Decided to post this public here for all to see and heed.



This is 30 CU of luxury goods and the profit graph. HORRIBLE. As it stands with this your best bet is to sell ONE unit ONLY.

Question is what's the recovery time for 1 cu?

The new constant diminishing prices makes trading no fun what so ever. You could maybe slip by with selling 200cus and only lose 25% of the initial profit per 1 unit, but after selling just 200cus the prices drop by more than 50%. It's ridiculous, the amount of effort just to find a route and only make a decent profit with one load and then have it tanked for days or weeks.

Price recovery speed is not the matter here, it's the diminishing returns. It would be far more beneficial and at least realistic is some respect to have a set unit price for say the first 1000cus if sold in bulk, however, if you sell 500cus in bulk, the next 500cus will be at a lower unit price, and so and so forth with each additional bulk sale.

Trade routes back in the day could go on for days or weeks with tens if not hundreds of loads ranging from 10,000cus to 200,000cus and more before the initial cap. Now it's just one or two, if you're lucky, and it's worthless to add more then the item is tanked for a while.

I understand this is to make VO's economy more interesting and player driven but this last update FUBAR'd it to hell.

Even ore is hit by this, just about the only items worth it are the static prices of weapons... nothing like trading in a 150,000kg behemoth...

Ffs
"Back in the day" there weren't any nation defenses(besides the SF) and pvping didn't cost that much.
Now it's your turn to have a rough time.
Deal with it.

@ Surbius: Poor Baby. Welcome to the simulation/RPG genere. >:(

Okay, let's keep it constructive please.

is there a need for trade routes with large profit margins? luxury goods shouldnt been in high demand, except on fringe stations and grey space, raw goods being consistently profitable across different stations.

higher paying routes should be established through grey space...or trading across borders in general

And there was me thinking less people trading was bad for pierats too... shows what I know.

Oh well, back to the broken procurement missions.

This isn't just in nation space, this is every where.

Grey space is screwed, UIT space is screwed, Serco space is screwed, Itani space is screwed, and all it of six ways to Sunday.

Somebody beat me to posting this graph -- possibly because I took the time to go out to 1000 units. But it is the damage in the first 100 units that really makes the point.

Thank you, Blacknet, for posting this observation a day ahead of me.

Avalokitty, I am still interested in a graph with more cu's and how that would look so please post what you have.

Right now the economy is so fragile, it's like we're all bulls in china shops and we see red every where we look.

I feel a disturbance in the force...

This is what I was asking about earlier, people that are beginning to look seriously into trading, or even just light trading are going to suffer. A beginning trader in a Revenant could fill the 200cu demand in an hour or two, this price cut does affect even the tiny beginning traders. Like Surbius said, if trading is still supposed to be a legit way of making money, then the sell price reduction needs to be cut way down.

Various people, myself included, have suggested to Incarnate that a slightly different system be implemented, with some variations. There isn't currently a Suggestions thread about it, perhaps I'll post one later today. The general gist of what I've been seeing is to have each station have a certain amount of demand for a given commodity, and within that demand amount you would have a set profit per cu, but after that you start getting the current diminishing returns. Obviously that's just the rough idea, but it could fairly easily be fleshed out. Would something like this help fix the situation (as long as the demand amounts were something reasonable, not just a couple hundred cus)?

I could stand behind something like that once it's a bit more sketched out. Then the big trading risk would be noticing demand at a station for a profitable item, then getting that item there before someone else meets the demand. It would be interesting in the future to have a system for haggling over price, and getting a trade contract with a station if you can offer a specific commodity at a regular interval and most reasonable price.

Exactly.

Someone correct me if I am wrong here but isn't there already an EMPTY table at each station for demand items?? Wouldn't it be super simple to add an entry for each trade good that's needed? Going over this limit would yield the drop with the exp curve I posted above.

So out of curiosity, I decided to recreate Blacknet's experiment with a more pragmatic commodity, in Grey Space (not sure where Blacknet moved his goods). I don't have a fancy graph, but as you'll see it's not really needed.

Item: Orion Drill Bits

Purchase Location: Latos N2
Purchase Price (30 CU): 10800c
Purchase Price (1 CU): 360c

Sell Location: Sedina L2
Sell Price (30 CU): 24499c
Sell Price (1st CU): 831c
Sell Price (30th CU): 802c

The drop in price/profit was completely linear. I sold each item one at a time, and lost 1c profit each transaction.

I'm going to do some more experiments with this, based on Blacknet's 30cu amount (I have to run to work right now though), but this shows a couple interesting possibilities:

1. If Blacknet traded in grey, then it shows that trading in grey is generally more profitable.

2. Supply and demand are varied (based on how quickly you lose your profit margin), either by item, or by location. Either way, if this is the case it will definately make things more interesting.

3. Extravagant items (such as luxury goods) lose their profit margin quicker than staples and industrial goods (such as drill bits). Another interesting possibility.

So I would suggest before people become alarmist at the situation based on Suburbius' and Blacknet's observations, they go and make some of their own. I'm not saying the system isn't broken, but given the ease of trading in the past, and how ingrained that system has become into some of the veteran player's perspectives, I would be hesitant to jump on the "omg iz borkd" bandwagon so soon.

Things could be much more interesting this way, harder for sure, but more interesting :)

Edit: There's a 4c discrepancy between the selling price had I sold all 30cu's at once, and selling each one individually (24499c vs 24495c). Not really important to the experiment, but perhaps a bug that should be looked at?

So what we have at the moment is a buy price roll off mechanism that does not yet take into account a need for a plateau of stable pricing before the rolloff occurs. Clearly the number of cu of a given ore or goods which a station will buy should reflect the nature of those goods. The amount of stock held by a station before rolling off the price would be much higher for base ores , foods and other goods necessary to sustain life than for luxury or specialist goods .

Such mechanisms have been suggested diqrtvpe. From a previous thread:

" There have been many good suggestions made for the operation of an economic model. In the long term a full model in which every station has a demand/unit time ( d/ut ) and a max storage capacity ( msc ) for every type of goods or ore and that demand reflects the prices paid and availability of their manufactured goods including ships and equipment.

The d/ut would reflect the size, population and manufacturing capabilities of the station. The demand could be supplied by either players or npc voys, but when sated at the msc the buy price would fall to zero .

To give an example consider aqueous ore. It is not mined because its max buy price is 72cr/cu . Lets say station A has a demand of 100 cu/day and an aq storage capacity of 1000 cu. The station manufactures lux goods. For every cu of lux bought from the station its reserves of aq reduce by 10 cu . At some miniumum aq level the station refuses to make Lux goods because its store of aq is low and increases its aq buy price.

Anyone who wanted to buy lux goods would therefore have to provide station A with aq.

The msc for each good at each station would also obviate the profitable but highly unrealistic tendancy for power trading ( Yes, I appreciate TGFT are experts at it ) I would love to see a Station tell a trader that its buy price for aq is 1000 cr / cu , but that the demand for lux goods is sated and that it just isn't buying any more . Long term , reducing ( or charging for ) the player storage/ station would reduce the tendency to create massive stockpiles which when sold crash a price for months .

I do appreciate that a matrix linking 300+ types of goods and equipment at 120 stations is not trivial , and that the setting of demands, capacities and prices is a serious task but long term I feel it would be the way to go."

I think that the recent changes are a move towards the sort of economic model outlined. Perhaps we should give the devs a bit of elbow room to implement such an economy in stages.

I just compared listed profit in the description vs actual profit in the logs and there is major differences on this. the listed profit is if you sold *ALL* of it.