Title: The New Wagon Trade System

Family Name: Ganelles, Ghoulsbane, Reverielle

Region (NA/EU): NA

Updates: At end of opening post.

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Suggestion/Comments:

On the whole we like the new trade system, it has plenty of potential.  We've been trading for the last few days or so. It's more interactive, dynamic and more effort is involved. The NPCs are a nice touch around the cities (or in villages, or at nodes; they appear in a variety of places from what we've seen so far). The Old Moon Newsletter is nice, though it's very basic so far, however we believe PA have already updated its text on the test server so we'll see how that change is when/if it comes to live.

From our experience so far we've a few possible improvements and suggestions:

Trade Item weight

We don't think inventory space should a limiting factor for any wagon/elephant/boat (when that update comes, won't talk about boat trade further as it's coming in future). We think item limit could be solely based on weight capacity. As it is currently your Forest Path Wagon enhancements that improve weight are useless beyond a certain enhancement level as your wagon simply doesn't have the space to add more trade items, even if you have the spare weight. Enhancing and item to a higher level should always provide increased value and function.

Trade Item price/availability/silver per hour

The node investment requirements currently live aren't great, and whilst okay for us experienced players with alts and '101' energy potions at our disposal to use, the system seems too punishing to new players. Why not have the higher tiers of Trade Items locked behind completing the Life Leap Trade quests? Trading, like anything, should be easy to get into, but hard to master. Right now it seems there are just too many hurdles for newer player.

Additionally, pricing of Trade Items could be looked at across the board. Maybe the higher tier trade items could have a bit higher base price or maybe they could fluctuate more. Whilst trading is enjoyable, the actual monetary rewards currently feel a little lacking. The consensus between us so far is that "It's fun, but you basically make more silver doing anything else". We realize not everything should just be about silver/h, and no one is expecting wagon trading to bring in billions of silver daily, but we'd be foolish to think how much silver there is to be made isn't a significant factor driving many players' activities.

Trade Item Decay

Currently live when we move bought trade items into our Wagon, a 3 h decay timer begins. After 3 h item value is reduced to 25% and bargaining has no effect on reducing losses. This 3 h window feels too harsh, after all real life happens. We suggest it's reverted back to 24 hours; perhaps it could be 3 hours at 100%, then decline by ratio to the 25% over the remaining time. (edited)

Trade Mastery

At the moment Trade Mastery seems to have zero effect, it would be nice if trade mastery did something.

Distance Bonus

Right now you are better off selling items as close as possible. Running relatively longer trades from, for example, Grana to Velia, takes much longer and basically has a negligible distance bonus (not to mention you need significantly more contribution for route node investment). Maybe this is intentional, but there could be more of an incentive for wagoning long trade distances. Perhaps there could be a boost to wagon speed in general applied, or increase the effect of wagon wheel speed bonuses, something to make longer distance trade travel enticing. Or simply alter the distance bonuses applied so the longer trade routes, where there is inherently more risk involved, reward appropriately.

Trade Leap Missions and Guild Missions

These could do with an overhaul, especially in regard to rewards. For example, receiving production exp, for completing a Leap Trade Quests seems nonsensical these days. And the 'sharps' and 'hards' rewarded, whilst once valuable, are a dime a dozen these days. (edited)

NPCs

As Endclaive stated in last week's Twitch stream, the new trade system is primarily a PvE/RP focused event. To that end it would be nice if the NPCs that appear could be interacted with, to give more insight to what they're talking about and why, maybe even have voice-overs added, like other new content is receiving. 

Old Moon Guild Newsletter

Why not improve its presentation. As of now it's just a bland window and looks a bit unfinished. One option could be to make it appear like adventure log books do, each page containing one region's rumours for that 4 hour period, add some nice pictures, make it look nice and pleasant whilst retaining it's important functionality.

Trade Leaderboards

What about a Trade Leaderboard with rewards (maybe a title or three) mailed weekly/monthly/whatever to the top 5, or 50, or 500, or whatever, traders receiving a reward from the Encarotia family in the mail?

Trade Bell

We have a bell and notification we can customize notifying us about world bosses that will appear in x minutes, why not have a similar feature available for trading we can enable if we like?

Overall, the new wagon trade system is a move in the right direction. With time and continued support and development it's felt it can be improved even more to become more widely appealing and enjoyed by the player base, both in the short and long-term.

