Original Design question about shopkeeper prices

[Nomax5]

Do you think there was a reason why an npc shopkeeper would buy your fine steel weapon for about 5pp then offer it for resale at 10 times the value?

it has always been a mystery to me why the mark-up wasn’t say 30% or double the buying price or something.

I don’t think the original designer would make sucha fundamental mistake so I assume it was by design.

but why? what is the reasoning behind it?

[renoofturks1]

I would guess it had something to do with stimulating the economy. If a vendor would buy something for 10 plat, then resell for 50p, you could sell to a player for 40 plat and everyone would be happy. The higher prices on vendor-only sold items would also help to keep inflation down by eating up a larger portion of the cash flow in the system.

All just guesses of course.

[Nomax5]

yeah I can go with that renoofturks1 if you have 1,000's of players on a server and you want them in interact - buying and selling stuff from each other you need the vendor prices to be high. after all you're not going to by a fine steel weapon from a player for 30pp when the vendors sell them for 6pp

But

typically we don't have 1,000's of players so the vendor prices could be more reasonable and higher level players selling stuff to vendors could be helping new players by making items availiable.

Although I have a feeling they disappear when the server reboots.

[trevius]

That all depends on the server you play on. Some servers stress an economy, whether it is player-based or just buying and selling from merchants. My server doesn't really have much economy balance right now, but we may work on it more in the future. EQEmu Servers can be customized in almost any way the admin wants, so it all depends on how they wanted it designed.