Fix NPC Shops = Fix The Economy

MacThule · Sep 28, 2016

I love the recent market upgrades, fixes and improvements to shops & trade!! :D

The entire trade system is massively improved. I've now got a busy MP trade hub operational (on Brieries) that fills multiple bulk market orders every day as well as providing profitable work and shipbuilding materials to several dozen solo pilots & faction members. My shop is set up with a few automated production lines that immediately pulled materials I purchase, refine them, then sell the product for a good price. This has created some great infinite profit loops that benefit both our starport and our associated traders in and out of faction.

There is a fundamental hole in the economy though, and outside of the mineral/carved trade, player shops can only be sustained over the long term by subsidy.

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No matter how you wrangle it, buying Ore & Shards is a loss.

This is sabotaging macro-economic development throughout the MP multiverse and making it impossible to operate a market that provides manufactured goods to consumers primarily from ore purchased from miners, rather than from the results of flying out and personally mining, then selling. This is a serious problem, because any player with experience will not go mine then refine and sell most of their results exactly because they know that they cannot get the actual value of their work. It's far, far more profitable to mine directly then hoard the results for private production lines and completely ignore the credit-based economy.

This means no professional miners, because in order for players to exist as miners they need reliable customers and reliable sources of components. This also means no professional merchants or traders.

Despite the massive improvements to economy, the NPC shops are still pushing - almost forcing - all players to mine/refine/manufacture/trade all individually as jacks of all trades (and if you don't like it, you can just not play... which is a popular choice).

One can fix the prices of one's own shop, but so long as hundreds of NPC shops exist buying ores/shards at high prices and selling the most high-demand items crafted from them at a loss, no sustainable economy can exist. This means that in the long run, it's not worth while specializing for any player, ever. Every player must be all things or eventually hit a wall of non-sustainability. Specialization is non-sustainable.

I understand that the NPC shops are currently rigged to inject credits into the player economy by operating at a loss, but believe vanilla NPC shop pricing is actually breaking the entire StarMade MultiPlayer economy.

NPC Shops buy ore (ore & shards, et al) at C120/block.
Refineries break this unit into 5 ore caps, and 10 mesh (mesh & composite, et al).
Shops then price the caps at C12/b, which accounts for half the price of the ore.
The remaining C60 of value must then come from the 10 mesh, making mesh worth C6/b.
Shops then turn around and sell grey hull - which requires 2 C6 blocks to produce and is the cornerstone of the economy - at C10/b. A nearly 20% loss. No player shop can compete without suffering equal or worse losses.
Most other manufactured products from basic to advanced yield 0% profit for shops... which is better than -20%, but still totally broken.

Since no one can profitably compete to offer bulk amounts of components to the public all in one place, players must either shop around or manufacture their own. Most resort to the latter to save time. Economy over.

The NPC shops inject liquidity into the economy, but they do so at a loss. As a direct result credits are worthless.

Worse than worthless - every earned credit (as opposed to stolen/cheated/found/begged credits) essentially represents a fractional loss of value to the possessor because they originate in an economy that operates at a loss.

NPC shops must be priced to actually profit overall (i.e. sell all manufactured goods at 20-30% over their value relative to the price the shop pays for raw goods to account for the time value of manufacturing & building/maintaining both manufacturing and trade facilities) for credits to have value in the game. The higher the margin of NPC shop profit, the more precious credits become. Such shops would still inject liquidity into the economy because shops create credits magically and players create value by mining, so even a very profitable (high margin) NPC shop network would allow new players to sell mining results and make good money.

This would open up real margins for player merchants to make it worth the trouble of offering mining/trade work to other pilots and offering a seriously well-stocked shop that could out-compete the NPC shops (currently impossible without personally subsidizing prices eternally with no hope of ever seeing a return). This would permit a shop to stock massive amounts of popular materials, so it would not be necessary for every single player to maintain their own personal space station, factory, mining operation and trade routes just to build and maintain a few ships.

Players could actually play as miners or traders because it would be worth the while of station owners to pay them for it. Currently paying players to mine is either a loss to the miner or a loss to the merchant.

I believe this will change very quickly if vanilla NPC shop prices are fixed.

The fasted route to fixing the economy is to simply cut all vanilla ore/shard prices by 30-40% rather than re-price the entire product spreadsheet.

