Trade: Ideas and observed issues.

[elilasol]

Hi there. I am here to discuss some issues regarding trade, from a stand alone player's viewpoint. I will include some distant observations about village/village trading and inter village trading as well. I will be trying to keep this shortish but there's a big missing piece to the game and this would help solve some issues of player retention and just meeting/interacting in general.
This is probably ordered in level of need in the trade system currently... Number 1 at least is probably the most important change that needs to happen.

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1. Low level players cannot trade anything of value:
This is a sort of lie, but still a very large problem if you want trading to be a part of this game. If a player focused 100% of their starting experience on getting to boiling clams, and finding pearls, they could theoretically trade those when found. All other useful good listed as desirable on the trading forums are high quality clay/metal/goods which don't help an early level player.

Possible solution:
An object requiring massive amounts of low level ingredients that a village would want. The village wanting this item is pretty crucial, but remember it doesn't need to be spectacular. A castle which has a significant room layout inside/a statue which gives a 5% quality bonus to all items created within the claim it stands on/a giant wooden bonfire, giving all village kin a 5% bonus to stats or skills.

The best solution to this I have seen was in eve online, where the highest level items require massive amounts of low level minerals to make. Imagine if the recently released stone tower, instead of taking 2000 stone required instead 20,000. Or better yet, you created a large castle building requiring 100,000 or more stone. The difficulty of collecting this is not skill or ability, but time. Also, this raises the price of 10/10/10 stone to something worthwhile to a new player. They can show up and mine out some stone, get paid a bit and possibly buy something they really want early game to kick start their career.

Something requiring 200,000+ branches would also bypass this issue, creating a time sink to collecting all these things while also making the required object something that regenerates over time(A tree not chopped down will regenerate its branches). A new player can easily gather all the branches in their area, or even yours, having a bunch of trees planted outside so someone could just gather them while you are offline sleeping or something would still be worth paying some cash for because to a developed player his time is better spent gathering higher level resources.

For low level miners, a statue requiring 30,000+ of any metal. You've already made low level mining much easier to get into with the recent stone/metal changes.

Another requirement is that high level villages need to be spending these low level items constantly. A single castle would eat up a lot of resources, and then it would be built and the buying would stop. So they need high decay rates, or they need to be better the more you feed them per day. Something that needed 1000 stone/branches per day to stay at max quality and thus provide max benefit, with a decaying benefit the less you can feed it per day. Since this is difficult for players to really estimate ahead of time, having it have a decay tick at a specified time per day(noon GMT?), and decaying 10% of the amount currently in it would allow players to know exactly what benefit they would get for the next 24 hours.

There are issues to this in the current game of course, the easiest way to get a ton of stone is to just build a house/cellar and pickaxe all the stone out, destroy the cellar and then repeat forever, eliminating the desire to hire noobs to do your menial tasks for you(As much as I like the flavor of needing a pickaxe to dig out your cellar, this might need to be eliminated as a game mechanic for this to really work with stone). In addition inventory size is so small that carrying enough stone to trade for a decent price is difficult(There is a solution for this later in this post).

Taking quality out of the situation is also very important, if a castle/bonfire/statue made of 40/40/40 materials was more desirable, this eliminates the need for noobs since no low level player is going to have a high level survival stat.
Interestingly this would also make the game less dangerous as a result. When a noob is actually useful rather than taking up valuable space/resources, you feel less inclined to kill them.

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2. The only truly safe way to trade with someone is to be of equal power to them when meeting.

Meeting someone while you are behind a wall is really the only time you can feel remotely safe in an interaction, unless you happen to be powerful enough to believe you can kill the other person. Avoiding all human contact is safer by far, because you know any trade opportunities you might have mean you are also a target for destruction and theft.

Solutions:
A way to trade while offline is absolutely desirable here. Especially as a hermit or noob, while carrying something you know other people will want, you feel even more vulnerable. Remember that anything allowing this would also need to have a pretty large carrying capacity in order to prevent running out of space for trades while the owner is offline.

