World-Economy-Screen

What a lot of people do usually understand is that when features are readily available through game mechanics they get used more than outside things like discord or forums, etc. Right now we have a situation where people will undercut to get a possible sell - with it showing in the listing more will do it because it is easier. The same thing for this footfall game. There is a small amount that do it but when more can more likely will… it is all about the ease of access and ability to pull off this stuff.

That is why you keep it simple… location of shop, if player is active maybe because there is money in request basket or something else like fuel they add to the shop listing… then at least people still have to visit and it provides less way of gaming the system.

This will still not be an issue unless they put a selectable function to limit purchase quantity as a feature on shop stands and request baskets. As soon as one player zeros out a stand or basket it should go away on the market board. Unless the update is daily.

Yes it would go away but the person still had their opportunity. Time doesn’t really come into play overall in this. If it happens once it will happen again.

Also doing that would be requesting real time analytics… even more complexity to the design and time to create. This is one of the reasons I’m against pricing… keep the request simple.

We get near real time resource information on an atlas already. And I assume the Devs would let us know if an option was too resource intensive.

There are players on this forum that advertise scavenger hunts on their builds. This generates multiple footfall events. Is that wrong? The impetus is to gain coin via footfall from as many players as possible.

I do not see this as gaming the system, instead I see it as creatively using game mechanics for the enjoyment of all parties.

This games systems are broke IMO. Builders that are good, should have the footfall to profit from their time.
Shop owners should be able to make plenty from FF and sales.
Gatherers and hunters should easily make a profit from rare loot.

The problem starts at the very low playerbase at the moment, Gatherers have just about all quit. They have made stuff way too easy for just everyone to run out and get. Example, I used to farm beans about a hour or 2 a day and sell for 100c-120c each. They were difficult in a way to get, and not rare but not very plentiful. It created a market that someone could use to gain money. There is 1 place on Besv i used to go and get about 150ish beans. I get about 320 now from that place. Instead of leaving these things alone and keeping a market for the item, they buff it because someone whined about having to farm a few. This new screen will do that to good shop owners. The ones that have decent prices, live in the right place and advertise on their own, as a person would IRL. This will cater to the ones that sell dirt cheap and lead into huge footfall traps.

It might help for a small crowd, but itll hurt the footfall overall and turn into another weird mechanic this game doesnt need.

Farming, Blocks, creatures, titans, etc. would be WAY more beneficial to the game. Create new markets and help keep new people and old people all the same keep playing the game. New people already feel like its an empty world in most places. Wit this system itll kill the need for malls and social areas. turn everything into hubs for easy access to some megastore or mazestore.

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And unless the person buries a shop stand to be completely inaccessible and thus always be listed. They could even have different prices on the inaccessible stand than on the actual ones, as a sort of ‘phishing’ attempt to trick players that don’t pay attention.

They would lose reputation, sure, but short of word-of-mouth within small groups, the scummy practices of the shopkeeper wouldn’t reach every player. You couldn’t name and shame on the forums and discord due to the Code of Conduct, but even if you could use those mediums to warn people… most users of the system wouldn’t be looking for shop information on the forums / discord anymore. :stuck_out_tongue:

Listings, of whatever kind the devs decide to use (if they decide to do this at all), must take this into account, and so the list should only be updated with information about things that have been bought/sold in the last 24 hours, instead of being updated every time that items/coins are put on baskets/stands stocks.

The trade-off is that it would still lead people to go to shops and find the basket/stand empty (if they go with the option of showing coordinates), so that would have a slightly lessened impact on travel habits and wouldn’t eliminate the problem entirely.

I suppose they could do a mix of both methods and remove the coordinates from the list if the basket / stand is out of stock (or in the case of baskets, if it’s either too full to accept more items, or doesn’t have enough coins to buy any, even if the coin amount is non-zero).

I’d still prefer statistics instead of the coordinate and stock method but the points above should at least cover the ways to abuse a full listing system that I could immediately think of (and probably so could other people).

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As someone who has managed businesses in real life, I do have something to say about accessibility of data in general. It’s great to have. Always will be. The video game industry wouldn’t be where it’s at today if it wasn’t for ease of access of things like YouTube or Steam to get the collective opinions and feedback from hundreds to tens of thousands of people in a singular place. That consumer data is what led Boundless to be created along with so many of your favorite games.

I guess I am lazy for wanting to be able to see more data on what Spicy Beans are selling for or LED blocks or Refined Diamonds. Maybe I am just lazy for not wanting to create my own tracking spreadsheet for shop sales (even though I have one made) and want to see other pieces of data, like number of sales within a specific hour for certain items.

I don’t think having more data in general to look at for shops is necessarily a bad thing. It benefits gatherers as well and makes it easy for builders to know the cost of building their project or at least a rough estimate. Hunters even get to benefit from it. Knowing how much something is worth makes it hard for someone to screw you over.

Where others see problems I see opportunity. Perhaps that’s the entrepreneur in me talking.

Since this is a video game, there’s always people who are going to try and maximize the outcome with the tools (game mechanics) given to them. The oldest ones in this game are plot claiming and prestige. This isn’t an excuse to not look at a game mechanic suggestion and explore the possible ways to implement it. It isn’t like what happened to Bomb Mining. I doubt people are magically going to quit playing over having more data available to them about their shop and items being sold and bought in the game.

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i like the ideas you have in your last two paragraphs, well visualised and comprehensive statistics would be very much what i would like to see too ^^

I think we need
3. - listing of all items with all details that are available to buy and sell across a world

Let players avoid wasting time and crossing all the footfall traps which only generates coin for the ones who built them and do nothing for the player just trying to find an item they want to buy.

