• We are looking for you!
    Always wanted to join our Supporting Team? We are looking for enthusiastic moderators!
    Take a look at our recruitement page for more information and how you can apply:
    Apply

Goods Trading: "Fair Trade" "Unfair Trade" Profit Trade" "Pity Trade" "FP/Goods Trade"

DeletedUser26965

I'm writing this so I have a post I can link to regarding my thoughts regarding trading so every time I see the all too often brought up topic of "fair trade" I can link it rather than constantly having to repeat myself. These are my thoughts and my thoughts alone, you are free to form your own opinions and own structure regarding trade, I stand in no judgement of that so this is not about you personally or how you structure trade deals personally or guild wise, this is only regarding my thoughts on trade.

I am of the opinion that FoE players must immediately and forever stop using the term "Fair Trade" and the apparent inverse "Profit Trade" or any derivatives thereof. It's a difficult thing to fight against the accepted nomenclature of a culture but I'm determined. Unfortunately Inno has made this more difficult by using the term "Fair Trade" in its mobile version trade window as a checkbox and "fair" in its description of trade on its Wiki.

Here's a comment I wrote recently regarding the topic.

Whoever came up with the term "fair trade" should be exiled from the entire universe. What people really probably meant at the start of this game was "abuse of trade" in a sense. The thing is, in this game you can ask for 100 of the highest age good for 50 of the lowest age good and anything in between. I think you should be able to set your own values but I suppose the 1:2 thing came about to prevent abuse mainly regarding push accounts.

Regardless, people see trades like that and say "OMG you crazy, why you think you can get that!?!:confused:" not realizing it's a fp/goods trade or pity trade, or sometimes hasty guild mates trying to help their guild mates out with typical trades accidentally picking up these sorts of trades and say "OMG whachyou trying to do scam us!?!?:mad:" So then some goof came up with the "Fair Trade Calculator" and based trades using supplies and coins costs as the trade value, then "fair trade" eventually became something to the effect of "what is a fair trade?" and people trying to find actual fairness with all trades which is impossible."Fair" Trade

At the end of the day a fair trade is what you and the person you are trading with find acceptable.

I prefer the term "Pity Trade" for when a guildmate is asking for free goods to build something like the Observatory or Atomium which in turn helps the entire guild.

I don't really have a term for it yet but many players trade goods for fp's. These are simply FP/Goods trade deals. Different players structure such deals differently and what you find acceptable is up to you, no one else, there are no rules.

Neither of these are unfair trades.

Besides GB's people also need goods for Tech, GvG, GE negotiations, the continent map, etc. I don't know anyone who trades goods just to stockpile goods for no other reason than to just have goods to never trade them or use them. So where's the profit? If they're in your guild everything they do helps the guild in one way or another with how they use their goods.

If you use the calculators as a base for trade then say you are a calc trade guild.

If you use 1:2 up, 1:1 across, 2:1 down then say you are that type of guild whatever you want to call it.

(Edit: A guildmate used a great term that fits perfectly here. Whatever standard your guild uses, call trades that fit within that standard "Guild Compliant Trades" and for trades that don't call them "Non Guild Compliant Trades".)

If you're looking for some daddy figure to tell you what is right and what a fair trade is you're never going to find it. If you're looking for Inno to tell you what to do instead of thinking for yourself then good luck because I doubt that will ever happen. The closest you'll get from Inno is they describe the merchant trades as "poor" and "cutthroat" and I agree 1:10 across same age goods is horrible. They also say "You never know when or if your offer will be accepted, so it is a good idea to make sure your offer is fair to increase your chances."
https://en.wiki.forgeofempires.com/index.php?title=Trading

So please for at least the sake of clarity, let us do away with these nonsensical terms like "Fair Trade" and just describe the trade in question just for what it is. If there is ever a player just sitting in FoE doing nothing but trading thousands of BA goods for AF goods with no intention on ever using them than I call that an idiot trade and simply don't accept the offer.

Peace and happy go lucky fun trading wishes upon you.
 
Last edited by a moderator:

DeletedUser8152

So here's what I think the root of the problem is:

A fair number of people simply want to clear out their guild trade board. It makes them feel antsy to have posted trades going unfilled in their guild. So if they see a trade they just want to take it, to clear the board. But if it's an unbalanced trade for whatever reason, then they would obviously be losing value if they take it. This sets up a source of tension that makes them unhappy. To resolve that, they only want to see trades posted that are ones they would be willing to cover.
 

DeletedUser26965

jaelis said:
So here's what I think the root of the problem is:

A fair number of people simply want to clear out their guild trade board. It makes them feel antsy to have posted trades going unfilled in their guild. So if they see a trade they just want to take it, to clear the board. But if it's an unbalanced trade for whatever reason, then they would obviously be losing value if they take it. This sets up a source of tension that makes them unhappy. To resolve that, they only want to see trades posted that are ones they would be willing to cover.
Click to expand...

