Plort Market Drops Without Selling Plorts, Not Making Sense

[Imatron]

I've played the Xbox One version and got the PC a few days back since it was on sale. One thing has been a constant pain in the a**:

The Plort market prices seem to plummet the moment I acquire a particular plort, even when I haven't sold ANY on the plort market. With my experience from the Xbox version, I figured I'd start right off the bat setting up to stockpile and only sell when a plort's value is high, figuring I did something early on to mess up the market. I got Honey Hunter Largos set up so I'd stockpile them while using the Phosphor slimes to make money while those piled up.

After getting a small stockpile of about 150 phosphor plorts to sell, the phosphor plorts immediately dropped from 30 to 14. The Hunter plorts dropped from 80 to 30, and the honey from 50 to about 20. I hadn't even SOLD any of them, and as far as I can tell the price dropped before the daily in-game reset.

I've also noticed that any time I progress and find other slime types that currently go for high, they immediately drop by more than 50%. I don't understand the point of even trying to farm other slimes (save for Slime Science) if they always drop to match my existing slime prices the moment I simply SEE them. I feel like the game needs an update to always lock one slime type or another at 50 plorts minimum, even if it changes daily. Or at least if you saturate the market with ONE plort, the game should be programmed to drop just THAT plort until you've saturated the market with other plorts.

This is really game breaking, and turned the game into a matter of what color I'd like to sell, and not what plort was worth anything. Everything hanging out at 8-15 plorts makes the game infuriating, particularly when you start on that 7ee club thing.

Clearly there are OTHER factors controlling the plort market, but does anyone know what these are and if it can be used to fix the market? Otherwise, what even is the purpose of the market if I can never get the opportunity to sell them for the prices that make me rush out to get the darn things in the first place?

[HeraldOfOpera]

Confirmation bias. It's random and you're unlucky. (Actually, it's only one of those things, but it's also exactly one of those things rather than what you're claiming)

[Imatron]

So what your saying is that the plort value is entirely random with the exception that if I flood the market with one plort then that plort drops.

And furthermore, it is entirely by chance that in two versions of the game, each time I gained access to a new slime it plummeted in value? Thats about 12 for 12 of new plorts discovered on the Xbox One version and so far 6 for 6 it has happened on the PC version.

You can understand why I would mistake this as being by design, but hopefully that means I might still have better luck on the PC version.

[purplecharmanderz]

Had it not been for the fact we've dug into the code for the plort market numerous times, and with everyone who has been digging we've yet to find anything resembling an actual check for this (and with how often this seemed to happen to myself, believe me i tried to figure it out) its pretty hard for me to actually say this is a thing at this point.

Random noise can make for a drastic change for those with a distinctly high value given how it in practice ranges from about 50% the value Calculated to 167% the calculated value (2 seperate random noise values with a +/- 30% deviation each. One for individual plorts and another for the market as a whole). This randomness ironically covers the range of the drops you describe here. Annoying yes but this is meant to actually simulate a live market to a degree. If your hunter plorts were at roughly 50% saturation (of which they start at day 1 at) the base price to then be tossed into the rest of the algorithm would be 45. Having the random noise range in practice (in theory ignoring practical restraints it would be a bit larger of a range from 49% to 169%) is 22.5-75.5. Given you landed 30 at the end and 80 at the beginning we could work backwards using our extremes to calculate an original price which is what is effected by sales. Presuming 30 to be the 0.5 extreme (50%) and working backwards we get a base of 60 (which is the default price of a hunter plort so this isnt that bad when it comes to being reasonable with saturation and such. Fire this in for a max value with this base and random noise lands us around 100.2 (round down for any decimals)

This does over simplify some aspects of the code, since random noise does pick a "random value" (technically pseudo random, but to the casual player it seems random since its difficult to determine the seed sent into the algorithm, but it isn't impossible and can be predicted. Reason there are functional market predictors out there for the game, yet to see anyone prove one to be incorrect on anything.)

The actual process of seeding the random value im not overly familiar with, so i can't go into much detail with that, which does lead to the calculations i gave not quite adding up in some cases, as the seeded value may not work for those particular cases to reach the extremes. (Example, minimum value for the hunter plort determined by another data miner who actually made a market predictor, is 20. If at 100% saturation, base value before randomness should be about 30. 50% of that would be 15, which is out of range due to other factors that this basic explanation does not cover with the seeding process, and a couple other details i may have missed.)

TL;DR, while i would probably put it in a more polite manner as i don't feel this exact set of wording is ideal for the subject, but herald did already say it.

Originally posted by HeraldOfOpera:

Confirmation bias. It's random and you're unlucky.

Can definitely see why it would be believed to be like such, i believed it to be such as well until i actually got digging into the code.

[Imatron]

Yeah, I assumed you guys must have delved into the code for Herald to say its random. Just annoying that it always had to hit what I was gearing up to mass produce. I also wish the game would give you something to better guess the economic changes with, and have it more skewed by what you were selling than apparently the RNG Im getting.

Maybe have it give you a way to see what other ranchers are selling to better guess the long term marketability trends?