Doppelganger
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Posted - 2003.09.06 08:19:00 -
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In many posts I have noticed some very elaborate schemes to fix the stagnant manufacturer market, which has been depressed for a long while. I offer a simpler solution [maybe], but to express my ideas completely I have spent a lot of time defining solutions and offering rationale. If the length scares you, just skim, you should be OK.
Let me offer the following proposition:
Manufacturing is not broken. What did I do to deserve the extra money over cost I am being paid? I spent a few weeks training to PE5, more or less. That is all. I think manufacturing is not a "dead" profession, being defined that it is unprofitable, as one still comes out a bit ahead of pure profit mining. Why so little extra? Because that's all it's worth. I still make about 1 million isk per cruiser sale, which I think is adequate compensation for the time I spent scraping together minerals via buy order or mining.
If this proposition is true, what people are really complaining about is how boring being a manufacturer is. You build something and you put it on the market. There it sits...for a *long* time, in many cases, unless you start pricing very low, which would make it not worth the time to procure the minerals, in most cases. Basically, what people are asking for are fluxes in price and demand to make things more interesting, and through overall greater volume, more profitable.
Here's one problem:
A player loses a ship. The first thing they say in their heads:
"I lost a ship. damn. It's time for me to mine like mad."
This happens probably in excess of 90% of the time.
What we end up is a cycle: People lose X ship, and, as a relative certainty, end up mining minerals and then some to replace their ship, pay the manufacturer to perform a service, *and* replace the modules that were destroyed, hence a cycle that really causes more and more minerals to be introduced into the player market. A manufacturer buys them and repackages it into an ever escalating number of ships. Common sense dictates what happens to said ship prices. Example: To me, a thorax is about 4.5 or so million in worth. (after inflated mega/zyd prices, as a ballpark estimate, about 4.0 by default) If everyone who loses a thorax loses some 2 million in modules (and sometimes far more than that!) and pays me about 5.5M for a new one (not a bad deal, in many regions), what we have is some 7.5M in pure mineral being injected into the economy to retrieve, more or less, about 4.5 million in minerals of goods. The rest of the money goes into items whose worth is not in any way correlated to how much they cost to make but their rate of appearance in drops and effectiveness (and thus demand). This doesn't even take into account that people often mine millions worth of isk in their spare time without losing a vessel.
I spent so much time elaborating on my interpretation of the problem because, in my opinion, stop-gap measures are being taken to slow down the rate of market stagnation as opposed to really making it more dynamic. I offer a single possible improvement below. Please add your own or comment on this perspective of thinking.
Trading is an underused profession. If we had more traders, then we would see less dependence on mining for isk generation, and perhaps a market with less overabundance of minerals. Thus, I suggest making trading more workable and fair as such:
If I understand most posts on these boards correctly and my not-terribly updated experience buying minerals in higher sec systems, the current stack representation of the market for buy orders is terrible. It should definitely be altered to a priority queue. For the uninitiated, the current system is that last entered buy order of the highest price class is serviced first. In a queue, the first order placed would first have to be serviced before moving onto the next of the same price class.
The typical argument for the stack is that otherwise weÆll have people with huge buy orders that they constantly procure money for (that is, they donÆt have enough money when they place the buy order, but get it as it flows in) monopolizing the market, at the expense of those with smaller buy orders who should have the chance to ôcut in.ö
My counterargument: instead of cutting in, you should be offering a higher price anyways. That way we actually have people RAISING PRICES as demand goes up instead of constantly trying to exploit the stack. This is especially true in the case of minerals, the only really kinda-sorta working market, as the alternative is downtime trading.
In a nutshell, I have given up on pure commodity trading simply because I cannot make regional orders close enough before downtime, as itÆs 4AM my time. People have suggested spawning goods while the server is live to fix these problems. I am convinced this is what has to happen. Even with the queue this is a problem as people will be bidding (which is a good thing for an ec
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