2011-05-30, 03:45 PM
octopusprime Wrote:Yeah and put the guild style merchanting on auto-pilot. To any affluent group of people who have a damn clue or ounce of foresight, this is free money unless scrolls bought are untradeable. There needs to be limits on how many one can buy for this to work at all that or the untradeable solution which is also terrible.
Anyone can buy scrolls for the same price. The only way merchants win is if they can get it for cheaper - which relies on two things.
1) limited supply. There are only a finite number of cheap scrolls available, once the merchants buy them they're all gone, and people have to pay higher prices if they still want more scrolls.
2) difficulty of finding item sellers. Merchants spend more time in FM = more opportunities to buy cheap scrolls.
If you make scrolls available from an NPC for a fixed price, then the only time merchants "win" is if that price rises. Then they can dump their stockpiled scrolls - which has an immediate effect on the NPC price. Nobody's going to pay 10mil from the NPC when merchants have thousands of scrolls available at 9.5mil each - so the NPC gets ignored until its price drops back below the merchants. At which point, the merchant still has hundreds of scrolls, but they can only sell them at a loss until the NPC's price rises again.
It doesn't eliminate the merchants' profit entirely, but it does get rid of huge undercuts - if someone finds a scroll, and checks the scroll NPC to see that it sells for 10mil, then they're gonna go to FME and S> scroll 9.5mil. They're not gonna go herp derp, merchant says it's 3mil, and lose 7mil of profit unknowingly cause it's too hard to price check things. If they do sell for 3mil, it'll be because they have some extreme need to get rid of it, and make money fast.