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KharnovKrow

In-Kind Trading

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I don't think that I'm presenting an especially hot take when I make the claim that a vast portion of the currency available in-game is held predominantly by veteran players, and tends to pass between the hands of the veteran players who produce higher-quality goods with their higher-level skills. I'm not even necessarily as upset about that as some players might be, but I must admit that one of the consequences of it has been a small disappointment for me; there is not much in the way of a trading market for lower-level goods, as the veterans with money have no need for them and the lower-level players who need it won't part with their small handfuls of coins to purchase them. To the extent that this bothers me, it's mostly because I feel it takes away from Wurm's ability to function as an immersive simulation; I like the idea of being able to ride my cart over to the next village and trade with the people there if I want to. But the Wurm economy in its current state seems to instead be dominated by grand artifacts or enormous bulk orders shipped between continents. I feel like I can understand why the current state of affairs has emerged, but I also want to try and do something to resolve the frustrations that it creates for me. I've got one or two ideas that I'm considering trying out, but I maybe wanted to get a little bit of feedback first; in particular, I know Wurm players have been discussing these issues for my entire adult life (if not longer), so I wanted to check if some more experienced people might have some input to offer, whether it be helpful advice or honestly saying "someone tried it, it didn't work."

As the title of the thread says, the idea I want to discuss here is the notion of trading "in kind" rather than in currency. Obviously this is something that already happens all the time in Wurm, but I'm thinking about it in a larger and more organized sense. Among a single community where everyone knows each other's circumstances, negotiating a fair exchange of goods and services is pretty straightforward, but when one has a bunch of strangers coming together to try and do business, it helps to have a more consistent set of standards. That is the role that currency traditionally fills, providing a 'lingua franca' for expressing value. But the numerical nature of Wurm presents at least one possible way to measure comparable value between two wildly different types of goods without the medium of currency: it takes the form of a formula that I've been pondering a little bit over the last day or so:

 

(Mass) x (QL) x (material value) x (production value)

 

"Material value" would be an integer between 0.5 and 1.5 depending on the type of material used (e.g. 0.5 for plant goods; 1 for animal goods; 1.5 for mineral goods); "production value" would be similar, but increasing based on how many stages of processing were involved (e.g. 0.5 for "raw" materials; 1 for refined materials/simple goods; 1.5 for finished/complex goods). Obviously such a formula would have to be a guideline used in good spirit; no arguing that a 100 piles of dirt are worth one high-QL item, etc. More obviously, my lack of experience with the Wurm economy means that I have no idea how effectively such a formula actually represents the value of the goods in question (especially regarding my "material/production value" estimates). Feedback would most definitely be appreciated ^_^

 

Obviously there is another issue raised by this. While the awesome goods being traded by veteran players make traveling across continents worthwhile, traveling halfway across Xanadu isn't exactly practical when one just wants a fancy new rake and a few barrels of wine. For this kind of trading system for lower-level players to function, there needs to be a decent quantity of potential trading partners all relatively close to one another; it would work best if most of the lower-level players who might want to trade with one another were encouraged to stay relatively close to one another, or had reliable transportation to such a location. So the question that I'm led to ask is whether there are in fact enough "lower-level" players (let's say, players with most of their skills under 40, for example) to put something like this into action at all, or if we are like the rare cherished children of elf communities, vastly outnumbered by our elders?

 

And, in conclusion, I apologize if I'm repeating a bunch of things that veterans have heard a half-dozen times before; I've been trying to do as much research as I can before opening my mouth, but Wurm has a lot of history lol

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I may be talking from a "veteran" perspective, but I think QL is the most dominant factor in an items worth and easily dwarfs most other factors you outline for that formula. At least when you consider the time it takes to imp something to 90. Mass doesn't really matter and would just imply the amount of materials used during imping, which again will easily outnumber the mass used in creation. Unless we're talknig really complex things like boats, but you have that covered with production value. However, things like tents primarily derive their value from the "complex" assembly, so I feel it should be a bigger factor for them.

 

Material value: This is compounded by the creators skill as someone with higher skill will need less material, so that's a mostly latent variable. Mineral goods is also too rough of a measure because lumps of different metals are vastly different in size - iron is 1kg per lump, while silver and gold are a mere 0.1kg, making those items 10 times more "costly" in terms of materials. But again, this depends on the skill of the creator, so unless we're talking about a golden large maul or something that uses ridiculous amounts of materials/lumps, QL is a better approximation.

