Global Item Search

I suppose he rather meant something that a strong trader with lots of gold could use the global price list, detect all cheaper competition, buy them out and sell at an exaggereated price until enough of the item has been produced again to challenge his monopoly.

 

That makes more sense. Thanks Conjurer!

 

It will be a race to the bottom.
That is a simple fact for all items which are available in large masses and have only a small demand/consumption. As soon as several people produce that item they have only 3 ways:
1) undercut the price of the competition to get the sale, which the competition then could do too and you again...
2) don´t undercut and lose the sale in hopes of seeling later,
3) create a cartell and negotiate with your competition so that noone sells below a certain threshold to ensure profits...

 

I have advocated for a global item search as well. But if you have one master list of all items and prices, that will mean that people will always buy the cheapest option on the list. Which means that the person selling it the cheapest, will always get the sale. Which means that every vendor will start selling cheaper than everyone else. It will be a vicious cycle that drives prices down. There is the possibility that people will abandon crafting all together because there is just no money in it. Or you have a veteran player basically give things away, to drive out all competition. Then jack the prices sky high when everyone leaves the marketplace.

 

No idea - balance supply and demand?

 

With a large enough player base, I think the system would stabilize itself. Laz over on NBNN News was saying how the BMC would get together periodically to set prices throughout all the vendors in their guild. When someone would try to sell cheaper than the BMC, the BMC would buy out their entire supply and then resell the goods in their shops at the agreed upon price. There is power in numbers and that system would certainly keep things level. But you need a huge player base that can afford to empty out inventory from other vendors. SOTA doesn't have that large a player base yet.

 

Interesting! Thank you.

 

I can't wait to bathe in the hate on this topic.

There seem to be some issues surrounding the in-game economy. My biggest complaint was that when I first started leveling my crafting skills, I lost money. Others have issues with outrageous price fluctuations from town to town.

What if Catnip takes the average cost of every item over the last 30-60 days and sets that as the locked in price? The item costs the same, the world over. You would need to do this for both the buy and the sell value. Then you can have the global vendor list without driving prices down. It could actually be profitable to be a crafter.

If we wanted some sort of ebb and flow to the economy, Catnip could set a max and minimum value for each item. The price would fluctuate either on demand, supply or both preferably. Starting today, an iron ingot has a base price of 100, with a max of 200 and a minimum of 25. If the current global supply was one million iron ingots, then as the supply drops, the price goes up until it hits the max of 200. As the supply gets over one million, the prices drop. You would need a time factor so that someone doesn't drive the selling price up to the max so they can then flood the market and make insane profit.

 

And I am very sympathetic to that. I understand that the dev team is small and may not be the most experience devs out there. I have no issue cutting them slack.

 

Greetings all
It would be easy to create a Global Item Search. Just have a database of all base items and set the price for each item. Then all vendors would have the same price and it could be easily updated once a month/week. Problem is if all items were the same price what would make a buyer buy from you versus another vendor? How would you make money? As real estate people would say it would become Location, Location, Location. That would become the biggest cost to crafting, not the materials or time.

 

Greetings Barugon
Do you think the weekly prices of base items would change that much? I have seen vendors with multi-weekly pricing that was not much different from their post date. I think that a weekly update would be a reasonable time frame. More current than a month and less work that daily.

Also for automation purposes does the API capture vendor sales AND prices? I "think" I remember that it can tell you what a vendor sold on which date. If it does show price it could be scraped and dumped to a out of game website that could function as a global list.

 

Are you asking in the /t Trade Channel in the game when looking for specific items?

 

This regional economy thing is another example of "great idea on paper, not that enjoyable in reality".
The mere use of the word "discourage" means devs were actively limiting the game and revoking freedom from players.
Then they opened up all gates and teleport scrolls were introduced. Now we have a non-functioning half feature of regional economies.
The regional economy feature doesn't exist.

Oh, btw I don't think the global vendor search is currently needed in the game.

 

Today I´m in Soltown, which is a supposed to be a town for early beginners coming from Solace Bridge.
Opened Player Vendors list. Sort by price - the first eight items all cost 99.999.999 gold and are not even items to buy but simply used to have the player buy elsewhere or look in the sales tab...

Thou lost an eighth.

 

Novazon