I would like to provide comprehensive overviews of Starbase economy in its current state, what can be done better, address the inflation we are facing, ship prices in general, NPC markets and Auction House. I would like to point out that I have a master in economics and these are not just ideas pulled out of thin air. If you don't have time to read this skip it to the Static ore prices.
Inflation of prices, money and its problems.
Currently we are facing tremendous inflation in Starbase that is now about 560% compared to day 1 of SB. In comparison inflation in Venezuela was about 500% which is one of the worst managed economies on this planet. This in itself tells a lot about how SB economy is being handled.
A bit of theoretical background. Why is inflation bad. Inflation in itself isn't bad when it's managed. 1-2% yearly inflation is actually ideal in the real word economy. One would say that game has nothing to do with real life economy but he could not be more wrong. All economy models are simplified and they actually are “games” or simulations with just the key aspects being calculated on the very basic level. That is exactly what the game is, a simplified real world where time flies faster as we don't have our whole lives to live inside said game. This part is important and we will work with it when talking about ship prices.
Main reasons why too high of inflation is bad for the game:
UX and GoL are the main reasons. It is very hard to count in millions or even billions, the amount of numbers is overwhelming, everything feels highly overpriced and from real life we are used to counting stuff in ten of thousands at max. Euro or Dollars are the two main currencies which people use and they are used for stuff costing 10, 100, 1k, 10k dollars but noone is ready to count in billions.
Other reasons:
Money is losing value fast. I was able to buy 321 vasamas, now I can buy just 57 vasamas and I did not spend a single credit. All the balance gets broken every time when FB devs change stuff by 200% in one patch. This makes starter jobs earning unbalanceable. It takes up to 10 hours of doing starter jobs now to get a hauler. It took one hour 3 months ago. Simply because someone can't create solid design for pricing of ores. Which is the key that affects the whole economy. And it's not getting better! It's getting worse every week.
Best message to date about this is quote from one CA player:
<C:\LemonGrab>06.11.202>
Also, I just checked ship prices for myself. +500k for a Vasama. 4m for a Hauler. I said it before and I'll say it again, the devs are breakdancing on their keyboard and calling it balancing.
People say I am too negative, that I don't appreciate being in the CA. Well to those people I say no. If you overlook these problems now, where they can be forgiven, they will make it to the EA and ruin the game reputation forever. But not only I give criticism I also provide solutions! For free just because I care about the game.
Solving this issue
Solving inflation is actually quite easy, it's more than doable in CA and you don't need any other game features for it to work. Not only that, you can build other game features on top of it. I do like FB a lot and they are great devs but saying that they can't balance it now cause they are waiting for other features is pure BS. Anyone who understands the topic can do it and after the last 7 months in CA I am more than certain that they really have no clue what is going on or at least someone who is in charge of that economy. Also the economy can not wait, it is the core feature of any MMO. It can as well be a single player game without a working economy. And you can't balance the economy in a week even if you did not sleep a single night.
First comes design. How much should a ship cost, how do we value the money, is 1000 credits a lot of money? 1000 euro is not a lot but it is not a little. Let's say we go for user friendliness, if I have to count zeros when trading with someone or listing items for sale we already failed the task. That means the most common transactions can not be done in millions. Currently in SB I go through 50 million credits, I sure don't go through 50 million credits IRL, I would have to buy like 5 supersport cars and I would still have money left.
So one criterion is to not count zeros. We could make a stack of ore for 100 credits but that would leave us no room for cheap items. So we need room for balancing as well. And for items that are made out of those stacks. So we want to go smaller than 100000 cause you can see for ourselves how hard it is to read it and know if it's 100.000 or 1.000.000. But we want to go higher than 100.
Ideal base price for stack of ore would be 10 000 credits. For every ore NPC market buys from you. There are two ways where to go from here. One is static and the other one is dynamic. Static ore prices are much simpler to execute but they would mean no more NPC items selling ship parts. Not a big deal for most but I want to present both variants to allow better discussion. Every rock or ice material would be 2k per stack.
Static ore prices.
