Trade Improvements 2

A while back I made some suggestions regarding trade in Illy.  Those focused upon the underlying economics of trade and suggested, in part, that the cost of equipping troops was far below the benefits reaped and thus it was better to forgo equipment (and thus lower demand for the goods needed to craft that equipment) and just build more troops.

In this "installment" I'd like to address the problem of trade distribution and hub location.  By trade distribution I mean the tendency of most trading to be done in Centrum and for many, and maybe most of the other hubs to be under-utilized.  By hub location I mean the placement of hubs in arbitrary locations by the game rather than by the players.

There are, I think, a number of reasons for these problems.

First, most hubs are so underused that in many cases they are ignored.
Second, because it costs nothing to store things in Centrum, there is little reason to store anything anywhere else.
Third, a hub may be well placed, but the placement may not be where the players need it to be.

That the hubs are under utilized is obvious if you look at the market.  Almost all buy and sell orders are in Centrum.  Why?  Because that's where the buyers and sellers are.  No player wants to sell something in a hub that isn't being used.  To change this we need a way to drive the buyers and sellers away from Centrum.  This results in the prices for things in other hubs being higher because the competition is far, far, less than Centrum. And since the cost of storage in Centrum is nil there is little to no reason to store anything anywhere besides Centrum. 

To solve these problems we need to force buyers and sellers out of Centrum and give the players a method by which they can move or build new hubs.

Getting the buyers and sellers moving out of Centrum  is the easy part. If we make staying in Centrum more expensive or limit how much they can store there they will be motivated to move.  You can either just plain limit the amount of goods to some reasonably high amount, or charge for anything after a certain amount, with the charges going up as more is stored.  If I have a billion food in Centrum and I'm paying 1 million gold a day for the top 500,000,000 I very well might just move it to save the gold.  This true of every item too.  By limiting, either by a strict limit or by financial incentive, the amount stored at a hum...all hubs I would say...you force those with more to re-distribute their storage.

Second, if we have a mechanism by which alliance can build hubs and declare them to be a hub, we can place hubs where they are needed and wanted.  This is a more radical idea, but say an alliance builds a hub, could they not collect taxes on it?  And if lots of alliances build hubs it would increase the competition between hubs and other alliances.

Thus, to fix the problem of uneven distribution you need to charge for storage above a certain level in Centrum or reduce the cost of storage at other hubs.

To make sure hubs are where they are needed and wanted you could allow alliances to build them.

Those are my suggestions in "Part 2 of 'Trade Improvements"

Let me know what you think.

AJ

I have found multiple Hubs that are used frequently but none of them are quite as active as centrum.

Half the reason trade in illy is borked from the beginning is lack of necessity. There is no real need for it. Before trade hubs, when all trade was city based, few people bothered. Vets can produce for themselves, newbs don't have sufficient cash to impact trade. The structure of illy (lack of true rarity and limited bottlenecks) makes trade and gold no more than a mini game 99% of the time. It's only during tourneys or the few large wars that even individual players run low, and the market never runs dry. Crafted gear, while neat, lacks sufficient depth or impact. Rarity and effort keeps the cost high, but the value isn't enough for most people to bother. Except for people who simply enjoy it, or for the occasional shortcut, the markets just don't matter.

While Count Rupert is probably correct that things are stored outside of Centrum, he does mention that traders are in Centrum because that's where the traders are who do trading....which was my point to begin with.  It's true, as he states, that other hubs contain things, but other hubs are not usually active trade hubs.  To stimulate trade you need to distribute trade and to do that you need to either increase the cost of storing resources in Centrum or restrict how much you can store there (and thus force you to do some buying and selling elsewhere).  Personally the first option is much easier to implement as the fees collected are collected at the sale and could just be raised.  The latter would be harder to implement and not a guarantee that trade would be more distributed.  And while Brandmeister and PhoenixFire have experienced higher trade levels at some hubs, I do think they can admit that Centrum trades do dwarf anything anywhere else.

My response to Solanar is pretty much covered my first post, "Trade Improvements" and I think he and I agree pretty much, though it may be we come to different conclusions as to why crafting and using crafted items is not a high use activity.

Finally, abstractdream is probably correct to say it's not a problem ...for him/her.  The idea the we all need to search to find what we want may underscore the problem as if the hubs were more even you would see other hubs listed when you look in the markets for an item...right no we usually see only Centrum listed and abstractdream may, therefore be assuming that the market only shows Centrum.    And while it may be that the other hubs are distribution hubs for alliances it is also true that whatever you can do in Centrum you should be able to do in all other hubs...but cannot because nobody really trades in other hubs for the most part.. which is my original point.  One wonders how things would be if your own local hub had as much activity as Centrum.  Certainly things would move faster and often you could receive your goods much faster.

I do, also, wish to thank every body for their responses.  I'm certain the devs read these things and consider what the players are saying...so we end up, in the long run,...getting the game we desire.

AJ

abstractdream wrote: I (NOT a trader) have a different opinion on this (surprise!). Centrum as the main trade hub is logical and useful and isn't a problem as far as I can tell, but a benefit to all. It centralizes trade so everyone knows where to go to get what they need instead of having to search all around or ask in GC. As for the rest of the hubs, they are most useful as distribution hubs for alliances. I know they're useful for storing your stuff, and I recommend it as the best way to avoid theft but hubs come into their own when an alliance clustered around one uses it to move things around where they're needed. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.