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Ridiculous exploits
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Control Volume RJ: ControlVolume CO: Control Volume Post Rating: 0 + / - Total Posts: 43 Karma: 122 Joined: Mar 31, 2012 |
Posted on Jul 28, 2013 Okay gonna drop this here so enough jerks repeat it to maybe drag Scott back to the game because holy shit is some of this stuff broken. Is it a dick move? Maybe, I don't care.Anyways company selling is broken. How broken? Well, start a new account, then sell your company. Then make a new free company. Then sell that company too. It'll net you a cool 35mil each time you sell. If you have a company, like me, you can still make 25mil a pop. There is no limit to how many times you can do this apparently. It would be trivial to set up a bot to spam the hell out of this. The next part is that research is included in the inventory cost of an item, so the actual worth with appraisal is wholesale*(1+quality/50). For people with 100+ quality, they don't even need stores, they can just shove them into a company and sell it for 3x the wholesale. Not a very good system since it's a hard limit on how low you can sell stuff. Also related is an exploit I used way back when the stock market was still in and the population imploded due to stupid oversights leading to infinite money that didn't get punished. If you have enough wealth and want to quit, you can buy out the entire B2B, sell the company, get most of your money back, and repeat indefinitely until your funds are gone. Some of the top players can do this for days on end with the amount of net worth their companies have. Not directly beneficial, but if you're quitting anyways it's a bad way to fuck with market stability and makes people less likely to be naturally interdependent. |
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Control Volume RJ: ControlVolume CO: Control Volume Post Rating: 0 + / - Total Posts: 43 Karma: 122 Joined: Mar 31, 2012 |
Posted on Jul 28, 2013 Although this game is practically dead anyways so I guess it doesn't matter, dunno why I'm bothering except that the game is a good concept extremely poorly executed.
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Company Man RJ: Don Draper CO: Don Draper Post Rating: 0 + / - Total Posts: 17 Karma: 10 Joined: Jun 16, 2013 |
Posted on Jul 29, 2013 That sounds like a lot of pent-up rage being let out. I admit I am a pretty new player in the grand scheme of things but I disagree with a few points here.1. The game hardly seems dead to me, I know several players who came here from another business simulation game and I was mentored by a player who promoted me to be in charge of his trainee program for new players and I have frequent conversations with new and newer players who are building their companies up. I think that for not having a dedicated source of advertising, at least not one that I can see, there are a reasonable amount of new faces around. 2. I'm not sure I understand how you can make 25 million restarting a company, but isn't that a pretty small amount of cash for an established player? I make 25 million in a few minutes of selling in my stores and I've only been playing a couple of months. I suppose if a bot was doing this it would be concerning but wouldn't Scott be able to detect if that was happening and ban them? I can't see anyone getting more rich doing that than playing normally. 3. As for selling products with higher than Q100 for 3x cost to produce, that would seem to be unwise to do since you can sell in stores for sometimes 7 to 10 times cost of production. You also can't sell more than you can make, so volume is definitely limited, and if you really want to sell at 3x production cost for Q100 products, you can sell huge amounts at low prices in big stores. I guess in principle that is a bit silly of a mechanic but it doesn't seem to be very sensible to do as a concerted strategy, and hardly strikes me as game breaking. I've been enjoying the game greatly so far and I just don't see what the fuss is. I'm more concerned that this is a side of the community I haven't encountered yet, I was hoping a game like this would be free of vitriolic outbursts like this that have more emotion than coherence but I suppose I just haven't been around long enough. |
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Control Volume RJ: ControlVolume CO: Control Volume Post Rating: 0 + / - Total Posts: 43 Karma: 122 Joined: Mar 31, 2012 |
Posted on Jul 29, 2013 Nah I'm not raging, just consistently disappointed with the state the game is in. The first paragraph is because last time an exploit came around, it didn't get fixed until everyone was abusing it and the game population dropped like a rock directly after.The company selling thing is that each empty company is worth 36mil right out of the box, and if you're only paying 10 mil to start a new company, you get 25mil after fees every time you buy and sell. With a bot doing this 4 times a minute, you make 1bil every 10 minutes through exploits. Also the problem with research multiplying worth is that it contributes to the dismal state that the B2B is in, not that it's impossible to make money. There is very little reason to buy, say, vanilla beans at $15 a pop to make extract when you can just make your own company and supply line and be making a lot more money. Vertical integration is head and shoulders the best option for making money, so the game stops being cooperative and starts just being a scoreboard. |
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Henry King RJ: Business Tycoon CO: BusinessTycoon Post Rating: 0 + / - Total Posts: 83 Karma: 13 Joined: May 31, 2013 |
