The Hard Questions & Ideas

It's a "Free" market, which means: you have the freedom to offer or accept a price when given to you (you should make your own decision)... Are you talking about Buying or Selling? They are two different Worlds, if you notice, the game sets a "value" of 10 gold each for wood, no matter if it's Pine or Maple (I think Pine is more rare, so it should have a higher value, but doesn't), they "buy" at 50% of it's value... If they were to "sell" the wood, they would sell at 10 gold (a 100% markup), this is pretty much standard Business stuff (buy low, sell high)... If you can double your investment in wood that means your making a profit from selling wood...

Supply/Demand is complicated, if I sell my wood at 10 gold per 100 logs and someone buys all my stock, then I continue to sell at 10 gold, I may not be able to keep up with the Demand for my stock of wood at that price, so each time I sell out all my wood, I bump the price by 100%, until I stop getting sales... This means I've gone over the price a "reasonable" player would buy my stock at, simply put he has no more money in his pocket and can't afford the markup price... For example: if I watch to see who is buying my wood, and check his vendor, I may find that he is trying to wholesale the wood by marking it up from the 10 gold price I start with to 50 gold each, by me upping my price, it puts a dent in his profits, so there comes a time where he no longer buys my stock because he can't make a profit by do so... If he is smart, he will approach me with a "deal" to buy 10,000 logs at 25 gold each, this would be acceptable to me because I still make 25k and he still makes 25k off the sales of wood to other players...

But if the other players are not willing to pay 50 gold for woods, then there is no sales and it all falls apart until someone decides to cut their prices until they start getting sales again, the Market will determine the optimal price for wood... The "Market" is all the players who come by our vendors to buy wood, if the wholesaler overpaid on the last order of 10,000, they should man up and take the loss and not overpay in the future, but to just sit on stock is a waste of space storing it...

Resources in a game are funny things, sometimes they sell like hotcakes and other times they don't, there isn't a continuous flow of resources, players come and go, they reach GM and then they stop buying so many, there're lots of reasons... The point is: you need to find the optimal selling price in order to get sales...

Going from 5,000 to 1, down to 1,000 to 1 is still nothing of value... I don't get many components from salvaging items, just more Patterns which are worthless... If I got hilts and blades in the same amounts as patterns, I'd be happy... But I don't...

I think I debated this in another thread which half of it was deleted somehow.... But I agree, if these sellers just lowered their prices they would get more sales and price fixing should be outlawed... Monopolies are illegal... I don't think crafting as a gold sink has been archived or removed, crafting is the most expensive thing to do, adventurers get far more profits than crafters, and I do think it is by design, which I do not agree with... If NPC pricing was in line with materials used, it would be a great help, but it's not and probably won't be in the future... So much for making a game the players want... Buying resources from other players only makes a bad situation worse...

 

@SmokerKGB you are arguing both sides at the same time.

 

There are two side to every market (sellers and buyers), and both have different viewpoints, notice the sellers are first in line because without sellers, there would be no Market, just players standing around with money in their pockets with nothing to buy...

It's up to the sellers to understand that the buyers have a finite (not infinite) amount of gold in their purse, and a price fixed in their minds as to how much they are willing to spend on a given item... It's up to the seller to figure out what that price is, because the buyer is not going to out right tell you... Even millionaire won't spend their entire fortune on a single project, they may risk 50%, but not all of it... Because they know if they fail, they will need to take the loss and they also know how much time it will take to recoup that loss, after all they did work hard for the money they just spent...

When you're manufacturing, there are other aspects to understand too, like your own cost to manufacture, if you spend too much on materials, in an unproven market, you take a huge risk at the items your manufacturing not selling because you didn't know how much they were in demand for what price... This is what we have in SotA... Manufacturing is what you do in most other games, but the designers of SotA didn't want manufacturing to happen, so they made it tuff to get materials, it takes a lot of them to make an item, therefor the end product must be highly priced...

They didn't consider that their main player base was "Casual, single players", what they made is a game catered for the overachiever, the top 1% of their clients, that's what players do in the other games, they BOT all their resources, mass produce items, then sell to an NPC to unleash huge amounts of Gold, which is bad for any economy... Just look at UO it's all screwed up, cost several million gold to buy special rewards that only a few player ever get because of the shear volume that they do...

We need to solve this dilemma, I say:
-Global market board (at least, regional through the town criers), so everyone can advertise on a level field... Stimulating competition between sellers...
-Diminishing return on Gold in loot, you can always sell the other items you get for gold...
-lower the required materials for crafting...
-let Game Merchants sell, in limited quantities all resources...
-let game merchants buy at material pricing for items sold to them, you can keep the 10 gold per ore pricing and just take into consideration it took 4 ore per ingot, several ingots to make a dagger...
-make a progressive loot system, rusty gear in low level scenes, as the scenes get higher in level, let the gold diminish and put in more crafted component (not just 1 in 1000 chance), make it so adventurers may want to gather several hundred components to sell to crafters (I for one wouldn't mind spending a higher price for components, instead of materials, if I could buy in bulk and sell for a decent profit to an NPC or player)...

The rewards for playing to higher levels should not be more gold, but more artifacts, that can be scraped for a pattern or sold for gold to another player and those artifacts should be comparable to the top crafted items in strength and worth...