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How to prevent novices from buying massive comms
The following is a system that would prevent abuse of the trade ministry's commodities by novices. Basically the more trusted you are by the city or commune, the more commodities you can purchase. This is to prevent a novice from purchasing 44k grain for instance, or to prevent people from doing what I did in buying and selling to foreign cities and communes.
Foreigners all can purchase up to 20 commodities a (day | month)
City rank 1: 50 commodities a (day | month)
City rank 2: 100 commodities a (day | month)
City rank 3: 300 commodities a (day | month)
City rank 4: 500 commodities a (day | month)
City rank 5: 700 commodities a (day | month)
City rank 6: 1000 commodities a (day | month)
City rank 7: unlimited
Now the trade ministry can sell licenses each year to people who are trusted (citizens or foreigners) to purchase more commodities.
I think this would prevent abuse of buying and selling commodities. Thoughts?
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(c) Iron Realms Entertainment 2012.
Comments
Could definitely see limiting sales to foreigners and novices, but maybe make it a percentage type deal? Say, the commodities warehouse keeps track of how much of everything there is, and can be given standing orders not to sell more than X% of the banked supply as of the beginning of that day (or even that month) to a foreigner. That way, people who actually have legitimate reasons to buy decent amounts of comms can buy them if the city's amply stocked, but it'd take an organized team to clean out an entire stockpile (an event I think should remain possible, just not easy). Could do similarly for novices, perhaps making it so anybody of CR1 and not yet a full guild member is limited in what they purchase - that limits pretty much everyone who'd not actually have much reason to buy in bulk without significantly harming everyone else. Less of an administrative task and more of an invisible wall that probably won't even be noticed by people who aren't trying to screw you.
This is one of those things that depend on player decency, which, unfortunately, is a failed cause. The only thing we can do is make the IC repercussions as harsh as is reasonably allowed to discourage such things from happening.
I keep a fairly tight hold of Hallifax's available stock since it's only rarely that we hold a village and we have to be more careful with reserves. But as far as I'm concerned, for day-to-day stuff, anything over 1,000 available units is asking for someone to come in and buy it out. If someone wants to make a bulk purchase, they just contact me and I make more available, or give the OK to an aide who can adjust stock for them if our timezones don't match up.
One thing I would love though is a shoplog for the Trade Ministry, so you can see who is buying what. After repeated buyouts of a commodity over a few days, trying to track down if those were 'honest' puchases, or if it was someone taking advantage of cheap prices to sell for profit can be a pain.
(Ah, ninja'd by Enyalida with regards shoplog)
It's very much Lusternia's version of capitalism. Orgs are the owners of and investors in villages who are the sole creators of commodities. Then the company/org with the biggest stock in say..gems controls the gem market. It's not a perfect comparison but whatevs. Especially since we can just murder the competition in Lustenria.
Either way, competitive pricing (if that even happened, as you said orgs hardly rely on the profits) isn't a bad thing.
That's not to say the reserve cap was met in this case, but for an org holding Estelbar as long as Seren has I would be very surprised if they had not long since exceeded it.
Not like it is any more bloat than the many shoplogs for player shops (and would still only show up to six days back).
However, no time limits on buying from the commshops. Warrior novices need weapons, and sometimes feel satisfaction in acquiring the comms for their own weapons.
That's fine. There's literally no/zero/none purpose for having more than (or even at) the max storage.
It's a game, I frankly can't be bothered less if someone bankrupts an org's entire store of comms. All that'll happen to that org's tradespeople are that they will be forced to buy from more expensive village comm shops. Or their trade minister will jack up prices and they'll be forced to buy at that price or be inconvienienced trying to get comms because of some arbitrary limit imposed by the trade minister to correct the problem.
The only reason for orgs to want to keep an eye on their stores is precisely to convienience their own members. From an OOC point of view, the trade ministry is to help make the game more fun for trade people who craft in mass. Not to "engage in trade". You can make an argument that this helps the end user by allowing a variety of trade products available for purchase, making the game vibrant and all, but I'll not go that far. Making the life easier for people playing a game is all that matters to me, for the current trade ministry system.
No, economics doesn't come into the picture.
When other players abuse (yes, abuse, not use) this system that has little restrictions, they profit, at the cost of the convienience of other trade people. This is a problem in my eyes because a system designed to make things easy for people playing the game for the trades is being used against the very people it was designed for. When trade ministries have to spend time and effort protecting their stores, when the admin have to spend time and effort coding in mechanical restrictions, all that's happening is going to be detriment to the game's health. You can go further and say that introducing this kind of commercial logic to such a small scale game is going to harm the image of the game because it lowers the viability for newbie trades people trying to get into the market with small purchases and craftings. But I won't go so far. Making life harder for just the trade people is the problem that abuse of the system creates, is all I'm trying to say.
I don't own a shop, but if I ever do, you can be sure I'll be crying bloody murder when someone profits at the cost of my inconvienience.
Using novices to scout org comm shops and to buy out comms is not "espionage" or "economics" or the "forces of free market" or "underhanded" or anything else you want to paint it as. It's just being a jackass, period. When players come with the mentality that this is okay because the trade minister isn't 'protecting' their stoers, then we have a system that was designed to help trades people turned into a jackass shit-flinging contest. Some people call this a toxic game environment.
Yeah, this is why we can't have nice things.
At this point, I can't be bothered to care much about lost stock when it's over the 60K cap. It's no big deal. I did everything I could to sweet talk our tailors into using up our large excess of cheap cloth and it didn't go anywhere. How can I be mad that it got bought up eventually?
If trade ministers really want to stop this sort of thing completely, they should just take the initiative and drop their "buy at" price to 1 for everything, or make it excessively low compared to what the price is generally game-wide (yes, I expect they'll need to do some research to figure out what those prices are).
There are some players out there who apparently have huge manses full of comm producing dingbat things (I don't), so I'm not sure how crippling this sort of thing is anymore, either.
I disagree. I'm not saying it's totally ethical, but I think you're making a bigger deal out of it than what it really is. I own a shop. There was situations were people would buy all my stock, then sell it at a higher price from their stores. I thought it SUCKED big time. I wanted novices etc to be able to afford basic goods without paying a fortune for them, but I definitely didn't suddenly think the admin should start coding around it. Instead, I instigated an IC tradeban against the people that were using these practices, banned said people from my shop (and encouraged shop owners to do the same) and found the instances of it were drastically reduced.
And that's the crux of my point. Whether you like it or not/ think it's jackassery or not, it's something that is easily fixed IN GAME by having trade ministers that actively pay attention to their ministry! It doesn't need a big admin boot to the face or coded limits that will ultimately annoy a lot more people.
Now, if you want to have a more controlled economy where the Trade Minister subsidizes various tradeskills and stipulates that the discounted commodities can only be used for X, Y and Z, that's fine too. Just don't use the main, publicly available, bin-less commodity shop to do it. You should either arrange transfers directly from the Trade Ministry to the person receiving the subsidy or sell the discount commodities via a standard shop stocking the commodities in bins only available to approved citizen tradesmen.