Commodity Prices

[Twilight]

Something I was thinking about after reading the log of the player-staff meeting.

Easy way:

If Armageddon still works somewhat like standard DIKU, each item has on it a material that it is made of.  Glass, wood, stone, etc.  these are generally primarily what something is made of.  Make coded tables with percentages for each trade zone, Allanak, Tuluk, Luirs, etc, listing out the material types you can put on items.  Generally the percentages would be 100% for a material.  If the price of the commodity changes in a particular economic zone, then change the percentage on the table, for instance wood becomes scarcer, change the percentage to 110%.

Link this table into the final pricing of merchants in the economic zone.  If the table has 110%, then merchants will pay 10% more than normal for an object with that material type, and will sell items of that material type for 10% more than usual.  You would probably need flags (if they don't already exist, not sure how the code behind merchanting works currently) to determine what economic zone a merchant is in, and flag all the merchants you want to use the table.

Pros:  One easy change of one percentage changes all prices for that item type in an entire economic zone.

Cons:  Item is probably made up of several different materials.  Granularity of materials might not be that good (eg stone might be the material type for obsidian, and it is just obsidian price that went up, but affects all stone objects).

Hard Way:
Put in place the merchant economic zone flags.  Create price affect flags for objects to a great degree of granularity (jade flag, as opposed to stone flag).  Place flags on items (a jade and obsidian ring would have both flags).  Implement weighted system for flags to work through table as above.  So 90% obsidian and 120% jade on a jade and obsidian ring would sell for 105% of normal price.

[Bardex]

The general idea is sound, but the logistics is badly flawed. In economics, there isn't just a flat percentage markup to reflect increasing costs. There's a thing called a profit margin that has to be met.

When you up the cost of something to 110%, you also have to pay taxes on the extra 10%. That means that your profit margin is now lower than it was before you raised the price. Dollar for dollar, you are losing money by raising the price, in that instance.

In Zalanthas, you are also dealing with risk of lives. If there is less wood available, it means the Salarr hunters are travelling deeper into the wooded areas to get that rare log. That means they are incurring more risk, and there are more lives lost. This costs Salarr more money as well, and that also has to be included into the profit margin. Someone has to pay for all those lost weapons and armor the dead Salarris wore when they went out to chop wood, afterall.

On your second point - many items are component crafts. Meaning - they are made from more than one single material, whether code-wise or virtual. A pair of pants has either a drawstring or buttons - those buttons would be a component, whether or not someone actually is using button-objects to make that pair of pants.

That was just a by the way. Anyway - if a jade and obsidian bracelet is only 1 small piece of jade inset into a nice-sized bracelet of obsidian, then it -should- have a completely different percentage change than a "tennis bracelet" type thing made of 50% one and 50% the other. It would get way too complex to determine which items get what increase, and trying to simplify it would just make the whole thing make no sense at all.

I DO like the idea, and I do NOT have any other solutions at the moment. But those are concerns that would make the idea not work as you've described them.

[Sanvean]

If Armageddon still works somewhat like standard DIKU, each item has on it a material that it is made of. Glass, wood, stone, etc. these are generally primarily what something is made of. Make coded tables with percentages for each trade zone, Allanak, Tuluk, Luirs, etc, listing out the material types you can put on items. Generally the percentages would be 100% for a material. If the price of the commodity changes in a particular economic zone, then change the percentage on the table, for instance wood becomes scarcer, change the percentage to 110%.

This is already in place, and what I was referring to when I said some attempts had been made to do this.  You'll notice things like tortoiseshell or isilt cost much less in the north than in the south, for instance, and a price may get adjusted upward or downward to reflect taxes, for another.

[Quirk]

The general idea is sound, but the logistics is badly flawed. In economics, there isn't just a flat percentage markup to reflect increasing costs. There's a thing called a profit margin that has to be met.

When you up the cost of something to 110%, you also have to pay taxes on the extra 10%. That means that your profit margin is now lower than it was before you raised the price. Dollar for dollar, you are losing money by raising the price, in that instance.

This is nonsense. This is complete nonsense. What you've essentially just said, simplified down, is that every time you raise the price on an item, you lower your profit margin because of taxes. I've never come across a taxation schema which would make this generally true on Earth, and certainly not on Zalanthas.

If your taxation is a flat fee per item (a la duty on spirits, petrol, etc) raising the price drastically inflates your profit margin. If you go from selling widgets on which you pay 30 sid duty and 10 sid for the widget components for 50 sid to selling them for 100 sid, your profit goes from 10 sid to 60 sid, and the margin leaps from 20% to 60%.

If your taxation is on a percentage basis of sales (a la VAT), you still increase your profit margin by raising the price. If you're paying 60% tax on sales, and the components cost 10 sid as before, going from selling them for 50 sid to selling them for 100 sid takes you from a profit of 10 sid to a profit of 30 sid, and a profit margin rise from 20% to 30%.

Supply and demand may mean that an individual seller in a market raising their price may find their profits vanishing as they sell fewer items. However, this sort of markup isn't quite what we're talking about - we're talking about modelling supply and demand on an area by area basis, and hence the market is as good in Tuluk as in 'Nak for, say, obsidian items selling at 110% of the price they'd fetch in 'Nak.

Compound items are something of an issue, however, and would require a more complex fix to be handled accurately.

Quirk