[MUD-Dev] Economic Growth: NPC pricing

[Timothy Dang]

On Mon, 21 Jan 2002, Paul Schwanz wrote:
> From: "Adam Martin" <ya_hoo_com at yahoo.com>

> I was curious as to why Timothy thought unlimited stock and funds
> were needed.  Especially given that Bobby was talking about basing
> an NPC's pricing on current inventory/scarcity.  On the other
> hand, I can see why you would want to protect newbies against any
> sort of Denial of Service.

The Denial of Service wasn't my reason for suggesting unlimited
supply.  I'm figuring that if an NPC merchant is calibrating prices
based on information it receives on trades, then it's important that
the merchant be capable of trading. If the merchant runs out of
stock, cash, or both, then it will be unable to trade regardless of
the price, and so won't be gathering information on the appropriate
price.

For instance, if a merchant currently thinks an arrow should sell
for 1GP, and the market thinks an arrow should sell for 10GP, what
happens when the merchant runs out of arrows? Nobody will be selling
arrows to the merchant, because they pay too little, and noone will
be buying because there's nothing to buy. On the other hand, what if
a merchant values arrows at 10K each, but has no cash to buy them?

The NPC merchant may be able to gather some information just by the
lack of trades, but this seems less trustworthy than getting
information from trades which actually happen. And the merchant
doesn't do anything for a system which hopes to use PC arbitrage
between NPC merchants, since players won't be arbitraging between
this merchant and another.

It sounds like the system works well enough for Runescape,
however. I'm likely being overcautious, since there's any number of
things which could potentially be tacked onto such a system to fix
it if it goes awry.  Inventory could automatically restock, giving a
sort of unlimited stock, though it may be empty at any given
time. And if all else fails, an admin can go in and tweak things.

------------------------------
Timothy O'Neill Dang / Cretog8
520-884-7261
One monkey don't stop no show.



_______________________________________________
MUD-Dev mailing list
MUD-Dev at kanga.nu
https://www.kanga.nu/lists/listinfo/mud-dev