Hide unfair trades coming from outside the FS

[Pheryll]

Voted no. I am not sure I like that the idea could lead to fellowships isolating themselves from the environment by posting only slightly unfair trades and just trading internally.

 

[SoggyShorts]

Voted no. I am not sure I like that the idea could lead to fellowships isolating themselves from the environment by posting only slightly unfair trades and just trading internally.

Interesting. 2 questions:
1. What would the motive be for doing that?
2. How would it really differ from FS members simply planning trades now? Just slightly more convenient?

I figure if you and I want to make a trade that no one other than you and I can see, we just do this:
I offer 200 soap for 800 shrooms
You offer 200 shrooms for 800 soap
And just like that, we have our members-only 2,000 for 2,000 trade.

 

[Pheryll]

Interesting. 2 questions:
1. What would the motive be for doing that?
2. How would it really differ from FS members simply planning trades now? Just slightly more convenient?

I figure if you and I want to make a trade that no one other than you and I can see, we just do this:
I offer 200 soap for 800 shrooms
You offer 200 shrooms for 800 soap
And just like that, we have our members-only 2,000 for 2,000 trade.

Currently you would need to keep track of these exchanges to ensure that these unfair trades balance out. With the change, all you need to do is type the amount you want in the left box and click the plus sign on the right box and you have a fellowship only trade. You can post as many of these as you want without having to coordinate or keep track.

 

[SoggyShorts]

Currently you would need to keep track of these exchanges to ensure that these unfair trades balance out. With the change, all you need to do is type the amount you want in the left box and click the plus sign on the right box and you have a fellowship only trade. You can post as many of these as you want without having to coordinate or keep track.

Ok, so perhaps a significant increase in the convenience of posting target-specific trades which could be a bad thing if used constantly at scale.

And the second question? What would the motivation be for FS only trades on a scale that would be bad for the game?
We've all wanted to post the occasional FS only trade for a quest or a little push, but with a trader such as this one where the worst deals available are 1:1, I just don't see any reason to favor FS buyers over neighbors.

 

[Palavyn]

I voted yes. However, this will NOT fix the biggest problem, which is an oversupply of goods produced in the library. (Scrolls, Moonstone, Elven Tree Gum, and especially Cosmic Bismuth)

 

[defiantoneks]

I'm down with any sort of solution that removes people selling soap and asking 10x the return.
a) I cant afford it
b) there's no soap to be had otherwise
c) i wouldn't pay that sort of (as others have said) parasite fee anyway. If i am that desperate at least the wholesaler offers nearly 50% return.

 

[defiantoneks]

btw, I used to play a different game totally unrelated to Inno, where the game itself had Bot generated trades. Maybe implement something like that for Sentient? random 2 star (even) trades popping up. would help where supply of certain goods is already limited and provide competition for those who seek to suck the life out of everyone else.

 

[Enevhar Aldarion]

btw, I used to play a different game totally unrelated to Inno, where the game itself had Bot generated trades. Maybe implement something like that for Sentient? random 2 star (even) trades popping up. would help where supply of certain goods is already limited and provide competition for those who seek to suck the life out of everyone else.

The problem with that is, in any browser-based game, the players can have bots, or scripts, of their own running. A player just has to have one of them running, leave the game open and the bot/script will snatch up anything it is programmed to buy. Maybe Inno has managed to block that kind of stuff, though, because it has been a long time since the last time I saw trades nearly always being snatched up as soon as I placed them, and by the same couple of players, regardless of time of day.

 

[SoggyShorts]

The problem with that is, in any browser-based game, the players can have bots, or scripts, of their own running. A player just has to have one of them running, leave the game open and the bot/script will snatch up anything it is programmed to buy. Maybe Inno has managed to block that kind of stuff, though, because it has been a long time since the last time I saw trades nearly always being snatched up as soon as I placed them, and by the same couple of players, regardless of time of day.

Then just use the reverse.
Instead of a bot that posts 2-star trades have one that takes any 2-star trade that is over XX hours old.

 

[defiantoneks]

that works too. since there seems to be a glut of all the things i'm boosted in, it's hard to get real people who need those materials.
if i post a bismuth for soap trade and no real players need it, let the bot sweep it up for me.

 

[OIM20]

Summary:
Hiding unfair trades is a possible fix to the phenomenon where some people are making profit on buying all the goods from the market, making artificial shortage and reselling them with unfair trades to make profit.

