Hi,
I've a web-based online game, whereby shops restock items in accordance with an item's rarity. Shops are restocked by the system between rand(5,20) minutes a part, with the next "restock" time being set at the last successful restock.
Item rarities are based on the number system 1-100. The system has "adjusted rarities" that subtracts 15 from the item's raw rarity. For example, if item A has a rarity of 50, it has a 1/(50 - 15) == 1/35 chance of restocking. If item B has a rarity of 90, it has a 1/(90 - 15) == 1/75 chance of restocking.
Naturally, with these kinds of chances only being given a go every 5-20 minutes, the commonest items are ever common and the rarest items are ever rare. Of course, users are always going to be chomping at the bit for the rarest and will always complain, to an extent, that "rare items are too rare." That's the fun of it.
But we've received some other type of feedback where users complain of "having a hard time restocking." This is leading to me to believe that, despite rarities, users are having a hard time obtaining the items that they want. I want users to have a fun time restocking and am trying to tweak how to restock items and handle their rarity. Right now, mathematically speaking, our restocking system is very "straight line."
I'm curious to hear about how others handle virtual economies and how to determine when and how to restock an item, based on some idea of scarcity.
Virtual economics, heh.