HWS Economy Update and Feedback

[h1myname1sdav1d]

Hello HWS Players!

As you may have gathered from some hints RexXxuS has dropped in some forum comments, the HWS Economy is going to be going through some changes in the near future. I am really excited about these changes and feel that if we get them right, that HWS will be an even more interesting universe to try to survive and prosper in. I wanted to take some time to talk about the changes and make sure that the community can help us get this right by giving us your feedback before all of the changes are implemented. Of course with all things, we will need to try stuff out and make adjustments as we go so please bear with us as we make these changes over the coming weeks and months. Please take some time to read this thread and give us your thoughts.

The Economy’s Purpose
When thinking about the job the economy of the game has, I want to reiterate that Empyrion and HWS is meant to be a survival PVE building game with PVP. We are not trying to make an economy simulator. The economy of HWS should support gameplay and encourage participation in what the game has to offer. One thing I have been concerned about is unintended methods for abusing features in the economy to get an advantage. For example, before the recent NPC trader pricing and volume adjustments, it was possible to spend $490,000 and end up with $47,000,000 worth of materials. Things like this remove any motivation for a player to mine, raid POIs, or participate in PVP and we saw players listing millions of items that came from deconstructors rather than any other source which is not the intention of our economic features. One of the most important goals in changing the economy is to ensure players are motivated to go out and play the game and in return, get a fair reward.

Dynamic Pricing
As Rex mentioned already, dynamic pricing is coming! This means that the price of goods in NPC Trader packages and Racom trader goods will fluctuate and adjust based on HWS market transactions. The math for this will be a closely guarded secret to prevent abuse but hopefully this feature will bring fair pricing to everything in the game. This feature has been asked for by players as far back as 2016 and I am really excited to see it implemented. A huge thanks to @Hayawen is due for the work to make this real.

A Question of Balance
As dynamic pricing is implemented, the next step for me will be thinking about balancing the rewards the game gives across the paths a player could take. For one, I want to make sure there is a valid path to wealth in both a PVE and PVP players’ progression. I also want to balance the game according to risk and reward/effort a player goes through. In starting to think about these things I have some questions for the community I’d like your input on. I can’t promise this is the direction we’ll end up going and even if we do, I can’t promise we’ll do everything as voted on, but the community input here will be very helpful in guiding this process.

Risk vs Reward

I am thinking of mapping the in game rewards in PVE and PVP activities across a scale of Easy, Medium, and Hard. Easy would be low risk (or easy to accomplish) and low reward and Hard would be the very risky (or very difficult) and most rewarding. Does balancing using an Easy Medium Hard scale make sense?

I broke this poll on accident. It had 70 votes and 90% were Yes for Easy Medium Hard.

Player Time
Assuming a player of average skill is attempting to make money at an average (medium) difficulty task. At today’s value, how much money should they make after 1 hour of effort?

• Under 10,000
• Between 10,000 and 50,000
• Between 50,000 and 100,000
• Between 100,000 and 500,000
• Between 500,000 and 1,000,000
• Between 1,000,000 and 5,000,000
• Between 5,000,000 and 10,000,000
• Over 10,000,000

PvE
Please pick the statement you agree with most

• Today’s POIs offer good value and the right items for the effort
• Today’s POIs offer a fair value but the wrong items
• Today’s POIs offer too much reward for the effort
• Today’s POIs do not offer good rewards for the effort

Mining
I am wondering if mining is something that a player should do to get going and from time to time as needed or if dedicated mining could be a valid path to wealth. Please pick the statement you agree with most.

• Dedicated selling of ores should be a path to wealth
• Ore should provide the resources needed to do something else to get wealthy

Manufacturing
Should players who take raw materials and transform them into final products have help making money on that process from the in-game economy or should the price of final products be closely tied to the cost of the materials?

• Yes, help manufacturing
• Don’t do anything special to help manufacturing, let the HWS market dictate pricing.

Economic Events
With dynamic pricing in effect, it would be possible for us to do server-wide economic events. For example, we could declare “The Zirax are going to war and need Iron” and adjust the dynamic pricing of Iron in the server to be more valuable, meaning players would be encouraged to mine and sell Iron to make a profit and the cost of items containing iron that the server sells would artificially inflate. This would last for a short period of time and then change.

• Let’s try economic events
• Don’t do economic events

PvP
Part of the fun of PvP is simply doing it. Players who want to fight and compete don’t nessecarily need an economic reward for doing it, which we understand. With that in mind, PvP should still provide an economic reward especially for factions who are working together. However, my questions for PvP will come later since balancing for PvP includes other changes.

