WOLV NEWS - celestial's article archive

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"Perfecting the Price, One Pup at a Time" 4/14/21
Irn Full Interview PART 1 - PART 2 4/14/21

APRIL 14, 2021

           An extremely popular topic going around many users here on WD: the unstable TC. I'm sure everyone is at least somewhat aware of the ever-rising-and-falling market here on WD, and if you aren't, all it takes is a quick look through a page or two of the TC. Currency ratio rates seem to change every day: today I just bought GC for a 1:99 SC ratio. Yes, ninety-nine, you read that right. One community of users stands out especially when it comes to actively trying to stabilize the Wolvden Trading Center -- The Merchant's Guild.

           The Merchant's Guild was started by @treestargarden#23521 back in February and has grown significantly ever since. With over 40 members, the Merchants Guild has successfully flipped the standard price for Healing Salve peruse and all members continue to work on stabilizing the market with decided prices based on multiple factors, not just rarity. THIS post shows all the market calculators currently in use by members of the Guild, and they encourage you to use them too! 


         The calculators are easy to use, and simple to understand, but certainly not as easy to create and develop. I have interviewed @Irn #13484 on the topic of her latest project, a Pup Pricing Formula [3.0]! 

          "On your pup pricing thread, you state that you are trying to develop a formula for selling your pups because you "like spreadsheets and consistency.". Other than these two, are there any other reasons that inspired you to create the best pricing formula possible?"
          A. "The single biggest inspiration was necessity. I'd just joined in late 2020 and had my first few litters; after keeping back my favorites I decided to sell the rest and realized, wow I have absolutely no idea how to even begin pricing these pups. So I started wandering around the pricing forums looking for answers, but was mostly seeing lots of folks posting the same question over and over: “how much is this pup worth?”" ..."Since then, my biggest inspiration to keep working on the formula has been love for this community. I know that's cheesy as all hell, but I was a mere babe during the height of the forum days of ye olde internet, so this was my first real experience with a group of like-minded strangers who also CARED about something like I did! The question “how much is this pup worth?” is still one that's getting asked a LOT, and I suspect it will always be asked as long as there are new users and new mechanics for this wacky game. That growth and that change is part of why I’m excited to continue here."

                    "Ideally, this formula will be utilized by not only The Merchant's Guild but hopefully by many other users to stabilize the market. Do you believe, at its current state, it will be able to create a stable and universal pricing system for pups?"          
          A. "Oh dang what a question! I would really like to think: yes. Currently, the goal of the formula is to create a floor, or a base price, for any given combination of traits a pup might have. The more people who opt into it, the more stable the market will be. But, it most certainly isn't the whole solution to a stable market, by itself"..."There are several factors and traits that still needed to be incorporated, where I and the folks who want to work on this haven't yet come up with the right math."..."Additionally, there are a lot of factors outside of the formula's control that go into the pup market."..."We can't change that individually; that's too big for any one user or one sale price point. Solutions to these kinds of problems will take time or even mod intervention to correct. However, I'm a big believer in collective action. The more of us are working towards a stable market by using stabilizing actions like formulas and base prices, the more stable the market will be."

                    "Do you think this formula still needs to be under development for longer, or are you relatively happy with how it stands? (If yes to part one of this question, how much longer do you think will be needed? )" 
         A. "I am extremely happy with how it stands... for now! Right now, it's (in my humble opinion) an excellent attempt at capturing the standards for pricing in this current market. Our main goals in the Guild right now are stability, and it’s doing its job (at least that I can see!) in that respect."..."there are always improvements to be made. The original title of the formula post is “Help me perfect a pup pricing formula!” - I confess that's now a bit of a joke to me. I feel that it will never be completely “perfect,” because just by using it, you change the market,"..."I suspect we'll start to move into a cycle where you've got a big change or overhaul (like the one we just made here) followed by a series of little changes; so if this is 3.0, the next tweak that follows will be 3.1, then 3.2, 3.3, etc. The big question is what will push us into 4.0! And I'm excited to find out with the rest of y'all what that will be."

          Irn says she hasn't chased a female pup in a very long time, and she only rarely chases male pups when they age up. Overall, this Pup Pricing formula has proven extremely successful for members of the Guild. Irn recommends joining the Guild, "I totally recommend to anyone interested in joining to check out our forum page and join the discord, if only to lurk for a bit to see if we're the kind of folks you'd like to work with. I don't think anyone needs any particular area of focus or expertise to join and get a lot out of it. Anyone is welcome! Our rules focus mainly around not destabilizing via undercutting, and not being an ass (we've got pretty strict zero tolerances around any form of discrimatory or harmful speech, so bigots need not apply). If those two things sound reasonable to you, we'd love to have you."  

