The true cost of a single arrow is more than 67 gold pieces.

I don't think I'm the first person to bring this up. But the true cost of a single arrow is more than 67 gold pieces.

2 chunks of coal = 6 gold
4 iron ore = 20 gold
4 wood = 20 gold
1 chemical = 1 gold
10 feathers = 20 gold
TOTAL = 67 Gold

That's counting all the base resources required, but not counting any markup you might get from individual crafters and gathers to obtain and create each part of the process. OUCH! I could see the cost of a single player made arrow being easily over 100 gold.

I know that arrows were very expensive in medieval times, so this may be historically accurate (which I like), but it seems like an interesting puzzle if we're trying to create a player driven economy.

The casual player will say, just keep arrows at 1 gold and let NPC's sell them. But that's not a good solution. I think NPC's should not sell arrows at all actually. This will create plenty of demand for arrows, but that will also drive up the price.

So two things. 1) I think arrows need to be far more effective to make them worthy of the steep price. I know the devs have said that will happen soon. 2) I think spamming arrows (via auto-attack or close range) simply doesn't make sense from an economic standpoint.

What are your thoughts?

 

The recipe is good it only needs to produce 100 arrows Seriously all the feathers and especially wood and iron is too much for 1 arrow.

 

Should I assume you got the cost of wood and ore by selling it first?

I'll do us both a favor and not nitpick the fact that these are current prices.

If anything though rather than the cost of materials needed to make an arrow.. This illustrates the need for the current cost of materials and possibly even the currency to change drastically when it comes time to balance these things. 20 gold for 10 feathers? What the hell is that? 2 bronze for 10 feathers may be more reasonable.

 

You have to remember how this impacts the rest of the crafting. We can't just make the recipe make 100 arrows. It disproportionately skews the results of crafting. I like the recipe as it is, just making 10 arrows. But maybe there needs to be a tweak earlier in the process. Something that gets more use of the wood and ore.

Also remember that if arrows cost 1 gold to make, then players can't sell them for a profit.

 

I just got the cost of materials from my inventory. Yes, they're current prizes, but what should a single arrow cost? It's a very interesting question considering how detailed the process is.

 

The cost of purchase.. everything is worth what it's purchaser will pay for it.

The cost of production.. that I think is the real question. I wouldn't want to speculate on what costs should be since I would strongly prefer a multi-denomination currency. I very much dislike how gold is so cheap in MMOs. Like I said earlier.. 2 bronze for 10 feathers to me sounds a lot more reasonable than 20 gold.. those must be some damned impressive feathers!

If I had to buy all of those materials to make say.. a dozen arrows..I would still want to be able to consider 1 gold to be way too much.

 

Bowen, the problem is that I can go out and get all the resources required to make an arrow, and buy 67 arrows or make 1 myself.

The prices for these basic resources are already so low, there's not much we can do to make this right. The inflation of the player economy is going to destroy the player made arrow market based on what we're seeing right now. It's really super interesting to me anyway, because having a player driven economy is AWESOME, but this is a problem that will probably go way beyond arrows.

I think having the NPC's sell stuff on their own is the core problem. It sets the minimum price for arrows and undercuts everyone else. But to be fair in this system, the NPC's would have to sell arrows for over 100 gold, and wouldn't that raise more than some eyebrows on the forums?

I'd love to hear what the devs think about all of this. It's a tricky one.

 

I think teaching chickens to dance to activate the Oracle orbital laser defense grid would be far cheaper than the current arrow weight and pricing.

 

Understand when I say 1 gold is too much.. I am speaking within the context of a multi-denomination currency. Think of it this way.. tranform all the current gold we have now.. into bronze.. then 1 gold would be equal to 100 or 1000 bronze or whatever the numbers ended up being. That would actually be a lot more than the 67 gold we have now.

