The thing that's disturbing is when new players in new cities "cannae" find "nae" trades for their messily T1 and T2 stuff unless they're in a proper fellowship with kind members. One of our member found before she joined that advancement was impossible and gave up playing for a bit. I expect many stop all together and forever.
Again, thank you all for keeping this thread going and for all your thoughtful and generous remarks!
I've found myself in that situation on my second city located on US3 "Felyndral" and despite knowing exactly
what* to do to mitigate that hot mess, I got myself stuck and frustrated for about a week before I bit the bullet and joined a semi-fellowship on a temporary basis**.
* That being "make your own trades" because most of the people who can take them will have a much longer reach than your own city will, which means there's no trader fee when
they take up the trade. Doesn't quite help when you've spawned out in the boonies with no city move in sight. Also doesn't quite help that mobile users get absolutely no indication that this is the case***.
** Some fellowships out there exist almost solely to alleviate the hardships imposed by the trader and poor city spawn location, and state right in their summary that they accept people who have no intention of staying there. It takes a bit of scrolling and checking, though. Frustrating when new players might not even know about this. Not to mention the horror show that mobile app users must endure. A barely-scrollable two-line input box is NOT good for user ergonomics and I fully expect those users to be put off by the whole experience.
Do you see my eyes? No. You don't. They've been burned out by the dangerous light of stupid design.
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EDIT: But yeah. As
@Mykan touched on, that has little to do with cross-trading and more to do with how the trader is used and who's all nearby to actually take those trades when issued.
*** EDIT2: That case being that the trader fees are actually fees imposed by the trader for trades that the person taking the trade takes, or that you can get around that by pushing your own trades and letting those fees, if the other player sees them, become
someone else's problem. Or that those fees make it seem that 1 or 0 star trades are the norm. Or that their city might get moved at some point so their trader actually becomes useful outside a fellowship. Or... uh. (long pause) ... I... I feel like I've forgotten something. Ah well. It's late and there's a storm brewing so I best go batten down the hatches.