OK, I made up some new charts and came across some interesting things.


Helio looks good,


Guardian cores are dynamic??? Plus goes from crap payment to nothing, nice motive to harvest cores.


Gauss series is also dynamic but they yield negative profit.


Superlight is also dynamic, not sure if it should be or not. Same payout as the guardian cores. for the work to get ONE of these items the payout should be static and GREATER in value.


Positron blasters looks ok.

::NOTES::
All of these seem to be a very steep curve with the exception of helio ore.

All units on the left column is in profit per CU, meaning if an item is 4 cu then (unit profit / cu)

Bottom line is number of units sold. I did this in increments of 500 to show how the curve works.

Er. What? Yes, cores are dynamic, the expected use-case was through missions (which is why they're worth "crap"). In fact, most things are dynamic.

Everything is going to be dynamic. The only actual questions are how quickly the rate should drop, where they bottom out, and how quickly they should return. Not whether or not they should be dynamic. If someone dumps twelve superlights at a station, yes, I would expect the demand to drop.

I'm not sure what you mean by "negative profit". I mean, there's no station that will charge you to buy stuff from you. But, of course it's possible to experience loss, the selling of an item for less than you paid for it. The point of trading is to avoid that..

Interesting graphs moda. The helio one would be a good example to refer newer players to when explaining the concept of price roll off.

Incarnate, Yes the negative profit is your sell price is less than the purchase price. I.E. you buy an item for 50,000 credits and it's 100 units, you sell it for 5,000 credits. that's a loss of 45,000 credits total or -450 c/cu.

On the recovery rate can you share any info with me on that so I can plot that out as well to show how that works, please?

Agree with Fluffy, the drop off for ores is especially rapid.

Ores should be in high demand as they are raw materials, especially the rare ones. Yet the price drops to almost 50% of max with a trifling 2 moth loads. If the model as is were translated to the real world, gold would be worth nothing.,,,

With the super light the station shows purchased price was 531c, I *KNOW* it's much higher than that, it costs something over 100,000 c to buy the goods for the superlight plus transportation time, it's 393 cu's total to make ONE superlight. The price on that may need to be changed quite heavy.

As for the drop rate on helio in defense I have to say the station can hold only so much and they are in need of so much. I know in real world cases a station can only buy as much as their storage can hold. That would depend on how much they use over time.

As said before this is just stage 1 on a redux and not the final product.

blacknet: I'm still not following you on "negative profit". It's just called "Loss". I mean, that's buying high and selling low, generally not considered a good strategy in any economic system.. but always possible.

I'm also not convinced that people should be able to dump 2,000 units of ore at a single given station at once and get a maximal price. Demand is a factor here. You can carry it to multiple stations in a sector and get closer to that, if you want (and given that it's like 1000-2000 units, far more than a shipload, I wouldn't think that would be so bad). I also decreased the price recovery time for the ores (time from min to max) by half, a few weeks ago. So it should be considerably more common to find stations offering high prices (albeit, for limited quantities). We certainly need better tools for showing all of this data to traders and miners, but that's not the same thing as making all stations have insane demand.

If you really want to make a comparison to the real world, see the recent drop in the value of Platinum and Palladium (bottom of the page) due to a reduction in perceived demand. Gold is demanded 25% more than it can currently be produced (according to a recent National Geographic article).. if it were produced 100% more than it was demanded, and economic hedging was not a consideration, you're right.. it would drastically drop in price. This is why DeBeers has massive stockpiles of diamonds, if they flooded the market the price would drop through the floor, better for them to stockpile and sell in small quantities. I could go on and on..

Yes it is a 'Loss'.

Dumping 2,000 units of ore at a station for max price would and could be bad. We need to be able to see what the demand for the good is and how many they will be willing to take. I.e. 2,000 units of helio in a 24 hour period or something like that, after that you would be selling for a loss or the station just flat refuses to buy them.

Incarnate can you share with us what the recovery rate is?

I have 0 problems with a sliding scale for things, that's wanted and needed. I am just trying to help traders out and fill in some of the gaps so trading can one again happen.

My goals here is to help supply some of those tools to the traders/miners.

The recovery rate was previously 46 days to go from min to max. For the common mined ores I dropped that to 20 days, the rarer ores (Apicene, Denic, Heliocene, Lanthanic, Pentric, Pyronic all fall under that, in our database classification) are currently 30 days. That's for any given individual single station to go from min price to max price.

I'm not totally sure if the recovery is linear, however, but I think it is.

ok cool, Now I can come up with a 'suggested' amount to sell. Also come up with repeat routes over time and put that into the IF code so all users could see it, or even a plugin. Estimated days until price is back to current levels and so forth.

incarnate said:
I'm also not convinced that people should be able to dump 2,000 units of ore at a single given station at once and get a maximal price.

Wow good thing there are not multiple players selling the same goods to the same stations on the same days huh? Just think, 10 pilots delivering an XC load of Dyes to the same station - they would all walk away with 200cr profit for a single load. How exploitable!

