What should NPC's sell?

While I understand and sympathize with your concerns, there is a single player off-line mode. I'm not trying to be dismissive, but folks who are very interested in the nature of the selective multiplayer system and how it works itself out in game are more likely to support the multiplayer-online mode's economy consisting of as much of a player driven LOCAL economy as possible while still being fun, and perhaps a baseline NPC driven (also local?) economy to provide some limits on how far this capitalistic economic model ebbs and flows.

 

IMHO: Given the tiny sizes of the intended "restricted" areas, and the reality of multi-accounts, there will be no local economies.

The design and all implementation possibilities, given multi-accounts, removes any chance of even a semblance of local economies. How so?
When one person can tell, in real time, the cost in various markets of items, because of two accounts, on two computers, simultaneously being active, any locality is an illusion.

Any attempt I've ever seen, in the past twenty years, of a player driven economy in online games, with zero NPC involvement, has spectacularly failed. Historically, there's a reason why laws had to be passed to prevent global market manipulation. It was too easy, even in the real world.

 

Granted, but I sincerely doubt the majority of players will have multiple accounts. There may be a subset, and if so, they still have to move the items to sell them in different locations, OR they have to travel to the location to buy the items at the lower prices. As long as they handle "instant" travel the way they have indicated in the past, I still have faith in local economies succeeding.

 

In my experience, for every crafting or tradeskill guild that's even remotely serious about either dominating a market or monetizing their online presence, regardless of the game, buying multiple accounts and making sure all the market data is on the web is step one.

 

But I fail to see how knowing that something is cheaper half way around the world impacts my having to either travel there to purchase it, or hire someone to deliver it to me, through the world itself, and in turn, charging a fee (I would assume). Unless, what I fear you're talking about, is an organized "business" trying to monetize in game items for real world money. In which case, I have no idea how to stop that, even with rules that prohibit it.

 

As addressed previously in this thread, I think Portalarium would be able to write a failsafe mechanism where NPCs stepped in if there was a real shortage that began to cripple the in-game economy. But it makes no sense at all to me to have things for sale like the reagents that are only able to be harvested during the full or new moon. Where did the NPC vendor et his/her stock? I just want a more comprehensive crafting system. This is my opinion, but any game that wants to be any sort of a sandbox starts with the economy and works its way up from there. I keep reading SotA is a sandbox, but I have played in sandbox games, and this game has a long, long way to go before it gets close. (And lucky for us sandbox lovers, there is a lot of time left to di it in!)