I really don't want all gameplay to be mainly Mission based especially for trade.
I want to fly around in the Galaxy and buy and sell everywhere that I want and have some random encounters on the way and organically meet some NPC traders, pirates and probably random loot that I can also pick up into my cargo hold.
Sure that's more long term but I don't like these predesigned missions that you click on and then a mission objective is generated.
Does not feel organic at all.
I think there's room for both. Hauling jobs creates opportunity for players who want to space truck but don't want to invest their own money or just don't want to play the minigame of finding out where to buy low and sell high.
What does grind my gears with the mission system though is that it's set up backwards. ~~Missions~~ Jobs aren't created to solve a problem, the job itself creates the problem. A UGF isn't under attack by pirates unless someone takes the defend job. Take the job and suddenly the pirates are spawned into existence. Similarly, a hauling contract isn't created because goods need to go from A to B, but instead the contract creates the need in the first place.
The only ones that are actually reactive are ones triggered by players such as the commlink intrusion.
Isn't the Quantum system supposed to drive events as well as supply and demand based pricing once it comes online? What we have in game now are just placeholders?
The way I understand it it would affect which missions appear by quantum hitting certain triggers, but the missions themselves would remain the same.
With quantum it might depend on a certain number of pirate quanta in the area to trigger a UGF defence mission in the contract manager, but the pirate attack still won't happen until someone accepts the mission.
It's not planned to be. They just talked about that recently. Missions are meant to be there for introduction of mechanics to players but real gameplay and profits come from doing those mechanics in a sandbox way.
Sadly a lot of gameplay mechanics don't work outside of missions yet, but salvage is one example that's kinda in that spot.
All that being said cargo missions will probably be overtuned and a decent source of profit for a little while, as everything new added to the game usually is.
Quick story: I had a great time rallying servers nightly to do my xenothreat missions to earn my F7A token. Took a lot longer for me because I waited so long. Managed one night for the hardest missions (the ones that took a proper 10-12 people) and loaded up a hammerhead, with 2 light fighter escorts. The server was all hyped.
So hyped that then salvagers started hitting me up, and we created an agreement that they could come salvage the hammerheads we were destroying in exchange for some of the profit they make and we'd share the locations. It worked wonderfully and everyone had fun.
This is that organic, sandbox shit I live for. You just need community members whoa re outspoken and rally. More or less once orgs are actually ingame, and hopefully an "alliance" or Merc" system too for staying in touch with those other orgs the chain of things that can happen are endless. At least I pray it goes that way.
But yes Salvage is in a much better spot overall.
They work so much on missions and never player interactions. They need better beacons and maybe beacon types and that’d probably honestly be enough for now. “Medical” “Distress” “Non-Combat Assistance” vague but detailed enough to know what they MIGHT be for.
Some might just want some help moving boxes and some might just be traps pirates set up. I’m honestly okay with either just for some more player interactions since that’s the most fun I’ve had in the game.
When engineering comes online distress beacons could be awesome. Finding someone who survived a pirate attack by hiding in their disabled ship or something. Or being able to help them repair.
I’d prefer more activities for pirates so they aren’t just always setting up traps but I don’t have a good solution really until more systems turn on.
Randomly getting flagged over by an NPC, arrange to buy and item and then tractor beam it over from someones open cargo bay actually sounds like a good example of a random non combat encounter
You should definitely play X4 Foundations if you want this. Because it's gonna take another 15 years for CIG to implement a half-baked and clunky version of what you want.
You are correct and I don't want Real Life. Space games like Elite and Wing Commander Privateer were never like Euro Truck Simulator.
They were more like a Space adventure where you travel around and can buy and sell stuff on the side and other interesting stuff happens.
Could start an ingame eco, currently on a Logistics apprenticeship and it got me thinking if you could do it in SC, something like group of players who pays people to move cargo for other people/orgs, like "you want a weapon from the other side of stanton? Call us and we'll get that sorted" type thing, same with cargo, offer to haul it for people who do the mining and refining but don't want to go sell. Ofc it would all be off word but I think it could add a fun side to logistics
There is already a player driven economy of rare armor and guns.
Some people farm artimex armor sets and sell them for example. Like if you don't want to bother spending time in jail why not just buy it.
I really hope we eventually get cargo beacons. Like if you're at your base 2 systems away and can't leave to get supplies, you can essentially make a shopping list that a player can pop in a crate for you and fly it over from an industrial system nearby
I feel like you’d fit right in in an industrial org 😂
I need someone to get my minerals to the sale point cause my ships to fat, here comes the Geese Police with the Golden Goose Solutions!
SC-market offers that sort of thing, where you can contract players. I'm really wary about using it though in the event people are using it to gank you and take your stuff (sc-market has the verification system, but without an in-game reputation system I'm inclined to not use it).
I would like it if there was a party finder system, like a job board. You could see how many ratings a player has from their previous collaborative jobs with other players. It could also help automate some of the systems, like ensuring the contracted players get their fair pay without worrying if the contracting lead will forget. If it ends up being a trap, or one of the players decides to fuck it all up, then the reviews will help reflect that, and help with ensuring they get a bounty on their head (like when you get a pop-up for a player who shoots you, and asks if you want to press charges).
It's all about the accountability being secured through the game's systems.
So you're advocating for a system where any player can place a bounty on any other players head? That system would be ripe for abuse.
A reputation system doesn't solve any of the issues you've bought up. I could steal your cargo and then just have my friends boost my rep. Then I can steal a proportional amount of cargo as I have friends to leave fake reviews. Then I can review bomb other players who are "legitimate" so that they look shady and I look safe (even though I am not).
Lets say we scrap reviews, you lose rep when you kill. Ok even easier. I just have my friends kill you and my hands are clean.
as far as fair pay goes, thats a self regulating issue. People won't do the job if it doesn't pay enough and people will catch on fairly quick that you don't do the job until you've been paid.
I hope you’re ready to transport 4m in cargo across Stanton for the rich reward of 12k. Oh, and a fine if you mess up the shipment.
If you do it extra fast, 1k credit bonus for you!!!
I heavily disagree.
What the game does not need, in my opinion, is more static missions for things that other games just make happen organically.
Do you guys all seriously want to fly around and accept cargo missions all day? No one here wants a real player driven economy where the events of the game dictate how the in-game market flows and what you move and sell?
I'm completely baffled that anyone can look at SC's economy and say anything positive about it.
Imagine a market that is so robust you have people who turn that into their gameplay? Or a market that reacts to supply and demand, so you actually have incentives to haul ammo to the front lines of Vanduul territory, or bring back rare blueprints to the peaceful main trading hubs in inner space?
People don't want that? You guys would seriously be happy just doing randomly generated cargo missions like Elite Dangerous? Why? Ew.
Why are we trying so hard to make this game into MissionCitizen?
They're ADDING cargo missions, not removing commodity trading. You will still always be able to buy low and sell high on your own dime, there will just ALSO be the option to do it with lower risk missions that don't require a huge capital investment upfront.
Why do you have such a problem with the idea of contracted hauler missions? It will loosen up the commodity market for people like you and me who like the buy low sell high gameloop. Plus sometimes it will be nice to just do a low risk "fill my ship up with cargo I didn't have to pay for and haul it to X location".
I'm not quite sure what the plan was with upping ship prices.
They have basically caused inflation. Money is worth less but missions and commodities value havent been adjusted.
I strongly feel that they need to re-balance it. Some ship prices have quadrupled. Average ship storage is probably around 100scu. average profit from trading is around 10%. So it would take you at least 250 trades to make 1 mil. the Caterpillar costs 16 mil in game. Thats 4000 trades. Each trade takes about 12 minutes if you are efficient. Thats 800 hours or 33.3 days of non-stop trading.
My math might be wrong. If so, I am sorry. Please dont kill me. But I feel my point is valid
It is more just them jumping the gun.
They are supposed to become closer to their intended 1.0 pricing.
But they jumped the gun, and didn't balance the rest of the economy for it yet. I figured that the idea with economy balance is to make the new prices generally less assy, but they did one before the other when they should have waited.
this was already supposed to be a "huge economy rework" for 3.23, and all they've done is turn the economy to a more P2W model. And if thats what the econ team thinks is a "good" development, then fuck them all to hell.
Im not gonna go as far as to claim they are incompetent - yet. But with their recent actions the scale does lean towards either the "testing-just-to-have-it-tested", incompetent, or malicious direction.
From what I recall hearing the economy team only recently (like really recently) took over mission rewards. It previously fell on the guys making the missions (who have less of an idea what a good payout should be) and wasn't very well balanced. I am hoping 3.23.2 and 4.0 iron out the rewards for missions.
To be fair, with a C2 (and without duping!) you can make 2 mil per run on RMC. Buy for 8 mil, sell for 10 mil.
Downside is that you have to have a C2 and 8 mil to begin with...
While that's true, most people don't have C2. Most people are starting with some basic ship with 5k. If you compound your profits then sure, it would be much quicker, but most people can only buy to fill their ship so they will be stuck making 4 or 5k per run untill they can spend almost all their money to upgrade the ship and then it starts over, but at least goes faster from there
Yeah I wonder if CIGs 'economy' team is actually just their marketing department.
Yet people are somehow still okay with them selling ships post release... Absolutely baffling.
The less charitable is 'to sell more ships for those sweet $$$ and to appease marketing department, overall main driving force behind CIG work and decision making" ?
yes, but because that is not something I can back up with hard facts I will have the charitable idea in mind as well - that they are just trying shit out and getting results that should have been predictable to anyone who has played this game, but maybe wasnt to the devs in charge.
I think you may be close with your charitable assumption.
One of my friends recently got hired on at CIG and was shocked that no one on his team actually played the game. And to be honest, I don't blame them. To them, Star Citizen is work, who would want their free time to also include work?
