[Balance] [AP] Stock exchange is better than cheating!

[unrockable]

So to be honest i played today three hours with sinza x10 (1000%). This was equal to arround 19 hours ingame. During this time i was only flying arround exploring the systems. I only did a few storymissions to get some 100k - 250k of money. At this point i started to play arround with the stock exchange.

And i have to say it is better than cheating. A legit way to earn 100m within 19 hours of ingame time

What i basically did was investing in "Naturals". They seam to need a serious fix. Its totally predictable and only appears to be random but is infact not. Some reassources have exact the same price and raise at the exact same moment for exaxt the same duration. It is so easy... Its so unbelievable...

I also tried this by building stations. But you guess, no chance to achieve this amount at all in given time. I remember days/weeks where i ran my pc the whole night to only be able to get a fifth of the amount i am getting now in 3 hours playtime. If this feature will make it to "Rebirth" than it needs a serious overhaul. At the current state it is a money printing maschine of highest glance.

Those are my fifty cent.

[Texhnolyzed]

Sounds incredibly lame to be honest. Well, at least they kept the tradition of making the X games easier with every new entry in the franchise, I guess.

I seriously hope that Rebirth is a big improvement in the design and stability department. I still have hope!

[kurush]

I remember days/weeks where i ran my pc the whole night to only be able to get a fifth of the amount i am getting now in 3 hours playtime.

This is inflation for you. Now they also got a stock marked and the entire thing is about to go supernova In any case, they fixed a couple of easy money cheats in AP so stockmarket is OK for fair balance. I wonder if there are still any nvidium clusters in the universe and whether they are as never-ending as in TC...

[unrockable]

In any case, they fixed a couple of easy money cheats in AP so stockmarket is OK for fair balance.

I played latest version of AP. i can´t see a fix or something. I mean the market is mostly OK, but those naturals are definatly not. If you try this with normal recources you will need alot longer or even fail to achiev any money. But naturals are kick a**. The company section is easy money aswell however it takes alot longer to get a good revenue.

I only invest in four markets so far, which is about 15m max amount at stocks. And after traveling one or maybe two gates you can make this 15m worth 40m.

This is inflation for you.

I would rather like to have a system where i can actually lose money. They need to even it out, or there is no point to build more than a single station in argon space to be able to use their exchanges aswell lol

Or maybe those Teladi will increase their fee for exchanges and/or initial amount for access to arround 10m credits.

It is just to plain easy. Somehow of a gamebreaker for me.

See proof (unmodified game):

[ external image ]

[melenkurio]

So to be honest i played today three hours with sinza x10 (1000%). This was equal to arround 19 hours ingame. During this time i was only flying arround exploring the systems. I only did a few storymissions to get some 100k - 250k of money. At this point i started to play arround with the stock exchange.

And i have to say it is better than cheating. A legit way to earn 100m within 19 hours of ingame time

What i basically did was investing in "Naturals". They seam to need a serious fix. Its totally predictable and only appears to be random but is infact not. Some reassources have exact the same price and raise at the exact same moment for exaxt the same duration. It is so easy... Its so unbelievable...

I also tried this by building stations. But you guess, no chance to achieve this amount at all in given time. I remember days/weeks where i ran my pc the whole night to only be able to get a fifth of the amount i am getting now in 3 hours playtime. If this feature will make it to "Rebirth" than it needs a serious overhaul. At the current state it is a money printing maschine of highest glance.

Those are my fifty cent.

You ran the PC for weeks the whole night without actually playing to get some money? thats lame imo. Thats kinda exploiting the game too if you want money so badly use a cheat but it will ruin the fun. You are not supposed to get money by staying a whole night in seta... Gosh its so easy just collect some missles on a battlefield and you get your millions in no time you dont need to exploit the seta and waste tons of energy for a space game...

And personally after I found out how easy the stock exchange market is I never used it again. It just ruins the fun to have 100 millions because of some new unbalanced system.

[unrockable]

I talked about the older games of the series. Since TC you can get money considderably fast with missions or whatever. But in the earlier days it was harder to get some money, so mostly seta the night was common to get some money from the factories.

