Ideas for a healthier game economy

[Tagamogi]

I love that idea as it reminds me more of how DAOC was done (but with houses not stalls) and I had sooooooooooooo much fun in DAOC running around the neighborhoods shopping directly from the houses.

This actually seems like a really nice idea to get people exploring housing neighborhoods. I've had limited experience with player housing (EQ1, Lotro), and while it was fun to buy a house and decorate it initially, the neighborhoods always seemed really deserted.

If we had shops inside houses in PG rather than the current keep area, this actually would allow us to have more sellers too, and the shop rental prices could be lowered since we aren't competing for a fixed amount of vendor stalls anymore. I've been thinking about Citan's original post on this where he said something to the effect that the stalls allow people to enjoy playing shopkeepers. I think this is true to a certain extent - I love being able to pick a name and decorations and message. But inevitably I run into the problem where due to the increasing daily rental costs, I just can't keep the shop running profitably. If I decide to sell low-profit items for a reasonable price, I run into that no profit problem much sooner. At that point, I can of course dump spare cash into keeping my shopkeeper game going and making sure nobody else steals my NPC shopkeeper but it seems a bit silly to spend lots of money in order to run a store.

So, what I think could be fun:
- Create a central search function that shows which items are being sold where, but not their price. So, price-conscious players can visit all the vendors to compare prices, while other players might just want to head to the nearest vendor, and nobody is going to waste their time looking for an item that isn't on sale anywhere.
- Allow shops in player housing in addition to the keep area. The keep area could still be used by players without a house.
- Lower the daily store rental cost, and maybe just keep it as a flat fee rather than increasing per day or make the cost increase much more gradual.
- Add a sales tax, so that players selling expensive items will pay more money and players selling less expensive (or no) items will pay less. The current system doesn't really encourage playing around with items if you aren't sure they will sell or if the items don't have a large profit margin. Replacing a large rental fee with a small rental fee + tax on items sold may encourage more diversity in what's being sold.

On a totally unrelated note, do people still buy things from the Consignment tab? I've pretty much stopped checking them since the vendor stalls came out...

[Dragone]

I like the idea of having areas of certain type of vendors based on what they are selling but what I would love is let's say a board just like the one for players work orders to be in each area and instead of clicking on each single vendor all the vendors products gets displayed to you on 1 board, needing a weapon I click on the weapon board, any vendors that put any weapons for sale all appear in 1 board.

Hopefully all this " broken" economy issues are looked at, after all we know the game is going to be wiped what should be addressed is what can we do after reset to stabilize economy, I would say observe and study current market and learn from it.

[Crissa]

Even with player housing, there will be a fixed number of in-game stalls. There's a limit to resources.

But you put up a good point; maybe the stall setup could be saved and only show in-world for the time you spend? That way you're not paying for when you don't have enough to sell or whatnot.

I just wish there was a better way to figure out who's shop was whose and to find them better. It takes so long to visit each of the stalls to find what I'm looking for. So many clicks.

I haven't seen anything in the consignment tabs that I could buy since the stalls came out.

[Eachna]

There's a lot of discussion about buying from shops, but an economy has two sides, and selling materials also has issues.

I feel like we need an option for harvesters to sell their raw materials to buyers. I tend to pick up everything I find on the ground out in the world. I know it refreshes fairly quickly, and I dabble in enough different crafts that I can use most of it. I sell the things I don't use to NPCs for cash.

One thing I can't use enough of is wood (there are other items also, but wood is a good example). I pick up much more than I use. I'd much rather sell it to a player than a NPC. There are a few issues with this.

I never know what is a good price. I have to catch someone in Trade whose looking for the exact wood I'm unloading, which is hard because of my timezone (fewer people in Trade). Too often I'll have cedar and they'll want maple (or vice-versa). Buyers expect me to have full stacks, and often I want to unload a smaller stack because I need cash for something now. It's a little bit ironic that we're told not to hoard stuff because of limited storage, but the only consistent way to get better than NPC vendor price is to hoard till we have a full stack. I have to find buyers online because it's very rare for people to waste work order slots on wood. Some do, and I've sold to them where I've seen them, but again they usually want full stacks (unless it's something extremely rare).

Once I sort out the my wood, then it starts all over again with my fruit, or hides, or whatever. Selling harvested materials for the best price becomes its own job.

