Universal Income and Barter Magic

[axus]

A problem: New and casual players don't have anything valuable to trade people who spend a lot of time playing.

Another problem: Refilling barter stands and checking at more than 1 market quickly gets tedious without Irongete running a bot and a website.

Solution to the first problem is automatic currency accumulation at claims of verified accounts . Call it "chi". Don't require a daily login, let it get updated at login like study desks.


Next I will list potential uses for "chi".

Magic barter tickets. Use chi on the ticket, right-click any barter stand. Now the ticket can be used any time to access the barter stand remotely. What could go wrong!
Use barter ticket on another barter ticket to clone it.
Sell barter tickets at your stand.
Or right-click the ticket on a container that has a green/red hand. Now the container can bypass the distance limit for transactions. Perhaps limit the enchantment to 1 week.

Star-shard alternative. +1 costs 2 chi, +2 costs 4 chi, up to limit +10 for 1024 chi. Mark item as starred.

Use chi on charter-stone to create consumable, resellable teleport runes. Which might work faster than hearthing

[Sephiron]

I like the idea of barter magic, hate the idea of universal basic income. It seems easily exploitable to me, and kinda p2w if you consider the advantage someone would have with a verified account over someone who does not.
If I start a game and find that p2p trading is locked behind a paywall... I uninstall

I think a better solution to less trade happening among new players, is to remove the need of steel for coin presses. Maybe allowing them to be built with bronze/iron, it will allow players to start markets as soon as they reach cave level 2- Opening up coin presses to early game allows potentially lower quality, less expensive goods to be traded that are more affordable to early game players. Things that are hard to initially acquire, like tea seedpods and opium grist, cheeses and silk, tin/copper/lead bars for people who are having trouble finding one or the other, defunct axes could be things traded for cheap at noob markets for cheap.
Yes you can build barter stands without coins, but nobody does it because the bartering system doesn't actually work well; you need someone to give you exactly what you want for a very specific item, it's not intuitive and actually historically inaccurate (they found that at no point in history did people primarily subsist on bartering as previously thought, people usually traded on credit or with functional goods like grain or rice before coins)

[Mr_Bober]

A problem: New and casual players don't have anything valuable to trade people who spend a lot of time playing.

That is not entirely true.

A few tips from someone who has been in both shoes:
1. Lower your expectations.
I know that top-q 150 axe is juicy, but when your axe is q50, even just a q60 or q70 is a great jump. And it's going to be dirty cheap. Top-q will often only sell for tokens, rarely for other items anyway.

2. Sell quantity, not quality.
Larger villages always have one issue: they consume specific cooking materials and curios very fast. They will often be happy to sell you their second-hand gear if you save them some time gathering these common materials, so that their hunters and foragers can focus on more high-q stuff rather than going for bulk.
Stuff like chives and other spices, meats from bear/boar/pig/seal/ptarmigan/hedgehog are often bought at any quality, sometimes eggs, any cheese (later on)...

3. Some items have value no matter what.
There's some items that are easy to make but take a long -idle- time. Vinegar, suckling maws, black pepper, opium, silk. All items that require very little skill, almost no stats (quality doesn't matter too much), but take days or weeks of waiting. Make them in bulk, and you'll sell them easily.

4. Most important lesson: try to trade directly with players, not through markets.
It's a bit more risky (unless you set up a stand for each specific trade, but nobody does that), but you always get better deals.
When I was a newbie I've had people give me more than I asked for, stuff that for them was trash and for me was valuable. And now that I'm on the other side, I often do the same, especially with those tools or crafting stations that I'm unlikely to sell and don't want to keep around for weeks.

[jock]

you can litterally sell bear meet or stones to people. catch stores or sell hedgehog.

No lack of income for hermits. Cast iron is also always forever needed

[axus]

A problem: New and casual players don't have anything valuable to trade people who spend a lot of time playing.

That is not entirely true.

A few tips from someone who has been in both shoes:
1. Lower your expectations.
I know that top-q 150 axe is juicy, but when your axe is q50, even just a q60 or q70 is a great jump. And it's going to be dirty cheap. Top-q will often only sell for tokens, rarely for other items anyway.

2. Sell quantity, not quality.
Larger villages always have one issue: they consume specific cooking materials and curios very fast. They will often be happy to sell you their second-hand gear if you save them some time gathering these common materials, so that their hunters and foragers can focus on more high-q stuff rather than going for bulk.
Stuff like chives and other spices, meats from bear/boar/pig/seal/ptarmigan/hedgehog are often bought at any quality, sometimes eggs, any cheese (later on)...

