Upcoming Economic Balance Changes

We have been carefully analyzing the distributed wealth of our current player base and we have uncovered some critical issues that need addressing quickly. The biggest issue is that the top 10% of players have 90% of the gold while the bottom 90% are incredibly poor and can barely afford to play. This has manifested itself in various ways through things like:

• Exclusive Use of "Reagent Free" Decks: On one hand this shows the flexibility of our deck building and skill system and every player should have a "Reagent Free" deck in their arsenal but that's not the only deck they should be using!
• Tons of Inventory on Vendors: Lots and lots of items on vendors and no one buying.

We cannot simply increase the overall influx of resources and gold into the game because that will cause inflation and damage the overall health of the economy. It would also only further increase the disparity between the wealthiest few and the poorest masses.

Instead we need to come up with ways to add wealth to the more deprived players that cannot then be ground repeatedly to either increase inflation or add even more wealth to the already wealthy. To that end we are going to start making the following changes. Some of these will begin showing up as soon as Release 34 but some may take longer as they are a bit intensive to implement. Please note the values below are all best estimates / starting values.

• Daily Confession: Visiting the Oracle on a daily basis and discussing how you are faring on your journey along the Paths of Truth, Love, and Courage will earn you 500 gold per day. You must answer her accurately based on your personal actions.
• Town Crier Outlander Registration: Novians do not exactly trust Outlanders and want to make sure they know where they are traveling around to. Thus they started an Outlander Tracking Program. Each time you visit a Town Crier for the first time in any town will earn you 100 gold.
• Starting Area Resource Yields: We are going to slightly increase the overall resource yields in the scenes around the starting areas.
• Reagent Spawner Balance: We are reviewing the reagent spawners to make sure they are evenly balanced against the power of the spells they are used with and well dispersed in the scenes so players won't have to exclusively rely on merchants.
• Quest Gold Rewards: We are going through all the non-repeatable quests and either adding gold rewards (if not present) or increasing the gold rewards (if gold already present).
• Skill Quests: Currently only Tier 5 Skills like Summon Elemental have quests from Master Trainers associated with them. We are going to add more quests from trainers for earlier skills like Rend (Blades), Piercing Shot (Ranged), Lightning (Air), etc. These will include gold rewards.

This is just the first of many such adjustments we will make to insure that the economy is properly balanced yet sustainable over the long term. Thank you for your patience as we make these improvements.

 

Great to see the analysis and plan, only comment I'll make is:

If you don't want players using reagent-free decks, the reagent-costing glyphs need to be tangibly better to justify their use. Currently, I would say they're not.
And that doesn't mean nerfing every glyph that doesn't use reagents. That means making the 20%+ reagent cost spells better, to distinguish them and attract their use.

 

Daily quests are a good idea but it's even better if you weave them into deeper game mechanics.

 

The Mail Delivery quests mentioned by Lum in the Post Mortem might be another "Daily" quest candidate.

 

Also crafting quests would be great for those who do not want to do combat but be a dedicated crafter. And of course bulletin boards to connect the world. Being forced to combat is a complaint I have heard from several. I am happy to do it all, but some do not want to.

 

ääähm, nope ... cuz the problem is for example, that you could use non-magic melee combat which normaly uses no currency (next to the repair-kits for weapons, but that is quite less expansive). This saves you a lot of money ... same goes with ranged, cuz yes, you have to buy arrows, but I pay 2gp for 24 and use 10-15 arrows per creature (in 4-5 skull zones), which is lesser costy then the cost of using high consuming magic. Instead, the usage of reagents could be reduced more at higher levels, so that you don't need so much ... or may be they introduce a passive to the intellect tree which reduces the consumption of reagents (like arrow scavanger is doing it with arrows). making spells more powerful is quite useless in all this mechanics leaning towards reducing cost of gameplay

 

Thanks - appreciate the fact that you guys are looking after all players.

 

I think if you look at experience gains you'd find probably even more massive tilting.

 

Looks like the problems are identified but the listed solutions seem really odd to me.

How about all spells need reagents? How about more fundamental changes?

 

Could it be that the top 10% of players play 90% more than the bottom 90% of players? I think I play about 100 hours per week for example.

 

These are good ideas, Darkstarr. I was wondering why most people aren't buying from player vendors - is it because they lack the gold or maybe just aren't checking vendor's inventory and relying on NPCs. Perhaps one of the "daily quests" could be to visit every player vendor in one area (Spite one day, Owl's Head the next, etc.). That will get people checking out inventory, encourage exploration and a good way to get some xp and gold.

I was thinking of a possible way to get gold back into circulation if it's do-able. Maybe make some very expensive, rare and irresistible in-game items for sale. Decos, instruments, etc. that would be a limited edition (only 500 available or whatever a reasonable number is) and have all proceeds go the poor (the poorest players).

 

exactly what I was thinking.

 

Wealth disparity (which I think is common in games but I guess they feel is worse here) I don't think is corrected by making it so only rich people can use magic.

 

another thing that hampers in game vendor trade is the marketplace. People are bypassing the in game vendors and directly dealing trades.

 

I'm curious @Elnoth . What do you do in those 100hr weeks ?

 

its that way right now though. What using reagents for all spells would do however is create markets for it. If it is to expensive then the market will adjust. Or port will adjust it. Another thing is there would be no free ride, it would be pay for repairs as melee or pay for reagents as a mage.

 

Well, maybe that's because they're getting better deals than what they're seeing on player vendors.

 

yep, and probably monetizing it also.

 

Well I don't sit around going to parties

I have mined enough gold to GM enchanting and I mostly kill humanoids. I find stuff that runs away useless to kill (wastes my time and only really gives XP). I spend the rest of the time running around to vendors looking to spend my gold

 

Funny how that tends to happen in economies...

I'm curious to know if the top 10% are just sitting on massive piles of gold with no use for it... or is it more the case that the top 10% are basically exchanging gold/items among themselves in a kinda-sorta SotA "Good Ol' Boys" club. There are different solutions for each situation...

As one of those players, I would like to point out that I have been intentionally limiting myself to fists as part of my character's lore/story. Also with 5 episodes yet to come, I thought it would be silly for me to rush toward a completed build right now. It's not so much because I'm trying to avoid using regs for economic reasons, although that does play in as a factor.

Now if only the people in charge of the real economy could figure that one out...

If the "poor" knew what the "rich" actually wanted to buy... and were capable of producing those items... AND if the "rich" were willing/able to go out into the world and buy those items from the "poor" rather than from other "rich" people... that might help level the playing field.

One problem seems to be... most things which a "poor" player is capable of manufacturing don't seem to be in high demand, thus resulting in a situation where the cost of manufacturing something is greater than one could ever sell it for.

 

I don't think Tier 1 spells should need reagents. Since they are all close range, the player is exposed to armor damage that needs to be repaired.