Ideas for a healthier game economy

[Eachna]

Yeah, pretty much all of the game mechanics reward players that are able to hoard, which is unfortunate.

Unfortunate, or planned given they're selling storage for real money once B2P starts up?

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...

Selling to vendors injects new money into the economy.

Selling to players removes money from the economy (through taxes, listing fees, etc.)

Selling to vendors removes items from the economy immediately.

Selling to players keeps items in the economy for the short term but most will eventually consumed.

It's better for the overall economy to sell to other players than vendors. It removes some of the money that the vendors inject into the economy or at least prevents the injection of "new" money, and it still results in the consumption of items.

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.

Well, with the caveat of not knowing how hard it would be to rewrite the code, I think partially filling work orders is a very good short term solution.

Combine that with a new skill (or expanding existing skills) to give more work order slots and we could eventually have Traders.

There are going to be people who want to do this (buy low, sell high, wheel and deal). All that needs to be done is to give them the tools to do it.