bigsatanloaf | Monday, May 27, 2013 - 12:50 am I was thinking about experimenting with buying and selling goods to increase enterprise profits, and I noticed that for 99% of the goods the market price doesn't change at all, even though supply and demand are changing. Can anyone explain this? I seem to recall this not being the case last time I checked many months ago... |
Scarlet | Monday, May 27, 2013 - 05:50 am The market prices only pivot around the base price by a limited amount. So basically, there is a maximum MP and a minimum MP to keep things from getting out of control. Most stuff stays consistently shortage/surplus so that's why the MP doesn't change. My assumed reason is because the market isn't balanced (i.e. there will always be huge shortages in dozens of products). |
Andy | Monday, May 27, 2013 - 09:52 am Scarlet already explained but here is a little more. There is an absolute low and high price for each product. Many products are constantly in short supply and removing this limit would have them go sky high. That would be great if players would react and build such corporations. It does not happen and such high price could bankrupt many other corporations. Once we see that there is more action around the current shortages, we will start to increase the range. We intend to allow for an easy conversion of corporations to produce a different product in the same product group, while keeping the quality and efficiency levels. This may increase flexibility on the supply side. |
Borg Queen | Monday, May 27, 2013 - 04:49 pm Andy, when you implement the function to Change corps to other Corps and allow C3s to also do that as you mentioned some time ago, that would bring a lot more mobility to the market and hopefully you can 're-open' the free market ^^ |
bigsatanloaf | Monday, May 27, 2013 - 07:03 pm Thanks all for the explanation. I like the conversion idea. I wonder if, either in addition to or as a stopgap until the conversion feature is introduced, there's another way to reward corps for producing goods in shortage without bankrupting other corporations. Maybe the production level could increase somewhat when there is a shortage for long enough and drop to normal levels once there is equilibrium? Seems like that would make the corp profit more without straining buyers of the product. |
Andy | Tuesday, May 28, 2013 - 11:09 pm C3s do not need this feature and will not use it. C3s are very flexible in closing corporations that are producing products that are in oversupply and starting new ones that are producing products that are in short supply. I don't know what you mean by a free market. The market is free but within some limits. If we will see that product switching has an impact on the market, it will become easier to widen the range and allow for more fluctuations which we hope for, a long time. This will allow for higher and lower pricing and for a wider quality impact. The corporate conversion function is planned for the coming 4 to 6 weeks. We are constantly looking at market movements and look for opportunities to widen the ranges. |