Edit: I may buy myself a Titan now, and blow these exchanges on sight. Will be a tought universe than hehe. 0 reputation ftw

[Drockt1]

hehe ya i used to have people tell me stations are great money makers.. im like cool.. so i tried it.. they take forever to make there investment back. Then you always ask these people how much SETA they use, and they sit for hours on end(sometimes overnight), just letting SETA run..

I personally hate seta.. i NEVER let time waste.. im like this in every game, i dunno why, but the idea of wasted time bothers me. So if the game is on, im doing something.. Sure seta gets used, but i never sit there and use a ton of seta.. its seta to get to a point, or get to a ship alittle faster.

To add something to Rebirth and the stock exchange.. there will NOT be SETA in rebirth.. and my understanding is they want the stock exchange in the game to give traders something to do. Without seta there gonna have a hard job making trading and station building profitable, without being massively over profitable.

[melenkurio]

hehe ya i used to have people tell me stations are great money makers.. im like cool.. so i tried it.. they take forever to make there investment back. Then you always ask these people how much SETA they use, and they sit for hours on end(sometimes overnight), just letting SETA run..

I personally hate seta.. i NEVER let time waste.. im like this in every game, i dunno why, but the idea of wasted time bothers me. So if the game is on, im doing something.. Sure seta gets used, but i never sit there and use a ton of seta.. its seta to get to a point, or get to a ship alittle faster.

To add something to Rebirth and the stock exchange.. there will NOT be SETA in rebirth.. and my understanding is they want the stock exchange in the game to give traders something to do. Without seta there gonna have a hard job making trading and station building profitable, without being massively over profitable.

Thats 100% how I feel about Seta too. I never use it and go afk to get money it just doesnt feel "earned" for me its like cheating imo. And yes stations are pretty slow to get money. I didnt even bother with them in AP. I just got around 20 Utraders now and if I go hunt some pirates I am 500k richer after some minutes without using cheap seta afking

[unrockable]

I can`t wait for Rebirth, and try to avoid thinking of it. But yeah freelancer worked well without seta. The highways and some faster ships will make sinza useless hopefully.

But as the exchange is now, its just plain win win win situation. It should be atleast a challange and smart broking to make it a cool feature.

[Coruskane]

ah but how much can the stock exchange scale?

Closed loop complexes, as an average, take ~50-80 hours to breakeven, depending on products, yields etc. So once you are off the ground, using the exchange or missions or whatever, a 400M cost complex (quite small) will get you your money without you even doing anything - with SETA - which you used for your exchange trading.

Reunion took so long to make money primarily because your seed capital was much smaller because you don't have missions and the exchange. In TC and AP, you can use missions to earn your first slug of start-up funds, cutting out a huge chunk of time to set up a highly profitable complex.

Scale it up to a 500 station complex and you can earn, without SETA, enough money to purchase and equip an M2 every hour....mmm

[LotharHP]

No SETA in rebirth, and I think it was a good idea for them to bring this feature out now for AP. See how people can break it and work the bugs out for Rebirth hopefully...

[AkrionXxarr]

You can get a good bit of money from the Stock Exchange, yes, but it's nowhere near what you can pull in from Nvidium mining and, like Coruskane says, even further from what later game complexes pull in (especially in X3:TC if you do the HUB mission and have those super complexes left over afterwerds).

[Haine]

Am I the only one who thinks these massive complexes are what breaks the game?

I don't see SETA as game exploiting tbh. But these massive complexes on the other hand.

[Bobucles]

Am I the only one who thinks these massive complexes are what breaks the game?

I don't see SETA as game exploiting tbh. But these massive complexes on the other hand.

I don't think it's so much with large complexes. Rather, it's virtually impossible to LOSE money, with any complex! A station has no upkeep, no tax, and no operating costs of any kind. Cheap goods go in, and more valuable goods come out. Every single time. There's little incentive or profit from building in lawless sectors, except for illegal drugs.

