Author: riser
This article was originally written before the start of trading period 83. Being busy as president and wood trader I left it almost completed when the period started so I did not post it for the edition 1 as intended. When that edition was published I saw thehopehitman2 had written an excellent and very similar article so I decided to complete my article after the trading period was over, as a summary of events instead of a prediction. I changed the verbs from a future to a past tense and changed a few badly written sentences but otherwise left it almost untouched. What is so striking is how similar thehopehitman2‘s thoughts and mine were about that period. I am not publishing this to be original or to copy his article, I felt a summary confirming his predictions would be a good acknowledgment of thehopehitman2’s excellent job as both writer and editor of The Miniconomist.
To match the start of the trading period 84 with the Christmas break, we had a shorter period 83. In a sense, it was an experiment. After all, it is not unusual to have a boring third week because so many people have abandoned or closed shop that even the remaining traders are having trouble working properly. Is a two week trading period the solution?
Usually the trading period is split in a few steps:
1 – Start of the round: Everyone try to make their first shop(s) to offer their products. Money is either plentiful or rapidly disappearing because of the high prices or nowhere to be seen, until a new person logs in and make the money flow again for everyone
2 – Crazy expansion: People are making shops in other cities. Shops are too small to use taxis properly or there are problems getting a taxi. There is a parking spot shortage. Shops are either full or empty (because someone needed your products and bought them all).
3 – Consolidation: Shops are getting bigger. That makes people better able to serve the needs of their customer. We know who was successful and who was not, who have a chance at scoring high and who won’t.
4 – Hoarding of money: The traders have finished spending money and are hoarding it increase their net worth because there is nothing worthwhile to spend it on. Stock market is no longer increasing and might have started lowering
5 – Clearance sale: Trade is dying. Traders are selling the last products to have nothing left by the end of the round. If the wood, iron or gas traders have closed shop, trade is dead.
How long does each step last? It depends on the trader’s strategy and on how successful the trader is and how active the other traders are.
Now, what about the two week period, what happened? Exactly the same thing. Those steps might have not been the same length but fundamentally, nothing changed.
What does that shorter length means then? I’d say on average, everyone is about 30% lower and so the ranking is mostly in the same order as would have happened otherwise. A few traders who had a good start but a weaker second week would probably have scored lower and those who had a slow start but a good second week would have had more time to continue their ascent but the rankings would still have looked mostly the same.
The traders I see who are really affected are the stock traders who have less time to make money but with the higher number of stock options one can have they should have been able to compensate.
The only persons really affected by this are the politicians. Those who wanted to change things now have a lot less time to do it. They can adjust but it still means they must do their things quickly.
So is the two-week period a solution? Not really, it doesn’t change that much the final clearance sale step. It simply makes it shorter. But it does the same for the fun part too.
For the biggest traders who after 3 days have completed building the shops and are already hoarding the money, it doesn’t change anything. For the smaller traders, having more time might mean more time to play and expand properly but also more time to wait if they have been crowded out.
Do I prefer two week or three weeks trading periods? Since I’m addicted and I come here for the social part of the federation, having longer periods means that dreaded boring week between the periods come by less often. But that’s just me.