I came up with a proposal of how to further enhance the trade feature and provide a possible long-term solution on the game’s economy and a viable in-game store suitable for both parties.
The general idea would look like this:
The trade we all know now moved into the store tab listing all sale offers from every player in the game and not just a specific chat server.
How does it work?
Simple, no need to contact the seller nor buyer thus making the whole trade much faster and more stable in prices. All a buyer needs to do is write down the first word of the item he/she is looking for and it would list all the sellers and their prices as shown above. The additional sort feature would be used to sort through prices, from lowest to highest or from oldest to newest (in case if someone wants to wait for a better short-term deal).
Chat trade
Moving the feature into the store tab does not mean it should be removed from the chat.
The chat trade would be used to trade only common building materials in real time like osmium crystals, computing chips, metal blanks, graphite plates, pure silicon, screened batteries and processing blocks.
The transactions should be done with credits making it a high flow of basic building materials and credits negating the credit overflow most people experience and making it a normal currency again.
Players that prefer modes like PvP/PvE would interact with players fond of Open Space and mining providing them credits that they are usually lacking from that mode whilst offering the basic materials in return that the other party lacks. Reworking the GS->Credit conversion would provide extra profit and could be convenient for players too.
Chat trade should be limited to 3-5 trades a day with a maximum of 100 units of building materials per transaction. Limiting the inventory to 999 units per item would be preferred in this case so the whole deal doesn’t go sideways.
This would eliminate the need of having basic building materials in the bundles, reworking the price of each bundle slightly to be more appealing to the masses and more likely make the players/users buy it regardless of financial background, not to mention more satisfied. The randomness can still be a part of the bundle store with this without much negative backlashes.
The store
The store would have resources like monocrystals, xenocrystals and ores like beryllium, neodium and electrum because, why the hell not, you need profit to develop something dude. The store would seem like a convenient option since there would be no other material involved in the bundles other than the variations of the rare materials everyone needs.
Long-term changes
In the long run, making the basic materials tradable via credits would negate the overflow of credit gains and make that currency more valuable and it would lower the stress of gathering them and leave a more appealing (positive) game experience in the very basic form of the game.
Moving the trade we have now with gold standards into the store tab and listing every sale offer with some kind of a filter would make it a lot easier and faster for players and more profitable for the company due to tax on trade.
Another variation of the same idea would be implementing the trade as seen above in the picture, making everything tradable via gold standards and reworking the bundle store by pulling out the common resources making it more appealing to buy. The common resources then would be a thing of trading, making a massive profit due to taxes on GS. Limiting the inventory to 999 slots per item would be useful to deny any massive influx of materials and general economic chaos of any kind.