This is an extremely easy solution to a major problem that could be packaged into any update and would not require more than a few minutes on the part of the dev team. It would not damage solo play, since most solo players currently do not rely on the (broken) credit economy much after startup anyway.

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Sorry about the wall of text - this is by far not my most concise proposal :p

Gasboy · Sep 28, 2016

Can't server admin change the base prices of all NPC shops? Which means they could set the prices of finished goods higher, and the prices of raw resources lower, and thus fix the issue entirely. And I think that's the answer you'll likely get.

HolyCookie · Sep 28, 2016

There is a lot of problems with the economy, primarily is lacks costumers. for merchants to exist there have to be a lot of costumers who are too lazy to find miners. Right now as is, IF a miner would sell his products to a merchant, the merchant is more likely going to compete against other merchants trying to sell to this 1 single customer instead of the other way around. Besides that we need some kind of rare thing that isn't common at all but pretty useful or just awesome to have (as bragging right) that could include some kind of decoration found on a planet with a change of 1 in 100 green planets for example. or 1 in 100 stations. this would provide a rare item whose price is influenced by the supply. because it is so rare many people will just want it to show off. Gotte say, I once made the mistake of buying 1m worth of ores to refine it and change it into the most expensive item in shop, found out I lost like 200k

that was the first and last time I tried to think smart with producing stuff.

RODLON · Sep 28, 2016

That's right, you can't compete with npc shops...
And the only reason people buy overpriced products at player shops is because there is no enough stock in npc shops.

BTW, I play on that server and I usually buy your overpriced ores/shards.

MacThule · Sep 28, 2016

Gasboy said:
Can't server admin change the base prices of all NPC shops? Which means they could set the prices of finished goods higher, and the prices of raw resources lower, and thus fix the issue entirely. And I think that's the answer you'll likely get.

Tweaking server settings is not relevant to an issue that hurts gameplay on all MP servers. Is there some general usefulness to players of the current vanilla status of credits as worthless and public player shops as unsustainable that I'm overlooking here? Is that somehow helping the game be more fun or grow and retain its player base?

HolyCookie said:
Gotte say, I once made the mistake of buying 1m worth of ores to refine it and change it into the most expensive item in shop, found out I lost like 200k that was the first and last time I tried to think smart with producing stuff.

This is exactly my point and I'm glad you've seen it yourself - most have, which is why players don't patronize miners therefore straight miners do not exist. It's straight up broken. It's not broken because of no customers... there are no customers because it's broken :-/

I'm not dealing in 'IF's - my shop does buy from miners and does sell to both pilots and trade nodes. So what I'm reporting here is weeks of testing.

I sell hundreds of thousands of components every couple days from my shop. I log in to a stack of trade network emails almost every day. But it's all at an overall loss. The only reason it works at all is because ONE part of NPC shops is set up to be profitable, therefore I can create infinite trade loops on that and my miners like the extra cash bumps they earn running occasional trade routes to subsidize my shop.

NPC shops buy/sell minerals at C1 then buy/sell carved at C30. This is a 3,000% markup for manufacturing. When my shop ONLY deals in minerals, it is very sustainable and very profitable to both me and any traders who use it. I've been using that to create viable work for noobs forever, but it can't support a shop to take loses in every other area so I have to be very picky about trading anything else and do so only to support an easier startup curve for server new joins and make for a better server.

So I've extensively tested sustainable economies restricted to the mineral market where NPC shops charge a markup for manufacturing as well as in areas they do not. Lack of overall NPC shop margins is what is making credits worthless and preventing us playing as specialists.

I don't think a "look-what-i-got" economy will be sustainable long-run either. One based on math will be. All players need components. Other players can manufacture and sell those, but only at a loss right now, so only an idiot would (or someone dead-set on playtesting the player economy ;-). Therefore EVERY PLAYER must be an island to himself and his own economic ecosystem, dependent on no one in the end.

This isn't happening because of lack of in-game trade features. It's happening because of very simple math.

As long as NPC shops operate the universal economy at a loss, merchant players cannot exist and therefore miner players cannot exist, nor can trader players. Without miners & traders, piracy is right out. Many would-be players want to play these roles, join the game, realize they can't do this without completely fabricating them as something that exists solely in chat, then give up because they don't want to personally micro-manage every single aspect of building a ship from mining the ore to designing the decorative trim on the turrets just to fly a ship.... and I don't think it's the StarMade vision for that to be the only way the game is played.
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RODLON said:
That's right, you can't compete with npc shops...
And the only reason people buy overpriced products at player shops is because there is no enough stock in npc shops.

