Is it impossible to set the rate prices go back up on things manually for stations? If not, is it at all possible for the devs to go through the 18 greyspace stations (not counting the uit station in ukari l2 and the serco station in helios b7) and manually set the sell prices to regain twice as fast? This would atleast temporarily draw some trade into grey, something that has been promised for over a year now. I realize this may not be a temporary fix, but it's something to hold us over till the economic redux that we keep hearing is coming soon(tm).

I agree with this. We do need some kind of temporary fix until the whole redux comes in whenever thats gonna happen. Make the sell prices regenerate faster, or hell make Procurement missions yield ALOT more profit (but not standing) in grey so people actually DO trading missions. But yeah, we need more things to draw people into grey.

In addition to this, we need to see more diversity in station types, particularly Odia to Pelatus where you have SEVEN Barracks stations.

+1

it'd be nice if the price fall off was fixed too it'd stupid that a moth (not an xc a regular moth) will tank a route in grey.

adding some new stations to grey would make it more worth while to trade there, but I think some tricks to help traders get away from pirates might be what really makes a difference.

you mean like team work?

That'd be great Pey, except that trade presently isn't conducive to group effort, unlike oh say mining where you can extract more ore per asteroid with a group than by an individual before the temperature exceeds practicality. Of course, selling said ore just puts you back to the trade problem of the stations tanking faster than the effort makes worthwhile.

well teamwork would increase profits by decreasing loss death fluffy. But the current situation is that the potential profits are very low, and the potential loss is very high. So trading is just not worth bothering with. Honestly I think all the regeneration speeds should be doubled, or the rate of decline should be halved, and then grey should be improved twice again.

This is well said. Why hasn't this simple fix been done yet? There simply must be a financial incentive to trade in gray!

Additionally, Conquerable stations should be great places to sell goods to make them valuable. The best trade runs in gray should be between these stations and Corvus stations.

That is exactly my point Look. A group like VPR does a great job helping traders get from station A to station B safely and doesn't charge for their help, which is noble, and happens probably not as often as they'd like, but often enough that they see a reason for their continued game play.

The current situation is such that the (Reward / (work + risk)) isn't high enough to get a solo trader such as myself to log on and trade. And if it isn't enough to trade solo, then group trading isn't even on the menu! The enhanced routes have been a curiosity for me to test and nothing more.

I can say definitively that VPR saw a huge drop in escort requests right after bulk trade got nerfed. People moved to nation-space, as A) there are many more stations in nation-space, and B) the potential loss in grey no longer offset the potential gain.

I'm for what LNH is proposing here. Increased trade in grey is good for EVERYONE (save those who want people to hang out in Deneb).

edit: might be interesting to tie drop-off rates with how many stations there are in a system. If there's a LOT of stations, faster drop-off. If there are few, slower drop-off. Makes sense that lone outposts would sustain demand longer as they have a smaller likelyhood of being refilled.

I've been doing this occasionally (I jacked up 4 or 5 items on gray routes in the last month), but you guys are right, it should really be done more broadly. I intended it, as I've said before, but I've kept getting sidetracked by some Big Thing or Other. Ugh.

Part of the issue is a lack of tools for visualization of the routes. Plus, I have to manually set the values, per item, per station, in our current toolset, since these are location-specific overrides and not universal to the item (otherwise, route bounceback would be affected everywhere). We only have an item view, which lists stations; I can't currently see all items within specific stations, which makes adjustment a bit more time consuming. So, basically, I have to make a list of every item traded in Gray, and then go through them one by one and flag all the gray stations with manual overrides for their time from min-to-max.

I'll see what I can do this week. This is a worthwhile priority. Ray is buried in work for our current unannounced project, and has a lot to do before E3, which is only a few weeks away.. and he's the main tool guy. But I'll see what I can come up with.

create a variable that indicates if a station is in grey (or just have the station look itself up to find out if it is in grey). If it is not in grey it uses the standard value, if it is in grey it calls a function that looks up the value and modifies it by some other variable.

Why use a tool to help you do it manually, when it should be automated by the program?

..except that blanket-modification of economic values via some single number is not a very good idea. Otherwise one could just do it with a SQL command.

Anyway, like I said, I'll see what I can do.

VO's economy sounds like a good use case for the properties pattern. To be specific, things like general demand dropoff rate should have a default value that is overridden for more specific situations in a hierarchy looking something like this:

global > territory (uit/itani/serco/grey) > system > faction > station

Classes of items (weapons, trade goods, etc...) could then have a multiplier attached for such values, also in a hierarchy (e.g. all > class > individual item).

Of course a genuine simulated economy with actual supply and demand through PC and NPC shipping would be even better, but I'm not holding my breath.

yes. plz fix. thx.

+1231234345664433539398578474773

I will attempt to start addressing this, this week.

I actually did a bunch of work on this on Monday (about 30 trade items), since I was all fired up by this thread, but a super-awesome bug in ray's editing tool silently nuked all of my changes, while telling me all was well. Sigh.

Anyway, that's fixed now. So when I do it.. again, it'll be.. good.

thx inc!

I think this is a move in the right direction....

but, ....

I don't think its going to have a huge impact. What is needed, in my humble douche bag opinion, are incentives to trade. Right now I see (or saw since most have probably accomplished this and I haven't bothered to get in game in a few days) is that players are working towards their Basic Miner 3 to have access to the Mining Moth 2. People / players do things for reasons. At present, there really isn't a reason to trade (apart from proc-ing up your standing which I've addressed in another thread).

The one problem that still hasn't been addressed, is giving players something to do with or that requires their credits. Or something to achieve by that activity- I suspect that there are very few players who have alts with less than ten queen kills or in my own case, the only reason any of my characters have mining licenses is to get the behemoths. Until such things are implemented I don't think your going to see a significant increase in trade activity. I would love to be proven wrong.

That said, trade in Grey should be optimized, not for the sake of 'forcing' player interaction, but to create volatile markets where fortunes can be made or lost away from the dull security of the more controlled national markets. We also still need to get away from the 7-11 economy and open up the Walmart Supercenter. Trade should not exist solely to support the possibility of piracy. It should exist to provide an economic backdrop that immerses players who want to play this role by providing meaning (incentives) to their time spent in game. At this point piracy should be facilitated to create risk. Piracy should not solely consist of ship to ship interaction, but should also be possible at the stations, against stored goods.

/end sermon