Request Baskets and a Bidirectional Economy

General
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OK so I made a sort of off-topic comment today in another thread about requests baskets, and something I call “economic confusion”. I actually searched a couple of months ago for any old posts I had made on this topic, but it seems it’s something I’ve discussed primarily in discord chats in the past.

Just to be clear this isn’t a thread advocating for change or necessarily arguing against request baskets. It’s just a discussion of the obstacles they present to the formation of familiar economic models, and some of the attendant difficulties for people trying to start up shops, or wondering why shops and “the economy” are so weird in Boundless.

I’m not aware of any straight analog to request baskets. Especially not paired with player shops.

Definitely not IRL and nothing really quite like it in any other virtual economy I’ve participated in. These cloud the “market pricing” model that many people depend on to market their products and goods, and also remove, for many players, the necessity to seek out the things they need. I’m aware that many players lean on this convenience so again, I’m not saying good vs. bad, just that i’s different.

In real life and most virtual economies we have a much more unidirectional economy. If you have something to sell you bring it to the appropriate market, or you find buyers/consumers for your products and make distribution arrangements. For some (even most in gaming economies) items this may include an auction house model which does offer buy and sell orders.

However even there lowball offers or “donation requests” are usually discouraged with fee structures, and a level of centralization that isn’t really present (natively) in Boundless. Also most of these types of orders are time-limited and thus require an active buyer to have at least “one eye on” the actual economy, or continuously waste money on fees.

You can’t, for instance, in real life get one cow, milk it in the morning, and then wander around town looking for baskets on people’s porches with money in them and a note asking for milk. Nor would you, if you needed a hammer or some wood to build a shed, just put out a note and hope that these things materialized on your porch at whatever random price you decided you wanted to pay.

Instead you look for a seller, perhaps considering several, and determine which one meets your needs at or near your budget. Same, in most cases, with an “auction house economy”.

It’s a common complaint that people go to the length to build a shop, and then they have a hard time selling anything. This is a slightly different issue with crafted items than with raw materials, but it’s still applicable to both, as request baskets can and do exist for all items in game. This is more of an issue, however, with raw materials.

This issue exists in large part because real active buyers quickly become known for their request baskets and they have no need to patronize player shops or participate in a more familiar sales-focused market pricing models.

Even with tools like BUTT or Boundlexx a player trying to sell something they don’t frequently trade in has no way to be aware of what prices commerce is happening at - there’s no way to tell if “the good baskets” are just empty right now, or if they exist at all. And since players can (and do) just leave out baskets with lowball offers in them, the spread on existing aggregators is more indicative of prices at which commerce is not happening.

If you’re entering a market and you want to be competitive, do you compete with the baskets, or the stands? Trial and error is the only way and that comes at a cost, whether that’s paid on confusion or coins.

IMO the model has both strong pros and cons. However without strong centralization like a universe-wide auction house where you can fully inspect and compare all items and offers - either a selling oriented or a buying oriented (unidirectional) economy would in fact be more intuitive to the people involved, and create, overall, a stronger economy.

So anyways that should be enough to solicit some thoughts, even if it’s a little vague. I’m distracted and don’t want to start with a novel length post. I am somewhat interested in peoples’ thoughts on this and it’s led to a couple of interesting discussions in the past. Again this isn’t really an attempt to advocate for or against - just a look at how this is different from other models and what effects it has.

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There’s no resistance to one direction of price movement if you only have one half. Think of this scenario: everyone suddenly wants 2000 hopper cores and shop stands don’t exist. They all make baskets and the first one offers 1000c, the second then 1001c, third 1002c etc. But they don’t know someone was looking to sell them for 50c, there just was nobody offering to buy them then. The seller is happy ofc, but the market price is skewed. This is even worse when the next time happens and the sellers try to use historic prices to price their product, and set it to 1002c because that’s what it sold at last time. Similar problems occurs if it’s the other way round and request baskets don’t exist.

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I like the economy model in Boundless. I played something similar on a modded minecraft server. There it was possible to place chests with signs to buy/sell. That way it is even possible to link selling and requests for buy/sell shops. It worked very well.

The best analogy in the real world is gold. There are many shops that buy it which equals request baskets. In the real world there is often the problem that items have a quality which cannot be guaranteed. In a game items are always the absolute same.

