4Game

As many of you have noticed, a lot of items lately became Barter only, this is causing quite a bit of trouble among the players, for some barters more than others. I'd like to point out some of the issues that this system causes, in an effort to improve the system because I think it could be great for the economy. TL:DR provided at the bottom.

The Amount:

Trades can be interesting without being overly complicated. One of the "worst" barters is the one for the T H I C C Items Case. It currently requires you to have 40 Moonshine, 25 Vodka, and 30 Whiskey. A total of 95 items, taking up 2 slots per item, with a total of 190 total slots being used. I think you can see where I'm going with this. That's nearly 75% of a Standard Edition size stash, basically making that trade useless to anyone who has that size. Even for someone with Edge of Darkness, that's nearly 30% of their entire stash. Personally, I would not do a trade that requires nearly this many spaces in my inventory, this is coming from someone with Edge of Darkness, it's just too much of a hassle. There's a few trades like this at the moment, it's not the biggest problem, but it does make those trades rather useless if you ask me. To fix this, we need more high tier items added to the game. Currently the only item that would make some high tier trades such as the T H I C C Items Case less crazy would be to reduce the amount of alcohol needed and make up for it with LEDX's. LEDX's are already used for many things, such as other barters, the hideout, and quests. Adding more items like this would allow for many more trades to be viable.

The Cost of the Items:

This point is referring to the cost of the actual items you're trading in to receive the item you want from a Trader. When an item becomes used for a desirable barter, it increases in price, and assuming that the trade was based on what the item's price without accounting for the inflation, the trade can often times become useless. For example, say if you could trade 3 Hand Drills for a REAP-IR Thermal Scope (180,000 roubles), Hand Drills currently at 45k a piece on the Flea Market, because their only use is for the hideout, they are large items, people want to get rid of them quickly, and Therapist buys them for the same price. This would cause the hand drills to increase in price, beginning to be equal to the REAP-IR, which would increase the price of them to be about 60k. Seems okay, right? Here's why it's generally not. People see this as a market manipulation opportunity. The REAP-IR is a very sought after item, so people will pay quite a bit to get their hands on one, so others will see this as an opportunity to overprice the hand drills and make millions from doing so. Now, each hand drill on the Flea Market costs 90k because of this. Now, the trade costs you 270k roubles in hand drills, meanwhile Jaeger sells them for 250k. This trade has now become useless, just as many of the other barters are because of this process.

Outdated Barters:

Many barters have fallen victim to the previously mentioned issues, so now, they are now "dead barters" and have no reason to be used, and have no place in the trader's menu. These barters either need to be removed or they need to be altered/updated so that they have a use again, because as of now they just cause the traders to load slower and clutter the trade screen. One of the many trades this is like this is the Items Case trade from Therapist. It requires 20 ophthalmoscopes, and 10 piles of meds. Ophthalmoscopes are 80k a piece on the flea market, and the pile of meds is 12k a piece, totaling 1.72 million roubles, meanwhile you can also just flat out buy an Items Case for 13,773€, which is 1.64 million roubles. This may not seem like a huge deal, and yes it's not overpaying by a lot, but because you're overpaying, why do it in the first place? This leads to the next issue, and how to make barters better.

Barters should be "profitable":

Why would you stock up on a bunch of items to pay the same price, or more for something that costs you the same in cash? It takes up more space and time to collect/purchase those items. You could just sell those same items on the Flea Market and make the same amount back as the cost of the item, if not profit because of it, because those items are often overpriced as mentioned in a previous point. Selling the items would also further increase your Flea Market reputation, allowing you to sell more items on the Flea Market than you could before.

Barters should not be inconvenient:

Just like the T H I C C Items Case, in a sense that it is just not worth having to deal with so many items in your inventory at once. The amount of total "space" required for a trade needs to be controlled, personally if the trade requires more than 80 total spaces, I don't personally think anyone would ever do it.

TL:DR

Barters are too tedious, overpriced, and inconvenient for them to be useful and a good system, acting to change these for the better will make the economy more stable and make the trades more desirable.