BTW, I play on that server and I usually buy your overpriced ores/shards.

Thank you :D

Actually a lot of people do. It improves game convenience. It makes it more playable for casual players and easier for new players.

But keeping a shop sustainable is like herding cats and results in no profit in the end except in improved gameplay for the others on the server. This is how I know that making player shops profitable will improve the entire StarMade MP Multiverse of servers substantially. When less experienced merchants can choose to do what I do now and make a profit instead of being forced to subsidize the operation, shops will flourish, components will be plentiful and customers will thrive because playing as a consumer will become viable in direct relation to the viability of playing as a merchant.

Gasboy · Sep 28, 2016

MacThule said:
Tweaking server settings is not relevant to an issue that hurts gameplay on all MP servers. Is there some general usefulness to players of the current vanilla status of credits as worthless and public player shops as unsustainable that I'm overlooking here? Is that somehow helping the game be more fun or grow and retain its player base?

Tweaking the server settings on an MP server CAN and WOULD fix the issue you're having. If the server admin lowers the base prices at which NPC stores buy raw resources, and bumps the prices at which NPC stores sell finished goods, it would fix the problem you're having.

The vanilla settings, no matter what value they are, aren't what everyone wants. They're easily changed and should be.

The default settings are designed for a fresh, brand new, never been seen universe. When there's a huge rush to mine resources near the shops. This rush eventually slows, and changes as the server universe matures. The needs of the players change.

Since Schine cannot guess what level each server "needs", it's left in the hands of the server admin to change the settings as they need.

MacThule · Sep 28, 2016

Gasboy said:
Tweaking the server settings on an MP server CAN and WOULD fix the issue you're having. If the server admin lowers the base prices at which NPC stores buy raw resources, and bumps the prices at which NPC stores sell finished goods, it would fix the problem you're having.

The vanilla settings, no matter what value they are, aren't what everyone wants. They're easily changed and should be.

The default settings are designed for a fresh, brand new, never been seen universe. When there's a huge rush to mine resources near the shops. This rush eventually slows, and changes as the server universe matures. The needs of the players change.

Since Schine cannot guess what level each server "needs", it's left in the hands of the server admin to change the settings as they need.

This is not a problem I am having. This is a problem 100% of players in vanilla servers have, and it is a problem, not a designed outcome. If Schine didn't want functioning player economies they would not be continually releasing new trade features as they have been.

There is no possible scenario where every player shop being unsustainable without subsidy contributes positively to gameplay.

Gasboy · Sep 28, 2016

MacThule said:
This is not a problem I am having. This is a problem 100% of players in vanilla servers have, and it is a problem, not a designed outcome. If Schine didn't want functioning player economies they would not be continually releasing new trade features as they have been.

There is no possible scenario where every player shop being unsustainable without subsidy contributes positively to gameplay.

But it's a problem that's solvable by having the server admin change some settings. Changing the vanilla settings does not guarantee that the server admin would not reset them to the old values.

And it's not a problem that 100% players have, don't pretend to speak for everyone. It's a problem for people who wish to sell finished goods at a profit. Something that is perfectly reasonable in my eyes. But it doesn't require Schine to change anything, talk to your server admins. They can do this, they can make it so that it's not a problem for you.

Lukwan · Sep 28, 2016

MacThule said:
Sorry about the wall of text - this is by far not my most concise proposal :p

Well lots of text does not make a wall. I had no trouble following that and I have had similar observations in MP.

SM seems to have a healthy amount of role-players who try their best to crowbar RP elements into a server even though the tools don't exist yet. Let's give them the tools, starting with a workable economy. The in-game currencies are credits, materials & faction points. So far faction points are not transferable or trade-able so they can't be used to buy things but credits and materials need to have a relationship that encourages player-trade (and may also have to be balanced for BPs if they ever become fill-able with credits).

MacThule · Sep 28, 2016

Gasboy said:
And it's not a problem that 100% players have, don't pretend to speak for everyone. It's a problem for people who wish to sell finished goods at a profit. Something that is perfectly reasonable in my eyes.

