Corporation Income Discussion (Golden Rainbow)

Parsifal, I encourage you to read my latest discussion of the problem. This appears to be a major bug.


I looked at two more corporations. Quality of 281 (ordering 160 supplies) and Quality of 250 (TP ordering 100 supplies).

Sales Strategies were 311% and 274%.

Actual sale price was 297% and 245%.

Finally found a private corporation paying MORE than it should:


Medical Materials corporation

Latest Market Price: 6,795 SC$ per unit

Quality of the Product 239.1

Production Last Month 188,779

Total: 3,647.73M SC$

Sale Strategy Start at 269% of the market price


It should be 3.45 Billion.

The overview of the game changes in the recent future would seem to be unmistakeable.

Refer to Parsifals post

Maxwell, read all of my posts in this thread. Corporation income is NOT being calculated correctly. Products are NOT able to be sold above about 297% of the market price. This is making quality over about 270 or so completely USELESS.

I think there is a communications disconnect here.

Parsifal is essentially claiming the calculation errors are intentional, while Q thinks they are unintentional.

I for one give the GMs the benefit of the doubt...while I am sure they want to make more $$, intentionally breaking the game rather than just changing it to be systematically less profitable seems unlikely to me.

no, i don't think that gm is intentionally screwing with the corp numbers. Q is probably right that there may be a glitch in the way the numbers are calculated. but as a matter of course gm is intentionally decreasing cost, profits, cash, etc of corps and ceo's. if there is a glitch my guess is that they will not/cannot economically fix the problem. what i'm saying is that the game itself is being tooled for short term players. on KB, there are probably no more than about 20 viable active empires. there are probably another 12-15 inactives that are heavily debt laden, that are waiting for memberships to run out and about 30 small active empires. as time goes by my sense is that there will be fewer and fewer large empires since the rules are now centered on quick results for new players, but the game does not give them much room for expanding unless they invest hard cash in gc's. i don't think the intent is sinister, just that there is change in philosophy of the game by the gm.

Well, I realize they are decreasing all the numbers and such, but this error I believe is unintended. It started right around when they started decreasing the numbers back in early december or so. Is there a way to check far back in time for corporation sales? I know some stuff you can.


If they want people to make less money on the corporations (and they've stated they want more profitability, not less), then this glitch needs to be fixed. I'm hoping my latest email to them will make them aware of the problem.

If not, then my next email will have about 20 examples clearly illustrating a problem. I NEED this thing fixed.

Q

You may very well have found a bug but the profitability of the corps or lack there of in the game is not the only indication that suggests our hosts are making drastic modifications.

Which appear on the surface atleast designed to increase real life profit.

Again after reading Parsifals second post I agree wholehearted with his assessment of the situation. These unsolicited changes with the program despite some opposition creates the impression that this is the overall intent of our hosts.

The price of Poker is going up boys.

Maxwell

Q, i hope you're righ, that there's a major glitch and if there's anything i can do, let me know. as to past data, unless you've downloaded it from the past, it's probably not available.
P

Well Maxwell, I think there is better ways to take cash out of the game than ruining fully upgraded corps due to a "ceiling" on selling price. Not to mention, the price you get for lower sales strategy is now totally random.

It clearly has to be a bug/glitch from when they first started lowering prices.

They have clearly stated profitability should be rising. Due to this problem, they are not.


The best thing anyone can do, is run the calculations as I have (takes less than a minute per corporation) as follows:

Make SURE its a corporation which sells consistently every month.

Sales price (do this after processing) X production * sales strategy = correct income

Profit/Loss Income / Production / Sales price = true sales strategy being used


If ANYONE can find a corporation which is over 300% (true sales strategy), please let me know. I have yet to find one.

I can use all the data I can get, to prove to W3C that there is a MAJOR problem with high quality corporations and sales strategies. It seems to be as simple as truncating any sales down to under 300% of market price, regardless of quality or sales strategy or actual price sold for.

Q

I don't have Microsoft Excel, so a spreadsheet would be very helpful.

looked at 3 state corps 246-296 Q.......achieving 99-101% of expected sales, this looks pretty constant at around 100%

3 private corps 333-324 Q .......achieving 85-90% of expected sales

An electric power state corp has a better result than a private one, and the lower the quality of the private corp the better the result...so far

If as W3 promised:

"Corporations are maintaining their profitability and in general, corporate profitability will increase somewhat in the coming months."

... the corporations maintain profitability then tax collecting countries should not drop in surpluses.

As mentioned up above, I can only presume that because of corps having stocks of supplies then they lag behind and produce lower profits.

Howeverer, if this is to be true, then my country should return to a £300 billion monthly surplus based on lower costs but income from profits should be no less.

The GM promised the same profitability but I fear they mean proportionately and not financially.

I don't have a problem with the devaluation but I do think it should be more explicitly explained.

If I have a country only collecting from profits and wages, the profits taxes should remain the same and wage taxes only go down if wages go down...... but I've lost £250 billion a month in 1 country. Wages have crept a little lower and profit taxes are vastly down.