When you get Ore you can either keep it, sell it to the NPC market for 10k credits per stack or list it on the AH if you can sell it for more there. So junk ores that everybody has in a given cluster are sold to the station instantly, it does not matter in which cluster you live, devs don't have to balance anything, ores you need you keep and the ones that are being sold for a lot of credits you list on the AH.
People would have to manufacture all the ship parts and list them on the AH, they could be shown on the same displays we have them now but they would all be player made and the one that noone made would still be listed as out of stock. Reason for that is you can't create the correct corresponding price in the NPC market if all the ore prices are 10k.
Prices of tools, ammo and weapons would all be static and it would be really easy to balance, there would never be any inflation cause you always gain money at the same pace over the whole universe.
It's non exploitable compared to a dynamic economy and it is a true player run economy as players mine all the ore, refine all the ore and manufacture all the parts and exchange all the listed items on the AH. Someone has a factory for thrusters so he lists thrusters but buys charodium, someone makes hardpoints so he needs different parts.
There will be more parts than there will be ships of course which would make the AH crash if demand is under supply. Its computer game and economy is simplified so NPC market has to buy both ingots and completed items as well. Price at which you sell every smelted or refined ingot would be 10k times the amount of stacks you need for a given ingon cause purity value exists + refined material bonus. That translates in to Ip = 10 000 * X + Br. (Ip = ingot price, X = amount of stacks, Br = Bonus for refining )
Refined material bonus is yet to be designed how much it would be but that is the ideal way to do this. You already know what the price will be, you just have to determine how much it will be when we get refining but the price is already designed and you know what you are doing. You can compare how long it takes to refine a stack of ore and adjust the bonus on that. It can be 1k, 5k, 10k of credits. Who knows how long it will take but you already know this value exists and you can work with it as Y. If refining each material takes different time than Br = q*Tr. (q = base refining bonus, Tr = relative time to refine said ore)
Price of manufactured items would be using the price of ingots that we defined plus manufacturing bonus. Ip * Y + Bm. (Ip = ingot price, Y amount of ingots needed, Bm = bonus for manufacturing. Again we don't know how long will manufacturing of each part take and if different parts have different manufacturing times. In that case Bm = k*Tm. (k = base manufacturing bonus, Tm = relative time to manufacture said part)
This system would make all the parts in the whole universe no matter what cluster or location or amount of players cost exactly the same when selling to the NPC market so you would not give credit boosts when living in a better area than someone else, let's say in Xhalium field. So exploiting npc markets would not be possible but! You can still have manufacturing advantage in making some of the parts and selling them to other stations. With the current system you can just live in an arkanium cluster, get shit ton of credits from the NPC market and ruin the life of everyone else living anywhere else.
This would also lock the inflation in place cause the prices you get from stations would be relatively low when it comes to getting credits. You can't just live in a corazium cluster, get credits 6x faster than anyone else and start inflating the economy. Single mechanics can't stop inflation completely, not the player made one but for those there are different mechanics. This would stop the dev made inflation and would give us a great start to work with all the incoming loops described above.
Current ship prices
Mechanics described above would not fix the stupid ship prices we have now. But it could be used for such things. We now have ship price which is 93% ores and 7% refining, manufacturing and assembly cost fee. My ship now is 500 stacks so I need 465 stacks of ore and sell 35 of them to pay the fee. The final cost in time we have now can stay if these numbers change like this = 35% materials, 20% smelting, 35% manufacturing, 10% assembly. We already know how much each of that fee is as we defined it above. But if we give all the jobs the same value per minute we would get a price of 175 stacks and fees that would require 100 + 175 + 50 stacks to be sold to the npc market to be paid in credits. This already balances the game cause I know how much I really have to pay for the ship (175 stack) plus I know that by creating furnaces, factories and other automation methods I can save 65% of the price! Right now with all that I could save 7% which is what pisses people off.
The ship prices paragraph is very simplified but these goals could be defined before to further balance the bonus you get from refining and manufacturing and the same bonus + 25% you have to pay in credits to the SSC if you want it to do this manufacturing and refining for you.
Last few words
Current state of the economy is, let's say, questionable. I often hear "Dude its CA" or "Don't be so hard on them" but you can't balance the economy one week before release, not even a month before. There are many issues that are unnecessary and that are purely design choices that do not respect that people still play the game during CA.