The current structure we have allows a good economic freedom.
When I need some quick coin I look for a request basket.
When I need items that are currently not sold or low in number. Request them.
Items I have too many of or I produce can be offered when I like having a shop or there is no request at desired price.
When I need material I can visit shops that offer them.

Would be nice when it worked that well in real life :slight_smile:

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I think this is the reason that we don’t have any buying only and very few buyer focused economic models IRL. It doesn’t work well and people are uncomfortable just firing offers into a void, so to speak. In most cases, it’s a seller’s burden to get their products to market.

Pricing can then clearly consider cost of acquisition and/or production as a baseline, and measurements of supply and demand then come directly into play as the market develops.

Value-added resellers (even sometimes straight resellers whose only “add” is aggregation and consumer-facing marketing) may or may not have a niche in a given economy but at that point the service they’re providing is also very clear cut.

To be fair, I can easily imagine and work with a sales-oriented economy because it’s so familiar it becomes intuitive. I don’t think I’ve ever encountered an example of a fully buyer-driven economy like what you describe - what we would have if we kept request baskets, and discarded shop stands. That would be wild.

We do have enough channels for communication that with a smallish economy like this I’m sure it would get sorted. But principles like anchor pricing would have a much more significant impact on the market than more common methods of price discovery. What mechanism would you envision for oversupply to affect market prices, when the only visible mode of competition is to out-pay competing buyers? I see this leading to steady price inflation with no real inbuilt mechanism to combat it.

That’s an interesting thought.

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It is super flexible, a major pro of the system. If there was a practical way to implement these items in real life, I think one benefit would be seeing a lot less dependence on things like major retail corporations.

Still even with channels like community bulletins, classified ads, and now the internet available it seems that people have never really gravitated in this direction. To be fair, I’m not sure how much that’s due to real obstacles or simply a factor of “it isn’t done that way”. Requests/offers to sell things seem to be far more dominant than specific requests to buy things.

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Ok so take an inverted example, no request baskets: You now have to become a shopkeeper to sell a rock you found, you can’t just bring it to someone who wants rocks and sell it to them.

And the price resistance missing: a bunch of ppl want to sell their rocks, first one offers them for 1000c, second for 999c, third for 998c etc. Someone had been looking for rocks for weeks and they were ready to pay 50k each, so they’re obviously happy, but the market price is again skewed there’s no way to know what the rocks are really worth.
If many ppl wanted to buy rocks, they would be at the mercy of the shop stands being priced well at the moment they need the rocks, no way to advertise your buy in price. The sellers would have to fumble in the dark to find a price their rocks sell at the most efficiently, and even then you’re not sure if they’d sell the same at a higher price too.

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This is fully what we have for the vast majority of commodities in real life. Again, not saying it’s the best possible case, just that it’s what we have and are used to. Because of this people respond intuitively to it.

As with real life, we have side channel for people to make private arrangements as well, to whatever extent they get used. A buyer can always reach out to a specific distributor, or randomly via local bulletin boards, classified ads, related forums, etc…

This is actually a very limited comparison, and we do have a couple of these such as pawn shops as well. However even with tangibles like precious metals that do get traded in bi-directional markets there are typically obstacles as mentioned against “noise” orders and certain other shenanigans.

These markets (commodity specific markets) are used primarily by knowledgeable individuals with a focus on active commerce. And even in more random markets like everyone pretty much knows that if you’re desperate enough to sell to a pawn shop, you’re likely getting, uh, lowballed at best.

Perhaps if there was a mechanism that would apply basket orders to existing shop stands directly the bi-directional flow would be more useful. But this just brings us back to the central auction house model. Which works very well in a limited/virtual economy where it can be fully centralized, but doesn’t have a broad spectrum IRL comparison due probably in large part to issues like quality control, as you mention.

If wonderstruck hadn’t refused to add or even consider anything to centralize activities or share data between world servers we could have a much healthier economy here. On a side topic of making Boundless overall into more of a real “universe” at the infrastructure level I really hope to see some of these things addressed with new owners.

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I ain’t no economist, so just a common sense point I want to make here (might be wrong).

In RL making a request to buy is admitting there is need (in some cases probably being desperate to buy), which drives the price up. Imagine that shops with requests to buy existed as the main good exchange model - that would mean the competition to raise prices so the needed goods are brought to you and not someone else.

