Thank you for putting the time into this, I legitimately have stopped even bothering trying to trade with how incredible broken the trader was.
A few examples:
No one out there can afford to sell iron ingots at 850 cr per stack, (even with autominers, that barely covers cost of fuel) yet one of the vendors sells iron ore for 1700 per stack, with absolutely no need to supply it with real items. On top of this, the effort it takes to make and sell rations is completely negated when you can buy the 170k package, and get the 500 rations and 500 energy pills (the hardest part of rations. That is selling rations for 170 credits at best, even ignoring the massive amount of meds on top of that. The lowest rations ever went for a non transfer sale in 4.0 was about 800 cr per, and no one could make them in bulk.
Making the npc traders a little more expensive is an excellent step in the right direction, particular in the aspect that it takes a second form of currency unique to our universe.
But two looming and existing issues still remain:
- The prices are ludicrous. The examples above are a little anecdotal, but they illustrate the point I am trying to make. If you are having trouble determining the value of a particular material, I can sooooo help with that. As some people know, I kept a spreadsheet manually tabulated with data from the recent sales column in 4.0 Taking into account over 1700 individual sales, and excluding outliers used to transfer good for free. If you want to know a reasonable price for something, you can ask! Because prior to 5.0, I had a finger on the pulse of the market. This is how I know that the market system is broken at the moment, because it is impossible to accumulate the same consistent sale data on the server that I did in 4.0. Everyone is selling for absolutely random values, and dont even get me started on epic weapon sales (cmon zc and lbp, do you really think they are still worth 100k credits when you get them in supply packs?), Point is, the prices cant stabilize, due to a number of factors, chief among them appears to be whether the npc trader is broken that day, and how much people use them. If we did normalize prices to npc trader’s ludricously low costs, we would wind up with dozens of hours of work mining refining and selling winding up netting less than 100k credits, whereas on the weekend, we could just go to pve gold planet, and mine that amount in way less than an hour. This is why I keep saying it has broken the market.
- NPC trader’s materials are coming from Nowhere. This means that even if the prices are accurate to server supply and demand (see point 1), the NPC trader creates these materials from no where, and cuts out the possibility of an actual player supplying to others! Plus, the prices, fair or otherwise, are no longer a dynamic living market, since there is no scarcity or flood of resources based on player movements. At any given day, anyone can get infinite resources if they have infinite money. This sounds reasonable, but it is the sign of a truly broken game economy, for one simple reason. All you wind up with is customers. Traders, miners, refinery corporations, etc will all have no purpose. I joke about this in chat from time to time, but I legitimately dont understand why the entire server is not on lucifer all weekend getting free credits, and buying materials no one had to make. It makes no sense. Why would anyone even bother doing anything else, when the time cost disparity is this high.
Anyways, I apologize if I got a little rant-ish, this has been bugging me for a while. And while I am so very happy to see it being addressed, just a few more tweaks to the system itself could bring everything back into so much of a better game for our server.
As always, massive thanks to rexxus, jascha, and all the rest for keeping things awesome.