NPC Traders
Player paid NPC traders have been a bit tricky. I’ve noticed a couple of different uses for them and a couple of ways they have been abused. I’m wondering what we think their purpose should be.

PICK ALL THAT APPLY:

• Other than dynamic pricing, don’t touch NPC traders
• NPC Traders should be for “In the moment” packs like a pack of SV Ammo for a single fight.
• NPC Traders should be for basic goods like ores, medicines, food, fuel.
• Its ok if an NPC Trader contains more of a single item than an individual player could use in a season.
• NPC Traders should be for advanced components like XL Thrusters and T2 Generators

I have wondered if we should ban advanced components like BA Artillery, XL Thrusters and T2 Generators. Since they are so densely packed with resources, will it give an unfair advantage to wealthy players once dynamic pricing is implemented or have they earned it? Also, does it take away from players who could provide these components on the player market? Do NPC Trader packs like these make PvP too easy to do?

• Ban advanced components
• Keep advanced components

Other Comments?
Leave me your thoughts below. After we balance income in the game, we’ll be able to do additional tuning which I’m looking forward to diving into after all this.

Note: I have not commented on inflation or the money drain issue. My first set of goals is to have an underlying system that we operate the economy on. From there we will learn how to manage it.

[Wiseman738]

Hey David.

I’m glad to hear that the economy is going to undergo an overhaul. But I’m going to just state that we need to be careful not to alienate current players and many don’t visit the forum so perhaps @RexXxuS could make an in game server message pointing people to this thread? I think that’s really important. Otherwise you’ll just end up with the vocal minority (ME! )!

Time to explain my voting choices:

Risk Vs Reward

1. The easy/medium/hard scale makes sense in my mind. E.G GG is a PVP ‘Hard/Very Hard’ area and therefore should have the highest element of reward. Moreover I believe that PVP planets in general should be more profitable than PVE planets otherwise we risk undermining the ‘pull’ factors that encourage PVP.

Player Time
2. For an average job I’d say either between 100 and 500k or between 500 and 1000K. I imagine this as making something like Combat Steel blocks from refining sathium and iron.

PVE POI
3. I haven’t voted on POIs as I dislike POIs in this game in general. I leave that vote to the more experienced POI hunters.

ORE Sales
4. The selling of ores in BULK should provide a reasonable amount of money in the long run.

Manufacturing
5. In terms of manufacturing I’d let HWS market dictate the prices here, I don’t think someone should be rewarded to heavily for simply putting these resources in a constructor.

Economic Events-BIG YES HERE!
6. Economic events sound like a FANTASTIC idea. This will stimulate the economy and provide an interesting series of dynamic pricing! . For this I vote YES YES YES. I always thought we could also do things like we had a long time ago where one particular type of resource in the OCD (e.g Fuel/Pentaxid) goes BANG (people get some compensation of course) and as a result it makes this resource ultra high value at the beginning of the game. (Whoops! Didn’t realise the poll was public, not meaning to shame anyone here, perhaps the polls can be made private or so only you can see who voted for what? I don’t mind public votes but it tends to make some people uncomfortable).

This happened before when Rexxus wiped Zasc/Erestrum ores and it made them ultra rare and very valuable for the first couple of weeks. So I’m absolutely behind this completely. Let’s DO IT!

NPC Traders
7. NPC Traders have for a long time been quite broken, and they’ve been getting less and less broken with each improvement which is a good thing. But I’d be careful in ‘nerfing’ them too much, they are very useful but they probably need to have some stricter limits in the sheer amount you can put in each ‘package’.

That said, keep advanced components.

Overall I’m very optimistic david! I’m glad that Rex has you and Hayawen to improve HWS!

People must justify their votes…
I’ll end this post by saying please do also keep an eye on the comments and not just the voting. I think it’s important that people can actually justify their votes so we don’t end up with a HWS Brexit

Also If you ever start looking at the universe structure and individual planets economic use then please let me know. I’d love to start a discussiong for how the HWS Universe structure can help define the economic value of resources.

Best regards and good luck!
Wise.

[DarthMyrten]

@h1myname1sdav1d

HWS is meant to be a survival PVE building game with PVP .

That’s the problem - I’d argue that many people like me don’t actually want survival beyond early game, because survival is fun at start but after few weeks it gets boring and it’s not what keeps people playing. Going back into ‘survival direction’ by making economy harder would alienate a lot of people.

As for NPC traders I disagree they were broken, they were a way of spending their RP for ppl who no longer planned any OCD upgrades for a season.

[Hayawen]

who’s voting 1m/hour max?
that means 700hrs of gameplay to get ocd 7… u loca?

[Snowman]

Mining
The only thing that you should mine to get wealthy is gold or else what is the use of having a planet made out of gold?

