Release Notes - 2021.3

Another point I’d just like to briefly bring up is player happiness/fun. Some players love the thrill of having no safety nets and a completely player-driven economy. Other players get more enjoyment out of having some security and stability, and their enjoyment of the game is going to go down when that stability is replaced with constant worry.

Rolling out massive MM changes unannounced is a pretty dick move.

Especially with no other means of currency generation.

In other games they offer compensation for these types of moves. I hoping there will be some sort of in-game compensation for this update.

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I also feel like those MM changes came way too sudden.

It might have been better to just decrease the MM price by some small amount each week in order to just fade them slowly out of existence instead – that’d allow players to adjust. Especially since it still isn’t possible to get rid of unwanted/unneeded bases yet.

It also feels a bit random to me that the AR MM was cut while the one for HE still exists, still wildly profitable. More so than AR probably.

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I just want to make the point that not all players are in uproar over the MM removals. I for one am fine with them. The MM prices are obviously a crutch for situations where player activity hasn’t developed enough. They are there to ensure that any starting package on any planet is viable, in the sense that you won’t ever be stuck producing something you can’t sell, or be unable to buy crucial supplies (e.g. fuel).

  • MG & S - there are still MMs for MGS and SCR, so anyone mining those wil be fine.
  • AR - no beginners start out mining AR, so no MM is required. Plus who was ever selling AR to the MM? It’s very much needed for INS, which everyone wants.
  • HE - a beginner might start out mining HE, on Prism, so the MM is still needed here, hence it stays.
  • DW & RAT - there is healthy demand for these on all exchanges. The prices may briefly collapse, but then they will recover, because supply and demand is still a thing - in fact isn’t it the whole point of the game?

In an ideal universe, there wouldn’t be any MMs at all, because player production would be adequate. I support the devs in moving towards that universe. As for not giving any warning about it, that was the right call, since it stopped people from gaming the market leading up to the change.

tl;dr - stop whining and enjoy the game. :slight_smile:

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There is T1 AR planet with a few ppl on it, it’s also been constanly dumped on MM

. This is 100% problematic as it removes a huge sink for INS and will be something that could keep prices of GG gases reasonably high.

HE MM is actually very problematic. You get 12 HE/day out of prism for only a few units of BSE (1344 currency dumped to MM per day per 16 BSE, its actually a better ROI than doing 2/3rd of the stuff ingame atm)

With this post I want to address the recent market maker changes, our motivation behind it, the turmoil afterwards and your critique of the changes.

First of all, I want to thank everybody who raised their voices, your feedback was insightful and is most welcomed.

Market maker: MG, S

With the Early Access release at the beginning of the year we introduced two new resources (SCR and MGS) that replaced the current resources MG and S. MGS and SCR received their own market makers, just as MG and S had before. We then removed the “system-supplied” flag from MG and S to effectively remove their market makers. Due to a bug in the world editor the market makers have not been removed and this has gone unnoticed by the dev team. At this point we owe the first apology: we should have noticed it and reacted much earlier!

The bug has been fixed with the latest release and the market makers for MG and S have been removed. This hit some players hard, as they have bases that specialize in producing MG and S primarily for the market makers.

We still think that the market makers for MG and S should be removed, as we have MMs for SCR and MGS. In order to make it easier for players to pivot, we will re-instantiate the MMs and remove them over the course of the next weeks.

Here is how we intend to do that:

MG S
previous 41 / – 82 / –
June 24th 28 / – 55 / –
July 1st 14 / – 28 / –
July 7th – / – – / –

Market maker: AR

The same bug struck the market maker for AR. Our logs indicate that the MM has had almost no movement in the past and just recently saw some orders. We will keep it, for now, on a much lower level to compensate for overproduction when extracting AR to produce INS.

