One issue I see is that regular automatic mineral dumps would mean that the minerals from people who don't care about gates would still dwarf the intentionally-deposited ones, unless I'm misunderstanding what you mean there. If the dump is less frequent than the gate launches, then it wouldn't affect all gates, but it would have a proportionately larger impact when it does dump.

Mineral dumps are necessary to stop gates from becoming stagnant. If everyone doesn't care about gate crafting then the LCDVM would have all the minerals and the gates would have none. If you're worried about about the dump overwriting peoples efforts then you could dump the minerals evenly amongst all gates so the impact is much less on any particular gate and player skewed minerals will still have their effect. The idea here is to give people a chance to craft a gate without letting people who don't care to ruin their effort. You don't want to have minerals just disappear without contributing to gate creation because that also leads to gate stagnation.

I would guess the transfer cost should be higher than 1 crown, as that makes every crown I get effectively a mineral of my choice — which makes manual mineral gathering pretty pointless for the purpose of gate influence. In fact, the handful of crowns I get from minerals would give me five times the influence of the minerals I manually deposited! Such a system might work fine, and it would provide a major crown sink, but it would change the gate crafting system more than it first appears. The transfer cost would have to be tweaked to balance how effective transferring is relative to manual mineral collection.

1 mineral = 5 crowns into the economy. With my idea, 1 mineral = 5 crowns minus the cost of transferring a mineral. Worst case is no-one transfers any minerals and the crowns added to economy is the same as it is now. Expected case is that half of minerals are paid to be transferred meaning crown output is effectively 4.5 per mineral. If you try to bump the price up then you just end up with the same problem that boosting has. Too expensive for such a small benefit.

How would this interact with boosts? The LCDVM couldn't provide less payout than manual depositing, or people would manually deposit even if they don't care about construction. It wouldn't work to give people the boosted price without actually sending the minerals to the boosted gates, as the boost wouldn't affect gate construction then.

The likelihood that a stratum will be based on its minerals is proportional to how filled it is. The extreme case where gates get no minerals would thus yield completely random gates, not stagnant ones; stagnation only occurs when strata keep getting filled the same way. We may be using different definitions for stagnant, though. I'm using it to mean repetitive with little variation.

Well if they're going to be random anyway, why complain about having the machine dumping its minerals into the gates. The only way the LCDVM would have a large effect when it dumps is when majority of players don't pay to transfer to gates or don't manually dump into gates (meaning most the minerals are unused in the LCDVM). In either case, the outcome would be either random or whatever the most popular minerals were in that period, which is mostly random.

Sorry; thought that's what I was doing. I don't have nearly enough information to guess the proportion of interested and uninterested people with any precision, but I doubt only half would get transferred with a 1-crown fee. If the wiki's right, each player can get at most 6 minerals per depth, and that's only for the largest-size mineral chunk; in the low-paying odd strata, I make enough each depth to buy over 100 depth-runs worth of minerals from the LCDVM, and I make over twice that per depth in the even strata — and that's crowns alone, not mats and minerals. I figure I can make enough on average to account for around 175 gate-indifferent players, and other people play much more profitably than I do. Unless the influencer/indifferent ratio is even more skewed than that, the LCDVM would stay pretty much empty and the net crown output would be needlessly high, even at 4 per mineral, since people would be willing to pay even more.

It doesn't matter if the machine stays empty. In fact, if the machine stays empty because people are paying to have it transferred to gates then that's a good thing, you're making it sound like it's a bad thing. Also, you seem to think that you need to make the transfer fee cost most/more than what you get out of a normal run, why? I'll repeat; the intention of the LCDVM is to allow players a chance to have a gate crafted without non-interested players interfering. This also serves as a small crown sink because if it becomes a large crown sink, you'll just end up with the same problem as boosting, too expensive for something that's not even necessary in the game.

Net crown output needlessly high? The LCDVM actually reduces the net crown output from minerals because of a transfer fee, which compared to right now, there is isn't fee. You feel as though this LCDVM should be the main crown sink in the game. This is silly and won't work because the gain just isn't attractive enough to justify making it cost more. In-fact, increasing the cost of transfers will reduce its effectiveness as a crown sink because then people won't actually use it.

People don't use the boost system much now, but they wouldn't use it at all with gate influence that cheap, since boosting would cost exactly as much as single-handedly filling up and locking the depth. Some players have enough stockpiled to single-handedly fill a whole gate at a 1/1 conversion ratio — not that there'd be enough supply to let them do it.

Double Post

Makes sense; my misunderstanding there came from this:

"You have to remember that people only get 5 crowns per mineral to begin with. You don't just go and take a large chunk of that away."

The dynamic prices were by definition based on usage. If nobody is transferring minerals, the transfer prices automatically drop to compensate.

If you have to wait to transfer minerals because they are getting to expensive then you jump straight into: "Gate crafting requires focused distribution." If you tell people to wait then pay then wait then pay, that's no longer focused distribution, which is what you need for gate crafting. And if you want people to not wait and keep on paying increasingly higher transfer costs then we end up back at "High prices are bad because no-one will use it."

This is the first time you've mentioned for transfer costs to update weekly and for the price increases to be gate specific, but what is that supposed to change?

Infrequent updates allow the prices to hit a much more stable equilibrium, as the algorithm would look at all the transfers and deposits for an arbitrarily long time period. It could get a pretty good idea of an equilibrium price with such a large dataset, and once it got close to even, it would stay steady unless a large number of players all changed their behavior. I would guess eight days worth of global data would be good, to match the gate construction cycle.

Sounds great. I don't think it would work towards what I have in mind for the LCDVM though, as I've already stated a few times. You seem to insist on using this idea so I recommend you use it in your mineral station thread so all your thoughts on this matter isn't wasted.

Dynamically-distributed costs aside, how about dropping the separate manual deposit interfaces for the individual gates? As long as there's an interface that lets us transfer minerals to any stratum of any gate from a central location, why not allow direct deposits from there too? You tell it how many minerals you want to send to the stratum, and if that's more than you have the excess will come from transfers.