The in game chat isn’t big enough for this…
While I commend the attempt to restrict pricing by putting a 3 x limit on manufacturing and can see that coding wise it’s a very simple solution, it still locks into place an unfairness to manufacturing over retail.
In rough terms maker cost = 20 plus admin and you’re putting a top price of 60 - Gross margin of 40, but you leave in place the restriction of 22 cars every 4 hours.
A retailer now has a top price of 180 giving them a gross margin of 120. They can place an order for 1000 cars, set all to max and come back in a week to buy some more. Three times the profit for a fraction of the effort. Surely this should be obvious to a game designer, so WHY???
My answer to restrict prices to both maker and retailer at the same level - let’s say a blanket 180k and let the market decide how much of the profit should go to maker / retailer. Only dumb people will pay 180k for a car they can only sell at 180k, but a smart player may pay 160k to lock in supply.
Or increase supply substantially by getting rid of the 22 per 4 hours rule or letting makers expand their factories to make more cars.
Hey Firesyscorp … you are right that this solution does not solve the issue that you note. It is only intended to be a temporary fix to stop the HUGE profits being made. The huge profits have hurt the gameplay so we wanted to fix that asap.
The economic algorithms we have planned are quite complex and will properly solve the economic issues … we are working on them now but it will take some weeks to finalize and tweak. We will probably do a full game reset shortly after.
With regards the balance of work and profit between MFG and RETAIL, the changes we are making will bring them more into balance. Once a RETAILER can no longer generate huge profits, it will mean that they cannot order large amounts of inventory and then walk away and let the sales run on their own. They will have to keep coming back to order more inventory based on their cash flow … the same as MFG have to come back to issue new production orders.
We are also going to look at adjusting the number of cars a MFG can produce … we may need to increase the number as you point out … but this is not clear yet as we don’t want to make such decisions until the economy is working properly, otherwise we risk making bad decisions. Our objective is to have proper balance of work and profit between MFG and RETAIL businesses. And, we are confident we will get there. Thanks for your continued patience and feedback!
I am not happy with the price controls:
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Price controls have NOT effected my retail businesses. I am still able to sell cars at g15,000,000 retail.
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By fixing MFG prices, you have taken a lot of the fun and competition out of the game.
You don’t need price controls on BOTH the retail and the mfg businesses. IF you just had price controls on the RETAIL business, that would solve most of the short term problems with the economic engine.
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Hi FlowInc …
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If you had inventory before the price controls were added, then some of the price controls won’t be triggered until you clear out that old inventory.
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By fixed MFG prices, I assume you mean the MAXIMUM price limit, because players should still be able to set their own prices to whatever they want (as long as it is lower than the MAX). This MAX is a temporary thing … it will be removed when we have the economy working properly in the next few weeks.
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The way the price controls work right now, they are needed on both MFG and RETAIL, otherwise players can (and did) exploit the price limits by inflating the price on one end.
All of the problems with the price limits and the reason we added them was just as a short-term bandaid while we fix the economy algorithms. All price controls will be removed in the coming weeks … except that there will be maximum prices that the virtual consumers will pay … it’s sort of a price control, but a more sophisticated one.
Hang in there with us, it’s getting better 
Awesome. This will make it more realistic. In the real world, I can price something whatever I want but no one is going to buy if it is ridiculous. In Thorin and I’s initial tests on this at the beginning the max price was g999,999,999. Obvious improvements since then. This temp fix is so new players can actually play the game instead of having every manufacturer selling for millions a unit. Long term, price controls should only exist in the virtual customer’s buying power and price tolerance – which looks like that is the plan anyways. I have no programming experience but I imagine an economy like this is an extreme undertaking.
Would love to see companies eventually be able to be a niche brand. Low volume, high quality/price cars sold to high net-worth virtual customers. Would be very interesting to see.
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omni9000 … you are exactly right … temporary fix to get away from players making unlimited revenue. With some other changes we are making, it will cost much more to make higher quality cars with more features too, so players will have to think about their price/features/quality/brand strategies more. Yes, we are also looking at allowing a very expensive/premium product to be manufactured as well … still some thinking to do on that one.
I think the point is that with the restriction on manufacturing prices enforced and not on retail, there is an ongoing and now even worse advantage to retailers.
If you don’t adjust your sell price there has been no change so many retailers, me included, still have multi million dollar price tags on their cars. The only change is that they now replace stock with much cheaper cars because of the restrictions brought in.
Part of the fix was to be a reset of retail prices to 40k max across the board and then we’d have to go in and change them back to the new lower max - that never happened and would at least complete the temp fix…
Firesys … the g40k price reset did happen, but if you already have old inventory, it won’t trigger until you clear out your inventory. Once your old inventory sells, you should see it for your businesses.
We did it this way because some players were paying a VERY high price for their inventory (so they could sell at an even higher price at retail), and we did not want to force you to lose a bunch of money on all your existing inventory.
Sorry - if it happened it didn’t work. You can easily check the stats. All of my old customers are still selling at prices way above the new expected max. Some in the 6 - 15 million range. Certainly none of my companies are affected and many have had no stock for days. We’ve all had enough time now and it was taking advantage of unintended generosity in the coding. Maybe do it again at 100k max but include existing stock. If we don’t change the price, there’s nothing to trigger something that’s lower than the historic high.
The only ones being hurt here are the new players and this is a beta anyway so results already include some historic glitches that can’t be undone. A reset will make it interesting for all again and can’t come soon enough!
Thanks Firesys … sounds like we need to take a closer look at the data to see what’s happening. I’ll flag for the devs.
We are looking forward to the reset too.
Hey Firesys … thanks for sticking with this. It does seems there is an edge case that is not being addressed and that is why some businesses who ran out of inventory did not have their price reset. We are looking into this further and trying to figure out what to do about it.
We appreciate you watching this so carefully and helping us identify this problem!
Hi Firesys, we wanted to let you know that we didn’t forget about this issue. We have found where the problem exists but have been reluctant to make changes because we have a lot of other changes already in the queue that need further testing that would be affected by making this other change. So, we are likely going to leave it as is for when we do the reset. The reset will be done in January.
