Economy.

I have an idea to improve the economy of the mud.

First of all, each trading location(tuluk,allanak,etc) would have to have a set of information.

Wep_LOW (low priced weapons..)
Wep_LCONSUMED
Wep_LBASE

Wep_MED
...

Wep_HIGH
...

Clothing, Spice, .... For every sellable type basically.


When an item of a particular type is sold to a shop, it raises the value of that variable.

(assume the base value of a high end weapon is 200)

Let's say Wep_HBASE is set to 1000 for tuluk.
So someone sells a 200 coin sword. Now Wep_HIGH is raised up to 1200.
The next weapon someone sells would get (base_price * Wep_HBASE)/Wep_HIGH
A reduction in price. More people sell, but as the shops become glutted the price goes down. The shops will still sell at their normal price, just buy lower. The 200 coins is the value before haggling.

Now, how does the market become unglutted? Well if a PC buys a 200 coin weapon then it goes down by that price. Also, each location would consume a certain amount of the types of object each reboot until it is back to the base. Say for this example the Wep_HCONSUMED for Tuluk was set to 200, so basically the imms think one High level weapon of value 200 can be sold at this location per week without changing the economy.

Keep the five item limit as well and shopkeeper limits on coin.
For low cost items in which you wouldn't want the changed to be as drastic, you would simply give it a higher base to reflect the HUGE market. To reflect a large amount of them sold, you should also increase the consumption rate.

It's sort of as if the players are a reflection of the VNPC's selling and buying habits.

What do I think it will do?
Well if everyone or one person keeps selling a certain thing it'll basically depress the market and force them to accept lower and lower prices, or start selling different things.
Maybe independant merchants would try and sell to players more. It'll create conflict as even if Player A and Player B are selling different high priced weapons the market for high priced weapons being sold to shops in general will dip in response. It'd make the independant merchants have to sell a variety of things, or at least wait until the demand gets back to normal. It'd reduce how much you could make as an independant merchant to a reasonable amount in my opinion. It would allow a way to adjust the economy of the various regions ro reflect what the imms think is appropriate.

?

[Trenidor]

Sounds cool, but would take a long and difficult period of time to program, not to mention all the lag it might bring for when someone sells something.

[Trenidor]

I think there is a slight flaw with your idea though. If I were to buy sacks of flour at 10 bags a piece, and I bought nearly a hundred (1,000 sid) you do the math and I can sell them back at nearly 10 times the price I paid for them till I reach the original price.

[Trenidor]

The flux in zalanthan economy isn't too noticeable to anyone. The way we currently have the system set up (you can only sell 5 items) seams the most realistic for roleplay in the world. If there was a ton of junk out there, people kept bringing it in to me, a shopkeeper, and I didn't think I'd be able to sell that many, I'd set a limit for how much I'd want to buy off someone and how much I wouldn't buy.

If you want to sell your junk, not in large bulk at major discount, just single items, then I don't think I'd buy it just because of the fact that it's better to have a bulkload of popular items that you paid way cheap for, then just two or three things that are worth little as it is.

If you want to sell a specific item to someone, and you have a bunch or can get a ton, I'd recommend Wishing up to the imms to help you make a buisness deal with the NPC willing to buy them. Buisness contracts can go good with shop keepers. Of course it'd have to be around 100 items, or a contract to bring a certain amout every few days, anything less would be useless.

Otherwise, I'd have to say what the shopkeepers say: "I've already got 5 of those already, I'm not selling them too fast so piss off I don't want your buisness."

Sounds cool, but would take a long and difficult period of time to program, not to mention all the lag it might bring for when someone sells something.

It would probably take me a day tops. The time would come from setting the values for all the different item types, not coding it. It wouldn't lag at as far as I can see. All these values are just integers basically and that many of them is the equivalent to couple npcs if that. The only time they would be checked would be while bartering. One person fighting for a few minutes would probably use more cpu time than this code in a whole day. Would the saving of the file occassionally lag?. It's probably smaller than a pfille, and the players are automatically saved a whole lot already.

I think there is a slight flaw with your idea though. If I were to buy sacks of flour at 10 bags a piece, and I bought nearly a hundred (1,000 sid) you do the math and I can sell them back at nearly 10 times the price I paid for them till I reach the original price.

Well, I thought I stated clearly you couldn't drop below the base level. So things wouldn't ever really get cheaper than that.

Otherwise, I'd have to say what the shopkeepers say: "I've already got 5 of those already, I'm not selling them too fast so piss off I don't want your buisness."

I believe I also stated they should leave the five item limit in place.