Large Medkit NPC Price Too Low

[Wesreidau]

The bug is:

 

Large Medkits are being sold from the NPC vendor at 5,000 gold, approximately.

 

This is a bug since:

 

1. Crew hires from the dock are at 500 gold each.

2. Large medkits heal 150 crew.

3. Large medkits at 5,000 gold heal crew at 5,000 / 150 = 33 gold each.

 

And also because, from player production:

 

1. Large medkits require 120 food, 30 tobacco and 30 rum.

2. Food is 210 for 6, or 35 gold each. 

4200 = 35x120

2. Tobacco is 500 for 4 tobacco, 125 each.

3750 = 125x30

3. Rum is 416 gold for 8 sugar, plus 2 barrels to make 36 rum. Due to a number of derivatives, NPC sale price of 75 will be used.

2250 = 75x30

 

10,200 is thus the lowest possible price a player could make large medkits for, assuming all of his labor hours were uncompensated and he pushed his plantation production prices directly to the customer without a markup.

 

The consequence of this bug is:

 

The incentive to make medkits, as well as sugar and tobacco, is utterly destroyed, as is a large source of player trading, merchant commerce and gameplay as players no longer ship sugar and tobacco home from distant ports, but instead buy up the NPC production of the finished product as it spawns. This is destroying game content, both for crafters and for PvPers. An enormous amount of fighting occured before this patch between sugar and tobacco ports and capital cities. This has now died out entirely, whereas tobacco and sugar trade was previously a major source of open-world merchant traffic.

 

The solution to this bug is:

 

Make a design decision. Are medkits intended to be the player-crafted means of avoiding the 500 gold crew fee, and therefore, the driving force for tobacco and sugar production and trade? Or are medkits supposed to be bought up from NPCs and sold at a mark-up to ~45,000, where their price is set by being cheaper and more convenient than crew hires. Or did you actually intend to just dump health potions on players.

 

As I understand it the design is thus; players take casualties, players buy medkits, players craft medkits, players produce sugar and tobacco, players ship sugar and tobacco to trade hubs, players fight against pirates, players take casualties. Thus sugar and tobacco are always in demand, merchants are always carrying sugar and tobacco, and combat occurs along these trade lanes.

 

If that is the intended state, then any NPC produced medkits should vendor at the same price as crew hires; 500 gold a crewman, or 75,000 for a large medkit, 25,000 for a medium medkit, 5,000 for a small medkit. Thus there is a soft ceiling on prices set at the hiring cost of crew, so players in a harbor can always hire crew if the local medkits are too expensive. However medkits are worth more than the hire cost of the crew they replace, as they can restore crew while at sea.

 

I almost think you meant to put small medkits on the market for 5,000 gold. That might be the bug, since the price that makes sense for small medkits was applied to large medkits, and small medkits aren't NPC'd to the market.

[Corona Lisa]

I dont think its a bug, since its the case for all materials produced from ports.

 

http://forum.game-labs.net/index.php?/topic/17158-economy-is-messed-up/

[Wesreidau]

NPCs producing resources for below player production costs is caused by either bad design, or bad math. I worked as one-sixth the US software testing team for #150 on the Forbes 500, testing their $1500-a-license software tool. I know the difference between when it might be a good idea to add something, and when something's broken. And while its an appeal-to-expert to bring that up, I'll use whatever rhetorical technique required to impress the point:

 

This is broken.

Edited October 29, 2016 by Wesreidau