I claim to speak for no one.

I'm stating a fact - no one is able to sustainably operate a shop trading anything except minerals without subsidizing it from other activities. The broken economy is problem for 100% of players because credits are inherently worthless to all of us, and the pile of player-owned shop features are basically useless to all of us. Not everyone may be bothered by that, but it's a problem that affects every player whether they know it or not.

Do you seriously believe that Schine's intent is for player shops to be inherently unprofitable and operable only at a loss?

Gasboy · Sep 28, 2016

MacThule said:
I claim to speak for no one.

I'm stating a fact - no one is able to sustainably operate a shop trading anything except minerals without subsidizing it from other activities. The broken economy is problem for 100% of players because credits are inherently worthless to all of us, and the pile of player-owned shop features are basically useless to all of us. Not everyone may be bothered by that, but it's a problem that affects every player whether they know it or not.

Do you seriously believe that Schine's intent is for player shops to be inherently unprofitable and operable only at a loss?

Again, you're assuming that it's an issue for everyone, when it is not. Some folks don't give one whit about producing stuff for profit. They just want a quick injection of credits to get the stuff they can't make, and they'll never touch a store again for any reason because they will have a factory set up and they'll make their own.

And the stores aren't useless to everyone. I don't find them useless at all. But then, I'm not concerned about selling finished products.

But all that aside. Ignore it.

Schine has give everyone the tools to change the vanilla economy. What part of that is not clear? The base prices can be changed.

Have you ever played WoW? Or any MMO with crafting (pretty much all the modern ones)? Materials are guaranteed to be worth much more than the finished product.

It's in WoW. It's in EVE Online. In any player-run economy without harsh controls, base materials are worth more than finished goods.

Probably because people are willing to pay in-game money to not have to spend hours collecting it all themselves. Do you think CCP and Blizzard intend this to happen?

Again. Schine has provided us a way to change server configs and modify the prices of stuff in NPC stores. How is this not getting through?

HolyCookie · Sep 28, 2016

Gasboy said:
But it's a problem that's solvable by having the server admin change some settings. Changing the vanilla settings does not guarantee that the server admin would not reset them to the old values.

Sadly, economy is not that simple. Imagine that IKEA would buy complete furniture, You buy a pack at IKEA, put it together and then sell it to IKEA for profit. That would be the new problem. because shops are endless, People will simply buy all minerals from a shop, process them and sell it to the exact same shop with profit.

The way to fix economy is to remove EVERY single NPC shop. That is the only way. the "trading guild" is an infinite chain of shops spread over the whole galaxy (galaxy was group name for milkyways right?) it means that there are almost infinite credits owned by the trading guild together with almost infinite supplies. removing NPC's is 1 way to fix the illogical economy, it doesn't mean that the economy would be totally repaired though.

MacThule said:
I don't think a "look-what-i-got" economy will be sustainable long-run either. One based on math will be. All players need components. Other players can manufacture and sell those, but only at a loss right now, so only an idiot would (or someone dead-set on playtesting the player economy ;-). Therefore EVERY PLAYER must be an island to himself and his own economic ecosystem, dependent on no one in the end.

You'd think that yes but just take a look at this mobile (and later PC) game with an average of about 50.000 people online at the same time Growtopia: Punch. Build. Grow. it looks a bit silly but once you get a bit further in it, you find that there is an amazing economy, from "farmers" (equivalent to miners) to manufacturers to salesman to builders to celebrities to thieves. The game started off as a 2d building game where you break blocks, get seeds from them (at a % change) and plant those seeds/combine them to grow things like toilets to a tree (yes ikr) when you break a block there is a change to get the block, nothing, a gem or a seed. gems can be used to buy several things including "world locks" they were a way to make sure people couldn't steal your stuff. Now, a few years later, people are using those world locks as currency, even better, the in-game economy is actually suffering from inflation what used to be worth 20 world locks is now 60 world locks. the most traded stuff are accessories. Many of them, like 150 different kinds of accessories. The game has events, things like valatine and sint- Patricks day. in these events you can get stuff that you can't get through the rest of the year. That plus monthly new items drives the whole economy.

Just to show that the "look what I got" economy is actually a thing

PS: I did definitely not spend about 1000 hours on a mobile game.

