Suggestion Shop-keepers, and the economics of NPC sales.

[Rednaxman]

Now, this is going to be a difficult thing to balance, and that will always be a fact. the economy will always be difficult to get right because there are just so ways a person can mess it up. everythings too cheep? great, now nothing is worth anything. make everything too expensive? great, now new people cant even get started. BUT, i believe there is a way to fix this in reguards to long term, and short term trade of craft items.

put a hard cap on the quantity of items that can be bought per person per season, or produce a hard cap to the amount of a specific item that can ever be bought.

think about it, a merchant doesnt just have an infinit supply of an item, now would they? they would want to sell to as many people as possible, for the highest price possible.
I can see what you are going to say, that it would be an issue with new players who make the mistake of using too many of their starter food, potions etc. BUT, i believe this issue would be quickly resolved by the inclusion of a simple method of gaining a very low quality resource, E.g monster meat, suspicious potions and potions of lesser-lesser healing.

the objective of doing this is not only to support the RP side of things, but also to stimulate the advancement of craftsmen throughout the world, to begin selling their creations to the masses and prevent relience on the server itself. by limiting the amount a person can fall back on npcs, the players are forced to fill this gap in the market, with adventurers being pushed to sell the produce they gather out in the world, and craftsmen to make money by selling their products to those adventurers in turn. by doing this, everything becomes much more valuble because there is a Hard Limit to what can be gained through passive play.

This also opens up opertunities in the market for seasonal items, where items get rarer and rarer the less available they are and thus are open to item flipping, where a player invests large amounts in seasonal ingredients, then sell them for more three seasons later where they are much rarer and thus are worth more.

Please give me your opinions on the subject, and possibly if anybody is interested in this topic expend on how we can support the growth of the economy between players, and seperating the relience on the server for trade.

 

[KabbyDankGod]

Yeh, I believe that merchants should have a limited amount of money and items. That way you cannot just infinitely purchase certain items from merchants that are valuable to everyone like, food, potions and drinks. This limit could either be global or per player, with global being more troublesome as then someone could just start to clean out low-level merchants so new players couldn't get items.

The testing should be a bit easier as Dyescape has a good statistics setup, though I'm not sure if merchants are setup yet. I don't think there should be a hard limit on specific items but rather the limit should be either the merchant runs out of gold or they run out of the items you want.

 

[Rednaxman]

Whilst I do believe this could be a good method, this runs the risk of exploits becoming more commonplace throughout the world, where a person can eventually drain an npc of all their money with no real consequence.

A more elegant method of doing this would to be increasing the price of an item slowly the more of it you purchase, thus meaning you have to turn to a player based route to obtain your items for a reasonable price and to slowly lower the amount of cash you can sell items to a merchant for, as they will may have nouse for such large quantities of one item.

I could see this working as a long term method, with it resetting every so often based on how long it has been since the sale. I would suggest that once a full in game year has passed, the items are forgotten about and thereof you can purchase them for the regular price

 

[KabbyDankGod]

If they make a day be 40 minutes, that would mean a year ingame would be rougly 10 days in the realworld. That might be a bit too long. Rather it should be maybe per season so it resets rougly every 2.5 days

Besides that I do like the idea of prices raising when items are bought, though the first five to ten items shouldnt raise in price

 

[Rednaxman]

Of course, I was suggesting that it be based on cumulative interest, where the price would increase say.... 5% each time. That doesn't effect someone buying one or two, but two hundred ? Different story entirely

 

[MrDienns]

put a hard cap on the quantity of items that can be bought per person per season, or produce a hard cap to the amount of a specific item that can ever be bought.

The problem with this is that it does need to scale with the amount of players. Imagine a shopkeeper only has 10 potatoes, and 12 people want to buy one potato. That's fine, then we just need 2 potatoes from somewhere else and the NPC can please the majority of people who wanted their potato. The problem is that when you have 1000 players instead of 10, and you still sell 10 potatoes, then shops will be out of stock at all time. The game needs to be scalable, meaning the merchants stock should somehow be based on the amount of players or economic activity. I'm not entirely sure what would be the best approach, but a single hard value of stock isn't scalable with a playerbase that can grow and shrink at any time. Let's see if we can find a solution to that problem.

That is only applicable on a central stock reused for all players. Per player stocks wouldn't have this issue.

 

[KabbyDankGod]

The problem with this is that it does need to scale with the amount of players. Imagine a shopkeeper only has 10 potatoes, and 12 people want to buy one potato. That's fine, then we just need 2 potatoes from somewhere else and the NPC can please the majority of people who wanted their potato. The problem is that when you have 1000 players instead of 10, and you still sell 10 potatoes, then shops will be out of stock at all time. The game needs to be scalable, meaning the merchants stock should somehow be based on the amount of players or economic activity. I'm not entirely sure what would be the best approach, but a single hard value of stock isn't scalable with a playerbase that can grow and shrink at any time. Let's see if we can find a solution to that problem.

Yeah that's why I suggested making things per player. Maybe there is a potion that a lot of people want, but you're only able to buy maybe three of them every reset. That would boost the worth of player alchemists that can provide those potion. Or people just have alts farm them and trade them to the main account.

 

[Perotin]

I know there are some economy plugins that scale shops relative to supply/demand, which I've always thought is the best way to make the economy more interactive. I/e The price of an item increases as more buy it, and decreases if less people buy it.

The cons to this is that some rich dude could drive up the price of an item, making it basically unattainable for a lot of people. There are a few ways to solve this:

- Have alternatives to every item so you cannot have a monopoly

- Have a function (looking at you @Zirker ) where the price of the item becomes exponential (not the price itself, but how much money needed to raise said price) after a certain point to make driving up prices very difficult. Would have to find a number to start doing said function

- Reset all shops every month or so, which could create mini-recessions or a bull-market (if price jumps up and everyone sells at profit or vice versa)

- Limit the amount of purchases per item per play, which would make the most objective sense imo.

 

[Zirker]

I think he meant that there are 10 potatoes per player, if there are 100 players the shopkeeper would sell 1000 in total but only 10 to each player. Either way I think this doesn't solve the problem of it being too expensive or to cheap, after all we are left with another problem which is, either there is too much stock of the item or too few...

 

[Euvrounin]

If you'll ask me .. i'll just have the merchant behave in way that if it has a rare or highly bought items to sell, it'll run somewhere else and hide until one lucky explorer find him.

you wont find him in his usual spot

jk.