Pirate Market

[DioChasek]

I guess that's a fair point. I was just thinking with access to ageinium you can get chicks to chickens rather quickly and up your nugget count combined with the fact you can fill produce satchels with the nuggets for easy transport, all of a sudden a single rancher or chef can have 7,500,000 worth of credits in a single produce satchel.

[Deadvickyart]

Mad Dealin' Maddy

"CHAMPION BELTHOLDER FIFTEEN SPACE-YEARS RUNNING, KID. JUST BECAUSE I'M INTO ANTIQUES, DOESN'T MEAN I CAN'T BEAT YOUR ASS IN THE RING"

Avaliable:    XX:45  -  XX:59

Buys:

10,000,000 Credits - Handmade Katana

1,600,000 Credits - Rusty Knife

1,600,000 Credits - Atomic Yo-Yo
900,000 Credits - Discount Dan's Golden Tickets
360,000 Credits - [name]'s [trinket]
360,000 Credits - [name]'s [trinket]
260,000 Credits - Bone Key
200,000 Credits - Authentic Moon Rocks

Sells:
5,000,000 Credits - Picture of a Monkey

Monkey comes with a random name and number.

2,000,000 Credits - Discount Dan's Golden Tickets

[Deadvickyart]

Finished console sprites for every trader on rotation, plus an error message sprite with a closed deposit slot. All traders get 4 frames of animation, like their larger sprites. Motion catches the eye.



Sprite for screwdrivered console. Now you can see the super-powerful graphics card running the thing.



Someone has taken out the graphics card, rendering it inoperable until it's replaced. It also changes the sprite so you can see the place the graphics card used to be.

I just need to wrap up the military surplus store, and make a final draft of all the trader sprites. Then the pirate market project should be complete and ready for testing. If anyone has any ideas for what to add to the wrestler store, post suggestions. I've been loving the feedback so far.

[DioChasek]

Can’t have a wrassle match without chairs and tables for dirt cheap.

[Ikea]

The buy prices for these things seem insane, way higher then other stuff in cargo/economy in large.

[Deadvickyart]

Can’t have a wrassle match without chairs and tables for dirt cheap.

Definitely overlooked that. The wrestler merchant needs more junk in general, so I'm gonna need more suggestions for stuff to fill out that list.

The buy prices for these things seem insane, way higher then other stuff in cargo/economy in large.

Katana is too high and I'm gonna take that down to 1 or 2 mil, the dan's tickets might be a bit overpriced too. I don't remember exactly how lethal and rare getting them is.

The prices are higher than other merchants, but that's more of a symptom of the merchants not being rebalanced frequently enough. Finishing mars station gets you around a mil and a half worth of gold bullion and cash, and it's one of the easier azones. In my mind, harder azones like the biodome or VR dungeon should have a reward of between that and 2 million and easier azones like the fartnasium and lunar museum should get you 300-500k in salvage. Puts it on parity with the time and effort required to do a PTL. VR dungeon's current cash prize is just giving you full access to the station funds, I'd rather people got rich from selling loot from there rather than just steal it from other players.

Also the rotation will keep the larger prices in check hopefully, you only have 15 minutes out of every hour to cash your stuff in. If you take too long making the katana in the hidden workshop, you'll have to sit on it for up to 45 minutes before you can sell it. Will need to see that in play to see if it's sufficient.

[Ikea]

Keep in mind starstones, which take around 15 minutes to get and are intended to be the big money maker, will net you 300,000-1350000, with an average value of 750000, that is 15 minutes of work and is the best money maker in the game outside of highly rng methods like wish maker. Mars outpost grants you 8 bullions, which equals around 360000 credits (not to mention mars outpost is quite old so it shouldnt be taken to reflect modern balance standards). With several economy balances the profitabilty of things have actually been going down (see things like lottery nerf.). Having qms be able to spend 3 minutes hacking into RD and steal a bee to be set for the whole shift seems bad all around. I like these sprites but I feel like there could be better execution with the pricing and what is bought/sold.360000363

[Deadvickyart]

Keep in mind starstones, which take around 15 minutes to get and are intended to be the big money maker, will net you 300,000-1350000, with an average value of 750000, that is 15 minutes of work and is the best money maker in the game outside of highly rng methods like wish maker. Mars outpost grants you 8 bullions, which equals around 360000 credits (not to mention mars outpost is quite old so it shouldnt be taken to reflect modern balance standards). With several economy balances the profitabilty of things have actually been going down (see things like lottery nerf.). Having qms be able to spend 3 minutes hacking into RD and steal a bee to be set for the whole shift seems bad all around. I like these sprites but I feel like there could be better execution with the pricing and what is bought/sold.360000363

15 minutes of selling food to cargo merchants or weed to diner merchants gets you a million easily for very little effort. Best way of making money is still that, fishing for wishmakers (give about 10 mil for a successful wish, once per person), PTL hellburns or mindslaving HoP to steal station funds.

