Trading Markets for items (and other stuff perhaps) that require physical attendance

[Олег Поленин]

@Mr. D, you said on discord about an item trading feature:

Quote

I almost built one and then I remembered that that's how everyone stopped going outside to collect resources.  So no, we're not getting a facility to buy items without having to get off the couch.

So let's dwell on that idea a bit more:

Imagine a "Trade Market" structure that you could build in any of your bases (real bases only, not the drone-based outposts!).

Any player who wishes to trade with you must physically get to your base location (thus must be your ally to see it) and only then can interact with your offers.

Multiple trade mechanics may be implemented, but I'd assume a simple one:

• first party (owner or visitor) might initiate with an offering ("I want to sell item X"), thus visitor might already see some offers from the owner or might just start a new one;
• second party must then make a return offer ("I offer item Y in return");
• first party reviews the offer and either accepts or discards it.

An interaction should require a single visit of one party on the Market physical premise of the other party; all further actions would not require a re-visit, eg.:

• player A visits the base/market of player B and places an offer, then gets home,
• player B sends a return offer,
• player A accepts the offer from home;

or:

• player B publishes his offer (from home),
• player A visits the base/market of player B and places a return offer,
• player B accepts the offer from home.

This could be used to trade items as well as resources (I believe these are still tradeable via land exchange, thus why not?).

A scheme like above would promote getting of the couch. Even if in the same city, you still need to get to other player's base. And still, there is a risk of player travelling 2000km to another player to set his base exactly upon the other players home, but hey, then it did promote travel, yup? and still, the benefit of having the other players trade outpost in your home ain't such a benefit, and there are still much bigger couching exploits that I can imagine, even with players just sharing their base area.

I have always said that a smartly designed trade feature, one without central market, but requiring players to build trade networks, would be beneficial to community building. @Eerienkah argued that such feature would rarely be used (two players would rarely have something to trade between), but I believe, that once you have few players that you can trade with, you can network. Once two random players discover on discord that they might be interested in trading, they will be able to find - via discord - other players who can form a route between them and thus help them with trade (or, well, steal the item, with all possible consequences). Hell, with some simple coding, even the game could suggest some trade routes (give you a list of people to ask for help).

You often claim this game ain't primarily about warfare, but the player interaction is currently mostly based on war. Why not expand on other areas?

Edited April 25, 2021 by Олег Поленин

[Mr. D]

I'm sorry, but I can't see this feature being added anytime soon for several reasons:

- There are way too many ways to exploit that. As soon as players receive control over where the other party needs to go this will be abused (and I don't really expect it to work any other way; no one wants to do something the hard way if there's an easier shortcut).

- This feature is very "hardcore" and aimed at a fairly narrow audience. Very few of our players expect or want to develop and maintain complex trade networks, especially if they rely heavily on discord.

- If there is even a small chance for me to arrange someone to build a trade outpost near my house/base I will actively pursue it instead of focusing on going out and collecting individual random / unknown items.

This and some other aspects of this proposal simply change the game focus & genre in an undesired direction.

- This is a lot of development that has a very little "return on investment". At this moment I barely have enough time to focus on features that increase our marketability, extend player retention (i.e. make things more interesting and long-lasting) or fix previous problems (and there is quite a list). I do hope that one day the game grows to an extent that will allow me to spend more time on it during the week. However, this feature just doesn't seem to advance us in that direction; it translates to me spending a series of weekends for the next couple of months to build a feature with a very rare use case.

However, having said that, I do have some plans for item exchange, but I'm not going to announce them just yet as there is a large number of bigger issues I have to resolve first!