Jump to content

Market Improvements


Guest Frawley
 Share

Recommended Posts

Guest Frawley

Hi Alex,

One of the great things about this game is the market, but it has a couple of issues that make it somewhat annoying, I'd like to propose the following 6 changes.

1. Trade Confirmation Screen
This one is fairly simple, a popup when you are putting a trade on the market that confirms the details of the trade, there would be an option to disable this popup for experienced traders on the Account Page:
Resource: Aluminium
Your Offer: Sell 10,000 Units @ $1,800
Best Current Sell Offer: 6,000 @ $2,000
Best Current Buy Offer: 4,000 @ $1750
Do you wish to proceed with this transaction?

2. Automatic Trade Fulfillment and Matching
Presently, the game has no automatic matching module, which means it is possible for there to be buy offers above the value of the current sell offers.  Presently these arbitrages are taken up by opportunistic traders like myself.  While this is great for traders, it is not ideal for the buyers and sellers, this could be rectified by trade offers automatically fulfilling overlapping prices prior to remainder of the trade being placed on the open market. 

3. Removal/Increase of the 99,999 trade limit
It's too low, particularly for food.

4. Removal of CAPTCHA's for trade & legalisation of Trade Bots
Given 1 & 2, the requirement to complete CAPTCHA's for trading should be removed, and Trade bots should be allowed.  With automatic matching there should be no opportunistic trades, and allowing trade bots will encourage people to invest further time in the game, enhance the economic meta game, and hopefully add further depth to the market.

5. Trade History API Improvements
--Addition of Global, Alliance, Personal Trade Flag
--Addition of &open=true flag, this will display all currently open trade offers that are available for acceptance.

6. Trade Bot API
Long run idea, and I will be submitting this as part of upcoming suggestion, but an input api that allowed players to automatically add and accept trades would be advantageous.

Bugfixes:
--Please make comma's not break trades
--If you are viewing coal trades and click create offer, it should default to coal, not food.

Edited by Frawley
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Yeesh, can't believe you guys are serious about nixing Kosonome trading on a game level as opposed to a player level. I do note that Bad Company posters are supporting this, so...

 

I also find it amusing that NPO wants to implement true algorithmic trading as opposed to TKR scalpers.

Edited by A Boy Named Crow
  • Upvote 1
  • Downvote 1

.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Well, putting a confirmation screen up would decrease the rate of fat finger trades, but I'll also note that this is standard in the real world as well.

 

Also, as for automatic fulfillment, limit orders, market makers, and attempts to increase market liquidity are also standard in the real world. Putting in a "buy/sell at market price" type order would be useful, certainly, with an estimate in the confirmation screen of its probable cost.

 

That said:

 

https://www.smh.com.au/business/markets/no-one-has-a-clue-except-the-person-who-pressed-the-wrong-button-a-history-of-some-of-the-worst-fat-finger-trades-20190128-p50u0t.html

.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Guest Frawley
5 minutes ago, A Boy Named Crow said:

Well, putting a confirmation screen up would decrease the rate of fat finger trades, but I'll also note that this is standard in the real world as well.

The difference between the examples provided and the game, is that all of those examples are highly experienced people making one off frickups, and in most of the cases the money was returned in full.  In the game, most of the errors are new players and irregular traders who get caught with there pants down, because the left a comma in the price or didn't notice that the drop-down defaulted to food, even though they were on a coal screen previously. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Guest Frawley
20 minutes ago, A Boy Named Crow said:

I also find it amusing that NPO wants to implement true algorithmic trading as opposed to TKR scalpers.

Just saw this.

Believe it or not Frawley =/= NPO, the ideas I submit are my own.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Administrators
22 hours ago, Frawley said:

Hi Alex,

One of the great things about this game is the market, but it has a couple of issues that make it somewhat annoying, I'd like to propose the following 6 changes.

