samidodamage
Buddy Fan Club member
And you can still do those trades. We have small cities (and the not so small ones get in binds, too from time to time, lol!) in our FS that absolutely need that kind of assistance; large cities will take the biggest unfair trade the game will allow T3:T1 to help those players. That changed with the update from 64:1 to 18:1. That still works to funnel the goods, we just have to change the numbers. The abuse of the original trader system was accurately stated herethen you might have to trade cross tier if that is all you have. happens to me all the time.
Around 2-2.5 years ago (I was somewhere around Dwarves/Fairies iirc) we had an FS member who did this. He built all T3 and then used a few Traveling Merchants and was surprised when no one took his cross-tier trades. He even added one extra T3 good and he touted them as better than fair trades because they were all 3 star according to Trader! Rather than argue the math with him to prove this was not a sustainable system, I proposed he take my T3:T1 trades at 16:1 for one week; at the end of that week, we'd reassess his perceived value of those trades. And, I'd give him back all the T1 he'd lost at any point if it turned out it wasn't such a valuable trading strategy after all... He never took me up on it and left a week or so later complaining he didn't get enough FS visits... He very well knew he wouldn't last a week taking those trades...Too many players abused this and flooded the market with T3 goods so they didn't have to produce their own T1 or T2 goods.
From what I can see, your biggest issue is that 17 of the 21 members of your FS show as inactive and have been inactive for some time. At least one of them hasn't had a score change since November 2017; pretty sure they stopped playing that city over 2years ago (I know the name and they are playing other cities now; that city cannot be deleted without deleting the entire account)... You can see the data on this at the ElvenStats website, so here's a link to your FS page there, you can find any FS or player just by searching for the name over there:
Mardeck's FS
Hover over the black triangle next to a member's name to see when their score last changed.
You can research other FS's over there if you decide the one you're in is no longer a good fit. Check out the 'Fellowships needing members' sub-forum here for Arendyll (they're at the very bottom of the main forum page).
If you've gotten comfortable there with the other 3 members, my recommendation would be to discuss trying to merge with another FS. Even if the other FS has only 4 active players as well, you'll have doubled the number of viable trading partners! Ideally, if the other 3 members are as active as you, you'd find a larger FS with a mix of large and small cities and then you'd feel like you were playing a different game, lol!