Suggestion: trading

[Darkseid667]

Hi folks,
have been returning to Discovery after a break to test the new patch. Many good ideas here, like reducing the Credits by the factor 100, refining ores to ingots in POBs, like it has been suggested in the POB threads a few years ago - very nice.
But who got the idea to make these commodities unsellabla on bases that sell? Why? Any accidental buy is irreversible, trading for best prices is extremely tedious - just why? Can't this be turned back to normal?

Best regards, Darkseid.

[Petitioner]

First things first, welcome back! If you're interested, there's an aid program for returning vets to help you get bac in the game quicker.

As for "high-risk commodities" being unable to be sold at bases they're bought from, this is a balance concern. Among other reasons, this is necessary to make sure inter-corporate piracy doesn't become zero-risk; once you get the cargo, you actually have to transport it.

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[Darkseid667]

First things first, welcome back! If you're interested, there's an aid program for returning vets to help you get bac in the game quicker.

As for "high-risk commodities" being unable to be sold at bases they're bought from, this is a balance concern. Among other reasons, this is necessary to make sure inter-corporate piracy doesn't become zero-risk; once you get the cargo, you actually have to transport it.

Hi, thanks for the reply. That makes sense. No welcome-back-packege needed however, got enough cash just hunting Liberty Rogues in NY

[Haste]

The main reason for this is simpler and unfortunately - as far as I am aware - not a problem we can avoid: for "High Risk Commodities", buyers have to be shut off from buying the commodity they sell for two main reasons:

• The profit curve of these commodities is exponential. Meaning that the further you take the item from the original producer (cheapest salepoint / point of origin), the more profit per second you start making. The issue with that is that a hypothetical reseller halfway down the route would be vastly superior for credits-per-hour than buying from the cheapest place. Imagine the origin point as "A", a reseller as "B" and the final, highest buying point as "C". For the section of the route from A -> B, you make, let's say, "6 CSU" on average. For B -> C, you make "12 CSU". These are just numbers for the purpose of an example, don't look too much into them. On average, the route from A to C makes 9 CSU. But why would you ever run that segment if you can run the quicker B -> C segment? You'd just find two well-connected, much shorter runs, reducing the risk you take by having to fly a long distance, and making more money in the process.
  
  To fix this, we made resellers significantly more expensive to buy these high risk commodities from. Their prices are calculated as if they were much further from their point of origin than they truly are. This reduces their viability as a source to buy the commodity from. So B -> C is toned down this way, making it not a concern. However, this creates a new problem: B sells for way more, and we don't have separate buy and sell prices, so it also buys for way more. All we have done is move the problem. It isn't B -> C that is massively too profitable now, it is A -> B. There is no solution for this problem other than, as I mentioned, variable buy and sell prices, which unfortunately are not a feature Freelancer supports nor one we can realistically implement (any time soon). So, instead, we prohibit selling these specific commodities to bases that sell them, so we can have resellers without creating hugely broken routes all over the place.
  
  
• The second main reason applies specifically to HRCs that can be refined from ores (and ore-like commodities). The issue here is that we want to create a profit margin for PoBs refining ores, naturally, to incentivize building and maintaining a PoB for this purpose as well as to pay for the refining costs themselves. To create this profit margin, we make the "derived" HRCs very expensive (90 credits across the board currently). However, that creates a potential problem where PoB owners could avoid having to do any significant trips to sell their refined wares: just sell it right back to the 90-credit salepoint close by and cash in your profit right away. Of course, you'd make less than you would carrying it to a proper destination, but depending on how the numbers work out it could be sufficiently viable that the entire ore -> HRC system would just devolve into people refining an ore locally and then also selling it to an NPC base 20k away. Not ideal, really. By preventing players from selling to bases that sell the refined ware, we basically decouple the prices of PoBs and NPCs. This also means that we can buff up the profitability of PoB refining without much concern for these sorts of super-short routes, if desired.
  

TL;DR: We had little choice but to add this restriction. The only real fix is variable buy & sell prices and the current only way we know of implementing them is incredibly, well, silly and undesirable. Maybe one day.

