World of Torr Economy and Trade

One of the main features of this server is the way the economy works. When certain items are bought in one city, the price of that type of item goes up while the price of that type of item everywhere else in other cities goes down slightly to compensate. The reverse happens when items are sold in a city. This makes for very interesting trade between cities and a self balancing economy.

If 50 people buy thousands of gold worth of weapons in Torr for example, the price of weapons in Torr will become astronomical while the price of weapons everywhere else will go down. A player can buy weapons from another town cheap and sell them in Torr and make a profit. As more weapons are sold to Torr, the price goes back down and the other cities where players are buying the weapons from will experience a rise in price to balance out.

Also, merchants will give big percentage bonuses for specific items that they don't currently have. This bonus is usually 15% of the items value. If you are selling a Longsword to merchant who doesn't have any longswords for 100g, the merchant will give you an additional 15g when you sell it. It is a good idea to bring different types of items when trading. Instead of bringing 10 longswords to cash in on a high demand for weapons, mix in a few different types of weapons to catch some big bonuses.

Tradeskilling players can also just make what is needed, if they know how, and make good money that way also. Moving a lot of goods around is a little dangerous however, bandits attack players with large loads of goods and other players might stop you also. Stopping a merchant with a 50 ingots of gold outside a town which demands it is quite tempting.

You should also consider that the main penalty for dying is the loss of items and not XP. Several items can be destroyed upon your death (not your respawn). Players will find themselves buying several items for replacements or perhaps buying more "mundane" equipment so as not to lose a fortune upon death. The item penalty does not take an items price into account.

	Item	Description
	Ales	Any Inn or Tavern Keeper. Different races brew different kinds of ales
	Meat	Fish, Animals on farms or in the wild. Farm animals carry much more quality meat than the meat found on hunted animals but hunting is free.
	Foodstuffs	Crops, Fruits, Eggs and anything that is "Harvested" from farm animals or the land besides meat.
	Armor	Crafted or found as treasure
	Weapons	Crafted or found as treasure
	Clothing	Crafted or found as treasure
	Jewelry	Crafted or found as treasure
	Gems	Crafted from rough stones found in mines or found as treasure
	Copper	Copper ingots of any stack size. Copper generally used to make jewelry and some weapons. Found in Torr Mines
	Silver	Silver ingots of any stack size
	Gold	Gold ingots of any stack size
	Iron	Titanium ingots of any stack size
	Steel	Steel ingots of any stack size
	Titanium	Titanium ingots of any stack size
	Potions	Potions of any type
	Scrolls	Spells Scrolls
	Plants	All manner of plants that are found in the World of Torr
	Leather	Leathers and unrefined hides
	Miscellaneous

You should note that the extremely rare materials such as Mithril, Ithilnaur, Kregora, Galvorn, Angilian and Eog are not trade commodities. These materials are very valuable to anyone but they don't get traded between cities often enough to affect market prices.

When you buy items from a merchant, his sell rate goes up slightly and when you sell items back to a merchant, his buy rate goes down slightly. Essentially merchants will raise their sell prices when people are buying and lower their buy rates when people keep selling them stuff. The amount of change is approximately: 0.1 + (ItemValue/1000) per item.

Every 15 minutes or so, the stores go through a "Heartbeat" which slowly "tightens" their buy and sell rates closer together on the order of approximately 20% of their current difference. All stores will also suffer a "stale" loss of about 0.1 percent to both rates, if left alone long enough, store prices will fall. The buy and sell rate of a merchant can never close to less than a 15 percent difference under any circumstance and can never go over 200 percent.

Every Heartbeat the stores also have a chance of buying or selling an item from every store to the "public". The public represents the common people in the kingdom your store is located at who are shopping at your store. Every kingdom has a different chance of buying and selling items from your particular type of store. This depends on what type of store you have and the particular supply and demand of that Kingdom. For example, Withertop is a fishing village so you can except a good chance your meat store will see good business there but don't expect your armor store to do so well. You also have to consider that whatever chance your store has at buying and selling to the public is divided evenly by the amount of other stores of the same type in that kingdom, this represents the competition. If your merchant has a 10% chance at trading fish in a particular kingdom but there are 10 other fish stores in town, your chance is now about 1%.

Once you "win" a trade from the public at your store the system determines whether you sold something or had something bought from you. The chances of whether you have something bought or sold is influenced greatly by the amount of items in your store. If your store is almost empty, you are almost guaranteed a "buy" and if your store has more than 20 items, you can almost be sure of a "sell" to the public. A normal store over time will hover around 10 items in it's inventory. If a store rarely sees business however, you end up burning money on the merchants salary and eventually will have to go out of business.

The economy also has a "Global Shift" which means when one part of the world experiences a increasing economy, the rest of the worlds economy will fall to compensate. When the buy or sell rate at a particular store moves because of a trade, the buy or sell rates of every other store in the world will move in the opposite direction by an equal amount divided by the number of stores. That means if you change the sell rate of a store by 1 percent and there are 100 other stores in the world, they will all shift by 0.01 percent in the opposite direction. Doesn't sound like much? Look at it this way, if all the stores on one half of the world have Buy and Sell Rates approaching 200 because of good business, you can bet that the OTHER side of the world will have buy and sell rates approaching zero. Then when everyone buys stuff at the cheap stores and sells them at the pricey stores, the economies will balance themselves out again.

The system has been designed to be a self-balancing and self-correcting system. The prices of items sold at merchants cannot be "dictated" by any hard-coded values. The system allows for the prices of items to become whatever they are actually worth to the players in the game without the market being flooded with junk are constantly dry on needed items. This is another reason why the vast majority of the merchants will (hopefully) be run by the players themselves who will be able to dictate what's "hot" and what's not.