I can't help if someone is OCD about the trade boards lol but however you want to term the trade I think it should be couched in terms of what the trade actually is, "unbalanced" doesn't really tell me anything about the trade unless you mean Steel is heavier than Gas that is;)

And how are they losing value if say it's for Atom?
 

DeletedUser13838

It's not about being OCD. Some of us feel it is a guild duty to fill trades if we're able. But we don't want to have to study the market to know the current value of paper to brass, gas to steel or whatever. So standard rates, however you define them, make things easier for those of us taking the trades. This isn't necessarily good for traders in the guild who don't want to be restricted by these rates.

What would make things even easier is if Inno allowed people to post trades that wouldn't be seen by guild members (ie the opposite of guild only). This has been proposed many times so I don't expect to see it.
 

DeletedUser26965

Konrad the mediocre said:
It's not about being OCD. Some of us feel it is a guild duty to fill trades if we're able. But we don't want to have to study the market to know the current value of paper to brass, gas to steel or whatever.
Click to expand...
Ah, so it's laziness then, j/k;) but yes I understand and do the same in my guild by trying to pick up as many trades as I can because I know it ultimately helps the guild as a whole.

Konrad the mediocre said:
So standard rates, however you define them, make things easier for those of us taking the trades.
Click to expand...
"Standard" doesn't really tell me anything about the trade but if you mean your guild sets a certain standard for how they want trades posted then by all means do what thou wilt and be happy.:)
 

DeletedUser13838

My guild uses the standard fair trade rules based on total coins/supplies. Other guilds may use a different standard like 1:1 within the same age and 2:1 between adjacent ages.
 

DeletedUser8152

sloppyjoeslayer said:
I can't help if someone is OCD about the trade boards lol but however you want to term the trade I think it should be couched in terms of what the trade actually is, "unbalanced" doesn't really tell me anything about the trade unless you mean Steel is heavier than Gas that is;)
Click to expand...
Let's say unbalanced meaning, you could get a better deal on the open friends/hood market.
And how are they losing value if say it's for Atom?
Click to expand...
Yes, but it isn't always. Maybe the poster is just looking to make a profit from clueless noobs. Konrad's solution would be my preference, just let people mark trades as non-guild.
 

DeletedUser8152

sloppyjoeslayer said:
But what if I want to trade someone FE goods for Arc for some fp's and they use BA goods? Will we be kicked from your guild then?
Click to expand...
Not my guild, we are not uptight about this. I would hope that even an uptight guild would let a player announce they are trying to build an arc and looking for help. And indeed, in such a guild those trades might get taken faster if players can assume that they are for a GB and not just open-market profit trades.
 

DeletedUser8152

I feel like you may be playing ignorant here to make a point, which is fine. Or not, that is fine too. So here in detail is what I would consider making a profit. To my knowledge, this is fairly common behavior for trading players.

First, you need to get a sense for the market value of various goods. If you see that fertilizer trades immediately at 1:1 with textiles, but doesn't sell at 2 fertilizer:3 textiles, then you guess that 3 fertilizer:4 textiles is the market rate. Then you look for trades offering fertilizer at 1:1, which some people will post because they don't recognize that there is a fertilizer shortage. You take all those trades ASAP, increasing your fertilizer stock and decreasing your textiles stock. To make it up, you offer trades at 3 fertilizer to 4 textiles. For each of those cycles, you profit 1 textile.

I have zero problem with that and applaud the player. However, if the only reason your 3:4 trades are getting taken is because someone in your guild is trying to clear your trades, then you are not actually profiting off of arbitrage. Your estimate of the value of fertilizer was wrong; on a really open market it would not sell at 3:4. That is not particularly your fault, but I can understand why your guildmate who keeps taking these trades would feel annoyed.
 

DeletedUser27889

Konrad the mediocre said:
What would make things even easier is if Inno allowed people to post trades that wouldn't be seen by guild members (ie the opposite of guild only). This has been proposed many times so I don't expect to see it.
Click to expand...
^ This is what would fix a lot of issues. I make deals with a fair number of people, sometimes I trade FPs sometimes friends I've helped return the favor. I used to post messages out to the guild stating 'Hey no worries about that Iron for Algee trade I'm not actually expecting any of you to get it' I've since stopped doing that because then it seems my other 'fair' trades don't get picked up and I've been guilty of the same, seeing someone say not to get XY trade because it's for a specific person and ignoring the rest of their trades because I'm not sure.

