Arconomy: The bigger balance PR (REVISED EDITION)

[ArcaneMusic]

This is a remake of #65046, with additional features added. The bolded sections will show the new added features and changes from the previous week of work.

About The Pull Request

This PR has been REMASTERED as of 4/6/2022. I would recommend reviewing the PR description as some design decisions have been changed based on maintainer review and design direction.

This PR covers 4 Key features:

• Price Rebalancing
• Passive Income
• Gas Exports
• Lathe Tax

Relevant Design Doc (Slightly out of date as a result of the discourse on the subject).
https://hackmd.io/WlWgyRafTaiAqz6ouOqC-Q

Price Shifting

So, in-game items that have prices have a major issue on their hands, being that they were decided by how much money that job should make. This means that many of the jobs in-game have been given prices scaled to their job's income. That income I adjusted by removing passive income in #54161. While this was helpful to moving towards an active in-game economy, it resulted in items falling into distinct price brackets. A high paying job like security's items could never be purchased by someone like a botanist, but a job like a security officer had more capital and buying power than most other jobs in-game combined when moving down those brackets. We've done a simple normalization of scale to help in bring things closer to a semblance of equality.

There are now 3 price brackets, PAYCHECK_LOW, PAYCHECK_CREW, and PAYCHECK_COMMAND. Command staff will still have a higher base level of money on-hand than other crew, and low paying wages that we on-station don't respect as being real jobs (assistant, prisoner) will have their items be intentionally cheaper to encourage active participation in the economy, but the difference in scale is now noticeably far closer to each other. This means that assistants can still interact with the economy as spenders, but if they want to be doing a lot of work with money, they'll need to put in work. Additionally, this means we arbitrarily enforce a system that allows for items to have uniformity in what they cost to other players. 50 credits for a wrench feels better when you know that other job critical items in-game are also around the same price, and it's equivalent to one paycheck.

Paychecks are reintroduced

Economy lost it's relationship to time. In a game where a single round takes 90+ minutes (Backed up not only by the head-coder's design direction as well as plenty of aggregate round data), having a relationship to time and how long it takes to afford something is a major consideration when you look at buying something. Also, we get to say that I was certifiably wrong in regards to the active economy thing, since we have very, VERY few active sources of content in-game that are very... fun? Bounties are literal fetch quests but something like tourists is at least more engaging and interactive with the round, and should be the direction we want economy-job integration to head in.

Between having inflation as a price manipulation mechanic already in the code, as well as prices being roughly equalized in terms of their costs between jobs and their impact on the round, this allows for the reintroduction of paychecks to an extent.

As an additional note, doing this meant tweaking down the syndicate briefcase of cash, so that instead of giving you 5000 credits for 1 TC, it now costs 5 TC to accompany the fact that this is now a rather significant amount of money, even on decently high population. Fun fact: the Syndicate Briefcase of Cash actually PREDATES the economy, and was NEVER ADJUSTED beyond the original implementation of the economy as a result!

Gas Exports.

ALRIGHT ARE YOU READY FOR SOME GRAPHS? I THOUGHT SO, YOU LOVE GRAPHS.
So, gas exports are fucked, have always been fucked, and consistently have proven to be capable of breaking the in-game economy for a long time. This is no secret, I've been pinged with players getting billions, actual billions of credits using it multiple times in as many years. See, any round where a player manages to buy the bicycle is a round where I've fucked up, or someone fucked and I let it get past me.

So here's how gas exports work right now.

So the vertical axis is the value of gas in a can, and the horizontal axis is the number of moles of a gas in that can.
So, all of this hinges on the value of a single mole of gas, and some gasses enable you to make extremely, EXTREMELY profitable gasses through atmospheric gas wizardry. As you can see by the green line. However, even those less profitable gasses are still in an extremely high magnitude of value.

Most gasses if you have a full can of it will net you OVER 10k credits. For scale, one crate being sold in cargo is 200 credits.
That's a minimum of crates for pumping gas into a hollow metal box and praying it doesn't explode.

So we adjusted the values accordingly.

_From top to bottom, we have the descending values of gasses potential maximum export values, with the top of the curve being anti-nobilium, then zauker, nitrium, etc. _
The baseline value of a single gas has been tweaked downward significantly. Even these values are still arguably very high, but I can play with it at the discretion of LemonintheDark. The green line at the top represents gasses that previously sold for 100 credits per mole, antinobilium I believe, and working downwards. I am going to try and enforce 10 credits per mole as the absolute maximum hard cap on gas exports, regardless of how many gasses we try to add in the future. Because the alternative is getting a gunjillion credits by huffing miasma into a tank of steel. And we ain't having that shit.

Lathe Tax

Part of the testing for this PR involved me modeling the SS13 economy in a given round as a kind of controls problem, with each source of income introduced in the round as a kind of input (Passive Income, Bounties, Tourists) in order to get a handle on roughly how much income a single round of SS13 will see per player on the given designed round-length, in order to estimate how much things are going to cost. Modeling how much players spend on a given round is variable enough that it'd be too difficult to accurately test without just throwing this up on a server and getting live data.

However, from the appearance of my dataset, players would be making a LOT more money nowadays with all of the above changes implemented. In an attempt to curve that intake, I attempted to implement a small, low scale tax of printing items that would take a small amount of players income every time they print, as a way to add a basic economic side-effect to this mechanic.

