Postby Deareim » Wed Mar 09, 2016 9:20 am
Very interesting post about trading effect on influence of a station :
"The problem you're going to have, is maintaining any sort of total overwatch. You might *think* you have no other commander action, missions, bh-cashing-in, etc, but it's nigh-on impossible to be certain. Even keeping an eye on traffic-statistics is not a true indication, because that only seems to be incremented when a ship passes into or out of the system - someone staying in-system and not leaving, doesn't seem to be noticed by the 'traffic report'. This opens the way for someone to be in-system and messing up all your best-laid plans... and you'll never, ever know for sure.
My gut feeling (and one semi-supported by the fact that FD locked-down the Dev-Update thread where I raised the question) is that the BGS 'trade' mechanism is sublimely simple. I'm not entirely sure FD want us to realise that. Look at the backstory... the BGS was basically designed as something to give the illusion of a vibrant trading scene, a background stock market feel. They've already explained that all the NPC trades are 'virtual' and not directly accounted for in the BGS - it's smoke and mirrors to create an effect. Trading's effect on influence is worked out through averages and aggregates, computed on a daily cycle once the BGS scripts kick in and updates the trading part of the Stellar Forge (or whichever DB it lives in). Even FD's own 'explanation' post (Dev Updates, 7th Jan 2016) only specifies that trading has an effect of 'plus-one' into the Influence bucket. They specifically do not go into any detail as to the intracacies of what they mean by 'trading' - and I think that is because there are no intricacies being computed or calculated.
I don't mean that as any form of attack, though. I think it's perfectly logical and acceptable, given the BGS's original aims. I genuinely don't think that FD expected that we'd become so attached to it, and play it to the depths that we have. I think they assumed that the pew-pew and general profit-hunting from trade, rares, bounty-hunting, missions, CGs, et al, would fulfil our basic need to be space-traders, pirates, bounty-hunters and whatnot. I really don't think that minor factions and their lifecycle was on their agenda - but it has emerged as true 'emergent gameplay' and now they are probably thinking about beefing it up to make it more viable, believeable, less nonsensical. I believe that they originally gave us Powerplay in order to sate that need for 'system-flipping' and 'expanding our power-base' but not everyone enjoys the grind and repetitiveness of the PP tasks, so the BGS still has a great many takers. So much so, that FD have introduced the concept of PMFs now... and deeper and deeper we go into the black box.
So... my gut feeling is that the 'black box' of trading, actually only has one component. Trade. It's not about profit. It's not about quantity or tonnage. It's not about a combination of both. It's not about import nor export. It's about tills ringing. I hypothesised a few weeks ago, that the act of pressing the SELL or BUY button is what gets recorded in the big BGS script as an act of trade - nothing more, nothing less. Each button-press means one 'chip' into the 'trade-happened-here' pot. Get enough of those, and take away from them the murder and bounty/fine-given chips, add in all the cartography-selling, bounty-hunting, fine-paid chips, and you have an overall 'heat' level - positive or negative, for that particular faction in that particular system. Compare that with the other factions in the system, some of which will be 'hot or cold', positive or negative too, and you'll have an overview of how the influence 'rope' (which is always 100% between all factions in the system) is being pulled. It's like a giant game of tug-of-war with up to seven people. Some days, the same amount of 'pull pressure' from your faction will NOT yank the rope as much in your direction as it did yesterday - it depends how hard the other players (factions) are pulling their bit of rope, too.
But anyway, we tested this (as best we can). We have a low-traffic planetary station in our system, which we wanted to hurt by trade. The faction that owns it has no other markets or platforms worth considering in the system, so it's a reasonably isolated test-bed. We decided that shipping in (i.e importing) large quantities of scrap - which was a commodity that the station did not have any demand for, but did offer an uncompetitive price for - would be the way to 'hurt' them, via this 'selling in' theory that we'd read here many moons ago. We knew that it being a low-value item would negate any effect of 'commodity-price' (i.e. if we had dumped in Palladium, we'd never be sure it wasn't the value of the individual tonnes that was the catalyst). We also chose to run the scrap in via ground buggies (which have a cargo capacity of 2 tonnes each). This meant that we could negate the effect of any large drop happening in one go, as being the catalyst (i.e. we ruled out any 200t dumps, by limiting each dump to 2t per run). It basically meant that the tills in the marketplaces were ringing constantly, and without it being an exploit (i.e. we felt that sitting in the station with ten Pythons carrying 200t each, and selling in 1 tonne 200 times per Python was a bit 'cheaty', so we invented this buggy-run concept to make it fun and to make it feel right).
