Selling Farm in Bulk over time#26157

This is a continuation of suggestion #26140.

In short, players find it frustrating to spend a lot of time in bandit to sell off their stock and secondly it is further worsened if more than one player wants to sell.

My suggestion is to allow players to deposit their produce to the merchants in bulk. The Merchant will convert your produce into scrap (Imagine the merchent selling your produce to other NPC’s), but you will not receive the scrap up front and will have to wait untill the whole stock has been ‘Sold’, Here is an example:

At a current rate of 3 scrap for 2 fertilizer you deposit 200 fertilizer at the merchant. You will receive 300 scrap after around 12 minutes (This is the current rate of 27 scrap for 18 fertilizer per minute that is currently in effect at the Merchant).

Some of you may wonder how this is better than what is currently in place. This suggestion fixes the first issue mentioned above.

A farmer can go to the bandit camp and deposit 500 fertilizer if they want. While the merchant is converting the fertilizer, the farmer can go and do other things, even go back to his base. They are not stuck in Bandit camp waiting for the stock to fill up again and incrementally sell their stock. They can go and actually play the game.

One negative to this suggestion is that a group can sell more than a solo and can break the economy.

Here are further suggestions to help address this issue. Limited amount of slots. Similar to the drone system, only a limited amount of people can sell produce at a time.

1) There are 2 slots where you can deposit your farm for each produce type and a person may only use 1 at a time.
2) You may only deposit produce that takes a maximum of 30 minutes to finish.
3) Once finished the slot is opened for other players and you retrieve your scrap from the merchant.
4) A Player may not use the merchant for 30 seconds after collecting their scrap
5) A timer will show when a slot will be available for other players.

The big thing to note here is point number 1. Yes three players from a group can use these slots at once, but they will have to step aside after using it and there are other produce players can sell in that time.

EDIT: After thinking about it, I am changing 3 slots to 2 slots. 3 slots can be abused by clans and if it will be abused, perhaps reducing it to 2 will discourage clans for exploiting it.

All this does is make it so players have to make 2 trips instead of one. And based on the stack sizes and slots, this may not be enough to compete with even 9 large planters. Once again the solution is simple, remove the trade barrier, and just fix the rates. I’m willing to be changing it to a 400 cloth per 20 scrap or 500 cloth per 20 scrap would be plenty. Because my farm when pumping out at its best was putting out around 25k cloth per harvest. So say we do 400, that would around 1250 scrap.. 8 harvests a day thats 10k scrap. And before you say well thats still too much. That is a 9x9 3 story farm. And most cant farm it 24x7

I went and checked your claims and calculations and this is what I found:

If you had a 9 foundation x 9 foundation x 3 story farm, where every floor tile had a planter then you had 243 planters in the base. Every planter had 9 plants in it and you harvested 57.5 cloth per plant. This comes to around 125k cloth if a person harvest a 9x9x3 base.

This is where I found the numbers for the yield:

When we use your lowest payout, 500 cloth for 20 scrap, for a harvest from a 9x9x3 base you would receive around 5000 scrap per harvest, which is ‘plenty’. If you had a 48 planters in a 4x4x3 base, which I think is a good baseline farm base, you would harvest around 25k cloth and sell it for 1250 scrap.

This is the problem with economy of scale. If the biggest base would have been 4x4x3 then everything would be fine, but people will keep pushing and pushing until the economy breaks. If we balance around a 9x9x3 base, lets say 1k cloth for 10 scrap, the smaller farmer gets shafted.

Infinite trade does not work.

We can balance some things to make farms feel a little better.

Make the conversation rate of all produce be around 1,5k scrap per hour and change cloth exchange rate to 160 cloth for 10 scrap. This will make a 4x4x3 base the largest harvest you could make for selling twice to bandit camp for the full 1,5k scrap.

My suggestion will at least free up the players so they can do other things and not camp the bandit camp the whole time to sell off their cloth.

All this does is make it so players have to make 2 trips instead of one.

I am not sure what you mean with this, but yes, it is only 1 trip currently, where a player must stay in bandit camp for a whole hour to sell off their produce, 1 minute at a time, while elbowing your neighbour.

@Rawroku my other solution has been bandit have prices fluctuate based on what is sold/bought more and less. This could be per individual as well in order to make sure zergs don’t kill it for everyone, or could be global to see how the playerbase responds. Then it could start at say the 500 per, and end up at say 5k at max. And this also would make less popular items like the M39, certain components etc. More affordable later in wipe which could be another interesting component of the game economy as selling all plants and buying all items becomes necessary to prevent hyper inflation of certain goods

Dynamic Fluctuation is certainly a method that could be used to better balance an Economy. This has an added benefit that a farmer can change his product depending on the market price, like real life gasp.

This will require a completely new Economic system though, but compared to static infinite trade it is an improvement. One problem is still that a zerg can push the economy out of smaller players’ price range and they also can manipulate a market.

Another way to do it is with diminishing returns for each sale per person, but this can also be abused by zergs.

Honestly, the whole concept of zergs are a problem, but that is a discussion for another time.

Edit: As a side note, anything that reduces the size of bases all round is an improvement in my opinion. If farm bases are only effective at a certain size, that reduces average farm base size in general. Why is this important? To lower the stress on servers and improve stability.

So long as the selling for scrap and buying with scrap economics are separate (so selling hemp doesn’t make lrs cheaper for example but makes selling corn and pumpkins higher. And so buying lrs would say make M39s and wind turbines cheaper as it gets more expensive), it would encourage a large variety of selling and buying options that no one zerg could heavily control. Because massive farms would have to be specialized in one field or generalized which itself would make them less efficient. Then there could be a general inflation that when too much is sold for scrap the cost of scrap goods increase because of inflation until either a set period passes or enough items are bought of less popular categories IE electronics, less valued weapons, food. Then a large percent of zergs profit would either go to waste on overpriced goods, or into cheap items that theyd probably drop for randoms there, or would sell at a loss to players to get some scrap back

I think the in-game economy should be more player driven, but facepunch seems to have chosen to optimize the game’s economics for isolation. Almost the only things worth buying from other players are things you buy to reverse engineer on the research table.

@Donald Viszneki only way that could happen is if specialization was better for production than generalization. And in this game it isn’t. In fact specializing seems to be less efficient given you bypass resources with no reward

Lol, you two are nerds.