Time for Chain Mail

[Rigwyn]

Look, the price of things in the real world is based on what people are willing to pay and what sellers are willing to sell for. That's a fact.  ( unless you live somewhere where prices are forcibly fixed or dictated. )

If I try to sell apples for $400 each, you will simply find another seller who is offering a more reasonable price. Likewise, sellers have a limit on how much of a resource that can sell. Npcs don't. If you were to sell apples well below fair price, you would deplete your supply and not profit - possibly take a loss.

In my example with swords, I demonstrated the effects of having an NPC offer a fixed price on the buy or sell side regardless of supply and demand.  if Harn started SELLING Q300 swords from his infinite stockpile for 5,000 tria each then crafters would not be able to sell for any more than that because Harn would be undercutting them.

The example I gave was simple for the sake of explaining the concept. Yes, you can add all sorts of logic to try and counter manipulation but you cannot eliminate it altogether. If you look at modern stock markets, you will see that there are people who's job it is to monitor the market for manipulation, to investigate and prosecute those who do so.  Do you think Planeshift has the resources to do that?  NO.

Also, What you mentioned about being suspicious of inflated prices is not that easy. To do that you need some point of reference. You could say that the npc should be wary of price changes in excess of %10 of the previous day's average .. but that would only lead to slower manipulation over the course of weeks or months... and smaller windfalls. It would also put the NPC out of line should the value of an item actually change that much.   If steel mining was suddenly disabled due to a bug, and there was a strong demand for crafted weapons, the value of steel would go up and so too would the value of swords. If the NPC thought this was nonsense based on historical prices, he might be left in an exploitable state because his prices are not current.

If you give the NPC a FIXED supply of goods to sell, then players could deplete the NPC's reseve and then take over the market - charging any price the choose... that would be very bad.

[Gilrond]

I hunted and trained with red way at the same time... And yes that was after the changes took place though before the annoying thing about magic resistance

You didn't do that for all ways from beginning after the change took place. And some are worse than others. RW is actually the easiest in this regard because it has usable offensive spells in all realms.

[novacadian]

To prevent this abuse you would need a market where the seller cannot chose the buyer.

What is lacking, Rigwyn is a finite currency. Tria are some sort of minted currency. There would therefore be a limited supply at any one time. When the server is brought up that finite amount of currency would be calculated and distributed to merchant npcs through some weighted equation. You could then sell goods to an npc at present market value until they ran out of money. They would then need to sell some goods before they could purchase more. The profit could be recognised as well in their tria totals.

It is tria that is being generated from nothing. Great inflation is happening in the present economy which can be witnessed at successive house auctions. Tria should be a known constant to any minister of finance.  The present system has built in maga inflation by minting tria into worthlessness.

- Nova

[Herihi]

I agree Riwyn that the market will be manipulated.  It's being done right now.  As some of the ones who have spiked up prices of ores because they can still make a profit while smiths can't.  You aren't going to get rid of it and you never will.  Wanting to make a change shouldn't be shot down because the ideas you come up with might have problems.  Of course they do and we'll have to work through them.  What decisions should be based on is whether the changes will be better then the current system.  You aren't even going to have a fairy tale economy that works perfect.  But in my opinion adding supply and demand to npcs will be a major improvement over the mess the economy is now. Do you disagree?

[Herihi]

Okay so Gil the only way that would give you trouble is blue since the offensive spells just stink.  But I just hunted ulbers with crystal way and levelled up.  Will it take forever since the spell is low realm, uh yeah, but that doesn't mean it won't happen.  Same thing for azure, and brown.  Super slow progression if you hunt at the same time but it still can be done.  You just better get used to levelling up once a week.

[Herihi]

Ooh good idea Nova.....a finite amt of currency.  You can see what just printing more money does to the US economy.  It would have the same effect on PS as well.  Would be interesting to see what would happen if there was only a certain amount of physical currency to go around.

[bilbous]

* bilbous wonders how you got azure way to a level where there was a useful combat spell.

Only way I can think of is to spam defensive wind or relaxing sleep. Sure defensive wind has an effect now but it is still a pain to keep casting and kind of a waste of mana to keep it up. Relaxing sleep is once every 5-10 minutes unless you have few mana to begin with. These spells do not compare with combat spells that you have to keep casting over and over to kill a critter. You get much more effective practice in these and it is not spammy. Freeze is a spammy spell because it takes a while for it to become useful after a successful cast. I can cast it three more times before the first effect wears off and it might be effective.

[Herihi]

Me, spam a spell?  I would never do something like that.  Other then azure, crystal, blue............but other then those I never did.

[Jotiles Sorkey]

A finite amount of currency sounds great until you look at the fact that the number of citizens isn't constant... What happens when a super rich barron stops playing or manipulates the systems supply of currency to change prices in their favour to buy and then again to sell? Or better yet we see a huge surge or decrease in the number of players... again the economy would have serious issues with maintaining the supply of currency in a way the entire economy of ps doesn't collapse. We can't compare ps economy to the real world because there are many factors ps doesn't consider that makes a real economy work.

We keep losing sight of the fact that ps is a game. Diversity and change in what is available, desired and valuable are needed to keep the economy rolling. Lack of diversity and other limitations in the environment dictate what people can or will do; and right now it dictates that people do what they are doing. There is no simple solutions and at this point bandaids will not only be inneffective in the long run, they will end up making matters much worse...

[verden]

A concise and level reply. You probably won't be around long, LOL!

[potare]

when will heavy Armour come in?

[LigH]

"When it's done"™ — © 3DRealms

[weltall]

right now it's planned to not do it for now. due to the heavy unbalance it would gather.