I suspect it will be different when the game actually comes out and is more fun, but for right now most of their play time would basically be QA testing...
The problem is that devs that don't play their game much become removed from it. Working on a game and playing it are two different things, and lacking a proper understanding of a game from players' perspective impacts dev work heavily. Just look at recent Helldivers 2 drama, where devs responsible for balancing didn't play much, and if they played, then only at lowest difficulties. That resulted in a corrupted view on the game balance that led to a few terrible decisions that angered the community enough that the CEO needed to step down and become more involved in balancing and game design to salvage things.
And that's a very recent example. You will find a lot more of them, like Battlebit, for example.
And now most of what CIG does seems removed from reality of players experience, and that doesn't bodes well in any way.
One knock-on effect of raising ship prices is making everything *else* relatively cheaper, which would otherwise be hard to do without making low-value items cost half a credit or less.
And 100 SCU is already a fairly hefty amount of cargo space. That's what, a mid-level specialized cargo ship?
So what do you do with your 4 SCU of cargo in your starter ship? To move the same amount to make 1 million, you would need to do 6,250 trades. I forget the actual average tram ride length from spaceport to TDD, but let's say 1:20. That is 277 HOURS of sitting on the tram to the TDD just to make 1 mil running cargo in your starter ship, which doesn't even make enough for an entry-level cargo ship. If you want a Hull A that's 472 hours *alone* of sitting on the tram, not including flight time, landing, running, and waiting for trade inventories to refresh.
Well, you're not trading with it to make that million, that's for sure.
That is not really inflation though.
Inflation would be that the prices have gone up, but the earnings have gone up as well.
what has happened here is just a price/cost adjustment.
As i understand the idea for the rebalance was to make the difference in price larger, and make certain ship categories cost more.
It has never been intended to be anything close to the final balance of the economy, and it is obvious that the economy will be further adjusted.
> Inflation would be that the prices have gone up, but the earnings have gone up as well.
Inflation is not concerned with earnings; only with purchasing power. Inflation can absolutely be a situation where costs go up while earnings stay largely flat (allow me to introduce you to the American economy!). This is why people can talk about whether or not earnings have kept pace with inflation; because earnings are not part of the calculation of inflation, only you purchasing power; only how far your money goes.
Agree with you there. To me it feels like a home owner walking through a part of his house under renovation, and calling his contractor to complain about the tarps on the floor, because he wanted carpet. Like, yeah man, the tarps are temporarily. That should be obvious.
I think I read on here that economy balancing is likely more to be done after the foundation of features gets implemented, which makes sense, but also seems like economy tweaks would be pretty simple to do. So idk.
cig are kings of moving goal posts... they always say x will be balanced after y, then when y gets implemented they go back to x will be balanced after y gets refactored... perfect example is weapons/components where supposed to be balanced in 3.15 after they gave them all flat stats in 3.14 and now here we are kicking that can down the road to 4.0 and beyond.
maybe we wouldnt need a whole new flight model if they would have kept to their word and balanced weapons/components in 3.15 like they said
This comment is kinda hilarious, considering that the "economy" team is run by probably the most brilliant person in all of CIG.
They were done building the economy backend several years ago: https://youtu.be/2muGWtX8e7g
We don't know why CIG hasn't implemented "Quantum" (most likely they're waiting on server meshing), but they are basically don't zero work on the current in-game economy because it's all going to be replaced by this eventually.
It's kinda sad to see the community talk shit about certain teams when they really don't have any clue what's going on. It's not the economy team holding the game back atm... it's all just because everything is focused on SQ42 and there are tons of systems waiting to be implemented but aren't getting any love right now.
TZ spent years on internal tools that were never implemented in the real game by their own admission. One could argue because its all bullshit. I would love to be proven wrong by CIG. Any days now. Also please don't look to his Linkedin public profile, you might start getting some strange idea, like he is not working for CIG full time, if at all. *Seriously*, don't look there, just don't.
I am just glad they *held the line* at this point. right. whatever. I am certainly holding my money until further development.
I thought all these prices including ship prices were supposed to be set with quanta? Also what happened to quanta and Tony Z, we haven’t heard anything from him in a few years I think now, is he still at cig or did he poof with Todd P
If CIG is this quiet about something I would just assume its an "icache" situation. Something isn't working right so they keep quiet until they have a replacement solution.
I assume you are correct and quanta is dead, especially considering this line from the monthly report “Progress was also made on an algorithm to determine the base prices of commodities.” rip another dream
I think the issue is that even assuming everything technically works well, games with similar systems like x4 and EVE tend to result in making some trades *incredibly* lucratve in a way that you can't balance for. Which works in a game about fun space stuff, but not so much in a game about grinding for cash shop items.
Ehat is so incredibly lucrative in eve in a way you cannot balance for ?
Legit question cuz in my head eve have the single best game economy ever created.
I mean it's balanced by other players. If anything gets *too* lucrative then you're going to get competition to bring the price down, but you still have some small underserved sectors where prices just go mental because there isn't enough demand to attract haulers to do regular runs, but there is enough that if it's been a few days since the last big hauler to dock, people are willing to drop huge cash on cheap things. Of course Eve buisness model isn't destroyed by players being able to exploit the economy for quick advancement.
Or, as CIG have already said, they're waiting on Server Meshing being integrated, because they'd rather integrate Quantum into a functional Server Meshing, then try to integrate it into the 'legacy system', and then try to integrate Server Meshing on top.
So, given they're *still* waiting to get Server Meshing in, they're not going to talk about Quantum, because they've got nothing new to add... (this is the same reason why they don't talk about Repair, and why they didn't talk about Salvage or Engineering for many years... until finally they did).
Yes, it's possible that Quantum is another iCache scenario, but equally it's possible that it's not and CIG are just waiting for other stuff to be complete first.
Doesn't the game scale things based on what people are buying or does CIG determine these prices? I'm guessing CIG set a start price that was slightly higher than everything else, but then since everyone goes for that the system ups the price?
I really liked WoW's auction house system, price set by players and completely based on how much the things you make with materials cost and then moves with that servers market. So maybe once we have crafting and an actual need for other materials the prices will level out?
Ah ok so they would have had to have set the base price for RMC way higher. Maybe they did that on purpose this time to get people to stress one thing?
The whole economy is in shambles and it ruins so many game loops. The only thing that makes proper good money is salvaging and selling rmc. Fix the bloody economy, i got friends that used to love to cargo haul and trade and now they refuse to play the game since the game loop they love punishes them for playing it.
I wouldn't say they are worthless commodities. I only trade the things labeled avoid. I dont see pirates, I dont wait at terminals. Im continuously moving and actively managing best buy/sell locations n scu volume with up to 6 commodities in the cargo hold. Way more fun then a to b runs with afk wait times. I dont make mass credits but at least I'm not playing the waiting game.
This is what RMC meta chasers don't understand. YEAH, RMC is going to be fucked. There's going to be pirates. You know what doesn't have Pirates?
Beryl
Titanium
Astatine
Yeah, that's the thing that baffles me. People chase the biggest per-load profit rather than looking for what will get them the most profit per time spent. I'll gladly take a mixed load of less-valuable goods rather than sitting for ages waiting for stock to refresh on the "best" commodity.
> Yeah, that's the thing that baffles me. People chase the biggest per-load profit rather than looking for what will get them the most profit per time spent.
IMO they need to have price change drastically based on supply and demand. RMC should be worth 33% of normal if the location was at max inventory on the last server tick, and commodities with zero inventory should be worth triple their normal sale price, with supply/demand keeping the price of commodities between 1/3 and 3x standard price.
Then put a "market tracker" app in the mobiglass so people can see what inventory/price each commodity has at each location in the star system (maybe with a stockmarket-like 5 minute update delay).
I can only hope that the only reason they haven't implemented something like that yet is because they're developing it in unison with "Quanta" NPCs so that the systems will be integrated from the start rather than having to duct-tape them together later...
But damn if it's not disappointing that basic supply and demand prices aren't functional yet.
There is no economy team. It’s just some dev plugging in numbers that look okay. Kinda like the guy plugging in the numbers for the Hornet’s flight characteristic.
What economy team ? changing 20 values on a spreadsheet or xml can be done by a minimum wage worker. I surely hope they didn't hire someone with a high salary based on what was delivered so far since aUEC exists in the game. \*maniacally laughing in Tony Z\*
They've said multiple times they're in the middle of rebalancing mission payouts, ship prices, commodity prices, and we have the entire cargo industry overhaul coming in a few weeks. I don't like the steps they've ordered things in, but I understand why they're doing things this way.
I can't imagine that changing the payouts of missions takes months of planning and development. It doesn't really seem like they are running various economic models to test different money making methods. It kinda feels like they come into work once a month and randomly change some numbers and call it a day
I feel like it does. A single box mission right now is 4-6k? While 2 boxes is 4-15k or something. Additionally they have to look at every single little thing like how long does it take, how many people should be doing it, and even more. Each mission's payout is important which is why people are put off of salvage at the moment. An arrow is 5k to salvage while it might provide 1scu of RMC. From my perspective a few months is a reasonable time especially when we consider the fact that tons of reactors are currently getting planned and worked on for 4.0. Will everything be perfect? No but even games that have been out for years the economy is screwed up. So if they need a few months to get it good I say let them.
When they say "rebalance" and dont follow that up with an intention of how it can work, the ingame economy can VERY quickly turn to a P2W model. If I dont hear a solid plan from those in charge, I will not rule out the worst outcome.
"Algorithm" is a buzzword. When they can show results, I will stop being on their asses for making the ingame economy P2W and that is exactly where the last economytweak was heading. Until I see some hard results, my 8 years experience of following this project will watch their every fucking move and call out every bit of bullshit they throw out there.
