My Not So Private Crusade Against Macroing

[Lothaudus]

Supply and Demand my good man! You correct, the cast iron would be as valuable as ever UNTIL THE MACROER TRADES IT. Imagine the hypothetical town A, everyone in town A is a farmer and needs three iron bars to make a farming tool they desperatly need, but no one in town has any. Then the macroer comes to town and trades them all 3 CI bars, suddenly they all have enough ci to make their tools and therefor need it less. Before the farmers greatly needed ci to build tools, now they have more ci, and therefor don't need it as much, meaning they will trade less for it and therefor the value of ci has dropped in village A

But then Village B's MACROER comes through and slaughters all the inhabitants of Village A who then RAGEQUIT. Price of metal goes up again!

[Cajoes]

Supply and Demand my good man! You correct, the cast iron would be as valuable as ever UNTIL THE MACROER TRADES IT. Imagine the hypothetical town A, everyone in town A is a farmer and needs three iron bars to make a farming tool they desperatly need, but no one in town has any. Then the macroer comes to town and trades them all 3 CI bars, suddenly they all have enough ci to make their tools and therefor need it less. Before the farmers greatly needed ci to build tools, now they have more ci, and therefor don't need it as much, meaning they will trade less for it and therefor the value of ci has dropped in village A

But then Village B's MACROER comes through and slaughters all the inhabitants of Village A who then RAGEQUIT. Price of metal goes up again!

Actually the price would flatline entirely since there would be nobody left craving metal.

[sabinati]

How about Jorb or Loftar gives everyone a startup cash sum of a coin that can't be produced, and overtime they introduce an ingame system where the supply of the coin is controlled by lets say random spawning of a special rock to mine the coin from. Im not sure whether this would be regarded as a form of NPC or neither am I sure if its in the nature of Loftar to give everyone something for free (but wasn't there an occasion when Jorb handed out pumpkins?).

That answer your question?

As for why inflation matters, it means that the economy becomes useless for non-macroers, say macroe 1 some how spits out 100 cast iron bars and turns them into cic, for the sake of simplicity lets say there was already 100,000 cic in the economy, this means all cic prices must double or the shopkeepers will lose money, because the more coins in the economy the less they're worth. Whats worse the price increase will hurt those who don't macro because their money is halved in value, in essence stealing half their coins from them. The only way around this is for everyone to macro. Hence: Inflation = Tears of devoted players

stop it you're making my brain hurt

[Brickbreaker]

Supply and Demand my good man! You correct, the cast iron would be as valuable as ever UNTIL THE MACROER TRADES IT. Imagine the hypothetical town A, everyone in town A is a farmer and needs three iron bars to make a farming tool they desperatly need, but no one in town has any. Then the macroer comes to town and trades them all 3 CI bars, suddenly they all have enough ci to make their tools and therefor need it less. Before the farmers greatly needed ci to build tools, now they have more ci, and therefor don't need it as much, meaning they will trade less for it and therefor the value of ci has dropped in village A

I`m sorry to ruin it for you, but plows do break and need repairs. That is the most obvious sink for metals. Next one is probably armor that too wears out. More walls require more wrought iron and steel, etc. Most of the things you trade will too require replacements. Food, leather, linen, clay, soil, water. It all eventually run out and is needed again, same as metal (except indoor or inventory tools).
If I am a villager of town A, and know that my supplier only comes in once a week, I`ll try to make a stash of metals that`ll last me a week (that is, besides the plow). And if I am a merchant, I am probably aware that I won`t sell more than certain amount in one village, so I`ll have excess metal and won`t have to macro as much next time.

Metals exchange is working right now, I can`t see why it would suddenly stop doing so if metal was disassembled and reassembled into coins in process.

Your very right but heres the thing that happens when macros come in...
Competition. Once the macro A has an abundance of gold village A might start to look for cheaper prices from macro B. This makes macro A lower their prices
and eventually making gold less valuable.

imo the economy will never work on a large scale purely because of macros. I wish the devs would do something about this but apparently thats how they like it.
unaffected gameplay.

[sabinati]

metal doesn't devalue significantly and you can't just macro up some metal

[Brickbreaker]

probably not, but i just wanted to emphasize to arriel why macros can be a problem.
and anyway it works both sides macros can macro silk or chants or something.

[sabinati]

how would you macro silk or chants... come on man

[Potjeh]

If anything, silk is easier to macro than metal. Chants, on the other hand... If you're writing a full-blown AI, why not write one that hunts bears?

[Brickbreaker]

No intention to go off-topic but....
where can i get my hands on some good macros?

[burgingham]

Fascinating what people think a simple macro can do these days, as Potjeh said for most of the stuff you'd have to write a complete AI. If you put in that effort, then Kudos, you deserve it.

@brickbreaker, just learn how to write your own, this should keep you away from the forums long enough till this game has reached beta.