Investigation Request

I know it's likely to be fruitless, but asking Andy to check recent player market information specifically on Electric Power.

On the last month's tick, on each of the three worlds I am on I noticed a significant uptick in demand on EP on all three worlds that is both far beyond anything that a change you might have made would trigger, and far more than any individual player would be able to request without spending space in the hundreds of trillions (on each world).

GB - Last 23 month demand ~ 700M each -> Current month demand 1593M
KB - Last 23 month demand ~ 380M each -> Current month demand 977M
LU - Last 23 month demand ~ 500M each -> Current month demand 1131M

The value of the EP demand swing above normal is valued at 388.2T on GR alone.

This is far different than someone flooding the market with their stockpile. With the current spending space limit of 2.4T, a single player would have to have a 162 country empire or spend 776 GC just for the GR world alone to accomplish this swing legitimately within the rules of the game. The same thing happening on all three worlds that I am on, and possibly on the others, points to an exploiting player. Please investigate.

With the dramatic rise especially later with rampant cheating, perhaps it is time to also consider adding player moderators to the game; give them limited market access data to monitor for anomalies such as this to report to you with the full data, and just kick them some small reward like free premium for the month. Plenty of other games utilize player mods in such a manner to help the GM maintain their focus on game development rather than rule enforcement issues like this where a player with a little extra data could spend the possibly hours investigating this so you don't have to and just submit the pertinent data to you for resolution.

All changes in the market situation for EP are based on what players are doing.

The game procedures intervene if shortages in some essential products reach absurd levels.

These functions will never increase shortages.

we think that all such major fluctuations will subside in the coming days/weeks.

I feel like you didn't actually read my message but unfortunately that seems to be standard. It's fine I can't force you to care, I'll stop bringing things like this up to you.

How do you think a player is cheating though? What could a player do to create that demand? I fail to see how a player purchasing a bunch of electric power to create demand would benefit them anyway.

Direct trading of EP for gold coins?

Thank you for your questions Zentrino, hopefully I can accurately share some of my thought process here.

The thought that the demand spike comes from a player cheating isn't a certainty, but a strong suspicion based on numerous factors. Hence asking the GM to look into it, because only he has the ability to confirm. It is very possible that Andy had made some changes to the game without announcing them, as it does happen relatively frequently. To his credit though he does try to make the changes relatively small - nothing like this where demand for a single product, arguably the most in demand product in game already, spikes to more than double and in some cases nearly triple the set standard in the course of one game month. Default ordering for supplies for both countries and corporations are relatively low on both the water mark and quantities ordered, to the point that the graphs of supply and demand over time if you look at a current one should be relatively smooth for products like EP. That was the case until this issue that I brought up where demands increased substantially on at least the three worlds that I had market info on. With the sheer volume of added demand assuming no unannounced changes by Andy, the only possible scenarios are:
* The number of corporations on the planet suddenly doubles in one game month
* Multiple players logged in at the same time on multiple planets with max spending space available and used it all for Electric Power.
* A single player was exploiting the system.

For the information provided for GR alone, it would take 162 player owned countries using their maximum spending space to make this much demand in one month (for just this world, remember it happened on multiple in the same turn). I know some people elect not to show up on the 'who is online' list, but to put it in perspective currently on GR, 4 countries show up as online within the active timeframe that shows up on that list (which I could be wrong but I believe is 2 hours). Outside of unannounced game changes by the GM, which are absolutely possible, an exploiting player is the only reasonable alternative. Considering the numerous reports of players getting account values in the quintillions in a matter of their first few days and destroying markets, an exploiting player being at the core of this demand spike doesn't seem like a reach.

As to what the player could do to create that demand, I can't answer that question, and if I could I wouldn't announce it on the forum because it is clearly an exploit. The unfortunate reality is there is no realistic legitimate way for single player to legitimately create market spikes this deep and it is also not realistic that multiple players came together at the same time on multiple worlds to cause the spike. It would take dozens of players with dozens of countries each on multiple worlds each.

As to how it would benefit them, that's also something with multiple potential answers that I can't really answer because it's hard to know exactly what someone's endgame goal is with an action. I know EP is eligible for 'Direct Trading', and there are many directions you could take that.

