Title: Trading Rework Feedback/Suggestions
Family Name: BDFoundry

Region (NA/EU): EU

In its current state, the trading rework is not terrible, but it definitely still needs some work. We haven't had any updates to the actual system for a couple of weeks now. The only updates Trading has had on Global Labs are the quest fixes that should have been caught before coming to live servers. This leaves me concerned because in the past, PA have had a habit of dropping new content and then being done with it and moving onto the next thing, instead of further refining it and making much-needed changes.

Mysterious Giant Merchant Guild

(Been reduced from 7 days to 3 days in the Global Labs 12/05 patch)

The Mysterious Giant Merchant Guild mechanic is my biggest issue with the system at the moment. It is great for pushing prices back up when fall to 30 - 40% and get stuck there, however, the purchase lockout is far far far too long. It is currently 7 full days which is the same amount of time that the item stored in your Order Contracts will expire. If you don't pay attention and purchase the item before the mechanic, you are automatically making a loss. In my opinion, the time should be heavily reduced and players should be able to take advantage of this system. Instead of being punished for buying low, you should be rewarded for paying attention to items that are predicted to go up in price.

Order Contracts

The storage fee for keeping items in your Order Contracts continues even after the item expires. (Seems to have been fixed in patch 26/04)

As you can see in the image below, I kept several items in my storage since the first day of the trading rework. The storage period ended over a week ago, but the storage fee continued to rise. When I took these items out of storage today, the items had to be taken out 1 at a time, and disappeared completely.

This desperately needs changing. Imagine a player who stops playing the game, and when they return they find a large fee. They are locked out of using their Order Contracts until they pay up.

The Order Contracts UI is also not very clear, and it wasn't obvious that you had to right-click the items to move them into your inventory after purchasing them. A button underneath the item stack would be clearer.

Rumors

Food Rumor NPCs in Serendia seem to be bugged. (Seems to have been fixed in Patch 26/04)

No one has been able to find the NPCs for these rumors, and there are no NPCs at the location that the Codex database shows. It is presumed they are bugged and just don't show up.

For rumors themselves, I don't hate the system. Now that players know the locations and what they are looking for, it is much easier and faster to check the rumors. I think in some cases, the text in the speech bubbles could be clearer since there have been times when I was 100% convinced a rumor was correct, and then the price dropped instead.

Other Trading Mounts

With the update to Wagon weight, other mounts such as donkeys and Miniature Elephants have been left behind. Elephants were made for trading across the desert, and updating their weight/inventory would make moving trade goods across Valencia much easier. Currently, you need to take your wagon all the way through shakatu to avoid the desert, since wagons have reduced speed in the desert. I would like to see Elephants updated, or the caravan of camels added (that was teased at a previous Calpheon/Heidel Ball).

For ships, it would be a HUGE QoL if we could put the trade items straight onto the ship if the node has a wharf manager. Eg. Arehaza. Just let us put the items straight from Order Contracts onto the ship (like you can with a wagon). (Seems to have been added in patch 26/04)

Adventure Logs/Broken Content

There are several adventure logs and many quests that have been affected by the trading rework. Most of these have been fixed by now, but there are still 2 things I am aware of:

1. Deves Encyclopedia - the Love Potion no.9 and Ogre's Excrement have been removed, please add new items as alternatives for these pages. The Soiled Ogre ring has always been annoying to get, and now there is no other option.

2. Trading EXP artifacts are currently unobtainable with the removal of Imperial Trading. (Fixed in the Global Labs 12/05 patch)

Investment VS Reward

I still feel that the silver per hour from trading is not quite good enough. For players that don't fully understand the system, it is very very easy to make a loss and put them off the system forever.

Even for players that know what they are doing and invest all their time into trading, the amount of silver you make completely relies on the rumors and hikes in prices, so it is not consistent silver at all.

For the average person who ignores rumors, you can either make marginal profit or a loss, by buying low and hoping the price goes up.

Getting into trading requires so much investment and setup so I feel it should have a better payout. You need to connect the nodes and have several nodes leveled to purchase items. Not to mention the time it takes to check rumors, purchase items, then come back later to deliver and sell them. Trading is an active/semi-afk activity, and for the amount of effort you need to put in, I don't feel that the payoff is worth it compared to other active or semi-afk lifeskills. Adjusting the base prices of the items alone will cause more problems than it solves since that will also mean larger losses.

