One thing you got right Andy is that we could discuss this forever and I wouldn't be able to convince you that today is Saturday if you won't admit it. There is an ancient Greek saying by the comedian Aristophanes about it. It translates roughly as: "You won't persuade me even if you convince me". So, as I end this thread (and my case) I give you this nice link:
https://sim02.simcountry.com/cgi-bin/cgiw?productsuppliers&miProduct=300&miSortOrder=1&miAmount=248570864935 In FB, today 14.12.2013, at top market price (741K per unit):
a. The biggest corp has a market value of ... 500B only.
b. Half the MBMU corps are LOSING, yes, LOSING money even at top price
c. The rest are just making a measly profit of 100M to 300M per month which will turn to BILLI
Of course there are many that make losses.
this was clear from the start.
they are badly managed.
I looked at the ones you reffered to and they paid far too much for their raw materials.
It is very easy to destroy corporations.
I see many of these corporations with the highest market value around. they are extremely profitable when managed correctly.
There is a saying about a dancer who does not perform and blames the shape of the floor.
I hear this from andy quite often. We are to manage quality of all our materials on a individual corporation by corporation basis and yet you tell us that a good area is around 190-200. But you keep pointing out that half the corps make materials where quality does not mater.
On top of that the only way to get a set quality for any given resource to any specific corporation it by using a direct contract from a corp set up to produce at the quality you want.
To do this a player would first need a huge number of corporations at which point they would need to set up a contract for each resource for every corp manually as there is no point selling your 200ish quality services to your maintenance corp you would sell the 120 quality services from another service corp to that corp. And sell the 200Q services to your weapons corps. Assuming the player had this vast supply of corps to use contracting all of this with the number of corps needed
there are several examples of corps that do not need quality other than maintenance which will soon mater...and i suspect mess up all contracts involving maintenance.
How do you ensure that any given corp gets products at one quality and another corp at another quality? Unless you manually buy each supply every time a corp needs it you can not even set up supply quality for a given corp different from any other given corp. Much less any specific supply for a corp.
We do not think that you should micromanage the quality.
if you want to, you can place manual orders in some corporations and leave the others to the automatic procedure.
However, we do not see a reason to do this.
decide on the quality level you want your raw materials to be and set it everywhere.
For now, it does make sense to have it at a lower level in some corporations where quality does not matter but we have tested mix of corporations and the average is good enough. Not optimized.
with quality becoming more important for more products, the average will be even better.
We see some players who do not upgrade the quality of the corporations to 200 or 225. This is another way to keep the output product at a lower quality if quality does not matter.
turning off quality upgrading is a one time action and cuts the cost for the corporation.
the utput quality depends both on the raw materials and
The quality problem in all the maintenance corporations will be solved in the coming weeks.