Plans for an actual economy?

[Harbingerxy]

I wish was wondering if there are plans to make an actual viable economy in this game, or if it's gonna be a simple "build as big as possible ship and pew pew" kind of game. Right now, it's way too easy to earn money, but I don't know whether that is because of the alpha, or if that is the intent.

 

[Nootau]

This is a competitive online game. People will grind. Groups will form with similar mind sets. Tasks will be assigned for who shall grind and mine, who shall build ships and who shall fly them into combat to kill other people JUST to salvage their ships and bring back the \'booty\'. Once this becomes more difficult, the more this will become evident. Right now PvP is for fun as money, materials and other resources are easy to collect in mass. Once that ends, people will start seeing other pilots not just a neighbors but as sacks of loot.

 

[Harbingerxy]

can\'t wait till that happens. Right now it kinda sucks that everyone can afford a mega deathstar.

 

[Florrible]

From what I heard from the CoopY interview, trading with other players will become important in future as well

 

[JonasWalker]

While true to some extent not all of the player base will likely care for or about any PvP elements. Personally I have a general dislike of it and will likely stick to servers where it isn\'t the main focus.

 

[Archer6621]

People on our server are already trading stuff because of the usually low stocks at shops, which might be an unintended but positive side-effect of having shops low on stock by default.

Some folks want to build huge ships, but would have to hop from shop to shop to get the goods. Instead of doing that, trading with people that have the stuff seems more viable for em.

 

[Winterhome]

Fix the factories so you can choose your product and it tells you what you need to make it.

Then fix the economy so that making massive ships is incredibly expensive, and scrap can\'t quite handle the cost alone.

 

[JackPJ]

The problem with the economy is that there is no way it can be balanced with the current setup.

Just some of the many exploits that are a problem to server owners when trying to balance an economy are:

- Buying/selling the most expensive item in a shop:

When you first join a server, you just find the most expensive item in the shop, check the nearest 3 shops for its prices. The price difference will nearly always be 100% between one of the shops and another shop within a 3 sector range. Once you work out which 2 shops have the biggest price difference, buy and selll the item between the shops multiple times. Within an hour on pretty much ANY server, you will have 500+ mil.

- BluePrint abuse.

Another massive exploit with dynamic economy servers is that blueprint prices are based of the BASE cost of a part. Therefor, if you save a blueprint of say 10 items that have a base cost of 10,000, with a total cost of 100,000. You can just dismantle the ship once you purchased it and instantly sell it to the nearest shop that will purchase each part for 50% more than you paid because they are low in stock.



- Further BluePint abuse.

Rare Items aren\'t rare when a player can simply duplicate them useing blueprints... Found a nice L5 ore that will make you tonnes of money once refined? Just duplicate it using blueprints 50 times.

- Building block abuse.

Mining with salvage lazers is pointless while people can stick a build block on a planet, dump down three lines of syemtry, and use the 10x10x10 delete block to delete 8,000 blocks a click, as fast as they can click then go mass sell the ores for $$$$$.



The game needs a LOT of work done before ANY server can have a balanced un-exploitable economy.

 

[KevinGelking]

[Am I a necromancer?]

I just got into StarMade through a friend yesterday and ended up playing it till 4AM, I do agree, from the little experience I have, that earning money is currently too easy...

When I first started out I had my tiny little ship, went to nearby asteroids, mined a bit, sold what I had, and kept upgrading my ship step by step which was fun (until pirates came and camped spawn). I then watched the \"Episode Tutorials\" and noticed \"f*ck ores, just find a space station and you\'re a billionaire\"... so I did that and I am indeed a billionaire within a few minutes :\\

I think that Hull/Glass blocks etc shouldn\'t be able to be sold (but rather can be farmed to make production costs of own ships cheaper as you get them for free), and if they get sold, they should be worth much less. What this would do is give ores and mining some meaning again and allow for slower, more steady player advancement and enduring, challenging gameplay.

As for the \"Buy Ship, breakdown and sell\" as seen above, it IS possible now to pay ships in blocks rather than credits which can be enabled in the server settings. You can use your \"valuable\" credits on buying the blocks to buy the ship ... or you could farm for free materials from stations/other ships to buy it.

To finish off - I do think that the economy system is, at this moment, so easily exploitable that it takes all non-PVP challenge out of the game... :s

 

[Trollerbobman]

Thou shalt not necropost, thy dark necromancer!

