Business And Economy Archive
Thread: Suggestion: Buy Orders
bluejanus wrote:
Zalypsis wrote:
I'm not sure if any of you have ever played Eve Online, but they have a system quite like this.
For instance, in this "Pirates vs. Merchants vs. Navy" type space game, you could mine asteroids (equivalent to harvesting in SWG). Then you take the asteroids to any station with a refinery and you can refine them into different metals. Depending on the type of asteroid, they would yield certain metals. These metals in turn were used to manufacture things in the game (i.e. ship parts). Sooo, if you were a "crafter" needing 30 billion units of Pyroxeres to build your stockpile, you simply access the huge intersystem marketplace and put in a buy order for 30 billion units, and name the price you pay (cpu).
Then, when a miner decides to sell some minerals, he just accesses the marketplace and looks for a good buying price and automatically sell all his minerals to them at their buying price. The buy order stays up until 30 billion units have been delivered by any number of different people, or until the time limit on it expires.
It would be a very interesting feature for SWG...but would take a lot of bright minds and dedicated people to find a way to make it work smoothely.
What is the comparison of the ratio of resource produced to resource used in Eve compared with SWG. I'm betting that it's higher in SWG.
Well, the actual units are produced much quicker and in greater abundancy in Eve Online, but in Eve there is also much greater uniformity in both resources and equipment. I only played the two-week trial, but from what I saw, there were tons of different equipment you could buy, but each individual one had set stats and resource requirements. In fact, the resources didn't have "stats". Again, there were just many more kinds of them.
The difference between that game and this is that for instance, in SWG there are much fewer types of items, which are distinguished by their stats, which are based on the kind of resources and componets they are made with. In Eve all resources of the same type are the same, but the item base is insaley huge compared to SWG.
Anyway, the only thing of significance about this is that it would be harder to implement such a system in SWG, at least considering how much of a bang-up job the devs do wit their programming these days. Still, it would be a great asset to the crafters if it were ever implemented.
Vernygora wrote:
For one thing, crafters that are just starting out will see what other people need and make those items as opposed to making every item and see how well they sell.
From crafters perspective, being able to see buy orders will let them understand market better and thus serve it better. Hey, this is what I needed when I started out!
Being able to see what people are willing to pay for should push crafters toward making more useful items in general. I bet after awhile we will see less and less junk being sold on bazzar since crafters will realize that there is little point in making an item that someone doesn't want to buy.
If the buy orders are implemented right, you should be able to specify whether you need them on all-or-none basis or you are willing to take partial deliveries if you need more than 1 item of the same type . This will allow crafters to put large buy orders on rare resources that just spawned (and will go away some day!) and have an army (if the price is right) of miners of all scales to work on it. That way the crafter can concentrate on the actual crafting and worry less about materials. And beginner crafters with no established business relationships may make some good money. I've been a master weaponsmith and master shipwright and stopped pretty much because I had to spend a lot of my time looking for resources.
You don't need to implement buy orders to do your own market research.