Economy in a box

[mrudat]

At the moment to kick-start the economy, the best that can be easily achieved is to add a bunch of stuff to the auction house, but it is tricky to get the right amount of extra stuff.

 

What I think would be awesome (not necessarily for Homecoming) would be to have an "Economy in a box"; a new daemon that interacts with the auction house, and effectively pretends to be an economy. This would benefit a private server with only a few players online.

 

I don't know what would be the best design (and ideally it would be configurable), but I think something like:

 

Perform the following tasks once per hour:

 

Put bid requests in for salvage at vendor buy price, so there's a sink for salvage that's not in demand. Record the total amount of salvage bought for later use.

 

Consider all bids which are at least the current going rate, or at least the ingredient cost, at the current going rate or twice vendor buy price, whichever is higher, and:

• create common salvage from thin air
  
• create non-common salvage from bought salvage at a rate that varies by rarity (logically, one of the various technology companies built more interesting salvage)
  
  • for salvage of the same rarity, convert 3 pieces of salvage into 1 piece of salvage in demand
    
  • for salvage of a higher rarity, convert 3 pieces of salvage into 1 piece of salvage in demand; repeat until we have enough salvage to create the target object
    

   

  [*]create craftable objects (IOs, etc.) from bought (or upgraded) salvage with least 10% profit

 

I figure that if it's visible to end users, the sellers for the created objects should be randomly (or appropriately?) picked from the various organisations in-game.

 

Portal Corp, for example, should be able to supply pretty much any kind of salvage, I believe.

 

 

The end effect should be that the auction house should supply the demand for common salvage as well as a modest demand for less common salvage or crafted items, but shouldn't produce a sufficient volume of stuff so as to drown out crafters.

 

Edit: And, more importantly, it should do this with minimal interaction from the GMs.