A case for adding money to KSP2

[Ryaja]

I was sitting around and thinking, they have said that there will probably not be money in KSP2 but this could be a mistake, in real life money is a big restraint and reward for contracts, but I am not focusing on this, I'm focusing on the trade implications on multiplayer, yes you could exchange other resources too but a universal credit is great for trading, and would give a large purpose to contracts and could give you a friendly competition in space race mode(this was confirmed right?).

[Bej Kerman]

What would being able to trade money do that trading raw resources couldn't do?

[Strawberry]

Minecraft servers oftentimes use diamond as its currency, this is due to its scarcity, high tier usage and difficulty of mass production. Having gold be available in only limited quantities from each reserve (ie you can only harvest ten tons of gold from a deposit), and make it use things such as high grade electronic parts (such as AI modules that can take the place of crewmates for your colony deliveries), may make gold in ksp2 be used this way. 

[Drakenred65]

No one realy knows how there going to implement multiplayer at this point.

 

we know there’s going to be competitive and cooperative multiplayer, and each player can aparently cooperate with a team of players and thoes teams can compete.I think.

 

 

ok I’m going vid diving.

 

ok on KSP 1 there’s one actual KSP, plus all the odd locations and airbases scattered on the map, with none of the others being on the equator, and most are launch complexes with no runways.,  

but there is no reason besides the island airfield for them to replicate most of them because supposedly it already turned up in a video? However where your launch pad is can function as a difficulty modifier.

I think they can put a full KSP base at 6 locations that is on the equator on the east coast, but who knows what the plan is, you may be able to pick a point on the planet and poof

Edited January 4, 2023 by Drakenred65

[SolarAdmiral]

30 minutes ago, Drakenred65 said:

No one realy knows how there going to implement multiplayer at this point.

 

we know there’s going to be competitive and cooperative multiplayer, and each player can aparently cooperate with a team of players and thoes teams can compete.I think.

 

 

ok I’m going vid diving.

I believe this was specifically said in the most recent interview for PC gamer, "Colonies will change everything KSP2 full interview PC gaming show" but I could be wrong.

I think the wording was something like "We are going to introduce the concept of agencies. Allowing players too cooperate all working together for one agency. Or competing."

[Drakenred65]

35 minutes ago, SolarAdmiral said:

I believe this was specifically said in the most recent interview for PC gamer, "Colonies will change everything KSP2 full interview PC gaming show" but I could be wrong.

I think the wording was something like "We are going to introduce the concept of agencies. Allowing players too cooperate all working together for one agency. Or competing."

Sorry I updated my post just as you posted, I found that article, now I’m lookin for island airfield 2. 
 

never mind, I think they confused a different KSC for the airport.

 

I wonder if we will need to build up KSC in KSP 2 or if we have the option of building new ones elsewhere

Edited January 4, 2023 by Drakenred65

[Ryaja]

2 hours ago, Bej Kerman said:

What would being able to trade money do that trading raw resources couldn't do?

Money is like a universal resource, it can be very useful to have a universal trading credit that you can store digitally.

Edited January 4, 2023 by Ryaja

[Bej Kerman]

Just now, Ryaja said:

Money is like a universal resource, it can be very useful to have a universal trading credit that you can store digitally.

What's the difference in a game where trading ore can be as instant as rolling out a rocket?

[Ryaja]

Just now, Bej Kerman said:

What's the difference in a game where trading ore can be as instant as rolling out a rocket?

The money represents the ore, that's all money is just a reserve note.

[Pthigrivi]

3 hours ago, Ryaja said:

I was sitting around and thinking, they have said that there will probably not be money in KSP2 but this could be a mistake, in real life money is a big restraint and reward for contracts, but I am not focusing on this, I'm focusing on the trade implications on multiplayer, yes you could exchange other resources too but a universal credit is great for trading, and would give a large purpose to contracts and could give you a friendly competition in space race mode(this was confirmed right?).

I personally would argue multiplayer is exactly why you don’t want a universally fungible currency or codified player to player contracts in the game, because it opens up a an ethical can of worms. Yes, in real life currency exists and its used as leverage to extract time and value out of people with less accrued currency.  That is not a dynamic you want to recreate or reinforce in a game that is principally about learning, creative problem solving, and free exploration. No one should be on the hook to anyone else for any reason. All trades should be made in good faith, in trust, and as barter. I have a base on the Mun with more metals than I know what to do with. You have lots of fuel but not enough metals. I make a recurring resource run to your colony and you make a fuel run to mine. We both agree informally on the terms and everyone is happy. Thats really the only ethical kind of arrangement possible. 