AR
previous 250 / –
June 24th 166 / –
July 1st 83 / –

Market maker: DW, RAT

About two or three weeks ago, when planning and implementing the 2021.3 release, we had a look at the market maker statistics for RAT and DW. Back then their balance only changed marginally, the supply and demand was high and the markets looked healthy. We decided that we wanted to remove the MMs, we thought that removing them would not make a big difference after all. That way we would have two MMs less and less MMs is a good thing in our opinion. We would also have gained insights in how a market would shift if the MMs are gone.

I removed the MMs from the world editor right before the release and didn’t have a look into the statistics again. In the last two weeks the two MMs, especially RAT, pumped a lot of money in the economy and gained a lot of traction. The only conclusion is that lots of players are producing with the goal of selling to the MM.

In general that is not a bad thing todo. Until we have a more controlled way to inject money into the economy it is the only way (besides new players) to do so. At the same time producing with the goal to sell to the MMs is dangerous. We can and will change MMs.

Still, I owe an apology here. I should have looked at the statistics again, before implementing the change. Not doing so upset a lot of players and I am sorry!

So, Counterpoint and I decided that we will re-instate the two MMs, albeit with adjusted values.

RAT DW
previous 51 / 102 31 / 75
June 24th 32 / 166 19 / 121

Market maker: HE

The market maker for HE has been flying under our radar until now. During the whole discussion yesterday many players mentioned that it would be unfair to remove or adjust some of the major MMs while leaving HE untouched.

So we will reduce the MM by around a third.

HE
previous 112 / –
June 24th 75 / –
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Tbh, this should be done first. Same result but without stressed people.

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I appreciate the devs’ adding a phase down as a quick compromise. But I think there are a few ways to have the MMs mimic the real world better - and more predictable.

  1. simply having a schedule of MM changes, announced in advance, would at least give people time to plan. (This is like how the Fed Reserve announces plans in advance.)

  2. the MMs could be dynamic. lowering as they get sold to, then rising back up (to a ceiling) over a time schedule. Say it starts at 50 but drops to 45 after 500 has been sold to it. then to 40… etc. But rises 1 every 12 hours.

This could be throttled to control money injection. Faster decay up to the ceiling injects more money… (The current MM is a 0 second delay back to the ceiling). This also could be used to encourage trade → one exchange’s MM might be much lower due to more selling there than at another. Will more people move cargo from their local CX to another because their MM bid is always half the price of another??

  1. interest bearing items (loans, savings accounts, etc) are a easy way to inject money - as interest rates can be set (different for each currency) based on amount of capital deployed. If everyone is depositing NCC, drop the interest rate to near zero. No one is depositing CIS? raise it higher. The US has a near zero interest rate. Venezuela has a 57% interest rate. This could even be a PRO perk… (or perhaps allowing accounts in all currencies for PRO and only for 1 for Trial/Basic)

Just instituting a way to deposit cash to a “savings account” and having a formula moving the interest around each day is a simple way to add a place to add money in to the system.

-Uber

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When can we delete the CM? Since I have no use on Prism anymore and would like to move.

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I think this is something that people will have experience to understand, and there is no other way to experience it than to start trying things. :+1: I’m happy we are exploring the idea. I hope the devs don’t feel as though they shouldn’t touch things due to community backlash - I hope I speak for most of us when I say, “We’re happy to go through turmoil, give feedback, and be patient if it makes the game better.”

:beers: -rain

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I think for the generation of money a good idea would be to do a special planetary projects or upkeeps where planets (or administrative decision of governors or anything really that make sense) would be responsible to buy standard products (or more complex ones similarly to the big projects - like CoGC etc). If there would be some upkeeps for planets that could be covered by best bidder (or any other set of conditions), this could also encourage traveling more outside of CX - something like local upkeep/project market. Whether this should be player oriented (could generate exploits/scam) or more automatic, this might generate a good healthy competition and open markets for different products earlier.
There could be also planetary events giving +/-% to production based on something like - flooding (where a dam needs to be created so there is a demand for specific construction elements on the planet) etc. This is more than just economy simulation then, but could add a little bit spiciness. I would think generating money outside of CX would be more beneficial and would also support settling planets that are further away, which I think is also an issue.

