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- You could present the data in roughly the current format. Just add a range evaluation to the prices. Scrap metal tends to be 20$ here with a +/- of 2. Update the list on each planetfall.

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Or just use the same damn variables as there real prices have

Good Grief. We don't need dynamic pricing

1. Freelancer is huge. It may be 4 times as big as Privateer. Even without dynamic pricing it may take weeks even months to find a really good trading route.

2. Have you forgotten that people SHOOT at you in this game. A bad pirate ambush will cost you money if it doesn't kill. Then of course there is drug running.

3. What good is it? In Privateer and Privateer 2 prices only fluctuated by 10%. A trade route is only worth doing if it give you 50% return on investment, so you're not losing much when prices fluctuate.

4. This is an adventure game and trading is inherently boring.

If trading is boring and a superfluous feature why include it? Make it entertaining and matter or cut it. Price movement feels real, it makes the dynamic world more credible. More importantly its makes things more "fun."

Trading is something not everybody will like. Some like it already, just check some of the past forums. Boring or not, trading is in the game and it just might not be your type of thing.

Hello Everyone,

All of you have some good points as far as the trade system in freelancer goes, or should be like. Back in the day before the internet was available I used to play a multiplayer game on BBS's. It was called Tradewars 2002 and was one of the most fun I have had multiplayer. Then Wing Commander came out for the PC and I thought that if they could coombine the two, they would have a huge hit. Alas nobody came out with my dream game but I spent alot of time thinking about how I could implement such a system. I have some comments to other posts in this thread and then I explain how I would implement such a dynamic trading system in FreeLancer (kinda technical, so I put it last so you can skip it if you want).

Being a programmer myself I agree on how easily a new trade system system could be implemented. It would involve very little CPU time and you could get dynamic prices on the fly no problem. There would need to be little interface changes to the engine also, mostly behind the scenes "AI" programming. Both static and dynamic pricing systems have their advantages. If I were to create a trading system it would be a combination of static and dynamic. I like how DA implemented the static system, but it would so easily implemented better as a static/dynamic hybrid! I can't unsterstand why they didn't do this!! As it has beed mentioned before, a player who finds a good trade route has no reason to alter that trade route with a static system, leading to boredom. If the system were dynamic, then a player would be changing their routes bases upon the routes of other players. This would lead to more exploring to find bases so you could still make money.

Teabold: yes in my opinion it is viable to create a dynamic trading system by Microsloth. It wouldn't cost that much for them to do so either, its really a shame they didn't decide to put in the extra effort.

Bargib: agreed for the most part, you would need to "(simulate) the whole she-bang". But I think it would not be as hard as some think. Below is a model I would like to work on assuming I got paid to do it

Megido: Yep More complicated though.

Idioteque: Yep, a single players cargo would not be enough to change prices. However, if a player does do certain trade routes, you could assume that the computer would do those exact same trade routes (because they are profitable). So then you _could_ base the rates on purely what the players are doing And yep, the system would need to be in balance _before_ the addition of player characters. This I believe is the problem in implementation of current gaming AI's.

Mustang: Why wouldn't the that option be available to show the trade routes (good or bad price) of a dynamic system? The CPU usage would be minimal, trust me. It might still make it in a patch! Probably won't though, but we can still dream. As far as writing down trade route prices on paper, I did that way back in the day in Tradewars. I know what you mean. For someone who hasn't experienced it, they are missing in alot of fun.

Spacepilot Borodine: your 4 points are the same as I had in mind. I wish I had played Elite in the past, sound like I missed out on an excellent game!

Greyfish: As long as the system in initially balanced, and maintains its balance, everything should be ok right? Similar to the alignment system, if a player does a trade, and equal but spread out result will propagate through the system. If a played does a particular trade, the money he made should shift the system's money away from that trade lane but still maintain a balance of credits available to be made by players.

Spartan: I think if a dynamic system is correctly implemented it would not lead to "landing and leaving a planet repeatedly until prices are good". As far as "Having to look around for selling prices is a waste of time", I think that if you are given the proper tools in game to detect good trade routes in a dynamic system, it would not become tedious for a player, since they wouldn't be _required_ to write everything down as notes.

Apocalypse: Exactly the reasons I wish a dynamic system was implemented. This would stop all the newbies from _only_ doing those that are the most profitable. A dynamic system would incourage exploration to find the bases that would lead to a better deal. I agree it would be easy to implement, as long as it isn't a "full" implementation involving the NPC's.