Edited January 4, 2023 by Pthigrivi

[Ryaja]

2 minutes ago, Pthigrivi said:

I personally would argue multiplayer is exactly why you don’t want a universally fungible currency or codified player to player contracts in the game, because it open up a an ethical can of worms. Yes, in real life currency exists and its used as leverage to extract time and value out of people with less accrued currency.  That is not a dynamic you want to recreate or reinforce in a game that is principally about learning, creative problem solving, and free exploration. No one should be on the hook to anyone else for any reason. All trades should be made in good faith, in trust, and as barter. I have a base on the Mun with more metals than I know what to do with. You have lots of fuel but not enough metals. I make a recurring resource run to your colony and you make a fuel run to mine. We both agree informally on the terms and everyone is happy. Thats really the only ethical kind of arrangement possible. 

Money can be a basic for ethical trade, but talking about this gets into politics. But money could just be 1 credit is worth 1 unit of methalox,  or 1/10 of a unit of metallic hydrogen, or 1/2 unit of metal, etc. And this can be much easier as you can trade a paper or string of digits in this case that is the material, that's all money is.

[Bej Kerman]

50 minutes ago, Ryaja said:

51 minutes ago, Bej Kerman said:

What's the difference in a game where trading ore can be as instant as rolling out a rocket?

The money represents the ore, that's all money is just a reserve note.

The entire idea is redundant because we can just trade ore instead, yes?

Besides, for interplanetary transactions, I'd wager that cross-player shipping routes made using the automated milk run system KSP 2 has would make for more interesting gameplay than simple digital transactions.

Edited January 4, 2023 by Bej Kerman
tYPO

[Pthigrivi]

14 minutes ago, Ryaja said:

Money can be a basic for ethical trade, but talking about this gets into politics. But money could just be 1 credit is worth 1 unit of methalox,  or 1/10 of a unit of metallic hydrogen, or 1/2 unit of metal, etc. And this can be much easier as you can trade a paper or string of digits in this case that is the material, that's all money is.

The issue is those in-game resources represent players’ time, because it takes time to establish colonies and mining and tech advancement and processing to produce them. Once you’ve added a medium of universal exchange you’ve created a market in which players with easy access to lots of resources can use money to make other players their in-game employees, exchanging a resource (money) which they have lots of to purchase other players time. Thats a dynamic for a deeply exploitive and un-fun multiplayer experience. 

Edited January 4, 2023 by Pthigrivi

[Drakenred65]

I’m not sure how you can somehow have money and not earn it in game. It’s not like some of us are randomly going to turn into Bernard L Madoff after all and start  randomly claiming  unearned money that does not exist.

 

well yah, a number of online games have had players pull similar scams . I’m just not sure how they could pull something like that off.

 

Edited January 4, 2023 by Drakenred65

[Drakenred65]

2 hours ago, Pthigrivi said:

The issue is those in-game resources represent players’ time, because it takes time to establish colonies and mining and tech advancement and processing to produce them. Once you’ve added a medium of universal exchange you’ve created a market in which players with easy access to lots of resources can use money to make other players their in-game employees, exchanging a resource (money) which they have lots of to purchase other players time. Thats a dynamic for a deeply exploitive and un-fun multiplayer experience. 

This is the base problem. Let’s say we have yo mine the Mun for resources. If player AAAis mining the only 100 rated node on the mun, and everyone has at best 75. Then he’s got an advantage. He can get to Duna faster, then Jool then off to ??? Faster.

 

because Thoes resources ARE MONEY. He has no need for some of them compared to others, so he can spend them in trade on whatever, or use it for more of what he can make with it, or just throw it into the back of a storage bin someplace, maybee he can smelt it into a rediculous statue to him or her self.

Now if they set it up so that everyone gets one node per body, every node produces resource A! B? C!. And so on,  but in diferent rations because whatever, then we’ll perhaps they can balance it that way.

 

I doubt it though.

[stephensmat]

Anyone read 'Delta-V' by Daniel Suarez? His position was that Space was ultimately the only hope for a Capitalist system, because there's unlimited supply of everything 'out there' to exploit.

Some of the other sci-fi like the Culture Books or Star Trek suggest that having access to infinite materials means space makes a post-scarcity economy, where money isn't needed.

KSP1 follows both opinions in a practical way. The start of the Space Program has us counting pennies, and carefully weighing our science points. We move on to civilian access. Ferry these tourists to get the payoff, and while you're there you can run this experiment...