Also, the distance bonus is now heavily reduced for active wagon trading. With this change, you are better off just trading to the closest distance. It does not reward you for your time spent going long distances, and it is not worth connecting long distances due to CP cost. Personally, I do not like having to invest CP into my trading empire either, since it is much easier and more worthwhile to have that CP invested into workers instead for passive income. With new regions and more and more uses for CP, I already feel like I am having to choose between farming or workers. Honestly, I would prefer if the CP and energy requirement was scrapped completely, and instead, we went back to the old requirement, where some items could only be purchased if you have a high enough Trading Level (or Trading Mastery?). Currently, the only benefit to a higher Trade Level is a higher bargaining bonus, perhaps it should also increase your distance bonus.

Mysterious Scalper Merchant Guild

Should force a price hike event or a few price increases, up till it reaches a good value for the scalpers merchants to sell their stock back.

For 2 reasons: 1) It makes sense for prices to go up when the offer is limited. And 2) if the Scalper Guild mechanic wouldn't exist, those items sitting on low values would eventually get tapped by an increase or two in the 7 days they are currently locked out. (I am, however, expecting an answer from PA along the lines of "if the cooldown would be shorter the mechanic could be exploited in some fashion")

Rumours

Tie directly into the frustrating scalping mechanic and should have their probability to be confirmed taken up a notch or 5. Also, how is it that a price fluctuation doesn't affect all the items in a category? Cus that's yet another reason for the Scalpers to keep showing up to literally lock an entire node out of the trade cycle. 

Mounts

Have been an afterthought with the previous content drop too. Camels and elephants don't travel through the well. Well, they're an afterthought since the year they were introduced, pretty much. So if more than half a year was not enough for PA to help them squeeze through the well, one has to wonder, how long till they'll be given stats to fit the new trade system?

Also - as other people have also suggested - how about actually allowing the mounts hitched on the wagon to affect the wagon's maximum speed? Each of them sharing 10% of the difference between them and the wagon's max speed, for example.

Investment vs reward

They don't like, it seems, to reward traders in any way shape or form. Distance bonus is a joke, mastery is even worse for the active trade. The impulse to take your goods across the BDO world is gone, cus the distance bonus has no positive effect (literally trading at a loss, due to time consumption) as for mastery? Pffft! After removing the requirement for obtaining goods from the system... one would've hoped that having a high level will impact one's gains, but nope. PA decided that equality of outcome will govern this profession. Beginner 1 or Guru 50 will earn roughly the same amount of silver. On a good round, you can make good silver from trading. But good rounds are few and far between.

Order contracts interface 

Is counterintuitive a bit, yeah. The storage fee persisting after items expiration is probably an oversight. On top of that, the current value needs... something (?) to get updated after a trade cycle resets.

On top of that, I'd say that it wouldn't be too bad if they'd increase the weight limit a bit. Or decrease the weight of the goods to 250LT or so. So that you can pack goods from more than 1 category, in the rare instances when 2 categories get a price increase.

Extras

The room to manuever the wagon is extremely small in some nodes (Camp Balacs and Arwina's Tail come to mind). To the point of, before getting back on the road, you can lose 1 or 2 items (the fact that roads aren't continuous is another issue that compounds this problem but eh? too late to revisit'em all).

Also, I'm kinda wondering, how bad would it be to have the price fluctuation affect all goods being traded in a region. It makes very little sense for expensive food in Valencia to be sold in Mediah at those value in a time when Mediah's experiencing a week-long price plummet on food. I'm thinking that if you could buy low in Eternal Winter and sell high in Calpheon, due to the two regions lining up their fluctuations, things would get a bit more interesting and the need to travel across the world would be back in the profession. Of course, that would mean better distance bonuses too, 'cause gaining 30M in profit after traveling for the better part of an hour doesn't really sound like a fun way to waste your time play. 

I gotta chuckle at how the fix for the problems the revamp/griefer guild caused with the Trading Leap quests in today's patch is to make the quests not actually involve Trading.

It's safe to say that PA outright refuse to admit the Griefer Guild blunder. So they'd rather remove the trading activity from the trading leap quests than actually making that mechanic work within reason and logic.

Band aid solutions.