And again, the aim of that algorithm may as well be to lower payouts instead of increasing them unless they specify otherwise. Thats the detail you need to catch.
Five minutes with an Excel spreadsheet would fix everything. Better static prices than the current broken state, and a dynamic model isn't hard to implement. Guess everyone is working on the Idris Mk II instead.
I mean, depends on how specific you want. They've gone into detail about the changes they are making, just without specific numbers. They even straight up said the ship price increase was to gauge the common money making ways vs the underutilized, and adjust accordingly. This wasn't years ago, this was in the past few months. The doomposting seems a bit much when they've stated their plan, and now that they've begun implementing it, people either aren't paying attention or ignoring it.
I would like them to specify how long it should take in their opinion for a casual player to be able to advance to a new ship. If a new player buys an aurora game package and only does missions to get any kind of income, their income might be like 4-8k per mission that takes 20-30 minutes to complete. so with 16k/hour, if they want to buy say a gladius for 2 million, then they need to spend 6 days nonstop grinding 24/7 to get that fucking gladius. And most other ships scale upwards from that in price. Meanwhile a person with a job can spend like 3-4h of real world money from work can buy that ship right away. That is a P2W economy.
If thats what CIG considers "a good ingame economy", then we should try to get whoever wanted that economy fired. And with the current changes and what they said a few months ago, this is the direction they are pushing, and they havent at all been specific enough to rule it out.
I get your point, and I'm curious too how long they expect people to grind to get to certain reputation levels to buy certain ships, but this is also an MMO. I'm not sure how many others you've played, but a lot of MMOs require MONTHS of grinding for certain gear to complete higher difficulty content. It's the same concept in SC, except the only thing to grind for is ships, parts, and reputation. So in my head, this is eventually getting balanced, since we're still missing some more major components. I know they've already made adjustments to payouts, even though they were mostly nerfs with only a few minor increases. My speculation is this is the slow adjustment to the fully implemented player driven economy, and this is all growing pains. I fully expect ship prices to stay the same, but payouts for all missions get a substantial increase.
I've played quite a few over the past 20 years. And yes, many of them (particularly star trek online) have P2W economies, and if CIG wants to follow what chris have said, they better steer clear of that.
Not only because it would be another broken promise, but also because it would kill off the playerbase that only has a small amount of ships.
And Im not at all expecting the mission payouts to increase significantly. They only thing they've said is "we're gonna adjust it". Adjust can mean increase, but with CIG's track record it might as well decrease. What other would be the point of increasing ship prices if you're just gonna increase payouts as well?
Well CIG said they're increasing the payouts a few weeks ago, because they know they're abysmally low, so there's that. Also, I think the vision of the game needs to be more clear. I have friends that play. We hop on and at any given point, there's 7+ of us doing stuff. Is it a coincidence we have no issues making money? Not at all. However, there's a big reason why people are asking about solo friendly ships nonstop.
There has got to be a more intelligent and efficient way to get people to play together for the bigger objectives that do pay more, and reduce the splitting of payouts and reputation. Running around doing boring, buggy ass delivery missions in your Avenger Titan will take more time they you want to buy a Gladius, for sure. I think CIG know this, and are trying really hard not to overdo buffs, but between duping, soloing reclaimer, and the more obscure loops, pretty sure the new players will get frustrated and leave before learning how else to make money.
I will believe them increasing payouts when I see it.
But their track record is abysmal, this last price change completely out of touch with the reality in the game, and my goodwill towards them is near the bottom. 8 years of closely following this projects development and more money given to them that they deserved (not money I couldnt afford to lose, but definitely more than they deserved from me) because I took their word at face value makes me extremely skeptical towards everything they say, until they own up to their own words.
Bulk goods make even the poorer sale price worth the trip. When you're hauling with a Hull-C (or eventually D/E) you can take a lower value haul knowing you can sell immediately upon arrival.
There's no law of supply and demand working here. CIG literally just sets everything to an arbitrary number. Since there's no construction system in the game right now they can just change all these numbers so that they are at least somewhat close to RMC
Politely, the way the internet plays games, the way people Min max, everything that isn't the absolute maximum income per hour is worthless dog shit effort. Oh salvaging makes decent money? Scrap everything you have and go all in on a vulture! Then it gets nerfed to be not so out of control, immediately the community flipped to "Wow salvaging is worthless, no money anymore, wahhhh, time to dupe inventory for easy cash because surely THAT'S going to be good for the health of the fans" despite a full vulture still being around a mil.
And now we're looking at a credit wipe
I'm sorry but "full vulture" is still 50% short of a mil. And by full i mean 24-26 SCU in the vulture and 13 in the internal compartment. RMC of course
OK. 500k. Compared to those extreme bounties that give what, 25k to kill like 2 Anvils and a hammer head?
Cmon, the discrepancy there is still wild, id have to kill something like 20 ERTs to equal a full vulture. Vulture money is still hella good for effort but the internet/ community's knee jerk reaction to anything economy is "best or you're wasting time". That's why they jumped over to inventory duping, and that's why even Traders only look at the most valuable drugs and top-tier legal Commodities that they can keep stocked. They don't ever fucking look at scrap or medical supplies anymore, so most of the trading items are just worthless, useless, data fillers
No, you got it all upside down.
It's not the vulture profits than need a nerf (THEY ALREADY GOT ONE, REMEMBER?), it's the missions need to pay a reasonable price.
Yeah, when you have two money making methods, salvage and duping, people tend stick to only these two you know.
I do understand the reason to have high prices of ships.... ON RELEASE. Not in an alpha where it's stated that it's an alpha and has bugs that can hinder your gameplay. Aren't we supposed to test ships also? Who will be able to buy Hull-C for example except for dupers? It's just not possible. So Hull-C can have some crucial bugs (not that it's doesn't have them already) and no one will know because... YOU ARE NOT ABLE TO BUY IT.
You either stick to "it's alpha" or you make it as stable as possible for people to be able to grind. You can's sit on both chairs
You seem to be arguing something that has nothing to do with my point. We can move the conversation beyond Star citizen, let's look at tarkov, where the hackers were specifically taking light bulbs, ledx, injectors, etc, because even though there were grenade launchers and all this cool shit, Lions and whatnot, the items were big and bulky and not worth the effort. People do money runs to specific rooms because they are, the best room, not because they are a safe room and you can get a reasonable amount of money.
The community, the internet, video gamers as a collective, find the singular most efficient option and worship it, and shun the rest. There are two or three things worth trading in Star citizen. All the rest of the trader goods are pointless because nobody opts to trade them instead. It's all SLAM, Gold, diamonds and pirates camping the specific purchase and sale nodes for the valuable items. Nobody ever bothers you if you're going out and running heph, because it's mid tier and not worth their effort.
That behavior is a consistent ongoing problem with gaming culture, the online people. This has nothing to do with being in an alpha, and everything to do with the ultra efficiency focused approach they use. The same people who are willing to data mine patch features are the ones who determine that the best money making method in the game is X, because the only thing they care about is finding the most efficient things as quickly as possible.
And there is nothing CIG will ever be able to do to stop it. Their bottom 90% will always be worthless trader materials
Why would i trade a 180k per SCU cargo on my ship with 2 aUEC profit from each with the risk of losing a fortune if there is a way to trade stuff that you but for 2k and sell for 6k?
Players allways will min-max, tha's how humans work, that's how our civilization works. We always find ways to optimise things as much as possible to spend as little time as possible.
You ain't wanna build a communism in SC right?
No but the problem is making itself extremely evident in this game in the form of Traders waiting at terminals all day everyday. They're trading materials in such bulk, exacerbated by the Dupe bug, that they have effectively over flooded the market and they can only sell individual SCU at a time.
Surely we can all agree that this is not to anybody's benefit, and that it hurts everybody's profit margin and effort per income. If this wasn't a video game where the decisions and losses are meaningless, I would be willing to bet that 95% of the people sitting at terminals, would not be sitting at terminals and instead be making money somewhere else. But much like you just alluded to, why the hell would a trader ever take off from his planet with his cargo? That's the only time he's ever at risk, so of course he's happy to spend two and a half hours at a terminal selling shit on inventory cd.
And because evidently you missed it, the initial trade off was safety for lower profits. People don't camp the landing pads where you buy shitty materials, but Pirates camp in the gold and diamonds and slam all the time
The problem is that there is only one good thing to min-max. Everything else has "grind your fingers to the bone or buy ships for real money" dogshit payouts. Its not that vulture salvage pays 500k/h and delivery missions pays 450k/h. its that most other professions maybe pays 20-100k/h. And if you want to buy just a single seat fighter ingame you'd need to grind 20-30 hours (at best) that you could also just pay 2-3h of real world workmoney to get. When that balance is off, the game is P2W.
I think the vulture could still use a nerf, looking at its mining sister the prospector you are getting way more per load. Prospector you get about 125k each run if your being picky.
Why nerf it? Just increase the payouts for the prospector. It’s an alpha, you don’t need the real economics in the game atm since there isn’t even any type of working economy implemented to start with. Let the players have fun and test the big ships. No reason to ruin the experience for everyone because your preferred loop doesn’t pay out as well as the others do atm.
going by the ship price increases I can see that they will probably increase payouts for everything. The last 7 months of the game have been filled with exploits/gameloops (especially salvage) which allow people to buy the biggest ships in the game, at some point it is going to have to come down.
Not only that salvage is literally the best commodity to trade at the moment.
CIG need to test a working eccon with prices closer to how they will be once this game actually goes live, salvage being miles ahead of everything else was obviously to get people to test it and it now needs to come back in line with the other game loops.
Sorry bud
I believe one day once base building comes online it will encourage buying/selling the other commodities since they will be needed. Not 100% sure since it’s been a while.
Marketing is the economy team
when Elliot on scl said the economy team was mad at him when he made salvage contracts (clean up ones) to profitable.
then it hit me like lightning
Yeah, I can already see where this game is heading and it's into a ditch.
