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Author Topic: Market exploit, or is it intended?  (Read 2913 times)

Gaudium

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Market exploit, or is it intended?
« on: December 23, 2016, 03:32:08 AM »

Hello i had this game for several years and lately decided to try it out.
A friend of mine saw it and decided to give it a go and this is what he found:

1. You dock onto a station with a market that has lets say 6-9 stability and thousands of items both on black market and open market.

2. You use lets say 3 agents, even if 2 of them succeed you can double your bank.

3. Buy the goods that had their price dropped, exit the market and dock back in the price rises back up a notch and you sell.

He turned his 130k into 270k in a couple of minutes..

The issues seems to be:

1. Instant stability and price change on the market - It drops - you buy - you exit the market and dock again - it instantly raises up with the stability being at its lowest after the agents actions or it raises back up by 1 point but the price is also raised and gives you unparalleled profit.

2. Cargo capacity is unlimited, it only hurts you if you need to travel which in this case you don't need to even move.

I can link a short video where he does it on stream, it's in Russian.

It seems to powerful to me with no efforts needed to go insanely rich.
Is this intended? :)

If i may also share a suggestion:

1. Make the stability loss take effect over time, force the player focus on other things meanwhile and travel.

2. If the player camps the market, send in patrols due to the suspicious market destabilization.

Mods that are being used during this and might be the cause are:

1. Nexerelin
2. DynaSector
3. Starsector+

And other faction mods..

We will try to test it in vanilla as well...

Thank you for your time.
« Last Edit: December 23, 2016, 03:38:41 AM by Gaudium »
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Histidine

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Re: Market exploit, or is it intended?
« Reply #1 on: December 23, 2016, 03:44:24 AM »

Agents only exist in Nexerelin. Although the stability going up just by undocking and redocking sounds like a bug, I'd have to look into it (perhaps it's recovering from destabilization at the first tick?)

(I don't like the current implementation of agents/saboteurs for a bunch of reasons. I'd like to do something more like the Civilization V, but that would require UI modding that's not really possible at present.)
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Artist.the

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Re: Market exploit, or is it intended?
« Reply #2 on: December 23, 2016, 07:00:11 AM »

1. You dock onto a station.
2. You use 1-3 agents successfully. You goal is market level 3 or low.
3. You buying all weapon and(or) drugs that you can afford with your money (all goods have instant low prices after market destabilization).
Doesn't matter if you you have not enough space because we do not need to move in space at all.
4. You exit the market and dock again.
5. All goods exept weapons and drugs still have low prices. Weapons and grugs have prices that so much higher than before destabilization event. So you free to sell these and face the huge profit.
Important thing is if u have market level>3 after destabilization+buying stuff and dock market again weapons and drugs prices will be still low. They grow up only if market level 3 or less and after redocking.

So main issues i see is this
First - unlimited cargo (even if u get 0 burn speed as result)
Second - something in hidden price mechanics i gues that makes guns and drugs and maybe something else have huge bust in price on level 3 and less and in this case something in Nexerelin mod (because of agents) needs to be fixed. I'm not sure. I see exploit here or bug.
« Last Edit: December 23, 2016, 07:03:03 AM by Artist.the »
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Histidine

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Re: Market exploit, or is it intended?
« Reply #3 on: December 24, 2016, 02:55:48 AM »

Well, I've got a partial fix for this: next Nexerelin version it'll go straight to the final price even before doing a undock/dock.
It'll still be possible to use this trick to make money, but at least the margins will be much thinner (and you have to buy before you know whether the destabilization worked or not).

Thanks for reporting!
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Gaudium

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Re: Market exploit, or is it intended?
« Reply #4 on: December 24, 2016, 12:10:55 PM »

Cool, thank you!

Great mod! :)
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