Since the game's down for patching i've got some time to comment
Right now there's very little point commenting on "fixing" the economy, because it's broken "by design". Meaning, since barely *any* trading features are in, the economy that *is* in right now is literally nothing more then a placeholder.
For example; the game is clearly going for a player run economy, but there are NO unique player-crafted items to trade. The only things you can trade is stuff literally everybody can make: Preset weapons for example. Not only that, but because everybody HAS to craft those items to unlock research, so everybody is incentivized to make everything. Naturally, this causes rampant deflation in those assets, because people aren't buying, they're producing and selling in order to progress.
An easy fix for that would be enabling trading of truly player crafted items: Ships/blueprints, custom modules, custom YOLOL code (selling it in an entire module makes it more casual-friendly), which immediately also makes the game more player-friendly because the advanced players literally generate the stuff the casuals need, who in turn can help generate the massive ore count the pro's need. Ontop of that, to REALLY get the player economy going, the player vendors to sell this stuff should ONLY be available on every person's own personal station (The devs can "rent out" origin station space for a price only companies can afford to both drive currency sinks and incentivize grouping).
Once people have an incentive to sell to places OTHER then the origin station (meaning stations have automated player vendors that can sell AND buy), prices on the general auction house will stabilize as assets flow to different locations (there's a goooood reason WoW never created a cross-server auction house. It'd crash every price on every server). Much of the supply of the higher-end ores will be sold to player stations in the vicinity as travel time is a BIG profit drain, and it also enables station-to-station trade through arbitrage.
Economy wise, the first piece of advice i'd give the Devs would be implement player shops, limit them to player stations, and DON'T do anything complex with it! No YOLOL code, make it a quick unlock in the research tree etc. Complexity might be fun, but it's not *always* the best solution. The game needs more exchanges to actually be a game more, so players need a quick and dirty way to make them. Just cause the software boots up doesn't make it a trading game.
With that said, the selling of ores to Origin station is very much a quick and dirty fix to another problem the game has: Sources of Liquidity.
Price doesn't just depends on supply and demand of the ores,
but also of the currency. Selling ores to stations creates currency. But ask yourself: What
other sources of liquidity are there?
Jobs
and nothing else. No quests, nothing. And the jobs are horribly boring to do and offer no progression in the game, compared to mining ores. Also, ALL of these sources of currency are located on Origin stations,
and nowhere else, so it's impossible to create any local economy/exchange rate to begin with. You NEED the ores to progress through the research tree AND build stuff, while jobs only give you currency, which doesn't do much. It's much more profitable in terms of player time to go mine ores and then sell the excess to the station for cash. So that is what's happening, en masse.
In turn, this cash is
required because that's the
only way to refill propellant for early players. Once you create a need for the currency, you create a demand for the currency. And in this case, the demand for the currency is too small compared to the amount that can be generated. Or in other words, the NPC sell prices for ore set at the stations are FAR too high, compared to the currency needed to "repair your gear" just like in WoW (propellant can be seen as a gear-durability-cost). So everybody has plenty of money, while for everything else,
they need ore and not currency. So basically alot of currency goes "unused" because it has no use. The moment something truly useful is added which can only be aquired through currency, prices are gonna go through the roof because a giant amount of "savings" unlock at the same time and all dive on that asset.
You would expect to see inflation with so much currency printing, but, there's massive deflation in ore prices. And the reason for this is is the same as with the currency: the "liquidity demand" for ores is LOWER then the supply of said liquidity. Or simply put, more ores are being mined then are being consumed, and thus, everybody has plenty; and not enough ore is demanded against currency on the auction house to make the price rise above the price floor set by the NPCs. People just don't need it!
I've seen this before, in Champions Online. The crafting system was too basic upon release, and the Devs seriously underestimated how much people could no-life grind crafting reagents while there was no durability cost or soulbind system, so stuff crafted lasted forever and could be traded forever. As a result, bags that ought to have cost ~1000g and supply high-level players with income, cost ~1g05s because the NPCs bought the bags for 1g exactly.
The explanation for this is in Starbase is simple: Not enough ships/stuff is being built with the ores being mined. Part of that is simply the time and complexity it takes to build a single ship! I've got 105 hours now on steam since the first week of august, and 80 of that was spent *just trying to build a wireframe for a ship and figuring systems out*. I haven't even gotten to YOLOL code yet! Or plating! Wiki resources are *terrible*. I REALLY thought getting a mining laser was as simple as "unlock a mining laser module, build a laser mining module, stick it on my laborer, and press spacebar to fire". Because, yknow, that's every other game out there with pre-built modules.
Buying a pre-made ship took about 2 hours, meaning generating the currency for it by selling ore to the station and flying back and forth. Think it was 450k. The disconnect is just too big! Just mine ores, sell em to the station, become a millionaire, and whenever you ACTUALLY need to pay for building a ship (at the end of it all), then just buy the ores on the AH! Sell 10x, buy once = low prices due to demand. Always remember that Demand comes before Supply. There is no incentive for people to list their ores on the AH either, because even if the currency they got for it was appropriate,
what are they going to spend
that currency
on? Another ship?
