New Market Details

[Shadow]

Alright, I thought I'd share the details of the market plan I've been coding. It will go in as a theme for next turbo round, along with reverse desertions, and if things work out I will make it a permanent feature of 3.0 (probably with tweaks based on your feedback). Here's how it works:

When you sell stuff, prices are rounded to the nearest 10. This is to ensure that lots of people will have units priced the same for each type. You can also choose to go anonymous on the market, so that people will not be able to see your name next to your goods. Otherwise, you can still see who sells what, but you can no longer choose to buy from specific people.

Instead, you tell the market how many of a unit you want, and the market will automatically give you the best price available (ie, buy from the cheapest sellers). However, it will do so by spreading your order over as many people as possible, as evenly as possible. So if the market is active, it will no longer be possible to aim where your cash ends up, and it will not be possible to use the market as a storehouse as long as lots of people are selling at that price. Because of price rounding, this should be always.

Because storing should no longer be possible, I have done away with market commissions. Instead, you will pay 10% commission if you choose to be anonymous, and nothing otherwise.

If this still doesn't make the market active and/or fix storing, I may fold mercs into the public market as just another entry under this system. But I'd like to test this out first, because that will be a lot of work.

Thoughts?

[Firetooth]

I like it, but I think mercs will be needed unless the playerbase grows tbh.

[Shadow]

Oh, I didn't mean getting rid of mercs, I just meant that they would be another entry in the pm, which would only be accessible once you bought out everything players were selling cheaper. But that's not going to be in the next round, mrecs will stay as they are for now.

[Firetooth]

Ah I see, I still think it might be an idea to make you able to buy from mercs over the market, just for those that hate giving others money. Plus, the capacity of mercs isn't usually sufficient. I guess we won't really know how effective this is until next round, though.

Another crazy idea: could you raise the sell price for food on mercs to 10 now the buy price is doubled? Or just generally raise the merc sell prices? :P

[Shadow]

the reason merc sell is low was because the changes were aimed at making pm sell replace it. I'll get it there eventually ^_^

[Ruddertail]

Shadow - I would think you'd /want/ people to be anonymous - prevent people from buying based on whether it goes to a friend or foe. Maybe force anonymous, or flip the commission to you pay for the privilege of making your name known, so your allies can plan to buy when you have a bunch of stuff hit the market, and get mostly your stuff. . .

[Shadow]

fair point

[Shoot]

I have a few questions about the new market:

1) What exactly do you mean by "spread your order as evenly as possible"?

If I want 5 million rats and 5 people have priced their goods at the lowest price, would this mean that I am purchasing exactly 1 million rats from each person (assuming they at least have that many available) regardless of how many each person has available, or would it be proportional to how many rats each of them have available? As an example:

Person A - 10m rats available
Person B - 5m rats
Person C - 25m rats
Person D - 1m rats
Person E - 9m rats

As there are 50m total rats available at the desired price in the example, if I were to purchase 5m rats (10% of the total available rats), would it be exactly 1m being bought from each person or would 10% of the rats from each person be sold?

2) If each seller sells the same amount (1m rats each) in the above example, can people subvert this system by listing multiple smaller packages at a given price point rather than one large package to receive multiple shares when goods are bought? (e.g. if 10 packages of an item exist at the same price and 5 of them are by the same seller, would this seller then receive 50% of the sales as he has half of the packages up?)

3) You say that the prices round to the nearest 10. This does not apply to food as well does it?

[Shadow]

I have a few questions about the new market:

1) What exactly do you mean by "spread your order as evenly as possible"?

If I want 5 million rats and 5 people have priced their goods at the lowest price, would this mean that I am purchasing exactly 1 million rats from each person (assuming they at least have that many available) regardless of how many each person has available, or would it be proportional to how many rats each of them have available? As an example:

Person A - 10m rats available
Person B - 5m rats
Person C - 25m rats
Person D - 1m rats
Person E - 9m rats

As there are 50m total rats available at the desired price in the example, if I were to purchase 5m rats (10% of the total available rats), would it be exactly 1m being bought from each person or would 10% of the rats from each person be sold?

Exactly 1m would come from each person regardless of how many they have. This is to stop people being able to control the market by flooding it early and locking land. However, if one of those people had only 500k rats, then it would buy all of theirs and then repeat the loop, spreading the remaining 500k evenly over the remaining sellers.

2) If each seller sells the same amount (1m rats each) in the above example, can people subvert this system by listing multiple smaller packages at a given price point rather than one large package to receive multiple shares when goods are bought? (e.g. if 10 packages of an item exist at the same price and 5 of them are by the same seller, would this seller then receive 50% of the sales as he has half of the packages up?)

No, each iteration of the market loop it loads exactly one package (the largest) from each seller at the lowest price and buys from that. If this is insufficient, it will repeat again. However, multiple packages at the same price will not confer an advantage. I'm still ironing out the SQL queries I need to make it so, but I did foresee this problem ^_^.

3) You say that the prices round to the nearest 10. This does not apply to food as well does it?

no, food is left as-is.

[taekwondokid42]

I think it would be better - more fair - to base it on which person had their stuff on the market first. If you change prices, we go to the back of the line.

[Shadow]

no, we had that ages ago - what happens is that one person can easily completely dominate the market early on, making themselves the only person who ever gets cash via the pm.

