The new market is here! Prices are now determined by supply and demand - the more stuff there is on the market, the lower the prices, and vice versa. Over time, slowly, the market price will revert to the mean.
I had to tweak the merc prices a bit to make it work. My hope is that this will make indies a little more likely to actually use the market as a market. We will see.
On the public market page there are now little arrows indicating in which direction the price will trend, unless someone buys/sells some more stuff, which will cause an instant price change.
When you buy stuff, you get the quoted price for your whole order. So basically, you are rewarded for buying in bulk.
It is possible to manipulate prices. If you sell a bunch of stuff, the price crashes, and you can buy back cheaply. I haven't yet decided if this is a bug or a feature, and it may change during the round.
Please test it out, and tell me if you have questions/comments/bug reports. I'll be playing, but mostly I will only buy/sell stuff and make pirate noises.
This is an excellent change. I love new ideas. As a wolf I'll be strictly buying from the market.
My only issue is the food prices. I stored about 800m food for $13 and now it is all $17 each. Yuck.
Can you put brackets in? $11-$15 would be sufficient
It is capped. The prices will go down as more people enter the market. Just be patient. It goes quite low, when the market gets flooded.
Food prices just tanked, get it while it's cheap
I set it to take about 2-3 days to revert to the mean, assuming nobody buys or sells more in the meantime
This thing is freaking awesome. I use and check the market so much more often now, when there's a bargain I buy. I feel like it's truly a real market instead of just a storage area for extra nw. Sometimes the prices dip or rise super fast, but wow! How cool!!!
Glad to hear it
Seems like minimum food price might be a bit low, though, it seems to be hard to keep any volume on the market at all ^_^. Could also be the initial amount that needs tuning.
I happen to question the efficacy of this market as it can be very easily manipulated to benefit clans. You can drop or raise prices with several small purchases or sales, and I've already noticed it's possible to have an unfair advantage if done correctly. This will also destroy the server if someone were to decide to lock again like last round.. there will be no way to mass stack against an emperor. Any way to minimize fluctuation over shorter periods of time?
Edit: My news feed is full of micro purchases such as this
Time Event
6.4 hours ago You sold 187,500 Skiffs on the market for $413,268,750
6.4 hours ago You sold 1,200,000 Rats on the market for $480,600,000
6.4 hours ago You sold 375,000 Stoats on the market for $468,787,500
6.4 hours ago You sold 138,750 Stoats on the market for $173,451,375
6.4 hours ago You sold 21,808 Stoats on the market for $27,262,181
6.4 hours ago You sold 4,175 Stoats on the market for $5,219,168
6.5 hours ago You sold 12,500 Stoats on the market for $15,603,750
1 days, 2.2 hours ago
Daily prices are being driven in the direction that benefits the person manipulating the system in place. If you would like I will demonstrate how easy this currently is.
This adds another dynamic to our strategy game, though I'm not sure if that was your intention.
Shut up Snare. ;)
The food sales don't seem to have the same balance as the troops. The troops tend to regulate much faster but food going up in prices might be broken due to a percentage factor of a smaller number and higher capacity.
It's clear that if skiff prices are increasing, every 10 minutes you'll see $2001 turn into $2030 etc
But food at $6 tends to increase much slower if at all. 500m food on the market will bottom out so selling in bulk is a terrible idea.
You will be rewarded if you leave the food exposed to sack and nobody sacks or punished if you try to make sales.
The loop snare is getting at would be the way I bought a bundle of 3.7billion food for $6 and only need to sell half of it back in small batches to expand. A few flaws in this new system but I'll have to comment on it later when I've thought about it a bit more.
The market is designed to adjust itself to the state of the game: the more there is on the market, the harder it will be to manipulate. But the speed at which it adjusts itself could certainly use some tuning.
The market manipulation is something I was aware of before the round started, and I said as much - I haven't yet decided if it's a bug or a feature ^_^.
I'll watch it for a month or so before I make any changes, since it's early days yet. But so far I tend to agree that food regulates a bit too slowly and responds to new sales a bit too quickly. This can be tuned pretty easily, but I will wait until I've seen a bit more time pass and a supply build up on the market before I make changes.
Food and troops are adjusted the same way behind the scenes, but because of rounding to the nearest integer it looks like food happens more slowly. That can also be adjusted.
Quote from: Sevz on October 16, 2018, 08:53:51 PM
Shut up Snare. ;)
The food sales don't seem to have the same balance as the troops. The troops tend to regulate much faster but food going up in prices might be broken due to a percentage factor of a smaller number and higher capacity.
