The Economy and Selling Things too Low

[Talan Va'lash]

I didn't want to hijack Varka's thread any further, so.. lets use this one.  See original thread here:  http://www.layonaraonline.com/forums/forums/thread-view.asp?tid=14041&posts=9#M82776   First of all, there is no good way to make a rule about this.  Period.  A rule must be strictly defined and any strictly defined rule about prices of items will be a major pain to make and will be frequently incorrect/out of date and no fun at all.  So, Please... please... don't say "There's no rule, I do what I want."  Don't make it so that a rule has to be made.  Bartering is a part of the rough period we are trying to incorporate into the world.  Prices were not standardized by corporations and often more than one form of currency was in use in any given location (which likely were valued differently against eachother over time and in different areas.)  Bartering, trading, haggling is good RP.  It adds to the setting.  However trading guilds likely established set or semi-set prices for goods they sold frequently (sometimes kings and barons and such would set prices and require that x be sold for x amount, but such micromanaging rarely led to economic success.)  So, by saying what I did in the above paragraph I'm not saying that the standardized price list that Pathfinder/Freemen mentioned he was estabilishing in the context of his guild is bad RP.

[Leanthar]

"...In conclusion, I'd like price setting to stay in the hands of the community, but for this to happen and to keep the economy from going crazy there needs to be some amount of OOC discussion. Remember that we're simulating a real economy here. A lot of the factors add to a real economy are absent here so lets try to work together on this..."
  Yep.  Pretty much that.  Keep the OOC in tells or on the forums as much as possible but yes that has to happen.

[Destropterammer]

Well i agree with Talan on what he's saying here. I've been replying to a few threads now that in my opinion was items sold too cheap. By doing that im not trying to offend or stealing the market or something similar. At the moment i have no character that sells anything unless strictly asked. So with that in mind i'd like to inform the "new" players that there was a time when the team felt the economy went nuts. So they tried to correct this, by raising prices on spell components pick axes and the like. Another thing was, which might not have been the economy's fault, was that a series of quests suddenly involved PC's to pay a considerably large ammount of gold. The Ulgrids wanted gold for their loss of men, the queen needed gold to rebuilt a few burntout crafting houses, and needed weapons etc. for her armies. By saying this im hoping that people might consider their price tagging a bit, if not the same thing might happen again in your time on Layonara.

//the amounts of gold im speaking about here was not just 100's of thousand of gold. Many players had their accounts emptiet more or less. At their own will ofcourse.

-Destropterammer, the whiner.

[blfarris]

I would like to say one thing on the subject, because of some negative prior replies to my prior postings, I will not be making furthur OOC comments on this subject.

Why does your character make something?  to use, to sell, to barter?
I sell items to make gold, to buy other items, I bought a house, currently not much in it.  Would like to buy other items, but gold supply in my bank account is low (12k I think at this time).

So to "Tell" me I am the fault of a economy collapse, I truely find as a very offensive comment.  I will continue to create and sell at my prices, and to sell to a pawn shop and get almost no gold at all, when I can sell to a player character for 600, even when lens pricing say 2000+.

Sure at one point, I will have no need to create, except to help another player character, but right now the demand on items I sell are high, why cause of the price.  

Question to the Layo team, how many player characters have so much stashed away and not even selling these items?  items cause lag, gold does not IMO

again, I am done with this subject, I truely find it funny that a select few are so upset  

[Destropterammer]

I was not trying to offend anyone or upset. I'll aswell shut up now. Let the ones it will hurt deal with it.

[steverimmer]

I was thinking about this recently because although I've never really been much interested in crafting both Bil and Buppi will soon be high enough in crafting levels to start selling some pretty good stuff. 
  The way I thought of going about charging would be for the crafter to buy the materials that were brought for an item (if any were brought) from the PC who wanted the item, but if successful sell the finished  product at a higher price than most others would sell for, plus the cost of the ingrediants added to the final price. 
  This might seem a silly way to do it but this way the crafter takes all the risks and makes an added profit to cover future failures, plus of course the buyer still makes a profit even if the crafter fails.

[Talan Va'lash]

blfarris - 6/13/2005  11:42 AM

I would like to say one thing on the subject, because of some negative prior replies to my prior postings, I will not be making furthur OOC comments on this subject.

Why does your character make something?  to use, to sell, to barter?
I sell items to make gold, to buy other items, I bought a house, currently not much in it.  Would like to buy other items, but gold supply in my bank account is low (12k I think at this time).

So to "Tell" me I am the fault of a economy collapse, I truely find as a very offensive comment.  I will continue to create and sell at my prices, and to sell to a pawn shop and get almost no gold at all, when I can sell to a player character for 600, even when lens pricing say 2000+.

Sure at one point, I will have no need to create, except to help another player character, but right now the demand on items I sell are high, why cause of the price.  

