Roadrunner feathers would be easiest to lock down. Not much supply at all.
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Just to set the record straight: I was not first to level 50, that was Karo. I also did not get any funds from any bugs.
Then I was misinformed on that. Apologies.
So let’s say you lock down road runner feathers. First the issue is supply, you can’t control supply so another group can form to gather the feathers. They can hand trade to avoid known members of the cartel or any shop owners that participate or make the finished goods and sell those. It is hard in a game like boundless to really control anything. With infinite supply, decent player communication and already formed guilds/ groups it is hard to lock anything down that cannot be overcome with some effort.
I think the other thing to consider is the affect on player retention. If you get a group that makes it difficult for players to acquire a certain good and therefore progress, you can have a negative affect on how much people play or if they play. Since no one has to play the game(unlike real life with the oil cartel), you can drive away you own customers if you try to maintain prices that are too high. You could get comments on steam , great game but a group controls x necessary resource and price gouges the new players.
I don’t think it would be feasible. The game is always changing. Things get buffed/nerfed. The cartel would need to control most if not all of a certain resource. Even blocking off all the diamonds on a planet would be useless because the devs can spawn another planet if they need to. They could go around buying all the roadrunner feathers and later down the line the recipe could get nerfed/changed at any time. Now you’ve got all these useless feathers that are no longer worth what they were when you bought them.
Yeah realistically I wouldn’t bother. I’ve played games where Chinese farmers buy all the supply then gouge. Was friends with a Chinese gaming farmer, his account played 24/7, he played 12 hours a day for $600/month.
It can be done, but not in the traditional sense… instead of fixing prices high, i see them targeting a single or few items and, in an organised way, drive down the prices to where competitors can’t go or arent willing to take the profit knock.
This would be good for buyers and bad for sellers, unless the cartel is willing to “buy high sell low” to keep mats coming in.
I believe the crucial step here would be to hand buy from dedicated gatherers… this way, market prices for the resources will drop as competitors try to keep their (higher) profit margins at competitive product rates.
This drop means the raw mats are less profitable unless you sell to the cartel… so gathering is less rewarding / not worth it unless you sell to the cartel. Effectively, in theory one could crash the market on raws and be the only ones selling the product cheap… THIS is where the opportunity then presents itself to reinstate pre-fixing prices, bump your margin and dump your stock. Assuming nobody else has been stickpiling the now-less-valuable raw mats there won’t be a lot off competition for you.
Caveat- needs a product thats high in demand, made from resources not used for much else (as other uses would keep the raw mat stale on the market)…
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So…in light of upcoming changes to forging, who’s up for a cartel now? 
In all seriousness though, I’ve gone through the process in my head and I think it’s easier for shop keepers to establish a cartel than it would be for customers. In order for customers to do it, they’d essentially have to develop a blacklist of shopkeepers and store it on a 3rd party site and then promote that constantly. You can’t do it on the forum because it would potentially violate CoC. In light of this, I don’t think a union would work for customers.
What forge changes
I mean you’re allowed to gain the trust of people, manipulate your way into getting permissions, then stealing all their stuff…
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the idea is not a cartel its a simple lets be normal people thing ans stop to be greedy and eat eachther up. you cant have competition when you push every little shopinto the abyss just to be the big one selling. atm the whole shop thing is a huge mess.
when i came up with the idea i never had in my back a cartel or whatever you guys imagine in it. it was just a simple thing if the shopowners stop to fight eachother and work whit eachother. you drive in the name of ‘‘compeition’’ prices down kill some small shops whit succes and then have a mess and complain about the game be bad and needing to be fixed. so lets fix it the right way. player owned economy can not be fixed whit a patch just by players.
so here a last time explained; all shops as a team set a bar and keep to it there is room for a healthy competition and not what you do now.
the people in need of money sell to you and in need of goods buy from you, i need coin and wanna spend it but at a stable rate, make it possible whit a system and i take it. if you manage to keep to the bar you set for shopowners economy can stabilize, and the coinflow gets some speed again, if it works i hope you get rich cos you deserve it.
if a shop needs fast cash he can then ask another shop and sell a little cheaper per handtrade. if you have a team you can exchange a lot better goods, communicat better and dont be greedy.
if your a team there is no need to buy people out and resell it for a bigger profit. from my view it has done more damage then be a good competition.
handtrade between players are also good for the coinflow. have some gatherers work for you dont run alone around. extracoin benefits every new player. offer jobs at teh forums make some noise as a lot do succesfully.
just dont forget you can not patch or fix something that shud be player driven by changing the mastercode of the game and program this and that if the players keep behaving as usual. the game works as intended the system is not utilized as it shud be by the players. devs can not patch our brains, or how we behave.
in the end this shud be fun? right? shud be a team game? right? shud be and stay a nice community? then it needs work 24/7 by all the nice people here in the game. economy is only as good as the greed is low and understanding high.
thank you.
The shop keepers will always do what’s in their best interest; to maximize profit. The customer will always do what’s in their best interest; to buy at the cheapest price.
With this said, why not take your ideas and implement them for other players who want the cheapest prices?
Btw, I’d highly recommend being a shop owner. Because you will find that it’s a humbling experience. Being a successful shop owner is not a trivial issue than it is being made in your post. It’s more nuanced and complex than what you are alluding to
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Everybody in this game has a shop. And Cartel fails, Corporation wins.
it would be wonderful if all the shops sold everything at the same price!Unfortunately this would be especially true for the shop closest to the portal hubs. “There’s no need to hurt your feet walking to the shop behind me little oortling, give me all your coin…”.
If you have a shop, and you’re not on the highway… you can probably sell to the people who live right next to you. that’s about it. in order to get any customers, you’d need to either have a better product (reliable stock in game as there’s no QC yet hehe) or a better price. if we remove price from the equation, it would depend solely on who is nearest and has stock.
Lets assume prices are fixed based on a ?self determined acceptible profit margin? (nigh impossible to establish - the player who has 12h a day to play may value his farming time less than someone who can fit only a few hours a week). So every shop that sells raw mats or puts out a buy basket has a predictable price. So stocking your shop comes down to picking up the ingredients at the agreed price, crafting the product and selling at the agreed price… No shortages, no random bargains to be had to give anyone an edge, no reason to farm anything except the item that pays the most per minute spent gathering it… thus no stock of other less valuable items, thus no production, because you cant pay someone more to give you what you need…
It’s a very difficult thing to take the free out of free market, especially without some supreme authority enforcing rules (be it an in game dictator or hard-coded limitations); and it hasn’t shown to be very effective on earth - I can’t see it giving wildly different results in-game.
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Or cripple people’s kneecaps. Tho I wouldn’t mind that being in the game so I can yell ‘Get off my lawn!’ and cripple the kids messing on my lawn.
i agree completly that we need shops at one place in the name of the holy oort we need them at one place.
too much portals and only 6 really active shops at all.
just 6 eh?
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Remember when there was only npc traders ingame. We sold to them for coin. Farmed a lot to get more coin. Now you replace the npc whit the standarized price system. Shud then the people not be acting similar to get coin. My whole idea comes from npc traders. Its just that the role of npc trader is taken over by shopowners. A simple standarized system.
I will make a shop at the arie portal hub asap. To understand you better i will have this experience and maybe we can have more good and constructive posts like this between us.
There are 2 big differences between player and npc shops.
- Npc’s have unlimited coin (or they should, as they don’t do feats)
- Npcs follow rules and dont care about profit / dont need or want to make more coin
Looking forward to your shop! What will it be called?
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