Trickle Down Effect - how reagents could shape our economy

There has been a few of you who have hashed out conversations about how reagents can effect the outcomes of battles in regards to pvp and pve who are on both sides of the table of being for and against reagent requirements.

I personally would like to talk about the gathering and selling aspect of this debate in how it will effect our economy in positive and negative ways and gather (pun intended) your feedback in an area which we havent put much thought to post.

With SotA being highly resource driven in the economy, with armors wearing down, arrows needing to be crafted, tools breaking, this causes a fixed demand for supplies in this area giving crafters and gathers a reason to invest their time into these traits as they know that they can get a steady income out of them its the same reason doctors will always have a job because they are Needed.

What comes into play with reagents is for better or worst reagents will fall out of that "needed" category, now before much debate goes into defining what we can classify as a need; I am only labeling it as such because it has an optional element to it that the other resources do not, while we could debate how optional reagents will truly be the fact remains that they will not be required in some cases.

So what will be the effects?

Gathers who want to be effective in the market are going to chose to spend there time harvesting required resources.

1. Because it will have a stable price on the market with less influx to optional goods
2. They will always have buyers and dont have to hold on to the items for long
3. They can build a clientele that needs a steady supply, while reagents can be a "screw it, I have to make due without them today" no matter how hard it is to use without them.

This mindset I believe is going to be the driving force in making reagents the bump in the economy.

 

It does seem a complex situation. Without reagents, there is almost no need to go and gather plants, because there are only so much vanity-items (like clothes, and beds which would need cotton), so there would be a whole lot of people who enjoy the gathering who don't have much to do anymore.
The advantage of not having to gather reagents for spells, would be that as somebody who uses spells, you can just go and do whatever without having to think about cost much.

On the other hand, needing reagents does give a huge boost for the in game economy, which will keep a lot of people busy with gathering, and supplying resources every day.
Of course the disadvantage is that if there is nobody doing gathering, there would be a whole lot of people not really being able to perform magic, and so not doing what they want either.

On a more neutral level, there's resources that require replenishing like arrows, but others that, after creation, don't require much like swords and armour, so there is something to be said for both positions.

However, there is an entirely different aspect as well, which is the social aspect, which I think is even more important.
Not requiring reagents, means there is no reason to interact with people and shops, and just go about your business as you want, while people who don't do magic, have to interact to get their armour and weapons fixed, and get new equipment.
This also means that people who want to try out magic, wouldn't get in contact with people who know it, and can't ask things in game, and have to depend on outside information, while other people can learn a whole lot more in game.
So, I think it's important to have reagents, not just for the economy, but for the whole social interaction, and actually being a part of the gameworld.

 

I'm sorry, but that's not how economy works. Price is determined by offer and demand, so as long as there is some demand, some people are going to carter for it, till the point where the price drops low enough to not attract more suppliers. If people would only supply "required resource", we'd never see luxury articles, since they wouldn't be produced according to your theory

 

I agree with your line of thought, I will take the fault of not wording it better as what you said was the point I was trying to make that required resources would be a better option as they would have a more stable demand.

 

This is why I'm so against spells not requiring reagents. It undercuts demand and therefore makes magic more common place and less special.

It's bad for the economy, immersion, combat balance, and overall game balance.

 

Please do not get me wrong, I very much agree with what you say, but only to a point. As was recently elaborated (just to be sure we're talking about the same situation), it wouldn't be a "black or white" (binary ~winks to Owen~) situation, but rather that there would be "classes" of spells that can work on a lesser effect scale without reagents. Like they said, it has to be balanced (on the fly through testing), but if the numbers work out, there is absolutley no hit for economy. If you make a reagent appear more often (and thus increase offer), or if you make it optional at a cost to efficiency (and thus slightly reduce demand) is the very same effect on economy in total, which is what the thread's all about (though I'd say that if carefully balanced, it obviously doesn't drag down combat/over all balance and I see an increase in immersion, but that's too off topic for this thread).