Lord_Greyscale · Sep 28, 2016

Gasboy said:
Schine has give everyone the tools to change the vanilla economy. What part of that is not clear? The base prices can be changed.

Have you ever played WoW? Or any MMO with crafting (pretty much all the modern ones)? Materials are guaranteed to be worth much more than the finished product.

It's in WoW. It's in EVE Online. In any player-run economy without harsh controls, base materials are worth more than finished goods.

Let's fire off a bit of a side-track.

Armor blocks. how many times have they been changed in the base code?
If "Schine gave you the tools to change it" is a true counter-argument to "vanilla values be wonky", then Schine would have never changed the armor blocks. EVER
(to wit, Armor used to be slightly less armored than it is now, and Hull used to not even have an armor rating. Schine changed it because someone [probably a lot of someones] pointed out that it was broken.)

Vanilla values are incredibly important, largely because not every server is going to implement (or be willing to implement) the changes necessary to have a player-run economy.
(I know I damn well wouldn't, too much effort digging through a poorly organized block-behavior file, and I fucking despise math problems. If I wanted to set up an economy, I'd have been an accountant/economist.)

As to your bit about those MMOs :
The "economy" in those MMOs is intentionally built the way they are, to try and prevent anyone from actually running an economy.
It's known as a "money sink", where the vast majority of the "economy" is designed to strip you of all your gold, in the hopes that you'll then be desperate enough to use REAL money to buy more game-money. (the slightly less shitty version is done that way to try and make the "maxed level" players have the same difficulties as new players, only that never actually works)

TL: DR, you are comparing economies that are intentionally broken, to an economy that appears to be broken by accident/oversight (but which is plainly intended to be working) , and using that comparison to try and keep it broken.

EDIT: partially ninja'd by HolyCookie.

MacThule · Sep 28, 2016

HolyCookie said:
Sadly, economy is not that simple. Imagine that IKEA would buy complete furniture, You buy a pack at IKEA, put it together and then sell it to IKEA for profit. That would be the new problem. because shops are endless, People will simply buy all minerals from a shop, process them and sell it to the exact same shop with profit.

We can already do this with minerals and most players don't even realize it. Most shops still have raw minerals sitting in them at any given time. And let's say players do buy raw from shops and sell refined back to them for profit. This hurts our imaginary NPC shopkeeps, but doesn't hurt gameplay.

As it is, most NPC shops end up buying tens of thousands of one kind of computer system and being broke anyway. So they already get wiped out by player activity (and as noted they really exist to inject liquidity, so this not hurting anything). Removing them as obstacles to player economies does allow them to be wiped out slightly more easily, but it also removes a barrier to a wide variety of gameplay options.

Gasboy said:
Again. Schine has provided us a way to change server configs and modify the prices of stuff in NPC stores. How is this not getting through?

You've said the same thing many times now. Server config can be changed. Everyone knows that. That is completely off topic. At no point was there any question about server config options.

I am alpha-testing this game. I couldn't care less what a particular server admin changes or doesn't change. That affects one server only. My concern is for the overall program, hence the suggestion here regarding a problem the vanilla settings rather than talking to an admin of one of the servers I am on.

Any problem that denies EVERY player a wide variety of intended (based on recently implemented features) gameplay options undermines the growth and sustainability of the player base. This undermines Schine's funding and negatively impacts the entire development of the game. The current vanilla settings for shop prices are not deeply considered final price points based on a complete economic model. They are ad hoc values to make shops be there for now. They were set long before recent changes to the trade system and have not been updated in at least 2 years. They will almost certainly have to change between now and Beta. These ad hoc values need a minor update sooner rather than later though. One which will take an extremely minor amount of work and will substantially expand gameplay options in line with existing features. Vanilla shop prices aren't canon, and they aren't off limits from proposing changes.

Yeah. Believe it or not, I actually suggested exactly what I intended to suggest. Sorry if the suggestion galls you, but you're simply not going to convince me that my suggestion is based on lack of understanding of the game and the ability to modify configuration settings. Deal with it - I'm suggesting a minor, well-informed change to vanilla shop price settings. On purpose.

No one even denies that the economy is broken. Not even you - you just keep saying "but server config!"

It's broken. Let's fix it.

