Discussion regarding the new economy balancing

From the latest Update of the Avatar #193:

"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."

So, now:

• Get money (500g/day) for checking in with the Oracle
• Get money for introducing ourselves to Town Criers
• Increased resource yields
• More quests for gaining skills

What does everyone think? I can't play the game because beards are broken, but I'm interested what people think of the changes. Why are people having trouble making money? When I think about other MMORPGs, it seems they have zillions of quests which offer newbies a way to make money, as well as lots of loot to sell from mobs. Why was this needed? Does SOTA need more generic fetch quests? What does everyone think?

 

I'd like to see mobs have a small to medium chance at dropping exciting things, like junk loot which is stackable (eg embroidered silk handkerchiefs/humanoids or ancient dragonbone skulls and legs/wolves, and so on) that can be sold for decent amounts of gold, and rare items of social clothing people can trade with each other, and rare and unique housing items people can trade with each other.

Would make hunting a little more exciting while bumping the economy with random rares, yet still not causing the hyperinflation the devs worry about so much.

 

I think the plan is, eventually, to have player-made objects end up in loot drops. But that's probably a long ways off.

 

Loot in most zones, especially low level zones, took a pretty big hit. New skills, repair kits, reagents, etc, still cost as much as they ever did though. Weapons also break very quickly and people are now dealing with lot taxes. Some places are still good for making gold, but most places aren't, and most people don't know the best spots.

I think it's pretty normal for a small % of people to have a lot more resources than most, but it's not normal for so many people to struggle just to be able to have the basics and go out and fight. I hope that more time will be spent working to improve the experience of the majority of players relative to trying to slow down the top players. I think there has been a lot of burning down the house to kill a spider to this point.

 

Yeah...I think Portalarium had this lofty philosophical goal, "We don't have junk quests, all our quests are story-filled and meaningful!" except, yeah, guess what, there's no way to have that many quality quests, that allow newbies to grind out some basic necessities. They aren't even implementing enough "story quests", let alone quests to allow people to get some basic money and equipment. As is the case with so many areas of this game, the lofty goals that sound great on paper are failing to be realistic in a MMORPG.

 

1. Sounds like a good way to encourage Oracle use
2. Good generic quest, but presumably not repeatable, so really only useful to new players... who could use the money the most!
3. GOOD. As it is, I can farm a bit more reagents than I can use (the rest can go for alchemy), but others just can't get the hang of it. If yields are better, player sales of reagents become more viable, and it becomes a consumable that new players can sell.
4. Makes the game more interesting to have more skill quests, and they're looking into making all quests possibly give more gold. I spent a few hours figuring out the Kiln Cistern quest, and while I got 5000xp (reasonable), I got a paltry 75 gold. And I had to take multiple attempts to kill that boss, at adventurer level 53 or so.

I can't find anything wrong with those points. The first is the only thing close to a "basic income" (which would be more like a "basic giving up"), but encourages the use of a major world background system in the game. And it's the same as the daily rental for a taxable row lot, but you do have to log on every day to qualify for it. I've seen daily quest stuff that was much more generic.

 

Yeah, I can't either really, on the face of it. #1 and #2 seem awful artificial though...I'm trying to figure out what other MMORPGs do to make such things unneeded? I guess more quests...

 

Flash Questing helps a bit as well

Hope to see you there!

 

What is flash questing?

 

Details in my signature below. Launching today.

Just my way of interacting with the community and helping with the gold and resources issue.

 

Hey, cool! Thanks for doing that @Pikegirl!

 

I see no issues making gold at a modest rate while adventuring only. So I don't understand why others have challenges with that. I don't do anything special. It simply requires saving without spending much. However, if I adventure, craft, maintain a taxed lot, buy items to decorate a house, and buy items to arm my character, then it is a problem. Not enough gold to go around.

That leads me to the realization that I need to pace oneself. If I buy all crafting recipes I want all at the same time, I'm broke. I need to pace myself. If I want to decorate an entire room by buying from player vendors all at one time, I'm broke and instead need to pace myself. Pacing myself is not a bad thing. It should take some time to get everything in the game.

Given that, the dev team might also need to look at player multi-tasking buying behavior and understand if we are pacing ourselves properly, before judging if we don't have enough gold. That player vendors are filling up might not mean that we don't have enough gold. It might mean that we are trying to spend the gold we do have too fast to get to the endzone too quickly.

Then there is the basics of supply vs. demand. That vendors are filling up too much might mean that there is over supply, not under demand. When supply is too great, few economist would advise flooding the market with more cash to expand consumption if there was not sufficient demand to begin with! Better advice might be to reduce production to more sustainable levels that match demand. SOTA's problem is that it has few brakes on the supply side to slow production . Most of the economic brakes are on cash sinks affecting demand side.

Instead of adding more gold into the economy so early in the game's evolution, what the devs should do is allow the over-production to continue, which would eventually lead to price drops from those who truly want to move their product, which in turn would allow players with less gold to buy more. This assumes that crafting is then not too expensive to perform. But I don't see that as the big issue, as most crafting components are 'freely' collectible. The 90% that are presently poor represent the REAL economy, let that play out awhile longer and see. The 10% presently at the top eventually will feel the competition for demand and have to lower prices.

 

Your post is full of good common sense and basic economic theory, but I wanted to comment on this...we have to assume that the developers have baked in very comprehensive monitoring tools for every aspect of the game, including and especially the economy. They know exactly what's being spent, where, and probably a large amount of why. Now, is the problem a fundamental lack of this and/or that? The developers may or may not be open and forthcoming with this information. We can only guess what the root problem is by their attempts at a fix.

 

It angers me that some people say the equivalent of "well I don't have a problem so stop whinging". Do those people think everyone else is stupid? If 90% of players are struggling just to exist then the game is the problem however much the devs woulkd like to believe that everything works just fine.

 

The devs, demonstrably, do not hold this opinion, else they would not be attempting to address it.

 

Yes.

 

Hello,
I have proposed a few straightforward solutions regarding economic matters on this post: https://www.shroudoftheavatar.com/f...nomic-discussion-balancing-the-economy.62110/
I know it is a bit long, but I urge you to read points number (1) and (2), right in the middle of the long text.

thanks

 

Well I think I'm about to say something that'll be pretty unpopular.. that is.. there shouldn't be ANY "good spots" for farming gold. And just throwing more money at a problem has never worked in any real life scenario so why should it work here?

This is another example of an unrealistic/unnatural/gamey solution that really irritates me.. but I suppose that is more my problem. I just prefer design that feels like it belongs. Why should the Oracle pay us to see her? What kind of sense does that make? And how much gold does she have anyway that she can do this? She's basically being turned into a gold faucet. Sure it's only 500g a day.. but if 1000 players see her every day.. then she's pouring 500,000 gold into the economy daily for what? Oh wait how many backers do we actually have now? Does anyone think for a second that there aren't any large groups who will start farming the Oracle for gold?

These changes may not be as bad as increasing resource yields but in the long run I don't see them as being much better either.

It would be better to put a stop to the idea of farming gold through grinding and address the imbalances another way... such as through the markets.

 

I posted this thread which seeks to bring a new skill tree called 'Order' that is intended to help lower reg use chance and boost PvM damages so people can cruise through mobs more easily, but it hasn't gotten many views as it's in the same section as PvP discussion so it hasn't poked through to the top since it was posted. Darn PvPers get all the love!

 

Precisely what I propose here: https://www.shroudoftheavatar.com/f...nomic-discussion-balancing-the-economy.62110/