Yminale: Trading in NOT boring in a dynamic system. The game should show rankings of each player on the server when you login to the server along with your rank within everyone else. This will inspire the competitive nature of people to make more money to outdo the other players.

Those are my thought on the trading system. Other features I wish were implemented (besides dynamic trading) in FL were planetary orbits and other moving bodys, gravity wells, and the option of using a neutonian flight system. Also, alot more upgrades to your ship would have been wonderful, such as in the Privateer line of games but more! Basically just a money sink so each player can compete to who can make the best ship (the ship is like a character in an RPG, and the various upgrades would be like character equipment). Server clusters run by Microsoft to support mass players would also have been wonderful. I would pay monthly! There should also have been more interaction possible between a player and a factions bigger ships and bases. Player "guilds" should be able to purchase large ships as a base so that they could have more than one ship available to them (Imagine having a Sabre and a Humpback docked and switching between them at your base at will!). You could buy fuel to move your base from one location to another.

Anyways, I'm tired, goodnight everybody!

Mox ([email protected])

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Here is how I imagine how a trading system could be implemented (technical rablings from my brain):
1) When the server was started the prices would be similar to those already in the game. Each base would have a set quantity of each commodity. The way you would get these numbers intially would be either have people set them manually or run a "stabilizing" routine on the universe.
2) Each base would either produce or consume products, and would tend towards the starting number. There would also be minimums and or maximums. The game has already established which bases (regions) produce and consume products, just build on that info.
3) If the current amount in base inventory exceeds the use of a product, the price goes down. If the amount in a bases inventory goes below the production normal, the price goes up.
4) To get a list of current prices of all bases realtime, you could go to the trading computer on your ship. The red/green box would change to a colored bar. Red would mean that the product would sell for a loss, green for a gain. The length and direction of the bar would indicate the amount at the base as opposed the the base's normal amount. There would be an analyse button added to the interface. It would contact all the bases that you have previously landed at and get their prices. You would select a range in hops for the computer to report on and the computer would show you the port that would realize the maximum profit within that range of hops. Optionally, you could also provide the "durability" of the route to the player (how quickly the profit would degrade the next time if you were to make the same run).
5) The server operator would be able to "inject" credits into the dynamic system either automagically via random events, or events from a predefined list, or from the will of God (the server operator picks the event's time, place, and product affected). This would allow the server operator to control the amount of cash introduced to the system as the number of players grow/shrink. If the players are hard up for cash, add credits to the system. If the are rich, decrease credits from the system. The operator could also edit the amount of the cost of ships, ship repair, and missles and such. It is imperative that you have a money sink for the system!
6) The price a base sells a product for is modified by the amount the base would have left after the current purchase is made. This means that someone buying a small amount would get a better deal than someone buying the whole amount left at the planet. But of course, the player with the bigger cargo hold would still get more money out of the run. Same goes for the reverse; If a base is buying a product, it will pay less to someone bringing in a gluttonful of a needed product as opposed to someone bringing in a smaller amount.
7) (Optional?) Bases will earn a very small percentage of credits for themselves for businesss that they do. The bases will of course, compete with the other bases in pricing. If they find that they are being passed up in favor of the next base over, they will alter their prices.
Note to #1 above: The "stabilizing" routine talked about in #1 is a neural net's learning algorhythm, this would take some initial CPU power at first anytime the sources of supply are redone. This should only happen when the server admin changes the initial values of a base. This would change internal weights invisible to the player to stabilize the system.

In order to have a truly the illusion of a dynamic trading system, you would also have to program hueristics into the A.I. of the computer controlled ships to make them seem to react on the trading system. Some rules would be:
1) The computer creates tasks of routes of freighters approximate to the actual goods that would be shipped by a player in a given trade lane.
2) If players loot alot of a certain product (from the freighters in #1) in a given area, the the computer A.I. would increase the amount of bounty hunters.
3) If a player ships goods in a freighter to make credits, then the computer will decrease the number of cargo ships carrying said cargo. Pirate activity would also increase.
4) If a player kills the pirates that show up due to increased trading, then the computer will decrease the amount of bounty hunters operating in the region, and freighter trains will be more prevalent.
5) You could even go further, and create weights on which of the differents aligned factions would be operating around each area.

Why are you all talking about Elite? I think Elite had a good trade concept but Privateer 2 also. I really want to know why DA dont take that system.

