Changes To The Premium Vendor
Earlier this week, there was an announcement posted by the game developer regarding changes to meet Roblox’s new policies for age restrictions as well as meet new government restrictions imposed on games internationally. Normally we would defer these types of updates to other news channels. But this one has a potential impact on the in-game economy so we are going to use this week’s update to discuss.
In case you missed it, here is the change log for Tradelands over the past few days:
The most important take-away from this is that items purchased from the Premium Vendor may no longer be tradeable. That means the anchor that keeps the price of some items grounded will be removed from the trading economy. These purchasable items will have a designation “[P]” in their name to differentiate from their tradeable counterparts. When you remove the grounding factor in this way, it means the item will lose one of it’s primary influencing factors, and price volatility is likely to result.
Consider what would happen if Brekonium was suddenly available via mining rocks. Right now, because the material is locked behind the Breki Wealth Token, prices stay consistent with their price tag at the vendor. If they were minable, it would have fluctuations that are more akin to Electrosteel. The amount being mined would be a more important factor than the price to buy them at the merchant.
Unless things change, the market which will see the most change will be the wood market. The fact that all wood types available in Timberfelling are also in the Premium Merchant keeps price fluctuations somewhat anchored to the value of Premium Tokens. This is why the JSI Index follows a different trend than the other primary indexes and has half the value of the mining index. If Premium Woods truly become untradeable, we can expect these to more closely match the price fluctuations of their metal counterparts. We are already seeing Spruce get a leg up as a result of all this.
In fairness to the developers of Tradelands, I can see that they are trying to minimize the potential impact of this new requirement being imposed on them by Roblox. I think they correctly deduced that their audience is not on the younger side, and as a result need to ensure they keep their Teen+ audience if they want to attract the navy vs pirate crowd to their game.
That means when it comes down to fighting/roleplay vs. trade/economy, they are targeting the former. The “Trade” in Tradelands will suffer a bit, so expect some volatility in the economy soon. We will continue to report on the status of the economy for as long as we are able, despite the possibility that this change will prevent several of our members from participating in the game’s economy any longer.
