Just some basic points on game economy, specifically.
It is already broken.
There are people that struggle, some kind of inflation deal is just telling lowbies their twelve fang left is worth even less, so I'd prefer not to punish people just kicking off their career further by having all merchants affected by some universal valuation and devaluation score.
The economy has things like scrolls and crafting supplies, rentals and NPC factions (and AMPCs) alongside characters that retire indefinitely with their stockpiles to erase and quarantine wealth.
The problem is the generation.
NPC merchants have infinite pockets.
I know that curbing the merchants to have their own limited gold pool isn't an option for this server. Works for many others running lower magic servers due to resets and lower population numbers, but not quite here.
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So I think the method to halt this gold generation, needs to be some kind of activity value at the specific merchants.
As an example, X amount of things sold incurs its own "OCR" penalty against that infinite gold generating merchant, that lowers the percentage of gold one can receive from a merchant until it cools off.
Tie it into the appraise functions that already exist, as this IS a limiting formula that exists.
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Now if people start trading around goods between each other before selling to get around it, so what? Larger parties working together should be able to get their golds' worth, but not everyone will have appraise scores maxxed out, and eventually everyone in a given group will start hitting into some larger deficits.
This will mean stockpilers will hoard junk items over gold, which are a lot more fun to pickpocket for AMPCs, and have to manage their inventory weight and space more efficiently, causing more self-limiting effects on how much "wealth" someone can pump & dump into the world at any given time.
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What's more, it makes sense. In the shoes of a shopkeep, if someone comes in and keeps emptying the same trash to your store, you're going to pay less for their goods until you've had time to move the stock you already have, you've already been shown there's no supply or demand issue for them to reasonably markup. Those goods become worth less the more that is brought in.
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This value could also work inversely too, this heightened OCR value could give people discounts to buy their existing goods (up to a point) so if there were consumables from that store they wanted to buy after all, it wouldn't cost them that much.
Frequent suppliers of stock may not get paid as much but they'll get discounts on goods for a bit, and it could function as a quicker way to cool off the penalty, buying things one might actually need from the merchant.