 

That's a lot to balance just for the sake of trying to allow people the convenience of never running out of spells.

I understand your point about the economy, but that's theoretical. It may work out that way. Of course it may work out that people would rather team up with their friends and blast everyone with free spells. Or perhaps people will just use swords and avoid reagents altogether.

Supply and demand balances the economy. It's only when you start adding artificial mechanics like not needing reagents that it gets overly complicated and unintended consequences begin to occur.

It's like if you have some fisherman, and then you tell them you're going to give everyone in the world a free fishing pole. Now how many fisherman are you going to have? Now how many people are going to make fishing poles? Now how many people are going to pay for fishing poles of great quality? We don't know the answers to those questions, but we've most certainly muddied the waters and our ability to control the economy for fishing poles. Whereas if we just let supply and demand handle it, it's inherently balanced.

 

I certainly see and understand your concern, though supply and demand is still valid in this scenario. Please allow me to elaborate my point and use your own examples.
Let's say reagents are required and we have the loot/ransom as is proposed right now. People would team up, use reagents to blast everybody, loot, sell and purchase new reagents. Rince and repeat.
If reagents are optional, they have less cost on blasting up people, but require more people to blast up others. The loot they get is sold for less money (more people selling to your theory given that it's 'easier'), or they get less ransom per person (spells being less efficient, requiring more players for the same effect). The net effect on economy is the same.

If everybody gets a free <insert item>, the result is greater competition for what the item does. Let's say you have the choice between using a knife and a gun if you get into a fight IRL, but you'd have to pay a little fee for the gun. I would be willing to bet that a majority would use the gun, despite the fee, because the result is still 'worth it' (a better chance at saving your life). If done right and balanced properly, that's the same scenario in a game. People are willing to 'invest' resources/reagents/money to get a better result out of their hunt. Hypothetically, if I can decide to use no investment (reagent) and return with 1000 gold after my hour hunt, or to invest 1000 gold in reagents but return with 4000 gold from my one hour hunt, only 'botters' choose to go without, since time is hardly a limiting factor to them. Everybody else has to factor time and convenience into the equation.
There might be a slight overhead to the balance, but I doubt that its as significant as you seem to think it would be. Even less so, considering that all balancing has to be done life anyway.

 

Your assumption is that the devs will increase the effectiveness of using reagents to a point that "makes sense" so that only an idiot would cast spells without them. This is the extreme of your argument, but your argument is not THAT extreme. What I'm trying to say is that I recognize and appreciate your logic and I realize that there is more to it underneath the extreme, I'm just trying to illustrate my point as simply as possible. Let's not debate all of the what if's.

So I'm willing to assume that the devs are capable of doing this. But here's the kicker. WHY? Because at the end of the day if it requires massive balance to make everyone WANT to use reagents as that's the most efficient way to cast spells....what are we doing this for? Why is this even remotely important?

My argument is that it's not important. It's giving people a convenience that they don't need and that the game will not be tuned for because it's inconceivable that through MIN/MAXING the world will support reagentless spells without either 1) Ruining the economy or 2) Having a balanced economy where it's now pointless to have the mechanic.

Unfortunately, you can't have it both ways.

 

If we could steer away from talking about tweaking the effectiveness as that is slightly getting back into the combat aspect and defining how "needed" the reagents are.

In the end you can tweak any item to the point that it forces the player to have to use it, making a home rent cost one million a week if it doesnt have a bed in it vs one thousand if it does will make it so that you will see every home with a bed.

But were it stands now what effects does it have on the economy that makes it positive for being an optional items? I would be interested in hearing that side of the table because with the current system I want to know how us players can use it to our favor as it stands currently it doesnt look like much which is why I want to bring this topic up.

 

Well, that leads us away from the original topic of the thread, so I hope the OP is going to bear with me, but I'd say for three simple reasons. It adds choice of playstyle (e.g. if I would just want to tag along a guildmate in order to supply a spell or three, but don't want to bother harvesting/buying ingredients first, I could do that), it adds immersion for some players (I can easily envision the mighty fireball spell to require this rare ingredient to reveal it's full potential, but at the same time, I can see why a simple light might not need anything more than my focus/mana just as well) and it helps to balance (and thus develop more diverse) spells, since it adds one more means of fine-tuneing.