It's clear that if skiff prices are increasing, every 10 minutes you'll see $2001 turn into $2030 etc
But food at $6 tends to increase much slower if at all. 500m food on the market will bottom out so selling in bulk is a terrible idea.
You will be rewarded if you leave the food exposed to sack and nobody sacks or punished if you try to make sales.
The loop snare is getting at would be the way I bought a bundle of 3.7billion food for $6 and only need to sell half of it back in small batches to expand. A few flaws in this new system but I'll have to comment on it later when I've thought about it a bit more.
Lol whine to me profusely in private and publicly chirp me and kiss butt on forums. Cute.
So... updated opinions now that the market has some volume to balance out the price jumps?
Is there still a way to recall troops off the market rather then sell them once they hit market?
No. That's by design, market storing was getting ridiculous.
You can sell pub marketed stuff directly to mercs in a pinch, but you don't get very good prices for it.
Crickets
I know I've sold like 30b food so far, how are troop sales going? Is this thing active across the baord?
Quote from: Shadow on November 20, 2018, 09:24:47 AM
Crickets
I know I've sold like 30b food so far, how are troop sales going? Is this thing active across the baord?
Me and Austfit have discussed it at length privately. I have a few observations, but as to not sabotage our strategy I will withhold a few of them :P
The most obvious is the ole' leader "Wolf+feast" hoarding strategy is nerfed heavily. Food is worth $5 on mercs now, when it was $9. This is a significant debuff in regards to food storing as a strategy in terms of converting food -> cash -> troops. It is arguable that public market safety is still incredibly valuable considering 3 month long sets but the other debuff is dynamic pricing. Wolf would typically chuck food up on the market for $25. But now enemy empires with some effort can depress the food market to as low as $7 per food.
For solo play leader is still the top predator but they lost out on food storing being viable compared to indy and their troop storing. So far troops are now the go to resource for storage. I will end the discussion here to leave the server to figure out how best to utilize this avenue of storing.
Basically ruined Indy play. With predatory leader players routinely market robbing any passive storing efforts, a new version of super market hoarding has monopolized the game. Offensive leader strategies are nearly invincible. The current market is a storehouse and all 1.2 billion rats and most of the stoats are owned by disl & gier, as they hoard cash and buy everyone out, rob the money back, then manipulate the prices. I now know how shadow's felt for a decade being on the losing end of one unfair exploit or another lol 😂.
I'm confident we'll be able to catch gier with his pants down before reset if he stops camping online for a few hours, but leader math has changed since troop training was taken out of the game. We used to be able to accomplish ~98 leader defence ratio after 22 suicides (from 175), but with troop training gone we can only get to about 116 ratio, which makes it for a little more of a challenge (more so difficult for camping targets.) We were able to get a 186 attack ratio last night but gier logged on at 104 defence ratio before we could steal our 600bil cash back.
To top it all off, If an emperor were to attempt a land lock, the current system offers little advantage to the majority of the game, and the single army market storing strategy that gave disl a chance last round is no longer possible.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not whining and complaining that I'm getting spanked this set, and I won't just quit like a lot of others might when they've had everything taken from them overnight. Any ideas on preventing this invincible strategy? I wish I hadn't wasted a month and a half storin troops for the enemy lol but I'll figure out a way to get it back.
I like that the market isn't really a good storehouse, which was most of the point of the change in the first place.
Not thrilled that it's now more of a rotating storehouse. The idea behind it is that there would be enough people involved in every market that you would have a hard time getting your troops off without also giving like 10 other people a lot of your money. With a small player base... meh. not sure there's much to be done about it short of removing the public market entirely.
The game has certainly shifted to public market monopoly play. But as shadow mentioned this is a symptom of the playerbase being too small. Or rather too few market players.
When we bought out rats the cash was spread out between sevz and snare. Two Indy rat empires had a rat market monopoly but they were fairly easy to rob. 22 steals takes about 60-70% of the empire's cash from what I witnessed. 350 bil split between 2 empires, that is 44 turns worth of stealing. If those rats were divided by say 4 empires, then we must spend 88 turns of stealing. Fail army and pearls seem to be on your side, it was a tactical error to keep all the rats between 2 rather than 4 empires. This would be a soft counter to market robbing. It would be less lucrative on our account stealing and the target empires would keep more cash after hitlimit. Suffice to say if there were say 8 market players holding rats, market robbing power would diminish.
