Temporary quick fix: Default player shop prices

[MacThule]

Suggestion: Please set default player-owned shop prices (buy & sell) for all items to zero until other shop issues are resolved.

Shops keep resetting to serve ALL. Prices can't be set to make earn profit because the sell price eventually resets to match buy price. Lots of little issues making player-owned shops somewhat broken.

But it's nice to be able to offer power & other ship basics at market price - without personally loading up to restock spawn - so that new players aren't so frequently stuck in the near-spawn regions unable to construct a viable ship due to market depletion. But to market 5-10 simple items, it's necessary to go through and manually lower the price of every other item to zero, which takes an hour, or people rob your shop by selling you loads of lava and dirt and plants and other useless things.

Current default prices are meant to be high for profit, but since a newly-opened shop is not fully stocked, this is not helpful. Better, I think, to adjust the prices as products are stocked, than to have to adjust hundreds of prices to stock the first item, and then still have to adjust prices individually again as successive items are stocked.

Until other issues like buy/sell permission and the ability for buy/sell prices to remain different are resolved - which may take some time considering other more pressing concerns in the game - I think that setting default prices to zero would at least encourage some degree of player-generated economic activity by eliminating the tedious hour of preparing a shop to sell generators, and it wouldn't interfere with any other current use of them or prevent prices from being raised by anyone who WANTED to spend an hour or two messing with shop prices.

 

[CyberTao]

Prices should default to zero, because you don't want to have to constantly change the prices, but if anyone else wants to change the prices, they should be forced to go through the effort? How is 0 a good value for player-economy as well? That's just giving away blocks, there's no economics in that.

If the shops reset to serve all, and the prices reset to 0, it just ruins any attempt to use the shops as shops to gain any form of profit really.

I feel like I'm missing something.

 

[MacThule]

CyberTao, I very politely made a request, a suggestion in the Suggestion forum. I didn't say anything "should" be any way. I clearly explained what I thought about the situation and never attempted to assert that my suggestion was the best way or tell anyone what to do. Please do not try to put words in my mouth that paint me as arbitrary and demanding.

Prices do not reset to default. The Sell price resets itself to match the Buy price you set. So default price of zero only prevents newly opened shops from being robbed by enemies who choose to exploit the fact that you can't selectively keep them from trading with you, it doesn't require anyone to repeatedly set their prices.

I can think of no good reason players might want to put money in a shop that is - unless you invest 1-2 hours in grueling data-entry type work on your shop at open - buying flowers and burnt sand for nearly twice the market average amongst AI shops. Especially when any enemy or rogue can swing by and dump 50,000 of everything they don't want on you to drain all your shop money and prevent your shop buying resources.

I'm pretty sure that unless when a player opens his shop he is stocking more than 50% of the item types in the game, defaulting prices to zero will be a timer saver for that person. But yes, if you're dropping a brand new shop and filling it with more than half the item types in the game all at once - then you'll be wishing for high default prices. I just honestly don't see that happening.

I've never encountered a shop trading openly with the public for more than a few days before closing up and going faction-only. I'm sure your experience has been quite the opposite, but that is mine.

 

[CyberTao]

All you said was prices were resetting, nothing about buy or sell prices exactly. What's more, the blocks in a shop are in some cases more valuable than the credits. Unless a price of Zero means that it can't be bought/sold, you provide an easy exploit that allows anyone to steal all the blocks stored in a shop after it resets, assuming the price resetting is tied to an event, rather than being random.

You trade being robbed of credits for being robbed of blocks which you were trying to sell. If Sell keeps resetting to match the Buy price, then they would just lower the buy price to 0 afterall. That or just fix the bug upright.

If you don't want people selling you crap, you could always remove as much as the credits as you can, or just fill the shop with those blocks so that people cant sell any more without having to buy them first. Setting the prices doesn't hide the problem, it just helps in some cases, not all.

anyone who WANTED to spend an hour or two messing with shop prices.

>Affects people who use default pricing
>Instead of just sell prices, you have to do both sell and buy
Basically causing much more work who those who don't set the majority of prices to 0. Suggestion honestly felt like a convenience request in that regard.

 

[MacThule]

First let me clarify that I have already fixed the prices at my shops on both of the servers I frequent. I spent a lot of time in testing, working with another player, figuring out how a shop could be set up to actually trade for profit. Changing the default would not help me in the slightest. I've put in the hours on mine. I think it would help any player trying to set up a shop from here on in though, and that might encourage player economy, thereby reducing the effect of continual product depletion in the systems around spawn which forces admins to waste their time repeatedly manually correcting the situation.

All you said was prices were resetting, nothing about buy or sell prices exactly.

I said exactly that at the beginning of my OP, actually. Third sentence in.

You trade being robbed of credits for being robbed of blocks which you were trying to sell. If Sell keeps resetting to match the Buy price, then they would just lower the buy price to 0 afterall.

This is not what I said, nor what shops do. I'm getting the distinct impression you don't know through experience how player-owned shops actually behave in-game.

I will try, again, to clarify, because I know that actually many otherwise experienced & knowledgeable players have not directly experimented much with the shops.

When a new shop is placed, item X has Sell & Buy price set to 1,000 by default. If the Buy price (the price at which others buy from the shop, not the price at which the shop buys items from others) is adjusted to 1,500 then it will stay that way until deliberately adjusted again. If the Sell price (the price at which others sell items to the shop, not the price at which the shop sells items to others) is set to 500, it will eventually re-set itself to be 1,500 - the same price as Buy was set to. Defaults do not come into play except in regards to the prices all items start out with when the shop is first placed. Default price has a one-time application. The only re-setting involves Sell price re-setting itself to match whatever the current Buy price is.

I don't understand your meaning of being robbed of blocks. If a player deposits power generators in his shop and set the price from zero to 200 buy no one can take his blocks without paying the set buy price. Where is the robbery? Besides that, coming from a default of zero, only the buy price need be set to protect a shop's viability because until the sell price sets itself to match the buy price the player has set, it will remain where it was - at zero.

I really do not think my suggestion is unhelpful or selfish CyberTao. It helps me personally not at all, and I've spent many hours tinkering with player shops over a period of months before making this suggestion which you are determined to show is a foolish idea, without actual knowledge of what the shops do yourself.

I would love to see the price re-setting bug fixed. I would love to see the permission re-setting bug fixed. But these are code problems, and might take a developer hours just to track down and identify the problem, let alone repair the coding. My suggestion is direct, straightforward and would take one programmer only an hour or so at most to complete.

Even if the re-setting bugs were fixed, I still believe that MOST players dropping a new shop for trade will only be stocking it with a few dozen items at most within the first few days. So even with the bugs fixed, the player would still have to set the prices for every single item they did not stock (and did not want to just buy from any passerby at the above-market default prices) to protect their shop.

 

[CyberTao]

If it is a bug that is setting the sell prices to match the buy prices, then I don't see how they could hotfix it. It's bugged and not working as intended. If they could reliably set it to default to "X", then they might as well just fix the bug.

It's an error in the coding afterall, there is no value to set to 0 in the configs that I have seen (Most shop stuff is in blockconfig.xml), which means Schema can either fix the bug, or go in and add more variables to the blockconfig.

Also, it is very confusing talking about Buy and Sell, since as a shop owner it's reversed compared to a buyer's standpoint. I suppose using common logic in starmade should be a implied no-go though. My mistake.