          You can find Irn's Pup Pricing calculator HERE 

The biggest of thank-yous to Irn for agreeing to speak with me and be featured in one of my articles for WOLV NEWS. 

JESUS THE FUCKING FORMATING IM GOING TO CRY 

IRN FULL INTERVIEW :: 

Q1. On your pup pricing thread, you state that you are trying to develop a formula for selling your pups because you "like spreadsheets and consistency.". Other than these two, are there any other reasons that inspired you to create the best pricing formula possible?

The single biggest inspiration was necessity. I'd just joined in late 2020 and had my first few litters; after keeping back my favorites I decided to sell the rest and realized, wow I have absolutely no idea how to even begin pricing these pups. So I started wandering around the pricing forums looking for answers, but was mostly seeing lots of folks posting the same question over and over: “how much is this pup worth?” The price check posting system then seemed a little chancy – some posts would get a response, many wouldn't – and I didn't want to ask for help every time I had a new pup to sell! Based on the discussion around me, I started figuring out a rough metric for at least baseline prices, but I was new, and I knew I was missing a lot of what was going into the prices when more seasoned players put up pups on the market. So, I asked for help. The proto-version of the formula is actually first seen publicly here where I first asked if there even WAS such a formula that folks were using. You can see that beyond the first few very helpful responses from Sol, there wasn't a ton of traction, but it told me enough: there wasn't a formula; and my starting numbers were way, way off.

But I'm a spreadsheet person at heart. By this point I was already using a spreadsheet to keep track of everything: current pack members, pups born from each litter, lineages to check for inbreeding, what pupsitters were covering which pups, even how much food I need to take in each day to feed everyone. I kept putting my pups up for sale with best guesses, and got really mixed results. It was weirdly anxiety producing – would I have to start chasing pups as resources got stretched tighter and tighter? Or could I still afford to feed them until adulthood if my hunting teams got better? And how DOES a hunting team get better? I started getting more into the community side of the game, asking for help where I needed it, responding to folks in the help chat if I knew the answer to their question, always keeping an eye out for someone who had made a formula they would share that I could use. I started recognizing more and more patterns in what sold vs what didn't, and as I started buying wolves myself, I got more data on how folks were pricing THEIR sales. Slowly a formula developed, but it was still unreliable; the market was changing faster than I could keep up, so I didn't know if adjusting my formula had been the deciding factor in which pups sold, or if it was just today's market fluke.

Eventually I just said fuck it (can I swear in this?) and wrote out a post detailing my formula and asking for more help. If the mythical formula-haver was out there, they were being damn quiet about it, and I'd just have to start working on it myself. That post actually sat in draft for days, and I had to have a non-WD friend convince me to post it (like I said, anxiety!!). I didn't expect much of a response. But, clearly I was wrong! LOTS of people engaged. Lots of people wanted to help! I think right now the forum discussion is 13 pages long. I was (and still am) blown away by that.

Since then, my biggest inspiration to keep working on the formula has been love for this community. I know that's cheesy as all hell, but I was a mere babe during the height of the forum days of ye olde internet, so this was my first real experience with a group of like-minded strangers who also CARED about something like I did! The question “how much is this pup worth?” is still one that's getting asked a LOT, and I suspect it will always be asked as long as there are new users and new mechanics for this wacky game. That growth and that change is part of why I’m excited to continue here. I love being part of the people who want to answer that question as best we can, even knowing that there can never be the perfect answer!

Q2. Why did you decide to go to the general WD public for aid? Why not just keep it personal or only have a few select users to help you with your formula?

Honestly? The biggest reason is that I just straight up didn't know anyone here! I have exactly 0 real-life friends who play WD (although that may change eventually, if they get curious about what this weird website I like to talk about a lot is like!) and am not a very social person on the inter-webs, so had 0 WD friends either. I had no idea who to ask for help, let alone how I'd ask.

I also did keep it personal, for a while. I joined in October of 2020 and started trying to price new pups basically right away, but besides a first quick “Uh does anyone know if this math exists?”, I didn't ask for proper help until mid December. The pups I was producing then weren't varied enough to get a full understanding of what was worth how much, and I was kinda stuck on what to change to get the formula to work right. If you stare at something for too long, you stop seeing it properly; I was at that point, so I needed some fresh perspectives.

And, part of it is that I just thought, there might be other people like me who I didn't know yet, who had been doing similar work but hadn't posted about it, or who hadn't posted where I'd see it. I wanted a way to reach out to them, even though I had no idea who they were, or if they even existed. A public call for help seemed the best option, and I'm so glad I took the leap, since such wonderful things have come out of it!

Q3. Ideally, this formula will be utilized by not only The Merchant's Guild, but hopefully by many other users to stabilize the market. Do you believe, at it's current state, it will be able to create a stable and universal pricing system for pups?

