My take on an economy. The Caravan:
When exploring echoes, you may come across a caravan symbol next to an echo. This shows the player that somewhere in the echo, they can encounter a caravan being attacked. After defending the caravan (if the NPCs dont die), they can interact with the weapons dealer, the armorer, and the jeweler. (includes relics) Each of these NPCs have an inventory of appropriate gear that are other players listed items that you can buy. If there are any slots open and available, you can pay a travel fee to the NPC for them to travel with your item and attempt to sell it. Upon selling it, they also take a % cut. If there are no spots available, you can buy an item to free up a spot. There would be different caravans for different corruption levels. a 0-100, 101-200, 201-300, 301-400, and 400+ that can only be enounctered by finding them in their corruption range. Each caravan could have different item requirements, maybe only the 300 and 400+ allow exalts or idols or uniqes etc TBD.
EHG can balance it buy limiting vendor inventory size, how often it can appear in an echo, listing fee, listing duration, % cut fee, difficulty in keeping the NPCs alive, what items are sellable at the different tiers of caravan, what those tiers are. They could even have a ācaravans more likely to roam this monolithā randomly to encourage players to go to monoliths they may not traditionally do if they want a higher chance to find it.
Let me know your thoughts, and this is meant to be a limited economy trade system, not a friend to friend system which is another issue
I like it! A similar take to the dungeon concept but in Monolith Echoes instead. Echoes desperately need some dynamic and interactive content and this would definitely be an exciting thing to find.
I think this is my favorite suggestion regarding trade. It adds more excitement and incentive to monoliths and I think a traveling caravan would fit in really well with the world.
This would add exploration aspect to monolith when caravan shows up and it desperately needs that since itās just a boss rush atm.
You also considered RMT with this by adding brackets so EHG could add/remove brackets to make it harder to RMT through the system based on the data they have for example if 1% of the player base is in the last bracket and there are 10k players then perhaps combining 300-400 and 400+ could be an option to increase the pool of items being sold.
You also mentioned listing fee and if the fee is based on the bracket you are in, this would limit what kind of items people list.
I like it.
The limited item slots is a very interesting idea.
I think the fact that you can effectively buy a slot in the market poses a rather big potential risk, as it makes market slots a speculation asset.
Hear me out, market slots have intrinsic value to a player that intends on selling something, however, even someone that does not have anything interesting to sell still has a very strong incentive to occupy the slot.
If the item is properly priced, a posted item might be bought just by virtue of the fact that doing so will allow the buyer to post one of their own items.
This gives item slots an intrisic value that is decoupled from the price of the posted item.
A market slot can be seen as an investment, whereby the poster can speculate on the āpriceā of a slot, by posting useless items at the price you think a slot is worth.
I think the system would work perfectly in the presence of non-malitious users, that would use it for its intended purpose.
However, it is always worth investigating how the system behaves in the presence of malicious users.
In this scenario, malitious users would be āspeculatorsā that flood the market with useless items just to bet on the āvalueā of a caravan slot.
If enough people do that, the system will grow in a speculation bubble where slots are sold for their speculative price, cutting out legitimate buyers in the process.
However, even if you donāt get a runaway speculation bubble, I still think the system produces very big incentives for filling the caravan with garbage and mild speculation whereby all low-cost items are bought just to occupy the slot and tax legitimate seller by forcing them to buy useless overpriced items to free a slot.
I really loved the idea! I feel like The Caravan can fit really well in the game!
However, iām worried that it still could be exploitable like @GiraffaGonfiabile says.
So iāll try to re-think just a bit. Appreciate any corrections if iām wrong with my thoughts!
Every time you find a Caravan on Echoes (and save them) you could be able to sell 1 item per NPC each time.
When you access to the store of each NPC, they will have 2 stash tabs. The first one will show you a few randomly items placed by the players for a limited amount of time (24-72 hours). The second one, will show you randomly items placed by the players for a permanent amount of time (unless they cancel it). This last one can be discarded if could harm the game.
Place an item on the temporary tab will cost you a ālowā % fee deduced at the moment you click āConfirmā. If your item is trash, the time is over and nobody seems interested but want to try your luck again, you take the risk of keep losing money rather than gaining it, meaning you would not try to sell any shitty item you find.
Place an item on the permanent tab will cost you a high % fee deduced at the moment you click āConfirmā. In this case, even if your item is a āGGā one but you overpriced it, cancelling it and re-price it could cost more than will worth trying to sell it.
The important one: you can only place a limited amount of items at the same time. It could be a total of 2 to 5 items per NPC (that means, up to 5 armours, 5 weapons and 5 jewellery). And/or the amount of items placed at the same time can escalate with your corruption, meaning that higher corruption = more items placed at the same time. The idea is to maintain it limited but promote going further in the game.
If you reach the limit and try to sell something else, the Caravan NPCs should said something like: āUnfortunately we are full at this moment, but we promise to come back!ā, so the only option left is to see what they offer, but buying something will not give you the option to sell an additional item.
However, the problem I see is how viable is this. At this point I feel like it will work better a āsmartā trading NPC who can offer not only gold, but also runes/glyphs/another equivalent item/something else or new. With smart I mean a (unfortunately) complicated system where the NPC can understand if you are offering something very valuable and in exchange will offer you something according to what you want to sell. Something like Tujen (Expedition) from Path of Exile. So thanks to this, there is no need to trade with players. Or iām dreaming too much?
Yep, but if trade between players doesnāt exist, trading between you and a NPC could be a reeplacement. The NPC from town could not be interested and offer you 500g, but the Caravan NPC could be, and offer you a different price. Just a thought, doesnāt mean itās viable or easy
If the original idea of the post have a way to work, it would be nice and less complicated with what I thought.
The problem is: You need to balance all gold spenders with each other. If the caravan is worse or better then Lightless ARobor then noone will go into it anymore or dont use the caravan.
People would only spend gold in the best possible way what devalues some options over other options.
Yes, thatās basically balancing trade as a source of loot for the player versus Lightless Arbour vis-a-vis gold cost. Though itād be harder since the gold cost is kinda up to the player (presumably/hopefully).
In these sort of systems it is useful to prime the market in some way, otherwise the market ends up being very unstable until a consensus is reached.
Also, without a reference point, many players might be reluctant to interact with the system until it has been āfigured outā by more advanced players and content creators.
The one possible way of doing so is to put NPC traders into the picture that give an upper-bound on the cost of some items, and give a bit of a frame of reference for the pricing of things.
Thankfully the caravan would be self balancing by the players. Since they are the ones setting the prices itās up to the player base to judge the value of items against other options for gold.
ā¦ at least if they donāt sell it themself for thousands of gold ^^.
Sounds exciting. Well done, Sir!