Tell me about your trade routes.

Hey all, I am apparently ignorant to the "trade route" aspect of the game. I wanted to ask you guys what your favorite trade routes are.

According to Lord British:
"We have whole guilds in the game now which are arbitraging resource values and running their own trade routs and methods. They weigh in all the time, when we change the ease of difficulty of any of their own routes we didn't even know existed."

https://www.reddit.com/r/SotA_Offic...ka_lord_british_creator_of/dj5s208/?context=1


What are your trade routes?
What are you trading?
How much gold are you making from it?
Are you trading to NPCs or Players?

 

You mean something more complex that "buy in a POT and sell in Owl's Head"?

 

My understanding is that it is not so much trade routes and more of captive markets. Price comparison is difficult given the slow transport and have to hunt for each vendor. Players may stock vendors in far flung towns to market there but I don't call that a trade route, thats setting up franchises. A trade route would be heading across the world to collect goods and sell elsewhere. I've seen some of that in other games where players would buy recipes only sold at one out of the way NPC vendor and resell in the prime market.

Are there trade routes of they type in the game or are they just stocking vendors across the world?

 

I don't understand what it means either unless it's just referring to running to town from some other zone.

 

Buying from NPC in reselling it in POTs and NPC towns does happen. Same for buying from COTO vendors and selling for gold.

 

I think it's important to look at the question that was posed that Richard responded to:

"These were a few quotes from the seedinvest description that Richard clarrified.

• "Create a trade route" - selling things in the regional economies of NPC towns.
  
  
• "Conquer a town" - defeating a siege.

These seemed misleading, I don't think Avatars can currently make any meaningful change on the world of New Britannia. There is no action that I perform that can change the way the world looks or behaves (apart from decorating).

What are you planning for meaningful sandbox interactions that will have an effect on the world? Are you planning anything that would inspire PvP and Guild participation?"

 

Yea.. that was a weak answer IMO
That goes back to my comment about them intentionally using terms to imply things that arn't there.

Conquer a Town.. is a term they listed and didn't adjust.. and its the exact reason some people look at PORT as being *shady*.

I don't like that. I don't like his answer. And personally that looks like a cop out to me. And sorry PORT, you can't just keep using established terms and *mending them* to meet your definitions. This is as bad as calling the game a * Pre -Alpha! * untill you decide to stop working on it. - Though i don't feel like reading people try to justify that agian.

I shot an arrow into the sky. Might as well say the game has player propelled and crafted rockets, and an extensive space system/galaxy! Then be surprised players feel mislead.
In summary-
Thanks for asking that Kor, and yes its misleading to say the least.

 

I think what he meant was there were particular scenes players would go to to acquire certain resources, and then take the finished products (or rare resources themselves) to certain "market" towns or popular shopping hubs to sell for profit.

The "weigh in all the time" comment was most likely directed to the mine changes and ore nodes that got tons of feedback and complaints.

Edit to add:
There are also people that try to specialize in particular types of goods... like for instance teleport/recall scrolls is a big one and so is dyes. When you craft these types of things and take them to a shopping hub area... I guess that is considered a "trade route" in their eyes.

 

To me, creating a trade route would encompass things like setting up a merchant town like New Brittanian Market. When people want things in mass, they go to these markets. Players advertise their shops and specialize in particular wares.

Isn't that what Richard was talking about?

 

I don't know what they meant, but I don't think very many people at all would interpret these things as the ability to establish trade routes. To me, the implication is that there is some action that players can take to secure safe passage from one place to another, or something along those lines. Any game where you can sell things and move from one place or another could be considered to have this trade routes feature if these were the criteria.

 

As if I would tell you about my sweet spots. Tzzzz.

 

That was a great response.

There are organic trade routes that have developed (just as they do in every game). That's what they're talking about.

Here are some examples:
A person goes to Ravensmoore, farms skeletons and dumps off the weapons at the blacksmith in Owl's Head. That's a trade route.

Another person takes ore from the Elysium Mines, sells it to a player vendor for gold, then uses that gold to buy COTO's at yet another player vendor. That's also a trade route.

Still another person grows cotton on their lot, takes the cotton to Brittanny and sells it on a public vendor, then takes the gold and uses it to buy artifacts that are being sold below market value, brings the artifacts back to their own vendor and jacks up the price. Again, trade route.

It's not very sophisticated. There's very little regional impact. Teleport scrolls and now Lunar Rifts will make control points almost pointless. But trade routes do exist and they're used every day. My hope is that as we expand the features of this game we'll see more interesting and more designed routes emerge. To accomplish this however, we'll have to restrict some of the free travel we have now, and make control points more meaningful.

 

Funny I see posts like this . . Go back look at what I said long ago - 3 - 4 months before a conglomerate group sets the market for Resources, 6 - 12 market set for end items . . .