An exploiter recently took their ill gotten gains to FB and created chaos, using his unlimited funds to hostile bid military corporations from C3 and active players alike. Many legitimate players felt many negative effects as a direct result of that player's cheating. So when I see something that doesn't have a reasonable explanation, I try to bring it up to the GM to investigate. Well, tried to bring it up to the GM to investigate. You can't force someone to care though so I'm probably done trying to care about the health of the game.

Auditor

You catch more flies with honey then vinegar.
Coming off as a pessimist from the start does not help your case.
I understand and respect your desire to bring this issue to the attention of the GM. You just need to be more graceful in how you present it.
This is advice coming from a guy who had his fair share of bans and fights with the GM over the 15 years I have been here.

---

However to answer your question.
You need to learn more about the game mechanics when it comes to "low water marks". Those kind of swings are natural due to corps and countries trying to over order products when they hit low water marks.

Sometimes you'll notice a corp/country trying to order an absurd amount of products. I had a asset maintenance corp one time trying to order over 100 strategic military bases.
When a corp/country hits its "low water mark" and doesn't get an order it keeps reordering the product month after month based on strategies. Once that mark has been met the previous orders are canceled.

In some cases this causes a rapid increase in orders and they just as quickly disappear.

This is more then likely why Andy said to give it a day/week.

I would say if after about a week there is no noticeable drop in demand then the GM should investigate, however, bubbles like this happen all the time

While I appreciate the input, the pessimism is of course led by extensive experience bringing things up to the GM in the gentlest of ways and having them either completely ignored or having the response completely addressing something other than what the post was informing. I applaud you for being able to remain an optimist for 15 years.

As for your low water marks and their mechanics, I don't want to cause conflict but you might not be fully aware of how it works. I'm all for learning things I don't know and there's plenty I don't know, but your example and rationale don't fit the current situation very well from my perspective.

The low water mark and ordering can result in some wildly out there orders pending that can send supply and demand spiking. 100% absolutely. The situation that you're describing though only tends to manifest in products where the ratio of supply to demand is wildly out of sync. In my experience, and you are completely free to correct me, the issue that you are presenting where a corporation will try to purchase the same item through repeated orders with the low water mark actually puts in those additional orders if the initial order isn't filled within 10 game months. So with your example of the strategic military bases, that makes complete sense. On your world currently the demand is 1884 strategic military bases to supply of 41. At that rate with standard ordering it takes ~ 46 months to fill that order, thus the repeated ordering from the low water mark comes into play. That isn't the situation with Electric Power, however. Even with the huge spike in demand that occured, your world's current supply is 428M vs a demand of 1100M, so ~ 3 month fulfilment, and the historical difference between supply/demand from the chart doesn't bring the difference to anywhere near a 10 month fulfilment time, making errors caused by low level ordering moot.

If I'm wrong definitely correct me. I'm not against learning by any means.

Stupid question alert:

How much electric power can a corp order?

Not a stupid question at all. I know I couldn't answer it just a couple minutes ago before trying it out. It looks like individual corps have spending limits of 280B, which at current EP prices is enough to purchase 669,056 units. I didn't actually follow through with the purchase though so it could be limited to that much or it could be limited to 120 months x whatever its consumption is, because I know in automatic settings you can't set the order quantity higher than 120 months.

Any chance it could play a role in this?

Anything is definitely possible. I feel like it's not likely just from the sheer number of clicks someone would have to go through to manually make that many orders and on multiple worlds at that, something like that I would assume would take longer than just the one game month that it went down. There's one person who could look through order logs but he says there's no issue to look through.

It wouldn't be the first (or likely the last time), that bots or scripts were used to do something huge on simcountry.

If it is any consolation, or can aid in us trying to better understand the anomaly discovered by auditor, the price of EP of Kebir Blue is interesting and makes me curious.

