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)