You can only fly one at a time!
All of this does not have a quick and easy solution. Basically, the way to solve this is to create more sources of liquidity generation and demand throughout the universe, while driving prices up for crafting materials so there's more demand in currency for ore. But that will create problems of its own, most notably destroying the fun to build ships since it would take AGES to grind for a single one, aside from taking ages to design and build it, which is what this economy is REALLY built on: the Time economy of flying to resources as well as designing ships from scratch, and the interchange between the two systems (some people build and sell, some people mine and buy. I can't sell my ships right now, but people can mine like crazy).
Just take the currency out.
You don't need fiat money. You can work with labor-justified money, and this game is perfect for it! Path of Exile already does something similar. It doesn't have ANY "gold" or "credits", instead it has many currency tokens, and its economy functions just fine.
What you need is
utility value for items to give them a desire within the economy. In Path of Exile, it's Chaos Orbs, which allow you to re-roll stats on Diablo-like gear; a very desirable functionality.
Since Starbase already has many ores that have utility function, one doesn't really need to set a universal currency, and just let the player base come up with its own. If you take all money out, you'll find that the playerbase will develop currencies
on their own! One ore will become the most widely accepted at a relatively stable price VS all the other ores, because that one ore is the most useful. This also used to happen in MMOs with hyperinflation in the currency, where eventually it was replaced by useful items in-game which had a limited supply (i've been playing games for a VERY long time).
That last bit right now is the problem. There's no limited supply within Starbase because all the ores are generated at too low a cost compared to their usefulness. And that's an extension of not all features being in yet.
I saw on the roadmap that an "alloy" system is planned by combining ores. This will cause a liquidity drain on ores by consuming them, while creating a player-crafted item in return. The deeper this system is, the better it is for the economy, as it'll create more and more items that cannot be found by everybody (so
have to be purchased), and therefore are in limited supply. Creating an good alloy would be the same as creating an rare or epic crafted item in WoW with favorable stats, so well worth the trouble (IF there's a bit of randomness involved: If all alloys are exactly the same, it effectively becomes a pegged currency, and a 40% bastium/60% volkarium ore would sell for 40% bastium 60% volkarium, because you could just as well buy the ores yourself and craft the alloy yourself (unless there is a 3rd crafting requirement such as money or fuel)).
If the devs are smart, when the alloy system is introduced,
they simply remove all other currency liquidity sources from the game and replace them with an alloy that has a certain difficulty to make (say, Bastium and Volkarium have to be combined into Copperium which forms the copper in the gold/silver/copper trifecta) and offers a universal use to all players in the game - which is then offered up at a 1:1 exchange rate, creating sound money. While it seems scary to let everybody print, the rightful observation that Time is the limiter here, puts a hard cap on how much alloy everybody
can and will make for currency purposes, just like Chaos Orbs are continually consumed for their functionality within Path of Exile and generated by drop-chance, and thus, prices as measured in Chaos Orbs are fairly stable.
Meanwhile, trading this alloy on the open market establishes currency pairs: Copperium:Ajitite becomes a trading pair, just like gold:silver is. Demand for the alloy as currency stabilizes with the demand for the alloy in industry.
As for which alloy would function as "the global reserve currency", that answer is simple: Whatever alloy "Has the most utility use and can be generated only limitedly, yet isn't prohibitively rare".
For example, If there's a specific substance which allows your repair tool to "Mass repair" components on a ship with a sort of x-ray vision, while the default mode is still the ardious component-by-component repair, then that substance has MASSIVE value! People WILL demand it, giving it a price. What this price is
can be left up to the players themselves! It's not for us to judge whether the people producing this alloy want Bastium, Volkarium or anything else for it. The only thing the player base needs is an UI that actually lets them do this conveniently and quickly.
Simply because, time = value, thus time = money, so time saved = money saved. That's a very high utility value when it comes to repairs. Propellant same thing, though really that should be made readily available because
running out isn't fun, so having to pay money for fun directly is deeply negative. Premium propellant would also create a massive backlash. But mass-repair substances, wouldn't, beyond the people who want everything for free all the time.
The more convenience it offers, the more value it has. To put it simply: This game needs The Spice.
KEEP IN MIND THAT STARBASE IS A GAME IN A DIGITAL SPACE! THEREFORE, THERE ARE *NO* SUPPLY CONSTRAINTS!
We're literally never going to run out of ore to mine. SO, to control inflation and deflation, you have to control Generation and Destruction rates. If something is generated faster then it's destroyed, there is inflation. If it's destroyed faster then it can be generated (due to travel times for instance), there is deflation. When both are in equilibrium, so too is the economy.