For example. the price of EP is continually falling over the course of the last 36 months from 434,700 SC$ per million kwh (Feb 5380) to 400,400 SC$ per million kwh (Aug 5382). It seems rather counterproductive to lower the price of a commodity (EP) despite the market shortage still being -578,000,000 million kwh.....especially when the market shortage was roughly -380,000,000 million kwh (as noted by auditor) a few game years prior with a market price of 434,700 SC$ per million kwh.


in essense:
Before 5380: Shortage= -380,000,000 million kwh ........ Market price: 434,700 SC$ per million kwh
Feb 5380: Shortage= -848,000,000 million kwh ........ Market price: 434,700 SC$ per million kwh
Aug 5382: Shortage= -578,000,000 million kwh ........ Market price: 400,400 SC$ per million kwh


And thank you Auditor for being observant and proactive in pointing out game fluctuations. Diligence like that is what can hopefully prevent (or at least mitigate the effects of) cheating or coding/system malfunctions.


AJ Massey
The Kingdom of Vestfold, Kebir Blue

The base price of EP is down 1 or 2%.

however, we aloud the EP price go up a higher level than most other products.
the difference was about 15%.

this was not followed by players action to produce much more, except of course the increase in the number of wind farms.

we do not think that the higher price will bring any change to the market situation.

in the long run, wind farms will bring a change but that will take a long time.

in that case, the price of EP should return to the normal range of pricing of nearly all other products, hence the small decline.
we expect EP pricing to decline a bit more but slowly.

we have checked the fluctuation ranges of products and found that wind related products also had wider fluctuation ranges.

In general, the simulation model in Simcountry runs OK.
Taking into consideration the thousands of data items in countries, corporations and enterprises, it runs very well.
This does not mean that we have no issues. We do.

we have problems with some market valuations, pricing ranges, structural shortages and many checks and balances that have to be updated to fit the changing situations following changes and additions to Simcountry and players strategies.

We are frequently making small numbers of small changes to keep it on track. None are large.
Most small corrections go unnoticed and can be considered irrelevant.
some are notices a month or weeks later and some immediately. None are worth the a big discussion but we will keep answering all questions.

Hey here's an idea, make prices respond to price fluctuations!!!!

EP corps don’t seem to be very profitable. At least compared with others. Lower prices will make this worse. Players won’t build them. So wind farms will take their place. It would help if we went back to be able to sell higher than market + quality in response to shortages. That creates incentive to build.

Wind farms and wind turbines are selling for a very high price.
the corporations producing them are very profitable and their market valuations too.

So... Get rid of your EP corps. Great! A new green deal. Unfortunately I have 100 Ep corps to drop now.
Rob

Hey Rob,

Even if Andy wasn't lowering the prices, they would still be doomed regardless by the flooding of the power market with wind power. Same for nuclear power.

I don't think that any of the energy products is doomed.
power stations will remain profitable.
Electric power will continue to show shortages.

The price of EP is not going anywhere.
It had a price range that was a bit wider than that of other products and it is now back to "normal".

Maintaining the wind farms, when you have many, will not be easy and their numbers might stabilize.

I am not sure many would like to have 30 wind turbine corporations to maintain the wind farms, let alone 100 such corporations.

Bad maintenance of wind farms due to shortages of wind turbines will reduce the output of wind farms and the shortages will have to be eliminated.
This function will start to kick in after the next upgrade, or maybe a bit later.

Don't jump to conclusions.

James,

I flooded the market with EP (electric power) as an experiment to see what would happen. We found that 400-500 EP corps closed and country spending went down.

In order to do this experiment I had to stockpile EP for a few irl months. Demand for EP stayed around 400-500M per month. In order to meet that demand there would need to be like 300K WF (wind farms) just to meet the demand for WG. If there ever are too many WF on WG, then people will just sell their excess EP on the other 4 worlds.

I wonder where I can see the 400-500 closed EP corporations.
we have graphs showing numbers of corporations.
is it visible in that graph?

Shortages in EP on WG never disappeared. Shortages remains stable.

The price graph did not show any decline (beyond the slight correction back to the standard price range).

Andy, for what Emerithe is talking about you'll need to go back to around April 30th, his experiment and your recent changes are not close to each other time wise.

Emerithe,

Good to know there are some experimentalists still here.

I would add, that I see no reason yet to build ep corps, so things could get interesting. I should play around with nuclear power, if that’s still a thing.