Hey citizens of Lioden, Taxxi here. It's my first time posting anything in this board, and while everything in my idea may look solid to me, it always helps to have a little bit of constructive criticism and/or suggestions! So if you read this and don't support it, feel free to explain why you don't, or offer a suggestion that might change your mind! :]
I've also done a little searching and I haven't found anything similar to this, so either it's been shot down in the past, hasn't been proposed, or I haven't seen it. Either way please be kind, I'm just trying to help solve a big problem here.

There's a lot of blabbling between here and the main point, so if you want to get to just the bulletpoints, skip down to the big bolded summary.

Anyway, a lot of people, myself included, have been frustrated by the economy of Lioden. Examining it, it seems like we have a couple of problems here: 1) A shortage of SB in the economy, 2) a surplus of unwanted or unsellable cubs, and, although not tackled in this solution, but obviously a contender to the problem, 3) high stud fees.
EDIT: Apparently there is not a shortage of SB (this may not be the problem as I suspected) - so why are nice lions going for dirt cheap/or are unsellable?

If you're like me, the inability to sell quality cubs for a decent price, i.e. over 100sb, has severely harmed your experience with Lioden. I love this game, and I want to continue loving this game, but this makes it hard!

So, Zephyr and i tossed around some ideas, and we came up with a tentative solution that goes a little something like this:

- An npc, like the Monkey, who - instead of buying items from you - buys unwanted lions in a range of 100-300sb.

BUT WAIT, you say, won't someone exploit this?
Of course people will want to exploit this, so we thought about thwarting that.

- Each lion could be priced depending on markings OR stats OR both, so that a lion with one marking and low stats (an NCL, for example) would only fetch 100sb, whereas a lion that has been bred several generations in, with say seven markings and 200 stats, may fetch something along the lines of 200sb. How detailed staff would want to get into this is up to them, but the option to have custom markings worth more money is always an option.

My line of thinking was to have the NPC pay in line with Decor's pricing guide, although slightly less, which would encourage sales and actual purchase of lion cubs by PLAYERS. This would encourage people to first attempt to sell to people first, but if they for whatever reason cannot, then they aren't totally out of the stud fees that they've paid.

Now let me briefly bring up stud fees, because although this solution does not tackle them (there isn't an inherent problem with stud fee prices in my opinion), it is affected by them.

Say you find a nice, cheap stud. Lots of markings, really beautiful lion. Stud fee is 500sb. Now that's pretty cheap, since a lot of really, really nice lions can go for 1000sb, or even in the GB range. Now say you stud a nice lady to him, and she, best case scenario, has four really, REALLY nice cubs. In the current Lioden economy, you really only get around 75sb for a cub on a good day. Assuming you sell ALL of these nice cubs and keep NONE for yourself, you're only going to make 400sb, that's a 100sb deficit from your original stud fee. Not including any food that you fed these lions to keep them happy or whatever.

Obviously this is frustrating. It's frustrated me for months, and in recent times, has frustrated me even more. Sure, there's ugly cubs, this is a fact of life. But there are really, really nice ones that someone could use, and either they're sold for way below value, or chased, and that's sad.

And, not to throw Decor under the bus or anything here, but located at the very top of the pricing guide is a quote:

"For myself I would like to get at least some back on the studfee if the cub Im selling dont turn out the way I wanted/need it to be (if Im aiming for something special) but the cub isnt "ugly" (or "plain") enough to not at least deserve a chance for a new home. So...I put together these little pricing "guides", in parts building on both stats, basecolor and markings."

SUMMARY

-- An NPC that would buy lions from people (effectively chasing them, but for money and without the guilt)
-- Prices would range from 100-300sb based on stats/# of markings.
-- Prices would be LOWER than Decor's Pricing Guide to encourage people to use this as a baseline for player-to-player lion sales
(for example, a lion sold by Decor's guide might sell to a PLAYER for 250sb, but the NPC would only offer 150sb, etc.)
-- This would lower the amount of unwanted lions floating around Lioden
BUT
-- It would also feed SB into the economy, which means that nice lions would actually sell for what they're worth
-- The system could either not accept NCLs (to prevent blatant exploitation), or pay dirt for them.
-- We could also instill a daily/weekly/monthly limit to discourage 'farming' of lions just to get money. The goal here is to make lions sold to PLAYERS worth more than lions sold to NPC, while still providing sb to the economy to promote this exchange.

-- I understand Lioden is run off of purchasing GB/donations/actual real life money, so the SB value of GB would inherently go up, with all of the sb floating around in the economy. This might even help promote actual real life money spending for GB via the Oasis, instead of SB. However it would not be impossible for people who cannot afford to by GB with real life money to purchase GB via sb.

Obviously the idea is still in a working stage, and if you have suggestions to better it, just let me know!