I await the bounce in my country surpluses from corp profit income to resume to the guaranteed levels.

David, the bounce isn't going to happen until this problem is fixed.

I realize they mean proportionally same or more, but this is not the case until this problem is fixed.

As discussed (and reviewed) the other day, I do agree the corp income is wrong or at least the information provided to us to calculate corp income is incorrect.

From further testing, the main problem seems to be that selling price is capped at about 300% of market price.

Q,
Thanks for your time spent on the current issue.
My question is, "if" the selling price is capped at 300 and it's not a game bug, what adjustments should be made to adapt to the new settings? Would it be to lower the quality of supplies?

I don't see the purpose or point of such a cap, if they truly implmented one. It makes high quality beyond useless. It completely goes against "maintaining or increasing relative corporate profitability". However, so far, they have refused to acknowledge any problems exist.

I still haven't figured out exactly what's going on for under 300, as those numbers don't all match up either. Lowering of supplies might be a good short-term fix, haven't tested that yet.


I would like to encourage those who have a good understanding of the issue at hand, to also write W3C, asking them what is going on. Maybe if I'm not the only one pointing it out to them, they will realize something is up. Maybe someone else could explain it to them in a way which would get them to better understand.

Q

I don't see evidence that anyone has clarified what is happening. There are several pieces that you can not know for certain.

The best price is determined by market conditions. The price this month and the price last month do not tell you the price in between. If that is the explanation you should be able to buy at roughly the same lower price much of the time.

If the game is discounting or capping quality the lower prices would not show up in companies making quality 100 products.

If W3C is discounting high quality items when market demand is for low quality the it should not effect common market or direct contract sales. The price paid by the receiving company should match the profits of the selling company. You can get a good measurement if you stop selling on the open market so that the only product sold is the contract.

Adding a fee like shipping and handling or a brokers fee would make sense if W3C is trying to make the markets realistic. If that is the case they should be willing to confirm it. But, we also should be able to calculate the formula.

Common market/local market is doing the same thing, its not selling at market price. Its selling well under (same range as I described before), if the quality is above 300. I have checked this as well. Same problem.

Pathetic sheep, your argument about price, is meaningless when price is only supposed to vary up to 5% either direction. The real and expected price here is off up to 35%.

I still have yet to have anyone prove to me they have seen a corporation selling for over 300% of the market price. ANY product. High Demand, High Supply, whatever.

Also, if the higher price isn't obtainable, then the product shouldn't be selling the SAME month! The product should remain unsold until someone wants it at that price, or until the seller's price meets the price people want to buy it at. Your argument, while thoughtful, is not happening in-game period the way it should be.

I can give you HUNDREDS of corporations of evidence that this problem is indeed VERY real. If I wished, I could present to you TENS OF THOUSANDS of corporations, by taking hours upon hours of my time to skim through every corporation on every world, to point out to you, there is indeed a serious problem.

Every corporation I have checked for this purpose, has been product sold THE SAME MONTH as it is offered. This eliminates the market price flucuations of processing time, and eliminates the monthly reduction in sales strategy as factors.

Pathetic Sheep, I suggest you take a look at some of the numbers yourself. I have spent several hours doing so, and have yet to find evidence against what I'm claiming.

Q

having checked quite a few now it would appear that quality 333 achieves only 85% of expected sales rising to 90% at 300 quailty.

All state corps show 296 achieves 100% on average expected sales, increasing to 110% at 195 quality

I have only checked corps in my country Kimberleigh

Extrapolating with a linear best-fit, it seems clear selling at Quality 1 is the most profitable, netting us 140% expected income. :D

Maybe 160% if we assume an exponential curve.

Need more data points on the low quality side to figure out which best fit fits best. The big % jump between Q300 and Q296 really throws things off.

quaxcol,

Coolwind posted the information I was looking for. Most of my corporations do not sell everything every month. However, it doesn't look like my state corps are selling at high quality either.

I checked a military base company on white giant. My quality is 120. I have 25 unsold units but the sale is either 1 base or 0 each month. The products sold last month is higher than the sale strategy.

The demand for military bases on white giant was 100 last month. 70 of them were my orders. I used a fixed price that was slightly higher than the best price.

It is possible that fixed price orders below the market price are getting filled by your products.

I would also point out that my military base company was not supposed to be selling anything. They automatically sell regardless of the setting in the automation section. The executives you assigned to the plant must have decided may have decided to fill the contract.

Try testing the market. Buy $600B in Cocoa and look what happens to the cocoa sales. If you buy at twice the market rate the "best price" rises at 5%. But the sales still happen.

so, Q other than trying to get gm to fix the glitch, what is the optimum quality to sell products? under 300 or lower?

Coolwind, I randomly checked a few of your 296 quality state corps. They're off as expected, you must have calculated something wrong.

They're selling in the same general range that I've already described before (290-297% of market price), while your sales strategies vary from 307 to 327.

Sales strategy seems to be the biggest factor in this problem.