Vendor Quantity Pricing

General discussion about anything related to Transcendence.
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Vastin
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So, my 2 cents on the new vendor limitations in the game now:

1) Vendors stop buying items when they have a lot in stock.

Opinion: Thumbs Up

Analysis: This reduces the emphasis on endless farming a fair bit, or at least encourages you to pursue a wider variety of targets as your money sources in a given system can dry up fairly quickly.

2) Vendor purchase pricing depends on amount in stock

Opinion: Thumbs down

Analysis: In practice it has the same effect as point one (it limits the amount of money you can make selling the same stuff to the same vendor all the time) but unlike point one, it encourages a whole lot of meaningless logistical gaming, such as shuttling and warehousing specific goods outside of vendors so a vast amount can be sold at an 'optimal' price.


I'd stick with the vendor stock limits, particularly as they cannot be 'gamed' - it should be simple to tell a vendor not to buy all of a player's stock if it exceeds the vendor's stock limit - but discard the stock number pricing mechanism. That kind of logistical complexity seems sort of un-fun.
Sponge
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On the other side of the coin, vendors not buying when they have a lot in stock encourages the exact same logistical gameplay (which is really quite exploity) as point 1. You either sell all at once or the vendor will stop buying half way through the looting.

As another point, decreasing price doesn't necessarily decrease farming. It just makes it far more time consuming as you have to do more system-hopping to find the stations you need.

I do like the new system, but it still needs a bit of tweaking. Here are some things to consider.
What if:
1 Vendors never stopped buying an item, or stopped only when they had huge amounts of an item. The price for an item that was in high supply would begin to decrease exponentially.
2 Vendors not only priced based on how many of an item they have in stock, but also how many the player has, and how many are available for looting in the system and in one system in either direction. *
3 Similar stations had "trade routes" in which goods were moved around and sometimes removed from the game to gradually remove surplus items, and to simulate a living economy.

*Point 2 is a bit quirky as far as narrative justification, but would help to prevent abuse. To remove items from the local "economy," players would have to loot substantial quantities and move them a couple systems away, which would, in many cases, not be worth the additional profit. You really wouldn't be able to go back and get the items to sell, as this would lower the price again as you're reintroducing items into the local economy.
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Periculi
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I agree with changing the single sale exploit. And I think that improvements can be made to the stock pricing adjustment.

It would be easy, I have looked at the code performing the price adjustment and having the stores drop the value offered for quantity would be easy. Also setting the max they are interested in is easy to do as well.

Just need to add the adjustment code into the quantity sell actions, perhaps some extra dialog after the quantity is added, to give the store a chance to reject or change the bargain price. (i.e. when selling quantity, don't give the price until an amount is offered, then calculate a price to offer.)

That way when you go to offer the store 140 tons of ore they normally would only buy 100 tons of (not a real example) in parts, they would reject the amount and kick back an offer like "I will give you [lowest value] for [max amount]"

(now, I also think that the vendor might need a little extra bargaining intelligence- if you offer them quantity of an item, they know you have it so if you reduce the amount you are offering at that time you wouldn't expect the store to give you a better price all of a sudden. If the vendor made a price offer, set it for the session.)


Addit-

About point 2 above:

As far as tracking all those items goes I don't think it's very practical, maybe not even possible, and if it is, I think it would suck up a lot of resources. Consider cataloging all the loot in a system for starters- you would need to cycle through every object containing items in the system (and new ones are spawning in all the time) get their inventory and add it to a local database, then filter for the item type in question. Once you have a catalog set up, a few spawns down the road and it's out of date again.

Next you have to access the databases from systems close by, because you can't search their objects (they get stored on disk) you can only look up your stored data from earlier, compare those results and again filter for the item you want to figure the cost adjustment on.

If a system hadn't been created yet (visited by the player), there wouldn't be any objects to search nor a database created. So systems that haven't been visited by the player can't be added into the economy tracking.

It would be a lot of script, and unless George built in some better item tracking methods it would be a rather inelegant solution. Even with some built in trade AI to track and adjust item values, it seems like a lot of micro management for a real-time space combat action game.

