NPC Market is destroying server economy

[Pericles]

Some of the packages for the NPC traders offer way too many goods at way too low of a price.

I’m not sure offering what is basically an infinite supply of anything at a set price is good for any game economy, but when the prices are this low then I definitely dont think it is.

For example. Iron ore is being sold for just a little over 4 credits per unit in batches of 48k! As a guardian that means I can buy almost 500k ingots of iron for about 1.000.000 credits per day. This is such a large volume that the price of iron is guaranteed to never fluctuate as long as the buyer can reach the NPC trader.

Don’t have enough credits? No problem, ask around, someone will sell it to you for 4.5 credits. Who wouldn’t make an easy, guaranteed profit? This is basically what the price of iron ore is in the in game market place. No surprise there. Ore is basically being sold for a fraction of the price above the NPC price after you account for the trade fee? Is it even worth doing this when you consider that you are losing out on your 1% per day profit? No.

There are other examples as well, some of which put the price point of goods at a ridiculously low price. This is good for old players that read the forums and know the rules, but its also kind of boring for them as well. The only upside is that you get to swindle noobs that don’t know about the NPC trader. Is that an upside though?

A huge downside is that there is no price fluctuation on several of the most important goods in the game…

And no competition between traders! Either find a mark and sell them some over priced goods or compete for that fraction of a guaranteed profit.

Hope this post helps improve the server.

[Achilles]

Hi Pericles

This is being addressed

NPC Trader measuring / suggestions?!

Hey NPC Traders / Customers, I want to talk with you about this feature. On the one hand I was thinking that we turn this soon into an “OCD Trader”. The items will be taken from your OCD instead having it infinite from the server. Is this good or bad? Wouldn’t be this same as trading over marketplace more or less? So maybe keep it as it is but brainstorming about prices. My recent idea had 2 new points to make it better for calculations: every slot you want will be added with 1000 credit…

[Pericles]

Nice!

Thank you.

[Mordgier]

I think the NPC traders before were not such a big deal as they were a pain to use as you had to actually go to the marker - while the in game market was instant and convenient. So the price difference was justifiable by the convenience.

Now the NPC vendors are actually MORE convenient than the market.

The market really needs to be broken down into REGIONS, like Guardian region, Pirate Region and so on with Elemental Market being able to access ALL regions.

Or we need to be able to put a market terminal on our ships.

Until one of those happens the NPC vendors are actually a better deal and just as convenient as the player market.

[mcprouty]

NPC Trader measuring / suggestions?!

Thank you for putting the time into this, I legitimately have stopped even bothering trying to trade with how incredible broken the trader was. A few examples: No one out there can afford to sell iron ingots at 850 cr per stack, (even with autominers, that barely covers cost of fuel) yet one of the vendors sells iron ore for 1700 per stack, with absolutely no need to supply it with real items. On top of this, the effort it takes to make and sell rations is completely negated when you can buy t…

[Serious_Squirrel]

by the same token the traders high limit on npc trader packs gives them a huge advantage with 1700 a stack iron ore

[RexXxuS]

All feedback please in one place -> NPC Trader measuring / suggestions?!