Fix NPC Shops = Fix The Economy

[Gasboy]

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!

Okay, but answer me this then: If the players or server admin can already fiddle with the prices, why does Schine need to make a change to the vanilla game? 'Cause I've pointed out that it's possible already to do what the OP wants to do with some fiddling with the settings.

Also, the OP suggests that we should be able to make 25% to 30% profit on finished goods. Which means either the finished goods jump in price, or raw resources drop in price.

Okay, fine, but.

As someone else point out, people would buy out the NPC shops of raw resources, and then sell back finished goods for a massive profit. That's kind of not okay.

 

[spaceEngineer]

Okay, but answer me this then: If the players or server admin can already fiddle with the prices, why does Schine need to make a change to the vanilla game? 'Cause I've pointed out that it's possible already to do what the OP wants to do with some fiddling with the settings.

By this logic there should be no default values at all, and leave it all up to the servers to change them. This would very annoying for the servers to design an whole economy. As well as singleplayer would you want to fix the economy of a game before you could play it?

buy out the NPC shops of raw resources, and then sell back finished goods for a massive profit.

I do see the argument here there would definetely need something done about it perhaps lowering the maximum capacity on the manufactured items could work. The player would have to travel to a ton more shops in order to make a reasonable profit.

 

[TheWurm]

Okay, but answer me this then: If the players or server admin can already fiddle with the prices, why does Schine need to make a change to the vanilla game? 'Cause I've pointed out that it's possible already to do what the OP wants to do with some fiddling with the settings.

Also, the OP suggests that we should be able to make 25% to 30% profit on finished goods. Which means either the finished goods jump in price, or raw resources drop in price.

Okay, fine, but.

As someone else point out, people would buy out the NPC shops of raw resources, and then sell back finished goods for a massive profit. That's kind of not okay.

Listen, I think the OP should totally bring this up with their server admin soon so they don't have to wait on Schine, but since it's such a quick fix that appears to have a net positive effect, it wouldn't hurt to have it in the base game. If it actually were more than a line or so of code it might deserve more justification than that, but, well, it's not.

As for the possible exploit... I'm a little torn on that one, it's hard to say without crunching the numbers just how big a deal this would be. I can say that it would take an incredibly dedicated team of griefers to destroy the entire economy, which one could also say of the current situation. My gut says that, while it's a little cheesy, it seems like it would be about as much work as mining, therefore providing an alternative without rendering mining obsolete. Either way, after a certain point you'd be better off buying from players or mining for yourself anyway, since you'd be going through the resources much faster than the guild could restock.

Because if there's one thing I've learned while playing Starmade, it's that there's no such thing as enough.

 

[Jojomo]

As someone else point out, people would buy out the NPC shops of raw resources, and then sell back finished goods for a massive profit. That's kind of not okay.

Perhaps use my variable price idea then: have shops alter prices according to stock levels. If someone tried what you're suggesting they could make a profit for the first X goods they sold (reasonable enough, they did some work), but at some point the shop's buy price would drop below the break-even point, because they're now holding too much stock of the goods in question.

A player could make a profit by being a manufacturer/refiner, but this would place a soft limit on how much/fast they could do it.

 

[Raisinbat]

You're never going to have an economy when everything has fixed value. Trade is based off stuff having different value to different people, why would a miner sell his ores, whats he buying he can't make himself, especially if the manufactured product requires more than he would've gotten just producing his own blocks?

Ores are worth more than manufactured blocks, because ores can be turned into whatever you want, and converting from ore to block takes a miniscule investment in factory blocks. You aren't "adding value" by converting it, because everyone can convert it at zero cost. There's no time investment in the conversion, nor is there any investment in being able to do the conversion, that's why trade doesn't work.

This also applies to mining to some extent, since miners are also super cheap and you can't really specialize them in any way. All minerals are spread evenly around the universe so there's no scarcity/abundance anywhere.

Made a thread on this topic a while back but it never got any response : Read by Council - Factory progression block

 

[Nickizzy]

Woof! Now that was a long read that I skipped after the first five posts. Why don't you people just go and make a server for the original OP's idea? If you don't like it, don't play it. I sure would like that system. It'd also be nice because if it started up with a lot of people knowing at one time, people would be more likely to gang up into larger factions because it would be so much better than going alone.

 

[Jojomo]

You're never going to have an economy when everything has fixed value. Trade is based off stuff having different value to different people, why would a miner sell his ores, whats he buying he can't make himself, especially if the manufactured product requires more than he would've gotten just producing his own blocks?

Ores are worth more than manufactured blocks, because ores can be turned into whatever you want, and converting from ore to block takes a miniscule investment in factory blocks. You aren't "adding value" by converting it, because everyone can convert it at zero cost. There's no time investment in the conversion, nor is there any investment in being able to do the conversion, that's why trade doesn't work.

This is a good point. Converting ores to goods is free and automated, so miners and manufactured goods merchants are never going to be two separate groups, they'll always be one and the same.