By the time you get to the 'Mine and Convert Ore' stage, you don't need tourists anymore. You manage your Program right, you can have millions in the war chest. More than you'll use in a hundred launches.

KSP2 is doing away with money, and focusing on materials. Going to the planets is how you build resources to get to the next frontier. It even lets the harvesting be automatic, once you do it a few times.

This game isn't about Making Money, it's about the next frontier.

[Pthigrivi]

I think we can leave politics out of it and a debate on the C word isn’t going to resolve this question. Im agnostic on the subject. Im just saying within the context of this game setting up codified contracts with penalties and enabling players with lots of in game money to exploit new players with very little money isn’t a great recipe.  Problems are much less likely in an informal barter economy where resources only have value if you can use them locally. A player with thousands of hours may be able to trade 10 tons of antimatter with a new player, but if that new player hasn’t built up to antimatter engines and is just setting up their first methalox bases  it won’t be of much use to them and so it won’t have  any value in context. It means players will mostly be trading things they actually happen to need. 

Edited January 4, 2023 by Pthigrivi

[Ryaja]

11 hours ago, Pthigrivi said:

I think we can leave politics out of it and a debate on the C word isn’t going to resolve this question. Im agnostic on the subject. Im just saying within the context of this game setting up codified contracts with penalties and enabling players with lots of in game money to exploit new players with very little money isn’t a great recipe.  Problems are much less likely in an informal barter economy where resources only have value if you can use them locally. A player with thousands of hours may be able to trade 10 tons of antimatter with a new player, but if that new player hasn’t built up to antimatter engines and is just setting up their first methalox bases  it won’t be of much use to them and so it won’t have  any value in context. It means players will mostly be trading things they actually happen to need. 

I was trying to suggest a system of essentially universal ious that can be exchanged for resources either from other players or maybe even on Kerbin for basic resources, basically formalizing the barter system and adding base prices so new players aren't ripped off by older players over charging.

 

Of course the prices on credits would just be guidelines, to prevent new player from being tricked into being overcharged, but the choice of price makes it so prices change with the amounts of the material.

Edited January 4, 2023 by Ryaja

[Pthigrivi]

5 hours ago, Ryaja said:

I was trying to suggest a system of essentially universal ious that can be exchanged for resources either from other players or maybe even on Kerbin for basic resources, basically formalizing the barter system and adding base prices so new players aren't ripped off by older players over charging.

 

Of course the prices on credits would just be guidelines, to prevent new player from being tricked into being overcharged, but the choice of price makes it so prices change with the amounts of the material.

Who knows, maybe Im overstating the problem, and maybe its just the kind of multiplayer I would and wouldn't be interested in. Multiplayer would be fun for me with 3-10 people I knew and trusted well enough to make deals and share responsibilities and collaborate with on big projects. There would be no real need to formalize transactions. If it's not someone I feel like I can trust I just wouldn't make deals with them. But if I did, you just agree in chat and each player does their best to hold up the bargain, physically transferring resources to another players base or vessel. That process of physically producing and transferring resources is at the core of what the game is about--building and flying--and I personally wouldn't want to see money even in single player because it kind of defeats the purpose of the game. It would be like if you could just buy components in factorio rather than setting up automated crafting. The process of producing and transporting and carefully managing resources should have its own internal rules that are based on physics and chemistry and spaceflight. 

Say you have a formal system where a screen comes up with a trade offer and you personally click "accept" or "decline". One of two things happens: either the resources are magically and instantly transferred, which breaks the whole point of a game thats about physics and space travel, or the trade is not enforced immediately, and just lingers until it's satisfied. This would be the case for IOU's. And what happens if it's not satisfied? What if a player reneges? Do the trade contracts come with negotiated breach clauses? Are there clawbacks? Maybe its just me but I just feel like we're getting into a very different kind of game than KSP actually is in spirit. A game thats about optimism and creativity and physics suddenly gets bogged down in contract disputes and leverage and a lot of potential nastiness and hard feelings. 

Edited January 5, 2023 by Pthigrivi

[Ryaja]

48 minutes ago, Pthigrivi said:

And what happens if it's not satisfied?

This is why I suggest using them on kerbin too, so even if it wasn't satisfied the person could go and trade for some basic resources there or even with another player.

