Notes on the Market and suggestions for improvement
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Excluding NPCs, there are currently orders on the market from 90 different users. According to the score board there are 1,818 players on the map right now, which means the market is being fully utilized by less than 5% of players.
In addition, the vast majority of users are selling instead of buying. Of the 1047 orders on the market (excluding NPCs), 146 (13.85%) are Buy Orders and 908 (86.15%) are Sell orders.
I think this is caused in major part due to the current energy costs associated with closing deals. While I understand the goal of having regional markets, I think the current imbalances have to be addressed before players are going to really engage in the market - rather than having players engage with their local counterparts they are avoiding the market altogether.
* Due to the way new rooms are added- further away from established players- that new players near the border (the ones who are least likely to have all the minerals they need) also face the highest energy fees for engaging in the market. This is highly discouraging to new players, as they'll have to pay more for resources in energy than the resources are worth.
* Since tier one boosts are rarely if ever purchased (many have literally never had a purchase go through) it means most new players don't have a good way to sell higher value items on the market to get credits to join the market to begin with. Selling base minerals is difficult as they are undercut by larger players or are too far away from players with solid credits for their orders to be worth while.
* As it stands now Alliances and high level players have more incentive to trade amongst each other than on the market, as alliances tend to be cluster together and it avoids the credit fee. Even if it's not on purpose they do trade over the market it's more likely to be with alliance members since they are the ones closest to each other.
* Coding for the market is not simple and uses a bit of CPU, so the incentive for using the market needs to match that. Currently it doesn't.
* The high transfer fee puts a larger value on creating an order than it does on closing a deal. This is why it's possible to see sell orders below that NPC prices, as the energy cost is so high right now that it makes more sense to place a buy order than it does to close a sell order. For some resources (particularly Z) the cost of the mineral is actually lower than the credit value of energy, which means that after the conversion people are spending more in credits on energy to transfer material and close the deal than they are for the minerals themselves *even within the same sector*.
Proposals:1. Create more credit sinks on the higher end in order to incentivise market participation. One suggestion is the introduction of dectorations that can only be purchased with credits, so people have an incentive to spend large chunks of credits on things that have absolutely no in game value. I know this has been mentioned before, but I think having the items get purchased explicitly with credits is important (and it'll still encourage some level of subscription token purchasing).
2. Reduce the transfer fees by a factor of five (dropping the base transfer fee from 10% over one room to 5% over one room). This will still provide plenty of incentive for local transfers over long distance ones, but increases the range that most deals are viable in. To be honest I can see this value going even lower, but I think scaling down slowly to see how it works makes sense.
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If anyone is interested here's a spreadsheet with the fees by room-
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1GPnwD7lS854-4Vz-4WQYovH8g6-XnOZuBhBZugfoVPw/edit?usp=sharing
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I totally agree on reducing the transfer fees.
I would especially like to see transfer fees for energy drop. As is, I often have to choose between making a BUY_ORDER or paying 5-10x the average sell price....
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I also think that at this moment it's really inefficient to close deal on market. Reducing transfer and market fees slowly will help us observe how players react to those changes.
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I agree with the state tedivm sketches about the current market..
We are encouraged to have centralized empires, but we're also encouraged to trade locally. This doesn't add up.
Example:
http://i.imgur.com/4XBTX6c.png
I can sell L for all I want, but due to the costs of energy transfers it's currently more feasable to sell energy at 0.1 a piece.
If buy orders become more expensive then sell orders you got an issue in your market.
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Agreed. If lower fees would mean a boost in activity to the (currently quite inactive) market, that would be great. As the costs stand now, the market doesn't hold much interest for me.
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One thing that will improve the use of the market is more uses for minerals and compounds. This could include
- additional NPC buy orders for compounds (particularly those that have no orders)
- requirement for minerals or compounds for the power creeps
- requirement for minerals to build some additional types of building
- ability to transmute minerals into something else (eg Z + L => U, Z+U =>K, K+L =>Z, K+U =>L)
- ability to transmute compounds into something else (eg ZO + L => UO, Z+UO =>KO, KO+L =>ZO, KO+U =>LO etc)
- development of more complex compounds.