4- why not both the name and the location? If all I get is the name then how am I to find a shop that could be anywhere on a planet? And once I know where a shop is and have been there a few times the location is less of an issue.

It is one thing to explore planets because I want to. If I want to gather or hunt or dig for diamonds. At least I know where to go to find these items. I do not have to cross 48 planets searching hundreds of stores to find something. All I have to do is put an item in an atlas and I am set.

This is one reason why some players have decided to do everything themselves and others have limited where they even go to buy to places like some of the malls which at least gives them a better chance to find an item.

Various players keep wondering why the economy seems stagnate or places like the malls do well? One reason is players are tired of the attitude that the shop owners interests come first and players should be forced to spend their limited time looking to buy. Look at the real world, store’s prices for most items can be found online. People can choose to either use the resource or not but it is there and everything is not always the same price. How easy it is to get the item matters and despite what has been stated, loyalty does matter. Do I really mind paying a coin more per item to a shopkeeper that I have used before and keeps a good stock? Sure I will and have in EA.

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There’s nothing more fun than aimlessly wandering around for hours in ghost towns, visiting endless empty shops because of gleam club, looking at the clock and then realizing you’ve wasted your entire evening and accomplished nothing because you couldn’t find the one item you wanted to buy.

I seriously question the design choices at play here.

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The first few times going out “shopping” were ok. But then I started noticing a lot of these shops are mostly abandoned. Or just there for show with prices 100x higher than any other shop. (I assume these are the people who don’t want prices shown). After wasting a couple hours of my limited game time two days in a row trying to find a basket that isn’t buying at 1 or 0 coins, I’m done with the market aspect of this game until I can find what I need in a timely fashion.

I think having all of the data (price included) for each shop stand on a planet would be a good thing. No co-ordinates, just the region where it is located. If it’s in a mall, you may have to run into a few shops to see the one with the right price.

And to the people who are going to say that everything will be 1c, it won’t be 1c forever. If that’s how they want to spent their time farming something all day, just to sell it at a loss, good for them. There’s plenty of other items that they won’t have time for.

If I undercut you by 1c, then try and undercut me by 1c. Eventually one of us will either be bought out and run out of stock, or will realize we are losing money, and stop.

Certain items are always going to be 1c like it or not. Recipies change, new stuff gets added, the market will still fluctuate, but at least I won’t have to waste my weekend to find what I needed.

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I can’t speak for other people, but the reason I want the option to hide my shop stands from any such listing is this:

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This is inside my base.
No portals leading to it have any signs, there are no indications whatsoever that it is a shop, and the entire thing is underground with no entrance other than portals, so I frequently use ridiculously priced shop stands for mass storage of things that would be impractical to stick in storage blocks (because I’m already hitting chunk limits for storage and machines as it is).

People still randomly come in and poke around my storage area thinking its a shop just because it happens to have shop stands.

I would rather not have my storage area cluttering up the list :stuck_out_tongue:

Edit: I would also love to hide my portals from the compass for much the same reason. Even tho the only entrance to my base requires leaving one of my shops, going all the way around it, finding the door to the entirely empty basement level, and then going thru a portal, people still randomly go there because they see a portal icon and get curious. :stuck_out_tongue:

And then they probably make posts about how some ‘shops’ have ridiculous prices :roll_eyes:

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Maybe put a lock on it, and locked shop stands won’t show up? If that is possible coding-wise?

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i agree that you should be able to hide your own shop stands as well as mark certain shop stands of others on the list that you have visited and disliked or liked a lot.

The solution with the lock on the shop stands/request baskets sounds very easy and intuitive.

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They could also make a different block that is not a shop stand but can fit 16 smart stacks in a single block space. :stuck_out_tongue:

Then I wouldn’t use shop stands for storage anymore.

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I don’t think we want stand and basket prices - we want to know about what’s actually happening. What volumes, at which prices. I still think an in-game object like I described would serve this well.

I agree. Any long list of stuff would be such a nightmare to scroll thru that I would simply never use it.

It’s bad enough as it is trying to find stuff in the knowledge tab, now imagine a list that size multiplied by the number of shop stands placed in the universe.

shudders

A histogram with volume of sales and median prices over a period of X (preferably three different selectable periods, week - month - year) would be much better - and probably easier to code and display.

What most people in this topic seem to want however is to not have to physically go to shops to know what is there and for how much, in order to save time. If time saving is the ultimate measure of such a feature, then you might as well make an auction house with mail delivery and be done with it since that would be the fastest. :roll_eyes:

Personally I’d see it as one less incentive to explore and see how cities are developing and what other players are building and whatnot, but I suppose people might get a bit of tunnel vision when they’re shopping in a hurry and all they can see are the baskets and shop stands, so I can understand where the other side of the argument is coming from too. :man_shrugging:

It’s a complicated thing to balance. I understand wanting to get things done as quickly as possible to go back to doing other, supposedly more enjoyable, things with one’s gaming time, but I suppose I’m a bit weird in that regard as I actually find the exploration aspect of shopping enjoyable, so to me the current system doesn’t feel as bad.

But an item that shows transaction information that you have to visit might help? If it has a range maybe? And has to be fueled. And configured for a single item? Could make for some interesting new builds.

There was mention a while back regarding the original plinth (before it gets made into a selling plinth or request basket), being used as a display plinth. From memory, it just hasn’t been implemented yet. I wonder if this could fit the requirements you’re after.

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