Trade sucks

[shubla]

People only buy tokens, yes many other goods are bought, but for way too low price. For example, to buy cheapest cauldron that one certain shop sells, you would have to collect 100 wax. With 100 wax you could almost build your own mineholes and get q80 metal. No point in trading, only way to play the game seems to be to do it all yourself. Devs should in general work towards making trading more feasible. Not suggesting anything specific, but pointing out that they should in general give some thoughts while pondering mechanics to think what would make people trade more.

Not sure what would fix metal, maybe making it a bit more common so people could afford them?

Yes its bad example but in games like eve online trading works nicely, you can buy all items and sell all items etc. so its possible to make it work.

Lets say that somebody would want to focus on just a few aspects of the game, and buy rest of things (like metal) with his own profession, like hunting? glassmaking? silkmaking? wine making? None of these are possible currently.

In thread I would like to see real discussion about how to make trading everything feasible, not trolling etc. useless non related stuff which will be removed.

[Sevenless]

The problem is tokens have lasting permanent value in a game where nothing else is permanent. That makes it such an insanely powerful trade currency that it easily eclipses most other things.

I think trade gets better once actual markets get set up. Manual 1:1 trading has a pretty big per transaction cost for traders.

Edit: Village chat about this came to the conclusion that the power forageables just don't last long enough. Especially not compared to spammable crafted curios of 10h-2d runtime that have slowly been added over time. If something's rare, the runtime has to be really long if the stats aren't ungodly insane.

Edit2: The other issue is specialization doesn't really exist. My village can produce everything it needs, and anything it wants (wax, gold, etc) every other even slightly established town wants as well. I don't know how to solve this outside some kind of "town specialization" system like realm buffs but much more specific and exclusive. This would likely make weird and unfun gameplay mechanics for skilled players though.

[Zampfeo]

Trade was much better in legacy when any small village could create a trade thread thanks to remote alt oathing and teleporting to village. I did it in world 5 with the support of a relatively small, but active village. The prices were fair (looking at them now, it's unbelievable to compare them today's market) and it was an enjoyable way to socialize with people in the Haven community. Nowadays, the logistics for global trade are much different, so only large villages who can defend themselves against any raiders looking for a wealthy target make these public threads and they do so to get even more rich off of lazy hermits. Fair trade now is about making contact with your close neighbors privately which may be what Jorb wants, but this was the case even in legacy. I had interaction on both the global scale and with locals who'd rather physically boat to my location.

[shubla]

Trade was much better in legacy when any small village could create a trade thread thanks to remote alt oathing and teleporting to village. I did it in world 5 with the support of a relatively small, but active village. The prices were fair (looking at them now, it's unbelievable to compare them today's market) and it was an enjoyable way to socialize with people in the Haven community. Nowadays, the logistics for global trade are much different, so only large villages who can defend themselves against any raiders looking for a wealthy target make these public threads and they do so to get even more rich off of lazy hermits. Fair trade now is about making contact with your close neighbors privately which may be what Jorb wants, but this was the case even in legacy. I had interaction on both the global scale and with locals who'd rather physically boat to my location.

I'm not sure if transport of goods is so difficult anymore, with thingwalls you can travel quite easily after all? And use them to avoid revealing your location too.

Why there is less demand for many goods is another question.
Hunger bar and satiations maybe limit the crappy/low q food that one can eat, and abundance of craftable etc. curios makes trading for worse curios quite pointless.
One major problem is that most things, if they are worse quality than what you can produce yourself, they are 100% worthless, which is not good. Perhaps it should be more gradual so that worse ql would not be useless, just a bit.. worse? But still useful.

[wolf1000wolf]

Hmm, on a related question: Would a casual trading post be a target of raiders? I was thinking of making one to promote trade among the hermits/casuals in our area...

[Sevenless]

Hmm, on a related question: Would a casual trading post be a target of raiders? I was thinking of making one to promote trade among the hermits/casuals in our area...

You can't rule it out, but if it's small and nooby enough I doubt people would bother.

[VDZ]

and they do so to get even more rich off of lazy hermits.

Are they really aimed at hermits, though? The cheapest pickaxes they're advertising still cost an arm and a leg - they're q100+ but with my q20 pickaxe a simple q50 would already be a massive upgrade. Unless you're talking about people buying subtokens to buy the goods, in which case you can get a pickaxe upgrade for the low, low price of USD $40 in real cash. Yeah...

People only buy tokens, yes many other goods are bought, but for way too low price. For example, to buy cheapest cauldron that one certain shop sells, you would have to collect 100 wax. With 100 wax you could almost build your own mineholes and get q80 metal.

Yeah, I also get the impression that the other entries are almost there for show and the only real way to get stuff at their prices is to throw real money at it.


I've been doing a small amount of trading with people near me, but it's limited. I don't know too many people in my area, and none of them have progressed far enough to have stuff I can't easily get myself (my only more advanced neighbors moved away). I set up a barter stand for people passing by to maybe buy things (and I could make more if it's useful) but I'm really running into the problem that all trades must be at an X:1 rate for a specific object, and you can only ask for objects you already have. Currency is the solution to the former problem, but it's locked behind steel, and steel is hell to make for a hermit (so I don't have steel and nobody around me has steel). The latter problem ensures I cannot get things like steel without manual trade...for which you need to know people in-game who do have it, or jump through various hoops outside the game ("contact only by friending me on this third-party service") for negotiations which may or may not work out because they turn out to be on the other side of the map (and no, I'm not spending several hours boating just for one trade. Even waiting for someone to boat to you for who knows how long is a pain and requires you to commit a significant amount of time to the game just for one trade).

One thing that can really help, though, is realm chat. It's an easy and low-commitment way to communicate to people who are likely relatively nearby and online right now that you want to trade for something, allowing you to find a trading partner much more easily. However, that requires you to be in a realm and only a tiny part of the world has been realmed so far (and with the new system it's unknown how long it will take for most people to get access to realm chat, and there's nothing a hermit or small village can do to accelerate the process - I certainly don't have the 5 Rock Crystals, 10 Gold Bars, 10 Silver Bars and 30 Brimstone required to found a realm of my own). Perhaps it could help if by some feasible means any player could improve a Thingwall to create a region chat, audible to anyone in that region? (Though the regions might be too small to work in practice.)

[Fostik]

Well, cant say that entire trading is fucked in the game.
Yes, there are some traders, who created trade topics just to farm tokens/rmt for their high quality stuff, and it's obviously that all prices are just a convention, and trading is possible only for tokens.
But there also a lot of people who trades with neighbors with ingame goods for normal prices, and probably markets will open too, where competition normalizes prices.
The only two problems leaves here:
1. People buy their product, so they keep prices on same level
2. There are no other way for competition rather than start your tread and sell for lower prices, which is pointless without market.

[MagicManICT]

Too many people just got bored with the game after some amount of time, which is typical in MMOs. That's also a factor in making trade effective. If you set up a more casual trading post that the local spruce caps would want to use, you'll just run out of buyers before too long as player population of the world dwindles.

[Kaios]

MagicMan still has the worst takes of anyone on this forum. This is exactly what myself and plenty of other players strongly suggested would happen due to the impact of tokens (a real-world currency) on the in-game economy. The devs can either figure out a sink for players to use and get rid of tokens in some other meaningful way that does not involve trade getting screwed over, or they can continue to allow one small subset of the population to take advantage of the rest while at the same time causing trade to be ruined.