W3C - Game News May 24

1. Market Interventions

The game intervenes sometimes when huge shortages in certain products threaten the markets. There were many requests from player in the past, and recently, to reduce or even eliminate these automatic interventions.

Recently, interventions where reduced by mistake. As a resultwe the markets became unstable and even close to a collapse. Players did not intervene and did not start corporations to reduce shortages. We do think however that the markets will offer more opportunities, and Simcountry will offer more challenges if such interventions are reduced even more.

We have made changes to some products and will only intervene in very extreme conditions. Depending on what happens in the coming days, we may extend the process and reduce interventions even more.

2. Product price range

Some products have been tuned to widen their price range. The change in the price range is not very large but corporations producing these products may become more valuable if there is a shortage of the product and may suffer more if there is a surplus. Combined with reduced interventions, prices may start increasing more drastically. The corporations will turn higher profits. We hope that this will be an incentive for players to create such corporations.

3. Diversifying Products

In the coming weeks and months, we will add new products and raw materials to the production process of many corporations. The objective is to increase diversification in the products production and include more products as raw materials in the production process of a larger number of corporations.

This process has already started and small changes toward this goal will be made on a weekly basis.

This is a bit insane.

When I saw the game news I decided to look into these new products, and their usage was utterly minimal. Still, I decided to build a few new corps because there were so few, and I thought it'd be neat to be one of the only ones making them.

Then suddenly the demand for these products has skyrocketed.

Is there no way to introduce new products so that use is ramped up? As opposed to 0, 0, 0, 100000, 100000

Also, I'm not sure I fully understand the rationale behind caps. I've heard of certain products that are always in surplus or deficit, and I've seen this to some degree; but they are almost always things right at the cap. I'm not saying you should allow things to float freely, but why not allow the cap to be increased/decreased by 0.1% or 0.5% per month (or even less) so that these things fix themselves over the very long term. It might take a RL year to 'stabilize things' but is this not easier than having the GMs spend their time doing this manually?

Take Chemicals for example, which have jumped from 662 to 682 recently, but was stuck at 662 (IE the cap)

Why not instead have a system that allows it to go from 662 to like 663, and 664 (etc). So that if you are not near the cap it can move by 20, but if you are at the cap, it can only move by 1 or something.

We do try to predict the best way to ramp up demand when new products are introduced. Thanks to the complexity of the Simcountry economy this is not an easy feat and may sometimes be a bit violent. Other times it can seem like it's taking too long to ramp up. We're confident that as we introduce more products and diversify the economy, these growing pains will become much less evident.

As for the caps and market interventions. This has been a topic of contention for as lang as the game has existed.
We don't manually intervene in the markets. There's a rather complicated algorithm that decides on a per-product-per-world basis when to intervene and to what extent. From now on we'll be tweaking this algorithm on a regular basis to reduce interventions in the markets. This has to be done very slowly though, to avoid a complete economic collapse.

I've also realized the gaps are not as big as expected, as only a dozen or two corps have filled the gap.

I think that this can add a new aspect to the game if done right; and communication (IE things like this topic) are the right way to do it IMO

> Players did not intervene and did not start corporations to reduce shortages.

Exactly how much intervening were we supposed to be able to do? I started corps on WG in the hardest-hit products, a couple dozen of them. But because the market was frozen solid, once they burned through their initial materials, they just shut off for days until I immediate-purchased everything for them. Nothing we did made the smallest dent in the shortages. The only one I could fix was Carbon, because I built up stupidly large stockpiles when it was introduced, because I didn't understand the problems with new products that thenewteddy identified above.

Also, if this is what happens when market intervention is turned down, your economic model is totally broken. Run a quick and dirty calculation - population of the world * consumption per person, plus number of corps * consumption per corp, then compare it to total production of each good. If there's gigantic shortages of everything all the time, the solution isn't intervention, it's changing the production or consumption stats.

"Players did not intervene and did not start corporations to reduce shortages."

*coughcough* bullshit

While technically it is true that more corps could have been build, the underlying problem was NOT the reduced interventions but the simple fact that no buy order would go through, even for products in bright green surplus.

Seriously...

I think it's great the devs have taken steps toward free'er (albeit still controlled) markets !!!

Jonni!!!!

Where is my baby boy?!!!!!!!!!!! How are you, my dear? HUGS you!

Jonni went to the US for 10 days.
He will be back.

He might want to wait until after November...

Too long. we need him here.