Gameplay-wise, I suppose it could be balanced... my beef with this idea lies in the fact that it makes zero sense. Exchange rates can't make you money. How would they? Assuming the converter doesn't take a commission, you have the exact same amount of money, it's just in different denominations. If you have $3.50 dollars and you convert it to 350 cents, your money isn't suddenly worth more. I can convert it back and forth all I want, and I end up with an equal value every time.
I guess I'm really puzzled at the notion that picking up a stack of credit cards in Kusari and hauling it to Liberty should make you money. All you're doing is moving money. That's not in of itself profitable, any more than transferring my $5 bill from my pocket to my desk makes it suddenly more valuable.
Now, if you exchanged your Liberty credits for Kusari credits, then suddenly Kusari went Industrial-age and the value of the Kusari credit skyrocketed, then you could exchange it back for Liberty credits and have more of those. A dynamic economy would be a fascinating addition to Freelancer, but I'm 99.9% sure it can't be done.
I'll be the first to say that economics is not my strong suit, and if someone can explain this concept in a way that makes sense, I'll go along with it; until then, this money-making route doesn't seem any more legitimate than using a savegame editor.:unsure:
The Idea does actually work in RL. Assuming you play your conversions right and use large sums of money, you can actually make a profit simply by changing money into different currency.
I come from Britain so I'll use my money as an example and obviously I'll use low numbers.
Now, the current conversion rate is about $1.95 per GBP (Great British Pound). so I convert 100GPB into USD and I have 195USD.
Now, hypothetically, let's say the strength of the pound drop dramatically, so tomorrow the exchange rate is 1.8 USD per GBP. I convert my 195USD back to GPB and I get 108.33 GBP.
So through these two conversions, I've made 8 pounds profit.
Now obviously, in FL you can't have this dynamic change in conversion rates, but you would have 5 different "House Currencies". So by setting them up in such a way that making "Circular" trading routes, you can turn a tidy profit.
So say you start in Bretonia and you buy a Ten Million Credit Card (10mCC) for 9.8 million. You can either, take it to Liberty and sell it for the 10 million it's worth in terms of game credits, or perhaps you could take it Kusari and perhaps sell it for 1.1 million credit.
So that the ACTUAL credit value of card suddenly becomes relative to where you actually buy/sell it. That's one way to implement it another is...
To have House specific Credit Cards with a correct ACTUAL credit value vs. named value so a Bretonian 10 million Credit Card is worth 10 million credits, but if you were to haul it to Kusari, you could sell it for 12 million credits. This is more complicated and more difficult to implement I believe though, and is also without any immediately obvious advantage over the first method.
The only reason I came up with this method is to find a way of getting Credit Cards (back) into general circulation. 99% of all credit cards are held by player banks, so there's isn't a good pirating trade in them. However, if people would run the risk of being pirated to make a large profit then it would make pirating more profitable and Card running very hazardous.
Right, exchange rate fluctuation. Theoretically, it's just as possible to lose money that way, but hell, we can just pretend we're futures investment geniuses. A circular exchange route like the one you mentioned isn't out of the question. As for the other idea, I think you might be up against a brick wall in terms of mod-ability; the game right now has one currency, the credit, and is programmed with universal reflexivity in mind, i.e. 1 = 1 in all cases. I don't know if it's possible to recode the system, though I suspect it isn't. Actually, the more I think about it, the more unlikely it seems; removing that trait rips the backbone out of FL's economy system, simple as it is. Besides, Freelancer is about combat and trade runs, not consulting exchange charts. :)
I'm aware the one equals one thank you ;P, though you might not believe it.
But there wouldn't be a need to consult any charts or re-code the system. You simply Name a Commodity as a 10 million Credit Card, but set the actual purchase value to 9.8 million on a base. It's a rough simulation, but if you can then take it to base which is coded to buy the same commodity for 10.2 million then you've made you're profit. Thus it is a trade that you're doing.
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