Manufacturing
The manufacturing has the potential to be abused if it is ‘helped’. Even so the options here were not clear so there for let the market dictate them for now.

Economic events
Worst. Idea. Ever. The last economic event was the carbon blocks and that was ridiculous. Then take into consideration if someone decides to put the effort into storing some items for next season so that don’t have to worry about them and can focus on other items, then poof an economic event happens and you get compensated a bare pittance for the hard work you have done, no thanx. Nor could you do items such as iron due to the donor planets having deposits that are abused.

NPC Traders
The npc traders need a complete work over but if you can buy finished products such as fuel meds and gens why are ores being sold so that people don’t have to mine them? This and the deconstructor abuse has ruined the economy in the game.

Adv Components
Keep them but police them heavily, maybe a advanced component tax?

[h1myname1sdav1d]

@DarthMyrten

Going back into ‘survival direction’ by making economy harder would alienate a lot of people.

That’s not the intent of the changes. If done right there should be more viable paths to making money in the game. I’m hoping that we can encourage more things happening so there are more choices/options, not less!

[Snowman]

other then gold mining you can do multiple things in an hour to make money unless your a pirate, then I suppose you just have to pirate more

[Wiseman738]

Ahahah took me around that long to get it myself

Mining gold on GG I can’t remember how much ore I was getting per hour. I think it was like 140 stacks of 999 per hour which was pretty decent! But it still took a LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOONG time!

All I know is that I spent about three weeks of constant mining on the blasted planet ahaha! We literally mined it until there was no gold left to mine each evening!

I think it was when some people found some crazy shortcuts with commodoties that they were making money that us poor little gold miners could only dream of!

Best regards
Wise.

[h1myname1sdav1d]

@Snowman

The last economic event was the carbon blocks

To be clear they wouldn’t be like the carbon blocks. Only some % modifier on the cost of the materials for short periods of time.

[DarthMyrten]

Well ok, I’m simply discouraged by recent nerfs to mining and npc traders, but let’s see where we will end up

[h1myname1sdav1d]

We had to close some loopholes to make way for the cool stuff to come. With dynamic pricing ‘item categories’ will be a thing of the past and individual items will be priced according to their value. This will make the packages valued based on the items in the package.

[h1myname1sdav1d]

@Hayawen

1m/hour max

It’s not max, it’s an average player doing an average task. Highly skilled players doing very difficult things should be making more.

[marcspc]

I missclicked one answer, can I change it?
also if you reduce income, I hope HWS prices for OCDm EB and so are greatly reduced also

[h1myname1sdav1d]

I hope it’s not viewed as a reduction. But we will need to look at the HWS feature costs and rewards to make sure they make sense as we implement this stuff. It’s probably it’s whole own thread.

[DarthMyrten]

Also can you rename NPC Traders to Player Traders? It’s confusing for many people

[NuclearDeaths]

I like the idea of the events but like said before me not ones that just randon pull out of a player’s OCD

[Remeey]

Can we just have a pvp and pve server ? so both sides are happy pvp = if you play there someone will be on the way to take you out get ready. pve = me a cream puff that just likes to build and raid pois i won’t have to worry about getting killed by 14 ppl at one time. or you can do what i did one time and have 1 start location you have two portals one goes to pvp and one goes to pve if you go to pvp you can’t come back to pve and vice versa and yes it works just fine i used it for 6 months and the players enjoyed it. I’m sure Hws could come up with something amazing. well thats my input for the day Have fun guys remember it’s just a game in the end.

[Deliverance]

Great to hear things are changing!
Firstly, I own an NPC trader, so I do have an invested interest in how they operate. Secondly I pretty much agree with everything @Snowman says.

My primary role is trading and ammo sales with occasional joining in the PvP every now and then. As part of that process of ammo production has bean trying to create a fair trading structure of buying resources from players and manufacturing the ammo and selling them as a marked up item. Creating a system for players new and old to earn money through mining.

The NPC traders system pretty much stops this from happening effectively. I created a spreadsheet based on market prices of resources to generate a resell price of ammo. Items such as all artillery and homing missile ammo become so prohibitively expensive I am not able to buy the resources from the market or from players at a fair price to then manufacture to sell to break even on the cost without abusing the NPC system (or mine them myself). I think NPC trader items should be about ability to buy items you can’t be bothered to make or resources which are restricted that are in short supply in the game. As an example a faction bottle necks magnesium ore increasing the market price, but there is still a supply available through NPC trader or RACOM trader this also provides a self regulating upper limit on the HWS market price will sell for.

