Post:Commodities/Contracts Rewrite - 08/17/2011 - 03:09

Commodities/Contracts Rewrite · on 08/17/2011 03:09 AM CDT	1167
Hey guys - Wanted to give you a heads up as to where the commodities and contracts rewrite is going. I'll give the basics of my speech from Simucon, and supplement it with information and respond to questions. Basically, right now, Contracts are the guild saying "Take A from location X to location Y." A could be gem pouches, diamonds, whatever. However, upon completion of this contract, the goods you transferred go to the Void of Game Mechanics - You could ship 200 crates of diamonds from Arthe to Crossing and nothing would change. Similarly, Commodities are a bunch of commodity pits with a weird system that is generally accepted to be both broken and scary. In this, there is a limited supply of certain items, and events cause the price to vary, allowing a psuedo stock-market kind of feel to it. The new Commods/Contracts system (which we can call the Trading system for now) combines these two notions. The basic tenets are as follows: * A Good is anything bought or sold in bulk. Raw materials, pallets of wood, flats of donuts, whatever. * A Trading Post is some location that buys or sells at least one Good in bulk. This could be the commodity pits selling tons of different raw goods, it could be a mining outpost that only sells carts of iron ore, or it could be a blacksmith shop that sells bundles of longswords. All of these are, for discussion's sake, a Trading Post. * A TP will have an 'optimal stock' of each Good it buys or sells. If the current stock is higher than optimal, it will cost less to buy (if they sell it to you) and the post will pay less (if they buy it from you). * A TP has a maximum stock (usually around double the optimum) where it will no longer buy any more of a Good. * Random events can (and will!) cause the optimum stock or price of a Good in a TP to change temporarily. These events could be 'Rabbits ate all of the lettuce' or 'There's a party for a minor noble, we need more tarts' or 'The town guard is hiring a new batch of recruits, and has bought all of our longswords.' * The rumor system will be able to tell a trader about any random events that are occurring at trading posts in the current province. * Warehouses will be much more prevalent and you'll be able to store more in them than before. So that's how the new macro-economy will fare. Now, this is all well and good for commodities and people that want to run around doing a ton of research, but what if you're a new trader and you don't know everything yet, or if you don't want to do research and just want a profitable run? This is where the Contracts come in. Contracts are done through the Guild, and instead of picking up your goods at the Guild, you will ask a clerk for a contract, and he will tell you about a run between two existing trading posts that is currently profitable. After you've sold the goods, the Guild will take a 40% cut of the net profits you earn. If you've managed to lose money on the deal, the Guild will still pay you a small (much smaller) stipend for your work. This is called 'underwriting a contract' - The contract is guaranteed to earn you a little money, and you don't have to do any thinking. Now, as for timelines, this is in progress but major work on it is waiting until after Skills 3, Magic 3, and Combat 3 give me a break. As noted at Simucon, X3 will be starting testing by the end of August, so this isn't one of those 'Forever Projects'. However, I do ask that you grant me patience in light of the fact that there is a major project sitting in front of this one. This will happen, but it will take time and care. Let the questions commence :).
This message was originally posted in The Traders \ General Discussions -- Traders, by DR-SOCHARIS on the play.net forums.