1. Trade Confirmation Screen
This one is fairly simple, a popup when you are putting a trade on the market that confirms the details of the trade, there would be an option to disable this popup for experienced traders on the Account Page:
Resource: Aluminium
Your Offer: Sell 10,000 Units @ $1,800
Best Current Sell Offer: 6,000 @ $2,000
Best Current Buy Offer: 4,000 @ $1750
Do you wish to proceed with this transaction?

2. Automatic Trade Fulfillment and Matching
Presently, the game has no automatic matching module, which means it is possible for there to be buy offers above the value of the current sell offers.  Presently these arbitrages are taken up by opportunistic traders like myself.  While this is great for traders, it is not ideal for the buyers and sellers, this could be rectified by trade offers automatically fulfilling overlapping prices prior to remainder of the trade being placed on the open market. 

3. Removal/Increase of the 99,999 trade limit
It's too low, particularly for food.

4. Removal of CAPTCHA's for trade & legalisation of Trade Bots
Given 1 & 2, the requirement to complete CAPTCHA's for trading should be removed, and Trade bots should be allowed.  With automatic matching there should be no opportunistic trades, and allowing trade bots will encourage people to invest further time in the game, enhance the economic meta game, and hopefully add further depth to the market.

5. Trade History API Improvements
--Addition of Global, Alliance, Personal Trade Flag
--Addition of &open=true flag, this will display all currently open trade offers that are available for acceptance.

6. Trade Bot API
Long run idea, and I will be submitting this as part of upcoming suggestion, but an input api that allowed players to automatically add and accept trades would be advantageous.

Bugfixes:
--Please make comma's not break trades
--If you are viewing coal trades and click create offer, it should default to coal, not food.

I think 1, 3, and 5 as well as the bugfixes are what you can realistically expect sometime in the future. I don't have any desire to set up automatic trade fulfillment or allow trade bots in the game, however.

You said it yourself - the market is one of the best parts about the game. Automating it into something meaningless would, I think, quite effectively destroy one of the best parts of the game. Opportunities for arbitrage make the game far more interesting in my opinion. Communication about trades, speculation on prices, etc. all add to the important of in-game coordination and activity. Letting algorithms decide all the buying and selling would remove a huge driver of activity in-game.

  • Upvote 6

Is there a bug? Report It | Not understanding game mechanics? Ask About It | Got a good idea? Suggest It

Forums Rules | Game Link

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Guest Frawley
1 hour ago, Alex said:

I think 1, 3, and 5 as well as the bugfixes are what you can realistically expect sometime in the future. I don't have any desire to set up automatic trade fulfillment or allow trade bots in the game, however.

You said it yourself - the market is one of the best parts about the game. Automating it into something meaningless would, I think, quite effectively destroy one of the best parts of the game. Opportunities for arbitrage make the game far more interesting in my opinion. Communication about trades, speculation on prices, etc. all add to the important of in-game coordination and activity. Letting algorithms decide all the buying and selling would remove a huge driver of activity in-game.

Hi Alex,

Glad to hear a number of the items are on the radar.

With regards to 2. I get what you are saying, but these arbitrage opportunities are already primarily picked up by bots, both semi and fully automated, so I don't see why they making trades auto-fulfill like in RL would be that much of an imposition.  It doesn't actually change people's behavior, it just means the highest buy and the lowest sell, always represent the current market spread.  If you wanted to replicate the arbitrage opportunities in RL in game, that would require separate markets, not a single exchange, and there would need to be transactional costs between those markets.  Tying markets to Continents would be a step in that direction.

Re: Trade Bots
I take your point, but I disagree, Trade bots would exist to be market makers assuming 2 was in place, much like they do in RL, and 'algorithms' have to be designed by someone, and the reality of P&W is that we have far more frequent wars, and disruption events (alliances stockpiling, rebuilding, repaying loans etc) that make our market quite volatile.  It would be interesting to see people compete against each other from an academic point of view here.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Administrators
15 hours ago, Frawley said:

Hi Alex,

Glad to hear a number of the items are on the radar.