A way to declare an area as a neutral zone would also work. This is difficult to imagine setting up given the current gameplay available... But If I could somehow build an object which would be lethal to both myself and anyone else who initiated combat within its range, this would allow me to build a meeting place where the value of the items being traded was the only thing which held power in this situation.

Additionally, a way to build a trading post that doesn't directly connect to a town would help. Having a trading post a ways away from a city would allow me to feel slightly safer about going near it. Standing next to someone else's walls is always a risk.

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3. Traveling with goods is hard. Like... really hard.

This isn't something I really view as a detriment, but it causes issues with the limited carrying capacity of a typical person. The problem with this is nebulous and difficult to solve with one simple solution. What I want to be encouraged to do is build a cart, put a bunch of goods inside, and travel to a city. But I know that cities are very dangerous for me, the larger the city, the more likely someone is online and will murder me.

Solutions: ??
The previous two issues having solutions actually might solve this one on its own. If a large city had a need for low level noobs to help them, they might actually build a network of roads in their area in order to get assistance with their project. Also, if they felt they needed to keep relations with noobs, they would find it easier to not be known for killing traders that come to peddle their goods, regardless of how much it would benefit them.

The ability to trade without needing both parties online at the same time would also solve the issue of missed trade opportunities and lessen the danger a person might feel around a city.

Still, a way to stack these low level resources would probably also be needed. A cart has two slots for what I would call "storage" You can stick a tree log in there which if broken down would mean 650 branches or so(2 beech logs, 65 blocks a piece, 5 branches per block). So traveling with a large amount of branches isn't so bad, but remember that this is still just a single tree worth of resources. Stone however is much more annoying, you can't even lift a boulder until you've removed something like 75-80% of the stone. A removal of that limitation would help. Increasing the amount of stone per boulder might help as well, but is probably unneeded.. it looks like the average boulder contains about 60-70 stone, so bringing two of those to a city might actually be enough to be worth trading for, especially if people want a specific type of boulder/stone.

Also, since these logs/boulders are the largest concentration of stone/wood that exist, players will want to trade for them, not the individual stone/branches themselves. Allowing whatever trade system you implement to take these objects as sellable items of value will be very useful.

I should probably mention roads here? A properly built road is fine honestly, it's annoying that it doesn't work with carts/wagons yet, but from what I've read this is viewed as a bug, so I would already be expecting a fix for this.

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4. There is no way to tell who wants what, where.

This is always a problem in all games ever. Forums are shit for this, absolute garbage. You cant tell where you are, or where they are. Someone might need to travel for 10 hours to reach you, or 5 minutes. You, as a noob, might have no idea how to even tell someone where you are located.

Solutions:
Technically a solution would be to just give people a command to print out their exact coordinates? This feels pretty out of place with the game though.

A trade noticeboard combined with the road travel endpoints(A road network endpoint at a city would be connected to your trade post built into your city walls. A road network endpoint in the wilds would provide an option other than follow or travel which would be "List items for trade" and include all items both for sale and desired to be purchased.) offers a lot more interaction in game and also encourages road network building and even would encourage a trade hub, a single point where all nearby cities would build a trade road to in order to facilitate movement between cities and also allowing a noob near one city to have a larger selection of goods to choose between when selling their stuff.

High level trading between large distant cities is still an issue here, when you have something that is worth traveling 10 hours for, but don't really have the time to travel that far. I guess at a certain point someone will raise the cost enough that one party or the would be willing to make the hike. In addition this might encourage larger travel networks being built to facilitate trade between "great power" villages. A large road construction effort would also mean a lot more player interaction and cooperation.

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5. A wanderer/surveyor has difficulty benefiting anyone other than their own village/themselves.

If I find a 60/60/60 clay area that I definitely don't want to settle, I have no in game way of selling this info to someone other than just saying where it is out loud. This is fraught with danger for all parties. If I am honest, they can just walk away without paying me. If I am lying, I can take their stuff for the cost of a single lie. Knowledge is also a form of power, and giving some power to the wanderers/explorer types is going to encourage more exploration of your world.