Gasboy · Sep 28, 2016

MacThule said:
We can already do this with minerals and most players don't even realize it. Most shops still have raw minerals sitting in them at any given time. And let's say players do buy raw from shops and sell refined back to them for profit. This hurts our imaginary NPC shopkeeps, but doesn't hurt gameplay.

As it is, most NPC shops end up buying tens of thousands of one kind of computer system and being broke anyway. So they already get wiped out by player activity (and as noted they really exist to inject liquidity, so this not hurting anything). Removing them as obstacles to player economies does allow them to be wiped out slightly more easily, but it also removes a barrier to a wide variety of gameplay options.

You've said the same thing many times now. Server config can be changed. Everyone knows that. That is completely off topic. At no point was there any question about server config options.

I am alpha-testing this game. I couldn't care less what a particular server admin changes or doesn't change. That affects one server only. My concern is for the overall program, hence the suggestion here regarding a problem the vanilla settings rather than talking to an admin of one of the servers I am on.

Any problem that denies EVERY player a wide variety of intended (based on recently implemented features) gameplay options undermines the growth and sustainability of the player base. This undermines Schine's funding and negatively impacts the entire development of the game. The current vanilla settings for shop prices are not deeply considered final price points based on a complete economic model. They are ad hoc values to make shops be there for now. They were set long before recent changes to the trade system and have not been updated in at least 2 years. They will almost certainly have to change between now and Beta. These ad hoc values need a minor update sooner rather than later though. One which will take an extremely minor amount of work and will substantially expand gameplay options in line with existing features. Vanilla shop prices aren't canon, and they aren't off limits from proposing changes.

Yeah. Believe it or not, I actually suggested exactly what I intended to suggest. Sorry if the suggestion galls you, but you're simply not going to convince me that my suggestion is based on lack of understanding of the game and the ability to modify configuration settings. Deal with it - I'm suggesting a minor, well-informed change to vanilla shop price settings. On purpose.

No one even denies that the economy is broken. Not even you - you just keep saying "but server config!"

It's broken. Let's fix it.

And you keep saying "I'm losing money, please fix this thing."

If it's an alpha, you shouldn't even be concerned with credits. Or RP. You should be trying to break the game.

Have you stopped for a moment to consider that the prices may be intentionally borked?

Think about it, you said it yourself, that many people end up producing end products for themselves. If you're alpha testing, shouldn't we be testing the factory systems too? We know the shops work, we know buy and sell works. But every time a new block shows up, you have to make sure it can be properly produced.

And since you yourself admit to being a tester, you can understand them wanting to work on stuff in good time, right?

They've said they are working on NPCs. They've have mention that changes will come to the economy in future. NPCs are a big part of the game, economy included.

I can see them giving us better tools for controlling the economy.

But I'll just end this with a point you're missing.

The base prices for anything isn't their concern. It's a number players can change for themselves. Just like maximum speed, something people have asked for, and we have a config setting we can change. Schine wants the mechanics behind everything to work. The individual numbers don't matter because people can change them. It's that simple.
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Lord_Greyscale said:
Let's fire off a bit of a side-track.

Armor blocks. how many times have they been changed in the base code?
If "Schine gave you the tools to change it" is a true counter-argument to "vanilla values be wonky", then Schine would have never changed the armor blocks. EVER
(to wit, Armor used to be slightly less armored than it is now, and Hull used to not even have an armor rating. Schine changed it because someone [probably a lot of someones] pointed out that it was broken.)

Vanilla values are incredibly important, largely because not every server is going to implement (or be willing to implement) the changes necessary to have a player-run economy.
(I know I damn well wouldn't, too much effort digging through a poorly organized block-behavior file, and I fucking despise math problems. If I wanted to set up an economy, I'd have been an accountant/economist.)

As to your bit about those MMOs :
The "economy" in those MMOs is intentionally built the way they are, to try and prevent anyone from actually running an economy.
It's known as a "money sink", where the vast majority of the "economy" is designed to strip you of all your gold, in the hopes that you'll then be desperate enough to use REAL money to buy more game-money. (the slightly less shitty version is done that way to try and make the "maxed level" players have the same difficulties as new players, only that never actually works)

TL: DR, you are comparing economies that are intentionally broken, to an economy that appears to be broken by accident/oversight (but which is plainly intended to be working) , and using that comparison to try and keep it broken.

EDIT: partially ninja'd by HolyCookie.