 

If I had to spontaneously come up with a different formula, I'd say ditch the mass factor and tweak the material factor to something less plastic and have it consider what is actually made from said material, how much would it use, what difference does it make (a steel tool is worth more than an iron tool, while lead, zinc and tin tools are kind of garbage. Silver weapons have a decent bonus damage buff on certain mobs and should be appraised higher not only for the increased material cost, but also, to some extent, greater usability)

 

If I can break from the outlined meta a bit more, I'd say don't overthink with the formula though. Market appraisal usually works via actions done, products quality and possibly the skill needed behind it. It's a bit rougher, but trying to pin everything down will have you pigeonholed into many details that will take more effort than it's worth to disentangle. Appraise your items in copper and iron coins as it's usually done and both parties can then agree if the discrepancy is acceptable to both. The point of in-kind trading is that either party is happy and feels like they got ahead with something they couldn't do as well on their own, not to get an exact 1:1 trade, anyway.

 

The logistic question is a good one, it sounds like those people should either join up in a community based upon trading eachothers goods, but that's not for everyone. If the doctrines of Wurm would relent a bit here and allow something as simple as fast travelling from your deeds token to a starter town and vice versa, this would be easily solve by allowing starter towns to be meeting hubs without having to spend 2 hours two ways to even get there, but that'd actually strengthen the community feel of the game, can't have that... (insert obligatory "disable for PVP caveat" here)

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For years the bulk material prices were stamped by a lot of people at 10i per action so 1s per 1000 actions required to produce them. Bricks oscillate around 2s/1k because it's (roughly) 750 actions to mine the shards, 1000 actions to chip the bricks. This worked quite well few years ago, when not everyone had 10 free alts logged on pumping out bricks on all of them, effectively making 10x more material in the same time frame.

Exception being mortar which i argued for years, people try to charge 3s per 1k mortar because "it's sand and clay which you have to dig up and then 3rd action of combining them to make the mortar". Well, for one thing, we can carry material for way more mortar at a time than we can for bricks (in units) so it is easier to make, and mostly - it's only 50 actions of digging sand, 500 actions of digging clay and 1000 actions of combining them so 1550 actions on one of the easiest things to make in the game is commonly being charged at double the price of most other bulk materials.

I think the prices of bulk materials being tied to the timers come from the times when barely any of us had a powerful enough machine to run more than one or two clients at the same time. It made sense to charge the customer for the time you spent on fulfilling their order instead of doing something else. This has changed, with Wurm having minimum system requirements not that far from they were 10 years ago (settings dependent) but computers being so much more powerful and multi-monitor setup being the norm, it's much, much easier to run 4 clients per screen on 4 screens, each of them on minimum settings, just to pump out bricks/planks/nails/whathaveyou on 12 characters which don't even have to be premium. 

I don't do much trading, i sell nothing, i have no personal interest in this buy maybe it's time that people agree on basing the value of their bulk materials on something other than the actions? I mean, we already agreed on the current base line, why not rethink it to include the change of circumstance (multi accounts, commonly available supreme, enchanted tools). I'm not saying that the prices should be higher or lower but i do think they should be based on something else and not actions per item any more as per @KharnovKrow's post.

 

For the bartering idea, with current base value of bulk materials, someone will always suffer. If you are trying to sell this coffee mug for 1s and allow for in-kind trade, person who wants it will make 350 mortar and use that 90% of the time. I would love to be able to trade all the excess bulk materials i have hoarded over the years, preferably for something shiny, not even to have the shiny thing but to monetize hundreds of thousands of bulk materials and make them someone else's problem.

 

I am all for a bartering market but perhaps something closer to request orders would work better for that? Plug it in to the highway system, make an order board near a waystone, put up that coffee mug on sale for x amount of something that fits in BSB/FSB/Crate, basically, anything that the wagoner can transport. The same board could allow you to view existing orders and fulfill them, something like sending goods using the wagoner. Item could be delivered via ingame mail perhaps, upon receiving the payment of course. 

This still won't work for trading that coffee mug for the rake but it would allow new starters to obtain their tools without the necessity of using the currency.

 

Much bigger heads than mine would have to weigh in here, i'm not an economist. I do think however that as OP suggests, the base price of goods should either be based on something other than actions or not based on anything at all and we should stop suggesting that to new players. 

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I'm not sure I see the point of this - people agree what they think something is worth themselves already.  And that price shifts regularly based on what stuff is selling for on the open market.  The economy of wo is deflationary, so prices tend to go down over time as people undercut each other to try to shift their goods, so any sort of formula is going to be chasing a moving target all the time anyway.