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[Darkseid667]

The main reason for this is simpler and unfortunately - as far as I am aware - not a problem we can avoid: for "High Risk Commodities", buyers have to be shut off from buying the commodity they sell for two main reasons:

• The profit curve of these commodities is exponential. Meaning that the further you take the item from the original producer (cheapest salepoint / point of origin), the more profit per second you start making. The issue with that is that a hypothetical reseller halfway down the route would be vastly superior for credits-per-hour than buying from the cheapest place. Imagine the origin point as "A", a reseller as "B" and the final, highest buying point as "C". For the section of the route from A -> B, you make, let's say, "6 CSU" on average. For B -> C, you make "12 CSU". These are just numbers for the purpose of an example, don't look too much into them. On average, the route from A to C makes 9 CSU. But why would you ever run that segment if you can run the quicker B -> C segment? You'd just find two well-connected, much shorter runs, reducing the risk you take by having to fly a long distance, and making more money in the process.
  
  To fix this, we made resellers significantly more expensive to buy these high risk commodities from. Their prices are calculated as if they were much further from their point of origin than they truly are. This reduces their viability as a source to buy the commodity from. So B -> C is toned down this way, making it not a concern. However, this creates a new problem: B sells for way more, and we don't have separate buy and sell prices, so it also buys for way more. All we have done is move the problem. It isn't B -> C that is massively too profitable now, it is A -> B. There is no solution for this problem other than, as I mentioned, variable buy and sell prices, which unfortunately are not a feature Freelancer supports nor one we can realistically implement (any time soon). So, instead, we prohibit selling these specific commodities to bases that sell them, so we can have resellers without creating hugely broken routes all over the place.
  
  
• The second main reason applies specifically to HRCs that can be refined from ores (and ore-like commodities). The issue here is that we want to create a profit margin for PoBs refining ores, naturally, to incentivize building and maintaining a PoB for this purpose as well as to pay for the refining costs themselves. To create this profit margin, we make the "derived" HRCs very expensive (90 credits across the board currently). However, that creates a potential problem where PoB owners could avoid having to do any significant trips to sell their refined wares: just sell it right back to the 90-credit salepoint close by and cash in your profit right away. Of course, you'd make less than you would carrying it to a proper destination, but depending on how the numbers work out it could be sufficiently viable that the entire ore -> HRC system would just devolve into people refining an ore locally and then also selling it to an NPC base 20k away. Not ideal, really. By preventing players from selling to bases that sell the refined ware, we basically decouple the prices of PoBs and NPCs. This also means that we can buff up the profitability of PoB refining without much concern for these sorts of super-short routes, if desired.
  

TL;DR: We had little choice but to add this restriction. The only real fix is variable buy & sell prices and the current only way we know of implementing them is incredibly, well, silly and undesirable. Maybe one day.

Only your second point really makes sense, the first point could be avoided by carefully setting sale prices depending on distance from origin in ALL NPC bases. That's a lot of busywork, but could be done.

[Haste]

Only your second point really makes sense, the first point could be avoided by carefully setting sale prices depending on distance from origin in ALL NPC bases. That's a lot of busywork, but could be done.

I'd sooner say it's the other way around. Refinery versus NPC sell price balance is something you can extensively fiddle with to maybe just about make it work. The A -> B -> C "reseller problem" is one that the very laws of the universe oppose, as far as I can tell. I would love for you to back this confident statement up with some example numbers. I will provide the scenario for you to carefully adjust. I'll keep it really simple: a single "producer" (origin point), a single reseller and a single "consumer" (station that buys but does not sell). As before, we'll name them A, B and C respectively.

So, our goal is to create an exponential profit curve. Let's say that a 10 minute route should make $35 profit per unit (about 6 CSU), and a 20 minute route should make $120 (about 9.5 CSU).

We'll set the base price at the producer, A, to $50. This then means that the price at B is $50 + $35 = $85. The price at C would be $50 + $120 = $170.

Let's just make the example as simple as possible: B is truly right in-between A and C. There's a perfectly straight line of travel from A to B and then C. In reality, of course, things aren't that easy - but for the purposes of this example it keeps things as simple as possible. If you are correct in saying the prices can be carefully tuned to create an exponential curve, I imagine the simplest example would be the easiest to work with to prove your point.

So we've got what we wanted: A to B makes $35, 6 CSU. A to C makes $120, 9.5 CSU. However, here comes the fun part: B is a reseller. B not only buys for $85, but also sells for $85. So, I'm not going to buy at A at all. I'm going to buy at B. So, I'm buying at B for $85, and then traveling a 10 minute route to C to sell there at $170, making $85 in 10 minutes. That amounts to approximately 15.5 - 16 CSU.

Which prices are you adjusting to fix this extreme outlier? We want A -> C to continue making $120 profit and A -> B to continue making $35 profit. Under those conditions, what price adjustments are you making?