We expected that, come the BGS update cycle, we'd have made a nice fat negative effect, or no effect at all. If we had no effect at all, it might indicate that 'tills ringing' (i.e. quantity of buy/sell button pushes) is NOT the primary catalyst, and that it probably WAS something to do with either volume or profit or price-per-ton. If we got that negative effect, it proved that the 'till ringing' philosophy had merit, after all. Throughout all of this, we still believed the common view that 'imports in, hurt'.
What actually happened, we never expected at all!
The damned station's influence went up by 2% overnight - the most 'action' we'd ever seen from that place in one hit.
As far as we're concerned, it proved (not beyond all doubt, but reasonably well enough to keep testing the theory elsewhere, which we're still doing) that profit, value, quantity AND DIRECTION (import/export) of trade has NO BEARING WHATSOEVER. It's just 'tills ringing' that matters. Doesn't matter whether you sell in, or buy out. Doesn't matter whether it's mega-tons per transaction, or million-CR profits per transaction, or fantastic turnover per transaction. It's just... transactions. Sell a million tons by a million SELL clicks, and you'll add a million 'trade' chips into the trade-pool for influence reckoning later. I believe it's that simple.
And this does actually make some logical sense, if you think about it - and not just from the POV of the developers keeping the tracking and data management realistically small to be able to process it all in one nightly script. It makes sense from market POV, too. As someone who's played a fair bit of real-life stock market and been a successful day trader in the past, I'm familiar with the concept of 'market-makers' - perhaps you are too. They're the guys who 'make' the stock market run. When trading volume is low, they lower their offer price on a stock to make it look 'cheap' - and to attract buyers. The buyers they generate, feed the market. The market-makers will change their bid price too, to help influence, and indirectly control, the pressure of sellers against them, if the volume is great and they are running out of stock to be able to sell. They do not give a tuppeny hoot about the actual VALUE of the stock. They live for the spread - the bid-vs-offer price difference. What they care about is CHURN. Sales-volume. Tills ringing. Every ounce of stock they buy at price 'n' will be sold later at greater price 'n'+x - if the market is slow and volume is down, then x will be small. If business is booming and till are ringing, x doesn't matter, but it will be larger most likely, to capitalise on the volume. If the market gets really bad they will vary 'n' price, and offer to buy stock lower, causing the market to feed off its own fears and 'shake the tree' making the less-confident weaker ones sell up and run - but still, they will be selling that same lower-cost stock back to the market (if there are takers) at 'reduced-n' plus 'some-x-or-other'... i.e, always at a profit.
That is what market makers do. And imho, that is what Elite's Commodity Markets do, too. Prices alter (albeit slowly and in fits and starts) based on volume of transactions, demand and supply. Station markets don't lose money - they merely sit on stock for long periods when the market goes cold. The stock they buy in, they will sell again later, usually at a profit; sometimes healthy, sometimes not. On average, they always win, because they don't 'own' the stock; it's stock; they trade it. They churn it. Goods in, money out; goods out, money in - usually more. A ringing till is a happy till. Everything on the shelf has an asset value, and if it's lower today than it was yesterday, it doesn't matter, because tomorrow we will be buying it back for less than today, and although we're selling it for less than yesterday, it's still being sold for more than we paid for it - or it doesn't get sold.
Hence, I believe, that 'TRADE' in ED means just that. Tills ringing. Churn. Individual presses of the BUY or SELL button. That's all that matters.
Please test it. Please prove me wrong - I'd be happy to have supporting evidence, because we've spent a helluva long time working this through. But that's what we're seeing (more than the one example given above).
My other gut feeling is that all the observations about influence increases and decreases when exporting versus importing, value, profit, etc, is confabulation. We are cavemen in a spring storm, watching the lightning, hearing the thunder, feeling the rain, seeing frogs on the ground, heading for ponds and pools. Pretty soon, we reach the conclusion that lightning causes frogs, and frogs must come down from the sky when it rains. We don't know that it's because it's springtime, and the frogs are just coming out of their winter hibernation under piles of damp rocks, and heading for a pond to look for a mate - that's far too advanced a concept for the caveman, and unless he's in the habit of turning over the right rocks, all through winter, he'll just put his two-and-two together and get five. Frogs come down from the clouds via the lightning. Simple. Aren't we?
To be fair, we aren't. But you get the analogy, I hope. I believe it's actually the underlying trade calculation mechanic that is simple - but being human, we always look for a more complex, rounded, convincing and elegant explanation, sometimes because we can't see the simplicity, or can't imagine that it would really be allowed to be that simple. But just ask Occam. He's usually right. And he's very, very sharp.
TL;DR - buy, and most importantly, SELL one tonne at a time, loads and loads of times. See what happens to influence. Then tell us."
If he is right, it has a huge impact on the gameplay at the end....
