This is a modular approach to introducing player directed economics that are focused on 2 aspects of the game seen as boring and re-organizes the game to convert those fields into as-needed requirements for in-game use.

1. Get rid of non-premium varieties of minerals in stations where a "premium" ore exists in the game.

Reason: The overall suggestion negates the point of non-mined ore where a mined version exists.

2. Make selling mined ore persistent in the station.

Reason: Creating a market for an activity that is player driven like mining to drive another activity that is player driven like trading and manufacturing benefits all 3. It makes them interdependent directly.

3. Ore is "consumed" by the station at a rate that varies station to station. This is arbitrary until full economic changes take place way down the road.

Reason: Until the economy of the game can be sustained fully by player driven activity, certain things that are not scarce in the game need to be artificially made scarce. Since roids have an infinite supply of ore, and nothing but very few manufacturing missions actually use ore, this will be necessary to fake consume it until that is no longer true.

4. Ore prices are determined by supply and some fuzzy math that guestimates demand (similar to the math that reduces profit with large influxes of supplies in current economy)

Reason: This encourages selling ore to other stations when too much is being sold to one. It also allows the creation of "ore surpluses" where the ore is bought for 0 or very little credits due to high supply. Allowing traders to purchase the surplus amount and sell it to other stations.

5. Make personal inventories incapable of long term storage of mined ore.

Reason: contamination and oxidation can be the in-game reason. This is necessary to keep the system in motion through all players, new and old. The period of time is arbitrary, but 24 hours sounds good. Ore that is mined and intended for use is thus forced onto the open market unless within 24 hours used in a mission. Players with current supplies of ore can be given a popup on logging in to their character that they have 1 week or so to sell it to stations. Stale ore can only be sold to stations for extremely low fixed credit amounts and not persistent and can't be used for manufacturing.

Doing the above 5 things will give great incentive for mining guilds and true trading guilds to have a larger impact in the game. It also greatly targets new players since the learning curve for combat can be off putting for mobile players, having a much more important role in areas like mining and trading may aid in retention so they play long enough to get good at combat.

This is not a throw-away partial implementation. As the (if the) game progresses to a much more player based economy it can build on and out from this beginning step, so no time is being wasted doing this but not going all out 100% economy overhaul.

1. Don't really care.
2. Eh. I would prefer a consignment or bidding system for trading ores here.
3. Until ore consumption is tied to the greater economy of widgets, ships and weapons, no.
4. The effectively already has this on the sell side- which is why trade sucks. +1 for a more dynamic buy side though.
5. Hell no.

Overall, -1

Sounds like mining is a guilty pleasure for you, cellsafemode. It's evident that it's an addiction for you. Have you been to a Miningalic Anonymous group? They really do help.

mining was used because it's a player participating activity already and it's on the bottom tier of supply and demand. Unlike almost any other good that can be traded, ore supply is the only one currently possible to directly touch the most player driven activities in the game without heavily changing the "economy" of the game.

Rather than wait another decade for _everything_ to be done at once and some kind of pretend switch is flipped to enable awesomeness, it's very possible to slide into a fully interconnected and player driven economy. You can do this most easily through making the bottom most tier of the game's economy player driven and faking extraneous items and above tier items. When/if the game grows enough to handle it, more tiers can be incorporated into player driven supply and demand, but it's not necessary. In the mean time, miners have a daily never ending purpose and so you start to see mining guilds have a day to day function in the game. Trading guilds consequently also have a day to day job in transporting the mined goods to where they are needed not only for personal profit but for players who manufacture.

To bring them all together and to drive this economy the first step has to also include the inability to stockpile indefinitely the mined ore in personal inventories. This single ability negates the need for any specialization in the game and is a overwhelming contributor in why such guilds dont really exist currently in the game. Not only should they not be able to store ore in the long term but they should be reduced significantly in storage size with rental fee's increased significantly to increase the dependence on traders.

I suspect implementing something like this is not easy and would likely require a time consuming overhaul that may as well affect all trade items. I have made and agreed with a number of suggestions over the years that I still prefer to this.

This looks to me like it creates more tedium and grinding while needing fun.

I had a similar suggestion a while ago.

It would be nice if there was some sort of actual economy based on what players sell to stations instead of just stations always having an infinite supply of all of the things they sell.

