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The future belongs to COINS! #5050
Conversation
This will simply mute many of them, giving some BBS without any of these adverts at all
To be used when calculating mission rewards
Maybe we will round up? So we fly almost free already... |
@impaktor this may not be what you want to hear, (although given you called this a joke PR on IRC I'll go ahead anyways) but I don't think this is the right solution to the problem. Snapping mission rewards to increments not only doesn't fix the imbalance between risk (and fuel expenditure) and reward, but it also makes prices seem much more artificial. Even if this PR is meant to model the effects of futuristic currency, I'd expect the increment to be in terms of single credits, AKA the unit of currency we currently use. I appreciate the effort that went into this, but I don't think it solves the problem and I'd much rather allow missions to have variations in price (to keep them from feeling so 'samey') than lock them to increments of 10 or 100 credits. |
But that's not what this PR is addressing.
I disagree, quite a lot. It's the current prices that are artificial.
Yes, for commodities, that are governed by fluctuating market, like stock market, or real commodities. But for job listings? No, then we tend to round off numbers, (and some do the -1 unit to get the "now, only $9999"). Also, this partially also addresses #1054 Btw, this is exactly how Frontier did it (doesn't mean we must do it, but they obviously reasoned similar to me). Here are some rewards I wrote down when I played some Frontier a few months ago (comment in Passage column indicates passenger count):
Well, I was mainly thinking about the PR title |
I think I see what you're aiming for with this PR a little better - you're specifically addressing the artificiality of the random trailing digits in mission reward pricing. After having noodled on it for most of the day, I like the idea in theory, but I think there are some rough edge-cases in practice. I would argue that the rounding increment should be relatively uniform based on the number of digits; higher rewards should have higher increments, but when the reward is $1,000 a $10 difference between mission payouts is much more important than when the mission reward is $10,000. My gut reaction with this PR is that we're still swinging the other direction to where all mission rewards are unnaturally round numbers; even though missions are technically presented through a bulletin board, I'd expect things like fuel cost, tax, etc. to be factored in on the "lore" side, and those costs absolutely do not make for round numbers at all. The station, after all, takes a percentage cut of the rewards offered, among other authorities we don't actually simulate for simplicity. |
I would like to note that when I give the client the price for my work, I usually round the final number to a thousand, for example. |
To me this seems reasonable. They charge by increments of 5km for bus and train tickets here for example, and you buy postage stamps in a similar manner. |
Yes, I've thought of this also, but I've opted for the most easy & trivial way to fix something that's been an eyesore (for me) for a long time, and the end result is roughly the same, as long as rewards for a single module don't span several orders of magnitude. (Also, looking at the table in my last post, I think this is how the Frontier-guys did it).
I've been thinking that one should perhaps treat local and remote package and cargo delivery separate (because those prices actually do span two orders of magnitude), but beyond that, I don't see anything that might look strange to me. Do you have an example? On current master, every single mission above $100 looks bizarre to me, which is most of them:
Perhaps there is a cultural difference between Europe and US, since (as I've understood it) prices are typically pre-tax(?) in US, (something I've never seen in Europe); and dollar is 10 times more worth than Scandinavian currencies, and 70 times more than Russian rubel. Thus we are used to seeing prices: "1250" or "125", but "1253" for a service / second hand item - that doesn't have an exact price set by fluctuating market (like commodity/stock) - looks strange.
I'm not changing the cost of fuel, or tax? When I go to my local supermarket, there's an announcement board, for guitar lessons, math tutoring, second hand couch,... The price for these are "round" numbers. What they have to pay in rent, tax, food, is included in the price and rounded to something "even". I've seen many like:
but never:
We have beehives in my family, for the past 25 years, the price for 700g jar started out at 50 kr, then over the years we've increased it to 55, 60, 65, 75, I think we charge 80 or 90 now. Never 83 kr, or 71 kr. And that is on a market with competition for similar product (although honey Of the modules I'm touching here, I might maybe see a case for Taxi and maybe Cargo Delivery having algorithmic price setting, i.e. down to single digit $1, or even cents, but I cant see any rationale for keeping the current system for the other modules (thus this PR). I don't know what other people think? |
Introduction
This has been bugging me for many years: prices are not "even". Consider getting $24,441 for an assassination, or $1114 for delivering some cargo.
So I made a function that rounds input
x
to closest numberN
(could be float, e.g. 0.5), and returnsN
if input is below it, elsex
. I'm sure someone will now tell me we already have this function, or it's standard in Lua, - I'm all ears. (so to explain the title: we can think of this PR as reflecting how the market prefers to price in increments corresponding to some space coin)I'm demonstrating it here, for those who prefer visual explenation:
I'm also including a commit to reduce prevalence of the Donate to free software advert, on request of @Web-eWorks. Worth noting: I think the flying spaghetti monster one is more silly, (so naturally, I like them both).
(Naturally, I'll remove the debug printout commit)
Results
For the modules, I'm rounding the prices in the following increments:
Below I've dumped out some samples. Fuel Club hard codes the price (in increments of $100), and Crew contracts are single integer increments (i.e. were good the way it was), which looks reasonable. Nor do I show Second hand market prices, or Breakdown and service, the latter would show the price down to cents.
Assassination
Cargorun
Cargorun local
Combat
Search and Rescue
Taxi
Deliver Package
Deliver Package local