there is more other ways to earm NICs just fyi. also you can make different missions from time to time to avoid blocking.

however, i agreed that market and economics aren't good now. but probably players by themself can change things a litte. do you have any other ideas except kernel prices?

One of the things the dev's mentioned was that the insurance game skewed the market data. The infinite buy orders of kernels were there to give the economy an initial boost, but were removed once things seemed to be rolling.

Maybe that should be revisited. Initially I started to post that the days of easy NIC were over, but thinking about the how having billions of NIC just disappear off the market over night, it could need another NIC injection.

Ideally, something that would open Beta Allliance wallets to pour NIC into the economy would be better, but there really isn't anything that they need to buy from other players. Just having them sink NIC, like buying a POS, isn't going to help the general market.

I'm a big fan of the Artifact thing too, so its hard for me to say that this probably isn't helping. I'm finding things to sell, but alpha players don't have the NIC to buy T3- items, or need to if they can go get items themselves.

I started with 6M when artifact hunting came out, I'm down to 3M after buying charges and a T3 geoscanner. Nothing I have put up on the market has sold, but I also havn't bought anything off the market.

I'm not out risking Bots because I don't have the NIC to replace them, and I'm having too much fun scanning to do transport missions again.

TL;DR  - The corporations with fat wallets need to a reason to pour NIC into the market, or solo players need a reason and means to generate NIC to use on the market; with NIC either gaining in buying power ( prices being reduced to meet demand ) or becoming more availble to match pricing expecations.

taxes are no problem - it may look so, but the tax reduction extension is pretty cheap and i get it to lvl5 on any agent i have.

Problem is the offer, demand and time issue.

- not much player, no demand
- corporations are self sufficient, no equip trading required, minerals for lazyness
- process to gather enough minerals for basic stuff is very long and boring
- who wants to offer equip on the market, if he needs it for his own survival, while for estimated 75% of the craftable equip you need epriton or noralgis that has to be gathered on beta island.

the reward vs. risk is to low to do so for most industrial orientated player.

ontop of that, the process to make NIC from NPCs to be able to buy something involves mostly boring transport missions....

I think it's clearly evident someone made some choices which need to be reconsidered. People don't want transport missions, they want a working market, or viable ways of making income. Not by joining a zerg either.

while I'm doing ok on money, I think of other groups and new players.

Given recent reviews on this website from new players, it's evident there's strong support for something to be done.

The treasure hunt is good, but the market doesn't have demand.

The general Alpha dweller has no extra nic to spend. As I posted before, if I want to PVP with a Baphomet, I need to run level 3 (sans the beta trip) missions for 3 play sessions to afford to replace it. I can't even begin to replace my T-fitted Artemis with my current NIC supply.

What we are seeing is a huge divide between the NIC levels of corporations and of the individual players. Corps with Billions of dollars could afford to buy 10 million NIC items, but the average player can not. So when a module goes up on the market, it is priced at what the Corporations can afford. Sometimes sellers get lucky and the corp needs that item so it sells, but the average alpha player can't afford to pay that. One-off low priced items are scooped off the market and put back up for profit.

Either the game needs a way for the general population to get additional funds, or a very large NIC sink to reduce corp wallet levels; so their buying power drops and prices fall accordingly.

The other option, which I'm sure no one likes, is for NPC's to sell infinite items; which would kill the player industry. But than again, if it costs a player 5 million to make a Mech but the players can only afford to buy it at 2M, than there is no industry anyway.

Another angle to look at this, is that many corporations are set up as socialist economys, where everyone is given what they need for the services they provide. This doesn't support a capitalist market however, so you have this situation where the majority of the NIC base does not have any stake in the market, while the minority depend on it.

Its broken. Most other MMO's would die from a broken market, but since the majority of the players, the beta corps, don't require the market, the game will continue but the alpha corps and players won't.

Its okay to be beta only. As long as the alpha experience is okay and the miner says "Okay, i have to farm 2 hours titantium on alpha to get what i would in 1 hour on beta of eprition" ... or make it 3:1 or 4:1 ... but is must make sense. At the moment, theres no sense in mining at all since you should do transports and buy the ore ...

NPC kernel buy orders should be removed and replaced the NIC source with another system. I am pretty sure the Devs are aware of this and are working on a solution so I won’t post any ideas for what could be done if there is something in the pipeline.

Then couple this with low level NPC's dropping flawed (T0) items instead of standard modules and only high level and beta island NPC's drop standard items. Make the T0 items no more damage than yellow as this will allow them to be used or recycle much cheaper than the current system then when they get a rare standard module from a mob it's not worthless. Standard module drops need to be decreased but “salvagers” should still have a job. Each flawed module that drops should have a 25% chance to be a standard module.

These two changes would stimulate the standard module market and kernel market. Increase the base length of each sell order so that the minimum time is 1 week and the maximum is 2 months. That way people will put things on the market and be able to leave them there as there is demand for items but not many people around to buy them. As demand for item increases, more players join and a new NIC sink is needed the cost of listing items could be increased further for longer durations. For now keep it to a scale where 2 months costs 8 times the price of 1 week.

Now for the fun part that bring the whole economy together. New market tools and abilities. Features like being able to modify sell and buy orders remotely rather than have to cancel and put them up again and more market data! This is probably the most important feature to fix the economy. Add a market tool that unlocks more data by training extensions in marketing. The higher the extension the more they can see from remote locations and the more data they get and the more up-to-date data. Rather than a 24 hour average they can choose a 6 hourly average to see what times modules sell best and where in the game world most modules are being sold and bought and where the highest demand and highest supply of modules are.

This ^^

One challenge with adding NIC sources, is the game can't distinguish between poor alpha players needing a NIC boost and an organized corporate NIC raids. That is if the bounty is too high, then it would make sense for coporations to organize groups of 10 or so players to spend a couple hours just farming bounty. If 1 player can make 1M NIC per hour on bounty, than the corp could make more like 30M per hour with 10 people since 10 can kill many times faster than 1, and you end up with the same disparity in buying power, but just at a higher value.

Actually, something that could work;

If corporation had to make payments to their members, or if not mandatory, at least some provision for paying salarys. They take in NIC via tax but they don't pay it out. Seems very one sided.

The idea behind this is to get NIC moving out of corporate wallets, back into the economy. If there isn't enough NIC, then bounties would be good, but if there is enough, but its all in savings, than it doesn't help our economy.

The game could also charge an income tax per week on any NIC in the corp wallet, encouraging corps to spend it.

Yes of course, groups working on things should get better rewards, and organized groups even more. The trick is to balance, this is why the alpha experience is bad now, if any activity was made easier, than the benefit to organized groups breaks it.

The insurance thing is what comes to mind. Generally insurance as it was worked just fine, but when an organized group makes it into a production, the NIC source becomes unbalanced.

As long as groups only make a multiple more, that's ok, its when they can make an exponetial amount more.

Something like 1-2k NIC bounty would be OK probably, it isn't much so farming rats wouldn't be worth 'going corporate' on it, but it would be a few more NIC in the assignment runner's pocket.

Breaking it would be escalating the bounty for larger bots. Just a flat 2k for an arhke or a heavy mech. No risk reward gain for beta to even bother with it.

Problem with the insurance thing : It works in stEVE. Why ? Because the market is so large it cant be modified by some single persons.

We dont have that atm. So some persons can modify the market and abuse the insurance.

Another thing that will figure out if the game got enough players.

The nerf done ? Only possibility to get it under control until then ...