I don't want my guildmates to think I'm trying to take advantage of them (or anyone) for getting them to pick up crazy trades when I actually have paid for them by other means. But I also don't want my regular trades being ignored.
 

DeletedUser23444

Here is part of my take on Goods Trading Ratios...

While I have not formally crunched numbers "Cosmic Raven Style" (and by that I mean that even my FoE spreadsheets have spreadsheets of their own) to prove or disprove the true production cost of each specific good for each specific age. However, I'm 100% certain that any so called "Fair Trade Calculator" is not fair at all, neither in terms of factoring in the production cost of each good relative to others, nor in terms of understanding the markets forces that affect the relative value of each good.

At the very least I know that all "Fair Trade Calculators" one can find on the Web do not not accurately factor in the true cost to produce any good, especially in higher eras. In fact, I know it gets increasingly unfair the higher era goods you are calculating. Now what do I mean by this?


The true cost to produce any good should factor in all of the following:

1. How many tiles of land does one goods building require? This land requirement has two components for each building:

A. The goods production building size (Height x Width), plus...

B. The roads required to connect the building to Town Hall:
(shortest building dimension x 1/2 x 1 road section x N tiles/1 Road Section), where N equals either 1 lane road or 2 lane road.

Note we should factor in 1/2 of the road tiles that lie along the shortest dimension of the building, because some other building should be on the other side of that same section of road (at least if we understand how to plan a city efficiently); thus one half of any road section counts toward the building on one side, and the other should be attributed to the the building on the other side of the road.

So consider the land consumed by the two HMA goods production buildings listed below:

Ropery:
A) 3 x 2 = 6 tiles of land for the building itself, plus...
B) 2 x 1/2 x 1 = 1 tile of land to connect it to Town Hall
Total Tiles of Land for construction = 7

Brickworks:
A) 4 x 3 = 12 tiles of land for the building itself, plus...
B) 3 x 1/2 x 1 = 1.5 tiles of land to connect it to Town Hall
Total Tiles of Land for construction = 13.5

Straight away I can predict that the Trade Counter that most players will see, will include more trades posted where players are trying to sell HMA Rope for the other 4 HMA goods, than they will see where players are trying to sell HMA Brick for the other 4 HMA goods. Of course, this disparity would be on-average and across several months of game play, not in any single visit to the Trade Counter.

Note that these goods are from the same age. But because all HMA FoE players, as an aggregate population, will try to produce more Rope than Brick, Rope will end up being far less marketable than Brick will be, because to producing Rope requires slightly less than half the total land than producing Brick does. And for this reason, players will naturally gravitate toward producing Rope over Brick, which floods the Trade market with a massive supply of Rope that is disproportionate to the demand for Rope, compared to the other 4 HMA goods.


All of the "Fair Trade Calculators" do not factor in land at all. And the goods buildings from any time period named "an era" are much more massive than those from any time period named "an age"; not only that, but the era buildings all require 2-lane roads. And many later era buildings have weird shapes that do not fit easily in a 2-lane road city design, without a lot of wasted tiles of land, where we cannot add actual production and we must settle for adding Watchfires, Victory Towers, or some form of ultra-efficient decoration, in order get any real production value from land-locked parcels of land.


2. The required population and by extension the offsetting happiness required for that population to reach enthusiastic happiness. All of the "Fair Trade Calculators" do not factor in happiness or population at all. I suppose that these production costs could essentially be translated into even more land cost by using the average population density of all the regular houses and average happiness density of all regular cultural buildings from the same age as the goods buildings. But my point here is the high age goods we produce, the more it costs to produce them. And population and happiness are part of the production costs.

3. The coins and supplies cost to produce the maximum production efficiency of each type of resource in the same age. This is the only cost that most "Fair Trade Calculators" do factor in.

4. Any unrefined goods costs. Producing Goods from the Modern Era upward requires unrefined goods as inputs. An "unrefined good" is a good that that is from three ages lower than the age of the good we are producing. So producing 10 Translucent Concrete in Tomorrow Era, consumes 10 Ferroconcrete from the Modern Era, which in turn consumes 10 Wire from the Colonial Age.


