buying energy from sell orders



  • I think buying energy from sell orders should deduct the transfer cost from the order amount.

    As it is right now you pay more energy for most orders, than gets send to you. So you are actually paying credits to lose energy.

    Maybe you should recieve (Math.floor(amount /(1+transferCostMultiplier))) instead or something similar.

    I know that behaviour would be different from all other orders, but at least it would work.



  • I like this idea as it represents buying the energy at the location and then using part of it to transfer the rest.  It would make the energy market at least useful rather than having to filter by range first.



  • From what I can tell the entire market is completely useless and broken.

    If I want to buy 10,000 energy it costs me 20,000 energy to transfer the 10,000 to me.  If I wanted to burn 10,000 energy I can just drop it on the ground, why have a market API to complicate the process of creep.drop()?

    If I want to sell 10,000 Utrium it costs me 14,800 energy, which itself is the most valuable resource in the game (see above).  If energy is truly irreplaceable, nobody with any sense would spend anywhere near as much of it as the devs have in mind to complete transactions.

    I am confused why the devs bothered to add a market system at all if they did not intend for anyone to actually be able to use it.

    New players are probably the ones who would be most interested in selling minerals that they cannot otherwise use.  This _should_ result in some nice low prices for those with the credits to buy.  However, given terrible design/implementation of the market, the new players are effectively prohibited from being able to make any transactions that make any sense whatsoever.



  • Dear Xist,

    Please remember that the cost to transfer is dependent on the distance between the two trade partners. The intention of this restriction is to force trade to be local and to restrict the trading power of strong central players (eg myself).

    At the same time, remember that the purpose of the market is not restricted to energy trading. A large number of players (including myself) find the market essential to cover mineral shortages. In wartime (such as the recent SWW1), the market is even more important by providing emergency access to tier 3 boosts (albeit an expensive one).

    Since its introduction, the market has been phenomenally useful and interesting in its patterns. I do agree that further balancing is necessary and will take place, in time, but jumping to the conclusion that it is useless is rash.

    Kind regards,
    Atavus



  • That is probably the fundamental design flaw then, from a new player's perspective: The market is intentionally designed to be useless except if you are trading with people really near you.

    And when you're new, you are surrounded by other new players, who just like me look at the market and come to the conclusion that it's impossible to make a beneficial trade, and so nobody is trading.

    The only possible trades are so far away that the energy costs are so high that nobody can actually make any deals.

    Maybe one day I'll be cool like those of you who have been playing this game for years, and I will find an emergency reason that I need to burn an insane amount of energy in a trade that otherwise makes no sense whatsoever, and then I may agree that the market was useful in that instance.

    But as an actual game mechanic that's useful for all players?  It is not, nor will it in any reasonable period of play time be even the least bit useful for new players as far as I can tell.

    In fact, it's so bad, that my better choice is to NOT MINE MINERALS AT ALL, since I'd use up all of my storage space trying to keep them somewhere, and since I cannot sell them, nor do I have good combinations of minerals to mix in labs, they're basically as useless to me as the market.

    I'd hoped to sell the minerals I have, to buy minerals that I'm lacking, but that is not possible.  The market design makes it impossible.  It makes it so I have to sit here, pretend there is no market, until my GCL is so high that I have every mineral that I need myself WITHOUT any trading, that one day I decide that I just can't stand it and I really really need to waste a huge amount of resources to get a trade that is not at all worthwhile - hooray market.



  • Actually, I've been playing for exactly 6 months and the average play time for members of SUN is 3 months, whilst our recruits are usually about 30 days old. You'll find out that development caps off pretty quickly. You experience exponential growth in the first 30 days but afterwards you go into a logarithmic phase of diminishing returns.

    The local nature of the market is actually intended to protect smaller traders like yourself. This doesn't work particularly well in the energy segment, but does offer you the possibility to compete on the other market segments.

    To be honest, from what I hear, it feels more like you have grown faster then your neighbors and therefore find yourself somewhat isolated for the time being. You may wish to consider joining an alliance and respawning into their territory or simply waiting for others to catch up.



  • The issue is not about whether or not paying two times the amount of energy to transfer some minerals is worth it or not. I know that selling minerals might not be worth it in many places ... but it is fundamentally working just unprofitable.

    What I was critisizing was the haviour of energy sell orders only, since you don't actually get anything most of the time:

    filling a buy order:

    The buyer gets amount energy.

    The seller sends (1+transferCost)*amount energy.

    filling a sell order:

    The buyer gets/spends (1-transferCost)*amount energy.

    The seller sends amount energy.

     

    The issue is that (1-transferCost) is negative for ranges above 15. It would make more sense if the transferCost would be payed as a percentage of the energy in a sell order. So that you would get 1/(1+transferCost), which would be same percentage of the transfered energy as it is in a buy order.