Dynamic Commodity Prices

[Radion]

Would you spend your free time redefining the entire economy every, let's say, three months, of course keeping all the important aspects in mind, such as profit/time balance, lawful margins, contraband margins, favoring bottlenecks, etc.?

Can you code a system which can do all the above in an easy and time-efficient way?

An easy way to do it would be to automate the system. For each station, have a few goods that are considered "in demand" by the station. (i.e. refining stations have ore listed as a commodity that is "in demand") You then keep a tally of each "in demand" good for each station, and at the end of each day, compare it to a certain number, so for example, Refining Station A demands 1000 units of gold ore each day. If 1000 units are sold, don't change the price the next day. If more than that was sold to the station, decrease the price of ore the next day. If less was sold, increase the price. Theoretically, the system is self balancing, as infrequent routes are made more appealing, and abused routes are made less so.

The way this would be implemented would be with a server plugin that checks to see if a good that was sold was on the "in demand" list for the station that it was sold at. It would then add the number sold to a value for that specific good. When the server is restarted each day, a script will then go through every good's value and then compare it to the good's expected value, and then modify the sell price for the next day accordingly. If we want to take this a bit farther, this data would then be published somewhere on the forum so that traders can decide what goods to sell where that day.