Posted on Jul 30, 2013 The money from serial restarting of a company does not seem like a big deal, unless there is a bot restarting many times. A simple way to address that would be to say that you can't restart more often than once per day. A bot would be blocked by that, and 25 million per day is not enough money to make it worth bothering with repeated selling of a company.As far as the lack of incentives for cooperation, I think the primary reason there is a strong incentive in this game to push for vertical integration is the high cost of selling on the B2B market. With 5% fees for all transactions, if I make vanilla beans and sell them to another player, and then buy the finished product that he makes with those beans, we have to pay 5% market fees each time a product is sold. This is a strong disincentive to specialization, and gives players strong motivation to keep everything within one firm. If you want to see more products be listed and sold or bought on the market, get rid of the oppressive 5% sales tax that is charged on all market transactions. Reduce it to a fee of 1% or 0.5% or even make it free to sell on the market, and you will see a lot more players being willing to consider a strategy that is more cooperative and less vertically integrated. Research multiplying value of products makes sense, fundamentally, or there would not be much point in doing research. It also should make firms with high research more interested in leveraging that research by selling to other companies, but the fees make it more attractive just to keep those products in the same company and sell them in stores. |
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Tiny Hogwaffle RJ: Caligula CO: Tiny Hogwaffle Post Rating: 0 + / - Total Posts: 128 Karma: 10 Joined: Jun 3, 2013 |
Posted on Jul 30, 2013 25 million might not seem like much when you're a trillionaire... but when you're just starting out, that's a lot. I think it took about two weeks play for me to reach 25 million net worth.One problem with this game is there isn't any reason to sell products on the BTB when it's more profitable to use them or produce them yourself. Why would I buy chickens on the BTB for $10 a unit when I can just grow them myself for $1.50 a unit? Why would I sell chickens for $10 a unit when I can convert them to whole chickens in a slaughterhouse and then sell them for $30 a unit.. but why would I do that, when I can convert them to frozen chickens and sell them for $500 in a supermarket. I think people pretty much just sell excess stuff on the BTB. Or maybe when they're quadrillionaires, they just sell on the BTB because it takes too much work to do something more profitable. If you want to encourage more BTB transaction, you have to make it so it's not so easy to do everything yourself, and encourage specialist companies, somehow. |
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Henry King RJ: Business Tycoon CO: BusinessTycoon Post Rating: 0 + / - Total Posts: 83 Karma: 13 Joined: May 31, 2013 |
Posted on Jul 31, 2013 Of course you can do everything yourself, but you might not be as profitable doing things that way versus the alternative of specialization. For example, because you want to make your own chickens, instead of buying them, you save 9 bucks per chicken, but you also lose a land slot that you might have used instead to make a store that could sell more frozen chickens at 500 bucks each. The farm has more volume than the store, of course, so they are not strictly comparable, but just because you CAN farm does not mean you are better off doing everything yourself instead of outsourcing some parts of your production process.There are also quality considerations. You can make your own steel, of course, but you can't make everything with as high a quality as you can buy it, and sometimes, it just makes more sense to buy something of higher quality than you can make yourself due to space limitations or cost of high quality research. This game is partly about economies of scale, which includes economies of specialization, since if you are going to invest in having high quality research, it makes sense to leverage that and sell to other players as well with higher volume of production to maximize profits from that fixed cost investment in research. |
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Dana Sands RJ: Fred Fredrickson CO: Fred Fredrickson Post Rating: 0 + / - Total Posts: 26 Karma: 10 Joined: Apr 14, 2012 |
Posted on Jul 31, 2013 The incentive is that you can devote less of your land to factories and more to stores which will let you get larger stores faster and sell your end product at a higher volume.I think the real issue is that we don't yet have enough players for the BTB market to have real strong price pressures. Some products do (Eg: Electricity and water), there are enough people producing and selling that the price creeps ever lower as producers try to undercut the competition and get their stuff sold. It helps that quality has no bearing on the value of those products so we get closer to a "perfectly competitive market" (that term will be on your econ 101 test). With other products, quality will make some difference but we still just need more people in those markets before they'll settle at the equilibrium price point. The B2B request system helps with this a little and we should start to see companies that are almost all retail space (in fact, I might start one) and others that are almost all factories. |
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John Smith RJ: Lastverb CO: Lastverb Post Rating: 0 + / - Total Posts: 2 Karma: 10 Joined: Jul 11, 2013 |