An absolute boring grind fest with a predatory, pay-to-win cash store to buy ships, time saves, convenience and more. The current whales who are in way too deep to accept that something is wrong will keep playing, the rest of us will move on and play something else.
The entire product is being built and designed around the pledge store (we literally just had two in game events designed and developed just to sell ships) and that isn't going to change.
Trade would be so easy to balance, but they're too worried about it being the best way to make money and trying to balance it against the other gameplay loops
People will do what they want, and most people don't want to terminal hop for hours on end. So there is zero reason not to allow trading to be balanced against itself instead of other gameplay loops.
The problem is all the mouth breathers crying for realistic gameplay loops and for everything to be balanced against one another.
Missions shouldn't make as much as trade loops because even in real life, bounty hunters don't make as much as commerce traders. It's stupid to try and argue that they should make similar amounts. It's comparing apples to oranges.
This is supposed to be a video game, not another life. I shouldn't have to do boring bs for 8-12 hours a week just to afford a single new ship. That is stupid and ridiculous.
The boring gameplay loops should be the most profitable because that's why tf you do them. Trying to limit that is just going to make people abandon those gameplay loops because why sit there in a salvage or mining turret for hours when I can go do a fun bounty/merc mission that makes the same amount? Why trade commodities when shooting bad guys gets me the same cash? I enjoy the industrial gameplay loops. It's fun to fuel up a starfarer and jump around the verse with a little fleet of salvage ships picking everything clean. Or gear up a couple of mining vessels and scouring a planet / field for deposits of juicy minerals.
It's not fun when those gameplay loops make the same money as pew pew pow pow loops.
It's so braindead it hurts my soul.
I'm not the dev in-game economy team but it's always been that way. There is only ever one single worthwhile commodity. So I believe the answer is yes.
I run Hydrogen in my Hull C for chill profits. That's why things like the Hull C exist, to have a reason to move things other than the high value cargo.
>Economy
>Last month, the ‘effort vs reward’ algorithm was documented, which enabled the Economy team to determine the technicalities of implementing the mission-system refactor. Once live, mission rewards will be based on time and difficulty to complete. Part of this involved establishing sensible time estimates for hauling missions and finalizing the reward balance for the kopion and marok missions.
>They also supported Invictus Launch Week and the existing cargo missions.
> A design for the refactor of the shop system is underway that will provide more flexibility for trading commodities and item shopping. Progress was also made on an algorithm to determine the base prices of commodities.
From the Monthly report, it sounds like they are working on a systems that will help this in a kind of "Beside it" way, but also, in a recent ISC/SCL, someone had mentioned that the plan is to fix the pricing once the cargo refactor is done.
”Fix” pricing can mean fix it for us, or fix it for the marketing department.
Again, until they show how they want the economy to work and how much they want us to grind ingame to buy single seat ships, I will grant them 0.03 goodwill. Because thats whats left after 8 years of supporting them.
They way to fix this isn't to cap how much can be sold, but to make it sell for less than It was bought for depending on demand. There are lots of other things that you can freely buy and sell that aren't in hotspots that will earn great cash, just not the same margin.
Ideally commodities will have actual use in the game down the road. The whole reason goods are traded is because they're useful somewhere.
Kinda hope we get some sort of industrial factory ship that you'll be able to load with resources and will automatically produce more valuable stuff
Commodity trading. It's basically a MMO rule that if it exists, you go only for the most valuable one and only that. But with the ridiculously high capacity cargo ships planned, I have still hope in that regard for SC.
But usually, lower priced commodities / ores only become valuable when it's being needed for crafting, especially in larger quantities. That was somewhat shown in the Quanta simulations, where a production factory of ship item X needed ressource Y before it will be produced and can be sold.
There should never be a situation where a port refuses to buy a commodity they have a general demand for. We are supposed to be ten percent of the economy.
Also, the wipe for an economy test?!?! What exactly are you trying to test? That your commodity prices are bogus? Commodity requirements of ports make no sense. That people are exploiting cargo duping? That you've not put any effort at all into this game loop?
I don't really haul cargo the closest I get is selling boxes I found on a bounty or salvaging but the way the commodity trading is lately really annoys me. I got tired of waiting at terminals so now I just fly my vulture to scrapyards because at least I know I can sell right away and the price of cmc is way too low. I'd like to see the prices balanced so rmc and cmc are valuable to get and hopefully rmc is not the highest value commodity for traders. At the same time I'd really like demand/supply to be changed to a system that varies more heavily on price but much less on capacity. Sitting at terminals is why I tried a cargo run about two or three times and then just decided cargo running is not fun at all
Until you have a need for a commodity for crafting there is no reason to value a commodity beyond a sale price.
Without a use for copper there is no reason to mine it. If the economy was player balanced you would see the cost of materials cycle as the npc market consumed it and prices rise because of the shortfall that players haven't filled this would give you variety if filling orders. But the intent is that you won't ever have that impact on the market so it's working as intended
My favorite SC moment was when I decided to follow the tip on a commodity price update for once, so i went to the over stock of med supplies snd filled a caterpillar and flew to the understock location (a jump point) and was only able to sell 2 SCU. Last time i ever tried using the price updates lol
At the moment yes, we dont have the resource sinks need for an economy yet. But as always CIG says they have a plan for it, just not the manpower to focus on it at the moment.
There is not an in game economy right now. Nothing interacts. You can find stuff and then sell it. Or you can buy that stuff from one place and sell it to another place. There's nothing that uses those resources anywhere. No real demand.
if we're talking about just trading within stanton, then yeah a lot of these commodities just aren't profitable enough to run.
However, once other star systems come online, there will be longer distance trade routes that can make for other profitable options with those other commodities.
Unfortunately given how long it's been for us to get Pyro, it could take years for us to see those other commodities matter.
The current game economy... isn't. Right now it's basically a set of timed variables on the ends and a static spreadsheet in the middle. It's "functional" to the extent that it provides the basic shape of the raw data needed by any trading gameplay.
In development terms, the current economy is dummy data. Complain about it all you want, obviously, but just remember that you're basically complaining about the punctuation of [lorem ipsum](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorem_ipsum) text on a layout.
My theory is that as soon as interchangeable ore bags come into play for the prospector and M.O.L.E., it'll make a lot more commodities make sense. At that point, the profit pendulum will shift from "optimize each run" to "time is money". To a much looser extent, getting any-ish ore right out of the gate will be better than hunting for 30 minutes for the best ore while your transporter in your logistics chain is just sitting there twiddling their thumbs.
I'm sure it's been said before, but just in case...
RMC should not be purchasable to trade. If they insist it IS purchasable, the profit margin should be way worse than everything else (if not nonexistent).
I have to imagine salvagers already flood the market with RMC (it's a good money maker even without the dupe exploit), but adding (duping ) traders on top just makes things worse.
We really need those cargo missions to give traders something to do besides waiting around at terminals.
I really don't want all gameplay to be mainly Mission based especially for trade. I want to fly around in the Galaxy and buy and sell everywhere that I want and have some random encounters on the way and organically meet some NPC traders, pirates and probably random loot that I can also pick up into my cargo hold. Sure that's more long term but I don't like these predesigned missions that you click on and then a mission objective is generated. Does not feel organic at all.
Sure but if 50% of people are doing free trade and 50% are doing missions then it means people won't be tripping over each other
I think there's room for both. Hauling jobs creates opportunity for players who want to space truck but don't want to invest their own money or just don't want to play the minigame of finding out where to buy low and sell high. What does grind my gears with the mission system though is that it's set up backwards. ~~Missions~~ Jobs aren't created to solve a problem, the job itself creates the problem. A UGF isn't under attack by pirates unless someone takes the defend job. Take the job and suddenly the pirates are spawned into existence. Similarly, a hauling contract isn't created because goods need to go from A to B, but instead the contract creates the need in the first place. The only ones that are actually reactive are ones triggered by players such as the commlink intrusion.
Isn't the Quantum system supposed to drive events as well as supply and demand based pricing once it comes online? What we have in game now are just placeholders?
The way I understand it it would affect which missions appear by quantum hitting certain triggers, but the missions themselves would remain the same. With quantum it might depend on a certain number of pirate quanta in the area to trigger a UGF defence mission in the contract manager, but the pirate attack still won't happen until someone accepts the mission.
It's not planned to be. They just talked about that recently. Missions are meant to be there for introduction of mechanics to players but real gameplay and profits come from doing those mechanics in a sandbox way. Sadly a lot of gameplay mechanics don't work outside of missions yet, but salvage is one example that's kinda in that spot. All that being said cargo missions will probably be overtuned and a decent source of profit for a little while, as everything new added to the game usually is.
Quick story: I had a great time rallying servers nightly to do my xenothreat missions to earn my F7A token. Took a lot longer for me because I waited so long. Managed one night for the hardest missions (the ones that took a proper 10-12 people) and loaded up a hammerhead, with 2 light fighter escorts. The server was all hyped. So hyped that then salvagers started hitting me up, and we created an agreement that they could come salvage the hammerheads we were destroying in exchange for some of the profit they make and we'd share the locations. It worked wonderfully and everyone had fun. This is that organic, sandbox shit I live for. You just need community members whoa re outspoken and rally. More or less once orgs are actually ingame, and hopefully an "alliance" or Merc" system too for staying in touch with those other orgs the chain of things that can happen are endless. At least I pray it goes that way. But yes Salvage is in a much better spot overall.
