Trading is dead — why?

[sabinati]

the easy solution of course is to trade for things you plan on using or eating quickly.

[Sever]

It just occurred to me now that stealing from yourself to find an enemy is not unlike stealing valuables from yourself to collect the insurance money in real life. The only thing preventing this from being stupidly exploitable is the fact that you'd leave theft scents as well, and a claim and an alt takes care of that. If interactive trade is actually suddenly dead, it's probably this. Vending stands would be an unreliable way to deliver a trackable item to someone, so they wouldn't be affected.

[Chakravanti]

the easy solution of course is to trade for things you plan on using or eating quickly.

I hoard shit. At one point I had close to 1500 linen.

Moreover, this trading style also nixes Entardred's trading style as well. imho, It's too much of a hassle. I traded in too large of quantities to bother with this.

[Potjeh]

What happens if you buy stuff with stolen coins, and then those coins get remixed by the stall owner? Can the new stacks still be tracked?

[jorb]

I still don't see the problem. The ratio of "people out to get you" to "normal traders" is too low for the off chance of someone tracking you to be a serious concern without auxiliary reasons. General contentment, and an already saturated market, on the other hand, are very reasonable explanations if trade has, indeed, slowed down. No high level player can reasonably be missing much of anything right now (or he's doing it wrong). The marginal utility of producing another batch of whatever should reasonably be very low. The game has a finite amount of content, after all (Though we hope to fix that). Last time I logged in at Xanadu there were cupboards upon cupboards of most anything I could possibly need, so the incentive to go on a trading binge wasn't really there.

[Pacho]

Well, I can understand chak's paranoia, he has a lot of enemies thanks to that mouth of his, but regular players are really just fine when it comes to trading.

[Chakravanti]

RIght, it's because I talked shit to you way back in the day. THat's it. It's not the wealth I accrued from trading that everyone knwos about. Certainly not that. It's not the wealth a merchant middle class would accrue doing the same thing to get stuff without investing the excessive bicthwork it takes to make fucktons of linen to get items that take less than 1/10th of the time to actually make.

Yeah, it's because I pissed you off that I'm paranoid Not the menial 3 cupboards of stage 3+ cheese that were stolen in the waynesville raid or the merchant robe, HQ merch rings and 4 bolts of silk. Definitely not my wealth that makes me paranoid.

[jorb]

RIght, it's because I talked shit to you way back in the day. THat's it. It's not the wealth I accrued from trading that everyone knwos about. Certainly not that. It's not the wealth a merchant middle class would accrue doing the same thing to get stuff without investing the excessive bicthwork it takes to make fucktons of linen to get items that take less than 1/10th of the time to actually make.

Yeah, it's because I pissed you off that I'm paranoid Not the menial 3 cupboards of stage 3+ cheese that were stolen in the waynesville raid or the merchant robe, HQ merch rings and 4 bolts of silk. Definitely not my wealth that makes me paranoid.

I do not possess introspective insights into your mind. It might very well be that you have so much shit that you have now stopped trading for fear of losing it. My personal problem is the exact opposite. I have so much shit that I've lost the incentive to get more.

[Chakravanti]

Except that you weren't trading for any of that to begin with.

[jorb]

First of all that isn't exactly true. I've traded for quite a lot in my days, and all of what I did own was invested in Xanadu. Most of that was acquired through trade. Secondly, it doesn't really matter how I got it. I still lack the incentive to trade. Thirdly, this isn't about me. I think the same thing can be said about most high level players. I might be wrong.