(Not 100% sure how we makes these suggestions, so feel free to move or redirect me as needed)
It’s quite a simple suggestion: Remove the Market Maker from all markets with the introduction of Populous. (I would say before but seems might just be tidier to do it at once)
Why? The market is made. There’s quite a few places in which the market maker is limiting the price for no real reason. RAT and SF for instance would happily go lower at times but are prevented from doing so. There’s also been some talk of people having to stockpile resources to avoid selling to the MM.
There’s no MM MAT that is not available otherwise so serves no purpose for creation. The only positive purpose it serves is for disposal. This is only really NA, as far as i’m aware, and I’d say simply keep that one or have it lowered to 1 or 0.
I’ve heard some concerns that removing the tops could cause problems so i could settle for removing the bottoms only.
I could also reluctantly get on board enthusiastically with a general widening all over.
While I agree we don’t really need many of the MMs to actually “make the markets” anymore, we have to keep in mind they currently also serve the pretty important purpose of getting more money into the circulation. So until we have another mechanism for that, it’d probably be quite dangerous to outright remove them (at least completely).
I also wonder if been able to push that low would make it very hard for smaller newer players to break into a market.
You can only get things that cheap when you can build at bulk with low overheads but it might send new players bankrupt.
So i would say we think about what roles we suggest to new players vs what markets we no longer control.
a lot of the lower level MM don’t need to happen anymore and are really just pushing for unstable design. Good example is DW which is overproduced from EW/Boucher, RAT which seems to be a bit overproduced atm.
I don’t think complete removal is healthy, but removing the consumables, or the raw inputs (agriculture, ores) could make this iteration a bit more interesting
In many ways i think it cuts both ways. With prices able to lower the newbies costs should also lower as typically they’re the most dependent on buying from the CX for basic materials and consumables.
It’s tough to say how much we need cash input and output. I kind of assumed electronics now drove a substantial amount of cash injection. Would we be able to get some stats on how much cash is put into the economy via MM?
I’d probably be happy with just a general widening of MMs at the moment and maybe we can see the effect of that. There’s a few i’d particularly like to see edited though (DW, RCO, FF)