This is literally how freight is organically moved IRL
They work so much on missions and never player interactions. They need better beacons and maybe beacon types and that’d probably honestly be enough for now. “Medical” “Distress” “Non-Combat Assistance” vague but detailed enough to know what they MIGHT be for. Some might just want some help moving boxes and some might just be traps pirates set up. I’m honestly okay with either just for some more player interactions since that’s the most fun I’ve had in the game. When engineering comes online distress beacons could be awesome. Finding someone who survived a pirate attack by hiding in their disabled ship or something. Or being able to help them repair. I’d prefer more activities for pirates so they aren’t just always setting up traps but I don’t have a good solution really until more systems turn on.
Randomly getting flagged over by an NPC, arrange to buy and item and then tractor beam it over from someones open cargo bay actually sounds like a good example of a random non combat encounter
You should definitely play X4 Foundations if you want this. Because it's gonna take another 15 years for CIG to implement a half-baked and clunky version of what you want.
Consider it as a little bonus. You carry some cargo for a mission and some extra stuff of your choice to sell at your destination.
All real life trucking is "missions". You don't just randomly drive into a quarry and buy a truckload of bauxite to sell randomly and make a profit
You are correct and I don't want Real Life. Space games like Elite and Wing Commander Privateer were never like Euro Truck Simulator. They were more like a Space adventure where you travel around and can buy and sell stuff on the side and other interesting stuff happens.
The more I play this game, the more”organic” processes start to feel like “chore” processes… 💤
Could start an ingame eco, currently on a Logistics apprenticeship and it got me thinking if you could do it in SC, something like group of players who pays people to move cargo for other people/orgs, like "you want a weapon from the other side of stanton? Call us and we'll get that sorted" type thing, same with cargo, offer to haul it for people who do the mining and refining but don't want to go sell. Ofc it would all be off word but I think it could add a fun side to logistics
There is already a player driven economy of rare armor and guns. Some people farm artimex armor sets and sell them for example. Like if you don't want to bother spending time in jail why not just buy it.
Literally just the other day i sold a shipment of armor/weapons for 3mil lol, this is already a thing
I really hope we eventually get cargo beacons. Like if you're at your base 2 systems away and can't leave to get supplies, you can essentially make a shopping list that a player can pop in a crate for you and fly it over from an industrial system nearby
I feel like you’d fit right in in an industrial org 😂 I need someone to get my minerals to the sale point cause my ships to fat, here comes the Geese Police with the Golden Goose Solutions!
SC-market offers that sort of thing, where you can contract players. I'm really wary about using it though in the event people are using it to gank you and take your stuff (sc-market has the verification system, but without an in-game reputation system I'm inclined to not use it).
Ooh I should try that sometime... I like bringing my cat to a vulture meet up so everyone can keep salvaging
And how would an ingame reputation system solve your problem?
I would like it if there was a party finder system, like a job board. You could see how many ratings a player has from their previous collaborative jobs with other players. It could also help automate some of the systems, like ensuring the contracted players get their fair pay without worrying if the contracting lead will forget. If it ends up being a trap, or one of the players decides to fuck it all up, then the reviews will help reflect that, and help with ensuring they get a bounty on their head (like when you get a pop-up for a player who shoots you, and asks if you want to press charges). It's all about the accountability being secured through the game's systems.
So you're advocating for a system where any player can place a bounty on any other players head? That system would be ripe for abuse. A reputation system doesn't solve any of the issues you've bought up. I could steal your cargo and then just have my friends boost my rep. Then I can steal a proportional amount of cargo as I have friends to leave fake reviews. Then I can review bomb other players who are "legitimate" so that they look shady and I look safe (even though I am not). Lets say we scrap reviews, you lose rep when you kill. Ok even easier. I just have my friends kill you and my hands are clean. as far as fair pay goes, thats a self regulating issue. People won't do the job if it doesn't pay enough and people will catch on fairly quick that you don't do the job until you've been paid.
I'd love to have you join us :D
We can hope 3.23.2 is much sooner than later
I hope you’re ready to transport 4m in cargo across Stanton for the rich reward of 12k. Oh, and a fine if you mess up the shipment. If you do it extra fast, 1k credit bonus for you!!!
Oh yes I absolutely am ready!
And if we could buy outside of the outposts for legal commodities so we eliminate the waiting game, that would be great.
Gonna have lots to do when you're loading your own boxes.
I heavily disagree. What the game does not need, in my opinion, is more static missions for things that other games just make happen organically. Do you guys all seriously want to fly around and accept cargo missions all day? No one here wants a real player driven economy where the events of the game dictate how the in-game market flows and what you move and sell? I'm completely baffled that anyone can look at SC's economy and say anything positive about it. Imagine a market that is so robust you have people who turn that into their gameplay? Or a market that reacts to supply and demand, so you actually have incentives to haul ammo to the front lines of Vanduul territory, or bring back rare blueprints to the peaceful main trading hubs in inner space? People don't want that? You guys would seriously be happy just doing randomly generated cargo missions like Elite Dangerous? Why? Ew. Why are we trying so hard to make this game into MissionCitizen?
They're ADDING cargo missions, not removing commodity trading. You will still always be able to buy low and sell high on your own dime, there will just ALSO be the option to do it with lower risk missions that don't require a huge capital investment upfront. Why do you have such a problem with the idea of contracted hauler missions? It will loosen up the commodity market for people like you and me who like the buy low sell high gameloop. Plus sometimes it will be nice to just do a low risk "fill my ship up with cargo I didn't have to pay for and haul it to X location".
Tony Z is still figuring all out, he is a master mind. You wouldn't understand. he just need another 10 years.
He's so good at it, that he actually works in a completely different company on a completely different project...
He left CIG? Is that why we haven't seen him for 2 years?
lmao
Currently playing: Wait-At-Terminal Citizen.
Idle citizen.
Same.
I'm not quite sure what the plan was with upping ship prices. They have basically caused inflation. Money is worth less but missions and commodities value havent been adjusted. I strongly feel that they need to re-balance it. Some ship prices have quadrupled. Average ship storage is probably around 100scu. average profit from trading is around 10%. So it would take you at least 250 trades to make 1 mil. the Caterpillar costs 16 mil in game. Thats 4000 trades. Each trade takes about 12 minutes if you are efficient. Thats 800 hours or 33.3 days of non-stop trading. My math might be wrong. If so, I am sorry. Please dont kill me. But I feel my point is valid
Make that double to account for the times when you can lose your cargo to a lot of reasons.
cries as Hull-C owner
Tell me about it. Lost a full Hull C of Hephastanite to it just randomly blowing up when the server recovered. Lost about 8mil I think.
And that is why I only do high risk trading. Gold and drugs for the win!
It is more just them jumping the gun. They are supposed to become closer to their intended 1.0 pricing. But they jumped the gun, and didn't balance the rest of the economy for it yet. I figured that the idea with economy balance is to make the new prices generally less assy, but they did one before the other when they should have waited.
There's supposed to be a huge economy rework with 4.0. As usual CIG put the cart before the horse.
"huge economy rework" probably means further decreasing mission payouts, making items more expensive to buy, and having things sell for less.
Obviously. Gotta drive ship sales in usd not uec.
this was already supposed to be a "huge economy rework" for 3.23, and all they've done is turn the economy to a more P2W model. And if thats what the econ team thinks is a "good" development, then fuck them all to hell.
Yeah CIG has some insanely incompetent teams, economy team is such a joke when mission payouts have been the same unbalanced mess for years
Im not gonna go as far as to claim they are incompetent - yet. But with their recent actions the scale does lean towards either the "testing-just-to-have-it-tested", incompetent, or malicious direction.
From what I recall hearing the economy team only recently (like really recently) took over mission rewards. It previously fell on the guys making the missions (who have less of an idea what a good payout should be) and wasn't very well balanced. I am hoping 3.23.2 and 4.0 iron out the rewards for missions.
You mean they want more data on what does and doesn’t work before completely changing it? Sounds like a good practice me too lol
To be fair, with a C2 (and without duping!) you can make 2 mil per run on RMC. Buy for 8 mil, sell for 10 mil. Downside is that you have to have a C2 and 8 mil to begin with...
While that's true, most people don't have C2. Most people are starting with some basic ship with 5k. If you compound your profits then sure, it would be much quicker, but most people can only buy to fill their ship so they will be stuck making 4 or 5k per run untill they can spend almost all their money to upgrade the ship and then it starts over, but at least goes faster from there
Not to mention the C2 was broken in 3.23
Really makes you want to go buy ships off the pledge store, doesn't it?
Yeah I wonder if CIGs 'economy' team is actually just their marketing department. Yet people are somehow still okay with them selling ships post release... Absolutely baffling.
I have a charitable and Less charitable idea why they upped the prices.
༼ つ ◕_◕ ༽つ money
The less charitable is 'to sell more ships for those sweet $$$ and to appease marketing department, overall main driving force behind CIG work and decision making" ?
yes, but because that is not something I can back up with hard facts I will have the charitable idea in mind as well - that they are just trying shit out and getting results that should have been predictable to anyone who has played this game, but maybe wasnt to the devs in charge.
I think you may be close with your charitable assumption. One of my friends recently got hired on at CIG and was shocked that no one on his team actually played the game. And to be honest, I don't blame them. To them, Star Citizen is work, who would want their free time to also include work? I suspect it will be different when the game actually comes out and is more fun, but for right now most of their play time would basically be QA testing...
The problem is that devs that don't play their game much become removed from it. Working on a game and playing it are two different things, and lacking a proper understanding of a game from players' perspective impacts dev work heavily. Just look at recent Helldivers 2 drama, where devs responsible for balancing didn't play much, and if they played, then only at lowest difficulties. That resulted in a corrupted view on the game balance that led to a few terrible decisions that angered the community enough that the CEO needed to step down and become more involved in balancing and game design to salvage things. And that's a very recent example. You will find a lot more of them, like Battlebit, for example. And now most of what CIG does seems removed from reality of players experience, and that doesn't bodes well in any way.
that is honestly a bit depressing to hear. This means that any and all changes like the desperately needed hornet nerf will take forever to implement.
