[X3AP] Conventinal ways of making money are useless with Stock Exchange there.

[Arclacke]

Why grind trade runs and shit while I can sit in some stock exchange, run game in background and make 15M in 1~2 hours with no effort? You can just pick a fighter start, grab 50k Cr and start a "trader playstyle" without investments(like ships with large cargobays, trade softwares, armament, etc).
I think moneymaking was more challenging in previous games.

[Ketraar]

I think moneymaking was more challenging in previous games.

Absolutely true.

As for why still setting up trade and s..stuff

Well mostly cause you can, then because you want to and last but not least cause its fun. If you think that none of the mentioned reasons apply to you, well ignore them and play the game the way you want. Searching for a REASON as to why play a sandbox style game in any particular way is, well rather pointless, cause the whole point of sandbox games is that you make your own reasons and just do ALL you want, well for most part anyway.

MFG

Ketraar

[Echofinder]

You don't even need to wait really, the local stock exchange is exploitable to a hilarious degree. I don't use the stock exchange anymore, the goods sold are intangible, which I consider boring and tactless.

Though, if they made the stock exchange system piratable...

[BDK]

Rebirth is going out on consoles so I'm not surprised that you find it overly easy to make money.
Yeah whatever they say, it's going to be released on consoles as well.

[Playbahnosh]

Rebirth is going out on consoles so I'm not surprised that you find it overly easy to make money.
Yeah whatever they say, it's going to be released on consoles as well.

It's quite unlikely for a plethora of reasons. First of all, it's not coded for consoles. Second of all, it's way too large and needs way more computational power than any of the consoles can supply today. No, not GPU power, but raw CPU power. And most of all, you can't control a simulator with a lousy controller that would normally take TWO full keyboards to play. Your statement is thus invalid.

Also, a friendly advice: you should stop running around the forums hijacking threads and dissing the mods. It won't do good for your rep around here...

[AngryNewb]

The rich get richer. The only issue I see with the stock market is that there isn't really much risk.

I'm totally new, but if you have 10 million creds laying about you don't need for anything, now or later. Well, if you buy shares irl you don't lose that money if the price plummets, you still own the shares. As long as you don't need the money you have tied up in that company anytime soon, or that company goes bankrupt then the price will usually rise again.

This is especially true in the commodities market which is what people are mainly complaining about here.

Commodities prices rise and fall, but as long as you have the financial power to eat the loss of a few million creds (the loss being that they're tied up and not liquid) you can just sit it out and wait for prices to go more your way.

If you are rich and have a cool head, you get richer. Prices change quite fast in X3 and so you have rapid profit but...with jump drives and warp gates and what not I think the primary problem in X3 is that the computer doesn't offer you any competition.

This goes for trade too btw which is also idioticly easy money. Irl you have a million guys lined up to fight it out over the smallest chance of profit in any walk of life. In x3 it's you vs some rather daft AI's.

[Playbahnosh]

In x3 it's you vs some rather daft AI's.

GoD is anything but daft....he's outright EVIL!

All in all, I hate the Stock Exchange. It's basically free money with no work whatsoever. I could just as well use the cheat script, there is really no difference. Then again, I could just as well spawn myself a fleet of Tyrs and wipe out the whole game...

The one rule still stands: Money = Power. Power = Corruption. Thus, Money = Corruption.

I still feel better buying a brand new shiny Nova after two straight hours of mobile mining than I felt spawning 2 Odin's and obliterating the Xenon. The former was reward for honest work, the latter was something for nothing, thus worthless...

[Ulan Dhor]

This goes for trade too btw which is also idioticly easy money. Irl you have a million guys lined up to fight it out over the smallest chance of profit in any walk of life. In x3 it's you vs some rather daft AI's.

Trade is slightly different, as it's not scaling up that fast. It takes a while to get really rich just by trading, and you also have losses. You are right regarding the AI, but that was done on purpose, as the player has about zero chance against a good AI.

On the other hand, the commodity market, as you have discovered, has the possibility of endless wealth. You don't need to do missions anymore for money. You just do them for rep.

[BlueSwede]

It's just another way for Egosoft to give the player easy come by wealth ... beside nvidium mining and abandoned vehicles ... they all should be removed from the game alltogether ...

[greypanther]

Yes, maybe. But its just as easy for people to ignore the exploits, isnt it?

I mean play the way you want, thats the beauty of sandbox.

[AngryNewb]

Think back to Microsoft...how fast they started pulling in cash.

Not all profit requires hard manual labour, the richest people on earth make the stock market seem slow as hell.

[Bothersome]

You guys need to find a friend on here and agree to play your X3 starts in certain ways. Use the honor system to keep yourselves honest.

