There have been shenanigans in the MOR market recently. And while more established players have options (and are once again looking at how to secure their supply chains for necessary materials (hydrogen being the one on most minds)), new players can find themselves in a situation where the goods they need are in very short supply or at market manipulation high prices.
To try to ensure you don’t have new players (lets call it less than 2 weeks old) get discouraged because they can’t buy any H2O or H or… whatever doesn’t have a MM protecting the limit of the limit of the ask (and that gets to other problems - putting a MM on every commodity is extreme)…
Have new player accounts have a check every {period of time} (e.g. 24 hours) and if they are lacking production line consumables and the nearest CX does not list any below a reasonable price for that good, a faction contract of type ‘sell’ will be presented to the new player that offers to sell a enough for a few days at a reasonable price with picup at the CX.
For example, if new player had a construction start on a world with FEO (e.g. Vallis), and they ran low on LST, and LST was at 500 NCC ask price in Moria, they would receive a sell contract where they pay 1500 NCC for 10 LST. Accepting this contract, they’d pay 1500 NCC and would receive 10 LST for delivery at Moria. This isn’t a magical transportation of goods but rather lore’d away to a stash that the station manager has to help out when supplies get tight.
The goal is to limit new player exposure to market shenanigans. As pro players, we’ve got options (LM and private contracts) which may be inconvienent but are there. As established players, we often have weeks or even months of goods that can get juggled around if things get akward. This is to make sure that new players don’t get a quick “this isn’t fun, I can’t play the game when people are playing market games with more credits than I’ll likely ever in FINLA.”
I agree with this entirely and think it is a good idea. I also entirely disagree with purposeful market manipulation especially when it is for negative reasons and only personal gain.
Sure, maybe it is effective, but at the end of the day, this is a game people should be able to enjoy, and a few less-than-desirable individuals messing with the market without really caring about the consequences for those who don’t print money isn’t ideal.
I’m not sure what happens in MOR because my main activity is near ANT.
This is a free market. Have a bad player, also have a good player. Not all players are bad. I saw someone try to control RAT before. The price is high (around 150ea), and my corp members selling out to him cuz the price is high profit. Then, that player was afraid and cancelled orders at ANT. But still controlling other markets.
I didn’t market manipulation high prices. But I had let ALO’s price go high too.
ALO was 60ea but now 90ea. Why is the price going high? cuz I kept importing ALO for 20 smelters before. After building an ALO base. ALO’s price is still high.
So, join a corp and discuss how to anti the issue.
H2O price was going to 60ea everywhere before a few months. I think caused this issue because a lot of players thought “H2O is very cheap. Why do I need to build RIG to get H2O?” Everyone buys in the market and no one wanna be a supplier cuz low profit. When demand keep rising, the price will going up.
If Game Dev trying to control market price, the game will be boring. Hope you can understand.
This makes it rather difficult for a player who is starting out as a welder, metallurgist, or construction to get the necessary materials to do things.
And while people are working to get supply back into the market, the shenanigans are continuing and the supply gets bought out just as fast as it goes on the market.
New players, ones who joined today (e.g. players like these:
) are unable to play the game since they can’t get the goods that they need in order to go beyond that first order.
The porposal is to try to avoid having the devs put market makers in for every item that tier one production has but rather have a limited supply of goods with a mechanism in place so that new players who lack an established stockpile or are unable to engage other players on the local market because they haven’t bought PRO to not have the game made unfun from the very start.
Big fan of this idea! Giving new players a small helping hand could really help improve the already-confusing intro experience. What happens early on can have a big impact on how quickly a corp gets off the ground and builds enough savings/upkeep mats to ride out market shenanigans, so something like this would keep the new player experience more consistent.
My only concern is making sure players don’t come to expect or rely upon faction sell contracts. CX pickup instead of direct delivery is a good first step; maybe make it clear in the preamble flavortext (though I know I hardly ever read those as a new player) or a section of tutorial somewhere that contracts of this type are only given to corps just starting out.
