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- Napoleon 3h
- Bruhlicious 2h Deine Mutter stinkt nach Erbrochenem und Bier.
- AdamBlue9000 8s Rolling 526d6 damage against both of us.
a Mench 7h Doing a bit of everything.
- notloose 1h
And 16 more hiding and/or disguised

High-Demand Items Vendor
...and an opportunity to boost NT roles.

There are continuing issues with certain 'high-demand items' that the Econ system struggles to deliver but that are particularly important for characters in the game to have. This idea has two parts -- first to take some of those items out of the crate-economy cycle, and then second to do so in a way that boosts the viability of an under-utilized corporation and also means there's some traffic to and from SPACE.

PART 1: 'HIGH-DEMAND ITEMS'

Some items are in continual high demand, and are important for one of a few reasons:

- Items essential to people being able to make art (e-notes/e-prints, canvasses)

- Items important to certain character types (QuickTerms, tactical slings, ponchos*)

- Items that are hoarded because they represent a permanent record of the past (PhotoPlusses and FunCams)

(*Ponchos just received an update that may alleviate pressure.)

I have some suggestions above for what sorts of items may be considered 'high-demand'; others may disagree about my choices, but I think we can all agree that some of them are perennial problems.

I would propose that these high-demand items be placed in a vendor object, similar to how Progias and many other items are vended. The 'vendor' version can be at a premium.

This will alleviate pressure on 'essential' items -- I think it's particularly problematic when someone hits the game as an aspiring artist and can't create art, for instance.

The real beauty of my idea, though, is in part 2:

PART 2: NEOTRANS LOGITISTICS HUB

I would propose putting this item vendor in SPACE, in a new room in FreeSky called the NeoTrans Logistics Hub. I would describe the room as a whir of packages moving around on conveyor-belts like an Amazon warehouse, and have the 'High-Demand Items Vendor' -- which I might call something like a 'Logistics Bypass Terminal' -- emit messages like it just plucking the item out of the supply chain when it's used.

Gate this room to either all NT employees, only NT requisitions, or perhaps some new NT logistics job, and all of a sudden the company has this essential role in game-wide commerce that's real. Every fixer in Red Sector will be making friends with the NT logistics people; so will every corporate requisitions officer.

This also becomes an extendable solution. Staff has mentioned before that the Econ system is notoriously finicky, so when there's an issue items can be added to the Bypass vendor -- and beyond that, items can be added ONLY to that vendor if they should be things difficult to get. Imagine if particular high-tech vehicle or robotics parts can only come from the bypass terminal, for instance, or a new kind of fancy tailoring material, or what have you.

Certain roles in game are specifically positioned to alleviate shortfalls like this, and if staff don't want characters in those roles introducing new PhotoPluses, ponchos, slings, and canvases into the world, then they're probably not going to create a new custom vendor system either.
I believe those systems are also dependent on the economy system's scarcity metric. So those PCs will not be able to source items if the Econ system believes there are too many of them.
I would imagine raising caps on scarce items or enabling GMs to override them when puppets create goods would be the simplest way to fix this problem.
Perhaps. My understanding is that requires a lot more code work than my suggestion.
I don't get posts like this.

What do you think scarcity mechanics exist for, and why do you think bypassing scarcity mechanics will achieve what those systems are designed for?

Among other things:

* They exist to reduce MOO bloat by providing a cap of how many a type of an item will exist.

* They exist to provide conflict opportunities to take gear from people who have those things.

* Limited supply makes it so players can extort prices for an advantage based on supply and demand.

The fact that sometimes professions don't have access to the gear they need is a FEATURE not an unintended design consequence.

Respectfully, I don't think the system is working that way for SOME ITEMS. For katanas it works great -- for canvasses, not so much.

Objects that people won't have on their person aren't going to create conflict, and at least it doesn't appear that this is an ordinary demand cycle where some people are controlling the supply and selling at high prices.

I'd rather the conversation shift on how we could make it work for those items without the solution being "well distribute more."

There are game balance reasons that you cannot see that would make it problematic for some of the items you described to be released without cap.

That's fair. My idea of "give the keys to NT" was a way to try to make distributing more items solve a different issue people have identified, but I will think about it some more.

There are more code-intensive solutions I can think of, but this seemed like low hanging fruit.

The answer to hoarding is not to enable more hoarding. >.>