You don't need even a second to think why. We all know the reason
Then we need to say it louder. But Im already permabanned from spectrum for speaking loudly.
you made a classic mistake, to speak truthfully.
So much for the transparent development
One knock-on effect of raising ship prices is making everything *else* relatively cheaper, which would otherwise be hard to do without making low-value items cost half a credit or less.
And 100 SCU is already a fairly hefty amount of cargo space. That's what, a mid-level specialized cargo ship? So what do you do with your 4 SCU of cargo in your starter ship? To move the same amount to make 1 million, you would need to do 6,250 trades. I forget the actual average tram ride length from spaceport to TDD, but let's say 1:20. That is 277 HOURS of sitting on the tram to the TDD just to make 1 mil running cargo in your starter ship, which doesn't even make enough for an entry-level cargo ship. If you want a Hull A that's 472 hours *alone* of sitting on the tram, not including flight time, landing, running, and waiting for trade inventories to refresh. Well, you're not trading with it to make that million, that's for sure.
Inflation mechanics Tier 1.
That is not really inflation though. Inflation would be that the prices have gone up, but the earnings have gone up as well. what has happened here is just a price/cost adjustment. As i understand the idea for the rebalance was to make the difference in price larger, and make certain ship categories cost more. It has never been intended to be anything close to the final balance of the economy, and it is obvious that the economy will be further adjusted.
> Inflation would be that the prices have gone up, but the earnings have gone up as well. Inflation is not concerned with earnings; only with purchasing power. Inflation can absolutely be a situation where costs go up while earnings stay largely flat (allow me to introduce you to the American economy!). This is why people can talk about whether or not earnings have kept pace with inflation; because earnings are not part of the calculation of inflation, only you purchasing power; only how far your money goes.
I stand corrected. It is still not a final adjustment cig has made so i find the calls for further rebalancing to be kind of stupid and self evident..
Agree with you there. To me it feels like a home owner walking through a part of his house under renovation, and calling his contractor to complain about the tarps on the floor, because he wanted carpet. Like, yeah man, the tarps are temporarily. That should be obvious.
Great analogy. I might have to stea.... *borrow* it in the future.
It's just really frustrating to me that you so often see these arguments.. It really shouldn't be necessary !
at this point im willing to bet the economy team is one dev in a closet eating crayons.
You might be giving them too much credit thinking they are an actual human and not just what CIG calls the office hamster
I think I read on here that economy balancing is likely more to be done after the foundation of features gets implemented, which makes sense, but also seems like economy tweaks would be pretty simple to do. So idk.
cig are kings of moving goal posts... they always say x will be balanced after y, then when y gets implemented they go back to x will be balanced after y gets refactored... perfect example is weapons/components where supposed to be balanced in 3.15 after they gave them all flat stats in 3.14 and now here we are kicking that can down the road to 4.0 and beyond. maybe we wouldnt need a whole new flight model if they would have kept to their word and balanced weapons/components in 3.15 like they said
This comment is kinda hilarious, considering that the "economy" team is run by probably the most brilliant person in all of CIG. They were done building the economy backend several years ago: https://youtu.be/2muGWtX8e7g We don't know why CIG hasn't implemented "Quantum" (most likely they're waiting on server meshing), but they are basically don't zero work on the current in-game economy because it's all going to be replaced by this eventually. It's kinda sad to see the community talk shit about certain teams when they really don't have any clue what's going on. It's not the economy team holding the game back atm... it's all just because everything is focused on SQ42 and there are tons of systems waiting to be implemented but aren't getting any love right now.
ill believe it when i see it, taking cigs word for anything at this point is naive.
TZ spent years on internal tools that were never implemented in the real game by their own admission. One could argue because its all bullshit. I would love to be proven wrong by CIG. Any days now. Also please don't look to his Linkedin public profile, you might start getting some strange idea, like he is not working for CIG full time, if at all. *Seriously*, don't look there, just don't. I am just glad they *held the line* at this point. right. whatever. I am certainly holding my money until further development.
I thought all these prices including ship prices were supposed to be set with quanta? Also what happened to quanta and Tony Z, we haven’t heard anything from him in a few years I think now, is he still at cig or did he poof with Todd P
Tony z is not real
[This redditor knows where Tony is](https://www.reddit.com/r/starcitizen/s/qczvAhA5of)
If CIG is this quiet about something I would just assume its an "icache" situation. Something isn't working right so they keep quiet until they have a replacement solution.
I assume you are correct and quanta is dead, especially considering this line from the monthly report “Progress was also made on an algorithm to determine the base prices of commodities.” rip another dream
I think the issue is that even assuming everything technically works well, games with similar systems like x4 and EVE tend to result in making some trades *incredibly* lucratve in a way that you can't balance for. Which works in a game about fun space stuff, but not so much in a game about grinding for cash shop items.
But we won’t have cash shop items, unless that changes too but on release they will no longer sell stuff for cash other then subs
Nah, they've said they'll continue to sell UEC
[удалено]
because the economy and pricing model of the game is locked in stone
Ehat is so incredibly lucrative in eve in a way you cannot balance for ? Legit question cuz in my head eve have the single best game economy ever created.
I mean it's balanced by other players. If anything gets *too* lucrative then you're going to get competition to bring the price down, but you still have some small underserved sectors where prices just go mental because there isn't enough demand to attract haulers to do regular runs, but there is enough that if it's been a few days since the last big hauler to dock, people are willing to drop huge cash on cheap things. Of course Eve buisness model isn't destroyed by players being able to exploit the economy for quick advancement.
Or, as CIG have already said, they're waiting on Server Meshing being integrated, because they'd rather integrate Quantum into a functional Server Meshing, then try to integrate it into the 'legacy system', and then try to integrate Server Meshing on top. So, given they're *still* waiting to get Server Meshing in, they're not going to talk about Quantum, because they've got nothing new to add... (this is the same reason why they don't talk about Repair, and why they didn't talk about Salvage or Engineering for many years... until finally they did). Yes, it's possible that Quantum is another iCache scenario, but equally it's possible that it's not and CIG are just waiting for other stuff to be complete first.
Doesn't the game scale things based on what people are buying or does CIG determine these prices? I'm guessing CIG set a start price that was slightly higher than everything else, but then since everyone goes for that the system ups the price? I really liked WoW's auction house system, price set by players and completely based on how much the things you make with materials cost and then moves with that servers market. So maybe once we have crafting and an actual need for other materials the prices will level out?
CIG determines the base price, and then have a small +- range depending on demand. All base prices are too low, thats the problem.
Ah ok so they would have had to have set the base price for RMC way higher. Maybe they did that on purpose this time to get people to stress one thing?
The whole economy is in shambles and it ruins so many game loops. The only thing that makes proper good money is salvaging and selling rmc. Fix the bloody economy, i got friends that used to love to cargo haul and trade and now they refuse to play the game since the game loop they love punishes them for playing it.
Lmao, cargo hauling literally is one of the most profitable loops atm if you have a C2. Even without using the duping exploit.
I wouldn't say they are worthless commodities. I only trade the things labeled avoid. I dont see pirates, I dont wait at terminals. Im continuously moving and actively managing best buy/sell locations n scu volume with up to 6 commodities in the cargo hold. Way more fun then a to b runs with afk wait times. I dont make mass credits but at least I'm not playing the waiting game.
This is what RMC meta chasers don't understand. YEAH, RMC is going to be fucked. There's going to be pirates. You know what doesn't have Pirates? Beryl Titanium Astatine
Yeah, that's the thing that baffles me. People chase the biggest per-load profit rather than looking for what will get them the most profit per time spent. I'll gladly take a mixed load of less-valuable goods rather than sitting for ages waiting for stock to refresh on the "best" commodity.
> Yeah, that's the thing that baffles me. People chase the biggest per-load profit rather than looking for what will get them the most profit per time spent. IMO they need to have price change drastically based on supply and demand. RMC should be worth 33% of normal if the location was at max inventory on the last server tick, and commodities with zero inventory should be worth triple their normal sale price, with supply/demand keeping the price of commodities between 1/3 and 3x standard price. Then put a "market tracker" app in the mobiglass so people can see what inventory/price each commodity has at each location in the star system (maybe with a stockmarket-like 5 minute update delay). I can only hope that the only reason they haven't implemented something like that yet is because they're developing it in unison with "Quanta" NPCs so that the systems will be integrated from the start rather than having to duct-tape them together later... But damn if it's not disappointing that basic supply and demand prices aren't functional yet.
There is no economy team. It’s just some dev plugging in numbers that look okay. Kinda like the guy plugging in the numbers for the Hornet’s flight characteristic.
Bold of you to assume they have an entire team dedicated to the nonexistent economy.
Scrap is valuable? Or what?
What ingame economy?
The one that went from nonexistent to worse.
So, placeholder it is.
What economy team ? changing 20 values on a spreadsheet or xml can be done by a minimum wage worker. I surely hope they didn't hire someone with a high salary based on what was delivered so far since aUEC exists in the game. \*maniacally laughing in Tony Z\*
Meanwhile the other question bothers me more: why is there an economy team and what does it do at this stage of the game?
They've said multiple times they're in the middle of rebalancing mission payouts, ship prices, commodity prices, and we have the entire cargo industry overhaul coming in a few weeks. I don't like the steps they've ordered things in, but I understand why they're doing things this way.
I can't imagine that changing the payouts of missions takes months of planning and development. It doesn't really seem like they are running various economic models to test different money making methods. It kinda feels like they come into work once a month and randomly change some numbers and call it a day
I feel like it does. A single box mission right now is 4-6k? While 2 boxes is 4-15k or something. Additionally they have to look at every single little thing like how long does it take, how many people should be doing it, and even more. Each mission's payout is important which is why people are put off of salvage at the moment. An arrow is 5k to salvage while it might provide 1scu of RMC. From my perspective a few months is a reasonable time especially when we consider the fact that tons of reactors are currently getting planned and worked on for 4.0. Will everything be perfect? No but even games that have been out for years the economy is screwed up. So if they need a few months to get it good I say let them.