Question to the Layo team, how many player characters have so much stashed away and not even selling these items?  items cause lag, gold does not IMO

again, I am done with this subject, I truely find it funny that a select few are so upset  

This is precisely the kind of nonsense I was hoping we could avoid.  Read my post, read my post in the other thread.  Your ideas of pricing are based on a complete misunderstanding of economic forces.  High demand equal high prices not low prices.

But the worst thing is the "I'll do what I want" perspective.  The point is this is an issue that must be addressed.  Basically we can do it the easy way (have the community police themselves) or we can do it the hard way (force the team to make a rule about it.)

And truly offensive or not, you are going to be the one to screw up the economy if you are flooding the market with undersold goods.

And... lag isnt the issue, because if you sell an item to another PC, just because you no longer have it doesnt mean it doesnt exist.  Someone else has the item.  So, whether it causes lag or not, you're not reducing lag by selling it.  In fact you're increasing lag by ever making it to begin with (though, I dont think player inventories cause serious lag dependant on the quantity of items.)

-TV

[Leanthar]

Talan, that is quite enough.  Keep it polite please.  He has a right to say what he feels, right or wrong, but he has the right.

[Ar7]

There is actually a very fair and simple reason why many of the goods are sold way below their price.

Look at our player base, it is huge, and most of the people craft. Everybody wants to make a living and tries to sell the goods they produce. But as more and more crafters appear the basic rules of economy begin to work. There is always somebody who will do anything to sell his sword or ring, even if it means recieving less profit. As soon as such a person appears others will also have to lower their price if they wish to sell something, and it goes like that further down the road.

A simple example to illustarte what I mean. At the beginning of V2, when positions of the resources were mostly unknown and there weren't many capable crafters, my vendor sold +1 alexandtrite rings for 5000 a piece. And he actually sold around 25 of them during the first week, people continued to buy them until the vendors were removed. But about a week ago I heard that people are selling these ring for 1000 a piece....I was shocked.

There is no rule that can fix this, people just need to use common sence. Don't sell the item that costs 10 000 for 5000 even if doesn't matter much to you, even if you have a million in the bank you still need to ask a full price for every item. You won't be doing a favor to a new player by cutting the price, you will just A) Cheapen the item and take away a feeling of accomplishment from the other player B) Ruin the economy.

Of course I have made such exceptions, but they are very.....very....VERY rare, I make such exceptions only to people who are in some way very special to Rufus.

So once again there are the following ways to fix the economy

- Common sense
- L removes half of the resource deposits and makes them very hard to gather
- L changes the crafting e.g tools costing 50k like they used to in V1 or advanced crafting house limited to levels 15+

I assume nobody wants the second or the third option to happen. So please, use common sense, if you have a choice to sell an item for half of the price or to not sell it at all....don't sell it.

I would also like to suggest that all of the high level crafters work together to create rough price guidelines, atleast for the higher and middle end items.

[ZeroVega]

  Hehe, here's how I do business. I go around and ask people if they'd like to buy item X. They say yes and I ask them how much they'd like to pay. They tell me, and I continue on my way telling them I'll get back to them. I ask several other people and come up with varrying prices. Then I check the pricing lense.
    I usually take the average of the highest prices (top 3-4 prices) and then sell them for +25%. So it'd go something like this...
  Characters A, B, C, D, give me prices and it averages out to 16'000. I add 25% and only give discounts (and very small ones) if they bring me the stuff I need. Now usually I ask for enough resources to make two or three of the items they want... that way if I fail I have more tries, and if I succeed, well I have resources I didn't before.
    As for the economy thing... it has been ruined before. In V1 oak was fairly hard to get, thus oak bows and staffs were a treat to buy. However when V2 came along, suddenly level 6 characters were hauling out huge ox loads of oak and screaming up the craft boards... eventually it got to the point where within 3 days anyone could make their own oak bow, so people felt they didn't need to pay 5'000 gold for em like they used to. The market got flooded with so many it became a buyers market and the prices went down until they were selling for 100 gold.
    I don't believe anyone has yet to say "it's your fault the economy is crashing" cause it's never one persons fault. We who've been here through several "bull and bear" economies just want to make sure it doesn't happen again.

[lonnarin]

I usually charge and pay people with labor.  If you want a fullplate, you gotta be my ore lugging packox for 2 hours or so to cut the price in half.  If I want an item, I go out and mine at least 5 times worth of CNR for what it would take to make the item, and pay the crafter with the goods to give me 1 of the 5 items he'll be able to make in payment.  Sometimes if the CNR I collect is incredibly low-end, it jumps to about 10 times what's needed for the item. (sand especially... like 100 ingots of glass for one type 2 rod, 250 for a type III, a bit less if I also go coal mining)  Even when I don't need the item they make for me, somebody else does, and I can be somewhat of a middleman miner.  When I sell those, oh yeah, its fer retail!

When it comes to selling an item and somebody whine about the price, I usually offer them some way to reduce it, but they gotstah WORK fer it!  If they really need to be lazy, oh yeah... they pay retail... and I make them find/make me beers not on the ale list just to complete the sale!

LN Dwarf = Scrooge with an axe!