Details:

Research:
Currently some players are sucking the blood of others in Sinya Arda when taking certain goods from the market with slightly good trades like 101k for 100k, making a shortage and reselling them with really unfair trades like 87k for 100k. This kind of behavior is very common by sentient goods and kills the market. I took over the sentient goods market this week by sacrificing around 1M sentient goods and several hours a day in the process with the goal of looking into this and finding a possible fix. Previously we had a shortage of shrooms and ink and now we have a shortage of soap and velvet instead. So I think the shortage was not because players produce a different amount of these goods, but because shrooms and ink was holded back by certain players and this way they made an artificial shortage of the goods to earn profit on them. This kind of market manipulation appears to be a serious problem and I have a proposal about how to solve it.

How it works:
If players outside the FS could not post unfair trades that are visible to us, then our players would not be able to take them out of desperation and it would be harder for outsiders to make profit on them. It would be still possible to earn some profit on trades by waiting for 3-star trades and accepting them, but it would be close to impossible to manipulate the market by collecting all goods from it with slightly good trades.
For example if there are less velvet producers and more obsidian producers in a world, then currently they can post 101 obsidian for 100 velvet and sell it in a 87 velvet for 100 obsidian trade. The profit is 100/101 * 100/87 - 1 = 0.138 = 13.8% in this trade chain. In the proposed system they could post 101 obsidian for 100 velvet and they can sell it only in a 100 velvet for 100 obsidian trade, which makes it not profitable since 100/101 * 100/100 - 1 = -0.001 = -0.1%. All they could do to earn profit is waiting for a good trade, something like 110 obsidian for 100 velvet and accepting it and trying to take velvet from the market with a 100 obsidian for 100 velvet trade. This would take a lot of extra work for them, because they need to frequently check the trader to be able to find good trades, which can be taken very fast by others too and if the price of the velvet is high, then everybody will accept a better trade as 100 obsidian for 100 velvet, so it would be a lot harder for them to make profit and to manipulate the prices by collecting a significant amount of goods from the market.

Warnings:
Be aware that this proposal is not the same as completely banning unfair trades, because many people needs them inside the fellowships to aid fellows who ran out of certain goods or who need some extra goods to complete a research faster. Another thing here that making this fix optional by a checkbox does not solve the problem, even if it is enabled by default, because there will be desperate players who turn it off and accept the unfair trades.

Benefits:
- The price of sentient goods on the market would be a lot harder to manipulate.
- The trader would not contain many pages of unfair trades.
- We would not be able to accidentally accept unfair trades from outside the fellowship when the trader is sometimes automatically reordered after accepting a trade.
- It would unite the sentient goods market and we would not need to avoid certain players even when they are posting 3-star trades just because their trading behavior does not meet our moral code.

Downsides:
- It takes developer time. It can be implemented by adding another condition to the database query that lists the trades for a certain player something like "and (trade.rating >= 1 or sender.fellowship = player.fellowship)".
- It is harder to help new players with extra goods if they are outside our fellowship and this is used for both sentient and normal goods, since we cannot see the unfair trades they posted and when we post good trades, then they can be taken by somebody else if our neighbour is not fast enough. This is a downside even if we filter sentient goods trades only, because the same would be true for players who just entered the sentient goods market and need some help from outside their fellowship.
- People who play with multiple cities in the same world cannot move goods between their cities.

Compensation for the downsides:
- A possible compensation for the 2nd and 3rd downsides could be adding exceptions, something like a list of friends outside the FS. This could be useful for adding extra features, like sending messages to all friends or allowing sending URLs to friends.
- Another possible compensation is watering this down and adding a checkbox to show even the unfair external trades. This is easier to implement, but it would allow the same exploitation the main feature intends to solve.

I know this has been sitting for a while, but what about something that looked like this:

which would allow you to make trades that would exclusively be seen by the fellowship?

Or even a couple more filters:

<- allows you to pick the trade rating

<- allows for both trade rating and excluding anyone with the trader markup.

If I missed/overlooked a part of the discussion where this was already dismissed as a possibility, I apologize.

I know this isn't what you initially had in mind, but I think the option of making your trade internal only - something I did see someone speaking against - might address the issue of trade-hoarding you're referencing, if only to keep your 3 star trades from being poached.

 

[Lelanya]

Elegant! And it already exists in FoE, so someone in the company knows how to code this for both platforms.

 

[Revo1]

I think you should have an option to do that because sometimes I grab those (bad trades) to help out the smaller players.

 

[Sarafyne]

I don't think the problem is with regular goods, it's the sentient goods that are being hoarded and traded off with some ridiculous numbers. I don't think it would hurt anyone if Inno set some limits as to the ratio at which trades can be posted. I hate seeing those players (all top ranking) pick up my trades and then trade them off at 1 : 100 ratio or worse... that's uncalled for, makes the game that much harder for players with less popular boosts, and sometimes I am very tempted to send those high ranking nasties a message and give them a piece of my mind.... but I don't because I would just be wasting my time ...