Even if the market has absolute no need for an item, there are ways(exploits?) to sell any number of goods anywhere. In addition, NPCs will pop out of the woodwork to pick up goods they have no way of using. So basically, any station is guaranteed to make money!

There are issues in the other direction, too. Ever tried selling goods for 1cr above average? Yeah... it doesn't work. Galactic demand and shortages don't matter. If you build something in demand, you'll get just as many buyers as for something that no one needs. So there's virtually no way to increase your profit from a station.

I dunno how much AP fixed such things. But the trade system could some love.

[tb87670]

The stock exchange is cool and I made lots of money, but I assure you there IS a risk. Example scenario that happened to me:

I lost money a few times on SE because even some naturals that move normally every minute won't budge for hours in real life time (that counts my Seta for long trips, etc.) and sometimes the naturals will actually go up beyond the 100 index and just stay there permanently. At least permanently from my perspective, I got jump drive parts at 80 index, they dropped the ~70 when I should've sold them but I held them 15 min later, then they jumped within 10 minutes to 110+ and kept going up on the index until now they hovered in the 180 range for the past 6 hours real life time I played. This is on the Boron market. I plan on just eating the loss if it doesn't even hint at going down next time I get in the game.

[Master of the Blade]

The funny thing is, now that I've hit around 100Mcr, the stock exchange is pulling in less money - and less reliably - than doing combat missions for 2Mcr a pop. It is, however, a fun game to play while flying around looking for said missions. I sometimes end up checking my stock prices while in the middle of a Xenon sector.

[Malkuth74]

Maybe they should just nerf sata for whiners like you will keep on ruining the game for others that don't have all day to sit in front of a pc all day.


Because lets face it the real problem is sets not the stock market!

[aaronwestley]

After a while I realised you don't need to run SETA when playing the market. I think it updates every 15-20 seconds regardless if there is time compression or not.

It is game breaking to play the naturals exchange in my opinion. Making 20 Million in less than an hour. I started AP just for interest in the stock market, and if I thought it would be this easy to make money, I wouldn't have done it.

I like the idea of having a stock exchange, but I guess it comes to self discipline to ignore the naturals.

So for all those people arguing about what is the biggest exploit for money, it doesn't matter, because you can just download a memory address editor and enter in whatever money you want, in just about any game you play.

[Malkuth74]

Yes I would agree that the naturals need to have the index change thing reduced a lot maybe only update every 15 mins or half hour. But again the real problem is not how the stock exchange works but how guys like the op poster can sit in front of a pc in sera for 3 hours make a 100 million dollars. Then have the nerve to come on this board and say it needs to be nerfed.

This is a single player game, guys like this are the same ilk that pushed a lot of people away from tc. Them needing the mission payout in tc killed this ame for a lot of people. I'm not talking about the very first neff of the payouts but the 2nd and third nerfs that made them useless.


For once I wish the devs would listen to guys like me the casual plàyer that does not half 10 hours a day to play to make money the real hard way with broken factories and a useless ai that does not help at all.


In the end it's not the stock market that is the problem it's the seta that is the problem!!

[tb87670]

For once I wish the devs would listen to guys like me the casual plàyer that does not half 10 hours a day to play to make money the real hard way with broken factories and a useless ai that does not help at all.

In the end it's not the stock market that is the problem it's the seta that is the problem!!

SETA is not the problem, SETA is handy for me because I can't wait 10 minutes for a TS going 80m/s to go through a system like Aladna Hill where the gates are 100km apart. 10 seconds would be 800meters, 100 seconds 8km. 1000 seconds are 80km, and I'm 4/5 the way through the trip. Seriously, sit down and count to 1000. It's a long time. You claim to be a casual player so don't blame the SETA. The 'problem' as you call it lies in people that just sit there, and those are the kind of people who abuse game mechanics any way they can in any game they get. It's a personality type, so don't modify the game in any way as long as everyone enjoys it their way. I enjoy the game for a few hours at a time without idling on SETA, others enjoy idling on SETA. Leave it alone.