A) ability to fill a sell or buy order from an hub to a city (using hub vans of course)

B) ability to use all vans in an hub regardless of the owner city, for orders (I don't care if they will be visualized as multiple groups of vans, just want to be able to enter one order instead of multiple, and the ability to use them all together when option A is enabled)

I think the absence of A), and the fact city orders are still global and not local, are the main reasons because actually hub have LOWER prices. It's a bad circle, selling in hubs is not convenient because of taxes and lower prices, so you use mainly city orders, so hubs orders stagnate.... and so on...

May be it is time to remove the global visibility of city orders ???

Any town with the "Faction Markets" research can send vans to any hub you have a trader at and all vans at hubs work the same way regardless of what town they came from.

First off, I agree it's a flaw.  I think there are several despite the rather high quality of what they've given us.

but...

It you have widgets in a hub and a player is willing to buy them at $4 and you are willing to sell them at $4 then do you have a sell offer posted at $4?  If you do, why not just IGM the player and tell him that if he want's them at $4 he needs to click on the sell offer because you can't deliver on his buy offer.  I realize that for basic resources, hides, minerals and herbs we may be talking about more than 3K goods but for other stuff it's likely to be just as many vans for the buyer.

You can buy from a hub without even having a trader (let alone one at that hub).  You go to the market, find a hub sell order, click buy, enter the number to buy and click check, make sure it looks good and click confirm.  Your caravan heads to the hub with the gold, drops the gold off and picks up the goods and brings them home.

I've got traders at three hubs and I've sold sold millions of basic goods to people in towns and I've bought millions of basic goods from towns and I've sold 1000s of herbs, minerals, salts and animal parts to people in towns and I've bought the same from towns.  All with hub traders to/from towns.

Maybe I don't understand? 

Well, not just the closest hub but I do see that placing a sell order will not solve your problem if the buyer you want to reach is far away.

The problem and the oddity is all on the global visibility of city orders.

I have a city named MyCity with a trader in Centrum. Now there is another player with a city named HisCity located in Zampur. He set a buy order. From MyCity I can see HisCity buy order and I can fill it sending vans from MyCity, but if I moved those goodies in Centrum I cannot fill the order from there.

This is the oddity.

And this is the reason because actually it is harder to make money trading from hubs than from cities. Basic are cheaper in the hubs, because of lack of buyers, due to limited visibility.

It's time to push hub trading and remove global city visibility. I know it is a pain, but if we wait too much the hub market will be saw as limited, crippled and many players will not really invest in it...

just my 2 cents

I too like that idea ~~

There are still a lot of players who do not have traders, and the players who have more than 1 trader are relatively rare.

Personally, I question whether the faction hubs will ever be robust enough to support necessary trade in basic resources. 80 hubs with 5000 possibly active players, half of whom probably have no interest in trade, just spreads stuff too thin.

I agree with everything you are saying.  I'm not sure that global visibility is the only problem.  Removing global visibility allows each hub to vary relatively independently in price.  Which doesn't matter for everything other than basic goods as some traders will start moving stuff between markets to take advantage of the price delta and that will even out prices across Elgea.  But for basic goods, that's neither practical or realistic.  You'll wind up with large price differentials and no tools to address the need.

In respect to the proposal to accept buy/sell town orders from a hub it has the same problem.  You will be very limited in the number of these distant orders you can fulfill because one player has a very limited (in relation to hub trade volume) number of caravans.

Yes, visibility and accepting town orders are both issues.  But if you resolve either of those you will quickly run into the followup issue of limited hub transport capacity.  I think players should be able to rent vans to hub traders.  It can be another market at the hub.  Players post "vans for rent" and select the hourly/daily cost and traders rent them.  Either party can terminate the agreement at any time (after the van fulfills whatever it's currently doing).  If the trader terminates the agreement the van goes back to the rental market.  If the player does it goes back home.  Rented vans get listed in your van inventory just like a van from your city.  Then the devs just need to fix the system so you can lump vans from different cities together into a single unit.

I don't know, that's my thoughts.

I'm confused, because the old city to city trade model allowed players in a variety of places on the map to have access to every resource, everywhere.  If that was a "purpose" of the hubs I think they failed miserably?  By limiting the new goods to only hubs many players haven't even seen many of the goods ever for sale.  How do hubs help people in a variety of places on the map have access to resources?

Rill wrote: Limiting trade visibility for basic resources would make life substantially harder for many people (including newbs) who might not find orders for basic resources they need to play the game at their local hubs.  Sure, a newb with access to Centrum would be OK, but what about a newb who spawns in Tor Carrock or Arran?

Well, I've got several traders and they can't all be in Centrum.  If they turn off visibility and you see a market without a trader send me an IGM.

Zanpur/South East has already done this with the Humayan trade hub. I'd suggest you all work with your local alliances to nominate a trade hub within your region, adn encourage everyone to use it. 

I am basing my thoughts on this at least in part to economic theory, particularly research that has been done around protective tariffs.  The bottom line is that protective tariffs and other barriers to trade tend to inhibit the overall productivity of a "global" economy.

Inefficiency is not necessarily a bad thing.  If the reasons for this inefficiency are creating a system in which lots of people have loads of fun, more power to them.

There certainly is a segment of the playerbase that likes playing with trade.  More power to them.  But changes like visibility limitations in trade for basic resources may ending up making things less fun for a large segment of the playerbase that must contend with inefficient markets that do not have available goods.

I am not in a position to judge where the balance is in that, I am just saying that there are more dimensions on which to base decisions about the way market transactions should be structured than just what will make the most gold.  Another of the decision factors seems to me to be ease of use of markets and/or availability of goods for players who are not interested in complex market systems.

Personally I think limiting trade visibility now would be a death knell for the market in general, as there would now be no reason at all for the vast majority of players to even look at the market.  As it is, when I place an order for basic resources on the global market, there is at least a chance that I might also take a look at the faction hubs.  (I actually do happen to have a trader at one of them.)  If I no longer could place orders from my city with some expectation that people might actually buy them, I might ignore the market entirely and do all trade within my alliance or on the black market.  I think I am far from the only player in the game in that position.

The limited visibility hub model eliminates these barriers.

Globalization is great, but not if you want wider participation.  In the Illy global model, there are serious limits to trade regardless of the limits imposed by a global model.  If you want more traders, limit the markets so the mom and pop shop can sell you the things Wal-Mart can not.  If you've looked at economic theory, you know that!

Sure it will cost the locals more for the basics but a good mom and pop will get the local people the exact goods they need.  Wal-Mart can only drive the mom and pops out of business and then the local people will never get the exact goods they need (crafting components and equipment).