W3C - Game news September 24

1. Sneak Attacks

Sneak attacks can now be used from the country maps. When you click on a target, you can decide which type of attack, or a war declaration, should take place. It is easier now to select targets and use sneak attacks.

2. Movement of units on the maps

The movement of units far away from your own country is now made easier. Two errors that made this complicated are now solved.

3. Corporation Type Conversion

Corporations can now be converted within their industry group and become a different corporation, producing a different product at the same quality the previous corporation used to produce.
The change of type makes it easy to change a corporation that is failing because its product is in oversupply, into one that produces a product that shows a shortage on the market.
The corporate type conversion, is similar to boosters and requires one gold coin.

4. The Cost of Ammunition

The cost of many types of ammunition is declined and the monthly production is increased. This is discussed before and comes when many types of ammunition swing from a large oversupply that ran for a very long period, into severe shortage, mainly because large quantities of ammunition that were dumped on the market are all bought by many countries and because we currently have many more wars.

This was expected and it would be impossible to build so many ammo corporations to produce the larger numbers.

The production numbers were increased by 10% and the cost per piece of ammunition declined by about the same.
It is unlikely that shortages will now disappear and repeated action might be needed.

The increased production will not be such that the production of ammunition will become less profitable.

5. Product pricing

The price of many products on the market went down by about 0.7% It will cause a slight decline in both income and cost. This process is ongoing and will continue. It is unrelated to the decline in the cost of ammunition.

6. Expected Changes - Short Term

The transaction log will include all the transactions that take place for both the country, enterprise and all the corporations. The log will increase in size and will contain millions of transactions each day. It is kept for 5 real days.

This change is experimental, and pending performance testing. The log might be reversed, or partially reversed if we encounter any problems in its creation and its daily use. It will be part of the next update on Oct. 1.

Other planned updates include the completion of the "favorites" and "recents" feature on the country maps (Left pane) and the upgrading of conventional mobile units into auto response units.

Next on the plan is a start of a chain of improvements to the navy that will end up with an upgraded navy function with all features that are

Yay! The navy updates are coming! I like it, but can you change the type of corp that one is if its public? And if it can, does it have the same value?

When converting corporation types, is the change instant? Or does it take time?

Thank you.

Changes next game month

"The corporate type conversion, is similar to boosters and requires one gold coin. "

If I wanted to reshape my industry, I should be able to pay for the privilege, out of my earnings from the game.Not because I have a magical gold coin.

You already restrict features to paid members, and I pay regularly, now you want to restrict this KEY FEATURE that I have been eagerly waiting on for many months?

I am very dissapointed by this.

THIS IS NOT A BOOSTER.

I could of happily paid 500B a corp to covert them, and quite happily convert a few hundred corps, but I will not pay extra.

Teddy

Hey Snuggles!!! How come you dun come see me any more in chat? :-(

Actually, I am starting to wonder about this whole gold coin thing. It is very restrictive. I would like to see it us being able to pay out of our game money for the same things, such as shuttles, (which are not boosters either). Other option, get rid of gold coins. Basically, dedicated players that have made this game almost a daily chore should be able to find ways of playing without taking out the plastic.

No-one else care about the changing corps function?

the price of a product needs to be base on its production cost, and what players want to pay for or sell at to other players.

it should not be an arbitrary number decided by gm? gm can be decrease by 50% or 5% is irrelevant because it does not reflect the cost to produce the product?

for example, at full capacity my stone corp can produce 4,000,000 tons per month with a cost of $1,888,340 SC. this would be $0.4731 SC per ton. why is this product automatically is set at $200 per ton at Q100?

realistically i can be very profitable selling this product at $1.00 SC per ton in my local market, because that's a very high margin already.

what is the issue for players to price their own products?
if any player who is too "stupid" and selling his/her products for less than what cost to produce the products, then that is how earth economic works and this is how it must work on sc too because do we have any players in sc outside of earth?

i agree with xon and teddy bear im taking an economics class and its interesting to see how manipulative this apparent simulation is.... really makes it seem like this is more of a beta version of a game

@theway,
what other reasons is there, if not to make my corps pay $200 per ton for that product, if it could be price at $1 per ton?

economics is simply just making choices to allocate limited resources to unlimited wants.

When the price is completely arbitrary, (as was in the far past), cheating was trivial.

There is a wide range you can sell your products for, and making losses is within that range.

The corporate conversion is of course optional.
it can immediately turn a losing corporations into a very profitable one. It is of course restricted to prevent free players (and free accounts) that can be used to destroy profitable corporations and products.

Cheating remains a problem and many functions are, and will be limited to more serious players and using gold coins is helpful.

We think that trying to destroy the market for a product by converting many corporations will become unattractive if it costs 1000 gold coins and it will not happen.
doing the same for game money is of course different.

Andy

I was having a discussion with a player.

Can you please explain the Benefits of Higher Ammo Quality.
There was some confusion.

Currently High Quality ammo means a farther combat range and less ammo is used in battle correct?

price should not ever be arbitrary from a business point of view. to be profitable in any business, you need to know what you must make to cover your cost and have profit for growth. if you fail that, then your business will fail.

players who lack the basic understanding of pricing structures for their products, should let them run their corps/countries to the ground, and once its total assets = 0, then they must inject more money (sc $, gc, or usd) into their corps/countries, or the corp is automatic close because no worker would be working if they don't get pay. workers have their own expenses to pay too.

it would be difficult to cheat, if there is a very strong foundation. for example, in order to bankrupted a very wealthy corp by cheating through making that entity sell well below the cost to manufacture its products or pay at extremely high price for its products/workers, the only possible way to do is maybe to go through every single product that is injected into the production process of that corp to produce that product. i don't think any player out there has that much time or desire to sort through all those products, simply because every product is tie to at least 6 other products as ingredients

free players are much less committed with their times and afforts, so how will they possibly do that with each country having so many corporations to deal with.

what is the whole point of destroying a corp, even if it's in a c3 that you just taken over? the corp provide works for the population, welfare for the people, and so on.

i'm not there yet, but changing corp type should not have to cost gc, but should cost sc $ because that's exactly what the corp was generating before. what is the relationship between costing gc and changing a corp to produce different product? changing corp requires that some ingredients and workers mix may have to be changed, but what does these have to do with costing GC. if it cost 1 GC, then will this 1 GC be consider the cost to change and will be in the corp's budget as $41.50B SC as a cost, or will it disappear into thin air?

in order to make it work or balance on a debit/credit system, when player pays 1GC debit from his account, then gm needs to credit equal value asset to the player's account. the real question is where is this 1GC going to, to gm or to cover all the costs to convert?

Exactly XON, the large amount of $ required to convert corps, would be just as hard for newer and free players to acquire.

In fact,Andy, your argument is flawed, because gold coins are given to new players in abundance, meaning this would be open to exploitation, in exactly the way you say your trying to prevent.

Teddy

Corporation Type Conversion should not cost gold coins. Your stated position is flawed.

A beginner is given coins. They could use them to alter markets.

However, a beginner wouldn't have amassed large amounts of cash, and would be unable to pay a lump sum very often./

Alternatively, make a minimum level requirement.

We already pay for the game, stop trying to rob us.

Teddy

Teddy you are exactly right about the GM's reason for charging GC to convert corps. It isn't about beginners doing anything to harm the market. Actually the GM does an excellent job of that all by himself. The real reason is to generate GC for W3C and he should just say so. I don't agree he should charge for this but that is his reason.

And Xon you are right. It took a bit before you got to the place where I can say I agree with you but in the last few days you have said a lot of things that I agree with. Keep it up.