That’s why, I think selling product is something of a goods exchange model. We sell because we want to make money. We try to find a product that is demanded, spend time/money/resources to acquire it and to create a space we can offer it in. Putting things on sale means a need to get rid of a product (as it was invested in), which drives prices down in general (the buyers can shop around, wait for special offers etc).

Boundless is a game so behaviours might differ (including prices below profit margin - in the end it’s only one’s game time that is invested and not making profit doesn’t endanger one’s livelihood).

So, no matter whether baskets exist or only shop stands are available, players will always make some economical decisions that wouldn’t be healthy in real life, but create no hurt in game.

Removing baskets would mostly change how items are acquired, not necessarily prices.
But who knows. I don’t, for sure lol.

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This kind of all hits home a bit for me as I just created a shop recently within the past two weeks. I have both shopstands and request baskets. For every item I sell much like other shops, I have a basket buying the same items.

I sell a lot more than I expected to, but I have to be super-proactive in keeping the stands full and keep an eye on other shops undercutting. Now I could just forego the undercutting and keep my prices at one spot where I feel it’s a fair price, but then things would move much slower.

I even take things out of my own shop stands at times when they don’t sell well and sell them to a request basket elsewhere just because if I undercut someone it just makes the price so low I can just sell it in a request basket for a bit more coin.

I don’t see a huge problem with it personally, but it can be annoying at times.

The economy isn’t the best, but you can really play the economy and make some really good coin … if you have enough coin to start.

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This is a very valid and relevant point. It’s definitely a reason that we’re able to try out other models and/or have some intellectual discussion on the matter and it’s not a life-wrecking imperative for anyone :rofl:

This is one way in which having the bidirectional mechanism available disguises normal market indicators on supply and demand. The situation you describe would typically indicate an oversupply, and we would see ensuing depreciation on the commodity.

Here you’re able to go sell them to a basket at a lower price than you might actually want, but without creating any tangible indication of your situation on the market. Even if you know the basket is lowballing but you’re just wanting to free up some space or have become willing to accept recovery-level pricing.

This effectively hides the oversupply condition from the market. I mean, which can be great for someone who is trying to sell a commodity that’s in low demand, as well :man_shrugging:

Pros and cons for sure.

It’s not a huge problem at all. At least not for most of us. If i felt it was I probably would have brought it up long before when I was trying to figure out why this economy felt so different.

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Request baskets are the Door Dash of Boundless. I don’t consider the prices of request baskets at all when setting my prices in my shop stands. :rofl:

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from buyer point of view

  1. im checking B.U.T.T. for item i want, it showing eg 10 stands selling what i want, looking for lowest price, i see someone selling few SS of what i want but… BUTT showing that shopstand is located at eg Trior, ok im going to Trior planetary hub, using knowledge tab for item i want, buy from… located 2176 from my actual position, ok, entering all trior portals to check position again, after 3rd portal, bingo, im directly at shopstand, bought, we are both happy, me and seller

scenario 2 - shopstand located at boori, planetary hub 2726 away, ok, lets check portals, no no no no still 1600 away… ok lets go, running thru planet, closer closer closer oh i see shop :smiley: wait… where are the doors? why they are closed? wait. i see portal inside… i want to go inside let me in !!! looking closer thru doors, no label above portal, ok trying to force sanctum portal to bump me inside… no luck, screw it, going to check another seller from list

to be honest, after several such situations im started buying what i need running thru MALLS :smiley:

probably its impossible for BUTT to show coords of every shopstand or possible closest portal

same situationa with request baskets if i want to sell my stash, looking for baskets with highest price but again, no direct location, closed doors or build without doors with portals inside so usually im going to closest request basket i know where it is, few coins less but no stress bumping at closed door or wall :smiley:

overall system is good, fact i dreaming about MARKET BOARD or AUCTION HOUSE but well, maybe in future, maybe not but, we also have FORUM, so maybe more players will be posting they want to sell or buy something and posting direct location of their stands/request baskets we all will be happier :smiley:
do you running shop? tell us about :smiley:
do yuou buying something frequently or all the time? tell us about your request baskets :smiley: becouse we may not find them?

maybe new forum thread? players shops advertisements?

@Mayumichi i cant now imagine life without BUTT :smiley: keep it working and have our neverending gratitude :smiley:

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Yup that’s all too familiar :smiley: Still loads better than what it was like before, but a proper in-game universal AH would beat it no questions asked. Oh and BUTT could show the shop stand coordinates, but not portals, so it was deemed useless when you don’t have any reference about what those coordinates actually mean without a map, portals etc.