Point of sale adjustments are a great, easy-on-the-cpu-resources way to make adjustments to prices- there just needs to be a little adjustment to the way that the items are sold and maybe some review of the trade system and dialog to help prevent single sale exploits.
Yugi
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If there's one thing I'd want to change about vendors is to change the fact that they can't buy something costing 250,000 creds, but they can buy 10 somethings which cost 249,999 creds each.
Vastin
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Sponge wrote:On the other side of the coin, vendors not buying when they have a lot in stock encourages the exact same logistical gameplay (which is really quite exploity) as point 1. You either sell all at once or the vendor will stop buying half way through the looting.
Ah, yes, if there is no way to prevent a shop from buying everything you have on hand in one transaction, then you'll still get the same problem. That's the fundamental issue that encourages the annoying stockpiling behavior.

However, it doesn't strike me as being all that hard to have a shop list the maximum of something it will buy, so that I offer 100, it tells me it's only going to buy 59 (or it just takes 59 and leaves me with 41 remaining).

All the rest of the pricing mechanics add a huge amount of complexity w/o adding to gameplay - unless you truly enjoy keeping track of current vendor prices on a spreadsheet each game. :roll: ). They all encourage odd logistical behaviors, like trying to spread your stock out over several systems to get better prices or stockpiling.

It all ends up being an expensive distraction from the core game concept of exploring the galaxy, meeting interesting new races, and blowing the bajeezus out of them.
Vastin
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Sponge wrote: 3 Similar stations had "trade routes" in which goods were moved around and sometimes removed from the game to gradually remove surplus items, and to simulate a living economy.
Ah, I do like this idea - that stations would gradually normalize and alter their stock over time. Want to buy that Akan600 Turret? Might not be here next week! Or maybe there'll be a Katana in stock by then?

Still, this is another thing that has the potential to add a lot of unwanted complexity for a relatively small benefit. Hard to guage if it's worth it. My guess is, probably not quite.
Sponge
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Vastin wrote: All the rest of the pricing mechanics add a huge amount of complexity w/o adding to gameplay - unless you truly enjoy keeping track of current vendor prices on a spreadsheet each game. :roll: ). They all encourage odd logistical behaviors, like trying to spread your stock out over several systems to get better prices or stockpiling.
I don't think it would promote logistic gameplay at all. Imagine this scenario:
The player has 100 tons of ore. A station will only pay 5 credits a piece in these quantities. The player cannot simply drop the ore to get a better price, as the station would still know it's in the system. To remove it from the local economy, you'd have to take it two systems away, where it would the influence three totally different local economies and likely waste a bunch of fuel and time. The hassle involved is not worth a gain of almost zero. As items would affect the markets of nearby systems, there would be a large chance that by moving a lot of an item into a new area, you'll be lowering the price at other stations.

Periculi does make a great point, though, and that is that this feature would eat up lots of resources. In order for it to work, George would likely have to design a whole new method of keeping track of items, and that's probably not worth the trouble.
that stations would gradually normalize and alter their stock over time. Want to buy that Akan600 Turret? Might not be here next week! Or maybe there'll be a Katana in stock by then?

Still, this is another thing that has the potential to add a lot of unwanted complexity for a relatively small benefit.
I'm not thinking so much down the lines of "this item may not be here when you come back" than "we had a lot of this item so we reduced our stock by either destroying some or transferring some of them to another station." If all items were subject to change, you'd basically end up having a LOT more chances to get the item you want. By just removing surplus items, it would just make it so that a station is never totally useless as far as selling off items. Right now, it's possible (I've done it a few times myself) to fill up a store with a specific item, forget which station you filled up, and end up back tracking several stations to sell something off only to find that the station's not accepting that item.
Vastin
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Sponge wrote:I'm not thinking so much down the lines of "this item may not be here when you come back" than "we had a lot of this item so we reduced our stock by either destroying some or transferring some of them to another station." If all items were subject to change, you'd basically end up having a LOT more chances to get the item you want. By just removing surplus items, it would just make it so that a station is never totally useless as far as selling off items. Right now, it's possible (I've done it a few times myself) to fill up a store with a specific item, forget which station you filled up, and end up back tracking several stations to sell something off only to find that the station's not accepting that item.
Yes, that's a good point. Gradually eliminating 'overstock' items would be the simplest approach I imagine, and wouldn't have the effect of rotating new items into play.
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