The next part is when to to start stealing. There is a networth bug regarding the empire bank and public market transactions. The empire networth (in regards to cash) does not change until the empire logs in. It takes some espionages to figure out where the cash is leaking. The longer we wait to steal the more time the empire has to save all their cash .
Then comes the fact the whole operation blowing up in our faces if the empire targets log in, then they can save the cash by aiding it off to leader player and use it to buy us out. Tit for tat market warfare.
When to buy is critical too. Indy's depreciate their own goods due to the sheer volume of networth they make each run. Coupled with unlimited foreign aid. If you hold troops we can murder it away. If you market we have a window of dirt cheap troops to buy favorably, with a chance of stealing it back too. Leader players cannot depress the price of 1 bil rats without investing cash in the first place. We let the indys not only make the goods but run down their own prices.
I don have a solution but I can recommend bringing back bots, 1 for each market rats/weasels/stoats/skiffs/food and increase bots as needed. Over at earth empires bots are used in nearly every server and while they are terrible final day net finishers, they make great producers and buyers of goods on the market. More players on the market makes monopolies far more expensive aka difficult and eventually unviable. And with 3 month sets and dynamic pricing market monopolies make some of the best investment in terms of turns and resources built.
Holding networth like food or troops is begging to be destroyed. And leaders holding cash become prime targets for suicides>steal.
For all intents the market is still a storehouse. Can ya blame us though? It is so much easier to destroy networth than to create it, and in this game we can even take networth or be relieved of it. Only remedy I see is more market players to keep monopolies in check
Bots that interact on the market is a good idea, but a bit more time investment than I have in the near future, sadly.
What do you think of a decay on market goods, so that some percentage are sold off at market price to nobody every day?
Market decay is something I did not think of, and handles the market storage from getting out of hand on monopolies
Maybe the cash sold could be used for lottery or skiff races?
Either way I'm not opposed to it. But to be fair me and gier have less value on the market vs sevz and snare so this change would hurt them more
I wouldn't change anything until next round either way.
I had pictured the cash just going to the people who are selling stuff, basically as though someone had bought their stuff. Maybe at merc prices though, so that price manipulation can't take advantage of it.
Quote from: Wolf Snare on November 22, 2018, 07:36:32 PM
I'm confident we'll be able to catch gier with his pants down before reset if he stops camping online for a few hours, but leader math has changed since troop training was taken out of the game.
The only way you know I'm camping online is by doing it yourself, right? :P
Another possibility, though a bit more complicated, would be to have everyone's collective mercs quota as an entry on the public market (and get rid of mercs as a separate page). That way, you are always losing a portion of any cash spent to mercs, and it guarantees competition on the market, as well as maintaining some troop presence there to help even out prices.
One thing that helps out solo indy's and ledvel the playing field a bit would be to abolish limits of how much can be sold to mercenaries. If you have it, you should be able to sell it.
It was that way at other servers back in the day, and allowed solo indy to be a viable strat as you could instantly liquidate troops for instant cash as needed rather then having to wait for troops to hit market then potentially having to sit on billions in cash that cannot be defended from leaders, waiting for your next turn run
I'd rather make merc sell a last resort though, that's one reason the merc sell prices are so bad. That said, removng sell limits is an option, but with prices so low it's still not going to be very attractive.
The cash leak was implemented to make market theft harder, but it's still clearly viable on a delay. What about ideas focused on giving indices offensive tools to combat market theft rather than nerfing market theft? Beefed up sack or something
Ferret would need that boost too. Quite easy to market rob a forager :P
Hitlimit tends to keep sacks from doing too much damage. But a special attack to reprisal steal has merit.
Eventhough I'm not the biggest fan of the current market (no offense to everybody that helped coding it), I think the way it works is just fine. Instead of making any big adjustments to the market, some minor ones to other things might get rid of the buy outs.
- tweak $/loyalty when casting loot by either lowering the amount of cash produced, increasing loyalty costs or make it a 3 or 4 turn spell.
- reduce the current 550 turn maximum. Less turns means less leaders after a run regardless of the amount of land in the game. Less leaders means less cash.
- remove the 22 hitlimit for top 5 (debatable) players.
- slow down cash leaking out of the bank or drastically increase the amount of cash you can bank.
- tweak the stealing spell ratio. Instead of the >1.75 ratio, make it >2.2 or more, like muf (don't know the names you guys use over here :p).
