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.
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.)
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??
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.
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. 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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
we have mass panic, and quick sells because the MM has been dropped to the point where it’s literally not profitable
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.
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.
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.
So you’re saying there will be chronic undersupply in the short term, but nobody will go into RAT production because they’re afraid of oversupply in the long term? That does not match the behaviour of players that I’ve seen to date. People are inclined to jump on short term price moves - just look at the price graphs of any product in the game.
Also, for your prediction to come true, it would require that all those constructors in Montem start tearing down their profitable PP1s and replacing them with unprofitable FPs, “in case the RAT price goes up in future”. This seems like the opposite to how constructors on Montem would react to seeing lower RAT prices.
Granted, it’s possible that we will enter an endless cycle of other players rushing into RAT production and then leaving it again, as the price goes up and down. But that had been happening to a degree even with the previous MM spread. And in any case, so what? Isn’t that what the game is all about? Yes, the devs could add MMs with a narrow spread for every product, so that each player effectively played the game in isolation without having to worry about what other players were doing, but then it wouldn’t be an economy simulator game any more.
I’d also note that the game doesn’t force you to specialize at all. You could build one of every building if you wanted, and still make a profit, since fundamentally all recipes are profitable.
So again, I’m not really sure what the basis of your complaint is. I still think we should wait a week or so before passing judgement on the effects of these changes.
Now that is a strawman and a half, i most definitely said that EVERY product needs an MM.
No i was specifically talking about consumables, because if consumables are volitile, that isn’t good for the game in any respect
Yeah experts are just pointless things we should all ignore.
Also not all recipes are inheriently profitable, that’s just a load of BS, hell technically at MM price my Rats would be unprofitable even before building depreciation.
The basis of my complaint is a background in economics, and knowing that unlike any economical measure anywhere, that people in the real world and in video games aren’t logical, and you need some simple steps to make sure that we can have things not become either an infinite spiral of doom (Consumables going from oversupplied to undersupplied like twice a month) or a product that is completely undersupplied because the risk is to great.
This game also still requires a baseline inflation that the Devs haven’t put into the game outside of the MM’s, unless we never ever want to be able to produce the goods that are long term what the game has in mind.
Not to mention, even if you want to pivot, if your planet is bad for you, your still stuck there bucko.
There are no MMs for settler consumables, and yet there is significant oversupply of those on all markets. So any argument that the absence of MMs leads to undersupply of consumables would have to explain that away first.
The prospect of consumables oscillating between oversupplied to undersupplied twice a month doesn’t seem like a big problem to me. I see that kind of market behaviour as part of the game, and in that situation any buyer or seller can just wait a week for the price to swing back in their favour. In fact half the time the price will already be in their favour.
Perhaps this is the main area where we don’t agree, and if so then there isn’t much point in continuing the discussion. I’m okay with periodic market shocks and unpredictability, even for consumables, whereas you would prefer a more stable consumable base for people to work from. That’s fine, of course, everyone is entitled to prefer different things. We will just have to wait and see how these latest changes play out.
Whatever happens, I hope you continue to enjoy the game as much as I do, and thanks for sharing your views.
I think this is a misconception. I did predict that RAT would be sold to the MMs before other products very early on in the universe. But that is not because of oversupply, it is simply because of the relative price points of the different MM buys and the understanding that we inevitably would exist in a deflationary economy due to missing currency generators.
The fact that RAT was sold to the MM in mass was an unavoidable side effect of said deflationary economy where MMs exist.
To measure oversupply and undersupply of resources, we should compare their price points relative to another product. For example, you could very easily graph the ratio of prices between BSE and RAT over time and it would inform you about whether RAT was oversupplied or not. At the start of the universe, C and RAT were oversupplied due how too many players picked Carbon Farmer and then transitioned into RAT after they realized C was incredibly overproduced.
To be even more transparent, there is nothing preventing players from “covering the MMs” for consumables. We were never in a state where DW/RAT would be unavailable to all CXs. The primary reason why DW was only available on Moria CX through the market maker was the fact that traders made more profit trading something else due to the price ceiling imposed by the MM sell. Sybil and I could have easily supplied the CXs with consumables, but it just wasn’t worth our time or money to do so due to the market makers. The secondary reason was because there was too much currency in circulation so it was impossible to estabish a proper price point that made sense.
Your argument is that Rat isn’t oversupplied, but that the economy is generating money from it using the MM.
That literally, has to be due to an oversupply, that real players can’t use.
Like us using the MM to stabilize the economy doesn’t rule out an oversupply of the product.
That’s called using the wrong thing to explain things, the basic Supply Demand chart that everyone has seen isn’t used for tracking if a good is oversupplied (and is hardly used in the real world either).
For example, nearly everything in a Grocery store that can expire, is oversupplied, and then thrown in the bin, for the simple reason, that people would complain if they didn’t oversupply and instead undersupplied.
Now lets go to the game, just because we sell to the MM doesn’t mean they we aren’t oversupplying a good, in fact it means the exact opposite, anyone can place a request at 51.01 that we have to fill first, so anything making it to the MM is literally an oversupply, that the players can’t fill themselves.
Whether or not it’s good for the economy to sell to the MM (it is but ignoring that) the fact that we can and are selling to the MM, means that there is an oversupply.
As someone who produces RAT on Promitor I have made the following decisions:
I won’t repair my Promitor base and just run it into the ground.
There is no reason for me to settle another fertile planet.
However I doubt this will affect RAT/DW supply.
Thanks to a lack of FF we are running into a deflationary economy. For resources only the gas MMs are viable and even then the average MM price is 50 NCC/t. Assuming 200 SF for a roundtrip we are spending 5k NCC just on the FF MM. So a shipload only creates 20k net currency.
NE is at 150 NCC but I expect it to get nerfed until it is just as bad as the rest. MM money issuance is a charity at this point.
It is really weird how there are balance destroying 300k MMs for CC but nothing good before that.
Players want to build bases and bases only need B-fabs and consumables so that is all what players want. I would argue the real problem is that making buildings is too easy. You just extract FEO, LST and C and voila you have a factory even though B-fabs are merely structural components. Isn’t it absurd that electronics are a primarily luxury in this game? Not an essential component of a factory? By the time we get to the electronics MMs we won’t care because we already pulled through with our shabby little PIO buildings.
If that is how the game is designed why do we have Antares? It’s a rich player system but you don’t start out rich enough to play the typical Antares industries. It’s more likely that some players from Montem or Promitor decide to miss out on the 5% boost than an Antares player that builds an electronics base. Once you start selling CCs you will be rich enough to not care about those 5%.
In short: most industries/commodities are pointless, we need to “roleplay” to make them in the first place but roleplaying costs money so players do the usual B-fab/consumable grind which leads to an oversupply and a cry for higher MMs.
I’ll admit that changing the recipes for buildings this late would be disastrous but the fact that HQ upgrades which are a new mechanic that merely needs B-fabs but no electronics is a punch in the gut for Antares. There was an opportunity for organic demand but it was squandered in favor of oversaturated industries.
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.”
-rain