W3C - The World Product Market

The price of products on the markets is based on supply and demand and fluctuates in a wide range.

However, the fluctuations are limited to the range of about 50% and 145% of the base price of each product. These limits may change from time to time but always remained around these numbers.

Experiments in the past to let the price more space to fluctuate failed because there was not enough reaction on the markets to correct the balance of demand and supply and stabilize the price.

Many players, and we too, would love to see prices increase more if there are shortages but as we have seen, there are products that are very profitable because of shortages and despite the high profitability, the shortage remains all the time.

This proves again, what we already know, that market corrections by players are true in theory but are not forthcoming and the market cannot be set free.

There are several upcoming changes that might move the markets into more flexibility:

1. Easier to understand pricing

Currently, when the price reaches the max limit or the lower limit, it starts to fluctuate around that high or low value with no explanation of why this happens. The reason was technical and will now be solved but the mechanics of the process remain unchanged.
Once the price reaches the highest level, or the lowest one, it will remain unchanged until market conditions dictate a change down from the top limit or an increase from the lower limit.

The change will be implemented in the coming week or two.

2. Changing Corporations to make a different product

A feature will be introduced that makes it possible to change a corporation to produce a different product. The corporation will keep its quality level and efficiency level but will produce a different product. The player can only change the type to a corporation that complies with her game level.

The price of such a change will be 50B and some raw materials might be lost in the process or moved to the owners storage.

This feature is intended to make it easier to react to market conditions, change the supply and demand ratios more easily and may be, bring more balance to the markets and make a freer market possible.

1 & 2: Thumbs up.

I do have to notice that 50B is several years of profits, so if it is intended as a feature to balance the market, it won't work quite that well.

In fact, I would say it should have a cut in efficiency (upgrades) to reflect the change, as that would be expected. But that may be just me.

I like these changes.

50B is a lot less than closing a corp and building a new one LG. I'm hoping the corp type change will be relatively quick. Not taking like a year so loss of any production for a long time.

Sounds good though, still don't understand why players cant set their own asking price though. Again I say, if players ask too much the product wont sell. If someone needs something badly enough, they will pay whatever they have to. I didn't know of any market problem when that was the case, but maybe I am wrong...

Closing a corporation and building a new one, providing it with cash, upgrading and the time needed is much more expensive.

50B could take several years. That is probably one week. Taking into account the entire contribution of the corporation to its owner and the country.

I do indeed like this. Will it be both true for CEO and countries?

I do got one suggestion if i may.

Turning a cattle farm in to a nuke powerplant or vice-vercea seems a little far fetch to me.
So may i suggest that you can only change a corp within its field of operations? such as a Utilities corp can only be a utilities corp: Cable TV can only become power, nuke-power or telephone. and so on for all the other fields of operation of corps.

That's appears to be true, but it isn't so.

In a point, the cost of building a corporation is almost 0. In the beginning, the money is spent on goods and capital that can be recovered fully, at the exception of two production plants. In the end, the cost of closing/building a (country) corporation is the money spent on the upgrades and still the two production plants.

Right now, that cost is of about 56,6B, so it is better to pay the 50B instead of closing. For private corporations it is another story.

But, that is not the only or best term of comparison. The point is this: the higher the cost, the slower (less often) they will adapt to the market situation situation. Or not at all, if the market situation clears itself faster than they can regain from the cost of changing.

Moving on, the big question here is: how will C3s behave with this?

C3s are switching quite fast.
a surplus causes many to close and build different corporations.

C3s have few corporations and only some are state owned.

Andy

i stated before the GM needs to look into help players with large stocks.

I for example have 242M units of 272Q power worth 40T ive self contracted nuke power to myself and have spent 30T.

When i sell it sells for less then that becuase you claim theres a low market. These goods are selling as you stated but only a little amount of people buy these high Q.

Can the GM do something to ensure players get the Q they deserve?
If i have to wait a long time to make all my money so be it but i shouldnt get less then what i expect without consent.

What do you plan to do to help players?
Doesnt seem fair that when i sell from a CEO stock i get less then expected but yet Corps MAGICALLY get to sell all there goods at the best and highest Q.

Theres something wrong. If my goods are worth 40T i should get 40T

I tend to think the difference that corps make when selling high qua goods and when selling directly from your stock may be intended and may even be preferable. If selling from your stock, you always got full value for your high quality goods, why wouldn't you simply contract all your enterprise corp production to yourself?

I could simply hold my inventory for goods that are currently selling below the base price and choose to sell the ones above base price. If CEOs started to do this, this could mean 1000s of the worlds corps are not continuing to meet the daily demand since prices for goods, even in high demand, take a number of game months to reflect a large difference in price. This would be an advantage for large enterprises that can deal with temporary shortages but put small enterprises and countries at a disadvantage.

There should be an incentive for corps to sell their goods directly to the world market. This still leaves room to contract goods to our stock that we intend to use at high quality or could readily find a buyer for such as weapons.

6

I do like the idea of being able to change a corp type. this change opens up many new possibilities.

I believe previous experiments to allow the player base to rectify market issues failed for several reasons. I think most of those reasons can be summed up in one sentence; No-one really knew about or understood it was happening until too late for most to take advantage.

If this can be rectified by implementing some system/tool within the game to predict future or simply report current market demand in relation to the quality distribution, then any future experiments of this nature may have a different result.

I realise much of the historical market information is present in the downloads section but this is only useful in the most basic predictions of demand. In addition the information contained there isn't straightforward to utilise, a built in/bolted on solution would bring market prediction to even the most casual of players.