Minimum Store Block prices should be dropped to 1sc or nothing at all.
Minimum prices are absurdly high for Space Engineers store blocks, and I'd point to that as the main reason that player-to-player trade stations aren't a more common sight in multiplayer. When you can't sell at a fairly low price, far lower than the current system lets you, no player is going to go out of their way to buy from you over getting materials themselves or buying them at an NPC station (and even that'll be rare, as it was after Economy 1 and I suspect will be once Econ 2 has been out a month. Econ 2 might at least have some convenience buys because the repairs and contracts are at stations, but nobody's going to be buying much). When it costs 1200sc for one unit of grain, nobody will ever buy grain from another player over growing it themselves. The roleplay fun and the convenience factor aren't enough to make that cost worth it.
Hydrogen and oxygen stand out because, at the moment, their minimum sell price sits at 0sc. A station can even run as charity at that rate, and 1-5sc per unit is where at a glance I would guess a lot of player "gas stations" could actually reliably sell oxygen and hydrogen. That's half a million to two and a half million SC to completely fill a small grid hydrogen tank with fuel, which is to say still a ton of profit for the seller but also a price that, for such a large amount of hydrogen, might genuinely be appealing to the buyer too. That's a few hours of work collecting ice that said buyer is being spared from, after all. For comparison on how unreasonable these prices actually get, the raw ice to get that much hydrogen would be 25,000,000 units (25,000kg), which would cost one billion, two hundred and fifty million SC. This would take literal thousands of contracts to complete at the bare minimum price of 50sc per gram of ice. Just undercutting the NPC stations isn't enough to get other players to buy from a player store if prices are going to be that excessively high.
In my eyes, just dropping the minimum prices in the store block to 1sc or 0sc for every single item rather than just for gas would give player economies far more room to exist in Space Engineers, which ought to do wonders for making multiplayer a bit more fun. I genuinely feel like some servers would end up something like a lite version of Elite Dangerous or EVE in terms of how well players are able to connect and trade with each other given just this change and nothing else.
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The current prices are used by NPCs to determine value, but that should not restrict players. If I want to sell ice for 0, then let me sell ice for 0, the artificial clamp of prices hurts player driven economy. The minimums as they are defined currently should just be the "minimum NPC price".
The current prices are used by NPCs to determine value, but that should not restrict players. If I want to sell ice for 0, then let me sell ice for 0, the artificial clamp of prices hurts player driven economy. The minimums as they are defined currently should just be the "minimum NPC price".
Actually, the ideal here is that there is a new field added: "NPCPricePerUnit" or something. NPCs respect that, MinimalPricePerUnit is kept as a UI clamp for players. If server owners want to mod that down to 0, they can, and then NPC prices can remain unaffected.
If I could say "NPCs sell at 100, but players can sell for any" this now becomes a viable way for me as a server owner to make a "ceiling" on a good's price.
Actually, the ideal here is that there is a new field added: "NPCPricePerUnit" or something. NPCs respect that, MinimalPricePerUnit is kept as a UI clamp for players. If server owners want to mod that down to 0, they can, and then NPC prices can remain unaffected.
If I could say "NPCs sell at 100, but players can sell for any" this now becomes a viable way for me as a server owner to make a "ceiling" on a good's price.
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