Player based economy traders.

[kuplion 1785]

Something I think would help move away from the geared in 30 minutes (or less) issue that many servers seem to have (I realise it's not an issue as such but it certainly detracts from the survival aspect) is having traders that are only stocked with items players have sold to them (maybe plus a few basics like food and drink?). Whilst I've never played it, I believe Epoch has/had a system like this and MarXet was strikingly close.

I would love for something like this to be implemented and for it to be configurable on or off. If enabled, it uses the config set buy and sell prices for items, but stock levels are only that which the players have sold to the traders. Traders could remain the same, only having access to the items they would normally sell, but only in the volumes sold to the traders.

If disabled it uses the normal trader system as is.

The idea would be that it promotes all of the fundamental game mechanics; looting (so you can sell to traders), missions and engaging AI (for the sweet sweet loot), and it would promote PVP (and the stealing of other players loot).

Thoughts?

[Razzmatazz 19]

I know this is a very old topic, but I was coming to post a virtually identical suggestion. So instead of posting the same thing, I'll just necropost.

This idea struck me when I tried out the 1.0 release of Epoch. I was reminded of how much I enjoyed the forced scarcity involved where traders only sell items players have sold to them. Unfortunately, the trader interfaces, base building, base maintenance, and interaction (who asked for a wheel menu interface?) systems are all vastly inferior to Exile.

If there were an option to apply the same "traders only sell what's been sold to them" concept to vehicles as well, that would also be great.

It could be trader-specific as well. Traders are assigned a "trader camp" number such that anything sold to a trader that's a member of that "camp" would show up in the wares of the appropriate trader. That way, you don't have to worry about going to sell to a specific trader, and each trader still sells consistent wares. Selling items to the "waste" trader of a camp would push all the items to the appropriate traders' inventories in that camp. That way, players are encouraged to travel around the map to check the stock of different traders. Alternatively, if server owners wanted all their trading zones to share the same inventory, all traders could just be assigned the same camp number.

This system would make looting a valuable activity, increase the value of mission rewards, encourage player movement around the map, and make virtually all items more valuable.

[dekela 129]

I am currently running a dynamic trader price system on my server. The more an item is sold,  the less it's listed price becomes, the more an item is bought the higher it's listed price becomes. All prices are saved to the database and remain persistent across restarts. The system also counts and logs how many times the item is bought and sold. The idea is to implement a stock level system using the same process as the bought/sold system I have in place. I still need to complete a lot of work,  database queries, network messages etc,  as well as a lot more testing before the system could become public. In it's current state I see certain limitations I need to address,  however, I'm certain I will be able to come up with a fully functional system. 

[Razzmatazz 19]

That sounds like an impressive amount of work, maybe even more work than just limiting inventory to the number of items sold. Seems more straight forward for actual scarcity to create scarcity rather than prices creating scarcity.

[dekela 129]

prices will not create scarcity. what i am trying to do is create a multi function system where part one is a player driven economy based off players buying and selling habits.

part two will include trader stock levels, where the default stock level will be entered into the database, then as items are bought and sold, the stock level will rise and fall. once the stock level reaches 0, the item will no longer be available for purchase, until one or more are sold back to the trader. this is two independent parts of the one system.

part three allows each item to have its own sell % adjustable via the database, so no more 'everything sells for 50% of buy price'.

part four allows each item to have the amount its price increases/decreases when bought/sold adjusted separately in the database, so high tier item prices can raise/lower more or less than the low tier items.

part five is the logging to database how many times an item is bought and sold, allowing server owners to see what is popular and in demand, and what is not. this allows them to adjust pricing, stock levels, sell%, buy ratio and sell ratio to better balance the servers economy.

i have all of this functioning except for the stock levels as i have a few more limitations to overcome for that. i have other ideas to include such as dynamic respect levels needed to purchase items, based off either stock levels or current item price to name one.

this is a big project that i have been working on and off with for some time. once its fully functional and working as planned i'll look at providing it to the rest of the community if they want it. i cant provide an ETA, nor will i release it 'as is' or break it into separate projects, or even promise it will be finished at all. in the end i started this to see if i could do it, so now time will tell if i can 

[Razzmatazz 19]

Sounds pretty awesome!

[NachoNinjaGnome 0]

I always liked those styles of traders playing Epoch, Kuplion.  I've also played a server recently using a trader resembling what dekela was talking about.  Might even be theirs, considering that post was back in November.  Also, the MarXet on the server I currently am playing works well enough now.  The percentage based fees were either removed from the feature or turned off server side, not sure.   It would be really nice to see it improved though.  Being able to sort item types and search for specific items would be well received.  Showing the listed price of the items that you post in addition to the "0" showing you can get it back for nothing.  Being able to search by price would be nice too.  What would REALLY be the best option for the Exile mod in it of itself would be a combination and expansion of the current trader system and all the above mentioned that server owners could choose from.  There were also randomly spawned traders on an Epoch server I played awhile back that were kind of cool.  They functioned in the same way as the old Epoch traders mentioned above, only they weren't "protected".  They could be killed by players or AI allowing a new one to spawn next server restart.  Though, many players abused the crap out of this system to get the "perfect" positioning for their own convenience.  I kind of like the idea of the mobile traders as well, like a moving caravan or something that might stop at certain positions for a given length of time along its route, or that may slow and stop for a time when within player proximity.

Anyway, just my two cents...

Sincerely,

- NNG

[dekela 129]

I still have this running on my server in the same form, been too busy with other additions/features to go any further. The limits I see with how I do it is this. All traders items are assigned a global variable, and all overwrites use that variable for speed, rather than trying to pull prices direct from the db. Once the item is bought/sold, then it saves to db. Currently only weapons are dynamic, so there are 234 variables assigned every restart, if all items were included it would be thousands. Downside to this is too many global variables are not good for the server. So while I still work on it, all be it slowly, I still have obstacles to overcome before ever considering a release. 

[Razzmatazz 19]

I get that prices based on how many of an item are available is a feature lots of people want, but it sounds like that's really complicated. I'd be more than happy with a trader system that simply limits the items for sale to those sold by players without dynamically adjusting price based on how many of that item are available.

[Sir_Joker 54]

you can test traders with limited stock and dynamic prices (depends on stock and respect) on a demo server.
have a look here