be more mindful about the prices they set based on objectives. I actually think a lot more about the price I set in EVE compared to this game, because it has more consequences, leading to more accurate prices based on value
It would make vertical integration more useful (it isn’t right now). In the real world one of the reasons vertical integration is OP is that accessing the market has a cost (sales, marketing, admin, etc), so integrating removes much of that cost. In this game the selling expenses are trivially ignored (transportation costs are a rounding error). Adding a sales fee would also indirectly buff vertical integration
It would act as an additional money sink to reduce inflation, especially now since the NPC MMs are going to be tweaked
You could argue that it would make price convergence to equilibrium slower, but that might be balanced by point 3
* Yes, I know there is a limit of 3 cancelled orders per item per day, but that’s not a serious limitation. More something to prevent botting.
It would make vertical integration more useful (it isn’t right now). In the real world one of the reasons vertical integration is OP is that accessing the market has a cost (sales, marketing, admin, etc), so integrating removes much of that cost. In this game the selling expenses are trivially ignored (transportation costs are a rounding error). Adding a sales fee would also indirectly buff vertical integration
Vertical integration is VERY useful under current gameplay rules.
It’s unfortunately the meta way to play.
This isn’t great cause you engage with other players less, which is the meat and potatoes of the game lol.
Also, your proposal makes avoiding the CX more optimal, which does not seem like a good idea.
Unfortunately, that is a very technical view of the market. Of course, those 1-credit increments amount to spoofing, but the market operates discretely—not everyone is online 24/7. The market in general is constrained by two factors: there are players who have hit their maximum storage capacity and are simply “parking” materials on the market at extreme prices. All other players optimize their cash flow to ensure they are making a profit. Anyone can calculate the production cost of a good and determine the price point at which a profit is made. The only real consideration for players is whether it is cheaper to produce the material themselves or to buy it on the market at a slightly higher price—and whether they are trying to run a diversified conglomerate or specialize in a specific area. The fact that storage capacity costs a bit more following the latest update is a good thing, and the gate construction mechanic has helped reduce some of the financial surplus, though further adjustments regarding maintenance and VF consumption are likely still needed.
There used to be “Penny wars” until they fixed it so that price increments could not be smaller than 1% of the total cost of the item. Now there are “Dollar wars” or “100 Dollar wars” depending on the item.
I don’t think there is any real fix for these “xx wars” that wouldn’t involve introducing automation (which the devs don’t want) or restricting trading in some way that would end up being inconvenient or unfair to some people.
What would help the most is for the game to grow more so there are a lot more players. Then the spread between bid/ask will be smaller and trades will get filled faster. The result will be that there will be less chance that the high bid/low ask will stay on the board long enough to be undercut.
I think the issue with this is there will always be some goods with insanely low volume.
Some goods to have a narrow market would require an insane number of players.
I think some adjustments to the increase the size of the increment / adjust the sig fig would not be bad.
Some of use don’t want to engage (economically) with other players more - we prefer our vertical integration for our empires - even while we engage in talking with lots of people.
I actually somewhat agree. Specialization can get micro-heavy, and not all players will like it so it shouldn’t be forced. But it defo shouldn’t be mechanically discouraged either.
Please dont bring back the penny wars of many years ago. They sucked. In larger population games, it can do it well, but there just isnt enough population to sustain that here.
This was a discussion many years ago when all markets were able to trade at penny precision. Fine for SF and PE, a problem for fabs or expensive items.
$17,800.00
$17,800.01
It was bad. People would cluster at the price and not move the price in any meaningful way. Spreads would stay wide with everyone competing to be “first”.
The current solution is a compromise. It’s the least effort, least confusing implementation. Yes it’s not ideal at the high end before it rolls over to the next sigfig, so in the 7’s 8’s and 9’s it gets to be 0.2% or 0.1% change in price per tick. I think the game naturally, at the size its at, wants to be at around 1%. I find markets trade “the best” at this level. Carbon, most metals, lfabs, oxygen, hydrogen, EPO, etc. These markets don’t really have a problem with penny wars. If you want to be first, you have to put up a substantially better economic price.
However, imposing a 1% price change rule creates indeterminate and unpredictable “next best price” slots. You can’t easily do the math in your head as things become non-linear.
