@ Meric/Kipcha: The 30% tarrif is intended so that trade routes are not profitable, only events are profitable. This is design intent of the game to avoid you having to grind the same trade route all the time.
Which turns the game into "sit around outside of a station waiting for event to pop up"
Yeah, nah. The game is more fun having trade routes. a proper dynamic economy would actually have those trade routes but no singular super effecient one. It would be more, 'rotating' between stations. picking up loads dependant on price. However unless the news feed is upgraded significantly and the taxes are lowered this isnt happing. Its a miracle these stations even stay in business. im not talking from a 'realism' point of view but from an in-game point of view, when it costs a trader ATLEAST 800 credits to ship something that makes 2 credit profit. The game would actually sort itself out if given time, profit margins would expand correctly but i suspect npc traders have infinite money or some other DM fiat.
Instead look for food shortage events in particular, or destabilised economies in need of fuel that has very paying price for certain resources - there are megabucks to be made. You can make a few million with little effort, literally - if you anticipate market forces and do monitoring with comm sniffers etc. it's much more fun to be continually hunting down trade opportunity/events that may or may not pan out, than grinding a small trade route for profit for a few hours.
Sitting outside of a station waiting events is fun? as for comsniffers what difference to they make to normal feeds? The only faction i am not At Friendly or higher with is the pirates. and they dont have any comarrays.
As for scaling, not sure, there are a lot of economic flow on effects from that, and potentially the player can get even more profit by virtue of just have lots of cash to buy more items. There is already plenty of opportunity for money now, so it would have to be in consideration of many things either way.
Alot more cash to buy more items? % taxes dont work like that.
1 item at 30% tax is still 0.7 items.
10 items at 30% tax is 7 items.
Buying more doesnt increase your profit margins what so ever, infact most of the time larger item purchases HURT your profit margins as the price changes (without you seeing it) meaning you have to buy the number of items you want singularly to work out what your cut-off is for profit.
i would also like to point out here most stations do not require much more than 1 or two items to complete their (non event) demands for that product. The only time it is worth shipping bulk ever is for events.
For example i was shipping Weapons to Ratatosk once when Ratatosk was at 76% not supplied.
Foolishly i bought 40 weapons bought from the lowest price between Valhalla/Ragnar and Corvus (Jangala St.)
How much profit did i get? Well i would've gotten negative because 2 units of Weapons got me a whole 2 credits for my 800+ credit trek from Corvus to Valhalla. After those two units were sold the station still showed "not supplied" but refused to buy weapons at a price higher than Jangala St.
I understand security level may have played a part in this, however i was disappointed that 2 units was what 75% was.
But that still causes the issue i lsited in the first place. How do the NPC's turn a profit when freight charge alone is 800+ for a single item?
As for display showing the net import/export - it's fine, better than a spreadsheet. I hardly use it if ever because what is more important is the events taking place and supplying to those events for gain.
"its better than hitler, therefore its fine"
Hitler arguments are bad mmmkay.
As for the GUI for trading, i dont overly mind it i would just like a better explanation of what it meant in terms of "what is for sale" and "what the station actually needs" as there are several times the system has thrown my current understanding out of the window to do something rather baffling.
Right now im just making mad bank from bounties. When people are paying 1-3k a frigate plus salvage rights. its Easy money.