Dynamic Commodity Prices

[Cursetantine]

In the current state of the game making money is the easiest thing out there and provides zero fun and mostly seen as a boring phase of the game to acquire better&bigger stuff. That's pretty normal since the commodity prices are stabilized regardless of supply&demand .
Wouldn't it be nice if we had commodity updates once in a while that changes the prices of most used and least used commodities? I mean, Waterloo can't keep buying infinite amount of diamonds from the same price.
Also I think mining fields should get depleted or yield less , depending on how much its exploited.

Discuss.

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ALG #1

[Skorak]

Waterloo can't keep buying infinite amount of diamonds

It is an Interspace Station. Yes, yes it can.

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[StarRaven]

Waterloo can't keep buying infinite amount of diamonds

It is an Interspace Station. Yes, yes it can.

+1

[Thyrzul]

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?

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[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.

[Thyrzul]

I thought it's obvious, but it seems it's not: we are full of ideas. What we lack are people with skill and knowledge to make stuff real.

Can you code it?

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[Radion]

Can you code it?

can I get the source code for the plugins that relate to buying and selling commodities? If i can, I'll see what I can do.

[Cursetantine]

It doesn't have to be something coded. Even personal observations of admins are enough I think. e.g.: if X commodity's best price is at Y base, but no one is doing the route , it can be buffed to compensate with better routes .Or If another X commodity is too expensive and heavily exploited it's price can be reduced so people can rely on different things.
It doesn't have to be THAT dynamic really. And if I could code it , obviously I wouldn't be sitting here suggesting stuff.

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ALG #1

[Thyrzul]

@Radion We don't have too much plugins related to buying and selling commodities, do we? Perhaps the newest toys, trade event plugin seems to be related, but that isn't much to work with on the scale of the entire economy, is it?

@"astroicecream" I don't think you fully understand the entire dimensions of the economy. "THAT dynamic", lol, you don't even specify what degree of dynamism you speak of. And if done only selectively, on what basis should people (amins/devs) decide to alter the prices of only a select few of all the traded commodities?

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[Radion]

@Radion We don't have too much plugins related to buying and selling commodities, do we? Perhaps the newest toys, trade event plugin seems to be related, but that isn't much to work with on the scale of the entire economy, is it?

I find it useful to have something to work off of, even if I don't use 90% of it. And we have plugins that manage what can be bought and sold, so that would probably what I would use as the framework for the list of watched goods.