This is just a really high level thinking, that might not be in line with what you plan for the game in general, but I really hate MM and any other non CX-oriented money generation would be better here that would actually support more traveling (im not in fuel business btw ;-))

But if this is to be kept strictly economical, Uber’s proposal make also sense in a way.

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Fix your economy first, remove the MM’s second.

This should have been the obvious solution, put simply instead, you just destroyed several industries with no way of getting out of them for the people who are in them, with no prior warning.

As a note, this is the way you lose players, as it doesn’t feel good competeing against the devs vision that isn’t even fully in place yet.

The above is the kind of unhelpful comment that I would prefer to see less of.

Firstly, “fix your economy” is not a quick and easy task. There are 100 competing ideas on how to do it, and part of doing it involves experiments such as removing MMs. And this is assuming that the economy is “broken” in the first place, which seems doubtful. As far as I can see the game’s economy is functioning perfectly well. It’s true that people overreact to shortages by overproducing, and then overreact to the resulting price drops, creating shortages again, but that kind of thing is inevitable in a market economy game, and isn’t a problem per se.

Secondly, “destroyed several industries” is ridiculous hyperbole. There is player demand for all of the affected products, with the exception perhaps of S, but those players can pivot to selling SCR directly, while using their smelters for something else. I guess it would suck if you were on your way to the CX with a shipload of MG or S, but in that case you’ve lost at most one production cycle. This is hardly “destruction”.

I’m happy the devs put in a wind down mechanism for those S and MG players, since that seems fair, and I’m looking forward to when they remove more MMs in the future. I vote for BSE/BBH next. :yum:

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Destroyed several industries isn’t really hyperbole. If you were heading to the exchange with a shipload of S or MG, you were also probably needing to buy supplies such as RAT/DW/FUEL. Now you don’t have the sales to get your essential supplies and you are dead, and these players will probably leave the game.

As far as “just use smelters”, the Metallurgy field completely sucks with heavy products, low sales, high capital costs, and no Market Makers. Furthermore, as if you are doing S or MG, you’re not on a optimal starting planet, so you’re not going to be able to compete.

As far as “just do something else” comments I hear all the time. Many players join the game wanting to do one thing and also to have fun. For example a common comment is “I just want to farm” or “I just want to do heavy metals”, and they don’t want to “suck it up and do something else”. If they can’t do that, then they will and have in many cases leave the game and find something else.

“I just want to farm” is a pretty popular goal, which is why there is wide-spread anger about DW/RAT being cut off and reduced and there are people who have already left because of this change.

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Just keep this in mind.
Selling to MM is not the goal of the game.
Do not rely on it.

Agreed.

In any case, the “I just want to farm” people are not the same ones who start on non-optimal planets with the goal of selling one specific commodity to the MM. I started on Avalon myself when I was brand new, but quickly realised it would be playing the game on hard mode, and restarted on one of the main planets instead. And that was with the MM for S still in place. So I don’t think many non-hardcore players are being affected by these changes.

If you “just want to farm”, farming is still a viable industry. All the agri MMs are still in place, and there will always be massive player demand for RAT/DW. Part of the game involves riding out price fluctuations, or pivoting away from products that get temporarily swamped - either of those strategies works, given the cyclical nature of most prices.

In some ways there may have been a self fulfilling prophecy at play. Some players went around scaremongering that the removal of the RAT/DW MM’s would mean the death of agriculture. If this caused other players to quit in frustration then those first players can say “See? Players are quitting because of this!”

If everyone just calmed down, we could see how the adjustments play out. RAT/DW prices still seem to be quite stable to me.

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As long there is an easy and secure way for players to generate income (to save for bigger projects) it should be fine. If there is no secure beginner income new players may not stay.
As said, forum is full with ideas how to generate cash or change economy (i made a few myself), no need to repeat it here.
Just one thing:
It would be nice if at least a basic mechanism to earn money (for new players) would be stable and permanent. To attract new players and keep those with not enough time or effort to invest in high specialized ways to “stay alive” in game. Otherwise the player base will shrink, no matter how cool the economical mechanism is…

To you specifically, you realize that Fix your economy in this case is refering to the stuff that the devs have said themselves is in the pathline of the game?