Thank you for your time TGess
Inflation of prices, money and its problems.
Currently we are facing tremendous inflation in Starbase that is now about 560% compared to day 1 of SB. In comparison inflation in Venezuela was about 500% which is one of the worst managed economies on this planet. This in itself tells a lot about how SB economy is being handled.
A bit of theoretical background. Why is inflation bad. Inflation in itself isn't bad when it's managed. 1-2% yearly inflation is actually ideal in the real word economy. One would say that game has nothing to do with real life economy but he could not be more wrong. All economy models are simplified and they actually are “games” or simulations with just the key aspects being calculated on the very basic level. That is exactly what the game is, a simplified real world where time flies faster as we don't have our whole lives to live inside said game. This part is important and we will work with it when talking about ship prices.
Main reasons why too high of inflation is bad for the game:
UX and GoL are the main reasons. It is very hard to count in millions or even billions, the amount of numbers is overwhelming, everything feels highly overpriced and from real life we are used to counting stuff in ten of thousands at max. Euro or Dollars are the two main currencies which people use and they are used for stuff costing 10, 100, 1k, 10k dollars but noone is ready to count in billions.
Other reasons:
Money is losing value fast. I was able to buy 321 vasamas, now I can buy just 57 vasamas and I did not spend a single credit. All the balance gets broken every time when FB devs change stuff by 200% in one patch. This makes starter jobs earning unbalanceable. It takes up to 10 hours of doing starter jobs now to get a hauler. It took one hour 3 months ago. Simply because someone can't create solid design for pricing of ores. Which is the key that affects the whole economy. And it's not getting better! It's getting worse every week.
Best message to date about this is quote from one CA player:
<C:\LemonGrab>06.11.202>
Also, I just checked ship prices for myself. +500k for a Vasama. 4m for a Hauler. I said it before and I'll say it again, the devs are breakdancing on their keyboard and calling it balancing.
People say I am too negative, that I don't appreciate being in the CA. Well to those people I say no. If you overlook these problems now, where they can be forgiven, they will make it to the EA and ruin the game reputation forever. But not only I give criticism I also provide solutions! For free just because I care about the game.
Solving this issue
Solving inflation is actually quite easy, it's more than doable in CA and you don't need any other game features for it to work. Not only that, you can build other game features on top of it. I do like FB a lot and they are great devs but saying that they can't balance it now cause they are waiting for other features is pure BS. Anyone who understands the topic can do it and after the last 7 months in CA I am more than certain that they really have no clue what is going on or at least someone who is in charge of that economy. Also the economy can not wait, it is the core feature of any MMO. It can as well be a single player game without a working economy. And you can't balance the economy in a week even if you did not sleep a single night.
First comes design. How much should a ship cost, how do we value the money, is 1000 credits a lot of money? 1000 euro is not a lot but it is not a little. Let's say we go for user friendliness, if I have to count zeros when trading with someone or listing items for sale we already failed the task. That means the most common transactions can not be done in millions. Currently in SB I go through 50 million credits, I sure don't go through 50 million credits IRL, I would have to buy like 5 supersport cars and I would still have money left.
So one criterion is to not count zeros. We could make a stack of ore for 100 credits but that would leave us no room for cheap items. So we need room for balancing as well. And for items that are made out of those stacks. So we want to go smaller than 100000 cause you can see for ourselves how hard it is to read it and know if it's 100.000 or 1.000.000. But we want to go higher than 100.
Ideal base price for stack of ore would be 10 000 credits. For every ore NPC market buys from you. There are two ways where to go from here. One is static and the other one is dynamic. Static ore prices are much simpler to execute but they would mean no more NPC items selling ship parts. Not a big deal for most but I want to present both variants to allow better discussion. Every rock or ice material would be 2k per stack.
Static ore prices.
When you get Ore you can either keep it, sell it to the NPC market for 10k credits per stack or list it on the AH if you can sell it for more there. So junk ores that everybody has in a given cluster are sold to the station instantly, it does not matter in which cluster you live, devs don't have to balance anything, ores you need you keep and the ones that are being sold for a lot of credits you list on the AH.