You can disagree with me all you want but trading is inherently boring. Most people don't play Freelancer for Economics 101 and trading is a means to an end not an end to itself. The whole point of Freelancer is combat and exploration. You don't need price fluctuation to drive people to explore. The single player mission and people's natural curosity will take care of that. As for multiplayer, I suspect most people will play pirate and attack ships using the more popular routes so people will either work together in convoys or find new unknown routes. I never played Elite but I did play Privateer 2 and the flaw in that game was there was ONE good trading route and price fluctuation didn't effect profibility. Freelancer at first glance seem to have many good trading routes, some that may chains serveral planets and bases together. I think that's a better solution than dynamic pricing.

Finally if the lack of dynamic pricing is bothering you than don't play the game. It's not a even true criticism since it adds NOTHING to the core gameplay. There other games like Earth and Beyond and MOO3.

Guys, think about how much CPU time calculating the prices for 38 commodities over 160+ bases would cost, not to mention then running routines to try and match supply and demand between bases and determining which systems would trade with which others, then spawning AI convoys and escorts to trade between those lanes. As it is now, the multiplayer servers are spiking the CPUs, not the RAM or bandwidth (Johnny running a server from his bedroom on the same computer he's playing on doesn't count )Now think about those AI freighter that haul 4x40,000 units of goods, and those that are even larger. Now think about how many there are in the game. What would happen to your price if it had it fluctuate when a station gets dumped with cargo?

Think about it this way: How many tankers pull into major US ports every day? The price of oil and gas does not fluctuate due to the Exxon Maru pulling into San Fransisco. How are even multiple players with Humpbacks going to affect the prices paid by major stations?

To those of you that say "just have a 10% fluctuation in prices" think of all the work that would have to be done. You'd still have to go through all those calcualtions and balancing, but the addition to gameplay of a 10% fluctuation in commodity prices isn't worth the manpower and time it would take to implement it. On top of that, you'd still have people wailing and gnashing their teeth over "just" a 10% fuctuation, claiming it was BS because it didn't really make a difference.

Remember, the early previews were for the MMOG version of this game, which was later scrapped. If you want to see this type of stuff, the game will have to sell well enough to provide impetus for MS to greenlight the MMOG development. Only having a server farm can you run the millions of calculations needed.

I for one can't wait to see if we get a MMOG version.

Mox, if you're interested, i have a project to submit you... i'm a french graphic designer and with some fellow friends we're about to start "Elite: Phoenix rising". a FREE project to rejuvenate the Elite legend game... we already put a lot of work on this project (ship sketching/brainstorming/rules and univers background), basically it take the elite game as the base and we will atempt to developp all the part keeping the concept very close to the original.
exemple :

planet docking is truly interactive :
1/ you should ask for clearance to pass the gate, then take your number in the file of the entering ships (muliple choices of answers)
2/ when accepted, you have choice to enter the atmosphere in full manual - like in the begining of the game where you get a cheap ship - *(with the help of a ILS), ask for assistance(costly) or buy an automatic landing device (much more costly)
* it's more less easy to land following the ILS with the risk of failure of some part of your ship if you're not accurate with the iLS squares), vibration of your cockpit (and FF help) depend of meteo instability when you enter the atmosphere (the idea is to fake a full 3D rendering of the planet, so this interactive phase play like a transition between the 3D space planet and the 3D planet soil).
3/ in sight of the base, the control tower calls you to start the autoland process after the interactive atmospheric entry

this is just an exemple of what we want to do : immerse you in the skin of a space pilot

other goals :
- full dynamic trading (respecting Elite : simple/fun and effective)
- full dynamic and very varied missions (supply/trade/VIP transport/Info seeker/...)
- main plot (completely independant of the gameplay - we don't force the player to follow it)
- dynamic quests and subquests
- true open ended universe
- surprises
- hardcore simulation (space physic model/space rules and process...)
- more than 10 differents jobs : trader/explorator/bounty Hunter/Pirate/space cop/detective...)
- more than 20 differents space system with unknow zones
- 3D engine with DirectX9 effects
- all the basics from Elite series (ship/system names/radar/physic model...)
- Co-op multiplayer up to 6 (following the Diablo's serie)
- RPG status (simple but efficient)
- mods open
- build by Elite and privateer fans for Elite and Privateer fans !
- our references : Elite, Sundog, Iwars, FOFT, privateers...