Posted on Jul 31, 2013 Only problem with making everything yourself is cost of land slots. You can start new companies to for branching (no tech trading means you will not produce same item in 2 companies) and more land slots, but every started one costs more. Why you need more slots to grow at steady rate? Large factories become less effective after some point (most items get that point around size 500 for 24h runs) due to logarithmic EoS factor and exponential salaries. Of course suboptimal sizes are more preferrable as selling 10x at 50% profit gives more $ than selling 1x at 70% profit. Achiveable retail prices aren't helping this game. You can sell at optimaly 1-3x base value at 100% demand met and average market tech, while you produce at 1/3 of base value or lower. At 10% demand met its 10x base value or better. Why would you ever want to sell b2b anything that can be sold retail at less than 3x base value? If you produce something that got 100% market demand, no1 will buy it anyway. Making everything yourself got another big pro - you got steady, controllable flow of resources, impossible to get without bigger playerbase. |
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Dana Sands RJ: Fred Fredrickson CO: Fred Fredrickson Post Rating: 0 + / - Total Posts: 26 Karma: 10 Joined: Apr 14, 2012 |
Posted on Jul 31, 2013 A fair point but, and I'm just thinking out loud here, I'm looking at one of my big cash cows and, to keep the stores rolling along, I have so many land slots taken up by factories and research buildings that I only have nine stores, a third of which are usually expanding and they all sell the same eight products.The new, retail space only company that I started, has 32 stores. Right out of the gate I have 16,000 in retail floor space. Even starting with the same amount of cash (so I could buy all the land slots right away) it would have taken me a week of construction to get that same amount of retail floor space with just nine stores. And, since all of my inventory will be sourced from the B2B there is no reason that I have to sell the same set of products in each store. I don't even have to build the same store type on all 32 plots (in fact I'm doing mostly supermarkets and some hardware stores). My hypothesis (not even a theory at this point) is that I'll be able to get smooth flow of resources through product diversification. I can setup B2B requests for a bunch of different products with unlimited quantities then just adjust pricing as I go. That way, I'm okay getting sporadic inventory in giant lumps instead of steady output from a factory. At least, that's what I'm hoping for. Time will tell if it actually works. |
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Jurry Hart RJ: jurry CO: Jurre Post Rating: 0 + / - Total Posts: 78 Karma: 10 Joined: Feb 28, 2012 |
Posted on Jul 31, 2013 The idea behind it is ok. The only problem I can see is that if you will only depend on B2B for your products there's the fact that for the "giant lumps" you need the sales done by players on the B2B wich are for almost 90% of the time way over the average retailing price with lower quality. which lowers your edge on the retailing market. But maybe the huge store surface compensates for the quality & price diffrences. |
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M Burch RJ: Farmerbob CO: Farmerbob Post Rating: 0 + / - Total Posts: 151 Karma: 14 Joined: Sep 2, 2012 |
Posted on Jul 31, 2013 I think the buy/sell company exploit might be related to the land plot shift a few months ago. During that code shift, there was some measure of land-related compensation that occurred, and it might be that some aspects of that compensation is still impacting companies.As for values of goods being dependent on quality, I'm not sure I understand. I have one company whose only job is to research and produce 8 products. I have another company whose job is to sell those items in a supermarket. Most of the manufactured goods are higher than 80 quality now. I sell them to my retail facility at 10x cost to manufacture. My retail facility then turns around and sells them at a much higher markup than that, with sales prices adjusted so that whatever is in the warehouse will last 7-ish days. The retail facility has one farm and one research facility. The farm and research facility are there only for the B2B / Research / Factory related quests. QL 103 watermelons right now - and I am not bothering to sell them in the stores, because I need the B2B sales. As for the selling of companies, I agree that the mechanic is pretty abuseable. I'd like to see that go through the player market, where companies, when sold, are sectioned off and auctioned out. Research, owned land, facilities, etc. Then the proceeds are matched against the debt. The problem with games is that they are games. Unlike the real world where your paycheck depends on getting item A to market B at Time C to keep your contract with company D, it's all fun and games here. Which means that any economic simulation game is either going to be full of "reality" holes, or it's going to be pretty much a real world job. I wouldn't play this game if it felt like a job. That having been said, there is room for improvement, and ways to encourage interaction. I am wondering if it might be possible to somehow integrate the B2B market with the retail market. The idea makes my head want to hurt trying to figure out how the two markets could be reconciled, but it might be doable. |
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Bob Malone RJ: Bob Malone CO: Malone Post Rating: 0 + / - Total Posts: 341 Karma: 191 Joined: Apr 17, 2012 |
Posted on Oct 1, 2013 "this game is practically dead anyways"unfortunately yes. |
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