Forums » Suggestions
Publishing info about planned updates that affect gameplay
Beyond changing the ship prices and the fundamental tenets of the economy (changing demand dynamically with quantity), I don't think there's much else that you need to be concerned about. We will be reworking the distribution of ores in the galaxy, which I've discussed previously, and changing trade routes and so on, but I can't think of anything that would be of concern.
Secondly, my default behaviour is to inform you guys well in advance of major changes. The cases when I do not do this, as you mention above, are where I think that the information could possibly make a bad situation worse. This was certainly the case with the ship price changes.. I had technically informed everyone of the general ballpark some year or two previously, but I dropped it in as a "surprise", to avoid people stockpiling the ships at low prices and then selling them post-change. The sell/demand change was less clear-cut, but as far as I was concerned.. it was not preventing you from selling your stockpiled items and making a profit, simply that you would have to sell them over a longer period of time. This is part of why we "grandfathered" in existing over-limit stockpiles when the station limits were put in place.. to avoid penalizing people who had large pre-existing stockpiles. The attempt was made to minimize impact on heavy traders, while still negating the fast-dump stockpile trading system.
So, basically, in those two cases we did not inform the userbase in immediate advance of the changes on purpose. That being said, I don't expect any other equivalently major changes in the near (or distant?) future that would have as great an impact or be approached in the same way.
Generally speaking, I try to keep you guys well informed, significantly in advance of major changes. The only cases where I don't are related to situations where I think a few extremely-wealthy people could use that timeframe to further exacerbate the inflation problems, or where I think some other case of exploitation could result.
Secondly, my default behaviour is to inform you guys well in advance of major changes. The cases when I do not do this, as you mention above, are where I think that the information could possibly make a bad situation worse. This was certainly the case with the ship price changes.. I had technically informed everyone of the general ballpark some year or two previously, but I dropped it in as a "surprise", to avoid people stockpiling the ships at low prices and then selling them post-change. The sell/demand change was less clear-cut, but as far as I was concerned.. it was not preventing you from selling your stockpiled items and making a profit, simply that you would have to sell them over a longer period of time. This is part of why we "grandfathered" in existing over-limit stockpiles when the station limits were put in place.. to avoid penalizing people who had large pre-existing stockpiles. The attempt was made to minimize impact on heavy traders, while still negating the fast-dump stockpile trading system.
So, basically, in those two cases we did not inform the userbase in immediate advance of the changes on purpose. That being said, I don't expect any other equivalently major changes in the near (or distant?) future that would have as great an impact or be approached in the same way.
Generally speaking, I try to keep you guys well informed, significantly in advance of major changes. The only cases where I don't are related to situations where I think a few extremely-wealthy people could use that timeframe to further exacerbate the inflation problems, or where I think some other case of exploitation could result.
Seriously: can you imagine what would happen if myself, Tumble, Surb, Ecka, etc. were informed that Valks or Proms would be exploding in price in X days? You have any idea how many billions of credits worth of Proms/Valks would be bought and resold for massive profit?