Oh dang what a question! I would really like to think: yes. Currently the goal of the formula is to create a floor, or a base price, for any given combination of traits a pup might have. The more people who opt into it, the more stable the market will be. But, it most certainly isn't the whole solution to a stable market, by itself.

There are several factors and traits that still needed to be incorporated, where I and the folks who want to work on this haven't yet come up with the right math. What's the best way to account for mutation carriers? Now that we have rarer event-only claws / skin / nose types, do we need to start accounting for them when pricing a pup? If so, how? What about folks who are trying to breed LOW stat pups instead of high? Thankfully most of these are things that are likely to increase the value of a pup, not decrease it, so the fundamental principle of creating a base-price still holds.

Additionally, there are a lot of factors outside of the formula's control that go into the pup market. Currently the amount of (or lack of!) SC in the market, and the SC:GC conversion rate, are two REALLY big factors. We can't change that individually; that's too big for any one user or one sale price point. Solutions to these kinds of problems will take time or even mod intervention to correct. However, I'm a big believer in collective action. The more of us are working towards a stable market by using stabilizing actions like formulas and base prices, the more stable the market will be.

Even with all those caveats, I do think this version of the formula works very well. That will get even stronger as, I hope, people engage with this formula more and more and use it when pricing even more pups. Working with the Merchant's Guild to try and build a more stable market is incredibly rewarding, and I'm so grateful for the work my fellow members are doing in both the pup market and others. But I'm never going to say that any version of the formula is the set-in-stone-forever-perfect-formula: they're all just best reflections of the current market, and they'll need to be adjusted as the game evolves and grows around us. The more people that use the formula and provide feedback, or even take this version and develop their own, the stronger it grows and the more stable our market will be!

Q4. The formula was created for use intended for selling pups, however, can this formula be used on any age of wolf?

As a base price generator, I think it works well. I use it to sell grown pups and special NBWs all the time. To make it better though, I'd love to add more factors, like heats remaining, role proficiency, etc, which will make the formula more useful for pricing adult wolves with specific skillsets. But that's where the community comes in! I'm not a big seller or buyer of high-role-proficiency wolves, so we'll need the input of people who have experience with those kind of sales and purchases to better calculate a formula for those wolves.

IRN full interview cont

Q5. Do you think this formula still needs to be under development for longer, or are you relatively happy with how it stands? (If yes to part one of this question, how much longer do you think will be needed? )

I am extremely happy with how it stands... for now! Right now, it's (in my humble opinion) an excellent attempt at capturing the standards for pricing in this current market. Our main goals in the Guild right now are stability, and it’s doing its job (at least that I can see!) in that respect.

But there are always improvements to be made. The original title of the formula post is “Help me perfect a pup pricing formula!” - I confess that's now a bit of a joke to me. I feel that it will never be completely “perfect,” because just by using it, you change the market, which means that new updates will need to be made in the future to account of the ripple effect from those changes! It will always need to evolve and grow, unless both the game and the market have completely frozen and becoming static, which would bum me the hell out.

I suspect we'll start to move into a cycle where you've got a big change or overhaul (like the one we just made here) followed by a series of little changes; so if this is 3.0, the next tweak that follows will be 3.1, then 3.2, 3.3, etc. The big question is what will push us into 4.0! And I'm excited to find out with the rest of y'all what that will be.

Q6. How does the help from the community of WD and The Merchant's Guild assist you? Do you think it's easier getting help from the general public or do you think it would be easier with a smaller group/just yourself?

Oh my god yes, the help from both the community-at-large and the Guild has been invaluable. So much so that it's genuinely hard to decide which way is “more” helpful.

Some of the help is direct and easy to see: people on the forum post make suggestions of things to change or account for, we discuss those changes, folks make suggestions on how to implement them. Or sometimes I'll work more closely with Guild folks (BIG shout out to Treestar for all their time spent with me working on the newest iterations) to have more of a brainstorm session where we test out the math and get more into messy innards of how it all works. And sometimes it's even more abstract than that: I'm not a math person and my excel skills are 100% self-taught, so the longer I and other folks work on the formula, the more skilled we all become at seeing and implementing possible improvements. The number of times I have hesitated to change part of the formula because I don't know how to make that work in a spreadsheet, said fuck it (sorry again), and then gone and taught myself how to do that thing in excel so I can make the math work, is more than I can count, and it’s one of my favorite parts of this whole experience. I wouldn't be able to push myself that way if I was working alone.

In terms of what is easier... that's hard to say. There's definitely a power in not owning a thing; to say, hey, this belongs to all of us, please come and make part of it yours. That's what I love about the public forum aspect, and why I've kept it going even as I work closer with more individuals to do deep dives. But it's also very personal and vulnerable, too, and that can come hand-in-hand with hurt feelings and ego. More than a few folks have said that this entire endeavor is a waste of time, and that does sting. They may even be right, although I certainly don't think so. Even when folks are helping and adding to the discussion, when someone comes along and criticizes something you're passionate about, it's hard not to get defensive. In that regard, working one-on-one with someone eases that: you trust them, you know them, you know they're coming from a place of good intent.

