Trading post changes and its effect on the economy.
First off, I would like to say my main play style in New World is that of a trader, and in other games I have beyond extensive experience in markets. Last year I did trading and was in leadership in a large alliance in eve (9000+ players) . I moved around in the game 30k USD worth of goods personally, and much much more for my alliance. (using plex to isk conversion). I feel as if I have a good grasp on the economics of trading in virtual economies.
Centralizing the trading post will have some effects that will rebound in the game.
It will be a buyers market, with all the selling competition it will be a race to the bottom in prices. This means that yes, it will be harder to manipulate the market, but say goodbye to any good margins.
Due to the competition it will be much harder for players to manipulate the market. This sounds like a good thing, however, if somebody invests the gold to buy up all of a single item and relists them, when this happens it does several things. (When its done on a small regional scale)
It allows smaller traders and crafters to piggy back on the high prices, and sell at a more reasonable yet profitable price with less upfront cost
It helps raise the price of t1 mats that go into making those potions, quick thinkers can manufacture the relisted item and either sell and use those.
It reduces choices and emergent gameplay. Right now, it’s almost a minigame to get some mats from one region to another region to sell. This limits the physical amount of goods that can be carried from one part of the map to another. With this reduction, Fringe areas can have cheaper local resources than a trade hub, giving rise to a trading playstyle that is effectively just hauling goods for money.
Currently My company in the game has a buyback program for income, we are able to buy mats at a higher price then any buy order, and we sell them in more fringe regions of the game with a decent markup for our time. This is able to fund us more than what you would expect for a small group with no territories. This type of playstyle would be neutered as well.
The 1% of this game WILL get richer. Although with a unified trade post prices will go down, groups with enough storage space and income WILL be able to buy out items on a massive scale. Every single one on a server, with no effort. Then they can dictate an entire server’s prices on a large scale. Gone will be the days you can go to a different region to get goods if potions go up 1000%.
Lower level regions will die, and people will just trade in low tax regions.
This means that the more powerful the megacompany the more regions they will need to take to get proper income.
TLDR: goods will get massively cheaper, emergent gameplay will die, solo trading will have issues, and mega companies will grow larger.
Lower level regions will die, and people will just trade in low tax regions.
This means that the more powerful the megacompany the more regions they will need to take to get proper income.
You’re incorrectly assuming regions aren’t already dead. Can’t make something dead any more dead. In fact you could surmise that there’s no other way to go but less dead.
Its just going to change what regions are dead. Currently low pop regions are great for market seeding. The only issue I have run into are the number of buy and sell orders that are allowed to be on the market.
But the problem is so few players understand market seeding. They’ve only played global market games. I’ve simply suggested in that other thread, if you want your territory with less trade to have more trade, start a new market there. List your goods for even cheaper than the trade hubs, and encourage players to take their business elsewhere…
it is somewhat catering to the lowest denominator, but lets compare it with a game with thousands of potential trading spots, EVE Online, though travel in that game is generally easy and storage is infinite.
EVE is one game world, and has one central market with does 10X the trade volume and 3x the production of the 2nd best place in game (there’s really harsh penalty for centralizing production) which is 3x the third place trade volume. In EVE nearly all rare/valuable items are traded in the central hub because its the only place you can go and be almost guaranteed to find what you want, very much like New World.
New World doesn’t seem to differ from the EVE example very much at all, while having more unique items, less population, and less market orders per player, much worse market searching/sorting. These factors force the main hub to be even more crucial to the average player.