- ask Sevz what to do with this issue. Although his current runs remind me more of a turtle laying on its back, he is after all THE ultimate redwallian. Unmachted!
Some of these things popped in my head when writing this so not much thought was put into it. Hence, I might be missing some really dumb. English is also not my first or second language so my phrasing might look funny :-).
IIRC FAF had troop attacks that just took cash, and another that just took food, so ir was possible for indies to mess up the production of leaders/producers just as hard as leaders could mess them up.
I didn't mind it over there. Might be a way to deal with this - mutually assured destruction.
Bottom line is that the market will never be fully functional with a small player base, so pick your poison, I guess.
It dawned on me that over at QMT market cash and lottery wins would deposit to the empire as soon as they logged in. So if a mage wanted to market Rob they would have to camp online until their mark logs in, and be fast enough to respond.
We can take protection a step further, have the cash deposit to the bank instead so the empire has further grace period for their market cash in terms of maneuvering.
The bank would still leak cash, but only after the empire in question logs in. This gives the target empire a chance to respond to market theft.
That would immediately be abused as a way to safely store cash on an inactive account, I guarantee it
How about a 3 day grace period if they do not log in? We have to keep in mind that after 7 days of inactivity an empire goes into vacation. So something less than 7 days to prevent abuse, but more than a few hours to nerf market stealing.
I'm not sure I really want to nerf market stealing, though. I was to make it so that the market is not a safe storehouse that you can just dump stuff to and take it off at the end of the set. Having the fear of market theft at any time helps with that.
If anything, I want to make it so that people playing non leader based strategies can steal from the market, too.
This is why I keep harping on removing sales limits on black market. Yeah the #'s suck compared to public market, but when the alternative is potential market theft....
It just gives indy players options for funding turns.
You can sell your marketed goods directly to mercs from the public market sell page without impacting your overall merc sell limit (I think), so if you first public market stuff there is effectively no sell limit to mercs.
But yea, I don't see any reason not to remove those limits.
I think the market needs to be slightly tweaked in regards to super-high demand items.
There's currently 0 food on the market. I list 500 mil, which causes the price to tank, someone buys it all which causes the price to skyrocket -- but there's zero food left on the market. So when I list another 500 mil the price tanks again, and someone buys it causing the price to skyrocket.
There's not enough 'memory' at the moment.
0.3 hours ago You sold 500,000,000 Food on the market for $2,700,000,000 ($5.4 ea)
2 days, 4.6 hours ago You sold 500,000,000 Food on the market for $2,700,000,000 ($5.4 ea)
2 days, 19.8 hours ago You sold 500,000,000 Food on the market for $2,700,000,000 ($5.4 ea)
When there's other listings on the market (causing it to not zero out) it seems to work fine
5 days, 22.2 hours ago You sold 500,000,000 Food on the market for $7,650,000,000 ($15.3 ea)
But listing food and having it immediately sell for $6/ea (I'm assuming the missing $0.60 is market tax) isn't sustainable
Yea, that happened early last set, too. Once there is a decent mass of food on the market it's OK, but you're right that if it is consistently getting bought out it's an issue.
I could set min values for the reference point, which would require that the market reach "critical mass" before prices could start to drop and adjust.
As it stands it is highly in an empire's favor to buy out the market completely, and continously do so. This means new listings will be $6, rather than letting the market average out around 12$ or so.
The demand for food on my part is due to food being costless networth, which with x5 networth foreign aid makes a very cheap run overall. Networth range is important and food allows us to go higher. Also food is very scarce, mercs gives about 100 mil daily depending on land.and 1 of the ferrets simply isnt marketing their food.
This is an issue of there not being enough market players for food. But a code change on averaging out food even when bought out is a good idea. $6 food is an absolute steal
Given the inability of the food market to get off the ground this set, I have tweaked it so that prices will not start to drop until at least 5 billion food are on the market. Price will always be above average as long as less than 5 billion food is present.
This will be a gradual change over the next two days or so as the market equilibrates.
Kind of clumsy, but let's see how it shapes up.
any other big gameplay changes? i thought you could no longer make your clan tag none?
am i remembering right or was there a train button in the use turns tabs?
one more turn until im out of protection, positive ive already messed it up
Quote from: kell on January 30, 2019, 04:33:03 PM
any other big gameplay changes? i thought you could no longer make your clan tag none?
am i remembering right or was there a train button in the use turns tabs?
one more turn until im out of protection, positive ive already messed it up
None restriction can be bypassed with 'space', and many other unicode characters like U+200B. There is no 'industry' button (+25% production) in this code. Next best option would be Foreign Aid if clanned, or raise defences/anything really and F5+Enter spamming the public market every 5 turns if solo. 100% allocation stoats for example, sell to mercs 1 line when you need cash and switch into next allocation/spam/repeat.
