15Aug12 - Market Graphs

Yes but they can see trade hubs within their viability and buy from there, and send out a trader to a distant hub for buying/selling at that market. 

First of all, it is not finding grape patches on the map that is a problem. I can see plenty of them. I also see occupying army forces on virtually all of them. As a newer player, I am not about to try and wrangle those occupied grapes away from someone who has been playing for a couple of years and could squish me like a bug.  So whether or not there is enough to go around is completely irrelevant to me.  I don't have any I can get access to, so I don't have any.  Which means that even thinking about using the trade system is pointless for me.  I am not really worried about this, I have other stuff I need to get done right now anyways.  The trade researches and facgtion hub system will still be around in a couple months...or years....so I'll just wait til whenever I get big enough to dump someone off of some of those grapes and horde em myself.  

The hording is understandable.  Limited resources are going to cause people to want to horde the resources for themselves if they can, in order to profit off of having something that no one else does.  

The actual issue with all of this is that what people are really hording isn't grapes.  What they are ACTUALLY hording is access to the market. But if you don't let anyone else have access to the market, who are you going to trade with? 

The other people hording grapes.   That is it. No one else can make traders. To bad the other grape horders don't need YOUR grapes.  They have their own. 

People are trying to sell the grapes/wine for outrageous prices right now because they have a monopoly on the resource.  Here is the problem with that. If you pay an outrageous sum just to use the market then you defeat the entire purpose of being able to use the market.  The idea is to make gold. Paying for the grapes and wine would currently cost me far more than I could conceivable stand to make.  If I can't make any gold in the market, there isn't any point in trying to get access to it.  So I don't need any grapes.   

Especially when I can just bypass the markets and trade resources with my alliance members, who are scattered all over the map, have access to the stuff I don't, don't have access to stuff that I do, and like me enough not to price gouge me like the people in the market would.  

Smaller players gain far more by simply bartering with other small players to get the things they need.  I may not make any gold this way, but at least I also did not lose a ton buying my way into a market that has no one else in it to trade with anyways.  

The only people who are going to actually be able to use the faction hub system in a meaningful way is going to be all the people who are trying to create a bottleneck on the resources so that they can make massive profit off of them.  But it is hard to make a profit if no one can even see you sitting on all those grapes in those faction hubs farther than 100 units away.  

Eventually I am sure that people will settle down and stop occupying every rare resource they can get their troops on simply to keep anyone else from playing with em. I'm sure a couple months from now grapes will no longer be an issue and everything will settle down.  

Until then, I am sure that there will be players who are a little short on common sense who are willing to pay the astronomical fees the grape and wine dictators demand. People who want access to the market enough to ignore the fact that they are never going to make enough in the markets to balance out the cost.