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[Busy Miner]

Only your second point really makes sense, the first point could be avoided by carefully setting sale prices depending on distance from origin in ALL NPC bases. That's a lot of busywork, but could be done.

I'd sooner say it's the other way around. Refinery versus NPC sell price balance is something you can extensively fiddle with to maybe just about make it work. The A -> B -> C "reseller problem" is one that the very laws of the universe oppose, as far as I can tell. I would love for you to back this confident statement up with some example numbers. I will provide the scenario for you to carefully adjust. I'll keep it really simple: a single "producer" (origin point), a single reseller and a single "consumer" (station that buys but does not sell). As before, we'll name them A, B and C respectively.

So, our goal is to create an exponential profit curve. Let's say that a 10 minute route should make $35 profit per unit (about 6 CSU), and a 20 minute route should make $120 (about 9.5 CSU).

We'll set the base price at the producer, A, to $50. This then means that the price at B is $50 + $35 = $85. The price at C would be $50 + $120 = $170.

Let's just make the example as simple as possible: B is truly right in-between A and C. There's a perfectly straight line of travel from A to B and then C. In reality, of course, things aren't that easy - but for the purposes of this example it keeps things as simple as possible. If you are correct in saying the prices can be carefully tuned to create an exponential curve, I imagine the simplest example would be the easiest to work with to prove your point.

So we've got what we wanted: A to B makes $35, 6 CSU. A to C makes $120, 9.5 CSU. However, here comes the fun part: B is a reseller. B not only buys for $85, but also sells for $85. So, I'm not going to buy at A at all. I'm going to buy at B. So, I'm buying at B for $85, and then traveling a 10 minute route to C to sell there at $170, making $85 in 10 minutes. That amounts to approximately 15.5 - 16 CSU.

Which prices are you adjusting to fix this extreme outlier? We want A -> C to continue making $120 profit and A -> B to continue making $35 profit. Under those conditions, what price adjustments are you making?

Shouldn't stuff be linear, not exponential?

[Haste]

Shouldn't stuff be linear, not exponential?

Regular commodities are linear, high risk/value commodities are not. If profit was linear this would obviously solve itself, but that's not the goal here. The goal is to strongly encourage players to take these more expensive (at base price) commodities a long distance to make the increased profit. This adds to the risk factor - running highly valuable commodities back and forth between two bases three minutes apart is fundamentally not very "risky". Running a 20 minute route with a big payoff is, as getting pirated towards the end would be a very painful experience.

The fact that with distance from the origin point, the price goes up exponentially is why this whole issue even exists. "Solving" it by not having exponential profit rates is not a solution, while the current system (no selling back to producers/resellers) is - even if at first it might be a little unintuitive. On the other hand, it's communicated both through the item's infocard and icon. Paying a little attention when buying or selling expensive items is not that big an ask, I think.

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[Busy Miner]

Shouldn't stuff be linear, not exponential?

Regular commodities are linear, high risk/value commodities are not. If profit was linear this would obviously solve itself, but that's not the goal here. The goal is to strongly encourage players to take these more expensive (at base price) commodities a long distance to make the increased profit. This adds to the risk factor - running highly valuable commodities back and forth between two bases three minutes apart is fundamentally not very "risky". Running a 20 minute route with a big payoff is, as getting pirated towards the end would be a very painful experience.

The fact that with distance from the origin point, the price goes up exponentially is why this whole issue even exists. "Solving" it by not having exponential profit rates is not a solution, while the current system (no selling back to producers/resellers) is - even if at first it might be a little unintuitive. On the other hand, it's communicated both through the item's infocard and icon. Paying a little attention when buying or selling expensive items is not that big an ask, I think.

Thanks for the detailed answer!

[Darkseid667]

Shouldn't stuff be linear, not exponential?

Regular commodities are linear, high risk/value commodities are not. If profit was linear this would obviously solve itself, but that's not the goal here. The goal is to strongly encourage players to take these more expensive (at base price) commodities a long distance to make the increased profit. This adds to the risk factor - running highly valuable commodities back and forth between two bases three minutes apart is fundamentally not very "risky". Running a 20 minute route with a big payoff is, as getting pirated towards the end would be a very painful experience.

The fact that with distance from the origin point, the price goes up exponentially is why this whole issue even exists. "Solving" it by not having exponential profit rates is not a solution, while the current system (no selling back to producers/resellers) is - even if at first it might be a little unintuitive. On the other hand, it's communicated both through the item's infocard and icon. Paying a little attention when buying or selling expensive items is not that big an ask, I think.

Thanks for the reply. I am trying to find some profitable routes at the moment