The prices are off, but the system itself isn't broken. And the prices could be that way intentionally, so the comparison to WoW and the like is appropriate.

And armor isn't a fair comparison, because we have some control over NPC shops. We'd have to decompile the game in order to figure out how to change armor blocks.
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HolyCookie said:
Sadly, economy is not that simple. Imagine that IKEA would buy complete furniture, You buy a pack at IKEA, put it together and then sell it to IKEA for profit. That would be the new problem. because shops are endless, People will simply buy all minerals from a shop, process them and sell it to the exact same shop with profit.

The way to fix economy is to remove EVERY single NPC shop. That is the only way. the "trading guild" is an infinite chain of shops spread over the whole galaxy (galaxy was group name for milkyways right?) it means that there are almost infinite credits owned by the trading guild together with almost infinite supplies. removing NPC's is 1 way to fix the illogical economy, it doesn't mean that the economy would be totally repaired though.

There are other things you can do so that people don't do that. For instance, if you're a trader with a high end good, and you have 1000 sitting around and not selling, would you buy 20000 more from someone? So having the NPC shop keeper say nope is one way.

Messing with the base prices is just one way.

But you need more flexibilty than that, even. As your universe grows and matures, what people need will change. And the economy has to change to reflect that.

Hopefully we'll see this in future.

As for removing all shops, you'd kill the economy before it could start. No player has enough of anything to support a player driven economy on a server of even small size, not to start.

You'd need some NPC shops as both a spark and to keep playes honest.

Edit: Ugh editing on a phone is horrible.

Control · Sep 29, 2016

I am fairly confident that the entire trading system will see overhaul either with, or shortly after NPCs and Factions.

I 100% agree there is a problem, and to further push the economy testing, a fix needs to happen on the dev end (not just server alteration, which is a bandaid). However, I think the solution is embedded in factions.

Jojomo · Sep 29, 2016

HolyCookie said:
Sadly, economy is not that simple. Imagine that IKEA would buy complete furniture, You buy a pack at IKEA, put it together and then sell it to IKEA for profit. That would be the new problem. because shops are endless, People will simply buy all minerals from a shop, process them and sell it to the exact same shop with profit.

The way to fix economy is to remove EVERY single NPC shop. That is the only way. the "trading guild" is an infinite chain of shops spread over the whole galaxy (galaxy was group name for milkyways right?) it means that there are almost infinite credits owned by the trading guild together with almost infinite supplies. removing NPC's is 1 way to fix the illogical economy, it doesn't mean that the economy would be totally repaired though.

Unlike (perhaps) MacThule, I'm no economist, but wouldn't another fix be to have NPC shops alter their prices as their stock levels change? If you try to sell them something they have high levels of, they'll only offer you a low price?

If "just go to the next shop" becomes the solution to that, how about reducing the density of shops with the distance from the universe centre? There would still be infinite shops, but in effect the economy would behave like there were only a finite number.

Or have shop prices change in response to not only the stock levels in the shop, but also in nearby shops?

splatthecat · Sep 29, 2016

There are some fantastic ideas here that need to be addressed.

I would imagine that, as has been mentioned above, that the trading system will have an update in the near future, especially as addition trade related features have been added in recent updates. Imagine a first person shooter that gives you a gun, a holster, a magazine, silencer, laser sight and a dozen and one add on features but neglects to supply any ammunition to go with it.

Opening up viable play modes such as miners and traders makes perfect sense. A whole economy would evolve around these core functions.

Many of the NPC fleet submissions had some kind of back story such as they are explorers, scavengers, miners, loners, aggressors, etc and being able to play the game in the same manner is vital. On MP, the whole enjoyment of playing with other players is the interaction between them. Trade is as vital a part of StarMade as cannons, missiles and thrusters.

HolyCookie · Sep 29, 2016

Gasboy said:
[doublepost=1475097270][/doublepost]

There are other things you can do so that people don't do that. For instance, if you're a trader with a high end good, and you have 1000 sitting around and not selling, would you buy 20000 more from someone? So having the NPC shop keeper say nope is one way.

Messing with the base prices is just one way.

But you need more flexibilty than that, even. As your universe grows and matures, what people need will change. And the economy has to change to reflect that.

Hopefully we'll see this in future.

As for removing all shops, you'd kill the economy before it could start. No player has enough of anything to support a player driven economy on a server of even small size, not to start.