:P

 

[Sortin]

It\'s a valid discussion, as the game hasn\'t changed that much since the original post. I haven\'t played much since around that time of the post, and the default economy has not changed a lot since then.

However, as was mentioned, there is now a way to require blocks instead of cash to buy a ship. That was a much-needed addition in my opinion. It diminished the value of cash, and put it back on blocks.

I think overall, there definitely needs to be a general plan for how the economy would function upon release. However, at this stage, getting the economy balanced is not, and shouldn\'t be a priority. Any change to the game is going to affect the economy in some way, so working it out with every change would be a waste of time.

Your best bet is to search for a server that has modified from the default settings in a way that you like, or think you will like, and then try that server out. Right now, don\'t expect the game to simulate an economy- play it for building ships and flying around, etc.

 

[fstratzero]

Just make a resource action house (either as a new block, or apart of the shop menu which would be server wide), that should be easy implemenatation

 

[Capt Scragg]

If you are tired of anyone being able to build massive ships and you want a harder experiance then try Windoom.com and their server. Their economy is block based and if you want to spawn a ship then you need to have ALL the blocks needed to build it. Hardcore server very fun. Try it out and see

 

[Stakhanov]

As far as I know , no server features both death drops , custom prices , local block blueprints , disabled build blocks and cubatom recipes. Each has severe loopholes to take advantage of.

On top of that , there\'s no option to remove shop price variance. Harvesting neutral stations for power blocks also constitutes a silly shortcut that never should have been allowed.

Player interaction is fairly meaningless overall. There is not much resistance to any kind of goal without restricting yourself with harsh rules.

 

[Ultraviolet Dugong]

People just play it that way. There\'s no reason it can\'t be played purely cooperatively. One could start up a server with really strong pirates and put all the players in one big faction; then it\'s entirely PvE.

More to the point, it\'s an odd feature of internet culture (and, perhaps, human nature) to want to pidgeonhole multiplayer games into being competitive whenever possible. Maybe it\'s just me getting older, but the idea of optimizing gameplay to the singular, miserable, bleeding edge to get an upper hand on a faceless opponent just doesn\'t appeal to me anymore. That\'s kind of why sandbox games and strategy games with many viable options really interest me; I have more options than \"play exactly this way or loose\".

 

[Comr4de]

the /vg/ server had/has all of those



the issue is that updating via FTP is such a gigantic pain in the ass that none of the admins have bothered to do it.

 

[JakeT]

In relation,the Federal Reserve launched its latest Beige Book study this week. It showed only modest growth of the economy for the six weeks of July and the early part of August. Employers had little incentive to give raises, although hiring was up slightly and inflation was tame. If you need help paying for things while waiting for that raise, get a payday loan.

 

[HadrasVorshoth]

Economies naturally form out of any group of people with items to trade, so long as it\'s relatively easy to trade. I\'ve been trying in recent years to make a cross-game trading network (by the purchasing and selling of game assets allowing players to use wealth in one game to procure wealth in another), and one thing I\'ve learnt in the process of attempting is that if a barrier to entry into a market is low, like, being in the same game, then people will right off the bat trade. Minecraft showed this: how many servers had their own defacto currency long before Emeralds came in?

The only issues Starmade has really with economies is:

1. High Quantity, Low Demand: It\'s relatively easy to gain most items. This means that nobody really has any incentive to trade in most servers, and prices need to be heavily depressed to the point of near-loss compared to effort to be able to successfully gain customers. Generally. There are servers that make things sufficiently trickier or have something about them that increases demand that thus makes it a bit more of a competitive market.
2. Dropping items at each other is not the best way to trade items, really, due to the possibility of loss, people sneakily running past and taking it all, sudden dinosaur robot attack, etc. We probably need a trade GUI with either player having a limited trade inventory they can offer items into for other people to trade with.

 

[Ithirahad]

More to the point, it\'s an odd feature of internet culture (and, perhaps, human nature) to want to pidgeonhole multiplayer games into being competitive whenever possible. Maybe it\'s just me getting older, but the idea of optimizing gameplay to the singular, miserable, bleeding edge to get an upper hand on a faceless opponent just doesn\'t appeal to me anymore. That\'s kind of why sandbox games and strategy games with many viable options really interest me; I have more options than \"play exactly this way or loose\".


So sad; so true, and why Starmade has a chance of becoming one of the few games I actually enjoy, once problems like the economy are fixed.