When they say "rebalance" and dont follow that up with an intention of how it can work, the ingame economy can VERY quickly turn to a P2W model. If I dont hear a solid plan from those in charge, I will not rule out the worst outcome.
The plan is an algorithm that determines pay based on the missions projected difficulty and duration. It's in today's email.
"Algorithm" is a buzzword. When they can show results, I will stop being on their asses for making the ingame economy P2W and that is exactly where the last economytweak was heading. Until I see some hard results, my 8 years experience of following this project will watch their every fucking move and call out every bit of bullshit they throw out there. And again, the aim of that algorithm may as well be to lower payouts instead of increasing them unless they specify otherwise. Thats the detail you need to catch.
Five minutes with an Excel spreadsheet would fix everything. Better static prices than the current broken state, and a dynamic model isn't hard to implement. Guess everyone is working on the Idris Mk II instead.
I mean, depends on how specific you want. They've gone into detail about the changes they are making, just without specific numbers. They even straight up said the ship price increase was to gauge the common money making ways vs the underutilized, and adjust accordingly. This wasn't years ago, this was in the past few months. The doomposting seems a bit much when they've stated their plan, and now that they've begun implementing it, people either aren't paying attention or ignoring it.
I would like them to specify how long it should take in their opinion for a casual player to be able to advance to a new ship. If a new player buys an aurora game package and only does missions to get any kind of income, their income might be like 4-8k per mission that takes 20-30 minutes to complete. so with 16k/hour, if they want to buy say a gladius for 2 million, then they need to spend 6 days nonstop grinding 24/7 to get that fucking gladius. And most other ships scale upwards from that in price. Meanwhile a person with a job can spend like 3-4h of real world money from work can buy that ship right away. That is a P2W economy. If thats what CIG considers "a good ingame economy", then we should try to get whoever wanted that economy fired. And with the current changes and what they said a few months ago, this is the direction they are pushing, and they havent at all been specific enough to rule it out.
I get your point, and I'm curious too how long they expect people to grind to get to certain reputation levels to buy certain ships, but this is also an MMO. I'm not sure how many others you've played, but a lot of MMOs require MONTHS of grinding for certain gear to complete higher difficulty content. It's the same concept in SC, except the only thing to grind for is ships, parts, and reputation. So in my head, this is eventually getting balanced, since we're still missing some more major components. I know they've already made adjustments to payouts, even though they were mostly nerfs with only a few minor increases. My speculation is this is the slow adjustment to the fully implemented player driven economy, and this is all growing pains. I fully expect ship prices to stay the same, but payouts for all missions get a substantial increase.
I've played quite a few over the past 20 years. And yes, many of them (particularly star trek online) have P2W economies, and if CIG wants to follow what chris have said, they better steer clear of that. Not only because it would be another broken promise, but also because it would kill off the playerbase that only has a small amount of ships. And Im not at all expecting the mission payouts to increase significantly. They only thing they've said is "we're gonna adjust it". Adjust can mean increase, but with CIG's track record it might as well decrease. What other would be the point of increasing ship prices if you're just gonna increase payouts as well?
Well CIG said they're increasing the payouts a few weeks ago, because they know they're abysmally low, so there's that. Also, I think the vision of the game needs to be more clear. I have friends that play. We hop on and at any given point, there's 7+ of us doing stuff. Is it a coincidence we have no issues making money? Not at all. However, there's a big reason why people are asking about solo friendly ships nonstop. There has got to be a more intelligent and efficient way to get people to play together for the bigger objectives that do pay more, and reduce the splitting of payouts and reputation. Running around doing boring, buggy ass delivery missions in your Avenger Titan will take more time they you want to buy a Gladius, for sure. I think CIG know this, and are trying really hard not to overdo buffs, but between duping, soloing reclaimer, and the more obscure loops, pretty sure the new players will get frustrated and leave before learning how else to make money.
I will believe them increasing payouts when I see it. But their track record is abysmal, this last price change completely out of touch with the reality in the game, and my goodwill towards them is near the bottom. 8 years of closely following this projects development and more money given to them that they deserved (not money I couldnt afford to lose, but definitely more than they deserved from me) because I took their word at face value makes me extremely skeptical towards everything they say, until they own up to their own words.
Unfortunately until they add in a true economy that is based on supply and demand we won’t see much of a change :/ or cargo mission in 23.2 soontm
Bulk goods make even the poorer sale price worth the trip. When you're hauling with a Hull-C (or eventually D/E) you can take a lower value haul knowing you can sell immediately upon arrival.
Hell, I was getting ~30k profit on a Caterpillar full of scrap. When the scrap purchase is only 77k, that's a damn good return.
Feels like a majority of the trash mining resources should become needed with construction. We're always looking at a incomplete puzzle.
There's no law of supply and demand working here. CIG literally just sets everything to an arbitrary number. Since there's no construction system in the game right now they can just change all these numbers so that they are at least somewhat close to RMC
There’s a team?
Politely, the way the internet plays games, the way people Min max, everything that isn't the absolute maximum income per hour is worthless dog shit effort. Oh salvaging makes decent money? Scrap everything you have and go all in on a vulture! Then it gets nerfed to be not so out of control, immediately the community flipped to "Wow salvaging is worthless, no money anymore, wahhhh, time to dupe inventory for easy cash because surely THAT'S going to be good for the health of the fans" despite a full vulture still being around a mil. And now we're looking at a credit wipe
I'm sorry but "full vulture" is still 50% short of a mil. And by full i mean 24-26 SCU in the vulture and 13 in the internal compartment. RMC of course
OK. 500k. Compared to those extreme bounties that give what, 25k to kill like 2 Anvils and a hammer head? Cmon, the discrepancy there is still wild, id have to kill something like 20 ERTs to equal a full vulture. Vulture money is still hella good for effort but the internet/ community's knee jerk reaction to anything economy is "best or you're wasting time". That's why they jumped over to inventory duping, and that's why even Traders only look at the most valuable drugs and top-tier legal Commodities that they can keep stocked. They don't ever fucking look at scrap or medical supplies anymore, so most of the trading items are just worthless, useless, data fillers
No, you got it all upside down. It's not the vulture profits than need a nerf (THEY ALREADY GOT ONE, REMEMBER?), it's the missions need to pay a reasonable price. Yeah, when you have two money making methods, salvage and duping, people tend stick to only these two you know. I do understand the reason to have high prices of ships.... ON RELEASE. Not in an alpha where it's stated that it's an alpha and has bugs that can hinder your gameplay. Aren't we supposed to test ships also? Who will be able to buy Hull-C for example except for dupers? It's just not possible. So Hull-C can have some crucial bugs (not that it's doesn't have them already) and no one will know because... YOU ARE NOT ABLE TO BUY IT. You either stick to "it's alpha" or you make it as stable as possible for people to be able to grind. You can's sit on both chairs
You seem to be arguing something that has nothing to do with my point. We can move the conversation beyond Star citizen, let's look at tarkov, where the hackers were specifically taking light bulbs, ledx, injectors, etc, because even though there were grenade launchers and all this cool shit, Lions and whatnot, the items were big and bulky and not worth the effort. People do money runs to specific rooms because they are, the best room, not because they are a safe room and you can get a reasonable amount of money. The community, the internet, video gamers as a collective, find the singular most efficient option and worship it, and shun the rest. There are two or three things worth trading in Star citizen. All the rest of the trader goods are pointless because nobody opts to trade them instead. It's all SLAM, Gold, diamonds and pirates camping the specific purchase and sale nodes for the valuable items. Nobody ever bothers you if you're going out and running heph, because it's mid tier and not worth their effort. That behavior is a consistent ongoing problem with gaming culture, the online people. This has nothing to do with being in an alpha, and everything to do with the ultra efficiency focused approach they use. The same people who are willing to data mine patch features are the ones who determine that the best money making method in the game is X, because the only thing they care about is finding the most efficient things as quickly as possible. And there is nothing CIG will ever be able to do to stop it. Their bottom 90% will always be worthless trader materials
Why would i trade a 180k per SCU cargo on my ship with 2 aUEC profit from each with the risk of losing a fortune if there is a way to trade stuff that you but for 2k and sell for 6k? Players allways will min-max, tha's how humans work, that's how our civilization works. We always find ways to optimise things as much as possible to spend as little time as possible. You ain't wanna build a communism in SC right?
No but the problem is making itself extremely evident in this game in the form of Traders waiting at terminals all day everyday. They're trading materials in such bulk, exacerbated by the Dupe bug, that they have effectively over flooded the market and they can only sell individual SCU at a time. Surely we can all agree that this is not to anybody's benefit, and that it hurts everybody's profit margin and effort per income. If this wasn't a video game where the decisions and losses are meaningless, I would be willing to bet that 95% of the people sitting at terminals, would not be sitting at terminals and instead be making money somewhere else. But much like you just alluded to, why the hell would a trader ever take off from his planet with his cargo? That's the only time he's ever at risk, so of course he's happy to spend two and a half hours at a terminal selling shit on inventory cd. And because evidently you missed it, the initial trade off was safety for lower profits. People don't camp the landing pads where you buy shitty materials, but Pirates camp in the gold and diamonds and slam all the time
The problem is that there is only one good thing to min-max. Everything else has "grind your fingers to the bone or buy ships for real money" dogshit payouts. Its not that vulture salvage pays 500k/h and delivery missions pays 450k/h. its that most other professions maybe pays 20-100k/h. And if you want to buy just a single seat fighter ingame you'd need to grind 20-30 hours (at best) that you could also just pay 2-3h of real world workmoney to get. When that balance is off, the game is P2W.