Mox and the other, if you are interested (we need graphist/3D/programer/coder)
write me : [email protected]
http://ngrignon.free.fr



Edited by - Spacepilot Borodine on 27-02-2003 17:13:47

my god half you guys are insane, or at least on crack!!! could someone please explain to me why on earth your miserable ship delivering goods or not delivering goods would in any way deeply impact a universal economy?? you talk of dynamic markets, yet in actuality you're never going to get fluctuating prices that you directly impact. whats the point? today, XYZ store has how many trucks bringing stuff to it? now take that to the next level, a planet in the future. a PLANET would have thousands if not hundreds of thousands of ships coming and going bringing stuff. theres no way your single ship could have any major impact on an economic system. maybe if you had a fleet of ships, but thats a different story...if you keep bringing some material to a planet over and over, why would the price go down? maybe that planet is able to sell everything that you're selling to it to other people! why would you be the only person buying and selling to/from a place? the idea is ridiculous.

Trading is an important aspect of the game and it would add to the challenge of trading and the enjoyment of those who want to be traders not fighters. It's more fun for some to have to constantly look out for good trade routes rather than plough the same profitable furrow. It would mean trading required some acumen and some people enjoy that side of things.

I've only played the demo (and have a US import copy on pre-order) and so can't judge how trade works in the full thing but I can envisage welcoming dynamic prices if, as some posts suggest, it is quite easy to get to a position where you have more money than you know what to do with.

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You can disagree with me all you want but trading is inherently boring. Most people don't play Freelancer for Economics 101 and trading is a means to an end not an end to itself. The whole point of Freelancer is combat and exploration. You don't need price fluctuation to drive people to explore. The single player mission and people's natural curosity will take care of that. As for multiplayer, I suspect most people will play pirate and attack ships using the more popular routes so people will either work together in convoys or find new unknown routes. I never played Elite but I did play Privateer 2 and the flaw in that game was there was ONE good trading route and price fluctuation didn't effect profibility. Freelancer at first glance seem to have many good trading routes, some that may chains serveral planets and bases together. I think that's a better solution than dynamic pricing.

Finally if the lack of dynamic pricing is bothering you than don't play the game. It's not a even true criticism since it adds NOTHING to the core gameplay. There other games like Earth and Beyond and MOO3.

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And you can lieing all you want, trading is not boring, and its in mp anyway the only way to make fast your buck. Just compare the newbie trade run in the starter frigther to lets say a level 15 combat mission
the trade runs makes you 30 000 credits, the combat mission well with luck 10k (most likly more like 7)
not to speak of the fact that the combat mission takes you longer. and you will most likly die anyway as noob with a networth of not even 100k.

And as for mulitplayer, can you please explain me why you should play pirate?
What do you gain with that? nearly nothing, cargos do not drop huge amounts of resources, you get a high risk, you can not dock at most legal stations and have to fight at nearly every jump, and those fightes are even worst boring, cause the opponents stand no chance.
And than comes the worst part about pirating. You make LESS money, so it makes absolute no sense. Ripping of the nps is anyway boring, and trying to rip of the other players might be for a griefer intersting, but for john doe average it should be not really intersting aswell, cause he has no motivation to do it, cause those traders make much more money than he can hope to make with pirating.

Anyway if you do not like trading, you are free to play a differnt game.

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Guys, think about how much CPU time calculating the prices for 38 commodities over 160+ bases would cost, not to mention then running routines to try and match supply and demand between bases and determining which systems would trade with which others, then spawning AI convoys and escorts to trade between those lanes. As it is now, the multiplayer servers are spiking the CPUs, not the RAM or bandwidth (Johnny running a server from his bedroom on the same computer he's playing on doesn't count )Now think about those AI freighter that haul 4x40,000 units of goods, and those that are even larger. Now think about how many there are in the game. What would happen to your price if it had it fluctuate when a station gets dumped with cargo?

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wow millions of calculations, you are a real brainy right
or maybe you still use on old pc from 1980, such an nice xt with 16 mhz, that can do per second 16 million calculations
you know how many operations are needed for 3d grafik stuff? Just to calc a single poly
Your argument with the 4x40 000 units is cool aswell, to bad that for the game 4x4 or 4x40 000 takes exact the same amount of cpu circles, once you definied the integer variable, it will take always exact the same amount of ram, and it will take the same amount of cpu time to calc with it, doesn´t matter if its just 1, or if its 40 000, it just depends on how much bit you reserved for it from the beginning, and as those frigthers have already those high amounts of resources
though I guess that changing from 8 bit to 16 bit integer varibles (and btw as cargo can be over 255, they are using anyway already for players aswell 16 bit), won´t hammer your system anyway, its freaking, you would have to save 160x38 variables for those stations (that takes for those little bit over 6000 variables 97280 bit to save, that are not even 12 kb of ram), and munipulate them of players to sell stuff ... oh wait you would even just have to manipulate those that actually get manipulated, and while they can sell, they are not in space, guess what takes more cpu power, getting about 60 times per second updated the position of ship for all players that can see it, or working with 12kb of data and running some simple formulas over it

could be as simple as every station produce every hour x amount of that, sells y amount of x, and buys c amiunt of k.

