Hello everyone,
I’m sure everybody already knows for months that the Black Market is broken as is the economic system on HWS.
I spent sometimes reading old posts about it on the forum and it seems that things are even getting worse than before.
Right know on Blackmarket, any ore, ingot, pentaxid or fuel can be found for 1-3 credits each.
We’ve reach a point where there is not enough demand (even with daily new players on the server) and where we can’t even sell cheaper. who would like to sell 10k iron for 10k credits?)
You can know easily buy 20k iron for 40k credits, and it would be ok if this was just about iron, but this also concerns every other kind of ores.
None of them is “rare” anymore.
The only expensive things on market are epic weapons (but prices are getting lower everyday) and alien containers (here it seems the prices are more or less stable for weeks).
i don’t have any nice suggestion to unstuck the economy, maybe there are too much rich factions and people, too much meteorites and autominers core, too much epic weapons in Poi and not enough “unique item” with modified stats (like epic weapons with a little bigger ranger, a bigger magazine…) but i just wanted to give my feedback about it.
I agree, the market is totally broken. There is atm no need for people playing traders. The amount of ressources on the PVE-Planets is too high and nobody needs to buy something, because everybody has enough through the autominer-devices. Without any request on the market, the prices fall and fall.
Many players are living only in pve because there are huge amounts of deposits and meteorites and is absolutely safe.
I understand the fact that people don’t want to play in pvp areas (even if on that server it’s never a problem to loose 5 sv/day because you can always get tons of ores back in a few hours…) but at least, ore deposits and meteorites spawning in these areas should be reduced to minimum, and maybe there should be lots of hostile mobs.
That way, playing in pve areas would be harder and more competitive and that would make more people coming in pvp areas to find precious ores.
Honestly, Market has been trashed since version 5 with the local market stations. Prior to that, it was incredibly profitable to monitor the market, and to buy and sell items. Downside: you could collect from anywhere, so it was exceedingly easy to use it to send supplies at no risk to factionmates. The Want section of the market never recovered from this change. Who wants to place an order for a material on the off chance it can be filled in a day or three, when you can just go gather it yourself in far less time? As for the blackmarket, I would love to see it be used heavily, but honestly what you are describing, with incredibly cheap items not being sold, has been the case since I started on HWS.
In terms of “fixing the economy” however, it has nothing to do with scarcity, or too many rich people, or anything mentioned here, really. What is required is for people to use it. If you want something, post an order ( WITH A REASONABLE PRICE). Enough people post orders, people will turn attention to the market again, and stock them, as well as place new sale orders while they are there.
Personal gripe/theory here:
Empyrion has autominers. This means that any tweaking you might do to raise the value of ores, would only result in people hoarding them even more. Additionally, Increasing ore saturation means no one wants to buy. A fix for this, long term, would be to have only cobalt, copper, and iron as automine-able, and the rest requiring manual mining. There is a reason Gold sells, despite it’s only use being to stash value for later. It is because other than the HWS autominer, there is no automatic way to gather it. Make it profitable again, and necessary, to mine sathium, neodymium, zascosium, promethium, Magnesium, and erestrum, and you will see a lot more involvment in the in game mining and selling, rather than the ocassional visits to deposits to pick up zero risk, and little cost materials.
I know and as said yesterday: we will tackle it for HWS 7. I have already some big ideas regarding this.
One good way is to play more with players interest for buying things but the whole universe will adapt to it also.
However full OCDs etc. is something that needs to get sorted in another way.
Like in real world: once someone is rich and become richer and richer because of that there are few things only which can make him poor again. Well mostly things which he won’t like.
Let’s see. The focus till season II is somewhere else though.
I think it is important not to nerf the value of “richer” players too much though -
as wealthily individuals are needed in any economy to buy from those who spend time creating products to sell
The ability to become wealthy over time is a unique game mechanic of HWS that provides long term player engagement.
By wealth I mean all materials as well as cash.
But I do agree that if supply of goods/mats/gold starts to become constrained, then prices and demand will rise causing wealth to flow from the long term players to the more enterprising players - giving the opportunity for newer players and traders in general to accumulate via trade. In the latest version of the universe, I think we can see the RexXxus has already started to restrict the supply of mats to a certain degree.
The new RP purchase mechanic, as just implemented, is also a good idea as this takes away some of the game mechanic benefit/advantage from the wealthy - but does not impact the goods trading market. I imagine that more of this type of balancing in the future may be very helpful.
As for all the people worried about overfull OCD’s, how does it impact even the newest player on Empyrion? That is the whole DRAW of OCD. The cross wipe accumulation of resources. As long as the resources were accumulated legitimately, using accepted in game practices, why would it be a priority to wipe OCD’s to bring people closer to poor or give people an even footing. The thing people dont understand is that someone who has a large amount of materials in OCD does not magically have access to materials that other players do not. If, for example, they sell materials for cheaper because they have so much, good for them! But as long as more materials go out than in, they will run out eventually, and then be back on same footing as new players, in terms of stockpiles. In my experience and observation, in terms of trade atleast, a motivated player or group of players can make just as much money on their first season in HWS, as on their 3rd or 4th, all things being equal in terms of universe resources. This of course is not even remotely referencing bank account interest. This is a whole different animal from the OCD issue, and both were solved, in my opinion, quite cleanly by the limits set by admins. Bank accounts get wiped down to, at most, 70 million. OCD slots cannot have more than a set amount pushed to them now. Yes, legacy players and hws veterans most likely will have a few slots of more than 50k. Or more than a few. But the point is: its a finite amount. It can only benefit them once, when they pull out of these slots to sell or use it. And I will restate, this is not magical ore just thought into existance at the beginning of a season, making some players richer than others. It is time and effort, a whole lot of it, exerted at a previous date, being stored until the current season in the thing that really and truly sets HWS above and beyond other servers. If you really want to see what a server is like where all players are on an “even footing”, I suggest checking other servers without OCD. After wipe, all players start with near nothing. But guess what, there is still a distinction between noobs and players that put the time and effort into the game.
Bit of a rant, I apologize, but it always bugs me when people try and say an ocd wipe is the solution to literally anything.
oh and as to this:
There is a very specific reason for this. The things that get cheaper and cheaper as the season goes on are the things that cannot be stored in the average player’s OCD. This is the natural ebb and flow of the market in a season. People who plan ahead offload the supplies that will be wiped while they can still get some money for them. This flood, generally starting about a month before the wipe, tends to bring prices down lower and lower as each player tries to outbid, to offload epics, am cores, etc.
Rare containers cannot be stored in OCD, and are immediate use items. You will see a dropoff of sales of those as well, but far later in the season than the price reduction on epics.
Good point. OCD wipe and the overall attitude that rich people are rich and somebody must stop it is wrong. Or let me say: maybe it was our fault to implement some real life economy into HWS but so be it. New player have also a chance to get rich, and everyone who is now soooo rich and shiny and strong and bored and bla bla bla started also poor.
Regarding this I would like to see some feedback soon about EGS Star. Check it out and you will know what I mean…
Re the RP purchase - agreed in itself it is of little consequence, but the general approach of systems which level the field for game mechanics that are separate to the sales of good and services market, I feel is to be welcomed and expanded upon.
Re the OCD I agree with you, it is currently restricted/balanced enough and a wipe of OCD would be a massive disincentive to players and long term play in general.