NPC Buy Orders are gone
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Previously, NPC buy orders would sit around in the market for hours. Now they seem to disappear pretty much the same tick they are created. It is no longer reasonably possible for a newbie to begin participating in the NPC market manually, which I think was previously very common.
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Perhaps in the future changes like this could be phased in? Instead of flipping a switch, make the change gradual, over the course of a week or more.
Also, it would be nice if we could at least get a list of game systems you're considering making unannounced changes to. This is the sort of thing someone could have invested significant strategic and coding effort into, to be wasted now by an unexpected change.
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Honestly this change has, in my opinion (and many others) broken the market. There are barely any buy orders on the market at all and big players are selling massive amounts of stuff to them and closing them out before other players get a chance. I really think the number needs to be tweaked in the other direction.
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Like, how is it even possible for a new member to join the market? They start off with minerals and no credits, so they look for buy orders- oh, there aren't any. So then they can't sell their minerals, they have no credits, and thus they can't buy anything. The lack of people buying things makes the market unbalanced.
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Also, it would be nice if we could at least get a list of game systems you’re considering making unannounced changes to. This is the sort of thing someone could have invested significant strategic and coding effort into, to be wasted now by an unexpected change.
There were no changes to game mechanics, only some real-time adjustment of the parameters that you should not rely on anyway. Think of NPCs as real players with unknown intentions and code your strategy accordingly.
Like, how is it even possible for a new member to join the market? They start off with minerals and no credits, so they look for buy orders- oh, there aren’t any. So then they can’t sell their minerals, they have no credits, and thus they can’t buy anything. The lack of people buying things makes the market unbalanced.
In theory, player-owned buy orders should appear in this vacant space. We’re still experimenting, so things can be adjusted gradually. Uncontrolled inflation is not what all of us really want to happen in Screeps.
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I do agree that the market should be managed, and it'll take some adjustments to balance it.
I don't think this change is going to work though. I think the answer to this specific problem lies in adjusting the price of the minerals, not their direct availability. Price controls can be enabled in the market using the NPC orders- typically speaking people won't sell too far above the NPC prices or buy too far below their sell prices, giving you a range of value. If the cost of minerals is too inflated you can adjust the range to move player orders accordingly.
However, by removing these orders altogether the problem has potentially gotten worse. Players without credits don't have places they can sell too, which means they can't contribute to the market.
I think you should increase the orders again, but tie the prices into the history numbers you have- take the last 7 days (removing outliers from the energy column due to people using it as a credit transfer, or just ignore energy for now anyways) average price and use it to calculate the NPC prices-
Buy Orders = average - (10*stddev)
Sell Orders = average + (50*stddev)
Then you can screw around with the constants while maintaining a dynamic market.
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I don’t think this change is going to work though.
Again, we’re experimenting and trying different approaches. As you may have noticed, for now their amount is almost the same as before the change, but with lower prices
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The problem in this case was, as Tedivm kindly points out, that the previous update announced a change in prices. The update that changed the mineral distribution was accompanied with a clear announcement that NPC order buy/sell prices would have new values.
It was that announcement that set a precedent and established a certain expectation from the devs.
Don't get me wrong. I don't particularly mind. This drastically increased the value of my accumulated credits and there was no change I needed to do code wise. However, the crux of the issue is the quality of communication between the devs and the community. It would be nice if changes would be associated with an announcement more often. Even if it is tweaking of this sort, we don't mind. Especially if it is a change to the system (eg constructors).
Kind regards,
Your admiring fan
Atavus
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Game engine-related things will be much easier to track soon, when its code will be published on GitHub, all commits will appear in real-time there. As to market orders prices and amounts, they will change very often starting from now, probably even automatically according to some rules (as it is mentioned in the Market system article), so changelogs are not something viable in this case.
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I really think you are missing the point.
We are not asking you to make change logs for each market change, now that we are know it is going to be dynamic. However, up until now we did not know it was going to be dynamic, and you set the precedent of announcing them which implied that it wouldn't be dynamic. So we planned accordingly.
If from the beginning you said things were going to be dynamic there would be no problem. If when you decided to switch from static to dynamic then a single announcement stating that would have been nice. What happened instead is that our assumptions were changed with no real way for us to know it was going to happen.
What I suggest going forward is that any time you publish numbers you just be clear about whether or not they are "engine/game rule" numbers or "dynamic" numbers. For example, the support site article about the market should state that the numbers were subject to change with no notice.
So, to be clear, the issue isn't that we want to know each and every time you make a tweak to the game balance, the issue is we want to know what type of things you consider fair game for tweaking without notice.
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I can see what do you mean. We're going from this assumption: if some game mechanics numbers have associated constants, only then they are considered constant and cannot be changed without notice. Hardcoding your own constants in your code and relying on them (even based on some empirical observations that seem stable) is speculative and you do it on your own risk.
