While waiting on the first update on this months goals, we would like to share a little insight in what is going on behind the scenes in NTO.
We have made a few changes to the tool we are using to calculate prices.
The first change was an improvement to the time efficient formula that we use. The one we had before was slightly wrong, the effect from this was that prices came up just a little bit higher then they should have, T4 items was the ones that suffered the most from this, the difference from the old formula to the new was something round 8-10 000 for a T4 item that cost 2 000 000 NIC.
We knew that our old formula was wrong but we deemed it okay to use it until we found the right one. The right formula was posted on the Perpetuum forum by Tazca, so all credit goes to him for this contribution.
The second change was an implementation of a calculation method that tries to calculate the best decoder level to use when creating a new CT.
This change had a very big impact on prices, 5 examples of this impact looks like this:
Our price for a T4 Remote sensor amplifier was before this change 1 299 000 now it is 1 198 000 a drop of 7.78% .
Our price for a T4 Coreactor was 1 460 000 now it is 1 360 000 a drop of 6.85%.
Our price for a T3 Industrial tuning was 321 000 now it is 257 000 a drop of 19.94%.
Our price for a T4 Shield hardener was 1 993 000 now it is 1 902 000 a drop of 4.57%.
Our price for Medium compositecore slugs was 68.78 now it is 67.33 a drop of 2.11%.
The third and last change we will talk about here is an implementation of a function to automatically calculate and update prices of all the items we are selling, so every time there is a change to raw material prices we do not have to go trough every single item and see what the new price should be.
All the actual in-game orders obviously have to be updated manually, going trough 237 orders takes a long time so these kind of price changes is usually updated when we have to renew a market order, either when it expires or when the current order is sold out.