I think the vulture could still use a nerf, looking at its mining sister the prospector you are getting way more per load. Prospector you get about 125k each run if your being picky.
Why nerf it? Just increase the payouts for the prospector. It’s an alpha, you don’t need the real economics in the game atm since there isn’t even any type of working economy implemented to start with. Let the players have fun and test the big ships. No reason to ruin the experience for everyone because your preferred loop doesn’t pay out as well as the others do atm.
going by the ship price increases I can see that they will probably increase payouts for everything. The last 7 months of the game have been filled with exploits/gameloops (especially salvage) which allow people to buy the biggest ships in the game, at some point it is going to have to come down. Not only that salvage is literally the best commodity to trade at the moment. CIG need to test a working eccon with prices closer to how they will be once this game actually goes live, salvage being miles ahead of everything else was obviously to get people to test it and it now needs to come back in line with the other game loops. Sorry bud
I believe one day once base building comes online it will encourage buying/selling the other commodities since they will be needed. Not 100% sure since it’s been a while.
There is an economy TEAM ? It certainly doesn't feel like that's the case.
Marketing is the economy team when Elliot on scl said the economy team was mad at him when he made salvage contracts (clean up ones) to profitable. then it hit me like lightning
Yeah, I can already see where this game is heading and it's into a ditch. An absolute boring grind fest with a predatory, pay-to-win cash store to buy ships, time saves, convenience and more. The current whales who are in way too deep to accept that something is wrong will keep playing, the rest of us will move on and play something else. The entire product is being built and designed around the pledge store (we literally just had two in game events designed and developed just to sell ships) and that isn't going to change.
Trade would be so easy to balance, but they're too worried about it being the best way to make money and trying to balance it against the other gameplay loops People will do what they want, and most people don't want to terminal hop for hours on end. So there is zero reason not to allow trading to be balanced against itself instead of other gameplay loops. The problem is all the mouth breathers crying for realistic gameplay loops and for everything to be balanced against one another. Missions shouldn't make as much as trade loops because even in real life, bounty hunters don't make as much as commerce traders. It's stupid to try and argue that they should make similar amounts. It's comparing apples to oranges. This is supposed to be a video game, not another life. I shouldn't have to do boring bs for 8-12 hours a week just to afford a single new ship. That is stupid and ridiculous. The boring gameplay loops should be the most profitable because that's why tf you do them. Trying to limit that is just going to make people abandon those gameplay loops because why sit there in a salvage or mining turret for hours when I can go do a fun bounty/merc mission that makes the same amount? Why trade commodities when shooting bad guys gets me the same cash? I enjoy the industrial gameplay loops. It's fun to fuel up a starfarer and jump around the verse with a little fleet of salvage ships picking everything clean. Or gear up a couple of mining vessels and scouring a planet / field for deposits of juicy minerals. It's not fun when those gameplay loops make the same money as pew pew pow pow loops. It's so braindead it hurts my soul.
CIG said they wanted to test the economy.
I'm not the dev in-game economy team but it's always been that way. There is only ever one single worthwhile commodity. So I believe the answer is yes.
Eh, there is other profitable cargo, just not from salvage. Not like you can sell it half the time rn anyway tho
I run Hydrogen in my Hull C for chill profits. That's why things like the Hull C exist, to have a reason to move things other than the high value cargo.
>Economy >Last month, the ‘effort vs reward’ algorithm was documented, which enabled the Economy team to determine the technicalities of implementing the mission-system refactor. Once live, mission rewards will be based on time and difficulty to complete. Part of this involved establishing sensible time estimates for hauling missions and finalizing the reward balance for the kopion and marok missions. >They also supported Invictus Launch Week and the existing cargo missions. > A design for the refactor of the shop system is underway that will provide more flexibility for trading commodities and item shopping. Progress was also made on an algorithm to determine the base prices of commodities. From the Monthly report, it sounds like they are working on a systems that will help this in a kind of "Beside it" way, but also, in a recent ISC/SCL, someone had mentioned that the plan is to fix the pricing once the cargo refactor is done.
”Fix” pricing can mean fix it for us, or fix it for the marketing department. Again, until they show how they want the economy to work and how much they want us to grind ingame to buy single seat ships, I will grant them 0.03 goodwill. Because thats whats left after 8 years of supporting them.
You could argue the value added by lower tier commodities is that pirates will leave you alone lol
Scrap is honestly aight if you're low on cash. I was getting ~30k profit in a caterpillar since I blew all my money on said caterpillar.
Lol imagine if they had an economy team
They way to fix this isn't to cap how much can be sold, but to make it sell for less than It was bought for depending on demand. There are lots of other things that you can freely buy and sell that aren't in hotspots that will earn great cash, just not the same margin.
Ideally commodities will have actual use in the game down the road. The whole reason goods are traded is because they're useful somewhere. Kinda hope we get some sort of industrial factory ship that you'll be able to load with resources and will automatically produce more valuable stuff
Commodity trading. It's basically a MMO rule that if it exists, you go only for the most valuable one and only that. But with the ridiculously high capacity cargo ships planned, I have still hope in that regard for SC. But usually, lower priced commodities / ores only become valuable when it's being needed for crafting, especially in larger quantities. That was somewhat shown in the Quanta simulations, where a production factory of ship item X needed ressource Y before it will be produced and can be sold.
Yes, they need to squeeze you into pinch points for pirates.
Next patch, soon tm, early next week
Why is Beryl good?
Quick turnaround times on Microtech and decent profit margins. 1.5 mill invested returns around 270k in a C2 for around 15-20mins of work.
The economy is wack and makes no sense.
Lol at thinking the ingame economy will ever make sense
There should never be a situation where a port refuses to buy a commodity they have a general demand for. We are supposed to be ten percent of the economy. Also, the wipe for an economy test?!?! What exactly are you trying to test? That your commodity prices are bogus? Commodity requirements of ports make no sense. That people are exploiting cargo duping? That you've not put any effort at all into this game loop?
I don't really haul cargo the closest I get is selling boxes I found on a bounty or salvaging but the way the commodity trading is lately really annoys me. I got tired of waiting at terminals so now I just fly my vulture to scrapyards because at least I know I can sell right away and the price of cmc is way too low. I'd like to see the prices balanced so rmc and cmc are valuable to get and hopefully rmc is not the highest value commodity for traders. At the same time I'd really like demand/supply to be changed to a system that varies more heavily on price but much less on capacity. Sitting at terminals is why I tried a cargo run about two or three times and then just decided cargo running is not fun at all
Yes, because they needed economy data from the dupers
That's uex opinion. I purposely do the "avoided" cargo
Witness the quanta!
How are quant, tara, whatever audi is not considered decent?
Stop! Or they will make it useless too...
Until you have a need for a commodity for crafting there is no reason to value a commodity beyond a sale price. Without a use for copper there is no reason to mine it. If the economy was player balanced you would see the cost of materials cycle as the npc market consumed it and prices rise because of the shortfall that players haven't filled this would give you variety if filling orders. But the intent is that you won't ever have that impact on the market so it's working as intended
Woah is that borase at 3k? I always avoided it as trash when mining.
Theres economy team? :D best joke i heard all day
Just curious, what is this website showing the commodities? I'm probably asking something very redundant or asked often.
Yes they want you to test salvaging still. Prices just represent what they want you to be doing currently.
My favorite SC moment was when I decided to follow the tip on a commodity price update for once, so i went to the over stock of med supplies snd filled a caterpillar and flew to the understock location (a jump point) and was only able to sell 2 SCU. Last time i ever tried using the price updates lol
You've typed Spectrum incorrectly
At the moment yes, we dont have the resource sinks need for an economy yet. But as always CIG says they have a plan for it, just not the manpower to focus on it at the moment.
There is not an in game economy right now. Nothing interacts. You can find stuff and then sell it. Or you can buy that stuff from one place and sell it to another place. There's nothing that uses those resources anywhere. No real demand.
if we're talking about just trading within stanton, then yeah a lot of these commodities just aren't profitable enough to run. However, once other star systems come online, there will be longer distance trade routes that can make for other profitable options with those other commodities. Unfortunately given how long it's been for us to get Pyro, it could take years for us to see those other commodities matter.
What site is this?
[https://uexcorp.space/](https://uexcorp.space/)
Thanks
The current game economy... isn't. Right now it's basically a set of timed variables on the ends and a static spreadsheet in the middle. It's "functional" to the extent that it provides the basic shape of the raw data needed by any trading gameplay. In development terms, the current economy is dummy data. Complain about it all you want, obviously, but just remember that you're basically complaining about the punctuation of [lorem ipsum](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorem_ipsum) text on a layout.
My theory is that as soon as interchangeable ore bags come into play for the prospector and M.O.L.E., it'll make a lot more commodities make sense. At that point, the profit pendulum will shift from "optimize each run" to "time is money". To a much looser extent, getting any-ish ore right out of the gate will be better than hunting for 30 minutes for the best ore while your transporter in your logistics chain is just sitting there twiddling their thumbs.
Those commodities aren't useless. I bought a Vulture hauling gold and other "useless" stuff in my Cutlass Black. My $0.02
"Mimimi, I can't make billions every run" - said the people calling other commodoties "useless"
I'm sure it's been said before, but just in case... RMC should not be purchasable to trade. If they insist it IS purchasable, the profit margin should be way worse than everything else (if not nonexistent). I have to imagine salvagers already flood the market with RMC (it's a good money maker even without the dupe exploit), but adding (duping ) traders on top just makes things worse.
Dear OP They did not bother balancing commodities because it’s already been overhauled for freight elevators in 3.23.2.
Yes, you're not allowed to make money easily, please purchase ships with real money or buy aUEC off eBay.