This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a mixed decision. So, maintainers came up with an intended direction they want to see it, as they wanted to make sure that economy would remain a secondary system, that could still have an impact on round direction and the changes they want to see in the game.

So, here's the intent:

• Lathe tax should exist in the form of printing things from protolathes outside of your department, not on autolathes or your own protolathe.
• We want to promote people talking and collaborating to access things if it's outside the scope of their department and they still want it, with theft still being a viable avenue of gameplay.

Players will be charged 10 credits for printing a set of items not from their own protolathe, each. Printing an item can be paid for from your own ID card's bank account automatically, but the payment component has been buffed to handle physical money alternatives, as well as pulled money, similar to the luxury shuttle scanner gate's behavior.

Borgs are still enabled to print from lathes, however instead of it costing them credits, they now take a self-significant power cost in order to do so, preventing them from being used as a roving bank account for printing. I'll look into this further as we don't want to invalidate mechanics like borgs being able to do organ based surgery or building machinery, but we don't want them to become credit cards, so place that under advisement.

Tweaks and Updates:

(Suggested by Ziiro) If the revolutionaries win, centcom will no longer enforce the Lathe Tax.
(Suggested by about ~1000 people independently between my DMs, Reddit threads, the Feedback Thread, and elsewhere)
Printing items only taxes you once per print. EG: If you print 10 Kitchen Knifes as an assistant from the service lathe, you will only be charged once instead of 10 times.

Why It's Good For The Game

For many of the reasons that I outlined above, this is a good change in a positive direction.
Players get more ability to interact with the economy without having to do content that's becoming increasingly depreciated in my absence.
Players also have a baseline consensus on what values of credits are high and low because jobs have been given an equalized standard in regards to the cost of certain items.
Price fluctuations through inflation will now be more meaningful in situations where the economy becomes more relevant.
The system will still encourage you to play a job that's productive to the status of the station through lower paycheck jobs existing as well.
Gas exports are now reduced to the point that their value is appropriate for the first time... actually ever. Nice.

Changelog

🆑
balance: The values of nearly every item purchasable by players has been rebalanced.
balance: Players will now start with less starting money, but will receive a paycheck once every 5 minutes.
balance: The value of gasses exported through the cargo department have been skewed way, WAY down in terms of price.
balance: The Syndicate briefcase of cash now contains now costs 5 TC, up from 1 TC, for 5000 credits.
balance: Printing items from lathes on station now costs a fee of 10 credits per item printed if it's from a lathe not under your department.
qol: The payment component has received additional handling for physical credits, as well as pulled credits/ID cards for those without hands.
/:cl:

[realthomas69]

"Protolathes, Autolathes, and other production machines now charge at 10 credit tax per item printed from the machine"

Please no dude

[JohnFulpWillard]

I'm worried about the costs for using Techfab/Autolathe.

For Autolathes, they aren't connected to anything and can't get anything new like better parts, and can (and usually is) built by Engineering/Science as well.

For techfabs, this will mean it will cost about 100 credits to print 10 of each part, assuming you're using your department's techfab. That's just not something I expect a Scientist/Engineer to be able to afford to do upgrade experiments, on top of other stuff they have to buy (like airlock/apc/fire alarm electronics in engineer's case)

My main complaint however, is that off-station roles like Oldstation/Free golems who do have these machines but don't have bank IDs, won't be able to use any of them anymore.

[InvalidArgument3]

Balance: Printing items from lathes on station now costs a fee of 10 credits per item printed, reduced to 2 credits if printing from a lathe owned by your own department.

PLEASE GOD NO I JUST WANT TO BUILD/UPGRADE/REPAIR MACHINES

[GuillaumePrata]

Protolathes, Autolathes, and other production machines now charge at 10 credit tax per item printed from the machine.

This will cut on people tailgating into the eng/science foyer to print a bag full of random stuff so that is a win for me.

[dragomagol]

balance: Printing items from lathes on station now costs a fee of 10 credits per item printed, reduced to 2 credits if printing from a lathe owned by your own department.

How does this affect silicons?

[MaineTheMan]

actually let me explain, so i as an engineer (or other job similar) will print 50 of each t4 part for upgrading the station, this means itll still cost 500 credits, and if i end up doing it as some other job (if i hadnt chosen it at roundstart or job change etc,) it would be 2500. jesus christ.

[Weblure]

The lathe tax provides absolutely nothing of value while introducing a plethora of problems. It's not fun, it's not interesting; all it's doing is forcing an arbitrary inconvenience/brick wall onto people for daring to do their job or improve the station in any way. How is this good for the game?

[GolfinhoVoador]

The lathe tax provides absolutely nothing of value while introducing a plethora of problems. It's not fun, it's not interesting; all it's doing is forcing an arbitrary inconvenience/brick wall onto people for daring to do their job or improve the station in any way. How is this good for the game?

I literally came here to talk about the drone not being able to print stuff, not even free drones from the morph staff/NT Lepton Violet

[ArcaneMusic]

@Weblure @GolfinhoVoador Sorry about that, Fix is made and merged.
#66593

[Bawhoppen]

Sadly still a missed opportunity to call it the LATHE TITHE

[Weblure]

@Weblure @GolfinhoVoador Sorry about that, Fix is made and merged. #66593

Stop being nice, it's making it hard for me to be unreasonably mad at your PR 😔
Thanks 👍🏻

[GolfinhoVoador]

@Weblure @GolfinhoVoador Sorry about that, Fix is made and merged. #66593

Thanks