Imagine last round, sevs would have flooded the market in the first week, and that would have been it for the round - nobody would have been able to buy him out all round, and he would have collected every penny spent on the pm.

This new system favors the underdog and making breaking into a dominated market possible.

[taekwondokid42]

That's a fair point. Perhaps it suggests though that the ability to produce troops far outstrips the demand - maybe troop prices and costs overall should be lowered?

All this will be in my big post soon.

[windhound]

I think troop prices will be self regulating, though I guess min and max caps could be adjusted.
If the market is full people will lower their prices so their stuff gets bought, if its empty people will raise their prices to get the most out.  Basically same as its always been.

It will always be possible to send troops via the market, this just makes it so you have to time it right. 
ie, if you list troops you want an ally to buy, you have to list at the lowest market price so they are first in the queue to get bought.  Your ally then better be online 6 hours later or someone else is getting those cheap troops.  This method works with an anonymous market too, so seeing what all is available and from who doesn't really affect much as far as I can tell.

I guess we could induce random variations in time-to-market, ie "The sun is shining and the road is clear, your shipment arrived 2 hours earlier than expected"  or  "Your lead wagon broke a wheel, your shipment arrived 3 hours late"
Given people generally run once a day, a +/- four hour random deviation wont hurt anything, and it should be reasonably simple to code.

[taekwondokid42]

Just hang in with me for a moment while I play around with a few ideas.

Ideally (from my current perspective, perhaps it's not ideal at all) you'd have some sort of first-come-first-serve system, where the first person to get their goods on the market is the person who gets to sell them at that price point.

What Shadow is afraid of is 'sevz' (sevz is going to be the meanie today) putting say 50m rats on at the minimum price very early in the round - beating everybody else to it. Nobody buys 50m rats at the minimum price because it's just not worth it to them, and so sevz makes all the rat sales for a good week and a half.

Naive solution: put the minimum price at 0. Anybody who beats whatever price sevz picks automatically moves to the front of the line. But we still have the problem where the market could potentially become very saturated early in the round, simply because the amount of troops being produced and put on the market exceeds the demand for troops from the other play-types.

By my understanding, this is largely because indys are currently forced to use the market to keep their expenses low, or use a hybrid strategy that involves lots of tents (and possibly markets). So as people get used to the mechanics, the market will eventually balance things out and indys will cater to the demand --> the demand is low though.

The demand for troops is low because they are expensive to keep around and a huge liability: there're tons of ways to lose troops, even if you keep a 175 ratio at all times (*cough*). Leaders aside though, they can also be standard attacked, and troop costs are very high mid-run.

I think a good solution is to reduce how expensive troops are to keep around, and make troops overall worth less money. Keep the merc 'buy' prices the same to encourage use of the market, and make it so indys are less pressured financially to keep a high supply, but also make it so that it's more worthwhile for a casher to purchase troops (aka smaller investment and since indys are keeping more troops around they'll need to buy more in order to get land).

By keeping the income-per-troop low, you also prevent indys from being as potent as cashers when it comes to massing money.

[Shadow]

It will always be possible to send troops via the market, this just makes it so you have to time it right. 
ie, if you list troops you want an ally to buy, you have to list at the lowest market price so they are first in the queue to get bought.  Your ally then better be online 6 hours later or someone else is getting those cheap troops.  This method works with an anonymous market too, so seeing what all is available and from who doesn't really affect much as far as I can tell.

It's more than that, though. Even if you do time it right, if there is another player selling at the same price then half the cash you are trying to move is going to go to someone else, outside of your control. And because the market always gives you the minimum price, you won't be able to change the price to mitigate the damage unless you can lower it further. And if people are anonymous, you won't even know where it went.

Perhaps it suggests though that the ability to produce troops far outstrips the demand

When one person has 80% of the land for a week or more? Sure. There won't be much demand from the people on low land. In a normal round like this one, I think they are fairly even. The trick is to get people to use the market instead of mercs.

Naive solution: put the minimum price at 0. Anybody who beats whatever price sevz picks automatically moves to the front of the line. But we still have the problem where the market could potentially become very saturated early in the round, simply because the amount of troops being produced and put on the market exceeds the demand for troops from the other play-types.

Still no good: the person dominating would then effectively be price-capping the market, crippling the competition.

By my understanding, this is largely because indys are currently forced to use the market to keep their expenses low, or use a hybrid strategy that involves lots of tents (and possibly markets). So as people get used to the mechanics, the market will eventually balance things out and indys will cater to the demand --> the demand is low though.

If demand stays low, we can fold mercs into the pm to compensate.

The demand for troops is low because they are expensive to keep around and a huge liability

Not really. Nobody runs with lots of troops. Demand is at the end of the run, for defense, or to break someone at the start.

I think a good solution is to reduce how expensive troops are to keep around, and make troops overall worth less money. Keep the merc 'buy' prices the same to encourage use of the market, and make it so indys are less pressured financially to keep a high supply, but also make it so that it's more worthwhile for a casher to purchase troops (aka smaller investment and since indys are keeping more troops around they'll need to buy more in order to get land).

There is literally no (positive, lol) price for upkeep at which it will be beneficial to keep troops around during your run. Making upkeep cheaper won't change this.

huge liability

Troops are currently the safest source of networth in the game. Find me a safer one ^_^.