Refinery Fees

zacc

I'm poking around at refineries and notice this:

"Your Cost:     309 marks per batch."

I'm interested in what the fee is based off of and why it's necessary when I have purchased the refinery.

Are refinery owners being discouraged from refining their collected materials in their own refineries? I don't like this whole baseline fee thing. It's artificially inflating the costs of production and punishing those who can and choose to produce cheaper.

This was with a newly purchased stesium refinery. With a req of x4 stesium per kinetic battery, the cost in stesium alone (30.9 marks * 4 = 123.6 marks) is a bit more than the price of two kinetic batteries in the shipforge (100 marks). That's not including the costs of paristeel. Why bother? I wonder if resource-heavy goods such as astromechs, repairkits, and missiles are worse.

Crorr

Someone did the maths at one point. The short answer is that it's being looked at, and that missiles and astromechs are indeed worse, but that part of the 'looking at' may involve SF prices getting nudged up.

Shinonome

I feel like I should probably also warn you refineries have an IG yearly maintenance fee. If I remember right, it's over 1000 marks. Make sure you have enough in your cargo account before the year rolls over...

zacc

It would have been helpful if that was mentioned in the help file or REFINERY maintenance command.

kamdian

Refinery maintenance fee is 1200-1300 marks yearly. Ditto goes for autofactors. If you have one of every refinery and autofactory, it’s 26k-ish yearly. 

Cubey

Crorr said:

that part of the 'looking at' may involve SF prices getting nudged up.

I really fucking hope not. The playerbase doesn't deserve being punished just because the devs suck at economy and can't make refining profitable.

BTW, easy solution if you ask me? Make refineries and autofactories free to use. Still make 'em cost regular maintenance fees but operational costs should be 0. Of course the owner can demand a cut atop of that but that means everyone will actually make money this way, currently all refining is done at a loss and the owners share their refineries only as a gesture of goodwill.

"But Cubey", some may complain, "that means refineries will generate infinite money out of nowhere". Bullshit I say. Refining is still an investment of resources - time. If you value your time, your best use of it is pve. Killing mobs generates more marks per hour than any other activity in the game (even if you're in an overhunted zone), and even if you remove operational costs for refining, refining still won't come close to pve. It'll be a domain of people who want to make some dough in a noncombat way so why not, y'know, just let them?

Just saying.

Shinonome

Cubey said:

"But Cubey", some may complain, "that means refineries will generate infinite money out of nowhere". Bullshit I say. 

You're right to call BS, because it's not (like say killing mobs) out of nowhere. It's a transaction between players - any money a refinery owner might make isn't generated, it comes from another player. Right now refineries are, in fact, a money sink....

Tecton

SF Supplies are just a temporary measure while the game is new. They'll go away at some point in the future, and that element of the game will be totally player-driven. No plans on adjusting those prices at this time. A lot of the pricing disparity stems from other changes that were not retrofitted back into the system (things like drastically increasing the number of asteroids/gas clouds available/repair kits and missiles being changed from larger multi-use items into single-use ones. 

Anyways, getting those numbers properly refactored back to the intended levels is on my list for this week (alongside a bunch of economy changes)

Cubey

These changes better include a dramatic increase of profit from incursions and other space based activities, because otherwise all you're doing is making people even less likely to use their ships as anything but transport service for locations you can't reach on foot.

Shinonome

Tecton said:

repair kits and missiles being changed from larger multi-use items into single-use ones. 

Um... c-could we have this one back, please..?

Needing 4 tons and 30 marks per repair tick makes hull hits really expensive and cargo space intensive... although probably a bit less with the shield bypass adjustment just now but still..

Tecton

Shinonome said:

Tecton said:

repair kits and missiles being changed from larger multi-use items into single-use ones. 

Um... c-could we have this one back, please..?

Needing 4 tons and 30 marks per repair tick makes hull hits really expensive and cargo space intensive... although probably a bit less with the shield bypass adjustment just now but still..

Numbers didn't change

zacc

Very much hoping refining costs will be adjusted at some point. Those poor newbies and lowbies are going to be paying thousands for simple things once SF supplies are taken away.

Still not crazy about the idea of having to use others' refineries because they're potentially cheaper, while mine imposes a predetermined, locked fee on my usage. It kind of begs the question of why own a refinery to begin with if someone setting their unitcost to 1 (or some other low cost) is going to get all the traffic, especially if their refinery shows up first on the list. There's too much opportunity to utterly screw potential competition.