3. Some items have value no matter what.
There's some items that are easy to make but take a long -idle- time. Vinegar, suckling maws, black pepper, opium, silk. All items that require very little skill, almost no stats (quality doesn't matter too much), but take days or weeks of waiting. Make them in bulk, and you'll sell them easily.

4. Most important lesson: try to trade directly with players, not through markets.
It's a bit more risky (unless you set up a stand for each specific trade, but nobody does that), but you always get better deals.
When I was a newbie I've had people give me more than I asked for, stuff that for them was trash and for me was valuable. And now that I'm on the other side, I often do the same, especially with those tools or crafting stations that I'm unlikely to sell and don't want to keep around for weeks.

Look at https://brodgar.io/trade/
Nothing sells for less than 50 coins. A casual player doesn't have time to make silk without losing all the larvae one day (let alone 50q silk). How much time does it take to catch 25 hedgehogs or 100 rabbits? And then they spend 90% of travel weariness and the barter stand is full that day. Where do they get the pepper from? Probably they're happy to get 100q axe but for the people who advertise it's not worth making a trade that small.

Opium and vinegar are decent choices, but you won't find barter stands buying them or market posts listing them. A month for a few maws is possible, if the casual player makes a large enough palisade and fields.

A casual player doesn't have time to learn which neighbors are trustworthy, they likely aren't in a kingdom chat either. The current best solution is "join a village" and let the less casual players handle trades and upgrades. A lot of casuals won't do that and just quit after a month or two. I wish I could give them better advice than "join a village".

Verified accounts currently offer a lot more advantages than I'm suggesting here; which is to make buying/selling easier for everyone, and provide an effect that's already available from star shards. Also the non-verified non-casual player could now trade their 100q stone axe for some "chi", a barter ticket, or a teleport stone which would not have been an option before.

[kaysaari3]

Any-q wax is effectively currency at the markets; there's always at least one stand buying for coins. As long as you can make it to one, you're probably gucci once you have a straw-bearing crop and a few larvae, neither of which are hard to get.

[Mr_Bober]

Look at https://brodgar.io/trade/
Nothing sells for less than 50 coins. A casual player doesn't have time to make silk without losing all the larvae one day (let alone 50q silk). How much time does it take to catch 25 hedgehogs or 100 rabbits? And then they spend 90% of travel weariness and the barter stand is full that day. Where do they get the pepper from? Probably they're happy to get 100q axe but for the people who advertise it's not worth making a trade that small.

Opium and vinegar are decent choices, but you won't find barter stands buying them or market posts listing them. A month for a few maws is possible, if the casual player makes a large enough palisade and fields.

A casual player doesn't have time to learn which neighbors are trustworthy, they likely aren't in a kingdom chat either. The current best solution is "join a village" and let the less casual players handle trades and upgrades. A lot of casuals won't do that and just quit after a month or two. I wish I could give them better advice than "join a village".

Verified accounts currently offer a lot more advantages than I'm suggesting here; which is to make buying/selling easier for everyone, and provide an effect that's already available from star shards. Also the non-verified non-casual player could now trade their 100q stone axe for some "chi", a barter ticket, or a teleport stone which would not have been an option before.

Sounds to me you want to turn this into an idle game.
As I said in point #4, the best way to do small trading is talking directly with the villages close to you. It doesn't take much time, and after the first approach you can do most of it off-game through Discord, which makes it much easier to communicate.

[axus]

Sounds to me you want to turn this into an idle game.
As I said in point #4, the best way to do small trading is talking directly with the villages close to you. It doesn't take much time, and after the first approach you can do most of it off-game through Discord, which makes it much easier to communicate.

I'm on the opposite side of wanting an idle game, I want more people to participate in the economy instead of just logging in for 30 minutes to do chores and logging out. I've done my fair share of Discord and local trading, it's a lot of fun but several neighbors have asked me to handle the actual mechanics of trading the bigger ticket items because they don't want to deal with the hassle.

Sure the gold standard for a giant economy is a global auction house, but we're not going to get close to that ideal in w16. Your advice isn't wrong for someone who wants to trade, but the number of people who will take that advice is limited. I don't want to replace the products people make now, but to have them traded more.