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I see many indicators in the game that the multi-player economy is eventually meant to be player-driven. I don't feel like this is viable right now for several reasons. I think that making player-owned shops work better is a very good place to start on making player-driven economics feasible, and these are some of the suggestions for fixes and improvements that I have collected, starting with the most fundamental issues that seriously impair shops right now, and going on to things "which would be nice to see".
My intent is to open a productive dialog about problems and requests for shops, so if you have additional suggestions or thoughts about improving the function of shops, please share them.
Thank you!
Foreword:
It is understood that the game is "still in Alpha" (and what would be the point of any suggestion such as this if it were not?), and that it being written in script rather than code conveys certain restraints on features, additional to those already imposed by code itself.
Some Assumptions:
My intent is to open a productive dialog about problems and requests for shops, so if you have additional suggestions or thoughts about improving the function of shops, please share them.
Thank you!
Foreword:
It is understood that the game is "still in Alpha" (and what would be the point of any suggestion such as this if it were not?), and that it being written in script rather than code conveys certain restraints on features, additional to those already imposed by code itself.
Some Assumptions:
- A primarily player-driven economy is desired on most multiplayer servers.
- Functioning player-owned shops are a first-step in establishing player-driven economics, being centers for exchange of goods and credits.
- Some players do not actually enjoy crafting and would prefer to increase wealth through bounty-hunting ("pirate farming"), mining, or trade and should be allowed to succeed at the game without crafting.
- Admins on multiplayer servers don't actually enjoy manually re-stocking key items and credits at the spawn shop regularly, and expecting them to do so is not a sustainable solution to multiplayer economics.
- Please fix buy/sell prices to stay different when set different. Currently the sell price will reset to equal whatever the buy price is. Right now if I set my shop to buy cores at c50 and sell them at c150, after a time the shop is automatically changing to buy AND sell cores for c50. This needs to be fixed before players can effectively supply goods without giving away their profits.
- Please fix all shop permissions to stay as set. Currently at least some settings ("No Enemies") automatically reset to "ALL" after a short time.
- Please modify shops to display both the Buy AND Sell price in the shop window when shopping so customers can see the difference. Currently they have to sell an item at a player shop to confirm that the Sell price equals the Buy price (they automatically match in time, but sometimes this takes a while, and if that is ever fixed this will be absolutely necessary).
- Please allow shop owners to turn on/off trade of certain items and categories of items (i.e. "Flora" or "Decoration" or "Hulls:White:Crystal") with a simple check box or something similarly straightforward. OR allow them to set the volume they are willing to stock of an item, including zero. This would let shop owners quickly and easily prevent shoppers from dumping junk on them at high prices without forcing them to spend hours to protect the shop's funding by adjusting the price of every non-traded and undesired item to zero.
- There probably should be a source of credit creation besides the finite amount initially available in shops plus whatever a server admin manually pumps into the economy. In Eve flying missions creates credits out of nothing, there is no such function in Starmade.
- The credit-banking issue could be resolved by allowing shop accounts. Let owners give specific players accounts at their shop, basically an additional, private iteration of the shop which that player can access as holder, in addition to the shop owner's shop, which an account-holding player can only access as a shopper. Credit storage for account-holders could be limited. Holder block storage could be limited, could expand with shop expansion (see #7 below) or not, or be controlled by the shop owner, or represent a percentage of the shop owner's overall capacity for balance. Allowing shops to act like banks and offer accounts could dovetail nicely with #5, above, if organized to reflect the real world so that credits are created as some function of deposits in shop accounts (of course in this case, limits on the frequency and size of deposits of deposits and withdrawals would be of key importance), but such an economic system might be too complex for a simple game of pew pew. Either way – some servers have already scripted in banks for players because it clearly helps, so at least allowing players to hold accounts with player-owned shops might be a good idea and at the very least it would increase the importance of shops and the frequency at which players trade at player-owned shops. Accounts would also extend the usefulness of owning a safe shop at a home base to the whole faction, removing one of the many little incentives for the 1-man factions that abound on every server.
- It might help to allow owners to "invest" in their shops to scale up capacity. I understand there are variable sizes in the code at play here, but this is an important issue and not one that would impact combat, mining, building, etc – instances of shop-related variables are limited to shopping. Players often run around in million-block ships and larger. The economy can never dream of hoping to support the actual in-game economy as long as player-owned shops are limited to inventory sizes that don't even facilitate someone spawning a blueprint for a 10,000-mass ship. In two hours of quality mining a shop-owner can exceed capacity in several key items like power generators. It would be nice if owners could pay credits to expand capacity. Start the shop off at 10,000 units/item capacity and allow the owner to increase capacity by 10,000 units/item for every million credits they invest in the shop (non-refundable). Then big mining corporations could actually field a shop trading millions of hull blocks if its important enough to them to invest several hundred million credits in developing their trade capacity. It should go without saying since this entire thread is merely a suggestion, but obviously the figures I'm using for example aren't meant to be hard-fast restrictive target figures. Merely examples. There may be more practical increments.
- Reducing the capacity and frequency of NPC shops might help improve player-driven economies. I know this may sound counter-intuitive because on most servers I visit players are constantly struggling to find resources at the shops as it is. But even with 10-20 NPC shops per star system (which feels crazy excessive, BTW) the supplies of key components in a region are quickly depleted by even a handful of active players in that region. The capacity and number of shops could both be doubled and all that would do is delay the inevitable because components aren't being generated fast enough to replace what is consumed in multi-player. Meanwhile, experienced players extend their NPC trading into trans-galactic space when necessary, and the resource-depletion in the core of the spawn galaxy primarily hurts new players. The whole multi-player economy seems to be unsustainable unless manually propped up by server admins. Reducing the number and capacity of NPC shops would force even experienced players to mostly terminate their unsustainable reliance on them at the earliest opportunity, and to craft their own materials instead, which would inevitably result in surpluses of certain components which could then be traded off (once you've mined for a while and are at the factory, the difference between crafting 5,000 generators or 500,000 is only a couple of minutes in which you can even be doing other things). Long term outlook could then be to see most factions creating a surplus of key components that increase supply in the galactic core rather than depleting it and moving on like locusts. Of course this would benefit from higher capacity/volume for player shops, or at least the option to improve capacity/volume over time.
