Arga is completely right.

It is also reality that industrial corps like PIE will sell T4 with prices that cover the potential risk they are taking by mining/harvesting/ratting on Beta. Most Alpha dwellers will run triangles for weeks to afford that T4, and nobody will bother going into an undercutting war with them because as Arga said; there is never "enough" in PVP corps. You can have for example, 956 Kains in stock but you still have your 5-week plan which includes 250 more Kains to be produced & fits for them.

Maybe I missed the point of the thread.

It seems as I reread, its less about supply then demand.

The players that have access to and use the internal corp markets are not suddenly going to be consumers on the open market if the feature is removed.

The pool of consumers is small, so demand is small, compared to the overall population. Producers like Purgetory that are able to get out in front of the moving prototype market are going to fish the blue waters and reap the benefit, as it should be. The rest of the producers are going to have to swim around in the red water and compete against a dimishing demand.

This desire to jump in front is the motivation behind all the revert kernel threads, because it's not like players can't figure out the best way to make profit is to provide items with limited availablity.

T3 and T4 won't always be ultra-expensive. Take the T4 LW frame as an example. At first you couldn't buy one for any price, then they started to show up on the market (Thanks P ) and since it's fairly low on the light kerner research, it eventually became available to many more producers, and now the price of 1.2-7M is driven by the cost of norgalis and epitron and is about as low as it will go unless those prices change dramatically.

They will however always be expensive to produce, and as such will never become 'common' in non-beta corp pvp until the next level of equipment becomes available. Why, simply it's not worth the 5 day grind to outfit a T4 mech for 1 or 2 fights a week before you lose it and have to grind another one.

Which leads again back to PVE and the small consumer demand. PVE doesn't lose bots and modules often, so they can afford to fit a T4 mech out to grind NIC on rats, but they only buy once. Purg is going to have a nice rush of T4 ERP sales for those PVE players, and he will get a tidy profit for his investments (All good ), and eventually those able to spend the initial high cost will be satisfied, but the price won't go down because there's no need to lower it; again because T4 is not about volume sales.

There are ALOT of players out there making items, alot. But they are also all in the red water. So yes, the market competition is very stiff for the small pool of players buying. The harsh reality though, is the more players that get frustrated with the market and stop production, means less competition for those that stick it out.

TL:DR The game needs more PVP, more PVP challenges for players that don't center around outposts, AND PVE content that is challenging and rewarding enough to risk blowing up bots.

Red water just means doing the same thing as everyone else, working on proven methods. Blue water in this case means the first out there selling ERP's.

For instance, a blue market idea would be setting up a mobile ammo shop out where players are farming, and selling them ammo through a container. Selling ammo on the market is red water, selling them in the field is a blue water idea

It's not that field ammo sales would work, but thats the risk you take to reach blue water (less competition), by trying something that may fail instead of just doing what everyone else is doing.

Technically Purgetory is really only limited by how much capital he wants to invest in his production chain and market supply of materials. Having high research makes the game simplier, because you know that by producing things at the end of the tree your going to sell them for a high margin. It's not the only way, its just the easiest.

Just to be perfectly clear, it takes Billions of NIC to complete the tech tree. When you see T4 mining lasers for 10M, it's not because of the material cost, its because of the huge time and capital that was required to achieve the ability to even make them.

As was pointed out, it takes 4 staggered lines to produce T4 items, as well as time and material. The selling price between T1 and T2 is fairly small, but it literally takes 2 times as much time and material to make T2. So, T2 should be at least double the price of T1 PLUS the cost of the prototype PLUS the cost of the kernel research to make the prototype.

T2 for items the drop off npc's just isn't worth producing, it's best to use those to setp to T3, at Triple ++ cost. But now your starting again to limit the market of those capable or willing to spend NIC on T3 items at that expense.

At that point, if you can make T4, your better off doing it, since the T4 will have a higher margin and you've already sunk 3/4 of the capital into the module.

Norgalis is expensive because it is. I know its wierd, players just don't like farming, but ninja raiders like stealing it, and the volume of norgalis off alpha plants is so low compared to incubator cost, you can buy it cheaper. But if it wasn't 'rare' and expensive, the devs would step in and make it so, because that's the point of it, to bottle neck production of tiered items and hmechs.

The trouble with ammo, at least from my production stand point is that there's too many of them, too many locations to sell them at, and they sell too slowly. Which translates to - they take up too many production lines, to cover even one weapon type needs a lot of material (which is NIC captial) that sits around for a long time with little margin.

The new CT base helps a little with tying up production costs, but they still sell very slowly, so given a choice between using material on a slow moving low margin item, or a fast moving high margin item... its a easy decision.

It has only been a few days since the CT change, its highly likely that new producers will start making ammo, because they don't have the choice, so slow moving low margin or nothing is also an easy decision.

Doesn't this go against your public message of encouraging market growth?

Its one thing to use the internal market to distribute to your corp members, but you've just created a shadow market. It's not an exploit or anything, it just goes against your PR. No wonder the open market has seen a decrease in activity.

