I have written a new tool to help me police shop prices. It now organizes everything being sold by a player shop based on store, item, and price. This helped me easily discover that Hiou was selling an item for $40 million while everyone else was selling it for $10k. Naturally, his item was confiscated. I can also easily determine that Zale is selling steel naginatas for $2500 while Huklebuc is selling them for $7500.

If you are using your shop as a storage room by charging high prices for objects, you better restock your items and keep them in line with the competition before I start going through this data in more detail. I'll talk numbers over with the rest of the staff to determine what are acceptable price limits (ie, 10x the average price is OK, 100x is not).


This tool is pretty crude, but was easy to write. If people have ideas for how this information should or should not be incorporated into the game, please post your ideas here. For example:
* Don't let someone compare the prices in my shop and find who's selling it for the cheapest
* Shop owners can see average going rate for a particular item when they stock it
* Create a real-time web-based market where people can browse what is for sale

Keep in mind that odd colored items or famous fecal matter tend to be a bit pricier than mundane versions. I'm not sure if they look different on your end.

I think being able to pull up a web app that lists stores and inventories would be a great idea.

Don't worry - I'm going to have the program compare shop values for an item against other people selling the same item. I don't care that people are selling an item for $X, only that they're selling it for 30 times more than the average player.


Take this example:



Hiou looks pretty suspicious right now!

One policy clarification that will get added to the main policy when they're finalized:
* Players that still play will get a mudmail about infringing items and will be given a reasonable amount of time to reprice / argue their case.

Just tax their bank accounts after x time, and if they can't pay a percentage of what they charge per item, have it auto confiscate/destroy the item :P

Stuff reasonably priced will not be taxed high!

Cost of overhead!!!!!!

Gotta pay for the gnomish electrical wiring

Highport Internal Revenue Service !

(A subsidiary of the Baron von Hanna treasury administration...)

A Highport tax collector just arrived.
The Highport tax collector just raped your bank account!

You now have 0 gold coins in your bank account.



Insert appropriate town name otherwise if not in HP :P
LOL!