The merchant economy

[Ratiotile]

So that was the other part I've been considering--reducing the amount of gold available. This has to happen by eliminating the unlimited introduction of "wealth" created by merchants that instantly liquidate items.

Here's my logic, see if it makes sense:

If merchants buy items for gold, then those items which spawn frequently and sell for a reasonable amount of gold will be sold directly to the merchant and liquidated. This allows a huge amount of wealth to be generated and stockpiled with minimal effort. As a result, inflation takes over and the monetary system becomes defunct. Just look at Xenimus: the only thing you can really do with gold is buy potions or supplies (bags), which is why any reasonably good items have costs in the hundreds of thousands of gold. Thus, players more regularly trade in other items because gold is acquired so easily by high level players. VTs have long been a form of Xenimus currency with a fairly stable market value (aside from EJ's periodic upsets). That is how money in PV should work--it should be reasonably stable.

An idea I had to resolve this would be to use the consignment merchant (I'm calling this feature a "bazaar") as the main way of liquidating items with high value. Bartering (trades) will work as they did in Xenimus--that seems to go fairly well; however, the bazaar would encourage players only to list more valuable items and the market is not inundated with gold as a result of the easy liquidation of monster drops. In other terms, gathering an inventory full of firestaves might be impressive, but it won't be as easy to get an immediate liquid return. The key distinction is that the merchants don't set a gold-price for these items, and thus inflation by the unlimited introduction of monetary wealth should be minimized.

To balance selling, I've considered sectioning the bazaar by "quality". Each player would be able to list a certain number of items in a given quality group; for example "beginner equipment", "intermediate potions", "expert armor". Each would roughly correspond to a level group. But this way, even high level players could list low-level items. There will be a limitation to each quality group to encourage players not to try incorrectly cross-listing to make more money (for example, putting high level items in beginner equipment).

Thoughts?

To clarify, do you mean to do away with the instant-selling merchants altogether, and rely on consignment only?

I agree that the gold inflation problem is primarily associated with the instant liquidation to traditional merchants. I also think that your idea on sectioning the bazaar is a really good, and will get trade flowing with items of all levels.

I don't believe that the traditional merchants should be completely eliminated, however. They have a few advantages over consignment merchants:
1) They provide a place to offload large amounts of items that not everyone will want.
2) It is a lot easier and quicker to use a traditional merchant
3) It is clearly better for buying arbitrary numbers of consumables

Traditional merchants can be kept while still curbing gold inflation. One of my previous suggestions, the merchant inventory/dynamic pricing would work nicely. The idea is to have the merchants dynamically shift their prices according to the laws of supply and demand. Merchants would also no longer have a fixed inventory, and would be supplied with items from players. This method allows merchants to buy a fire staff for a good deal of gold if he doesn't have any in stock, yet give a very low payout for the same item once he has thousands in stock.

What are your thoughts?

[Karl G.]

The bazaar would replace the merchant system, because the bazaar would have merchants buying and selling within it. Basically, I code some NPCs to buy and sell items on the bazaar as necessary. The bazaar has "caravan" outposts in the world at various towns, so it's accessible everywhere (unlike in Xen, where the consignment merchant is only in one place).

I have a different idea for how to handle getting rid of items you just don't want and don't want to try to sell, but it's part of the storyline and I don't want to give too much away just yet. Trust me, it's worth the wait

[Ratiotile]

So there will be a 'caravan' in each town, and they all link to the same market? If player A lists his 7p spirit ripper in Semel, will player B see it at the Tertius caravan station?

How are the merchants going to work? Are they going to be agents in the bazaar, so that players will see items listed by NPCs and have their items bought by NPCs?

I'm willing to do a writeup on the wiki about the bazaar system as a reference for future discussions.

[Karl G.]

Yes, items will spread throughout the world and will be (at least initially) available in all caravans at once.

The merchants will use a guided learning algorithm I came up with to both buy and sell items in the bazaar. Based on how items are bought and sold between players (and seeded with some parameters of value, rarity, etc.) they will both create new items in the market and purchase others. The items a player has WILL be able to be bought by an NPC. This event will be rare, but it is a way I can tune how many of a certain item are in the game without doing item wipes. For example, if someone figures out how to dupe a certain ring, I fix them bug then put out a priority buy on that ring and the NPCs will reduce their quantity in the world by buying them from the bazaar and destroying them. When I don't give explicit commands, the NPCs buy and sell based on their own parameters.

Feel free to create a wiki page for this if you want!

[Serenity]

I like this idea, but the way I'm taking it is that gold will be rare and picking up items isn't necessarily the best thing to do? Having a drop system like EJ's where every monster drops something doesn't sound like the best idea with this market. Will it be like that?

Oh, and storyline?
I like this more and more every day.