Internal corp demand isn't market demand anyway. NeX using it as a shadow doesn't remove the functionality of the internal market as a necessry tool for capitalistic corps to function. Simply, my miners buying charges off the internal market is NEVER going to be something that would show up in the public market. All it would mean is that I would have to put them in the corporate folder and either work on the honor system and since non-accounting players can't donate NIC directly, have to have them send me or another officer and we deposit it.

No, the internal market is a vital tool in managing a corporation, and I didn't say what NeX was doing was even 'wrong', only that it conflicts with what they have publically announced as one of thier Corporate Missions. If that mission has changed, that's OK too, no drama intended. Maybe they just didn't realize the negative effect a shadow market has on an open market, but I'm sure they are making a significantly better profit, so it's hard to argue with using it in that manner.

I completely agree with this.

The solution though isn't removal of the internal corp market, unless they provide some other tool for internal distribution, and then that too will be subject to the same work-around.

If someone is willing to put an alt into a corp, there's absolutely no way to know (for some game mechanic to know) if they are a 'real' corp member or there just to play the shadow market. If you limit the internal market, all that will do is hurt the corporations that are NOT using it as a shadow market.

NeX has the largest single consumer base in the game. Setting it up this way was shrewd business, and a way to leverage thier numbers to the best advantage.

I'm just as screwed by this as the next producer that doesn't join in the shadow market, but I have to admit it's brillent.

Yeah, it's easy to see how it's lucrative to make and use markets as such. But with all the quips about the markets being barren lately (and prior as well), it seems to be a bit of a predicament. Like I said, if they limited the internal market to make it viable, but not overly beneficial to using the public market the two could coincide. But as is, there's no real downfall to using the corp market and you even get the bonus of negating levied fees. It's almost as if AC wants us to use corp markets as opposed to the public market, which to me is largely detrimental to a game that needs a market that's player driven as everything is player made. It really has to suck for newer players when they try the game and cant even buy player orders and not only that, when they get subbed and find out the market pales in comparisson to what's likely subdivided amongst all the corp markets.

It's human nature to be lazy, which is what makes personal trading viable, but not readily used. The fact that people can post mass auctions internally and cheaper, means that there's not really an incentive to grow the public market when demand is being met internally by and largely by every other internal market. It's almost like a self fulfilling prophecy of the breakdown of public marketing. Limit internal so that private sales are still possible, but not a conduit to syphoning the public market appeal. It can be done, it just seems it was overlooked and so were the effects of internal markets.

Hrmm, from a producing perspective, the public market right now is pretty shoddy. While it may appear like it's ripe for the picking, it's not. The lack of supply on the market would normally indicate a boon for anyone with supply, but in reality it's lack of supply is because of all the internal markets. Demand is being met internally at market locations that are convenient to whomever's corp is setting up the market. Logistics is a pain in the arse in this game in my opinion, so moving around piles of goods is a big factor depending on where you're based, where minerals are and where you need to go for demand. If the demand is on your doorstep, it's as simple as sitting and stocking the internal market with lesser fees and watching your stocks sell. You'd inherently know what your corp wants and needs so it's not hard to market to your chums. This leaves public producers to cator to whom?  Unless they're in a corp they're not likely to even have the resources to do any substantial marketing and if they could anyway, they likely wouldn't even need the NIC at that point. You need a corp to build your research, so that's kind of the catch that's going to push you in to a corp and thus a private market. There isn't really any aspect of the current market model that makes the public market appealing. If that were untrue, the market wouldn't be a skeleton that's basically largely only used to sell raw goods to people likely to use said goods to manufacture items for their private markets.

Maybe impose an overall corp cap to the amount of items that can be listed on an internal market? This would force people out of the internal markets largely as only important items would be posted so as to stay under the cap. You could also apply a tax to the internal markets and leave them open, but that would be a tad more finnicky as you'd then have to find a fair tax, but also one that would make the public market appealing again. Given the logistics headache and the fact that the open market would be a lot more competitive, the tax would likely have to be high to counter the glaring deterrents of a public market to a producer.

Then let the riots begin.

I tell you though, removal of the internal market is going to make running a capitalist industry corporation incredibly difficult, which is likely to cause NeX to go to a communistic model.

Even if there was 0 tax on the open market, I would still use the internal market for what it was intended for, which is a way to distribute equipment internally.

The cat's out now, unless this is working as intended (Any Dev response on this)

A guess another option would be to require Sell Orders in corporate market to go to the Corp wallet and be taxed at the same rate as the open markets poster. Because really the issue here isn't with other corps buying stuff internally, since the buyer doesn't pay any tax. Also it stops other producers from filling up your internal market, since any sales would go to the corp and not to their private wallets.

This stops the whole idea of a shadow market, where dozens of independant producers join your corp with alts and sell to the largest consumer without competition from outside producers or having to pay any tax.

Actually this thread gave me an idea. I'm probably going to list a bunch of Syntec miners for 100k on our market, have proceeds go to corp wallet and call that our nic donation button.

ME SO CWAFTY!!!