[Economy] Market Pricing

[Maina]

So there was a discussion on the economy again, and how things like ores are not worth taking the time to gather and sell them. It's been a fairly consistent issue - at least since I've joined - that raw materials are seen as just... not worth the time and effort unless you use them yourself.

Rias has said there are various issues to restructuring the economy, and so I have come up with a way for players to self-regulate the economy a bit more effectively than the consignment system alone. This may be best as a placeholder for an economy rework later down the line, or maybe it can work as a long-term solution.

The idea is thus:

An object is worth 10 riln to the market. Someone consigns it for 100 riln.

The object sells. The object is now worth the average of the two prices: 55 riln to the market, without needing to consign.

If the difference between the market price and the sold price is less than 10%, just set it to the sold price.

If something is sold for the market price and then falls off the market without being bought X number of times (I am not sure a good number here, but it probably should be more than once; maybe ten times?) then it goes the other way; the price is reduced, perhaps as far as by half.

This way, for things like unguent which have had a pretty steady price for IC years, the market price would eventually match the value that players are willing to sell it for and other players are willing to buy it for. Physickers then no longer have to consign; they can simply sell directly to the market and avoid having to manage the associated fees and waiting to collect their pay.

It also allows people who gather materials to start charging what they feel is a more fair price without having to consign every single thing they gather. Though, of course, they would have to start consigning some in order to get the price increased.

The only potential for abuse I can see is characters from the same account (or even the same character) consigning and buying their own things to mark up prices. This could be solved with any items bought from the same account that consigned it ignoring the markup mechanic entirely.

This allows the players to start setting the prices for things rather than relying on an economy rebalance. It allows for simple supply and demand. Perhaps, even, each market could have its own supply and demand, to enable people to play trader, though this does open things up to more exploits and would probably require a more complicated system to allow.

Though maybe that is also worth considering: increase prices whenever something is bought out entirely and lower them again whenever they are sold back, to help encourage people to sell things to empty markets rather than bloated ones.