Island Sanctuary - "Predicted Demand" should be renamed to "Predicted Popularity"

I made this post in a reply chain on Reddit regarding how the IS market system works, but I thought I would put it here (with some edits) so the devs might see it:

The issue from a game design perspective is that you have two things labeled demand and two things not labeled demand, and they don't relate to each other the way the labels imply.

You have Popularity, Supply, Demand Shift, and Predicted Demand. OK, "Predicted Demand" and "Popularity" obviously correlate to one another, ie "Predicted Demand" denotes next week's popularity. We know this because of the matching face icons and because the help file tells us so. Alright, so demand = popularity. That makes sense. So with that in mind, what does "Demand Shift" denote? Well we KNOW, based on the other labels, that demand = popularity. We just saw that. So "Demand Shift" indicates a shift in popularity. Nice and easy.

Except that seems to be wrong. Demand shift indicates how the SUPPLY will change. This makes perfectly logical sense in a vacuum (a static supply is more or less sufficient based on a shifting demand) but is overtly misleading in context, as I just demonstrated. This is further compounded by the fact that there is no indication that supply is static. It makes perfectly logical sense to assume that we are one in a constantly shifting market of suppliers, so there's no reason to question why the supply values might fluctuate aside from shifts in demand.

I'm not blaming the devs, exactly. This is an easy but significant oversight to make as systems are being built and terms, labels, and translations are being added, removed and altered. But it SHOULD be changed. Either "Demand Shift" should be renamed to "Supply Shift" (which would be annoying for a few reasons, mostly involving the meaning of the arrows and keeping them intuitive) or "Predicted Demand" should be renamed "Predicted Popularity".

I agree. It's clear that a great deal of love was put into the Island Sanctuary market system, but the English terms given are misleading and have already confused some of my friends as they find their footing in the content.

"Predicted Demand" is literally a prediction of popularity and should be labelled as such. As for "Demand Shift", perhaps rename it something like "Sale Volume" (and rename "None" to "Steady" to match) so that it's obviously the draw on the supply? Something like "Sale Volume: Skyrocketing" makes it intuitive that the supply already in the market will be bought up.

Btw, in the German version that column is indeed called Predicted Popularity. I suspect a simple translation mistake.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Ilisidi

Btw, in the German version that column is indeed called Predicted Popularity. I suspect a simple translation mistake.

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I suspected the same from the English, as the Island Sanctuary market system designer clearly has the concepts straight.

I think it's unlikely to have been specifically a "translation mistake" simply because that's a pretty wild mistake to make, in a few different ways. I think it more likely that translation was ongoing while the system was still being designed and iterated upon, and while things were being added, removed, and shuffled around, this one thing in this one version got missed on the final update check. Super easy mistake to make, happens all the time. But it's good to know that it's correct in other versions! That tells me there's a good chance it really was just a whoopsie rather than a deliberate choice, which makes it much more likely to be fixed lol