So the total cost to produce 10 Translucent Concrete conventionally (without relying on GBs or Wishing Wells to produce discounted unrefined goods for us) would be total cost of all the inputs listed below:

A. Land for 1 Translucent Concrete Plant + roads: (5 x 4) + (4 x 1/2 x 2) = 24 tiles
B. Land for 1 Concrete Plant + roads: (5 x 6)+ (5 x 1/2 x 2) = 35 tiles
C. Land for 1 Wire Mill + roads: (3 x 3)+ (3 x 1/2 x 1) = 10.5 tiles
D. 2,180 Population and 3,052 happiness for 1 Translucent Concrete Plant
E. 1,360 Population and 1,904 happiness for 1 Concrete Plant
F. 720 Population and 1,008 happiness for 1 Wire Mill
G. 7,200 Coins, 7,200 Supplies to run one production of 10 Translucent Concrete
H. 4,800 Coins, 4,800 Supplies to run one production of 10 Ferroconcrete
I. 4,800 Coins, 4,800 Supplies to run one production of 10 Wire

Now some players will try to argue: "well you can just use GBs and Wishing Wells to produce the ME goods to consume as unrefined goods." This is not always true (if the players doesn't have either building), nor does it completely eliminate a production cost. Using GBs and Wells to produce unrefined goods will discount the cost of unrefined goods production. In my above breakdown of the total production costs of 10 TE goods, a TE player who owns GBs and Wishing Wells could eliminate these costs: E, F, H, and I. However, his GBs and Wells cannot entirely eliminate costs B and C, since his GBs and Wells certainly occupy land themselves. And we have also introduced two new costs: FPs to level up GBs that pay 24-hour unrefined goods productions, as well as the goods required to initially construct those same GBs. So I summarize all of this to say: at best, we get Discounted Unrefined Goods Production from GBs and Wishing Wells, not free production.

Then consider a situation like mine. Since I'm in the Future Era, my GBs and Wishing Wells produce PME goods at a discounted rate. In order for me to produce TE goods conventionally (which I still do), I must also maintain a matching ME goods production building and a matching CA goods production building, unless I can find a reliably cheap source to acquire these goods some other way (profitable trades, plunder, GE, and so on). And some players will say "well you can Trade your FE goods down for TE or your PME goods down for ME goods". But this means I am essentially sacrificing my ability to stockpile a higher age good in order to acquire a lower age good. So at least to some degree, I would be "Robbing Peter to pay Paul".

And nothing I have mentioned thus far has taken into account market demand, which also influences the value of each good. In most ages, there are two GBs to construct. And in most ages the total cost of all 5 goods to construct both GBs from the same age are exactly equal. Thus if one were to construct both Alcatraz and Chateau Frontenac, they would end up spending exactly 700 of each PE good. However, each GB does not simply cost 350 each of all 5 PE goods. The lowest cost for any of these 5 goods for only one of the two PE GBs is 200, while the highest cost of one good for one PE GB is 500. Why does this matter? Because across the population of all players on a game world, most players will avoid constructing some GBs from a specific time period, while most players will also construct the other GB from the same period. This ends up creating a greatly unbalanced demand for the 5 goods in same period.

And for the curious, each of the 5 goods from one age is required to unlock technologies in 4 different periods of the tech tree — the period the goods are from, plus three later tech periods. The relative demand for each of the 5 goods from the same age will vary greatly in any single period of the tech tree. However, by the time we have unlocked all 4 ages of technology that demands all 5 goods from the same age, then we will have spent the same total of each of the 5 goods from the age in question. (There are some later eras that do not follow this, because additional ages need to be added to the game in order to keep spending the earlier goods on tech.)



Most of the "Fair Trade Calculators" simply say that Colonial Age goods cost 9,600 Coins and 9,600 Supplies to run one 24-hour production of 20 goods, and the Modern Era goods cost 19,200 Coins and 19,200 to run one 24-hour production of 20 goods. And they calculate trading ratios based only on those numbers. They never factor in the difference in population required between the goods for various ages, or the different amounts of land required, or one lane versus two-lane roads. Not to mention the fact that the player in the higher age had to spend many more FPs and goods to unlock the technology to be able to produce those higher-aged goods. And then if all of this wasn't enough late-era goods buildings have positive and negative happiness side effects to consider as well.
 
Last edited by a moderator:

DeletedUser26965

jaelis said:
I feel like you may be playing ignorant here to make a point, which is fine.
Click to expand...
Nah, I would just call that smart trading, there's always some good that seems in short supply probably mostly due to building size such as in your example. So is it really profit if one guy loses a bunch a space to make goods while others have more space to build stuff? And really w/o some sort of history of trades on the server there's really no way to gauge the market.
 

DeletedUser8152

sloppyjoeslayer said:
Nah, I would just call that smart trading, there's always some good that seems in short supply probably mostly due to building size such as in your example. So is it really profit if one guy loses a bunch a space to make goods while others have more space to build stuff? And really w/o some sort of history of trades on the server there's really no way to gauge the market.
Click to expand...
It's profit if you make a series of trades and end up with more than you started with. Isn't it?

As to whether it is possible to gauge the market, I guess it would be better to let active trading players comment on that. I feel like I have a reasonable sense for it, but I don't trade so much to feel like a reliable resource.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top