The way I see it.. having gold as a single denomination currency not only invites unrealistically out of control inflation.. it practically forces it. Especially with the numbers we have in pre-alpha. The highest denomination is already practically worthless. A 3 denomination currency gives the economy a lot more flexibility and room to expand without it getting mind blowingly insane.

I remember a dev+ discussion on the economy where I put out and idea about vendors. I don't remember all the particulars now thiw was a LONG way back. but if I remember right the jist of it was simulating a finite market where vendors had limited currency to spend and buy. Surpluses in inventory would be sold off to the world.. lows in surplus could be bought from the world etc.. I should dig up that thread sometime.

I had this idea around that time that NPC prices would fluxuate based on player vendor prices in the region. Using arrows for exampe.. if players were selling arrows for (and just pulling out numbers here) 50G and NPCs were selling them for 75.. then NPCs in that area would lower their prices to remain competitive.. likewise they would raise prices under certain conditions also. Probably far more complicated than what the devs will want to do and I remember there were a few people who didn't quite like the details. heh.. but the economy is one of those things you're never going to get 100% agreement on.

I suppose my point here is that there's a lot of potential solutions.. it's a matter of what the devs like the most I suppose.

Probably my biggest concern is that the devs are a little too set in their thinking that they're bound to handle the economy (and other things) a certain way rather than try something new or more complicated that might do the job better.

To my mind.. the more natural the system, the more it can deal with issues without any redesign.

 

The components shouldn't be as expensive as they are, if your prices are correct based on what you would get from an NPC. To begin with, 10 feathers shouldn't cost 20 gold. It's relatively easy to get feathers in real life. Just look around a lake -- water birds drop them all over the place. Compare the price of 10 feathers to a piece of armor or an iron weapon, and this looks even sillier.

The fact that NPC sell things on their own isn't a problem, IMO, its a utility; it can help the economy by correcting prices to what they should look like, and help control inflation. Players should still be able to undercut the NPCs by charging slightly lower than they do and still earning a profit. If the numbers are messed up, that's a problem with the numbers.

 

@Bowen Bloodgood,

Yes a multi-currency system would be much better.

 

If I take a stack of wood, and cut it into timbers, and then cut it all into boards, somewhere along the way, physics goes out the window and I end up encumbered from all the wooden boards, even though I moved normally with the stack of wood.

 

As long as we can get gold off of skeletons, I don't think it matters if we have multi-denominatino currency.

What really matters is how much NPC's sell their stuff for. That's what the SOTA economy has been built on (for better or for worse).

In the case of arrows, NPC's sell them for 1 gold, so there's absolutely no reason to make them - ever. If the devs change this so that players can undercut the NPC's then they would have to make NPC's sell a single arrow for at least 100 gold so there would be some wiggle room.

Obviously no player is going to be auto-attacking using 100 gold arrows.

It's not a regional problem either. It's a very simple "gold sink" problem. Your NPC's can't undercut players. So what should the price of a single arrow be?

 

I feel like you have a point here that I'm missing and you're not just talking silly talk for the sake of it. Please prove me correct.

 

Its like there is some algorithm we are missing where SOTA physics takes the mass of an object and applies a price to it. This is purely wild speculation, but as you listed out the components of items to MAKE the arrow, what is the weight of all of those objects? Does an NPC or created arrow weigh less when its actually made?

Are we just paying an arbitrary amount based on a salad bar of materials??

Also, I lost a few brain cells in another thread, so you may be right about my point in this thread.

 

I'm less concerned about the weight for the purpose of this discussion, but that has been an issue in the past (encumbrance using fuzzy math).

In my experience, and I wasn't paying a lot of attention to weight, we were using A LOT of iron and wood to make 1 arrow. I brought this up in this thread when talking to Net, saying that maybe we needed to lower the quantity of wood and ore to make this more balanced. But I still think the core issue will still be there...what's the price of a single arrow supposed to cost?

