The system that was implemented in Latos N2 now had plenty of time for tests and the devs could fix many bugs. Months ago I talked to ray about one or two things that were missing and he said the devs would fix this. Along with this I thought about some more things that we lack here. Should be added for completion:

- Allow selling of unknown items to the station. It would make for a decent player market. That way, old ship models could be sold to collectors (Super Awesome Edition Vultures, 2 small Port Raptors UDV etc.)
- Allow the same for commodities. I haven't checked this specifically, but it'd be no surprise if stuff like FCP and FFSA was un-sellable too.
--> Fixing this would be a great option to add a set-price option. That way, builders could sell their stuff to Latos N2 and some person who passes by and finds the price appropriate could buy the item. "Unvalued items" are a great way to test this idea.
- Adjust the Latos N2 Trade Guild missions. The Procurement tab is still completely broken.

completition

Mad spelling skillz you have there. Perhaps you just like to see tits everywhere.

Edited. It was quite late there. Apart from that, take your grudges and problems elsewhere, please.

who sets the price?

Latos is too close to uit space and a conquerable station for a player market. I'd suggest corvus stations host a players market with a 25% commission to corvus that lists items for a week.

So, I agree with the Subject of this thread, but not necessarily with the OP. What you're asking for are mostly feature additions, and not bug-fixes.

I would really like to get feedback on the overall "balance" of the Latos N2 market, and how it's working as implemented, with the items currently supported? If there are trade-guild issues, ok, we can check that out (actually I want to dump/re-implement the trade guild stuff entirely). But from a fundamental basic trading standpoint, how is it working? How are the numbers working?

Is it a price-exploitable loophole? Is it stupidly expensive? How are the pricing variations based on inventory quantity? A lot of this stuff used numbers that were kind of grabbed out of thin air, with some vague common sense, but I don't have much confidence in them. Nor have we had time to really do a metrics dive on the history of trading in N2. So.. player feedback on that would be welcome.

Aside from Harpo's Shop alt who was regularly(auto?) buying up and hoarding trident commodities and other goodies then reselling for a higher price, its pretty useful for those building tridents.

That said, i don't see how this is good for trade role-play and subsequently pirate role-play.
UIT need a reason for the rest of us to not blow them up and that reason should be that they have access to commodities or manufacturable items that the rest of us don't have but want/need.

Selling ships is a really bad idea.

Ok, but aside from reselling commodities and items that are usually unavailable, are there any opinions on the pricing model of the items, etc?

VO needs serious inflation, I think that the items are far too cheap but it's impossible to tell until you roll out actual scarcity and we see what items are actually in demand the most.

I think you will find that most of the items with the exception of trident parts, commodities used in trident manufacture and top tier weapons and ships that most things will be next to worthless in a normal supply/demand scenario.

The trident parts, commodities used in trident and top tier weapons are ALL under-priced at the moment but they will settle naturally into their hierarchy based on popularity. For example with weapons you should have hiveposi/hive gat and lenbs up the top going down all the way to n2's or xgx's.

N2 started off being used by some players to sell things but I now hardly ever see stuff there that players have sold.

As Ore says it is now just a shop for dent stuff sold by the station.

I read somewhere (too lazy to look it up now) that there ought to be some type of history factored in to widget pricing. I.e. if widget Y is always getting snapped up and station X just can't keep it on the shelves, the price should be a lot higher holding qty constant.

Perhaps it already works this way; I can't be sure. It seems like regular commodities currently used in manufacturing, such as Hydrogen Ion Collectors, are undervalued.

To mitigate market manipulation, other stations could adjust their prices, with a slight time lag (ideally this would happen naturally, simply through trade convoys exploiting the arbitrage between stations). Word of trade travels, and all that. Some manipulation efforts will likely still happen, but you could build in some bounding effects (Vendetta's version of the FTC?).

I believe that was my initial response when I experimented with the station. Within certain pricing constraints so that player manipulation of the prices doesn't get out of proportion.

Take Hull Panels for example. The only source is Verasi C4, they are 6 cu each and you need a shit ton of them. Supplying N2 and future stations should reflect the difficulty in moving that much supply to such a convienient location should be reflected in the buyers cost. Compare the challenge of the two similar items External Hull Panels at Latos N15 and Hull Panels from Verasi. Players to make the effort to stock N2 should recieve a substantial proffit compared to someone who stocks it with Silksteel which is available in Azek.

@greenwall - The player would set the price of course.

@Ore

Selling ships is a really bad idea.

Why? We are not bypassing faction exclusivity. What I am proposing is a way for players to sell limited ships and items (such as the ships&items named in my first post) to the station so other players could buy them. Right now, this is not possible as the station doesn't recognize those items and can't put them on the sell list. We are not talking Valks/Proms etc. here.

@incarnate:

What you're asking for are mostly feature additions, and not bug-fixes.

Yes. And also no. I ask for a completion of the system that was implemented by you. While the ability to sell these "unknown" items (as ray named them) should be included in said system already, the "set-price" option is indeed a new feature that I suggest here.

I would really like to get feedback on the overall "balance" of the Latos N2 market[...]

The station just has about 95% of the available commodities in VO for sale. This is probably not what you intended. As mentioned by my forespeakers, the pricing of the items is not very accurate to their demand by players. And then of course there is the problem with player bots sitting in station and buying up the stocks of desired items (commodities used in Trident manufacturing, etc.). There's room for improvement.

Perhaps you could add an editional tab called "player-sold items&ships" where players can sell system-undefined items for a price that they set.

Ideally, I would like to see a specific player buy / sell option that is associated with the key system.

For instance, I could put items that I have in the station up for sale at a given price asking price, but limit their availability to only members of my own guild, everyone or to the exclusion of individuals / guilds that I consider enemies.

Sieger, its pointless waste of time to write code for the selling of deprecated ships.

My bot didn't auto-buy anything, I did it manually. I wanted to stock up but didn't want to lock everyone else out. The reason I bought stuff from the station is that certain items seemed to get up to a certain quantity then not increase, so the station having 550 silksteel or something is not really that useful, so my bot has thousands available for when somebody actually wants it.

I should fix the bugs and put it back online.

As a nationalist, I advocate for the selling of ships.

Hunting down smugglers and traitors seems like an excellent opportunity for RP, no?

The problem is that not everybody wants VO to be an RP game; some want it to be a simplistic Red-vs-Blue game with rigidly defined factions. The RPers and the RvBers both agree with mutually exclusive standings (unlike the Carebears), but we are split on issues of access, nation-changing, etc. To me, the idea of a game that supports playing a pirate but not ship-stealing is ludicrous, whereas to them the idea of a game of factions that lets people blur the borders by using "enemy" ships is equally ludicrous.

Fortunately, VO isn't intended as a simplistic Red-vs-Blue game.

Not only does VO need exclusivity with nations but it also needs exclusivity with the various roles of mining, trading, nationalist, pirate etc.

The moment ship selling/trading takes effect, I plan to make a valk alt, not to be confused with a smurf alt. Nations won't mean anything at that point. Welcome to Ambiguity Online. A game for fence sitters.

I don't think I'll ever understand the disdain for use of elite ships of foreign nations.

The problem is that not everybody wants VO to be an RP game

More that not everybody wants VO to be a sandbox game. You can still RP in red vs blue, but it's constrictive.