Trade will happen between builders wanting to buy components and materials, and miners/merchants as described above. What will miners do with credits?
I guess NPC shops really are vital to the economy, at least in the early stages.

This also applies to mining to some extent, since miners are also super cheap and you can't really specialize them in any way. All minerals are spread evenly around the universe so there's no scarcity/abundance anywhere.

Yes, a non-homogeneous distribution would be nice.

As well as creating price differences in different regions, it would create new roles for players like caravan drivers, and caravan escorts.

 

[MacThule]

This suggestion is not about what variables *I* personally want to play under in a server; I play on 3 different servers right now and have played on over a dozen over the past two years. They're all slightly different and I like that.

This suggestion is not about how many pretend credits one pretend toon one player on one server has.

If it was, I wouldn't be dumping billions of credits each and every week into subsidizing a shop within limping distance of spawn (hell if I needed setting changes to make money I wouldn't have billions to invest every week in the first place). I wouldn't be handing out free ships to everyone who asks for one regardless of faction. If it was I'd be keeping it all for myself. Or to be more precise, I wouldn't bother with worthless, broken credits (as I don't in most other servers) because my mining ship with the 50K-block salvage array melts enough material in an hour to supply me for days of building and testing. I certainly wouldn't have spent days building a giant public docking array and public factories in attractive packaging or even attempt to finagle sustained viability out of the PUBLIC faction option.

Brieries is just where I have been testing player shops, public factions, and the trade & social metas of this game (having "tested" manufacturing for hundreds of hours now over 2 years and being well satisfied that factories generally work as intended. as do cannon, salvagers, scanners, thrusters, and basically everything except player shops). The most recent in a series of test grounds, actually. Personally, I'm all about that PvP... but there isn't enough organic PvP in MP for my taste. There are never enough players, and those that are camp their HBs 90% of the time. Starmade has more potential than any game I've seen in almost 3 decades of gaming. It's almost the only thing I play anymore. It's failing to realize its potential though because of major shortcomings in terms of accommodating new players, and there are ways to fix this without at all curbing the scope and complexity that give Starmade its robust character.

When all players must be all things to themselves in order to survive in the game and cannot sustainably specialize, every new player is being forced to take the entire massive learning curve for this game on the nose within hours of spawning in for the first time. It's not viable (in MP) to simply spawn in and spend a few hours flying, getting used to how ships and our byzantine map system work; you'll end up shot down and back at 2 2 2 broke and inviable, forced to make a whole new character (kiss any emotional attachment this player had 'goodbye' at this point) to try again, still with very little clue as to what to do (certainly not start a shop, be a miner, or take up trading/exploration, because those are all broken except as chatroom RP conceits). Do this to most new players a few times and they are done for good.

This suggestion is about Starmade's overall MP player base. It's about the game's social meta (which is heavily derived from its economic meta).

It's about looking at the MP server list and seeing more than 100-150 players combined from all servers online during peak hours.

Currently the Starmade MP experience for completely new players must often feel a bit like "OK, this game is super-complex, and you have to learn a little about all of it before you can effectively do any of it... but at least once you kind of get the hang of it you can't be a miner, trader/explorer, pirate, pirate-hunter, mercenary, merchant or industrialist so just found an "empire," spawn a station, HB it, and hunker down for the long campout. Someone will be along shortly either to troll you or insist that you follow them around looking at every cubic voxel of their decorative Star Trek/Wars ship replica. Welcome to Starmade Multiplayer!"

Money I have. Resources I have. These are gotten on any server in very short amounts of time - by a veteran player - and there is nothing anywhere in this suggestion about making resources easier to get in general (in fact I'd readily support reduced mining bonuses). I've spent my resources all, for months, on social experiments, the results of which indicate that many times more first-time Starmade players stay longer and are more likely to remain in the game long-term when they can quickly and easily access useful facilities on their first spawn (not just a creepy, robotic stick-shop drifting in the middle of nowhere), safe docking, attractive surroundings, and a reliable source of income from mining and/or trading.

This result could be achieved through automation and implementing a better spawn shop, but why?

Why, when Schine has already invested so many of their man-hours into coding player-based trade features and player-owned shops and clearly wants the galactic economies of servers to generally be player inclusive, not player exclusive?

There are players out there who would not only provide new players this access to facilities and work, but would enjoy doing it if it didn't mean a career of grinding just to prevent new players from being instantly overwhelmed and quitting. Insisting on retaining an incidentally broken economy is literally telling every potential new Starmade player who might want to play a specialist role in MP that this is not the game for them.

Want to play as a miner? No one can afford to buy your wares.

Want to play as a trader, and explore new systems seeking new shops and markets? NPC shops are all cleaned out of credits by computer dumping and Player shops are broken - don't bother.

Want to be a pirate? There's no one mining or trading for you to hunt other than a handful of veteran players in titanic "miners" that rival the firepower and durability of a super star destroyer.

Want to hunt pirates? Nope - no pirates to hunt.