Update:

Trade Window:

Juvios, Alnilam and Harth have some suggestions on reducing the 4 hr window between trade good price updates, their posts can be found on pages <here>, <here> and <here>.

30% Trade item lockout

A chorus of comments and posts through this thread, and others, do not support this change. It's arguably brought more problems than it's fixed not least of which are the problems associated now with Leap Quests and Adventure Logs possibly being unable to be completed. Among others, Harth has some suggesting which can be found on pages <here>.

Silver/h

It has been spoken of above, but the overwhelming consensus of posters in this thread and elsewhere is that silver/h could be significantly be improved.

Old Moon Guild Newsletter Rumours

There is concern, through played experience, that the number of rumors proving to be true is too low at the moment and could be improved. ChickenSan, Harth and Juvios have some comments on this which can be found pages <here>, <here> and <here>.

Yes, I fully agree with the above and would really appreciate these suggestions being looked into. I think these changes would be quite welcome by the community. 

Thanks a lot BDO for a great new feature, and I look forward to the possibilities it opens. 

Without starting a whole new topic, can we also talk about the impact on fishing?

Many of the significant trade managers at fishing areas (Port Epheria, Tooth Fairy Cabin, Iliya Island) have been removed.  Some of the remaining trade managers (Wolfgang in Calpheon) no longer accept fish.

For someone who does an overnight fish near Epheria, for those fish beyond what the imperial trader will accept, my closest sale point has moved from Epheria to Velia.  It doesn't seem quite right that half the continent is my nearest sale point.

Can we get a few of these re-added, or some other change to make this not such a hassle for people who fish away from Velia?

Dius at the Port Epheria wharf should still accept all your Imperial Fish deliveries. I believe Wolfgang in Calpheon City is a bit bugged at the moment, but PA know of this and he'll be fixed in a future patch. Additionally, there are some notes on the Global Test Server regarding fish trade: "It has been modified so that you can deliver Imperial Fishing to NPCs outside of the main towns and large cities" link

I get what you're trying to do here, but no, no it's not, and no, no it isn't.

Your comments actually point that out, perhaps gently, in their number, scope, and content.  

Trading has become even more niche than it was, when it works at all.  It's not even 'trading', it's now an investment 'game'.

If you and some others in the community are genuinely pleased by the changes, good for you.  But that's an exception.  Most of the community disagrees (see many other posts here already) and it's not just run of the mill resistance to change and naysaying by min-maxers.

I've just been hotspot fishing as a sideline at Arehaza and discovered that I have to sail all the way back to Velia to sell them. (Short of a special overland trip with a small catch) My primary purpose there is gathering. I will need to limit my time there or have some rotten fish.

i.e. Mixing activities no longer works for me.  We need more sea fish selling points on the coast again!

Good to know that Wolfgang may be a known bug.  For Dius, he does still work the same as before, but there are some limitations.  There are fish you catch even in Ross Sea that don't qualify for imperial delivery (eg. Cuvier) and of course there's a count limit on common blues.  Either way you end up needing a normal trade manager even after imperial delivery 

Yeah, OP really needs to understand that they are the VAST VAAAAAST MINORITY and their little trio is just about the ONLY people I've seen giving this hot garbage ANY sort of praise.

0/10 update and I'm not gonna stand for people coming on here trying to give devs the wrong impression of the community. Nobody here on the forums like this update. Nobody on Reddit likes it. Nobody on discord likes it. Nobody in ingame chat likes it. This isn't an acceptable way to treat their players and they need to know that.

One other thing worth mentioning is the Quotation Board. Aside from being hard to navigate (especially in the sections that contain crafted crates or gatherable), there's this other problem where the trade items you buy cannot be quickly identified as belonging to a type or another. The only - completely useless - information they have is:

Really? You need that info, because the item may just... happen in your wagon's inventory, but not what type of a commodity it is?

I mean, it's all fine when you buy now food across Balenos and sell it 4h later thanks to a price hike. But when you're stocking up everywhere with various items and you have days of waiting for the items' price to go up... well, memory gets fuzzy.

Displaying the category each item is part of on its description window somewhere could be quite the QoL. Reason being that I don't wanna have to setup a spreadsheet with everything I have purchased across all trade managers. It would become a bit too much of an offline chore.