I, when I'm wearing my harvester hat, don't want to deal with these issues. I don't really want the "best" price, I just want "Better than the NPC vendors." But there's no infrastructure for this. Storage is tight (especially in Serbule) for aggregating partial stacks into full stacks. Traders need to be able to buy a lot of diverse items, not just a few items (like with work orders). I need them to be able buy when *I'm* online which happens to be when most American or European players aren't connected, not when they're actually online. And so on.

[Tagamogi]

It's a little bit ironic that we're told not to hoard stuff because of limited storage, but the only consistent way to get better than NPC vendor price is to hoard till we have a full stack.

Yeah, pretty much all of the game mechanics reward players that are able to hoard, which is unfortunate. A similar problem is the vendor stalls increasing in cost if you rent them multiple times - that means that in order to make the most money from your vendor stall, you need to hoard up the items that you are planning to sell for days or weeks until you are ready to rent a stall and can fully stock it.

Going back to your actual problem - I'm not sure if making it easier for players to sell to other players is necessarily in the best interests of the overall economy. If everyone can easily sell to other players for more than vendor price than nobody is actually going to sell to the vendors. Taking money out of the economy is actually a good thing since it slows down inflation, so if a player sells an item to a vendor for price x, and a second player buys it for twice x, that's x money removed from the inflation pool...

That being said, I do get what you are saying. When I play, I often think that I'd just like to be able to toss up a couple items on the auction house and get them out of my inventory. Selling to other players also feels more rewarding since I know that an item is actually going to be used.

I wonder if it would be possible to modify the player work order system to allow partial completion of a work order. For example, I think it would be nice if someone could put out a work order that says "I want up to 1000 pieces of maple wood and will pay 50 councils for each piece" and different people could then turn in smaller amounts of wood, 3 or 10 or 50 or 89 at a time, until the total 1000 pieces have been collected. I think that could help a lot with common consumables like wood and hides.

[Crissa]

I think the current situation we're getting the worst of both worlds: Deflation to the common items but inflation on the player market.

All I need are prisms, but... I can only get them from players right now.

[ShieldBreaker]

I'm not sure if this will actually help the economy, but I think it would be really fun and it might help the economy.

Idea:
Extend the Player Shopkeeper system to allow them to buy items off other players at face value.

-limited to the cash on hand of the Shopkeeper (allow owner to add money to the shop for the purpose of buying stuff)
- maybe with some controls as to what % of cash on hand or a set amount by owner.
-limited by the Retail Management so purchased items don't exceed the shops inventory size. (maybe allow some bonus extra slots for bought items)
-Allow the player to choose what items should be purchased, I'll buy resources but not weapons. etc...
-Allow the player to set rules of what to do with bought items, hold as hidden items, put up gems at X2 face value.

in future iteration more complex rules could be added, if someone has Poetry book X in inventory offer then X councils for it. Or only buy gear with face value of 200-1000. Only buy from guild members, Only buy from Player X etc.

I can see at least the one downside that new players would have less incentive to build favor with NPC because I would think these new money pools would fill there need to sell stuff when the NPC money runs out. They would go to the players stalls first and sell what they could.

For people filling your shop with junk it would be optional to buy stuff, and it would just have to be a risk you take. You aren't out anything but time because the items face value is what you pay. And I be thrilled to find something cool I want that happened to be sold to my shop.

Rules for Account wide characters (aka alts)

If your Alts could be the only ones that could sell directly to your own shop, it would still be helpful and cool. This could also have much simpler structure, all stuff sold by an alt automatically gets hidden, or put up at X2. No need for trying to limit what would be bought.

[cratoh]

Everquest 2 did a nice thing. Centralised broker, but if you went to the house where the person had sales crates you could get it minus the broker fee.

Maybe add a central search feature (broker) then penalise a player if they buy direct ratehr than going to house(presumably that's where it is headed) or to the player stall.

[Khaylara]

I liked the search function idea a lot, i wonder if it's hard to implement (growing increasingly frustrated searching so many shops when i need 1 gem)-let's say i need quartz, i get in that area and type /search stalls quartz and the stalls that sell it get highlighted or with a !! over their heads (or something simple like that). I'm not a programmer so I don't know how hard that would be to implement but it would be amazing and save so much time.

[Crissa]

I'd love player stores with limits cash. NPCs do that, so I'd expect a player store to do the same ^-^