What makes this a frakking tragedy is that ALL the functionality for these specializations has already been implemented. Schine has already coded the support for specialized player roles, but the NPC shops (which were originally implemented to improve easy access to small amounts of materials to ease player startup) are currently breaking the economy and thereby breaking all potential for specialization and actually hurting player startup in most MP servers where said NPC shops are typically cleaned of credits by veteran computer dumping (an exploit which doesn't work well at player-run shops, BTW, since the computer sell prices can now be set 1/100th of their market values to prevent it).

Currency in the real world exists to liquefy value for easier exchanges. A currency that deters exchange by overtly sinking value has no purpose. Starmade currency is a dunsail, as is every game feature based on it, Even systems like jump inhibitors are damaged by this farce of an economy, since these are essentially pirate gear and piracy cannot exist without a functioning economy upon which to prey.

Without currency, without exchange, without markets, without the potential for specialization and interdependence, there is no foundation for social complexity in Starmade beyond the level of a loose collection of small private teams of non-casual players sharing a chatroom and occasionally occasionally engaging in ritualized combat or flower wars. I think it's a damn shame. Dozens of new players visit every major MP server each day, and 90% of them are simply overwhelmed and drop the game like it's hot. Some of the remainder struggle on for a few days or a week or two before giving up in frustration. This is not a foregone outcome if we invest even a fraction of our attention to the social and economic metas of Starmade MP.

Variable shop prices determined by stock levels and market values would be great, as would several of the other suggestions for fixing the economy. My suggestion requires no coding. It requires less than 5 total minutes of Schine's time, and until they decide to invest in more far-reaching changes to the market, it would go a long ways towards fixing the interim economic meta. If you want a working economy and agree that ending the NPC shop credit sink would improve the game, please support this suggestion for now, and suggest other improvements that require code-changes in their own suggestion threads

Many people are afraid of any change - no matter how positive. Still... I've yet to read what the downside of my suggestion could be in game terms. Fixing the economy would only help Starmade's social meta and this entire community. There is no imbalance, no damage, no loss.

Personally, I want to see Starmade grow. Most players here do. I also want to continue to explore the social meta and make suggestions for improvement based on my experiences. I know the Schine team wants to see value (preferably in the form of currency:D) for their work as well. Therefore I think that - somehow (whether by simply lowering ore/shard prices next update, or by re-pricing the entire finished goods side of the economy or completely re-working/eliminating NPC shops; I am not attached to means in this matter, only to ends) - fixing the economy to make player-run shops profitable and sustainable without a subsidy grind so that shop owners can also enjoy their play time while continuing to engage in behavior that improves the game for an entire server (i.e. offering goods to the public and buying resources) instead of outright punishing public service is a fantastic little idea that will improve gameplay for all and has great potential to improve total Starmade player numbers over time by improving the experience of new joins and offering a broader scope of potential careers to players.

This suggestion does not even relate to the topic of server-specific settings, as its scope includes every Starmade MP server that makes up the Starmade MP Multiverse. Just like the slew of suggestions about fixing vanilla armor values before that happened.

 

[Madman198237]

I'm just gonna rate that complex yet well-thought-out post informative and put the agree right here.
Good job, you've successfully tested a clearly damaged and damaging mechanic that most people would much rather (and some do) just shoot repeatedly with a Death Star III (Yes, you all know exactly what I'm talking about). Destroying the laws of physics and broken shop system, all at one go!

But seriously, good job.

 

[<SCRIPTKITTY>]

I say we just need to (slowly) get rid of the npc shops, and let players figure it out. That way there will be competition and a market. The value of minerals and materials will be entirely up to players and so everything will be worth what people are willing to pay.

This idea does come with the condition however that In order for player based economy to work there must be
0) balanced npc shops
1) plenty of trade nodes. - check out GenXNova, plenty
2) a rework of the recipes - more advanced blocks need to require more advanced recipes, this will make certain blocks and the resources to create them valuable because they are more useful TO PLAYERS and not because some npc says that they are.
3) a startup that works. - The only problem I can see with removing npc shops all together is in order to have an economy you have to have people willing to fuel it, when a server starts and there is no economy, you need players that want to be miners, merchants and manufacturers. The problem being, If you have no way to spend money why would you spend time earning it. I PRESENT A SOLUTION : Allow players to buy out npc shops and use them for their own profit. If players can build up their own wealth enough through mining and manufacturing and selling items to BALANCED npc shops and then buy the shop out (for a large sum of credits) then npc shops would slowly fade out and people could go on being as capitalist as they like.

 

[Raisinbat]

Allow players to buy out npc shops and use them for their own profit. If players can build up their own wealth enough through mining and manufacturing and selling items to BALANCED npc shops and then buy the shop out (for a large sum of credits) then npc shops would slowly fade out and people could go on being as capitalist as they like.

Could allow shops only in owned systems, and only 1 per system.

 

[<SCRIPTKITTY>]

Could allow shops only in owned systems, and only 1 per system.

That could give people a reason to expand, I like it