I guess too many people want to have all their goods bought up and unavailable for purchase for them to walk back the problem guild, or they love to punish those who would dare trade in this game.

Yeah, today's quest changes were band-aid fixes again for a bigger underlying problem. I still believe the Merchant Guild mechanic needs reducing (for all the same reasons I listed before).. Pretty much all of the quests involving trading don't actually involve buying/selling items now. My issue is that "talk to this NPC" to complete the quest doesn't actually teach players anything about the trading system.

Instead of just talking to an NPC, the NPC could have given you a specific quest item that sells at the trade manager for a fixed price. This would get around the problem of the Merchant Guild lockouts. It honestly just feels that they decided to do a last-minute quick fix with minimal effort.

We did get two very nice changes though in the patch:

- Improved the order contract so that the storage fee is no longer charged when the item circulation period expires.

- Fixed an issue where trade items under an order contract could not be immediately loaded onto a ship.

I still need to test this, but I believe this means we can now move items directly onto our ships?

More bug fixes:

• Fixed the issue of the reactions of town NPCs to rumors of the rising and dropping prices of military supplies in the Old Moon Guild Newsletter occurring simultaneously in certain situations.
• Fixed the issue not being able to control keyboard and mouse sometimes when interacting with NPCs.
• Fixed the issue of Serendia food fluctuation NPC not showing.
• Fixed the issue of the prices not being updated even though there were fluctuations in the market prices of some trade goods in the same category within Order Contract Storage.

It's nice that PA made some changes so quickly to those broken quests. It's just unfortunate that the changes feel like they miss their mark in terms of appropriateness. They scream 'rushed' a bit.

It would be lovely if PA would actually have open communication with us (and move past this seemingly 'us verse them' mentality PA appear to foster at times).  If they did that I feel we'd be more inclined to trust them and take them at their word when they say they will continue improve on content released, and, most importantly, they could take the time needed to implement changes and updates properly.

We know these things aren't done overnight, but silence and then patching that feels rushed and half-hearted in effort is not the answer.

Thank you Tansie and everyone for the feedback. I agree that the trading revamp has some potential, but it still has a way to go to be an enjoyable system.

The Giant Trade Guild is a big issue right now. Earlier this morning, there was a 'Hike' of food items in Valencia, except they were all locked, so nothing really happened.  I think if PA wants to keep this system, they need to reduce the lock to 2 days max.  If players want to buy items low in hopes of holding them for a few days and selling them at a profit, what's the downside?  There's a limit of 66 items in each order log, so if you do this you are locking yourself out of chasing rumours until you sell those items.  That seems like a fair trade-off to me.

A couple of small annoyances:
- When buying items (to the order log) you will get a notice saying "the distance is too great" if your mount is not close enough to the manager, even though you are not loading anything on the mount at that time.  Please remove this check from the code.

- Why is there a limit of 20 items to take out from the order log at a time?  My wagon holds 22 items, just let me load it all at once.

- The removal of the option to channel swap to fill your log was a bummer. Before, I could load 3 wagons (66 items).  Now, I only get 44 because it's not worth doing another trip for 6 aditionnal things.

Also, who will ever buy things in Arehaza if they are not trying to get the Merchant Ring?  It's way too far from any sale point to be feasible.

Off-topic warning. With all the experiences we've got since the advent of AFB and the trend we can see in terms of when, what and how things mentioned there are approached, if anyone would be to actually make a "#Suggestion" thread of this nature, it should gain more traction, faster than Choice's proposal for RBF revamp. Alas, because it is painfully obvious that 200 OP upvotes and community needs are of no import when it comes to AFB promotion and subsequent improvements, it would still have been for naught. I have no clue what would be needed for PA to improve their comms with their non-KR players (some of these players also customers). Hat's off to the GMs for really trying to make people feel that non-KR players aren't ignored :)

Sadly the fixes do sometimes feel to be done exactly so: overnight (or even in a shorter timeframe). The bridge autopathing issues being a good example, with the Orc Camp bridge still being a trip stopper (for me) in 4 out of 5 attempts to cross it.

If the distance bonus would become relevant again and the elephant and its gear would be tuned to handle the new trade system, Arehaza could become quite attractive. Chances are it won't be so, though.

This is certainly a painful change.  I agree, please put some method in to use Ogre's Excrement again or provide another option.