Traders Feedback

[Tom]

We've had the new trade system for a while now. I'd like to hear from trader characters if the brokering thing works out for you. Please, no general comments from region lords, this is about the brokering aspect available to trader characters only.

Does it work? Is it fun? Is it profitable?

[Penchant]

Its worked, easy to use in my opinion, though not profitable to me due to the food surplus everywhere in Dwilight that I have been.

[Eithad]

Easy and fun, not profitable.

[Tom]

We'll tackle the surplus with more tweaking once the system is live on the stable islands and we have more data to look at.

[loren]

As a trader and Lord, I find its actually a lot easier for me personally to simply search for food at a low price then go around and try and sell at a profit from my own stores.

I've brokered probably five or six deals and only made 4-5 gold combined.

I think part of the reason why this might be true is that I rarely find a marketplace where I see both buy and sell offers that can be matched.  The prices are different or the same, or there is simply too much to be sold or too much to be bought.  In other words some areas are food rich and they are too distant from the food poor ones.  This necessitates the previously outlined strategy of purchasing food and then traveling to the places that buy it.

[Indirik]

Trader + Lord/Steward = best possible combo. The ability to either broker deals, or to trade from your own stores is a killer. But I do think it would be nice of a trader could have a partial match on one offer per brokering.

[egamma]

If I may suggest a few additional enhancements:

Partial offers would help everyone out. If a region lord puts up a buy offer of 1000 bushels, it's really frustrating when, as a trader, I can only find 900 bushels in range to broker against it. And I'm sure the region lord needing 1000 would rather have 900 than 0.

The market page should have a calculated value of all visible buy/sell offers--the total amount in sale offers, the total amount in buy offers, and the average buy/sell offer price per 100 bushels. That way region lords can decide to either put up a generous buy offer, if they badly need food, or they can put up a stingy offer if they can afford to wait. Same for sale offers--if they need quick gold, they can easily determine the going rate in the local market, or if they want more money, they can put a higher price on the food. (Note that this is based off of statistics of only the regions the lord can see--the 400 mile radius--not the statistics page).

[Indirik]

Partial offers would help everyone out. If a region lord puts up a buy offer of 1000 bushels, it's really frustrating when, as a trader, I can only find 900 bushels in range to broker against it. And I'm sure the region lord needing 1000 would rather have 900 than 0.

I know that I would definitely like someone to sell me 100 more than I would like 0.

Also, when selling, I would like to sell 100 more than I would like to sell 0.

In fact, that's why when I post offers, I just post a lot of 100 bushel orders. If I want 1,000 bushels, I post 10 orders for 100 each. I can't see why anyone would do any different. There doesn't seem to be much point to posting a 1,000 bushel order, unless you already have a trade partner arranged and ready to trade on that amount. There is simply no advantage to doing it.

[Foundation]

Hmm.  Partial brokering wouldn't be too bad, but how would you propose the game handle that?  i.e. how would it decide what to do when you just select a bunch of offers?

[Indirik]

Allow a single offer to be partial-filled, and let the trader pick which one.

[Foundation]

How about this variation on what you said, Rob?

If the trader only picks one buy or one sell offer, and that one is larger than the others combined, then we try to fulfill as much of that as possible.  But even in this case, which opposing offer do you fulfill first?  As many as possible starting from the largest?

[egamma]

How about this variation on what you said, Rob?

If the trader only picks one buy or one sell offer, and that one is larger than the others combined, then we try to fulfill as much of that as possible.  But even in this case, which opposing offer do you fulfill first?  As many as possible starting from the largest?

Do it in whatever way makes the most money, of course.

[Foundation]

Greedy traders!  No respect for the cost in CPU cycles. :P

[Tom]

Can we get this topic back to its topic, please? Thank you.

[egamma]

We've had the new trade system for a while now. I'd like to hear from trader characters if the brokering thing works out for you. Please, no general comments from region lords, this is about the brokering aspect available to trader characters only.

Does it work? Is it fun? Is it profitable?

Yes, it works. It's more fun than the previous trade system. It's not very profitable, but since you don't have to pay caravans and caravan guards anymore, it has the capability to be more profitable once supply and demand are fixed.