Shattered Kingdoms

It is obviously the fault of all the vets crowding the MC, that are causing prices to go up.

The Dark Side is more fun.

There's less random [REDACTED] "hi, how are you, I just saw you 30 minutes ago"/drunk/[REDACTED]/boring fountain RP.

That's not rubbish, that is serious stuff.

Ok, can we now have 4 or 5 different shops selling versions of the same thing? In each city?

SK is not a 21st century economy where every good can be mass-produced at the lowest cost and shipped to nearly every location on earth to be sold at competitive rates. Most items are hand-made by skilled crafters and mages, some of whom have unique knowledge of the techniques and magics required to produce them.

The system is working in that the price rises to as high as the market will tolerate. Clearly these items are of unique enough value that people are willing to pay through the nose for them. If you are one of the people who either can't or are not willing to pay the same price, then you will either have to travel widely to find an equivalent good or settle for an item of lesser quality.

That's the economics system working as it was envisioned to make money valuable enough and items expensive enough that you have to make hard decisions about your purchases instead of just picking up every item you want from every shop.

If you know the game well enough to buy expensive gear, why would travel to another kingdom be a serious hardship?

I agree with oa. I think the economy system is my least favorite thing about sk.

I never said it was.

Again, a viable system, but with severe flaws that could be relatively easily addressed.

The main issue here is that the characters who are forced to make those "hard decisions" are the ones for whom it hinders actual enjoyment of the game for the players. By the time a character is required to be dropping obsidians' worth of coins at the shops for consumables to be competitive amongst their peers, they have the ability to make obsidians' worth of coins with an hour of concentrated effort (not saying it's an enjoyable process, just a possible one). Most of the characters who are required to be using things like store-bought armor and weapons don't have the ability (i.e., skills, HP, PE, ME, or level) to make the coin necessary to buy what they need just to hit a level where it's not essentially suicide to wander from city to city bargain hunting.

It's equally frustrating dying repeatedly while training, then being forced to sit around and wait for multiple SDs to wear off, all for lack of basic gear to train with.

The code works just fine for the high-level store-bought items that it's intended to regulate (vials, wands, scrolls, staves, etc, whose prices skyrocket and stay that way essentially forever), but where it falls apart and detracts from enjoying the playing experience of the game is when it makes it frustrating to even engage in the tedium of leveling to a point where your character is taken seriously. And, yes Dulrik, we are all aware that you don't believe a character needs to be GM before they engage in RP, and in some cases with some players you are correct, but whether you agree with it or not a vast portion of the playerbase just simply will not take a character seriously until mentor/masterish at the least. It's getting to the gateway of that point that the code right now is hindering.

Shhh. Don't say that, you'll get blacklisted.