Money and Trade System

[Erik_the_Blue]

I disagree- as it is, there is no protection from scammers, not even the scent-based protection we enjoy on our claims. It only makes sense that if someone just up and walks away with all your hard-earned trade goods without paying, or even simply walks up while you're dealing with annother user, that there be some system in place to recognize this and flag it as a crime.

Like I said, trust. You don't trust any random person you don't know who walks up. That's why we have communities that (supposedly) make it hard for criminals to move around. Thus when someone does walk up, it's not likely they're a known criminal. If they do walk off with your stuff, call them out on the forums. This doesn't do anything about throwaway alts, but a community's security is compromised should they make it so anyone can openly walk in and out. Collective security is vital to trade; an interface is a crutch to supplement what the players cannot themselves provide.

I like the idea of minting Greater Brogdorian Dollars (Tin) or whatever, but just remember that the pure value of the metal is all that matters at the moment.

The value of the metal is all that will matter as long as everyone can instantly identify the composition of a coin with 100% accuracy and precision.

[Laremere]

Oh, I forgot to mention that you should be able to place liftable things on the blanket, and begin trading like that. Though people would need to be able to see inside containers that are placed on the blanket.

[Jackard]

As for a dedicated trade interface, it's unnecessary. Simply have both parties drop the goods or put them in container(s), and don't leave until both parties are happy with the trade. If you can't do this much, then the issue is trust between players, not the lack of an interface.

I disagree- as it is, there is no protection from scammers, not even the scent-based protection we enjoy on our claims. It only makes sense that if someone just up and walks away with all your hard-earned trade goods without paying, or even simply walks up while you're dealing with annother user, that there be some system in place to recognize this and flag it as a crime.

I agree with Erik, for once. There are less restrictive ways of dealing with dishonesty than outright forbidding it through game mechanics. Most of them hinge on a player-run civilization:

Guards. Pay players for protection, for you or your market. Devs could allow more Hirdsmen to help this... wearing uniforms like the Hirdsmen cloaks would aid having an "official" force.
Capture game mechanic. A way to punish someone without killing them.
Examine game mechanic. A way for players to view each others backpacks - similar to how Steal works, but not being able to take anything. Like flashing someone an ID.
Signatures game mechanic. Devs add a way to sign/date items with your characters name. To make forgeries more difficult, signing could require Lawspeaking and/or a difficult-to-make machine. This ability opens up the possibility of:

Licenses. Provides "official" identification for both merchants and guards.
Inventories. Your claims of theft have more credibility if you can prove the item was yours.
Money. Only money signed and dated a certain way might be viewed as "legit" among players.

[Peter]

You'd rather have seven new features added than one, to "simplify" things?
Look, I'm not asking for any kind of contractual thing or other forced fairness- all I'm saying is a UI element that lets both sides see the whole deal at once, without putting things on the ground or in baskets, which is a workaround and we all know it.

And I don't think it needs to make fraud impossible- maybe there could be an option to "take all" and run, but that leaves a scent, just like other crimes.

[TempestReborne]

Coins are worthless without some in-game value.


Currency is only valuable because people believe it has value. Nobody is going to accept your completely worthless and unusable pressed coins when they could've gotten some bars of metal instead, which could actually be used for something.

If coins can be easily melted down to be used as metal bars, and pressing coins essentially results in the player being able to carry much more metal around with him due to stacking, then you have a useful potential currency. After that it's just a matter of exposure.

[Jackard]

You'd rather have seven new features added than one, to "simplify" things?

read again - I only listed three features. everything else was managed by players

Look, I'm not asking for any kind of contractual thing or other forced fairness- all I'm saying is a UI element that lets both sides see the whole deal at once, without putting things on the ground or in baskets.

liiiike the Examine feature, eh?

Currency is only valuable because people believe it has value. Nobody is going to accept your completely worthless and unusable pressed coins when they could've gotten some bars of metal instead, which could actually be used for something.

Going to assume you are speaking to someone else since I never mentioned coins being made unusable or changed from their current form.

[Junkfist2]

Signatures game mechanic.

I made a meandering thread that started to touch on this, nothing serious, but the problem is names aren't unique.

Maybe to avoid that problem the signature would include the town they belong to, so you know it's that Mastakilla527 from Murderton and not that other Mastakilla527 alt someone made.

The coolest shit would be some MSPaint program to make an intricate seal that someone would actually have to verrrrrrrrry carefully try to forge but that's probably just pie-in-the-sky thinking on my part. (it would also be fun to carve actual offensive images on runestones with that mechanic. Writing "Boner Honkfarts" is ok and all but I'd much rather be able to carve a visual representation of what a Mr. Boner Honkfarts actually encompasses naw mean?)

[Jackard]

Yea, I remembered that, but it wasn't quite the same - it was only for parchment and didn't include dates. Dates can be important. Being able to sign everything would be nice.

[Yolan]

Coins are worthless without some in-game value.

Currency is only valuable because people believe it has value. Nobody is going to accept your completely worthless and unusable pressed coins when they could've gotten some bars of metal instead, which could actually be used for something.

If coins can be easily melted down to be used as metal bars, and pressing coins essentially results in the player being able to carry much more metal around with him due to stacking, then you have a useful potential currency. After that it's just a matter of exposure.

I disagree, and I suspect the devs would too. The point of this game is emergent complexity from a sandbox. Economics? Coin value? These things are dependent on players, and the structures that they set up. That is, how much do you value something? That is what it is worth. An 'in-game' value on coins, by which I guess you mean as with NPC shop keepers selling goods for a certain number of coins and such, wouldn't make any sense with the vision of this game. For one, it would create distortions.

In the early stages of our game world economy, we are really at a barter point. Coins are merely a bit sized, smaller version of the metal from which they are made. This will always remain as the foundation to their value. However, with many more players, more settlements, more things being traded, coins will begin to be accepted as being worth a certain amount. This amount will perpetually fluxuate, depending on how much money is in circulation. A deflationary pressure would be people melting the coins to make things, and an increase in the number of people holding/storing coins. An inflationary pressure would be more coins created than are melted down, etc.

When people know that everybody will accept coins as payment, _that_ is when they become partially 'detached' from their utility as a metal, and become an easily tradeable substitute. You might not need metal, but you accept coins as payment because you know you can trade them for something that you do need, without the value radically falling away in the process. And likewise, the person that you trade with, may well accept them for the same reason. It just needs enough people, enough time, enough trust, and a little kick-start.

EDIT: I love the idea of being able to mint your own coins (as I do the idea of branding wine), but they will _only_ differ in value from other coins if they contain more or less actual metal. Sure, you could make some steel coins, stamp them with a 'P', and create an artificial list of goods and how many of these 'P' dollars they are worth, but what the hell for? That is really putting the cart before the horse. Not only would anybody outside your little experiment laugh at you, the actual value and the 'official' value would constantly be at odds for all the different fluctuations that naturally occur in a living market.

[sabinati]

Currency doesn't enable trade, it just makes it more convenient.

As for a dedicated trade interface, it's unnecessary. Simply have both parties drop the goods or put them in container(s), and don't leave until both parties are happy with the trade. If you can't do this much, then the issue is trust between players, not the lack of an interface.

As for player run shops, we've had a tread on that before. Reading it may be of some benefit.

there were a lot of good ideas in that thread and the only person who really seemed against it was JTG