Remove MM’s should be after Government contracts, generating currency etc. is in the game, not before.

And as said in another comment, none of what i said was hyperbole, a lot of players are living shipment to shipment, and doing this overnight is a joke.

HE is dead, RAT has crashed to crap overnight (On AI it was 60-70 the day before this change, few days later and we are looking at the 32 MM as a reality as people try and offload their supplys as quickly as possible.)

It’s all well and good to say “Selling to MM isn’t the goal of the game” but you can say that after a Playerbase is actually established, and a proper economy is running, not before.

Personally, i’m ready to quit, i have quit games before because of Dev’s visions ruining the game, and i’m sure i will do it again, hell this entire change means players that are smart, will be making their own consumables, because an undersupply in consumables means that the entire economy chokes and freefalls, which is what you are basically forcing to occur with this change for RAT and DW specifically.

You’re complaining that the prices of consumables are falling, and also claiming that players will make their own consumables due to undersupply. That is not how the economy works. If there’s undersupply then prices will rise. Alternatively, if the price of a commodity is falling, it’s because of oversupply. You can’t have both undersupply and oversupply at the same time.

People have always complained about the RAT price. When it’s high, the buyers complain. When it’s low, the sellers complain. This is just what people do. The price was comfortably above the MM bid for months, but now apparently when the MM bid is removed or reduced, it’s the end of the world for RAT? That doesn’t make any sense. If some people are now panicking and offloading their supplies to the reinstated lower MM bid, that is hardly the devs fault. Why would any rational player do this, when there will always be demand for RAT? Beats me, but if that’s really what’s happening then I expect to see the price recovering in short order, due to the resulting RAT shortage. So in the long run any RAT producers will be fine.

HE is dead? I doubt it - the MM bid was only reduced by a quarter, and there is still player demand for HE - it’s required to make TRU, which is needed for every tier 2+ building in the game. I bought some myself a couple of days ago.

It seems to me you’re just complaining about the changes without any coherent reasons why. How about we wait a week or so for the markets to stabilize before declaring that the game is “ruined” due to what may turn out to be relatively minor tweaks?

Oh sorry i didn’t realize we were literally only going to talk about how the market is right now, my bad, there won’t be an undersupply because of players lack of wanting to deal with the Dev vision, don’t worry.

Here’s the simple economic sense as to what will happen.

  1. we have mass panic, and quick sells because the MM has been dropped to the point where it’s literally not profitable
  2. People switch out of a product that now no longer gives them any reason to make it, while there is demand, this game forces you to specialize, and specializing in consumables, is now not as good an idea.
  3. This leads to an undersupply in Consumables, note that this is the worst thing that can happen in this game, you don’t get to decide if you use them or not, they get used.
  4. The market spirals out of control, because the risk of joining the Consumables market to make more then your own supply is now extremely high, since (unless you have enough funds to ignore anything happening in the market) an oversupply leads to the price dropping to the point of unprofitability.

Your assumption on how the market works relies on one simple thing, that no-one acts based on short term issues, due to the fact that they don’t have the money on hand to do anything else.

The devs forced people to specialize, and then removed the benefits of specialization by removing the possiblity of a steady profit, this can be months worth of time down the drain on experts, and not only that, if your industry is dead and the planet is now worthless for you to be on, guess your screwed anyway, because you can’t remove your base.

There are so many fundamental things missing from this game, that removing the MM’s aren’t an option, but hey, we are gonna do it anyway.

Hell the fact that Rat’s are sold to MM at all should be a warning sign for the devs that the product is oversupplied by a lot, but an oversupply in a core consumable is a good thing, but we are now punishing it like it’s bad, and that will lead to an undersupply.