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I agree that the fees are too high, especcially when you consider how big players get. Trading past your neighbors can already mean >10 range. NPC trading post can be quite far away too (never seen one, who is closer than 15 for my minerals and that rarely as well).
But I think the main reason why so few players participate in the market, is that boosting is underused and most people on the map are in the energy only phase. They might want to sell minerals to buy energy, but there just aren't enough people who use minerals without mining them on their own.
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If people are struggling to use boosted creeps, then perhaps a new building that could store both energy and resources, and spawn creeps would help bridge that gap, and produce more resource usage.
If the objective it to create more depth to the market, then perhaps a leader board with some measure of orders posted could be used. The measure would need a bit of thought to avoid people puttting up orders that will never be used.
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People aren't using a lot of resources currently because they can't bse used 24/7 reliably. This means there's very little gain in actually using the boosts apart from the occasional boosts.
Even with my large empire I can't even build 5 fully boosted builders 24/7. I use up all resources I gather, so there's no point in selling them. I occasionally sell surpluses to buy stuff that's lacking at that time.
The use of boosts is for "occasional" boosts only. Balancing what to build and what/when to use is extremely difficult, even if you got lots of minerals. I'd love to build big hauler creeps 24/7 and reducing CPU usage that way. It simply isn't feasible.
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Excluding NPCs, there are currently orders on the market from 90 different users. According to the score board there are 1,818 players on the map right now, which means the market is being fully utilized by less than 5% of players.
But 312 players participated in fulfilling those orders in the last 10 days. It is 17% of all active players which seems to be quite fine ratio considering market coding difficulty and RCL 6 requirement.
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That's a really disappointing reply. We've brought up a bunch of points, and pretty much every player agrees that the market is broken. It's very disappointing that you're just going to ignore us and put your head in the sand over this issue.
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What makes you think that the market is broken if 17% of all players (including novices that have spawned today) are using it actively right now? You simply have wrong information, this is why you make wrong conclusions.
The market is very active and alive, we monitor it regularly.
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I agree that there should be more ways to spend minerals and mineral compounds (and there will be), but this is not related to the transfer fee topic.
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What makes me think the market is broken? How about all of the threads with players complaining about the market? Do a survey and see how many people are happy with the market and I'm pretty sure you'll find the number to be very small.
While 17% may be "using" the market (closing deals), only 5% of users are *driving* the market (putting up orders that others can use). As I pointed out (and you ignored) there are huge numbers of boosts that literally see no movement on the market at all. According to your own numbers 83% of users completely ignore the market. The one thing that most new players want- energy- is so cost prohibitive to send that they would literally lose energy when trying to buy it.
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I think the energy send orders are a different issue (loosing energy when you try to buy some would constitute a bug for me).
I agree, that for new players trading is very expensive, since there aren't many people nearby, who are trading. I also agree that transfer cost are very high, the closest order i ever found on the market, was a NPC order at 15 range for my minerals and that is allready almost 100% transferCost.
I wouldn't base my judgement on perceived player percentages though, because how many people of those 83% are zombies or players with a very early code base? Judging from my surroundings and that i was top 200 in energy after 1 month of playing, I would say almost all of them, but I would hope the devs have better statistics on that.
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Dear Tedivm,
I disagree with your assessment that the market is broken. Perhaps it can be optimized to increase its use, but the market has already been an excellent mechanic for a significant number of players, myself included.
The market has been invaluable in helping me deal with base mineral imbalance. In the recent conflict it was also essential in gaining access to certain minerals I had not stockpiled previously (XZH2O).
From what I can tell (don't have any fancy statistics), most people engaged in the market are using it in the same way. First, to handle mineral imbalances (export excess, import shortage). Second, to gain access to mineral compounds they may need due to a conflict (because either they didn't stockpile or don't have production capacity).