Anytime you make things scarce there is going to be more work involved. But that's why those people who choose to provide those goods and transport them become valuable and their job has a place in the overall game. Something that can't happen in a non-scarce economy.

You can't say you want a player driven economy and then complain about such a thing requiring more effort involving things that dont go pew pew explode. If the game is going to have an economy and having things like manufacturing and you dont want it to be the way it currently is, then you need to drop the idea that the only viable thing in the game is pvp. There can be traders who dont do a damn thing in the game but move things for themselves or others from point A to point B and they wont be drop dead bored from it because unlike now, it would be important and necessary. They would be targets (way more than now) and they would have people who they need to get to protect them. Etc. It's not just a mindless grind like it currently is because what they move is persistent and scarce and absolutely required by everyone in the game.

Same for mining. It's not just mine when you're bored and store shit for years until you need it. Having to need to mine frequently and a number of people not wanting to do it will create a vacuum of demand that will allow mining guilds to hold real sway in the game. Granted it would be even more important if there were other changes related to roids but for now this would be sufficient in making the act of mining more strategic and competitive.

It should be a series of logistic and strategic alliances between trading and mining guilds/players and smart commerce to get rich, manufacture and maintain influence. Not mindless grinding, hoarding, etc. To do that without a full rewrite you need a good deal of the above suggestions.

This all or nothing nonsense is also pointless. You dont need nor want everything player driven and persistent. There aren't enough people playing the game to sustain it. Start small, and build if needed but it's certainly not necessary to have the desired effect.

Gotta just love it when non-programmers have no idea what the code even looks like yet can throw around terms like 'easy', 'modular', etc. as though one could just go TaaDaaaa and you're done. There's nothing you've mentioned CellSafe that we haven't all discussed at one point or another. (in fact both Rin and I make a common point of lecturing on how a consumer based economy would not only work but why it would be good for the game. You really should try doing some reading. You act like this game was just released last year and is in some kind of alpha or beta stage rather than in effect being a plane which has been in the air for 12 years. (and all the subsequent issues necessary to make modifications of the kind we're requesting)

The client and server are written in C, not C++, so lacks the dignity of being object oriented. (it makes up for it by being faster though, but we'll not digress into why certain languages should be chosen for various tasks) There is something like 1 to 1.5 million lines of code in the client and just north of 3 million lines of code in the server. That should start to put the size of the task into understanding.

Secondly, given the nature of the code, there's no such thing as modular. Any modification would require a major overhaul of both the server and client code, so if you're going to be making major paradigm shifts like would be necessary to provide a proper player driven economy in here, you might as well design the whole thing then implement it all in One Fell Swoop, otherwise you end up tying yourself down in making major changes for incremental improvements, which is actually a huge waste of time and resources.

In conclusion, we'll make a better impact if we simply decide what aspects we want in a player driven economy then let Inc and team finish designing and building it.

If I sell something to the station that it doesn't already have for sale, it should then be there for sale, until it's all sold. This will help the poor folks who accidentally sell their goods to the station. They would pay the mark-up as penalty for staying up too late :)

Just because I haven't decided to start spending time coding up scripts in lua or working on irc relay bots or web based servers to talk to my scripts with json extensions doesn't mean I'm not a programmer. You can find some of my work on vegastrike, I have used this handle or a slight variation for over a decade and a half. Obviously, not being able to see, much less have an outline of how this game is made up, I can only infer based on the code I have seen in similar projects.

In any case, the usage of easy and modular weren't programmatical terms but procedural and functional. You can encapsulate (modularize) the functionality and benefits of a player based persistent economy the way I described it and then easily extend that if ever needed to items that continue to be "faked". It had nothing to do with describing the code implementation, there is no way to know how the code is organized and setup. But from a gameplay perspective, it is a very powerful and minimally invasive means to get the desired end.

Edit: and by that I mean you don't need to turn everything into player persistent and controlled in one swoop. Nor would you want to because that requires the ability for the player base to sustain it all and I dont think anyone could honestly say currently that it could. So instead you need a incremental approach that can be extended as the game population allows for.

@csgno1

I think your comment deserves it's own thread, but you are 100% correct. Most games that I've played that pretend to have an economy do exactly that.