If the arrow can kill another player in one hit...sure, let's make it cost 200 gold per arrow! But if it auto-attacks and does 3 points of damage, is that even worth 1 gold?

 

I know this is slightly off topic of the resource cost of the arrows, but I think the underlying issues that currently face archery are part of the problem.

Ditch skill based arrows (i.e. arrow requirement to use a skill) and make it so that there is a flat bonus to the type of arrow you use. Broadhead causes bleed, needlehead has some armor ignoring, etc. to make it so there is an ability to build your arrows based on your play type, not just to hold stuff so you can use skills. This would also affect the auto-attack issues as it would consume the main arrow you are using and that would affect damage or resistances or whatever. To some extent, I can understand the attempt to balance auto-attack by not depleting resources (but then that really kills realism), as melee auto-attack doesn't consume anything and magic staff/wand only uses a minimal amount of focus.

I'd also definitely up the arrow amount (10/100/whatever) to match a similar amount of wear and tear most weapons would have in normal use for the same amount of resources (if it takes resource cost of 50 to make a sword with a durability of 50 then have arrows break down to 50 arrows for the same amount of resource cost or whatever). I know this isn't perfect as there are skills that mitigate the wear and tear on equipment, but this can also be offset with skill that help you reclaim arrows in the field (or even field strip arrows on the fly... they aren't great but better than nothing).

I would love to see this game get ranged combat well balanced (as most systems are either magic or melee biased). Its something that I have yet to find in any of the games I've played so far.

 

I've thought about this more.

Ok, so you effectively drive down the price of player made arrows to 1/100th of the current price. So now it costs a player 1 gold to buy an arrow from an NPC, but if they make the arrows themselves they could get 100 arrows for the price of 67. Ok, so that's a little better.

But now we have to make it so players can sell those arrows for less than what the NPC's would buy them for. So the NPC's would have to start selling arrows at like 10 gold per arrow. So now the player that just made 100 arrows could turn around and sell them to an NPC for 1000 gold.

It makes my head hurt trying to figure this out, it's like an endless loop of broken economy. I think arrows may literally break this entire system.

 

I'd keep it at 1 gp per arrow. If you craft 100 arrows for the price of 67 resources, it gives you a profit of 33. There isn't a NEED to undercut on a regular arrow (which would be the only thing likely offered by the NPC). The specialty arrows you craft would be worth more money and would be where your profit would be. A fire enchanted broadhead, for bleed and burn DoT, would be worth much more than the standard low level bodkin that the NPC sells. OR just up it 1 gp. NPC sells it @ 2 gp, you can undercut them @ 1 gp. Still gives same profit margin to the crafter.

 

I've had a problem with the economy system for a long time. My argument has been (for over a year now) that a player driven economy that artificially pushes gold into it can't be properly balanced - for reasons just like this arrow example illustrate. That said, I'm trying my best to figure it out and make it work and so far I just can't do it. There always seems to be some reason it doesn't work well.

The effectiveness of arrows and auto-attack are part of that problem, so I don't think your post is off topic, but I also don't see a solution being raising the arrow amount (see my post just above this one for the horrifying complexity that results in doing that). I just keep going back to the idea that the players expectation is to pay far less than 6700 gold for 100 arrows. Which is exactly what the minimum price would be if we stopped NPC's from selling arrows for 1 gold and actually let the players craft arrows as should happen in a player driven economy.

Even if we "magically duplicated" arrows using the same recipe as we have now, allowing players to make 100 arrows from the current recipe. We'd still have a huge problem. No one could sell arrows because players would not want to buy them at such high prices. We might be able to give players more incentive by increasing the power of arrows, but now we have to balance that against everything else going on in the economy. I.E. don't forget that all those same resources are being used for other things, so now no one want to make cabinets and bookshelves because they'd rather make arrows where they get 100 for the price of what it would've cost to make a few cabinets, and cabinets are only worth a small fraction of that cost.

See what I mean? It's CRAZY.