You'd need some NPC shops as both a spark and to keep playes honest.

Edit: Ugh editing on a phone is horrible.

It is possible and I know that, 100% sure. it would even support warfare and the growth of factions and the size of ships would grow exponentially. Look at that game, that game used to not have any way to create stuff out of thin air, you only had 3 kinds of seeds which you could combine and use the outcomes to combine those and so on. Now it has about 50k people, but it still has those 3 kinds of seeds regularly in trade by mass producers (mass producers use cheap common seeds and combine them to form a commonly used block this progress could take 50 in game hours over the time of 1 month). In that game producing was actual work. This game does it for you, within 5 days a faction can set up enough to be a thread even without shops.

Killing NPC shops forces people to either produce it themselves or trade. What could be added to that is to set up a trade network of shops where you can see what player shops are offering/asking without being there.

about the part "But you need more flexibility than that, even. As your universe grows and matures, what people need will change. And the economy has to change to reflect that." A realistic economy changes by itself, the best we want/could get is an economy that changes by itself and doesn't need constant maintenance by admins/developers.

I do not mean that I would "like" the fact that all NPC shops would be gone. To be honest, I am, as logic engineer, the kind of person that quickly goes to a shop, buys the logic stuff and never returns (cuz I buy a good amount). Many of the things in here that can be interpreted as opinion are just opinions, nothing more but speculation :D

TheWurm · Sep 29, 2016

Gasboy said:
If it's an alpha, you shouldn't even be concerned with credits. Or RP. You should be trying to break the game.

Have you stopped for a moment to consider that the prices may be intentionally borked?

Think about it, you said it yourself, that many people end up producing end products for themselves. If you're alpha testing, shouldn't we be testing the factory systems too? We know the shops work, we know buy and sell works. But every time a new block shows up, you have to make sure it can be properly produced.

OK, this really bugged me to read, because either A) I'm missing something major here ( and I did read your entire post twice) or B) you don't seem to have thought through the implications of this suggestion, which considering the volume of your posts I find difficult to fathom. Either way, if you'll indulge me, I'm going to expound on this for a moment.

I'll start with your basic premise, because I'm an overly pedantic prick.

Premise: every aspect of the game needs to be thoroughly tested.

Now what does it mean to be thoroughly tested? We could say that every possible issue has been explored, but that's difficult to measure. It is much easier to measure how much time has been spent testing the feature. So I'm going to define thoroughly tested as:

Thorough testing: (def) x amount of hours have been spent testing this system, where x is some large number. (Probably 10,000, that's a popular number of hours).

Not a perfect definition, of course, but I'm trying to stay as general as possible.

Now let's make the premise more specific: since all aspects of the game need to be thoroughly tested, and manufacturing is an aspect of the game, manufacturing needs to be thoroughly tested. So far we seem to be in agreement.

Now here's where I think you make a mistaken assumption, though that's only speculation. I'll instead stick with what the OP has said to see if his suggestion as written would keep this testing from happening. SPOILER ALERT: it wouldn't. Like, at all.

The reasons given for this suggestion seem to boil down to this:

MacThule said:
This means that in the long run, it's not worth while specializing for any player, ever. Every player must be all things or eventually hit a wall of non-sustainability. Specialization is non-sustainable.
...........

Players could actually play as miners or traders because it would be worth the while of station owners to pay them for it. Currently paying players to mine is either a loss to the miner or a loss to the merchant.

Or, in other words, players should be allowed to specialize. Now you haven't shown in any of your arguments that the proposed solution wouldn't accomplish this goal, so now we get to the real question: if players could specialize, would it stop manufacturing from being tested? The answer is an emphatic no. Some players may stop testing manufacturing, but only if other players did their manufacturing for them. In fact having a working economy, where goods cost more than their constituent parts, would make manufacturing more worthwhile, since currently the only reason to manufacture your own goods(as opposed to trading raw resources for finished goods at a profit) is because the shops restock too slowly.

The only thing this might keep people from doing is mining (wouldn't that be tragic) but I highly doubt that, since the supply of minerals would be way too slow for most players. If that does become an issue, though, there is a very simple solution: don't sell any raw resources from TG shops.

But since I really doubt that'll ever happen, let's try the price change thing.

P.S. Now that's a wall of text!

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