I was going through my inventory and I noted the price of a fully tanned leather hide: 50 “dollars”. Seems legit enough. But then I glance at the cost of a leather patch, and that’s 20 “dollars”. This is strange, because cutting up that tanned leather hide is a guaranteed 4-5 leather patches. This seems like something of a discrepancy.
I know most of the time you get more for the whole thing if you sell it in pieces, but who wants a handful of generic ‘leather’ that could have come from some zombie’s half-melted blood-caked boots with half their heel still glued to the inside? I mean, I would if I had to, but that’s got to affect its value. Leather patches just comes from so much crap and tanned hides take a lot of work. A handful of chopped shoe leather, or a fresh strip of tanned leather? You tell me what’s worth more.
That was just one example, but I wanted to know if there’s going to be a revisit to the whole trading system in the future. Some of the prices are a little bit iffy and trading as a whole just isn’t especially valuable.
AFAIK the goal was to set the “prices” to their approximate pre-cataclysm one (since they are used by vending machines and whatnot). After that factions would be able to place “weights” that would weight prices of certain things upwards or downwards, such as for example a group of bionic cyborgs not valuing food as highly, or a group of old ex-military soldiers being willing to pay more for explosives and ammo.
That said if you find something that seems wildly inaccurate for a pre-cataclysm price feel free to point it out, there’s lots of things that just don’t have good price values right now.
The whole trading sistem needs an update. The large majority of items have an unbalanced price, from guns, to base items; from ammo to food. Seriously, food, ammo and books are ridicolously cheap; while you just need a rubber hoose and a container to siphon thousands of dollar worth of gasoline from ANY vehicle you find. Also, NPC have tiny inventories and from the moment you are mid-game their stuff won’t be useful to you, even if you reach those 3x3 refugee centers with a bunch of traders.
If you find prices that are horribly wrong, then make a list of the fixed prices. Heck, I’d even be willing to PR it up myself if you don’t feel like taking the half hour or so to setup github (though for just a JSON change like that it’s really, really easy).
All we need is someone to go through and start finding more realistic values for things, which is time consuming, but not particularly difficult.
The current state of the prices are that they’re modern prices for the items, they are in no way sensical for use by NPC traders, but they’re what we have right now. What we need now is one or more of the following:
A separate cataclysmic price for each item, reflecting the general change in value based on post-apocalyptic supply and demand.
An actual supply-demand system that scales prices based on how quickly NPCs and factions use the items, and their relative scarcity.
Per-faction lists of price adjustment factors for different items or classes of items.
Formulas for item value based on objective qualities, such as value as a weapon, value as food, value as clothing, etc.
Any of the above would tweak values of items closer to where they should be. Offhand I don’t know which ones we should focus on.