On trade

I wanted to write something on a different topic, but my mind kept returning to trade, so here we go. Trade has been on my mind a lot lately, because it ties into so many things. Item teleport, information teleport, player teleport, movement speed, resource gathering, crafting, communication, storage, money are just the most screaming topics. There are tons of other ones being influenced by them.

Now two steps back. Trade, what is that? When I talk about trade, I talk about the exchange of information, commodities, services and currency, in any combination possible, between two parties. These parties can include any combination of NPCs and/or players. Me giving a newbie a sword for free, is a trade. A good one for him, a financially not very good one for me, but then again, I might do it to woe the newbie to join my guild. See how those trade things instantly get a bit into everything?

Trade is the under appreciated orphan child of pretty much all games out there. There are exceptions. But few and far in between. The most common one is the item exchange, that happens between two players at the busiest location within the game. The next common one is buying stuff from NPCs. Not very exciting. But trade (especially the player driven kind) can be so much more.
Imagine a world where there is a gigantic super market every mile or kilometer if you so like. Those stores carry everything. From toothpaste to your favorite shoes and on to the latest games and comics. Whatever you would want, you can have there. No matter where you are, you know, within half a length unit, you'll be at one of those stores. That's how games pretty much always do it.

This approach completely eliminates competition. Why open a store for shoes, for games, for anything at all, if you can have more and all the rest as well, in a location irrelevantly further away? Sure, you picked up on the word location now, so your shoe store is placed smack in the center of 4 of these large stores, therefore it's more convenient to go to your place, because it's closer. That, is only true if you have to walk there. And even then, the next store with much more selection is only 5 minutes away, walking. Your only advantage is muted that way.

The most viable model these days is the niche products. You sell only the very top level things, or the things impossible to get in the large stores. This makes for rather poor trade still though, as you need to acquire those rare items first, and who says you want to sell them and not use them for yourself first?

You have seen the auction houses, which essentially eliminate the normal trade functions, and emulate the online store in the real world. Instant access from anywhere, buy anything in the blink of an eye. And more often than not, have it delivered in an instant as well. In an economy where travel is irrelevant and information travels at the speed of light from any location to any other location, only the lowest price is really relevant. Yes quality (if such a thing exists) is relevant too, but we are comparing same quality items here, apples to apples.

So trade is now reduced to penny pinching and big box buying. Is this fun? Not really. Convenient in some ways, but also a gigantic avenue of play wasted.

Making trade interesting needs several hard decisions. First, no fast travel. So you can't teleport yourself or anything else over distances inside the game. You could allow messaging in the game, because people can just as well use their favorite IM client or voice chat. But no item teleport, no currency teleport, no player teleport, period. It also means no flying mounts that can be pretty much invulnerable to anything by just flying away, faster than anything can catch up with it. Speeds of travel have to be a bit realistic for travel on foot and for travel using other means. With that established, distances mean something all of a sudden.

Now you need to concentrate resources. Add multiple points for resources, but concentrate them in those points. Not the one desert rock valley where all the ore is, or the one mountain. Add several, but keep distance between them and the more interesting settlements. Create areas where there are no mountains and where there are plenty. Now you have a basic supply and demand economy. In the mountains it's easy to mine for metals. Any metals people need, they can get them for cheap there. But the cities need metals to, so you can buy it cheap in the mountains, travel with it to the city and sell it there for profit. In a desert area, they have probably plenty of stone, but not much wood or iron. The mountains need more food imports than the cities on the plains.

Add danger. Getting from A to B can't be a walk in the park. Even if it turns out to be in the end, there has to be the possibility, remote, but still close enough that it might happen, to be robbed. Or worse, killed.

Now you have the basics of a trade system that gives players, either traders by heart or resource gatherers, interesting decisions. Should I sell my metal here at the mountain and get some more metal? Or am I on my way to the city anyways, so I might as well take it with me to sell it there? Do I take little with me, because the way is perilous? Or do I take a lot, then take a route that is slower but less likely for me to be attacked?

This eliminates the auction house of course, but opens up the possibilities of player run stores. Including the big box types, but that would be a lot of work to pull off as well, just like in real life.

We are not quiet there yet.

Let players craft meaningful items, as well as menial ones. You need drones for your space battle, arrows to survive in fantasy land and bullets for your space marine. Those being crafted by the players means that players supply players and they have higher importance for other players. Some low grade arrows and bullets you can buy at some NPC store, but the medium and good stuff, only from players.

Kill the big boxes. NPC's are only allowed to sell the cheap things, the very low end. A player with 10 hours of play time in crafting should be able to create things that are higher in quality than anything the NPC's offer out of their bag of infinite respawns.

All of a sudden you have a player run economy, that dictates prices by supply and demand, can even create luxury goods and add the profession of trader as a viable play style. It still has it's exciting bits though and isn't all tables and statistics. And more importantly, the traders enrich the entire game for other players through simply playing what they like to do.