There is no "arbitrage" and groups just complain because some thing got easier or harder . . . .

This is how I interpreted the "Economy" as it was presented to us in the beginning - Regional and set by Player ; ;

Regional this would work like say you look to the;

North West - Kobolds / Skrekk - I figured that because the Kobolds had looked to have mastery of Electricity and use water that if you made items in their forges / stations you would get boosts. I mean like you would have to first become "friends" of the Kobolds. From there you could learn how they mastered their crafting ways. Then as a friend you can use the stations (only works there NOT at your own home) and you could get bonus' and or boost to Air and Water Skills / Spells.
NE - Elves - Earth / Sun - stations in their main complex . . .
SE - Undead - Chaos / Death (Night time boosts) - In their places . . .
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I think you get the idea, This would be "regional" as it stands now it is exactly as I said it would become, a large conglomerate setts the market. Sadly the main two resources holding the market at all are Gold and Silver. Everything else is pretty much phfft.

So there are not really routes, but there are towns that have become a "hub" for resources as hoped but regional LMAO.

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Resources themselves where also supposed to be regional but they appear that it is more scenes not regions.

There is a TON of work needed to be done to give any credibility to a creative robust and viable player run economy.

First though need to reign in the bell curve of skills so players can have a more equal footing at gathering some of the most coveted resources :-(

Also need to work on more variety of uses for resources not just add some to recipies already there to give items with out a use some use Tungsten ? ? ?

​

 

Okay so the "Develop the trade route" has nothing to do with a background simulation or the NPC economies? It is just having to do with players? That makes a whole lot more sense. I was thinking that there was some way in game that you could take advantage of the local NPC economy and make gold off of it. For example I was thinking of buying a resource from an NPC in Etceter that you could sell for a higher amount in Kingsport. I guess I am just too used to the way games like Elite Dangerous do trading.

 

That's pretty much it. As well as the other scenarios given above. You can sell somethings for 1 price in place A or another price in place B . That's your choice. And as I see it thus a trade route.

Do you buy you resources from player A in Etceter or player B in Ardoris? Who's got better prices? is it easier to travel to? All taken in to account making "Trade Routes"

Laz

 

by "route" he means silver mines, and by "weigh in" he means cry on the forums.

Lets see a dev set at a desk and actually craft something

 

Well we have gold, cotton and tea leaves, but we need rum and opium to establish really good trade routes.

 

The term "Trade Route" usually has a pretty specific meaning in games, though expectations and implementation between genres sometimes varies. But since we already have a precedent of using terms here flexibly rather than literally, I'll skip over a lot of details and thoughts on that and try to just stick to functional elements.

"Trade Route" is an industry standard term (in environmental programming, not necessarily real-life economics) covering a set of mercantile concepts where the economy supplies a natural advantage or path of least resistance such that producers have an upper hand over merchants, resulting in trade relationships where merchants have more incentive to seek and pick up goods from producers than producers have to seek and deliver goods to buyers.

We do indeed have this kind of economy, though it doesn't always manifest as a visible "route," so using the term in advertising or other communications outside of internal development, while not technically incorrect, can easily cause misunderstanding and frustration because only a small subset of the population will be able to "see it" based on their outside knowledge of underlying mechanics. The problem isn't a lack of current functionality, but the lack of a visible point of entry and manifestation within the game itself (plus a secondary problem of not having a lot of attractive buy-with-gold things desirable to producers to give them a lot of incentive to participate in the first place regardless of their power position, but that's a separate topic from this), thereby making a current gate on the system of knowledge and social network. However, when player-to-player mail comes online, this gate immediately goes away and the system will be a lot more democratized and more accessible to isolated individuals.

 

You guys read this like a legal document. You should be reading it like a resume. Of course every little thing is inflated and expressed in glowing terms. That's what you do when you write a resume. That's what you do when you write promotional material.

If you're going to take exaggeration to task, there are much bigger targets in the world.

 

Trade Routes were quoted as a feature and defended by RG. The only thing you can find when you search for "trade route" and "shroud of the avatar" are the seedinvest page (and references to it) and some lore pages on sotawiki:
http://sotawiki.net/sota/Jaanaford http://sotawiki.net/sota/Etceter http://sotawiki.net/sota/Community:Port_Phoenix

I was misinterpreting it as a feature in the game. I believed that there would be information in game about creating trade routes, that you could see someone on twitch.tv playing a "trader" character. There is no mechanic in the game that, for example, would increase the prices of certain imports in Ardoris when it is under siege (e.g. Maple wood, since the Perennial coast is mostly Pine).

The way that RG is interpreting it, it is more of an emergent property of the game based upon the allowed interactions between players and the world (e.g. Players can set up vendors accessible to other players and the prices will vary from town to town). I would not say that the interaction is unique to SotA (can be found in any rpg or mmo), and I found it confusing that he defended it as a feature.