Sorry but is this really suppose to be a multi player game? Maybe a slightly more robust algorithm should be developed.

If they all sold at the same time, in theory. Over a day, there would be some demand recovery time between sales. That's also why there are 135 different stations to trade with. Finding the more lucrative routes at any given time is what trading.. is. It's also what gives the UIT a specific trading advantage, since they have access to everyone.

Even if we leave aside the whole supply/demand based on manufactured item sales thing (which we're heading towards, as we've said), and just discuss some hack that artificially increases station demand with player counts.. it'll still be possible to saturate demand of individual stations. Why on earth would a station with low demand pay lots of money for something it does not need?

I agree you shouldn't be able to exploit the system, but Inc try a simple test (I know you don't have time, but only devs could reset prices) on the test server -- you'll see that the price for rare ores (I don't mine non-rate ores) drops dramatically after 200-300 cus. And then it doesn't recover for 30 days. Something needs to change to make mining worth while again. I suggest either:

1) Make the drop off less exponential and more linear, flattening the drop off curve significantly.

2) OR make the recovery period significantly shorter -- like a week

3) OR add more mining missions at stations AND make the payout for those station based mining missions closer to max price per cu (i.e. 40k for 40 cus of pentric is not a good ROI). After all, the station posted the mission, they must *want* the ore, right?

I'm already doing 3, I've talked about it elsewhere, but we've had some problems with the PCC feature that limits the number of times someone may take a mission over a given period. Otherwise the missions would have appeared weeks ago.

But regardless, here's the thing. We were using the pre-existing mining demand curves for.. ever, since the beginning of the game. The changes we made to the calculation of demand, a few months ago, only impacted the fact that the demand changes are visible instantly, rather than a minute later. So, strictly speaking, for other miners, there is no difference in the demand drop now versus the past four years, only in the payout for a given demand level. It's not possible to stockpile ore and generate as much instant income from a mass-sale, but the actual mineral demands are no more "depressed" than they would have been all along.

This is why I only dropped it to 30 days, for the moment, to experiment. Basically the issue now is that the instant payout potential is drastically reduced, for those who were using mass-sale techniques. But the actual demand values are no different than they ever were.. the financial impact is just more visible.

We will continue to tweak and look at the demand recovery time and other values, along with the new missions and such, until we find an equilibrium. However, I also think it is also entirely valid that people may need to spread the sales of their goods across more than one station. We're working on tools to improve awareness of prices at different stations within the current system, and so on, to make this easier.. but fundamentally I this is an entirely rational strategy. A lot of things are changing, and the "standard behaviour" of traders and miners will also be one of them. Just because we're going to re-balance and fix things, does not mean that we will "make it like it was". Going to a any single station and getting an ideal price for an unrealistically large number of goods is not part of what we're trying to do. Sure, some station consumptions may be higher than others, yielding needs for larger quantities at a given price tier, but do not expect this to be the common case, let alone a ubiquitous one.

Fluffy: You always "tanked them in one trip", you just didn't stick around to see the price drop. The extent of demand drop hasn't changed, but it now is visible to the person causing the drop, and the amount they can make from causing the drop is greatly reduced.

Also, a cubic unit of cargo space is not.. small. You could fit a hell of a lot of diamonds in a single Cu, if you really want to be pedantic about that comparison.

In case it hasn't become clear in the last like 3928493289 threads I've written, we know perfectly freaking well that the trade system is current out of whack, and we're changing it. That's why we left escort missions in their current (inflated) state. We're only balancing one income method at a time. Development takes time.

So... Not entirely related (but I think its something to consider)...

When you sell to a station, who exactly is getting the goods? Traditionally in Sci-Fi, traders wouldn't trade to The Station per-say, they'd trade to the shop owners as well as the station owners if needed, but primarily the goods would usually go merchants requiring items for their store (which would generate the merchants buying low, and then going around to sell them to players at a higher price).

Are there any plans in the works to facilitate such a system? I know currently all the goods are bought from and sold to The Station, but adding NPC Shop owners and Players would change the Supply/Demand significantly and could 'stimulate' the economy.

As said previously with some new updates rolling out Incarnate did not want large stockpiles of goods which would make things more problematic.

Under the current system 500 cu's is the half life of all the items. Half life being the point in time when the profit margin is half that of a single unit. I.e. you sell one unit for 1,000 profit, if you sell 500 units you would get 500 profit per unit. 1,000 units you would get 250 profit, so basically 2 xc loads to get you into bad regions where a trader does not want to go.

Include recovery time wise and you will be revisiting the station every 3-4 weeks assuming no one else is selling that item there in that 3-4 week period.

I would like to see some type of trade computer type thing in the interface to help with this area. With over 45,000 possible item combos out there one would need a team of specialized skills (read GUID like TGFT) or some serious time on their hands to learn the system. Question is what could be done to simplify things for the average user.