 

[Jianju]

It is sad but true that some do the equivalent of this trade manipulation in real life. Interesting, if angering, parallel.

 

[able99]

The unfair trade problem is real, the proposed solution is complicated.
My solution is to simply have 0 star trades expire in 24 hour or less instead of the normal week. This way the ligament use to help players with 0 star trades stays intact. The players who post the 3 star trades will need to spend spend time daily re-posting their trades and hopefully they grow tired of it. Having 0 star trades expire in in 24 hours, or maybe same time as daily decay is probably easier for developers to code.

 

[Lelanya]

The unfair trade problem is real, the proposed solution is complicated.
My solution is to simply have 0 star trades expire in 24 hour or less instead of the normal week. This way the ligament use to help players with 0 star trades stays intact. The players who post the 3 star trades will need to spend spend time daily re-posting their trades and hopefully they grow tired of it. Having 0 star trades expire in in 24 hours, or maybe same time as daily decay is probably easier for developers to code.

Ooo I like this solution!

 

[ajqtrz]

Okay, the "market parasites" have found a way to benefit themselves at the expense of others and thus, it appears to be claimed, they should be stopped! But what about 3 star trades?

Think about it. Some people say 0 or 1 star trades are "unfair," and "manipulate" the markets, but what about 3 star trades? They put the sellers listing at the top of the board, which means the "fair" 2-star trades are farther down and thus less likely to sell. What's fair about that? After all, if the 2 star trade is defined as "fair," listing the 3 star trades as above them means those trades are "more fair?" That might be true for the buyer, but the seller certainly is losing. And if the seller is losing, by the definition of what's fair in the game, they are taking an unfair trade. And if I sell all my goods at 3 star, don't I get the advantage of people taking my trades over the poor guy who only lists "fair" 2 star trades? Shouldn't I be penalized because I'm taking advantage of the market? If I do it enough won't that mean those selling at 2 star will be forced to sell at 3 star just to get their trades taken? Doesn't seem fair to me at all!

Thus, the underlying desire to make everything fair runs into the problem of people deciding for themselves what is fair and what is not. Sure, you can declare this or that trade "unfair," but that's a moral judgment you are making. You can call this or that person a "parasite" and claim they are harming others, but those others don't have to make those trades, do they? If I need a resource but don't have the ability to get that resource at this time, I have to wait. So if the price of a particular good is at some level I can't afford, it's just part of the game. And I'm not talking about just goods. If I need supplies and don't have them I have to spend an instant or wait. If a good it got to a price I couldn't afford, because somebody bought all the goods of that type and is reselling them at a profit, isn't that what a 3 star trade does? Doesn't it sell at a profit? So, if you want things to be "fair," you will need to ban anything but 2-star trades at exactly a 1:1 ratio between same tier goods.

In any case, the ability of some players to "corner" the market in sentient good, is only sustainable in a market where people think they know what the good is actually worth based upon some standard "official" valuation. It's never sustainable in a normal human market, real or imagined if the participants can ignore the official valuation. Here's why:

Let's say the price of velvet is driven up because some group of players buys all the 2-star trades for velvet and re-posts them at 3 star. This, in effect, makes velvet worth whatever the 3 star trades are worth. Now if I'm a velvet producer, I need the other two sentient goods on that tier, right? So I start producing more velvet because I can get more of the other sentient goods for my velvet. I win. But wait, if everybody producing velvet starts producing more velvet eventually either the amount of velvet in the system will be so much that the demand for velvet will go down, or those trying to corner the market in velvet won't be able to buy that much velvet. In either case, the price will fall. Such market fluctuations last only as long as people insist on NOT taking advantage of market conditions. If the velvet producers actually produce more and flood the market with velvet, problem solved.

In the end it's understanding how markets work, real or imagined, that make things better, not trying to design an artificial control system that isn't accurate, flexible, or fair.

AJ

 

[Iyapo1]

If I do it enough won't that mean those selling at 2 star will be forced to sell at 3 star just to get their trades taken? Doesn't seem fair to me at all!

This is a valid point and exactly what is wrong with scrolls. The surplus results in 3 star trades. The bigger the discounts the worse the problem becomes.

 

[SoggyShorts]

My solution is to simply have 0 star trades expire in 24 hour or less instead of the normal week.

The big parasites are constantly online and would simply repost more often. I'm afraid you wouldn't see a noticeable difference.
Hiding zero stars from players outside of your own FS wouldn't be difficult to code at all, that's not the holdback. The only reason this issue hasn't been addressed is developer apathy partly fueled by a couple of selfish posters who can't see past their own egos to realize that such a change would be better for the health of the game.