To mess up a protection strategy is to use no turns at all tbh. For indy the hardest part is getting your first couple billion cash. $4 billion can easily turn into 200 million networth with 100k land for example. #10 is giving free aid btw
Quote from: Shadow on January 29, 2019, 12:52:12 PM
Kind of clumsy, but let's see how it shapes up.
There seems to be some kind of bug. It currently is impossible to buy food. Clicking the purchase button does nothing. Troops are working fine.
Works fine for me... try again and let me know if it's still an issue please
It's indeed working as it should now. A few hours ago both me and someone else were having the exact same issue.
Very strange. The change I made did not relate to that functionality. If you encounter the issue again please take a screenshot of the page with all your relevant stats and send it to me.
question for the market...
stuff placed on the market isn't included in your net worth,
and you lose 20% of the value when you take it back off,
for some reason i thought we used to pile food there to store net
You can't remove stuff from the market anymore. Instead you can sell directly to mercs.
Quote from: Shadow on January 29, 2019, 12:52:12 PM
Given the inability of the food market to get off the ground this set, I have tweaked it so that prices will not start to drop until at least 5 billion food are on the market. Price will always be above average as long as less than 5 billion food is present.
This will be a gradual change over the next two days or so as the market equilibrates.
Kind of clumsy, but let's see how it shapes up.
Seems like it might be overtuned?
There's a pretty big opening for someone to play my Ferret strategy from last round and forage their way to huge profits atm.
Disclaimer: I believe I've sold the most food on the market this round.
I think it's working alright. I listed enough to get value over the hump and down to $17 ea (-10% market tax = $15.3) and someone bought most of it.
There's only two bil food on the market at the moment, half of that mine, so there's still substantial demand.
If a Ferret wanted to flood the market the price would crash.
iirc I calc'd the 'break even' for a leader player of making cash vs food to sell to be ~$12/ea
So if it'll stay there or above I'm happy to continue supplying, clearly people need food, or don't value their cash.
2 days, 10.8 hours ago You sold 410,538,912 Food on the market for $6,281,245,354 ($15.3 ea)
3 days, 6.3 hours ago You sold 513,210,391 Food on the market for $6,466,450,927 ($12.6 ea)
5 days, 7.4 hours ago You sold 309,367,758 Food on the market for $5,847,050,626 ($18.9 ea)
5 days, 7.4 hours ago You sold 159,367,757 Food on the market for $3,012,050,607 ($18.9 ea)
5 days, 12.1 hours ago You sold 50,000,000 Food on the market for $945,000,000 ($18.9 ea)
7 days, 5.8 hours ago You sold 533,092,725 Food on the market for $8,156,318,693 ($15.3 ea)
7 days, 5.8 hours ago You sold 500,000,000 Food on the market for $7,650,000,000 (15.3 ea)
7 days, 5.8 hours ago You sold 500,000,000 Food on the market for $7,650,000,000 (15.3 ea)
7 days, 5.8 hours ago You sold 499,999,940 Food on the market for $7,649,999,082 (15.3 ea)
7 days, 5.8 hours ago You sold 499,900,000 Food on the market for $7,648,470,000 (15.3 ea)
7 days, 5.8 hours ago You sold 495,366,387 Food on the market for $7,579,105,721 (15.3 ea)
7 days, 5.8 hours ago You sold 495,000,000 Food on the market for $7,573,500,000 (15.3 ea)
7 days, 5.8 hours ago You sold 386,066,361 Food on the market for $5,906,815,323 (15.3 ea)
7 days, 5.8 hours ago You sold 48,344,178 Food on the market for $739,665,923 (15.3 ea)
9 days, 5.9 hours ago You sold 451,655,809 Food on the market for $8,129,804,562 ($18 ea)
Yea, there's an element of supply management to the food market in particular. A ferret who dumped a crapload of food on the market all at once would crash the price. But if you dump the same amount in 5 shipments over 5 days, the price basically stays stable the whole time. OPEC but for food.
But yea, I'm the other one selling food, and people are buying it even at 19. Crazy.