[aegora]

Great question! Inflation will work both ways in a system where the items for sale are produced by the players themselves. A higher price of sale will mean the shopkeepers will offer a higher payout when they recieve their new shipment of wares! Meaning: we are making it profitable for players to sell their items to the shop with the high inflation, which should then lower the price again as they increase the supply.

As for the newbies, well, they are newbies, and will likely have no need for rare and desireable potions of rabbit translocation or fashionable platinum embroidered cloaks. The items most appealing to newbies would also be the easiest to craft, and should therefore be in very high supply, keeping their prices low. If this turns out to not be the case, well, legislation by the council of that city should be effected to keep prices low. One would hope.


As for the point of the excercise, well, I was kind of hoping to stimulate some sort of craft-driven economy. Too often I see carefully designed excel spreadsheets calculating the exact cost of every little material component and the profitability index of product Q. This ends up with a bunch of powergamers producing a thousand broadheaded, oaken shafted arrows that nobody uses, and none of the other items.

Keeping track of buyer behaviours is nothing short of easy. just log whatever is bought or sold over time. We have static guideline prices, obviously, because this system is not in place yet, and people have to sell their items! Determining exactly how badly a player might want a healing potion is the purpose of the algorithm. How much is someone willing to pay? at what point does the cost outweigh the demand?