If a trade ship gets destroyed and robbed, or a player brings some cargo, you substract or add something to those fixed amounts. You can totaly ignore the normal trading, and only if a player is involed and actually do something that interrupt the statistic (and static) normal trading, changes are made.

Its damn easy, a kid in his first year computer class could code it.
Now you just need a formula for each station that determinded the prices, that does involed the amount of goods that are actually storaged in the station.

If you want to give it a nice touch, you could substract from this variable something, if someone steals from the storage depots that some stations have

You could aswell add an little extra touch that adds a system how the stations are linked, and if a station has a low at something that it normaly sells, it sends for example only half as normal to the other station, and the storage income of this other station per hour reduce in this area, still takes not much cpu power, cause there are than just about 160 checks to do, and only if a player triggers a change at the trade system. so it happens about once every minute or so. nothing compared to the power the net code sucks up ^_°

And you know whats most funny about it?
It takes less cpu power than shooting random into space, what many players for example do to their group members at servers with deactivate ff

Edited by - Apocalypse on 27-02-2003 21:13:42

For my ten penneth worth, I am really really disappointed that there isn't dynamic trading. I guess I can agree that your own small amount of cargo would not affect the overall price in reality but this is a game and I believe you want to cut out the repetitive nature if possible. By all means let the prices fluctuate just as they do in the real world. Better still in the 'job' board, why not have messages saying planetxxx urgently needs xxx cargo - let this price hold for say two or three consecutive dockings (depending on the number of jumps needed). This would then help to satisfy those of us who like trading. I amassed a huge fortune playing Elite and was disappointed that I couldn't pay someone to make special mods for exorbitant prices.. Oh well.
I don't understand why there are so many types of commodities to trade. Why bother with water for instance where there is at best a $15 mark-up - Higher priced commodities should allow a higher % mark-up. Otherwise, again why bother.
With the much hyped neural net, surely all prices should be available - added to that why not display the number of gate jumps or distance between the place buying - you could buy at that agreed price and a set delivery date - if missed the price may have gone up or down - this would be is a little like playing the stock market (you could also use the gate jump count to set the way points).
I know that this game wasn't designed to be a 'trading' game as such but keeping static prices opens up the game to abuse where there are bound to be bugs where two planets need each others goods at large price differences... ten trips later you can buy the universe...

Yes I will still buy the game, but like others in this thread, having to use pen and paper to track prices was fun. Fluctuating prices are fun and won't affect those who don't trade anyway. The message board should display trade shortages instead solely fighting missions - this would lead you to parts of the universe you may not have visited...



Sparowhawk by nature

Wow, talk about totally missing a point. Do you practice that, Apoc?

The fact is, the CPUs on the servers are spiking at 100% now while still having plenty of RAM and bandwidth to spare. To have the type of dynamic economy people are wanting in this thread would require so many clock cycles to maintain that we'd be reduced to playing a trading sim where we'd have to stay at the home office and watch little icons of our ships moving across a map

The comment about the huge amounts of cargo that the frieghters are hauling has *nothing* to do with the CPU, it has to do with people wanting delivery of goods to affect the prices. How do you think your 275 units are going to make a difference when a freighter convoy is dropping a quarter million units into the market on that system every few minutes? Remember the analogy of the oil tanker I used? The price of oil doesn't hinge on whether one or a dozen tankers bring in oil. For an ecomony as big as the one in Freelancer, the only thing that could affect prices is a blockade of the sector due to war between the Houses, or a massive pirate operation which would bring a battleship task force in faster than it would take for any price adjustments to occur.

Short version: Digital Anvil determined that the other things that would have had to be cut out to have a dynamic economy were not worth the time and trouble.

(Darn phone call: left out a whole section)
What I meant about the calculations was that the computer is not only just doing the stations, but also having to route convoys to react to the supply and demand. If something happens to the convoys, then you have a cascade effect that can start folding in on itself. Remember the old saying about chaos theory that a butterfly moving the air in Mexico can make a Hurricane in the Gulf? It's like that. Oh, and I have a Bachelor's degree in CIS, so I know how numbers are calculated and all about 3d graphics.

Edited by - Torgen on 27-02-2003 22:14:20