Shinonome

Everyone pays that fee. Those that are charging lower, are taking a loss each time someone refines with them...

zacc

Min. Batch:    10
Refining Cost: 1 marks per unit.
               10 marks per batch.

Your Cost:     309 marks per batch.

Doesn't that mean anyone using my refinery pays 10 marks per batch whereas I pay 309 marks per batch? If so, that would make it more cost efficient for me to find a refinery that charges <30.9 marks per unit.

Assuming that's the case, if you purchased a, let's say, iriil refinery and set the unitcost to 1, everyone except you pays 1 mark per unit refined. I eventually purchase an iriil refinery of my own and set the unitcost to 1 as well. Now, you have somewhere to refine iriil at the same cost you're charging others. Unfortunately, since your refinery is the first iriil refinery to show up on the list, you get most of the traffic while I'm sitting there unable to use my own refinery, although I can use yours, and not receiving enough traffic to, at least, cover maintenance fees.

Crorr

If I'm remembering/reading right that readout means that, at the amounts you have set, every batch of whatever that is costs someone else 10 marks and you lose a net of 299 because you didn't set yours high enough. YOU need to set it to 31m/u in order to only lose on the taxes/maintenance.

zacc

So the "Your Cost:" is how much maintenance will be charged per batch, regardless of whether it's mine or another's batch? If that's true, then it needs to be clarified in the messaging or help file. Absurdly ambiguous. I'm guessing this must be the case as increasing the unitcost to 1000 doesn't change it.

Good thing unitcost can be changed while in space. Will have to lower it to 1 mark for my batches and switch back for others.

Fyrel

Are the various 1 order cargo market orders randomly generated by the system? Or are people ordering those?

(Edited because I remembered the answer to my own question)

Fyrel

The reason I ask is because if there can be random cargo market orders, then you can probably pump them up to requesting hundreds at a time and popping up around starmourn like incursions, then if you increase the prince they're willing to pay for them to a range somewhere at least three times the refining costs, then everyone can win! Refinery owners win because they can operate at a profit instead of a loss without screwing miners, miners win because they can SELL their goods for reasonable fees, and the game wins because the economy gets kickstarted HARD, and it makes mining worthwhile.

Crorr

zacc said:

So the "Your Cost:" is how much maintenance will be charged per batch, regardless of whether it's mine or another's batch? If that's true, then it needs to be clarified in the messaging or help file. Absurdly ambiguous. I'm guessing this must be the case as increasing the unitcost to 1000 doesn't change it.

Good thing unitcost can be changed while in space. Will have to lower it to 1 mark for my batches and switch back for others.

Okay, clarification time.

You purchase a refinery for a bunkload of marks. The station adjusts its econstatus and everyone gets a new number that represents the per-refine/per-batch costs the station takes. The station takes this cost from the refinery owner every batch. It also generates an annual tax that is taken out on the 1st of nano or thereabouts. All of this is paid by you, the refinery owner, when the time is due.

You then set a unit price for each item that (hopefully) covers expenses and/or makes you a profit. Each and every time someone refines anything at your station, the unit price is multiplied by the batch size to come up with the batch price, which is transferred automagically from the refiner's balance to yours. Even if the refiner is you. Essentially, this means that when you refine goods in your own refinery, you lose the per-batch fee that represents maintenance costs regardless of what the unitprice is set to, but that's it.

Fyrel

Crorr said: Stuff

I'm sincerely baffled as to how this system is supposed to work. I don't mean mechanically, that I understand, but how this is ever supposed to make anyone in the world a profit. I'm trying to walk through the "Why" in my head, but it seems like inflation has been built into the system and that's utterly perplexing to me.

It also seems like if the price never stops growing, and incursions continue to be small in terms of profit, newbies are going to hit a huge mark wall because SF supplies are going away and you need kinetic batteries to perform incursions to get the ability to mine.

There's also the level 15 main story quest wherein you probably need a dozen kinetic batteries and repair kits, which is not that bad currently, but if you triple the cost (and several things currently cost more than that to produce) you have a pay wall of multiple thousand marks.

Mattias

As we've already seen with hunting and junk distribution, the Economy is currently "too tight." This is usually by design when in an open beta so designers can "loosen" it down to the right levels via testing.