With regards to 2. I get what you are saying, but these arbitrage opportunities are already primarily picked up by bots, both semi and fully automated, so I don't see why they making trades auto-fulfill like in RL would be that much of an imposition.  It doesn't actually change people's behavior, it just means the highest buy and the lowest sell, always represent the current market spread.  If you wanted to replicate the arbitrage opportunities in RL in game, that would require separate markets, not a single exchange, and there would need to be transactional costs between those markets.  Tying markets to Continents would be a step in that direction.

Re: Trade Bots
I take your point, but I disagree, Trade bots would exist to be market makers assuming 2 was in place, much like they do in RL, and 'algorithms' have to be designed by someone, and the reality of P&W is that we have far more frequent wars, and disruption events (alliances stockpiling, rebuilding, repaying loans etc) that make our market quite volatile.  It would be interesting to see people compete against each other from an academic point of view here.

I agree about arbitrage, and that's actually the concept I had set up for StateKraft before I shelved the project. I think it's a little late here to make such a drastic change to how trading works.

As for trade bots, sure, the algorithm creation might be fun for the ~10 people that are capable of making a trade bot and designing an algorithm to trade for them. Everyone else will be stuck using someone else's bot, or getting taken advantage of by trading manually. It would eliminate personal player participation for 99% of the players in the game.

  • Upvote 5

Is there a bug? Report It | Not understanding game mechanics? Ask About It | Got a good idea? Suggest It

Forums Rules | Game Link

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I strongly agree with Alex about the trade bots and automatic offers.  One of the things I like about this game is for someone who is especially motivated and active, they can make extra money day trading, posting lots of offers buying and reselling resources and profiting off the difference. 

I really like the dynamic of having a choice of whether or not to just accept an offer and get what you want immediately at a less favorable price, or post something at a more favorable price at the cost of having to wait on it to be accepted and with the risk that it will not be accepted at all.  More active players who are willing to wait and keep posting offers will get better deals.  And it's fun to come up with strategies to post offers in a way that are more likely to be accepted and outcompete other traders.

It's also favorable to newer players and smaller nations because smaller trade offers are more likely to be accepted quickly and less likely to be undercut.  There are diminishing returns to how much you can earn day trading.  Speaking personally, when my nation was much smaller and my income was in the 5-15 mill a day range, I often earned somewhere around a million a day trading resources.  And even when I wasn't day trading, I still made a lot of effort to get the best prices that I could when buying or selling resources for my nation.  As I got bigger, it became a smaller percentage of my income and stopped being worth the real-life effort to optimize.  Now I do more of a mix of posting or accepting offers depending on how big the spread is, how much I'm trying to buy or sell, and how pressing my need is to make the exchange.

I'll even say that it's taught me some things that can apply to real life economics.  In particular, the idea that you can get better prices for yourself if you have more time and keep money and/or resources sitting around available to be traded.  Having to balance getting better prices vs the opportunity cost of keeping aside cash and resources for trading.

Edited by Azaghul
  • Upvote 2
GnWq7CW.png

Link to comment
Share on other sites

On 1/29/2019 at 7:43 PM, Frawley said:

2. Automatic Trade Fulfillment and Matching
Presently, the game has no automatic matching module, which means it is possible for there to be buy offers above the value of the current sell offers.  Presently these arbitrages are taken up by opportunistic traders like myself.  While this is great for traders, it is not ideal for the buyers and sellers, this could be rectified by trade offers automatically fulfilling overlapping prices prior to remainder of the trade being placed on the open market. 

One of the main terms in Knightfall is getting rid of a trade bot to prevent people from screwing up a trade offer and not having enough time to fix it before someone pounces on it. This proposal all but ensures that if someone enters their trade offer wrong they will get screwed over. I know from personal experience I have screwed an offer up, say click sell instead of buy or vice versa but was able to quickly take the offer down before losing it. This would eliminate any possibility of being able to quickly fix your mistake.

  • Upvote 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

Loading...
 Share

  • Recently Browsing   0 members

    • No registered users viewing this page.
×
×
  • Create New...

Important Information

By using this site, you agree to our Terms of Use and the Guidelines of the game and community.