Help me perfect a pup pricing formula!

I find melanism to be prettier. You get the cool eye colors, and don't have to stare at that ghastly pink skin.

Yeah, that’s fair

Could somebody simplify this for me? It seems pretty interesting, but I'm not very good at math and reading stuff like that, so Im kinda confused

youll take each aspect of your wolf like base coat, genetics, stats, eyes even and apply a modifier for each one along with the starting price of 20sc for each wolf and the modifiers multiply your overall price to come up with a price for you for your pups based on what they have.

so like i have a female Jacinthe pup (0.22%) Teir 2 with 353stats 4 marks and fox eyes with no inbreeding. Those are all the things ill plug into the formula which means based on it she would be priced around 100sc. Now because shes 3rd or 4th gen from michael scott i could price her a little more perhaps because thats a big line. But this isnt absolute, but it is to keep us from underpricing so that we dont undercut others continuously and therefore bring the price market down so far everyone struggles to make what their pups are actually worth. teir 2s shouldnt e being sold for 10sc and thats what im finding. If we can get this sells to level out we can also keep the money conversion level as well so everyone always makes money without worry.

As much as we might want our pups to sell for more, economics just doesn't work that way. Supply far outweighs demand- den slots are hard to get, puppies aren't. Even trying to decide on a standard pricing formula won't work because not everyone will cooperate- not everyone will even know about it! As much as a T2 pup "should" be worth more, they just aren't because they are competing with a deluge of similar pups. There is no "should"- economic forces don't listen our wishes. It's like telling the sky to stop raining.

People keep having more and more puppies every day, which makes everything more common, which drives down the value of everything. Maybe if people chased more puppies this wouldn't be such a problem, but there's no incentive to do that- indeed the opposite, there's a disincentive because you feel bad for deleting a cute pup. Even those who buy puppies to chase can't solve this problem because more and more puppies just keep being born, so they can't possibly keep up.

This problem won't be solved unless there is some balancing game feature introduced, like an NPC that buys puppies based on rarity for some flat price. I hope the Mama Bear who adopts pups gets added to the game soon.

Until then all you can do is compare similar pups to see what they sell for, and advertise your tail off.

oh yes.. is Time for Mama Bear :)

@Wyrdwulf I totally agree about the need for a pup-taker system like the Mama Bear. And when you say you need to compare pups in order to price properly  - thats exactly what this formula is trying to do, so you're totally right! When folks price a wolf, they DO have a "logic" behind why they set the prices the way they do, and we're trying to quantify that - inherently a Sisyphean task but a fun one nevertheless!

I'm not sure I agree with your take on the incentives though - I've found that the majority of the folks I interact with here are not Raise and Chase like myself but are MUCH pickier about which wolves they do / do not keep because, if pups are going to be sold, they need to be sold for more than the cost of the resources to raise them. You can sell surplus food, feathers, nesting materials, cures, etc for much more.

I'm also not sure I get what you're saying about how the market doesn't care what should be. The market... is made up 100% of individuals making tradeoff decisions all the time - that's the basis for economics right there. In the aggregate, there are things valued more highly than others - a T2 wolf will always be worth more than a T1 because they are, inherently, rarer. Obviously you can have lots of fringe cases (some people may just genuinely prefer T1s) but overall, you will still see a demand for T2s that exceeds the demand of T1s, which is why the formula takes that into account. The question is not IF there's a value difference - the question is, what's the ratio? And that's why this formula has gone through so many iterations! I started off valuing T2s at 7x the same pup as a T1, which was WAY out of wack with the market originally, and as more T3s enter the market thats gone down even more. 

Unless I totally misread what you're saying and you're saying that there's no quantifiable minimum value for a wolf? In which case... then you've got a market failure in the form of a fast race to the bottom, and the only thing that will fix it is either intervention from the devs or collective organizing by the users. I can affect one of those things but not the other.

Unfortunately yes, I think we are experiencing a crash that can only be corrected by intervention from the devs. Prices are all over the place and don't seem to have much rhyme or reason- if I search for t2 pups there's 18 pages of T2s under 10sc with wildly varying characteristics, even 450+ stat pups for just 4sc!

As I said before since den slots are hard to obtain but pups are trivially easy to get, supply far far outstrips demand, driving the price mercilessly to the bottom. People are always going to be desperate to sell because chasing makes you feel bad so they price lower and lower and lower. I believe the problem is completely intractable.

I don't think organizing the collective playerbase is possible- not enough people will cooperate. (Not out of malice, but just because they are unaware of the effort or generally apathetic.)

If there were an in-game "price suggestion" feature that could rate pups on their tier/marks/stats/lineage it would help a lot since it would essentially do what your formula is trying to do, establish a price floor. Mama Bear might solve this by doing just that- not only acting as a pup sink to clear out the market, but providing a minimum price for each pup since you want to earn from other players at least what you could earn from an NPC.

I get that. I personally have found a lot of success with organizing, to the point where the guild has been successful in using concerted effort to increase guild profit, which is awesome. I don't think you need 100% user buy-in to make it effective (although wouldn't that be so cool??) - if you get enough of the active sellers onboard you can start to shift market culture. Even without that though, I think the formula has been really helpful in just giving folks the math to answer "where the fuck do I start???" when they begin pricing.

The other complication right now is the SC shortage which, as time goes on, will (hopefully!) get better and mean there's more demand in the market because folks will have the SC to burn on a cute pup, and the SC to afford more den slots. In the meantime, we work with what we have.

@Irn or anyone who knows, is the Merchants Guild still active and if so could I get a link?