Solutions:
A survey ability which produces a map. This map would, when clicked, list the item surveyed(example: clay), list the qualities known to the surveyor(example: a hearthling with 35 survival surveying a 60/60/60 clay area would produce a survey listing it as 35/35/35), list the surveying ability of said surveyor(allowing the purchaser to know if this purchase might result in a greater value than what is currently known about it, and allowing a mid level surveyor to possibly get more money for their survey), and finally, it would give a party style arrow pointer to the exact location the survey was taken when held(Like you are following a map to a location).

This has some issues, nothing stops you from surveying multiple times in the same area and selling all of them as different locations. Also you can make multiple surveys and sell them to different buyers, resulting in a sort of gold rush for who moves in and claims first. I think disallowing multiple surveys would be bad, but a way to know if one survey was within some minimal distance to prevent receiving a bunch of duplicates would be helpful.

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6. Farm goods will literally never be worth trading for as a village.

This is more midgame farmer oriented as low level food is pretty useless. All farm items grow and increase in quality regardless of location/biome. I, regardless of whatever skills I spend my points in, will never be better at pumpkin growing than anyone else. As a result, no one would need to buy any food other than foragables, and the only one I know of that has ever been a trade item was high quality blueberries.

Solutions:
Forcing biome checks for all crops would help a lot. If a carrot could only hit 10/10/10 in a cloudplain, and could reach 80/80/80 in a beechgrove this would force villages to need people from other parts of the world, or at least keep multiple farms far apart from eachother in different biomes. This would help with trees as well. Having to choose the trees I want to be good at producing, settling along a biome line and getting a couple biomes to choose from would force another choice when looking for a good location. This isn't really an elegant solution for low level farmers, but as a low level farmer personally, I use almost everything I grow.

Another solution would be to up the food requirements of animals, or having a special animal created that used a ton of food, similar to the metal/stone/wood sinks from above. The problem of animals starving and actually losing quality though remains a big issue, since you would care about quality and that would eliminate the usefulness of a low level player selling you 10/10/10 carrots.

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There's probably more that I can add here, but I've already spent a few hours typing out my thoughts and wants for this.

I like this game a lot, and I really just want to like it more.

[barra]

Something that requires 100,000 stone or 10 million stone is just going to see a big village employ 10s/100s of bots to dig up that stone. EVE's solutions aren't much help here because CCP doesn't permit bots as far as I'm aware.

Low level trade goods need to involve gameplay that can't be botted, like a minigame that involves filling in capchas to dig up gold pebbles or something.

[elilasol]

All actions are bottable. There is nothing you can build a game to do that I cannot also build a program to do for me.

And really this isn't a discussion on that. Keeping players in a game and invested in playing that game requires proper interactions. The most successful games that exist all have a relatively slow curve of player interactions. Starting people off with low level trading to find their first items they feel they cant get themselves and moving into actual conversations and such is very important for the early part of an mmo experience.

[shubla]

If jorb and loftar would REALLY want to stop botting. They would visibly say that they dont allow it and maybe rape few villages that are 100% confirmed botting.

[elilasol]

Look, bots are a symptom, not a cause. Bots are created as a result of a game having elements viewed as tedious but still necessary. There will always be bots, there is no way to stop this.

[dageir]

They could implement a bot-detecting invincvible forest monster that seek botters and botting villages and lay them to waste.
I would pay to watch villages razed before my eyes and there would be tears of joy!

[vatas]

They could implement a bot-detecting invincvible forest monster that seek botters and botting villages and lay them to waste.
I would pay to watch villages razed before my eyes and there would be tears of joy!

When I played Runescape, my woodcutting marathon interrupted when NPC appeared and teleported into some sort of quiz room. At first I thought it was just some random bonus or something instead of bot test.

Would some sort of Goblins, that ask you captcha-esque questions randomly if you do stuff repeatedly for long periods, ruin immersion too bad?

[dageir]

Maybe an "ent" could appear and bump the botter causing him to stop his action?

[sabinati]

could you guys stop posting about bots and how to deal with them in this thread, please