People would have to manufacture all the ship parts and list them on the AH, they could be shown on the same displays we have them now but they would all be player made and the one that noone made would still be listed as out of stock. Reason for that is you can't create the correct corresponding price in the NPC market if all the ore prices are 10k.
Prices of tools, ammo and weapons would all be static and it would be really easy to balance, there would never be any inflation cause you always gain money at the same pace over the whole universe.
It's non exploitable compared to a dynamic economy and it is a true player run economy as players mine all the ore, refine all the ore and manufacture all the parts and exchange all the listed items on the AH. Someone has a factory for thrusters so he lists thrusters but buys charodium, someone makes hardpoints so he needs different parts.
There will be more parts than there will be ships of course which would make the AH crash if demand is under supply. Its computer game and economy is simplified so NPC market has to buy both ingots and completed items as well. Price at which you sell every smelted or refined ingot would be 10k times the amount of stacks you need for a given ingon cause purity value exists + refined material bonus. That translates in to Ip = 10 000 * X + Br. (Ip = ingot price, X = amount of stacks, Br = Bonus for refining )
Refined material bonus is yet to be designed how much it would be but that is the ideal way to do this. You already know what the price will be, you just have to determine how much it will be when we get refining but the price is already designed and you know what you are doing. You can compare how long it takes to refine a stack of ore and adjust the bonus on that. It can be 1k, 5k, 10k of credits. Who knows how long it will take but you already know this value exists and you can work with it as Y. If refining each material takes different time than Br = q*Tr. (q = base refining bonus, Tr = relative time to refine said ore)
Price of manufactured items would be using the price of ingots that we defined plus manufacturing bonus. Ip * Y + Bm. (Ip = ingot price, Y amount of ingots needed, Bm = bonus for manufacturing. Again we don't know how long will manufacturing of each part take and if different parts have different manufacturing times. In that case Bm = k*Tm. (k = base manufacturing bonus, Tm = relative time to manufacture said part)
This system would make all the parts in the whole universe no matter what cluster or location or amount of players cost exactly the same when selling to the NPC market so you would not give credit boosts when living in a better area than someone else, let's say in Xhalium field. So exploiting npc markets would not be possible but! You can still have manufacturing advantage in making some of the parts and selling them to other stations. With the current system you can just live in an arkanium cluster, get shit ton of credits from the NPC market and ruin the life of everyone else living anywhere else.
This would also lock the inflation in place cause the prices you get from stations would be relatively low when it comes to getting credits. You can't just live in a corazium cluster, get credits 6x faster than anyone else and start inflating the economy. Single mechanics can't stop inflation completely, not the player made one but for those there are different mechanics. This would stop the dev made inflation and would give us a great start to work with all the incoming loops described above.
Current ship prices
Mechanics described above would not fix the stupid ship prices we have now. But it could be used for such things. We now have ship price which is 93% ores and 7% refining, manufacturing and assembly cost fee. My ship now is 500 stacks so I need 465 stacks of ore and sell 35 of them to pay the fee. The final cost in time we have now can stay if these numbers change like this = 35% materials, 20% smelting, 35% manufacturing, 10% assembly. We already know how much each of that fee is as we defined it above. But if we give all the jobs the same value per minute we would get a price of 175 stacks and fees that would require 100 + 175 + 50 stacks to be sold to the npc market to be paid in credits. This already balances the game cause I know how much I really have to pay for the ship (175 stack) plus I know that by creating furnaces, factories and other automation methods I can save 65% of the price! Right now with all that I could save 7% which is what pisses people off.
The ship prices paragraph is very simplified but these goals could be defined before to further balance the bonus you get from refining and manufacturing and the same bonus + 25% you have to pay in credits to the SSC if you want it to do this manufacturing and refining for you.
Last few words
Current state of the economy is, let's say, questionable. I often hear "Dude its CA" or "Don't be so hard on them" but you can't balance the economy one week before release, not even a month before. There are many issues that are unnecessary and that are purely design choices that do not respect that people still play the game during CA.
Thank you for your time TGess
