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 / – |