Back when I was a kid My brothers and two cousins and I used to play Monopoly as a summer time past time. Ah those were the days.... Anyway, we didn't really like some of the rules that were stated in the manual so we agreed to change a few and add a few more and whatnot. Made the game a lot more fun and/or shorter/longer as we needed.

But the point is, Monopoly was a multi-player game. X3 can be also. You just need to play in challenges against each other. You simply set goals that you and your friends agree upon and then race to that goal.

My oldest brother (X3 Master Pro) and I are currently play X3AP 2.5 Aldrian Adventurer start. Goal is X-Treme trading rank in least game time. We have also agreed not to use Docking computers, cannot take any missions outside of plot missions. No buying used ships. Cannot sell any ship with anything in the cargo hold. Cannot sell manufactured stuff to equipment docks that do not take it normally. In other words, can't make 1000 Silkworm missiles and then sell them manually at some equipment dock for infinite sales. The reason we did this, is to make X3 really long to give the other party a chance to get his empire together and catch up if he wants to win. No anything that is considered a game exploit.

Point is, if I were to do all that without anyone else playing the game on the same level X3 becomes a game of Solotair. I'd rather play Monopoly instead. X3 Monopoly.

And yes, we compare progress quite regularly.

[JackKiller2266]

i agree with Bothersome, and greypanther, in my 200 hour game i used to have (File got messed up and would not work) i only used the the stock exchange to get 50 mil then i stopped, why because i had enough money to get my a fully outfitted Cerberus, the rest of it went into my trading empire(But i usually kept a couple mill in the Exchange, not to make money from it just to use it as a bank). and as i was making money from the stock exchange i still was doing missions for both rep boost's and more money

[Lazerius]

At the beginning of the game, I agree. Not so much with your amounts, because if the market is being X2 sagt Bussi auf Bauch, and you've only unlocked 1-2 markets, you may go several in game hours and see zero profit.


Late game, I'm easily roll in 100M+/game hour with my complexes alone, and and that's while 1/2 of my complexes aren't selling, but stockpiling for my fleets.

Not to mention with higher fight/trade ranks, depending on the mission I come across, I can make 10-30 Million in about 2 minutes.

[werewolves?]

The great thing about a single player sandbox game is that if you don't like something you don't have to use it.

Personally I like it, it gives alternate play styles a way to work, and it's not like making money is a challenge anyway for anyone who has played longer than 5 minutes....

[JackKiller2266]

like others have said if you don't like it don't use it, or go to TC there is no stock market there

[Coreblimey]

The great thing about a single player sandbox game is that if you don't like something you don't have to use it.

I couldn't agree more!
Personally I don't use it. When I read just how easy it was to make your fortune in under an hour or so, I thought 'that's not for me'. I like to earn my money the hard way. (You know, start a script, put in how many credits; close script; reload; check how much you now have in total; notice nothing has changed; run script again; reload; good, no modified tag. So look again and see your cash hasn't changed; run script and reload another dozen times until it suddenly dawns on me about about the reload and swear never to use a script again). More fun for me that way.

[Greyhawk1]

A lot of work went into it but IMO that work would have been better used elsewhere. There are already a hundred ways to make a lot of money - however I still see M3 ships being blown apart by M5's without the M5 getting hit. Combat ships ignoring pirates and capital ships regularly destroying their own fighters.

Also no different colour scheme for company ships

[DrakenKin]

The market is a great feature.

I don't have much time to play so being forced to go from point A to point B for days or weeks to start out as a trader is not my idea of fun. With stock market i was able to get about 30 millions in a few hours and get a better start while skipping a lot of stuff.

Those 30 millions are not even that much mind you. When you are a new player learning the game a lot of it will go to waste. Also i can't leave the computer on all night because i sleep in the same room (it's unhealthy, makes the air bad) so doing a bit of stock market play helps in getting a bit more from the time i spend playing the game.

I bought all previous games when they came out and never played more than a couple of hours before giving up. Again it is a problem of time, and i honestly think that the stock market is the reason why i made it this far (30-40+ hours?) into albion prelude.

[AngryNewb]

I love the stock market, I'm still trying to figure out how I can move into more long term bigger investments (commedities is just 1-2 million here and there from very active work) but it's fun.

And it isn't really that imbalanced, for massive profits it seems to me you want a huge automated trading fleet, anyone who gets *filthy* rich on the stock market was either clever/patient or extremely hard working. Seriously, that man will have carpal tunnel.

I know, I tried playing the guild and I got rich and powerful, and as a result, carpal tunnel. Automated trading makes you exponentially more money and does not leave you with carpal tunnel.

I'm not joking about the carpal tunnel btw, I'm not playing the stock market until I've got another the guild incident on my hands, my hand was wrecked for two weeks.

I'm still curious about corporate shares though, aren't I supposed to be able to invest in the large corporations of the x universe? I can't seem to find them in the stock market.