Broker Limits

[mentalelemental]

This is totally not important and should go way, way down in your priority queue (if it's even deemed as something worth doing) but .. the broker. Man. Maaan.

As there are more and more hagglers, it's getting increasingly difficult to make successful buy orders. It used to be that multiple people could throw up a broker/buy for 500-1,000ish units for each of the three available resources (social, economic, military) and everyone would get their orders met. These days though, people with lots of money are rolling in and putting up multi-thousand unit broker/buys with enough capital to change the price whenever someone tries to slip in with an order themselves. This doesn't break any rules but it makes it pretty much impossible for anyone who doesn't have a significant bank account to buy resources in a given week.

Maybe the market is supposed to function this way -- survival of the fittest/richest -- but it freezes out those who are just starting out/doesn't have a lot of cash. The cycle of things is: buy a bunch of resources off broker, haggle-sell those resources for money, use that money to either buy more resources or materials (the former to be haggle-sold again and the former to be placed on broker). When a handful of characters put up 2,000 .. 3,000 .. 6,000 units resource buys for each type, there is pretty much no hope for those of us with less money to work with. Someone new might put up an order for 500 units of whatever at a slightly higher buy-price and the high rollers simply adjust their price so anyone selling their resources will sell to them. By the end of the week, the market is pretty tapped out and even if they've had their multi-thousand unit orders filled, there generally are no more sellers to sell to those of us left at the mercy of the market.

Initially, I tried to solve this ICly. I reached out to a character who had a tendency to post up those big order buys and we agreed ICly to a kind of truce -- we'd each only buy up 750 of each type at the start of the week. Once we both met those initial needs, then it was back to free-for-all market shenanigans. And it worked! For, like, a week. Because then other people started rolling in with multi-thousand unit buy orders and it just did not seem feasible to track down every person who did this as this scenario would only work with 100% agreement from those working the broker system. The moment someone is like 'nah, I'm just going to do my thing', everyone else starts to do their thing and it is back to whoever-is-the-richest-wins.

So this is my long-winded way of asking: can we put limits on the broker? Even if it's just for the first half of the week: one can only place broker/buy orders for X units of resources per PC during the first three days. Then it's open season for the rest of the week. Or something like that!

It's getting rough out there.