[Drakenred65]

16 hours ago, Pthigrivi said:

Im just saying within the context of this game setting up codified contracts with penalties and enabling players with lots of in game money to exploit new players with very little money isn’t a great recipe.  Problems are much less likely in an informal barter economy where resources only have value if you can use them locally. A player with thousands of hours may be able to trade 10 tons of antimatter with a new player, but if that new player hasn’t built up to antimatter engines and is just setting up their first methalox bases  it won’t be of much use to them and so it won’t have  any value in context. It means players will mostly be trading things they actually happen to need. 

I think your confusing cause and effect.

 

an experienced player is always going to have an advantage over newer players, even if the resource seed  is more randomized thane a Minecraft world generator. That’s just the way reality is.

 

a player who has more time to spend  in a world will have an edge over one who is new to it all. Again that’s just the way it is.

 

If people think they need a form of money to function in a multiplayer game with resource trading, THEY WILL MAKE IT.

 

The  ONLY way you can avoid this is to never have a tradable resource, or at most have a resource that is trade once and it’s character bound regardless of what it is.( for example if you have a team you can assign/share  team resources around.

Edited January 5, 2023 by Drakenred65

[Pthigrivi]

2 hours ago, Ryaja said:

This is why I suggest using them on kerbin too, so even if it wasn't satisfied the person could go and trade for some basic resources there or even with another player.

However, and this is a fundamental factor in space travel, value of x kg on the surface of Kerbin is not equal to its value in orbit, or on the surface of the Mun, or on the surface of Laythe. If you had a contract with someone to deliver 6t of uranium to Val snd they reneged, you now have a credit to buy 6t of Uranium on Kerbin. That puts you 7600 dV and 3.5 years in the hole. Because the cost of transportation is so high both in resources and (more importantly) in player time there is no universal conversation rate for resources. All value is contextual to where it originates and where its being delivered. 
 

And if you want to know how much worse it can get try to imagine different players timewarping at different rates and deciding who’s timeline is authoritative when settling contract disputes. 
 

27 minutes ago, Drakenred65 said:

a player who has more time to spend  in a world will have an edge over one who is new to it all. Again that’s just the way it is.

Maybe, but in setting the underlying dynamics the devs can either provide all the tools imaginable for mass exploitation or they can let resources just be resources and let players themselves make informal, in-turn, good faith agreements over chat in context. In the latter case burning people means losing friends, losing allies, and negating any reason to engage in multiplayer. It means you follow through with friends because you have a mutual vested interest in building cool new things and discovering new places together. In the former case you’ve bogged the entire experience down in contract disputes, fraud, check kiting, and pseudolegalismo that has nothing to do with core gameplay.   You’ve unintentionally introduced a moral hazard and perverse incentives because exploitation and abuse are more profitable than simply playing the game. 

Edited January 5, 2023 by Pthigrivi

[Ryaja]

1 minute ago, Pthigrivi said:

However, and this is a fundamental factor in space travel, value of x kg on the surface of Kerbin is not equal to its value in orbit, or on the surface of the Mun, or on the surface of Laythe. If you had a contract with someone to deliver 6t of uranium to Val snd they reneged, you now have a credit to buy 6t of Uranium on Kerbin. That puts you 7600 dV and 3.5 years in the hole. Because the cost of transportation is so high both in resources and (more importantly) in player time there is no universal conversation rate for resources. All value is contextual to where it originates and where its being delivered. 

Yes, that's why you set your own prices too, you include the shipping. This is an essential part of space travel and will also help people learn to manage space programs.

[darthgently]

Just now, Pthigrivi said:

If you had a contract with someone to deliver 6t of uranium to Val snd they reneged, you now have a credit to buy 6t of Uranium on Kerbin. That puts you 7600 dV and 3.5 years in the hole. Because the cost of transportation is so high both in resources and (more importantly) in player time there is no universal conversation rate for resources. All value is contextual to where it originates and where its being delivered. 

Clearly, KSP needs a court system as well as a currency.  J/k.   I vote for keeping it mostly about rockets

[Pthigrivi]

7 minutes ago, Ryaja said:

Yes, that's why you set your own prices too, you include the shipping. This is an essential part of space travel and will also help people learn to manage space programs.

You’re not understanding. The value isn’t just a calculation. Its relative to where its coming from, where its being delivered to, what tech levels and what level of processing each party has access to, and how much each player feels like they actually need x or y resource delivered to a particular place, when they need it, and how much they may or may not trust the person they’re dealing with. There’s no useful exchange rate. Its all situational and contextual. You’ve inadvertently created an incentive process where the way to get ahead is to exploit desperate players and local resource scarcity for leverage, potentially scamming them out of delivery entirely because they can just go cry to World Bank of Kerbin for recompense. None of this has anything to do with the core game.