CraigWCooper
commented
6 months ago I partially agree here but I feel like we will end up with more people making the same mistakes. which I will go into in a second. I would agree pricing and economics in ECO is difficult for most especially when they are just trying to play it like Minecraft. I think adding the systems you mentioned could help but I don't think it would solve the core common issues I see.. However more options and more functionality would be nice, there is a question whether or not this should be solved via in game mechanics or socially. I like the idea of some automation here for costing if anyone has used the mod Trade Assistant this is what you are describing.
I do believe that we will still have these issues however. (sorry if this all sounds like a rant but these are the issues I still think I will see happening)
Market fails to dictate pricing One big issue in eco is that prices are normally Fixed by some social agree on some agreed cost of base materials and not based on market demand and supply. I have been on too many servers where logs are worth the same as stones but stones are being sold in the 1000s where as logs are not sold at all, One function I would like to see added (there is already data for this that is used for $ exchange rates) where you can see clearly at a glance (not via the dashboard) what the average price of an item, amount of trades for x item at y price, how much sold vs crafted etc etc. To add to your functions, a simple "buy at average price" (average price of all trades for x item) could be useful.
Calorie Cost vs Material Cost This is another issue I see crop up an insane amount. I always am able to undercut any profession due to this thinking.
Players always tend to buy the goods used in their craft EVEN if they gather those materials themselves. How many times have you seen a logger BUY logs for 0.2 then sell hewn for 0.25 and claim its 25% profit and they can't go any cheaper or they will lose money. When in reality it takes them a 10th of the calories of a salad to chop a tree down for 50 logs costing them near nothing. This become more clear when Smelters charge high rates for iron bars claiming iron ore cost 0.1 when they literally gather the iron themselves (which in addition to my next point makes things worse).
IE Everything is profit if you gather the materials yourself. Of course valuing your time and calories should fall into that equation.
Stacking Profits. This is another common one that frustrates me and is why a lot of economies die. people tend to stack their profits mostly by mistake. Here is an example.
A miner mines some iron ore, he wants to the turn that ore into concentrate to sell. He has a store, and like most players will have buy order for his ingredients and has decided he will happily buy iron ore at 0.1, he then uses this price to work out his crushed iron ore price, using a arrastra he works out that it costs him 6 iron ore (0.6) to make 1 crushed iron ore. he then throws crushed iron ore up for sale at 0.8 because he wants a 25% profit. He will then buy crushed iron ore for 0.6 at his store. Then he turns that crushed iron ore into Iron Concentrate using a rocker box he can turn 5 crushed iron ore into 1 iron concentrate, because he sells his crushed iron ore at 0.8 he uses that price to cost his concentrate at 4.5 (425%), He takes smelting and using a bloomery he can make 2 iron bars for 1 iron concentrate, he sells his iron bars at 2.8 ((4.5/2)25%), seems fine right? wrong, in reality if he brought iron ore at 0.1 his iron bars cost 1.5 and he is selling them for nearly 100% profit. Also Forgetting about the fact that he doesn't actually buy iron ore at 0.1 he buys a salad for 0.5 allowing him to mine 250 iron ore and 0.1 is just a fabricated value I talked about earlier.
This gets into a problems with late game when people do this all the way up to steel + more.
^these issues are common and kill servers fast which if you have some combination allowing an easy "Average market value" for buy orders + something like Trade Assistant will solve a lot of those issues but from stacking profits.
Sorry this was long but I like the topic and the issues it faces.
THOUGHTS: Right now a lot of the game is really fun in the economy, but to achieve that, I feel like I need to create external tools to do so. Spreadsheets are a common thing in the shops. A new player often just tries to get a store up and copy others without actually having personal knowledge. There is also issues with having to constantly scroll through workshop lists to get what you want.
Store UI currently creates a major pain point of repetitive work and external data updates. And if you wish to adjust based on skill increases, upgrade modules, etc. Adding "Markup" as a feature would allow for quick adjustments to many items simultaneously or allowing it to be done individually in specific items outside of category.
STORE UI SUGGESTIONS:
Product Categories
Product entries