So currently in most cityRPGs, a grocer will sell food using the following event:
onActivate > Self > sellFood> [%portionsize][%foodname][%profit]
Using these settings:
onActivate > Self > sellFood> [Americanized][Cake Batter][4]
The result is something like, "Would you like to by an Americanized portion of Cake Batter, for $30?"
A client types /yes, the transaction occurs, and the person is fed.
The client loses $30, and gets fed.
The seller, gets whatever they put in the "Profit" box. In this case, that is $4.
The extra $26 is lost to the wind, or supposedly, is used to buy the ingredients to make the food.
This is a cool system, it makes sense that the seller doesn't get the whole $30. You can't make food out of thin air.
However the problem with this is that some people aren't interested in profit. They'll sell the food for the minimum possible amount. I don't know why, but that's just how it is. I can always find SOME shop selling an americanized portion of food for $27. And if there isn't such a shop, in most cases i'm free to switch jobs and sell food to myself for the minimum price.
This hurts every food seller on the server. If one person sells an infinite resource for the minimum possible profit, all other sellers have to either match prices, or get nothing.
Here is my proposed solution:
Give food sellers EXP for the food they sell. The higher the EXP the less the ingredients cost the food seller while the seller is online.
This means that if you sell food for a long time, you can sell food for cheaper, and still make profit off of it.
The most important part of this in my opinion is that if a seller dies or changes jobs, they lose all exp.
This is so that if a competing seller has shifted 200 units of food, and still has the profit set to 1, you can just- kill them. And reset their prices.
I'm not sure how well this would work on a server with no crime observation system. Right now it's like some omnipotent jerk is always watching and reporting your crimes to the police. So resetting someone else's prices is likely to get you jailed, forcing you to switch to the inmate job, thus losing all exp.
The last thing I should mention is that while a food seller is offline, their experience isn't being utilized to purchase ingredients. So the price would go back up to whatever it would cost a new food seller.