What i’d Like to see in the NPC trader system.
Cost of items within the NPC system reflect the cost to buy the resources through the NPC RACOM trades and / or linked to the HWS market prices. It shouldn’t be inherently cheaper to buy through NPC trader, just convenient.
The RP cost associated needs looked at, I see the purpose would limit abuse of cross buying between players and if RP was harder to earn then this would limit the exploitation of NPC Traders, however this only currently effects none factioned individuals or small factions. Earning 45 RP a day as a large faction member makes the RP cost ineffective unless saving RP for something larger.
I’m not convinced NPC traders should exist at all. They will always be abused providing 2 players work together. Possibly consider you have to manufacture the items to place within the NPC trader, keeping all the proceeds but then getting a cash bonus on top so it’s not effort free money. Probably very unpopular to existing NPC trader owners, but also probably a mistake making these lifetime purchase options no idea how you’d fairly remove them now.

People will always find an exploit or not an exploit just prepared to repetitively carry out a task, arguably mining astroids is just a repetitive operation no different from refining Pentax and selling it to NPC traders. I think the market system is great, I don’t think this is at fault and i don’t think minimum pricing should be introduced after all supply and demand will sort this out (providing resources are not rediculously easy to gather, arguably they are from mining astroids) by painfully slow mining meotorites.

The carbon block thing has scuppered this season, I personally did not make a single credit out of carbon blocks, my enjoyment is about earning my credits though trading. Carbon block money should of made money freely available and trade should of been great this season But instead it’s been used to leave up multiple OCD levels making it less of an incentive to trade. Once you can reach a level to access OCD in PvP space where’s the risk? Loss of a ship that’s easily replaced? . This so heavily favours experienced players in battle or mining on GG.

Refined Pentax selling… this is just killing trade, the volume you can sell to NPC RACOM needs to be a fraction or the price be market reflective (somehow).

Epic weapons - no sure if to easy to come by? These have become throw away if lost doing missions, not sure this is good or bad. I’ve 20 epic assault rifle just kicking around.

Lastly i’ve Created my own version of a player lead RACOM i’m trialing this season, providing packages of resources. Currently in Eden orbit, just head to the planet near the JVI capital repair bay. This is how I’d like to trade in the future.

Keep up the great work! Love it’s developing, if you’d like any input out of this forum i’d Happy to help in some way.

[Deliverance]

I also like the PvP / PVE start idea. If you want to create a trading economy do PvP players need restricted to certain resources and vice versa? It’s such a difficult thing to balance though because if you have unbalanced n7mbers of PvP to pve it can cause serious resource blockages.

[Brye]

1. I rarely PVP, my only source of income is mining and selling the resources or items to RACOM. I do not work very hard at it, I want to play with friends, not make and sell stuff constantly. I have 10-15 million in the bank. Barely enough to buy a decent garage ship. The people in my faction who go into PVP zones and trade have more than double that. Which makes sense since they have twice the number of traders to work with. They risk getting killed so they get better rewards.

The selling of ores in BULK should provide a reasonable amount of money in the long run.

2. Often I go to a RACOM trader and they are “full” and can take no more items. Those days I make no money. I do not sell things on the Market, but I probably should.

3. I have used the NPC trader and marketplace both. NPC traders cost money and RP both, which I like, since these resources are not player found/made/collected. My husband bought a package and deconstructed it- so he could get some of the rarer materials he could not easily get elsewhere.

4. If we can’t make money we can’t PVP. PVP uses an immense amount of resources (especially for ammo) and the cost is prohibitive if you are just starting. Unless you can afford to lose a ship, you can’t PVP. The only people to can PVP right now are the wealthy, or in a faction that has wealth and has the support of members who contribute.
   I have seen spawn camping and star gate camping. Ramming into another players ship to stop them from moving because you now have an “undocked ship” makes you not able to move and a sitting duck. I can see that for the same faction, but not to enemy factions. People are “losing connection” and quitting every time they are close to being killed, instead of sucking it up like the rest of us. I saw it at least 5 times yesterday by 1 player alone. God forbid they lose standing on the boards /sarcasm.
   PVP zones frequently crash when large battles are happening. Yesterday the GG playfield went down many many times (more than 10 times). When it goes down, you get kicked out of your ship and end up several Km AWAY from and outside your ship. This needs to be fixed !!! Dedicate more server resources if possible to PVP playfields when there are larger numbers of people fighting. It SUCKS when the server crashes and you die because someone can load in faster than you can. Not because they are the better fighter and beat you fair and square.
   I know this was supposed to be about the Economy and it is. I cannot AFFORD to PVP and repeatedly lose ships due to glitches, bending game rules or flat out cheating.

5. I LOVE the idea of Economic events !!! You zone in and get a request for items from your PDA. You have 30 mins or an hour to bring XYZ person a certain resource.