In any case even if someone does abuse the hell out of this and spends half a round scraping together 150 million space bucks in a round, there's only so much you can do with it. When the round ends, you get a chance to appear on the post-game score list and then it's all gone. Currently when cargo gets loads of money, they generally just sit on a huge budget or buy loads of novelty items like the hat crate. Not super unbalancing stuff.

Having qms be able to spend 3 minutes hacking into RD and steal a bee to be set for the whole shift seems bad all around. I like these sprites but I feel like there could be better execution with the pricing and what is bought/sold.360000363

Firstly, they'd only be able to do this if the round starts between xx:15 and xx:29 so they'll only be able to do this every 4 rounds on average. Secondly, Heisenbee has a persistant round tracker but currently the only legitimate reason to murder him is to fulfil a rare traitor objective (which can't appear on other antag types except sleeper agents/hard mode traitors) or to purposefully kill him just to interrupt the Heisenbee hat system. RD needs more of a reason to keep an eye on Heisenbee, he's left alone in his office too often for how valuable he's supposed to be. At the very least this incentivises RDs keeping him in the ID locker, out of reach of grubby thieving QMs.

[Ikea]

You should note that food selling hds been nerfed, wishmakers are super rare, alongside hellburns, and station funds are rarely worth millions. One of the core things about game design is players will make the game unfun for themselves, if one of these traders comes into play, theyd be a better money maker then basically any other trader, thus only these traders and these ways of making money will get used, because its by far the best way. In current balance having items worth one or two millions alone is questionable, let alone ones that you can get with ease in under five minutes.

[Deadvickyart]

You should note that food selling hds been nerfed, wishmakers are super rare, alongside hellburns, and station funds are rarely worth millions. One of the core things about game design is players will make the game unfun for themselves, if one of these traders comes into play, theyd be a better money maker then basically any other trader, thus only these traders and these ways of making money will get used, because its by far the best way. In current balance having items worth one or two millions alone is questionable, let alone ones that you can get with ease in under five minutes.

Think you're underestimating how strong food merchants and debris field merchants already are, and how much effort it takes to get some of the items on my list. Getting a bunch of specific trinkets with a strict time pressure is much more difficult than just selling crates you can get in QM, the prices I'm putting on one trinket is worth about 10 food crates ordered and sold to Zesty Trombone. I'm also being very careful to keep the big payouts for items that there's only one of per round, and take some time or risk to get. The yoyo for example takes two players working together to get it to the diner, and it takes about 30 minutes. Biodome knife takes about 20 without needing a second player. Both involve dealing with puzzles and mobs.

For reference of how silly the merchant economy currently is, you can buy steel sheets for 1 credit each from them and instantly sell them back for around 8 credits. A markup of 8 times for almost no effort. Mass-order them, mass-sell them, and you're rolling in cash. You can get even more if steel or sheets are hot items on the market. Repeat until you're the richest man in space. The goon economy has never been based on common sense, it's based on rewarding players for spending time interacting with it.

[DimWhat]

Just because something is a problem doesn't mean it's okay to add more stuff that is problematic on top of that.

[Deadvickyart]

Just because something is a problem doesn't mean it's okay to add more stuff that is problematic on top of that.

Making massive amounts of cash in game isn't a problem. If it were mars station, random locked safes, the PTL and the valuable astroids would be abused frequently. Genetics and Mining just got new ways to sell powers and minerals for cash, goon's been trending toward making the enonomy more accessible for more people and a diner expanion is the next obvious step.
 
A much bigger problem is the economy going unused in games, means the quartermaster and some gimmick jobs (President, Merchant, Regional Director etc, most of whom start a round with hundreds of thousands of credits) don't have much to do.

[Cal]

kinda is when voltrons are only 100k

[Deadvickyart]

kinda is when voltrons are only 100k

Yeah and what do most players do with it when they get it? Most of the times I see it, they just experment with it and see what doors they can get through. Then getting themselves killed by using it to tour the engine. Handmade katana costs nothing but time and is much more dangerous, but again most of the time when people make it they just fuck around hitting moneys with it or trying out the seppaku function.

[DimWhat]

Then why is trivializing low amounts of cash a good thing.