Change Consignment to FIFO

[Reyhan]

It appears that currently the last item put up for consignment is the first one that is pulled if a player attempts to order one of said item. This means that if a bunch of people put up the same type of consignment item (e.g. unguent) over a week or two, the first one to put it up is the least likely to sell and will expire the soonest. Since consignments expire and cost money, this seems less than ideal. Consigments should be organized so that they are first in first out so that everyone has the opportunity to sell and the first person to fill a need in the market isn't getting punished for it.

[Gorth]

Consignment already will appear lower on the order cue on average due to people usually consigning items higher than they would normally sell. Of course, if someone consigns for less, it should respect the cue as normal, as the cue sorts ascending from price, but I agree with this. We should probably still be careful about this as it could result in just more pain with expiring food items, like we've had several posts about.

But not many people consign food so, it should be fine.

[Reyhan]

This issue is about unguent jars, which seem to be universally consigned at 700 and never sold. Whoever puts theirs up first loses, and anyone can screw everyone else over by dumping a big pile on after everyone else's is listed. Piling onto an overcrowded market should make it harder to sell, not easier.

[Gorth]

Whoever puts theirs up first loses, and anyone can screw everyone else over by dumping a big pile on after everyone else's is listed.

Do unguent jars actually have a normal sale price? Perhaps we could have the market adjust sale prices if, for example, 30 jars of unguent are consigned at the same price in a row, consigning at another price resets the counter. This is a bit cut and dry, but I don't know about how we could easily economically balance this, except with an actual supply and demand system, which I think is out of the scope of the game.

[Reyhan]

If you try to sell it in the market, they will only offer you 75 for it as that is the sale price of a small clay jar. Consignment is used because the market does not see the unguent inside the jar so selling normally isn't possible.

I am not really following you though, sale price doesn't seem relevant. this is about a mechanical issue specific to consignment. People who sell things get all their money immediately and don't have to worry about what numerical order the items are listed in afterwards, and it does not matter if anyone buys their goods at all once they're listed.

[Gorth]

My point being, if the sale price eventually reflected what people were consistently consigning at, then people wouldn't even have to dump the riln into the consignment price and pray that people bought it.

[Reyhan]

If I could just sell my unguent jars at 700 and get paid immediately I'd do that, yes, but I don't think a massive rewrite of the market pricing system is necessary to address the issue I've raised. If equally priced consignment items were ordered FIFO it would solve the problem for everyone and wouldn't affect anything else, and most importantly, unless something is weird with data structures in the game's code, it would only take a line or two to fix.

[Marcuson]

As someone who uses market consignment often, I agree with Reyhan's suggestion. I'll clarify things about the way the market works in this post.

Presently, when you browse the market, the highest price is displayed. You'll see something like this:

Code: Select all

   an average small clay jar of some pale violet hillant unguent .......................................................... 700 riln (x32)

Which means some of the 32 jars may cost less than 700 riln. Ordering them will reveal the lower prices. That works fine as it is, in my opinion. (Though a new line for each different price wouldn't be a bad idea...)

Presently, when you order, the market always targets the lowest-priced item first. If there are 31 unguent jars for sale at 700 riln, and one for sale at 600, then 'order unguent jar' will target the 600-riln one. I think that works great, and it's intuitive.

However, if two people put their jar up for sale at 600 riln, the second person's jar will be targeted first, not the first person. That's definitely unintuitive. That's what Reyhan's suggestion is addressing, and I agree that would be a good change.