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So, let’s take a look at a common resource:

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Just looking at this, I’d almost say that nobody is really looking to buy or sell much tallow at all, it’s a stagnant market on an item that’s in oversupply.

Real world analogies tend to break on stuff like this - but I tend to think that even in a more typical MMO economy this situation would become self addressing. I mean if you acquire a somewhat minimal amount (180 tallow) the system will pay you .93c each piece to process them into the simplest form.

But due to us having a buy system and a sell system that are disconnected - we basically have people making a show about buying, and other people making another show about selling. There’s clearly no actual need on either side of the equation.

Imagine, if you will, a universe where these two systems actually interconnect. This is (relatively) easily done with a minor addition to the existing APIs and a single server outside of the world servers. However technicals aside, let’s discuss such a system from a functional standpoint.

Let’s say that you decide you want some tallow. You pull out a request basket and use it to create an offer. You know that a player can get .93 each from the game so you’re willing to pay 1.0c. You configure your request basket for the offer, and over the next (some period of time) it starts collecting tallow from shop stands set at 1.0c or less into your basket. It stops either when the basket is full, or there is no more tallow on offer for 1c.

At this point we have combined some of the pros of the boundless system with some of the pros of the universal auction house. And we have live commerce. As well as less confusion for someone trying to figure out how./where to enter the tallow market.

Pros from our current system:

  • Players interact with the system how./where they want.
  • Large buy/sell orders can be placed indefinitely with no fees or order timeouts.

Pros from an Auction House style system:

  • Players are able to buy and sell without spending hours running around, trying to find beacons/portals/etc…
  • Statistics and market information can be readily made available to players and developers.
  • Fewer players “avoid the economy” or have the impression that commerce isn’t happening (“the economy is broken”) in the game.

This also interferes with some of what I’ve vaguely referred to as “shenanigans” which in this sort of case include players placing uselessly low quantities of items at prices well below market on stands to attract footfall.

Also locked shops and hidden stands/baskets :stuck_out_tongue:

Such a system could exclude an option to exclude plinths from the system much like they can be excluded from the shopping API right now. In fact nothing would need to be added since it seem to follow that if they aren’t getting scanned, they’re not going to be ‘shopped’.

That way, as well as everything else mentioned here, people can still continue to have private shops for guild mates or friends as well, if they wish.

Just more random thoughts I guess. On keeping some of the unique feel of boundless, but implementing a more effective and intuitive set of economic tools. This sort of arrangement would eliminate the need to create and implement actual central auction houses or even an entirely new GUI while enabling a much more active economy in the game.

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You pretty much described a Market Maker in real world economies. https://www.investopedia.com/terms/m/marketmaker.asp

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In my experience I would see the described role (when reduced to manual performance) more as a broker. In virtualized markets like currency markets, some commodity markets, or MMO auction houses this service is specifically referred to as “automated order matching”.

The exchange/brokerage house supplies the tools and with commodities that can support it this frequently includes order matching, but in some markets automation is not desirable. In that case brokers and/or market makers work together to make things happen.

An individual broker is someone who performs manual order matching in a case where there is no “house” per-se, or for various other reasons automated order matching isn’t desirable. Two relevant analogies being a stock broker, who manually implements order matching on a stock market, or a real-estate broker, who arranges trades where there is no real centralized market.

A market maker then would be someone who is holding orders on both sides of the spread in order to take advantage of volume trading at low margin and decrease market volatility that comes with thin orders from individual traders on both sides of the book. In effect using some deeper pockets to help stabilize things. This is effective with or without automating the order matching.

I would call a shop in Boundless that has buy baskets sitting on shop stands an attempt at independent market making, in line with these terms.

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i would actually love that ingame
imagine small farmer crop more effective then mass produced crop that would make things interesting for small shops

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Yeah that’s the word, broker! Here’s some examples of games using such a system

Dual Universe

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EVE Online

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GuildWars 2

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I like that one.

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What I wish is for there to be one mall to rule then all. Everyone wants to have their vision of a mall and to have people open up shopes there and I respect that, I DO. But, I think we should agree with numbers such as they are, we should let one mall be made that every one uses and we all go there to buy/ sell.
It would let people run into each other more, be more competetive and just feel like am alive world. I don’t care who runs it, I just wish we could all agree to stop making alllll these malls and jsut work together.

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