Game Economy

I tried doing this with www.sotatraders.com . Give the players the ability to post their store (which town it is in, where it's located, even an image of the store), along with all the items that they sell, with the prices those items sell for. It's not a live snap-shot of what's on every vendor (that can't happen because the SOTA API does not expose player vendor data), but it gives you a clue as to who is selling what, and for how much it is selling.

I don't think Portalarium will go against one of their core economic mandates, and create an in-game global search functionality. It would essentially destroy the entire need/reason to have any player vendors at all...as, with a global search, players would look for the lowest prices, and the 10 or so players that can afford to undercut everyone else will mop up, while everyone else has vendors that no one visits.

 

Like others have said, the single biggest issue with the economy is that new items come in at an extremely significant faster speed than items are leaving the economy. Things need to leave the economy much much faster. I can make literally thousands of pieces of gear before my own gear is decayed enough that I would want to replace it.

My suggestions:
Make artifacts more powerful and completely remove the ability to repair them.
Make weapons and armor decay significantly faster ie. each time you die your gear takes 5 durability damage across the board.
and/or significantly increase the amount of materials it takes to make them.
Get rid of greater repair completely.
Give us more incentive to use consumables. With blessing, I basically never need to eat food and I don't think I have ever needed to use a potion.

 

Global search no, that would be bad, but if you enter a city having an help to at least know what vendor has the item you want in stock would be very helpfull.
Something ingame, you enter a city and ask the towncrier "Recipt supple leather?" and you get an hint who has it, something like that.
Trade towns have tons of traders and you need to go to each and look inside, even with an out of game source if it is not about speciality vendors (given most stock changes, especially for drop items, not playermade ones)
I am not for global at all, but at least knowing what vendor actual has what i look for is imho dearly in need to exist.

 

Personally i think that works, but there will be howling, given gold is not in plenty for most classes, especially for tanks who have a lot of wear and tear, they could be quick broke (and i kinda like hiding behind someone who considers it fun to take the pounding...)
Face it, not everyone who likes to craft produces things worth buying, if we demand that people replace gear at a increased path it is nice for the crafters but people react iffy as soon you demand that "yeah its a game but you have to work as hard as in RL to put on armor here"
Remove maybe gold sinks like fuels so things become cheaper.... if i make bows they are already costly, materials collected by myself and all.
Add an bowstring salvaged from elven bows and it goes easy in 40k alone for that.
Make the bow break faster and only a selected few will even contemplate buying one.

 

Well said Kain. I know many craftsman would agree with you as well. This is the issue with the micro Economic, which ties, I think, to my previous macro Economic view that supplies are produced more than demand. We make more than we can consume. How did we make more? By having unlimited resources and unlimited skills caps, classless. Everyone sooner or later will look alike on the skills tree.

 

This would just make it so you would NEVER find good gear on vendors, as all the crafters would keep all the good stuff for themselves. The junk would start to sell, and people would start to use founder gear, unless you make that stuff not repairable as well, and kill the promise of stuff not needing cotos. As well, the coto market would take a huge hit until they became cheaper then taxes again as cotos would no longer repair gear. With cotos being how post is making money to pay the staff, this would lower their income.

I dont know what stuff you fight, but in harder areas if you do not have your food buffs and blessings, you run out of focus too fast and that equals death.

 

I would have to disagree. As a crafter right now there is no incentive to try and make high quality gear when it won't sell for more than it costs to make it. Give people incentive to craft means more high quality items on the market. It's supposed to be a cycle and right now that cycle hits a crashing halt when nobody ever needs to replace gear.

 

More stuff on the market no one will buy. Are you going to pay 100k for top end gear just to have it broken and not repairable in a few days.

 

I think one thing that would help foster an economy without attacking anyone would be to add regional market boards that let you browse player vendor npcs on a regional basis for example a regional market board in ardoris would allow me to search and browse the inventories of all player vendors in the perennial coast region.

 

Hard to fix the non consumables market. But using food, as an example of a consumable, could be better if "lesser" food was not lesser but just had a shorter duration.

If I could buy a food that lasts 1 hour with the same stats as the surprise food (4 hour duration) but cost 30% of the price. I would use it when I knew I was only heading out for 1 or 2 hours.

Spung

 

No, but faster gear decay doesn't have to mean it only lasts a few days. I made my chest piece 4 months ago and it has only lost 10 max durability. That's insane, it's basically never going expire when you factor in greater repair. And I play A LOT more than the average person.

Dragon stew lasting 8 hours is way too much. IMO food that gives stronger buffs should last LESS time, not more.

 

Do you kite, use stuns, not getting hit much? Now go ask an archer how often they have to repair their bow.

 

Do believe the real issue is lack of demand, the problem is very good gear (which is what there is actually demand for) is soo expensive both in materials and time that most players (that aren't crafters) will assume the price you are asking is just ripping them off. Once you have that very good item what do you do with the stuff that you, and nobody else, wants.

I think a new mechanic needs to exist that "consumes" these craftables (anything with a makers name on it) but does NOT return gold.

Maybe a good idea would be to have something like a barter NPC vendor that you can "sell" these crafted items to and get potions that increase crafting (available no other way). though allow the items to be sold by players, but the only way it can be created in the game is via trashing crafted goods.

Edit : May be easier to implement if you used the salvage mechanic and that returns a new item that is used to craft these crafting potions.


Regards
Spung

 

Exactly, no one wants the junk, and 99% of what is being sold is exactly that, junk.

 

I agree and disagree with may things but Ill just say this.

