NPC Trader measuring / suggestions?!

HWS General Discussion
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21

Thank you guys, all of you have some very cool ideas and I am afraid that some requires to much coding from Jascha or are still lacking in a kind of automatism where it regulates by itself.

To explain a bit:
I already tried to ease the work by having the big Marketplace Station with different color codes. Yes 5.0 was horrible because of the rotation resets, ramming and what not. Also with LCDs which are buggy from time to time or got cleared.

All of this should be fixed in 5.1 so the NPC Trader will get a kind of revive.

  1. The color codes are very smart. You know exactly where to go if you remember what you wanted
  2. LCDs screens can have lock codes. Every NPC Trader owner will get his personal code from me so he can adjust his LCD screen as he wish
  3. If the marketplace will be full soon another one will just be placed above of it so it becomes a kind of battery shape. For me it is just an adjustment of the height coordinate
  4. NPC Traders can also be placed where you wish (except in Elemental Marketplace). Even in PvP with an Admin Core (indestructable). You wonā€™t get access to cargos etc, only to doors and LCD screens (to not have an invincible ingame OCD). Still there is a ā€œprotection-feeā€ of 1k credits per slot. So either your design or integrated in one of the Tradingstations?
  5. The profit for the NPC Trader owner is 50% instead of 77% now
  6. As mentioned RP becoming more and more important. Since RP wonā€™t be transferred with full wipes every HWS saison is a unique gameplay by itself. So the ultimate balance of the NPC Trader will be for now that you also have to pay with your RP. Credits will be used for the NPC Trader to ā€œkeep aliveā€ but RP are meant as your status in the universe. Ammo drainer or people who donā€™t care about RP are not worth for the NPC Trader to be welcomed.

Now the interesting part is the cost of the NPC Trader package for RP. As some of you mentioned some packages are just a ā€œtake everythingā€ monster package which canā€™t be really calculated. Not even with a complex formula. Are 999 emergency rations better than 999 8,5mm bullets? If you die due starvation you have a bad time. But without bullets you canā€™t kill stuff to get maybe food. So each items has its own value. Short term or long term.
So now it becomes ā€œless is moreā€ principle (or you are just damn RP rich and donā€™t care):
Each slot will cost 1 RP. If you have a 7 slot NPC Trader package it will cost 7RP for your customer. If you have a monster 49 slot npc package it will cost 49 RP for them.
You have to understand the current needs of your customer and I guess every origin has their own needs. Pirate = ammunition? Trader = survival? Focus on the important items and not flood your package with everything.

And nope, take a deep breath ā€” RP gaining will become less stressful in 5.1 and with an additional factorā€¦ you will see very soon :wink:

Iā€™m excited how this will turn out.

Thanks again for all of your feedback!
We are still in the beginning and some of your more complex ideas maybe coming after some time.

RexXxuS

2 Likes
22

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:

  1. 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 traderā€™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.
  2. NPC traderā€™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.

1 Like
23

No, it is ok, I love feedback.

If you can provide good prices this is also helpful!
Finding a good price no matter the other circumstances is just done manually without detailed research. However as I said, just collecting data from the Eleon Marketplace is not enough. I try to make it also dependent from the real usage profit.

Anyways even after limited packages you can buy depending on your origin and now the RP cost per slot you think it is still too imbalanced?
I mean even if it is too cheap you canā€™t buy one package till you get sick. Not even with smurf tactics.

Again your price experience is useful and you can point out some general total wrong prices to me (the overall value in mind though).

A lot of you missed HWS 1.0. There we had our own version of the Bank Item Marketplaceā€¦ eb:iron +300 :wink:
Items you could buy from the Elemental Bank. Also provided from the server but you had to pay credits to get them. Globally. The trick was that we took the economy formula from wikipedia from real life. So offer and demand controlled the prices. This was the very first feature which I built to the website. So you could saw the current prices of the items there and how the prices changed over time.
It was quite cool if I remember back. But even back in the days with 30-50 active players on HWS you saw the downside of ā€œreal lifeā€ stuff. Meteorites etc. caused an inflation so the iron price was very cheap after some time. Rich people could create a sold out quick. But maybe we could just changed some multipliersā€¦

In favor of the Eleon marketplace we turned it offā€¦ maybe it will get a revival some dayā€¦ just for your information :wink:

24

The only issue with this is that unless you are a very large faction, one npc trader package is enough to supply you for a long time, and ensures that you wont need to go buying those materials from real players looking to sell. That is my biggest issue, even if prices were the same as the player sales out there, That money still goes to someone who did nothing but set up the deal. There is no true supply to it. That same aspect makes it both a great benefit for donators, and a shot in the foot of traders. Even with autominers on donor planets, you must spend the time collecting, fueling, and then try to take it to market 30 sells at a time (which btw if we just had a ā€œrepeat last sell orderā€ button would be SOOOOO much easier of a process),And you never will have truly infinite supply. You may outpace the demand of the server, in which case it wont sell, and therein lies the risk of the market. But when someone could instead of buying the materials you worked to bring to them, buy them cheaper from something that pulls it out of thin air, it actively takes that money out of the market and into the pocket of the donator. This is why I thought a decent compromise would be to have the npc trader items supplied by players, that way if the package price were too high, you would have people selling, but no one buying, but if price were too low, the inventory would run out. In my mind, the NPC trader should be an easier way to sell, doing the hard work of holding onto buy information, moving inventory, and selling to players, without the effort of the owner. Not just a place where people go to donate to the player and get loads of stuff.

