Talk:Guilds/The Goods

This page created by JulianJaynes at the request of Robare.

Objection to Donation procedures

I feel that The Goods, as it is now, has forgotten some of the core principles of The Goods. The Donation procedure artifically inflates the Goods stock levels for no benefit to the community - the value of the commodities donated are forever locked up in The Goods, effectively depressing the Egyptian economy by the same degree that the Goods is inflated. Further, it sets arbitrary starting prices for commodities that are set completely on the whims of one person, and how they view the Egyptian commodities market.

I strongly encourage the current management of The Goods to reread the page entitled, "Pricing Explained," in The Goods' website. Take special note of the, "Ripe For Abuse?" explanation at the bottom. Forcing donations completely throws this entire concept out the window.

Further, the Donation principle also effectively forces The Goods to take donations for expansions, as well - when The Goods needs another Warehouse, or expanding the Guildhouses, or what-have-you.

All of this is solved quite neatly by allowing the organizers of the Guild to pre-stock items, and carry personal balances. These balances would, naturally, get to be quite large, but it would prevent "profiteering" (which is not the bad word that some people seem to think it is - people engaged in profiteering end up benefitting The Goods). Further, these balances could be used to directly buy the materials to make expansions to the Guild. And finally, these pre-stocks would serve the same purpose as the donations - it would get large quantities of common items in The Goods stock without giving someone an "unearned" (cough) windfall; the windfall would be going to people who have a vested interest in keeping The Goods alive.

Likewise, I also object to the item maximums. This only serves to artificially stifle trade in some common commodities. While in T3, maintaining enough Chests came to be a notable problem, T4's Warehouses make some of that unnecessary - low-value, high-commodity items can go in Warehouses, while high-value, low-commodity items can go in chests.

All of this can be done by implementing The Goods as it was originally designed. All of these artificial changes that have been made have been made by people who simply do not comprehend the math involved, and are literally afraid of people using The Goods in the manner it was originally intended.

The challenge has been thrown at me - If I think The Goods is doing it wrong, do it myself. If someone who has a copy of the T2 version of The Goods webpage scripts available, and they can provide me with such a copy, I may very well take up that challenge.

--Nekojin 21:11, 24 January 2009 (EST)

For those like me who want to know more about this donation process you should take a look at [1]. Currently there is no explanation of the donation process or rational on the Goods site. After reading over the history for why such a process was put in place (a very large number of new commodities were introduced mid-tale) I do not understand why such a system was put in place at this time. I agree with Nekojin's comments that the result of these donations is to permanently remove a set of resources from the trading pool, a cost that seems without justification. At this point though I do not see how they could easily back the system out even if they wanted to.--Vulpine 19:08, 3 February 2009 (EST)

I have to agree with the statements made previously regarding the donation status. I am finding that it is making it exceedingly difficult for me to acquire the goods I would like to trade for. I either have nothing of value to trade because what I do have is still on donation status, or I am unable to buy what I need because only half of the units needed to leave donation status have been donated.

I think that donating in itself is a fine and great idea, however the artificially high levels that are required for many items to leave donation status is prohibitive and we likely won't see many of the items ever leave donation status, or at least not for quite some time.

The absurd amounts of resources being requested for donations is really stifling The Goods, and what happened to the idea of getting a First Good, one of the big things touted on The Goods trading site?

While there should be a donation phase for some common items such as flax, vegetables, wood and boards is fine, having a donation status for something like Clay Domes, which people really are hunting for at this point in time only stifles the usefulness of The Goods and people will just trade on E! instead of using the services of The Goods. I know myself, I am not going to donate 4 clay domes, nor even 1, simply because I am getting no return value for something that does involve a fair amount of effort to collect the clay, investment in materiel (which I was unable to purchase from The Goods because of donation status), and time.

Perhaps the solution could be to lower the absurdly high donation requirements by as much as 50-70%, and retroactively provide some sort of a bonus credit to anyone who has donated items so far, maybe to the tune of a First Good for each customer to make some of the stock on hand, that will at this point be unavailable for consumption, liquid again and able to freely be traded.

My 2 deben worth of sand. --ModeSix 02:04, 4 February 2009 (EST)