I think the best solution is to make things more granular, where we sub divide it again at the 5 level, limiting the minimum tick size to 0.5%. Rather than implementing more complex systems. It needs to be intuitive to people who don’t understand this stuff deeply.
$499.00
$500.00
$502.00
$504.00
etc
$998.00
$1000.00
$1010.00
etc
I don’t think 7% is the right number at all, that’s way too coarse.
I’m against systems which penalize trading, since trading among people is one of the core gameplay loops.
It will also harm liquidity in the markets, as it is now an expense to post liquidity on the cx. Not only do you have the risk that your order gets frontrun and never filled, it’s an additional cost. It will incentivize people to take liquidity more often, resulting in larger spreads and less healthy markets.
On your points
It would reduce them, yes
correct, it likely would. ores and raw materials would suddenly become nearly impossible to stockpile, and those markets would exhibit much stronger supply\demand shocks.
Disagree, see above.
I think vertical integration is way, way, way too strong now. You can go from raw materials to endgame finished goods completely internally, bypassing the entire core gameplay loop of trading with other people. I don’t think vertical should be impossible, free choice and all, but IMO trade should be the incentivized path rather than vertical. Most players today exist as mostly vertically integrated companies. Very few are specialists. See this thread to why:
indeed it would, this is the strongest point in the camp of implementing them
it would make price convergence substantially slower.
My proposal is to add a sales expense to this game, which is an important part of any business, but does not exist in this game. For example taking a random company, Cisco, sales & marketing expense is 18% of revenue. Access to a market has a cost, and it somewhat reduces liquidity of that market. It will still be used if it is the most convenient way to trade (compared to finding private trade partners)**
Besides, you could argue the same for production fees, that they would reduce the incentive to produce, etc. If even the libertarians of EVE have stuck to a sales tax for 20 years there’s probably a good game design reason to it.
Which market provides 0% fees? Because I can’t think of any.
On some of the points:
2 - If storage is an issue then it should be handled by storage mechanics, not by granting free infinite storage for market ads. Maybe specialized storage that can handle types of materials etc. The fact that there are market ads that are not meant to be actually sold, and that you can bypass storage costs is a big problem in a logistics and market game. Stockpiling should have a cost, as it does in real life (and I’m not even going into decay of stockpiles here, which Songs of Syx implements nicely)
4 - I have some opinions on vertical integration, but I’ve already gone a bit off topic here. I’ll see if they hold as I grow from 12 bases to 20. I also agree with the need to increase specialized productivity bonuses.
** PS: I just remembered that I bough some currency from your FX order a few weeks ago, even though there is a fee to it. It’s the negligible price of convenience, as I was not finding a seller on Discord in a reasonable time.
Which market provides 0% fees? Because I can’t think of any.
Basically all stock\commodity\forex markets. Anything with an orderbook. There might be some de-minimis 0.0000001% regulator commission or whatever, but that’s it.
On the storage point, I do somewhat agree. It’s nice because its free to stockpile, but it makes it really difficult to economically balance gameplay of items with very large mass but very low value. I’m not sure what the right answer is here. Because that’s the majority of what the CX storage orders are used for. Big stockpiles of raw resources.
Yeah the FX market has the 0.1% fee - which only applies to matched orders rather than listing ones. Perhaps that could apply to trades which occur too. I think that would be the least-worst version of a CX tax. I don’t have the numbers on hand, but the cx’s trade something around $1 billion currency per day overall. 0.1% tax would be $30 million\month. Current currency supply growth is about 2-3 billion per month. So you’d have to tax all cx orders at 10% to negate the inflation.
The thing is, currency supply growth is not hugely effecting the game because a lot of it is just offsetting GDP growth and deflation. Much of the rise in CPI lately has been just repricing into the profit\500 area metric, as many many many items were badly mispriced. See HER\FIM for the most clear example recently. H2O as well.
Unavoidable fees are bad because they push people to do private trade. And fewer people trading will mean worse market conditions.
I think removing the forex fee would be a net positive.
Just because a mechanic is in EVE doesn’t mean its a good idea or even that it has a game design reason to exist.
Maybe they added it to solve another eve specific issue, or cause its realistic, or just cause they wanted an extra feature to exist.