As for prices, here are some select ones that I have loads of data for from 4.0
Iron Ingots: 5.2 cr per ingot
Iron Ore: 8 cr Per ingot (Yes this is accurate, I have found that people are willing to pay more to get the ingots directly in most cases
Sathium Ingot: 7.9 cr per ingot
Sathium Ore: 13 <<this trend of approximately 180% of the cost of the ingot to get an ore holds true for most types, except z and e. So for brevity I will leave out the rest
Copper Ingot: 4.1
Silicon Ingot: 3.7
Cobalt Ingot: 4.5
Magnesium Powder: 6.5
Promethium Ore: 10
Zascosium: 19.5
Erestrum: 19.3

Ration: two focal points of 900 and 1200 credits, this one fluctuated on a peculiar curve actually, but never stayed less than 800
Large medkit: 1000
Small medkit: 400
Energy Pills: 300

Large fuel: 20
Fusion: 40

Apologies, have to leave for work. will update this list with more later. But already you can see that those packages for example selling fusion, or rations, are selling whole packages for less than the cost of the rations inside the package.

1 Like
25

I guess what would really be a way to have some clarity is a master list.

No set amount but an average sale amount

Eg

Iron ingots per stack 6k-8k
Sathium ingots per stack 9k-12k
Cobalt ingots per stack 6k-8k

See where Iā€™m going with this, like above just simple to read numbersā€¦we do not know the market im afraid we donā€™t play the game like you do.

If someone has the patience and wants to see some npc trader price improvements we kind of need a master list of items, not all but the ones that people sell.

This way we can say to the ownerā€¦ Based on your package the price can be no less than Xā€¦

As the owner gets 50% and supplies nothing I am with you that the price needs to be fair and not kill. Off traders etc.

with the Rp restrictions we have already given the owners something to consider and the market will be less, you need RP now to even buy so that cuts the market. We will look at item restrictions alsoā€¦ Ie 999 rations and medikitsā€¦ The components could be available to purchase but considering how much they cost to make and time etc it is too easy.

More balancing is coming with so much preparing for 6.0

We appreciate as the game changes so do we and trust me we are working hard now to try figure out some real good balancing for all players

So all feedback is very welcomed and appreciated

Achilles

26

The numbers I quoted above are specific averages of a minimum of 100 sales of each item, up to about 1150 recorded for iron. I can if it would be helpful take that number and apply a standard deviation about that point to give you a range. But I used these numbers to set my sale prices in 4.0, and they were proven to be accurate by the simple fact that the vast majority of my sales went through, other than the ones that were undercut by @tomcat of course :yum:.
The rp cost goes a long way towards balancing it, even as not supplied, mostly because it creates an artificial limited supply to an individual person. Not ideal, but it may allow for competition as long as the trader packages are not large enough to fill the needs of the buyer completely.

27

Not from stats as McP has done (Nice work mate) but from when I was full on trading in 4.0, those prices are spot on.

Could almost always guarentee a sale.

1 Like
28

Iā€™ll take a single npc package as an example (they are all broken, believe me, this is just one that is very easy to see)
Galactic Outfitters NPC
8k Iron Ore
25 Rations
25 Medkits
1k Zas Ore
1k Eres Ore
2k neo ore
3k cobalt ore
3k silicon
6k sathium
8k magnesium ore
10k Fusion cells

Using the numbers gathered from actual player created sales, Here is what each of those things should be per unit.
Iron ore (8cr x8k) = 64k
Rations (1kcr x25) = 25k
Large Medkit (1kcr x25) = 25k
Zas Ore (26cr x1k) = 26k
Eres Ore (26cr x1k) = 26k
Neo Ore (13cr x2k) = 26k
Cobalt ore (6.5cr x3k) = 19.5k
Silicon ore (5.8cr x3k) = 17.4k
Sathium Ore (13cr x6k) = 78k
Magnesium Ore (13cr x8k) = 104kcr
Fusion (40cr x10k) = 400kcr

Now then. Anyone want to hazard a guess how much this package that would total up to ~811,000 credits on the eleon market costs? Anyone? Its 300k. 300,000 credits buys you something worth nearly triple that, from a location that has no concerns of supply and demand. Do you see now why I said that LoT stopped trading altogether until this gets fixed? There is no way I can compete with that. When the fusion cells inside a package are worth more than the package costs, what is the point of trying to sell fusion?

1 Like
29

Thanks!
Butā€¦ Sorry maybe I am too stressed but is the complain now that the Npc trader is too cheap or too expensive?

30

Thanks!
Butā€¦ Sorry maybe I am too stressed but is the complain now that the Npc trader is too cheap or too expensive?

31

No worries. The point was that is was way to cheap. That package I listed there should have been about 800 thousand credits, but is being sold for 300 thousand.