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Edit: sorry for posting in the wrong forum; I assumed Suggestions was specifically for discussing actual feature changes, whereas I wanted to focus more on player activity here ^_^

 

One important thing I wanted to acknowledge is that the idea of this formula was to try and cover trades where trying to convert it to coin value might be too much trouble, because the worth of the items in question would be so low, e.g. for items with QLs under 50; the idea is that the value of the formula is simply supposed to be an abstraction of "value" that doesn't translate directly to coinage. Flubb's comment suggests that the Wurm market is much better at putting currency values to those things than I thought however (I kind of overlook iron coins sometimes, lol). I also agree with the criticisms around the variety of materials require much finer coverage than just "plant, animal, mineral"; realized just a bit after my first post that I ended up lumping olives with potatoes and diamond with iron xD

 

Again, my hope is that this formula would be a rough guideline for two strangers who might want to do some trading, but don't have enough currency to necessarily be handing it out willy-nilly. If two people are just happy to give A for B, no reason to butt your nose in. My hope was that this formula could be something to refer to if a player is wondering how the value of their QL 40 rakes compares to another's 20 QL wine barrels; how easily would converting the values of those kinds of goods into iron currency be? :) 

 

Edit 2: perhaps I overthink these things, but I want to be clear that this isn't coming from antipathy against the older players. I've generally found the community to be extremely helpful and supportive during my brief time on Wurm. I'm interested in promoting trade/business between lower-skill players because it provides those players opportunities to level the skills that interest them in a way that feels genuinely meaningful, rather than just privately hammering out the Nth steel horseshoe in your smithy because you have months of grinding left before your skills are market-competitive.

 

(I have no idea what grinding smithing is like lol)

 

To briefly refer to a personal example, I find myself wanting a ~50QL needle to make a sail atm. I could ask the owner of my deed, he probably has a dozen way better ones he'd happily give me for free. For him it's trivial. But for an aspiring blacksmith, making that needle would be a great opportunity to level his skill that would feel like it actually matters.

 

Setting up the infrastructure for that is kind of what I have in mind :) But that goes back to the question of whether there's enough "leveling" players available that gathering them won't just lump all of them into one or two deeds?

Edited by KharnovKrow
Didn't want to double post

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On 11/6/2019 at 4:50 AM, Wonka said:

I'm not sure I see the point of this - people agree what they think something is worth themselves already.  And that price shifts regularly based on what stuff is selling for on the open market.  The economy of wo is deflationary, so prices tend to go down over time as people undercut each other to try to shift their goods, so any sort of formula is going to be chasing a moving target all the time anyway.

 

Supply and demand, the reason it's deflationary is because the supply (or ability to create the supply, i.e. toons only get better over time) outpaces demand.  There simply isn't enough item sinks in the game.  This bothers me, as it really hurts new players ability to enter and use the market, just as OP said

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I'd say.. better does not cost more.. else good walls would take more time to build.. but that's not the case.. when you make 100 bricks.. you do not get only 3-5-10 uncommon/rare bricks(like in other games) you get 100x relatively same quality bricks..(well in wurm QL at low skill could vary, better skill lowers the rng, but I was not talking about 'item quality' at all); * what I meant was... fancy stuff do not cost x amount of fancier resource... it takes same amount of the basic resource or additional 10-20 clay or w/e like for rendered walls, which is not hard to come by.
Game itself is not build for long term economy and limited amounts of 'fancy', you just need certain skill and a vain to get the resource, rest is not even same amount of time, usually time to get same results or better ones.. shortens also, if we count that .. game actually is built to have pretty bad economy around the end as the more people get better, the worse the market is going to look.

I'd say wurm is 'casual' as 90-99% of the time you have controlled environment, unless you constantly explore and put yourself in danger's way or AFK in wild for periods of time, etc, you get the idea.. Game's pretty chill and casual on pve.

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This may be a good idea or a bad idea, but what about an auction house. This may help stabilize the economy since you could see what is for sale regardless of what continent you are on. Hook it up to the highway system or mailbox as a delivery method and you may be surprised at what would happen. A lot of game actually use an auction house to help regulate player economies. Let me know what you think about it. We could make it to where you have to buy n auctioneer contract and make an auction board/building if you want to us it on your deed or go to a starter town where one would already be set up and list what you want to sell and for how much. You could also maybe put in orders at the auction house that would take the coin and pay for the items and send them to you once they have collected all the items. This way you can put the order up, pay the fee and price for the order and go about doing your own thing, then when the order is filled you receive it. This could also work for cross continent orders as well, so people are not traveling for hours to deliver goods and can continue to play the game.  

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