So, the perfect currency is an ore/alloy/substance that is continually consumed (and propellant refills do exactly this as a currency sink right now, but because of the above mentioned backlash, it's calibrated improperly to the cheap side), and offers universal utility value (meaning it has use to ALL players, not just SOME players), while not being "game breaking" when you run out (inconvenient, but not devastating). Getting stuck in the middle of space is too much of a "punishment" for "bad financial management", but having to spend 2 hours instead of 2 minutes repairing your ship cause you didn't keep an eye on your funds sounds about right. Naturally, it's just an example, as there are more functions in the game (or planned) that have value as time-savers, which different alloys could service, giving each of them their utility value as well.
As far as game code goes, it wouldn't even be hard to implement! Instead of using a currency number for everything,
allow people to chose an item to set to request as payment on the Auction House. Barter works just fine when everybody sees the price for which everybody else is trading, it's this opaqueness that causes inefficiencies in barter. There is absolutely NO reason the dev's can't make an auction house where you have the option to list Bastium for sale for 100 Ajitite or Volkarium instead of 100 credits, or for instance, demand payment in Bastium instead of credits for custom YOLOL module code.
It's literally adding a drop-down menu on the "sell" action menu and transferring items from one inventory to another, instead of credits from one account to another; and reserving inventory space/requiring available space before purchase should prevent most transfer/inventory bugs. Or use a mailing system like every other decent MMO out there (IMO the game launched too early, even for early access).
That'd even be a quick and dirty way to implement player shops into player stations on a short term basis. Simply enable a local auction house for each station where everybody can trade with eachother and add a "shop" tab, which allows the local station owner (3rd tab as company shop?) to promote his own items, no NPCs or AI code required!
Unless Frozenbyte's planning to work with a central authority within the galaxy that controls the price of currency (AKA the Starbase Devs themselves) and centrally plan ALL prices by messing with the currency generation of NPC actors (
which includes any liquidity source), the game doesn't need it, and would work better with free market mechanics.
The only reason i see for currencies is because paper doesn't have weight to it and pretty much everything else in the game has, so it allows credits to be transported at the same time as, and independent of a full inventory. Basically, there's no limit to how many credits can be stacked/stored and transported around space while everything else does have weight, giving a high utility value to credits themselves as an item within the game, since literally everything else has to be stacked and stored.
So with the above in mind, if the only source of liquidity for credits was 1 type of NPC vendor, which would ONLY take 1 type of ore,
at a set price to buy and sell, and convert it to credits 1 to 1;
then those credits would have the value of that ore, plus the convenience value of being credits, making them desirable WHILE keeping the liquidity generated under control. People might convert ore to credits, but once they need repairs, they convert credits back to ore to generate said substance, creating a liquidity sink for both the substance and the credits at the same time. Then you just need a bunch of credit tokens, rather then 1 universal "credits".
IMO, the best solution might end up being allowing players to create their own currency tokens, by creating an "exchange vendor" which ONLY prints currency when ore is deposited, and ONLY releases ore when currency is deposited, while the station owner determines the "mix" of ores that 1 currency unit consists of. More ore deposited, more backing, more currency. As long as the backing is 1:1, it's sound money (though value might vary per locale as ore values vary), and a financial crisis shouldn't be possible - but a financial collapse very much is, by an empire spending too much currency on ore conversion due to war, thus creating liquidity issues, allowing other empires to wage financial war by offering superior liquidity and/or backing.
(if you wanna introduce financial crisis into the game, just allow fractional reserve systems. Deposit 10% ore for 100% currency and just wait until the day where more than 10% of ore is withdrawn at once in a bank run, and an empire goes bankrupt. I'm against this though, i want escapism in my games
).
But again, not all stuff is in yet, and maybe they've already thought of all this
The server was just down for an hour and i was bored, plus i've fallen in love with the ship builder so i'm sure i'll be playing alot regardless
Managed to get a station 57km away from the Origin stations (turns out the safe-zone is cone shaped) and it's about 20km away from everybody else lol. Prime outpost spot i guess.
All of this is just to say, yes the economy's borked right now, but is to be expected with so little in it. The game launched too soon in that respect, economic balancing tends to happen in closed/open beta, exactly because if you don't have all features in you don't have all sources/drains of liquidity in, and things
will change later. It's good to keep an eye on it, but it's an early stage problem. If things are still this way a year from now, that'd be more worrisome - but still completely fixable. It'll take many more years before this game is done.
As for my credentials btw, i guess i am an economist
https://www.desogames.com/virtual-labor-and-lessons-from-economics-in-videogames/
The Definition of Money:
http://books2read.com/u/bzdaVz
The Definitions of Value:
http://books2read.com/u/3yaZWv
Ethereal Value and the Cryptofuture:
http://books2read.com/u/bMwrNA
(Just in case the dev's
haven't actually thought things through and are totally winging it; I'm Deso ingame or they can DM me on twitter
@Desogames which i check the most if they need advice
Haven't been this fascinated by a game in a while so i'd love to help; only if needed ofcourse wouldn't wanna impose ^_^)
