Dear Developers,
My day job involves modelling financial markets. I would like to contribute my relevant experiences in programming and market movements to improve the market system.
I understand the rationale for implementing the market floors and caps. However, it hinders the players’ gaming experience significantly. Therefore, I have a suggestion that could possibly be enhanced in complexity, based on your team’s preferences.
Basic Methodology:
- Compute mean of prices for each item based on historical prices
- Allow x standard deviation away from the mean. Example: 1 standard deviation allows a tighter control over the prices.
- Recalculate the mean and apply the standard deviation again (Allows a dynamic cap and floor that moves with market prices)
Benefits:
- The x standard deviation allows the developers to control the amount of market restriction
- Having a dynamic band allows the fundamental prevention of excessive prices, while still allowing free market movements determined by the player base
- RMT transactions or suspicious activity will create outliers outside of the determined standard deviation. A simple plot of the data points will let you determine it easily and trace the users. If the standard deviation is set as the cap or floor, the market system should not allow such outliers to occur
Costs:
- Might be computationally intensive, since I do not know how your system works. Personally, it takes me 1 min to calculate millions of data points. You can reduce computation costs by taking only the first million points instead of the whole historical series
- Might be oversimplistic view of the market. But I feel it will still work better than the current system
I hope you can take my suggestion with serious consideration. The current market system makes having silver relatively useless, as you cannot purchase anything off the market. A purchase renders everything untradable, while items get penalized with 1 potential. For new players to enter the market at level 180+, they essentially have to wait for a valuable recipe/item to drop in the dungeon before they can make a 1-to-1 trade.
If you have any concerns, feel free to PM me or reply me here and I can offer possible solutions.
Thank you.
Regards,
Pearls
@STAFF_Ethan @STAFF_Max @STAFF_John
P.S. Apologies for tagging you guys! I hope the staff can forward this to the relevant parties!