If money is too easy to make to start with then you screw over anyone who wasn't there when it was easy to make a million marks. So you have to start with razor thin margins and open it up from there.

Tldr Calm down guys, this is a known part of the process.

WyldeKarde

The best thing you can do is post examples - calculate how much you spent on an incursion versus how much profit you made and the related time spent to earn those marks.  

Then, the team has a better sense over time with data to figure out if incursions should drop more junk, or if the junk should be worth more, etc.

Qitorien

That all makes a certain amount of sense, particularly in making sure that people aren't making an absurd amount of marks in the beginning and having a fully functioning economy takes time to cultivate. My question is when will these things change? I want to farm gas and asteroids but it's difficult to rationalize it at the moment. I'm trying to be patient, but the ship stuff is one of the most enjoyable aspects of the game right now but it's the part (including incursions) that seems to make the least sense to do in terms of thriving financially.

eta: Just read the incursion newspost in game. That's a step in the right direction.

Shinonome

The problem, at least with refineries, isn't just the numbers.

They're a pure money sink mechanic, early in the production process, that will scale up as more people buy them. There is, literally, no way for a refinery to generate marks - at best an owner can hopefully skim some off the top (not at current refining prices, but maybe if demand were increased enough). But refineries, as a game mechanic, will always be taking marks out of the economy.

And unless refinery batch prices more than double, that will be most of the marks that pass through them...

Matlkael

But that is their purpose - to drain marks from the economy. That isn't a problem; in fact, it's supposed to be a solution to the age-old problem of MUDflation.

The actual problem is that the largest contributor to mark generation (plain bashing) does not interact much with this specific mark drain. Refinery owners are (for the moment) restricted to incursion bashers for their market. Hopefully this changes soon as the game and the economy develops!

Shinonome

Matlkael said:

But that is their purpose - to drain marks from the economy. That isn't a problem; in fact, it's supposed to be a solution to the age-old problem of MUDflation.

The actual problem is that the largest contributor to mark generation (plain bashing) does not interact much with this specific mark drain. Refinery owners are (for the moment) restricted to incursion bashers for their market. Hopefully this changes soon as the game and the economy develops!

Inflation will happen regardless. But they could have instead made % based market taxes. Or % based refinery taxes.

Making it a fee that simply scales upwards with the number that exist just enforces a price floor, instead of letting the market be... well, a market.

Fyrel

In my mind, aside from the fee rising, the problem is that there's no way to sell your refined goods for a reasonable sum, so the only reason to do refining is for captaincy experience.

Crorr

Right now there's nothing to spend those resources on either. Sure we can make some stuff instead of buying it, but in terms of marks spent, just the refinery fees alone make the SF more cost effective. Once the manufacturing gets into a better position we can theoretically create the demand ourselves and the admin won't need to put a bandaid in place only to take it away once they're done fixing the underlying issue they're already working on.

Basically, fixing manufacturing should be the end goal since it will knock the rest of the pins over. Fix production so that it doesn't cost an arm and a leg to produce anything and we can start actually producing things without someone subsidising someone else in the chain, we can set reasonable prices for things that are at or not much higher than SF prices so the admin feel comfortable taking that out as planned, and the economy can start actually flowing.

Slander

I thought the idea was that ship forge supplies are only temporary, making refinineries and autofactories a necessity in the future.

Squeakums

Yes @saturnine, I think they've mentioned that. But that's the bandaid that @Crorr is talking about isn't it? 

If ship forges no longer stock these items, your only option becomes buying the 2k mark repair kits we can currently make. I'm throwing a random number there, but IIRC it is more expensive than that. This is prohibitively expensive for newbies in the main quest (and really most people everywhere else).

If autofactory costs are brought down, or batch sizes per unit brought up (ie make 100 repairkits for 15 transteel instead of 15 for 15), then player made kits can be affordable. They might even end up being cheaper or the same price as shipforge kits. Then it doesn't matter if the bandaid is there or not, you've made it obsolete by bringing costs down. You can just remove it whenever and nobody is harmed, as cheap supply will be plentiful with low costs.

Slander

Yea, after posting my last comment I wrote up what it would take in raw materials for asteomechs and repairkits. It's insane. I knew it was a lot but when I showed other people IG they were all in agreement that it's just not sustainable. Having looked at I gotta say I feel drastically raising the output from autofactories is the best idea.