This means base minerals are actively traded all the time (obvious from volume trade) whilst high tier minerals are rarely traded since conflict is usually sporadic. For me this behavior makes sense and I don't see an easy way to increase the transaction volume of compound minerals.
Regarding the energy market, I don't particularly feel that this needs to be at the center of market system. Young players should be trading base minerals for XGH2O, not minerals for energy due to the transaction costs.
Lowering the transaction fee for transfers is probably not healthy for the community at large since it extends the range and trading power of the strong central players. It "globalizes" the market and will end up making it more uniform.
Just my 2 cents.
Kind regards,
Atavus
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One minor addition to the discussion. I think key in understanding the scope of the market is having a more realistic estimate on the potential participants.
The 1.8k players on the map are largely irrelevant since the number is bloated by one room players or zombies. If you restrict the number of players to those with 2 rooms and a decent GCL investment per month (eg 5m), then the number drops sharply to around 500.
Probably not all 90 users you mention are in that group of 500 so we can assume 75 instead. The 312 players that Artem mentions are very likely to be part of the 500 since they are active traders, but let's assume 250.
That gives you 15% of players creating orders and 50% of players engaging in market trades. That's pretty good imho, far from calling the market useless.
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Atavus, your experience on the market is going to be different than many others for one reason- you're in an area where the market is pretty well established. There are a lot of players in your area selling and buying, so the market is going to work better for you.
I also want to point that I never claimed the market was "useless", just that it could be a lot better and was broken in some ways. I brought up five specific points which are mostly being ignored here-
* New players face crappier market conditions than established players, further giving established players a non-skill-based advantage over new players.
* The lack of movement of anything that isn't either a base mineral or a tier three boost means that smaller players (the ones most likely to have only a subset of the available minerals) don't have a way to break into the higher level credit market (ie, they can't really sell XGH2O, and no one wants to by KH or KH20). Further, I think the fact that entire groups of boosts literally have zero orders being fulfilled is a sign that this isn't a healthy market.
* This is kind of an extension of the first issue, but alliances tend to trade a lot with each other even unintentionally due to alliances being clustered. As an example, I would not be surprised if many of the minerals you have bought or sold have gone to other SUN members more than random players.
* The incentive for programming doesn't match the gain for new players. Although the CPU usage has gone down a bit now that there are indexed order lookups it's still pretty intense for someone with maybe 40 cpu, and it's certainly still not very feasible for 10cpu players.
* Putting orders on the market is almost always a smarter move than fulfilling orders due to the energy cost.
I also want to clear up something that keeps being said without any real evidence- that a "global" market would benefit established players while squeezing out new ones. I don't buy this at all- new players are more likely to be selling minerals and older ones buying, which means in many ways the newer players would be at the advantage as they'd be able to reach more established players to sell too. Minerals are distributed randomly enough where it's difficult for a single player or alliance to get a monopoly on any, and if older players try to create a cartel to drive prices up they can always be undercut by the newer players. If we're going to keep touting this as a reason why small regional markets makes more sense I'd really like to see some reasons for why that's the case.
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As is said in several ways, the Market should be fair for New and Old alike. Energy transfer fees should be the same regardless of distance. It equalizes Old and New players.
Also, the Market orders should be a Game object/array and NOT a call to return an array. This call again disenfranchises the New player because of the CPU limit per turn.
The current Market is currently very much a Regressive Tax model on the new player (or in other words, the poor player). In Screeps New = Poor. Poor in CPU per turn; Poor in harvesting Energy ability; Poor in Credits to make deals; Poor in Minerals to Gather and sell.
Changes should be made to Democratize the Market and make CPU costs as low as possible (by having the Market data available without CPU intensive calls). By fixing the Energy costs to a standard and not have better placed old players have an advantage.
Any advantage in this game should always be for the New Player, since they are the life-blood of the game. Without New Players starting and continuing the game, there will be an ineffective world and just the same few that continue to run their scripts.