There are a handful of people in game who are the top crafters and they have had the market for a long time. People who have thousands and thousands of hours into it at probably 18 hours a day.

The casual player such as myself (hard core casual) is at this point probably 10 years behind being able to craft what they can mostly due to this HUGE.... HUUUUUUUUUGEEEE time descerpecy in the design of crafting.

Those handful of people are able to not put their high end stuff up as a monoloy at super high process that no one can afford ($500,000 gold for a +18 item for example).

Crafting is simply not accessible in any way to anyone without 10 years to play the game or the ability to play the game 18 hours a day and dedicate all that time for 2 years into it.

Even then, most of these people will usually do stuff for free for their guild mates if they produce the mats.

That is INSANE.

Can we just demand the expectation that if you are a typical player of this game (lets just say 3 hours a day), that in 2 years you can at least be a decent crafter in some way? I dont think thats asking a lot. The hard core players will still be able to actually produce vastly more items with their time.

 

I'm nowhere near being a hardcore, or even hardcore casual, player, and have managed to skill up the major crafting skills only from what I pick up and scrap (Blacksmithing, carpentry, tailoring), or pick up and use (Alchemy). I am near or at GM in all of those, and with some minor investment in gold (to buy about 3000 silver ore), have skilled up the MC options in carpentry, tailoring and BS to about 70 and started working on the specializations (most up to 20 or higher atm). I have just processed a lot of gold into ingots to start working on the enchanting options, and have some gold built up to buy the ore to make ingots I will need beyond that. Some irony there... that I have to use gold to buy ore to smelt gold...

This is since "launch", and with nearly a month off because of a move that was thrust upon me. So, a few weeks where I could play for a few hours a day on the weekdays, and no weekends.

I can't say i feel the 10 year chasm here... I am definitely feeling that I could be competitive within another month or two.

 

Add crafting mini-games where differential between Req. Skill and Actual Skill is a difficulty modifier. Turning out high quality daggers should be easier than turning out high quality greatswords.

Use mini-games to increase time per crafted item. For consumables and components, degrees of success or failure could raise or reduce batch output. More producer exp is generated per craft.

Basically, turn the system into a slower yet more reliable effort. If instead of taking five minutes to go from raw materials to finished product it took one or two hours, you would both reduce the number of people who want to craft absolutely everything to be self-sufficient and slow the problem of over-supply being pushed to market. Someone who does decide to craft everything is not going to be adventuring as much because their time investment in crafting is pulling them away from the field. They CAN both craft it all and adventure, but they have more meaningful choices in time budgeting.

 

I don't think the issue is that everyone can make everything - at least with regards to gear - some people can and do specialize to level one specific craft very high, and that's what they do, or collaborate with other specialists to make 'really nice things'. However, doing this is completely unprofitable due to the current implementation of the RNG and the fact that most of what you craft is trash that there's nothing to do with that nobody wants, that you can't even GIVE away. Making items no longer explode was a nice step, but the reality is you just end up with more junk than ever before, and selling it to a vendor is not an option - not when its thousands in mats to make and the vendor return is 50g. Not acceptable. Instead, it will languish om vendors forever trying to get something, anything - or be given away to help a new person out since it is effectively worthless.

Increasing the decay on gear is the wrong tactic here, since nobody is actually wearing this junk.

I think an idea like Spungwa's above that gives us some sort of global 'trash bin' where this stuff can be recycled is an option - either that or actually make salvage return more than 0.0!% of an item's value at grandmaster, for crap's sake. Seriously. There is nothing to do with this junk. At all. It would be nice if we could just take it apart and smelt it back into ingots, or something. I do like the idea of NPCs paying a special currency for crafted gear, so as to not bloat the gold economy, and that currency could be used to buy crafting specific things - like say, recipes - so you aren't relying on finding them in a bandit's pocket as the sole method to obtain them. Crafting needs more advancement by crafting - the current system is just downright inaccessible.

The special currency solution - This would tick a few boxes actually - getting crafted junk into the loot table by actually encouraging players to sell it, for example, and letting crafters advance a bit by actually using their trade, which is sorely needed here.

Regarding the overall economic situation - we are where we are. A classless game means everyone CAN level everything, if they want to grind out the experience for it. Which means yes, a lot of people will opt for self sufficiency and there is low demand for universal consumables, decorations etc. There's no way around that. Even restricting crafts or adding specialization will not fix it - because people have multiple accounts and will still opt for self sufficiency, all it would do is frustrate a lot of people and make matters worse. I think the first step would be to evaluate all the 'useless' food recipes, consumables, potions, etc. - and make them worthwhile and diverse - then we might start getting someplace. Next step - get rid of the RNG, let people craft custom stuff, limited by their success chance and item dura. Then you'd find a crafter who makes things in the type/style you like and become a customer, there'd be no more failed crap all over the place, imagine a world in which someone could custom order a set of gear for you and you could actually quote a price and be reasonably confident that you could produce said item? The biggest problem crafting has right now pure and simple, is RNG, its always been the problem, and it will always be the problem, until we do away with it. There's no good reason for it, I'd gladly triple the cost of gear crafting if I could just make what I actually want to make and I think most crafters would agree. Not everyone wants the same stuff anyway, we'd not lose the diversity just the frustration.

Its better to not make all the junk to begin with.

 

The issue isn't that most of the gear isn't top tier, the issue is there is no reason to use anything except the top tier.

 

I used mediocre gear for a LONG time, and even still often use my founder gear. I preserve my good gear. Many other players do too. The issue is, 99% of stuff is junk, and people cant sell their junk, but for some reason even though its not good enough for them, expect others to buy it.