I agree that it is not going to be easy to achive, but I think that you can have both. Then again, economy and balance in MMORPGs is extremeley complex, to the point that there have been scientific papers on the subject. The key is likely that there's spells where the mechanic is less viable at the upper end of the spectrum, that there's spells in the middle where it depends on the situation and that at the lower end of the spells, they simply have little enough impact that they can easily live without reagents (e.g. casting a 'firework trick spell' to appease and impress the fair maiden).
Fortunately enough nothing is fixed, so why not simply look and see how it develops in R10/11? If the test fails, they are going to notice and roll back easy enough, little harm done.

 

They've already stated that cantrips likely won't require reagents, and that stronger spells certainly will.

I can't remember whether they'd mentioned reagents having an all-round 'empowerment' effect on spells.

That said, necrotic reagents harvested from human components would be great as part of the 'smuggled goods' stuff that RG wants to see in the game.

It'd be a shame if the 'smuggled goods' had no real purpose except to go from one place to the next - with human components, it's clear why they must be trafficked. If these components also function as reagents, then it's easy to see why people would want to use them.

 

'Casting without reagents' as an overall rule just seems out of sync with the other means of combat...

Melee and archery require *something* in order to fight - why shouldn't mages also have that requirement?

 

To me reagents are a second currency, A currency with a market value..

 

So here's my two cents, thrown rapidly at the thread without having much time to ponder (running a game tonight and still haven't showered the afternoon bike ride off):

Put an NPC merchant in each major town. Do NOT put such a merchant in smaller population centers. Give him or her or it two functions.

He will pay FOR reagents, in raw form only, and he pays LOW. But he will pay for every single thing you have.

She sells finished spell components, and she charges MUCHO DINERO. Like outrageous, possibly even crippling prices.

It has no limit to its stock or its warehouse capacity.

This penny pinching bastich will be easy to undercut, doing so will make more money, but no matter how the player populations swell or contract, no matter what happens, this NPC will function as a loose control, keeping the reagent market within a reasonable band (nobody can corner the market on mandrake and then start selling it at prices more fitting to a large city plot; nor can anyone find that hours of gathering work was in vain). Yet, at the same time, the NPC will not only not prevent individual sales, but will incentivize them, providing players with an existing market, meeting place (right under his nose) and price range to establish role-played negotiations and sales.

If you need fireball reagents and it's 3 am server time and it seems like nobody's on, you don't have to start whining in /general, or yelling at the top of your lungs, you CAN just go and pay the exorbitant NPC price. If y0u just finished gathering and you are ALMOST to the gold total you need for an in game purchase and nobody is buying your mats, you don't have to wait until the market wakes up, you can just dump em to the vendor (who pays better for spell mats than other vendors would, treating them as "vendortrash").

Howsat?

 

The OP thoughts on reagent economy make perfect sense. Some reagents are harder to find. Someone will invest time finding those and selling them. Others who are in a bind on time will buy them. An economy erupts. I wonder about the steadiness of the market though. I suspect that any serious mage will also be a reagent collector. So will the economy be more about buying as a convenience, rather than creating long term clientele hooked on a certain vendor. But who knows. It will also be interesting to see how scattered player vendors vs. an auction house result in price variations. Will price be more about what one person thinks is fair or needs for their effort, vs. seeing the latest value in a list of 30 such items and just choosing that.

 

Reagents are a renewable resource. They grow in the wild. People will have plants in their homes that produce them.

Nobody will be able to corner the market.

What will probably happen is the more common reagents will sell for dirt cheap...just to dump them. The rarer ones may have some limited value, but I am willing to bet there will be more people picking them then using them.

As for needing reagents, well..isn't that quintessential Ultima? Mixing spells from reagents in U4+ was an integral part of the experience.