Fair trade is always a contentious topic, even more so when it comes up after a guild is already well established. In one of my guilds there's been a long standing (and in my opinion pointless) 'compromise' that both common systems, "cost-of-production" and "2:1 1 age difference only" are acceptable. It occasionally causes confusion and for me often a source of irritation as in helping out I may wind up screwed both ways. There's nothing worse than someone complaining that no one wants their 1:2 down-trade when the person accepting would then turn around and be expected to fill someone else's 5:4 up-trade with the goods they just received. It defeats the point of having a fair trade rule at all. So what is the point of a fair trade rule?
There are those who feel they have an innate sense of what's fair and are therefore thoroughly offended that anyone would want a system other than the one they have in mind. To them having a fair trade rule is about playing with good people who would never try to screw them. I don't really feel ANY fair trade rule accomplishes that but it's one viewpoint that has to be considered.
Personally, my original acceptance of fair trade was based on the idea that in a fluid market where I was always able to efficiently trade back my excesses of a good for other goods made it easier for me to help people. I'd regularly clear the entire guild market of trades and then post trades myself that would restore balance to my goods. This worked fine for a good while. Everyone buys in, people try to target their goods either to produce a balance of both their boosts, or a single good that the guild is short on and everyone got the goods they need. So what changed?
A few things happened. The first is stratification of the ages of players. In the upper ages the fluidity was lost. There were goods that were genuinely short and had no-one yet able to help out with supplying the shortage or oversupplied and helpers were unable to avoid massive stockpiles. I was able to help with this somewhat by using recurring quests to supply my goods and provide a little of everything but ultimately this mostly wound up with me winding up with too much of the oversupplied good as I helped out everyone else. Some of the players who had pushed ahead of me when I stalled for a bit left over the problem that they couldn't get the trades they needed to keep advancing. I wished them well and before long I was once again at the top of the guild's advancement having lost many of our useful players. Lesson learned: trade system only works if you have someone at the top willing to supply everything going down.
The next problem is rope and paper mass producers. These two buildings are way tinier than any of the other goods buildings in the game at a mere 6 squares. How is it fair that 6 squares of paper and 16 squares of porcelain are valued the same? Well someone decided age of the goods was all that matters. If everyone means well it wouldn't be a problem but inevitably some opportunist comes along and says 'gee i can put up 15 paper mills!'. Oof. This works out great for them as, at first, the helpers just keep clearing trades and Mr Paper Producer gets all the goods he needs fast in a fraction of the area but before long you have your helpers all staring at 5k paper they're unable to rebalance because no-one else wants paper either. So much for no-one getting screwed. Once again the idea of a fluid market is dying and taking paper trades is just throwing away your goods for nothing. This problem has never really gone away. Sometimes it goes on vacation.
Another problem that struck is the need for a low age goods sink to deal with people camping those ages. Inevitably it came to pass that I had all the colonial goods I needed and was staring at a market full of people looking to trade up colonial goods (especially the dreaded paper) for my shiny progressive goods so they could build those amazing Progressive Era great buildings. Believe me I understand. And want to help. But when you already have thousands of colonial goods, a treasury sufficiently stocked for the amount of GvG your guild is likely to want to do (and even if there was a demand for more treasury goods how is it 'fair' that the higher age helper is trading away all their goods for stuff they'd only donate to the treasury), no more personal use for colonial or lower goods: what the heck are you going to do? I eventually did stop taking the trades, and the problem did eventually die down to a more tolerable level - I think most of the up-traders eventually got to Progressive and at least I can always sell those goods off for forge points to folks.
The final problem, the one all the fair trade fanatics obsess over but is really the least consequential in my eyes, is what exact ratio is declared fair. Both of the common systems are probably way off the mark as to true market value. The only reason they work at all is people buy into them. 2:1 every age up way overprices the value of going up an age. Space consumption varies wildly and it's almost always more efficient under 2:1 to produce only the most recent age of goods and trade them down which under a 2:1 system leaves a void in terms of people willing to trade up. At the same time cost of production adds little value to the person who actually advances. It also makes paper more valuable for trading up which might add incentive for producers to keep at it longer. Modern goods buildings are arguably no more valuable than colonial despite taking more space as by trade calculator 2 colonial goods = 1 modern good, and the modern goods building is destroying a colonial good to make that modern good. As a person who does recurring quests for goods this bothers me little but I'm probably a corner case.
What do I think really is fair? My simple answer somewhere around 1.4:1 1 age up no matter the age. this makes 2 ages difference a little under 2:1 and for refined goods makes the refined good worth 2.7 times the unrefined good (which would still make a Modern Era goods building a LITTLE less valuable than a Progressive Era goods building, but at least markedly more valuable than a Colonial Age goods building).
This still doesn't do anything about the aberrations caused by small footprint buildings but I don't think there's a reasonable system that does. It's incredibly hard to account for the true space required for a given good because of the sheer number of ways one can increase efficiency (including not using goods buildings at all). The only real answer to this problem is a free market where people only take trades they truly want and stop trying to help others blindly. Alas that is probably not a world anyone wants to play in either.
/rantover, and heads off to accept another 2k in paper trades.
Good insight. A better calculator is feasible. I started building a database to value all goods in equivalent diamonds, or Forge Points. Any interest in joining that effort?
ReplyDeleteDiamond values don't scale up by age so they don't really make a good comparable. They're also almost never the actual source of goods (nor are diamonds typically used as a source of FP except in new servers with people trying to race ahead).
DeleteYou could try using the in game points system to relate it to FP but that would make goods a lot more expensive than they tend to be eventually in practice (15 ranking pts for a FP spent on a GB, 21 ranking pts for a FE good). The good thing about using ranking points for a calculator would be that it represents the additional effort of refinement stages well. It does seem a little low in comparing adjacent ages that aren't a refinement gap though.
Overall the more I play, the more i believe in the free market and caveat emptor. The release of Oceanic Future and what it's done to the goods markets have more or less killed any thoughts of fairness in my eyes. I tend to need to offer 2 OF per 1 AF to move any at all. and 2 TE for 1 FE has also become common since TE are in less demand than FE. At the same time 1 TE for 1 CE is a fairly common rate because there happens to be ongoing CE war on my server. Supply and demand dictate the real trade ratios, not any principle.