Suggestion: trading

[Haste]

The main reason for this is simpler and unfortunately - as far as I am aware - not a problem we can avoid: for "High Risk Commodities", buyers have to be shut off from buying the commodity they sell for two main reasons:

• The profit curve of these commodities is exponential. Meaning that the further you take the item from the original producer (cheapest salepoint / point of origin), the more profit per second you start making. The issue with that is that a hypothetical reseller halfway down the route would be vastly superior for credits-per-hour than buying from the cheapest place. Imagine the origin point as "A", a reseller as "B" and the final, highest buying point as "C". For the section of the route from A -> B, you make, let's say, "6 CSU" on average. For B -> C, you make "12 CSU". These are just numbers for the purpose of an example, don't look too much into them. On average, the route from A to C makes 9 CSU. But why would you ever run that segment if you can run the quicker B -> C segment? You'd just find two well-connected, much shorter runs, reducing the risk you take by having to fly a long distance, and making more money in the process.
  
  To fix this, we made resellers significantly more expensive to buy these high risk commodities from. Their prices are calculated as if they were much further from their point of origin than they truly are. This reduces their viability as a source to buy the commodity from. So B -> C is toned down this way, making it not a concern. However, this creates a new problem: B sells for way more, and we don't have separate buy and sell prices, so it also buys for way more. All we have done is move the problem. It isn't B -> C that is massively too profitable now, it is A -> B. There is no solution for this problem other than, as I mentioned, variable buy and sell prices, which unfortunately are not a feature Freelancer supports nor one we can realistically implement (any time soon). So, instead, we prohibit selling these specific commodities to bases that sell them, so we can have resellers without creating hugely broken routes all over the place.
  
  
• The second main reason applies specifically to HRCs that can be refined from ores (and ore-like commodities). The issue here is that we want to create a profit margin for PoBs refining ores, naturally, to incentivize building and maintaining a PoB for this purpose as well as to pay for the refining costs themselves. To create this profit margin, we make the "derived" HRCs very expensive (90 credits across the board currently). However, that creates a potential problem where PoB owners could avoid having to do any significant trips to sell their refined wares: just sell it right back to the 90-credit salepoint close by and cash in your profit right away. Of course, you'd make less than you would carrying it to a proper destination, but depending on how the numbers work out it could be sufficiently viable that the entire ore -> HRC system would just devolve into people refining an ore locally and then also selling it to an NPC base 20k away. Not ideal, really. By preventing players from selling to bases that sell the refined ware, we basically decouple the prices of PoBs and NPCs. This also means that we can buff up the profitability of PoB refining without much concern for these sorts of super-short routes, if desired.
  

TL;DR: We had little choice but to add this restriction. The only real fix is variable buy & sell prices and the current only way we know of implementing them is incredibly, well, silly and undesirable. Maybe one day.

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