As many know, I’m not a big fan of the MM buys. But they inject currency into the market. We’ve now entered an era that everyone is going to remember. Deflation has pushed prices down in many regions. People are feeling it. HE, S, MG, and RAT sold directly to the market maker is becoming more profitable than selling to other players. This results in very poor gameplay experiences. In the previous universe, we endured this era for many months until electronics producers came into play, injecting new money.
The electronics MMs have been nerfed, and I have looked at them and deemed them completely unworthy of our attention. It would be more profitable to settle Prism and setup COLs and just mindlessly dump resources into the CX.
As I’ve said before, nerfing MM buys does nothing but move the bar to the next product, so I won’t propose that.
Instead I’ll propose adding a new MM buy that doesn’t exist, that is incentivizing us to tech up. Drones are a great product that encapsulates a lot of industries. They require electronics, high end materials, and subsequently will, if produced, create huge demand in all aspects of the universe - from SF and FF, from PE to PG, from Bfab to Rfab, and from FE to SI, TI, AU, and CU.
I created a spreadsheet to help me calculate the growth rate of various products given a matrix of prices. This let me equalize all growth rates across all products and see their theoretical equilibrium price. I locked RAT at 51, which I believe is going to be the biggest currency generator in the universe. Then, given an equal growth rate, I found that Drones would be valued as follows:
CCD 49708.99
RED 43820.86
SDR 61147.62
SRD 49022.54
SUD 68854.80
Now these prices as MM buys would let us create currency by selling a much later tier of products. But those prices are low because we should not be rewarding complex drone production (extremely long chains, high tier products, and capital intensive requirements) with the same growth rate as say… putting down a collector on prism. Instead, I believe we should take these theoretical drone values and double them - this will create a huge amount of incentive for players to tech up.
Suggested MM buys to add:
CCD 100000
RED 88000
SDR 122000
SRD 98000
SUD 137000
Full disclosure, I am an extreme case of conflict of interest here. I stand to make a lot of profit should these MMs be added. But I still think they are the most ideal solution to the current problem that will grow over the next few weeks.
The original idea came from Carepanda, and I only take credit on suggesting a price.
Cheers,
Rain
(P.S. we can probably remove the SP ask as well)