But this is, fundamentally, a communal project. I don't own this. I'm hoping it out-grows me someday! Keeping the community discussion going, both in the guild and in the larger WD community, is integral to the future of this project, and can't be neglected just because my feelings might get hurt a little in the process. If there are people who think the formula should change, I always want to listen to and respect what they say.

Q7. Once perfected and completed, do you plan to release the formula to the public along with a spreadsheet calculator for easy use?

Oh it's already out there!! The most recent version of the formula is accessible to anyone, and always will be. I've shared a version of my own excel sheet before for previous iterations, and likely will for this one too at some later date – there's also a breakdown line by line of my own excel formula and how it relates to the math. I'm a huge advocate for folks learning about this stuff, and am always happy to be a resource for people wanting to build their own sheet to calculate prices and track their

sales! I'm planning on releasing a clean template of my own tracking sheet that folks can copy and use, as well.

In terms of a spreadsheet calculator, I've worked with a few folks in the Guild to build one! Currently it's not widely shared outside the Guild, but in chatting with other guild folks about that today we realized that's silly and we want all the traction on this possible, so here it is! We're hoping at some point to get this turned into a proper web app calculator that is much more plug-and-go, but for now this should work well for anyone who wants to price a pup using this formula!

Q8. Do you think that even with a perfect formula, you may find yourself thinking a price is too low/high for a particular pup? If a user did find this to be the case, would you suggest keeping the formulated price, or would you say it's okay to alter the price?

The formula is currently designed to create a floor; if the price feels too low, then we actively encourage folks to price higher! If someone is consistently pricing higher than the formula for similar pups and having success selling them, that's really helpful to know, because it means we've undervalued something key that isn't being reflected in the formula price. Something about those pups is valuable, and the formula isn't capturing it, which means we have the opportunity to better the formula! The formula is ever changing, and we need the feedback of other sellers to get it working right whenever a new mechanic is released (like anything event related) or when we add in new elements (like when we include mutie carriers or things of that nature).

In the other direction – we're really hoping folks won't undercut what the formula prices an individual pup at. We encourage folks using the calculator to come chat with us (in the guild discord or on the forums or hell, just sending me a message) if they think the price that's being spit out is too high. For us folks in the Guild, that promise not to undercut is a main driving force behind what we do, and we keep each other accountable with that. That's part of why the ongoing work to maintain and update the formula is really integral to its success; we can't just set an arbitrary price and say, “that's your base-price,” and demand folks play by our rules. People are going to do what they feel works for them, and I can't fault people for making those decisions. But I do firmly believe that the more of us work together to abide by market minimums, more stable the market, and the better off we will all be in the long run.

In the other direction – we're really hoping folks won't undercut what the formula prices an individual pup at. We encourage folks using the calculator to come chat with us (in the guild discord or on the forums or hell, just sending me a message) if they think the price that's being spit out is too high. For us folks in the Guild, that promise not to undercut is a main driving force behind what we do, and we keep each other accountable with that. That's part of why the ongoing work to maintain and update the formula is really integral to its success; we can't just set an arbitrary price and say, “that's your base-price,” and demand folks play by our rules. People are going to do what they feel works for them, and I can't fault people for making those decisions. But I do firmly believe that the more of us work together to abide by market minimums, more stable the market, and the better off we will all be in the long run.

Q9. From your perspective, how successful has the formula been for you? How many pups do you end up chasing that don't get sold? 

I've had a lot of success with this formula. I haven't chased a female pup in a long time, and very rarely chase males once they've aged up. That does depend a lot on how active I am on the TC in terms of bumping trades, posting in the sales chat, etc, but overall it's cut way down on the pups I chase away once they're adults.

Q10. [kind of off topic] How would you describe The Merchant's Guild as a collective? Would you recommend any user to join, or would you recommend having a have a certain strive for this area of focus before joining?

I'm maybe a little too close to the Guild to give an unbiased opinion lol, but overall we're a good group of folks who want to work together to make things easier and to help us all make those cones. I totally recommend to anyone interested in joining to check out our forum page and join the discord, if only to lurk for a bit to see if we're the kind of folks you'd like to work with. I don't think anyone needs any particular area of focus or expertise to join and get a lot out of it. Anyone is welcome! Our rules focus mainly around not destabilizing via undercutting, and not being an ass (we've got pretty strict zero tolerances around any form of discriminatory or harmful speech, so bigots need not apply). If those two things sound reasonable to you, we'd love to have you.