SotA Economics - an opinion piece

Discussion in 'General Discussion' started by macnlos, Nov 30, 2018.

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  1. Vladamir Begemot

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    That's an interesting idea. It would still be player driven with just the NPC acting somewhat as a public vendor.

    Made by and sold by a player, then resold by an NPC to a player... NPC is scraping off gold on top of it, nice gold sink. (Considering how little NPCs pay for that +16 sword, and how much they could resell it for, it could be a HUGE gold sink.)

    Brilliant! @Bzus
     
  2. kaeshiva

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    See, I disagree? How is this different than a player spending hours every day grinding trivial mobs (zero risk) and selling the proceeds to the NPC which yields significantly more money over time? And does not require the timely agriculture investment as a precursor?

    If an hour of player time generates X money, it shouldn't matter what they are doing. Money gained from the NPC (faucet) is money gained from the NPC, regardless if I'm selling a rusty sword or a poison or whatnot. Its a matter of how much is generated in so much playtime - because time is the true currency here.

    If I want to make 10,000 gold - I can go clear an adventure scene and npc-feed all the crap I pick up in about an hour. OR, I can invest gold into seeds and water, spend 2 days tending a crop, and then hours standing at the crafting table processing what I've grown (while spending additional money buying other components). This is limited by the size of my planting operation (best profit) or, if I'm buying the crop from a farmer, in the case of deadly poison, I am making no money at all or at best pennies per hour. I'm essentially paying to level up my skills - breaking even. But this creates consumption/demand of farmed goods which otherwise simply does not exist. I'll spare regurgitating the math, but for time spent, adventuring is orders of magnitude more profitable use of player's time than anything you could craft throughout the game's history, deadly poisons included.

    The only real issue with it,is if people choose to macro/bot. Although the argument still stands, because people can macro/bot combat as well - albeit I expect its easier to do with crafting. And if that's the problem - well, I'd expect stricter controls/punishments on that behavior rather than a core nerf to any activity that is worth doing that doesn't involve mowing trivial mobs for hours upon hours, which is and has always been the most lucrative spend of player time, money-wise.
     
  3. macnlos

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    Funny thing about Macroing... The game I'm in completely supports macroing, even unattended... but NOT for resource gather skills. So as a bard, I can sit there and macro Musicianship until my heart is content. But if I'm got doing it for something like Mining, banned. Also, they actually put a CAPTCHA system in the game that pops up every so often so you can't actually do unattended macros for things that generates resources (fishing, skinning, logging, mining, etc).

    From a SotA perspective... they have all of these tight rules but I think it could be a little looser. For example, macroing water gathering is bad because it generates resources. Macroing smelting though.. who cares.

    BTW... thanks for the comments and feedback on this. If I look at the entire thread, there are a lot of responses and I think the point shown is that a) we know there are issues, b) I'm not sure what Port is doing for it, c) if Port doesn't look at this then the game will continue to lose peeps and struggle.
     
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  4. Eric White

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    I agree. I love the idea. AND it can be made even better IF the NPCs factored in what the players are buying and selling things for rather than some prefabricated amount. We know the data is there... if the SotAnet Price List site can pull the data, why can't the game itself do it? I'd like some checks and balances to give reward to the players for buying and selling on their own venders than the NPCs but truthfully... I thought I remember UO handled all this pretty good?

    Particularly the semi-finite resources thing. For instance... an NPC should not have an unlimited supply of gold to buy things OR an unlimited number of things to sell. The basics should ALWAYS be available (hammers and seeds and the most basic of gear, etc, etc )... but reagents in UO were not infinite. You often had to wait for a NPCs stock to replenish.

    I agree with @kaeshiva that crafting/farming are kind of getting the shaft compared to adventuring in the rate of gold one can make vs time spent doing it. It would be nice to see that changed a little.

    I disagree with the OP as I don't feel we need forced open world PvP to achieve a more balanced, player driven economy. That's a separate issue, IMO.
     
  5. Black FjP

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    I think where we all seem to miss the mark is that yes adventurers make gold while adventuring, but they are supposed to be spreading that thru the economy by spending resources on their gear and reagents to do that, things they need for adventuring. That does not happen very often under the current system, things last forever and they can be repaired with cotos. The cost of reagents from vendors was negligable compared to the amount of gold you made even BEFORE the loot increase, and now on top of that we are getting drops of already crafted gems, scrolls, repair kits, gold, silver, components salvage more, basically everything anyone could possibly buy from another player except crafted gear which we never have to replace.

    Yes, it's convenient for me as an adventurer that it works this way, but at the end of the day most people spend all this excess gold to get crafting skills that don't have a market outlet, becuase that market exists less and less.
     
  6. macnlos

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    I specifically used the word symbiotic. These discrete system need to be fed by some systems and feed other systems. If "adventurers" are not feeding/driving the "crafters" then it is broke.
     
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  7. Bowen Bloodgood

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    I would personally like to see 2-3 releases dedicated mainly to economy, much in the same way that they did with fishing and likewise just focus on a single major area of improvement.

    If they did that, then I think they could pick one major aspect of the economy and restructure how it works from the ground up. So just some more thoughts..

    Harvesting, agriculture and crafting. Two things.

    1: Increased yields. Whether in raw or processed resources. A major justification of the high prices on crafted goods far as I can tell is opportunity cost + yield + required resources to produce the finished good.

    Some may worry about flooding the market with resources, but when it's raw resources I think that's actually a good thing. The cost of goods would be driven down and be more affordable. Wood and ore is not difficult to get and for all intents and purposes are limitless resources.

    Some steps in the right direction have been made in terms of required sources with durability loss on failure rather than complete breakage.. and where I'm a fan of breakage, I'm not a fan of it occurring during crafting.

    2: Crafting.

    Crafting still suffers from awkward power balance.. Would love a more indepth discussion somewhere but what I'd like to point out here is you don't have to master everything to get quality gear. Improvements have been made but fleshing out crafting still needs a lot of work. Skill levels don't do enough to influence results and I hate to say it but for me, that means all that work to raise skills just doesn't feel rewarding. I feels like most of the reward happens early on and then.. well ok you get more masterwork options but the odds of success don't change that much and you only get two choices of overall quality.. standard and exceptional.. and that's a static random chance?

    Crafting skills and results have a direct influence on how we craft, the effort we put in, how fun we think it is etc.. all of which influences how much we craft and why. I guess what I'm trying to get at here is results and quantity come directly from how crafting works. Crafting and harvesting are what the player economy is ultimately built on yes?

    World Economy & Currency

    World economy as I touched on before. Currency.. ok ok.. debatable and this is of course my opinion. But I still want to see multi-tiered, tangible (weighted) currency. There's a certain psychological impact here. Multi-tiered isn't strictly necessary since you can always break it down to the smallest denomination. ie $1 = 100 cents.. and some people will argue it's less convenient and they don't want to manage it etc.. but then some like me would find it more run to have copper/bronze and silver, gold, cotos.. or however it would break down. Anyway.. weighted currency would affect how much people want to carry and spend and possibly provide other opportunities for creative services. So at least worthy of discussion perhaps?

    Finite / semi-finite resources

    Loot

    ALL loot should be useful somehow.. chaff loot like rusty spoons should be salvageable for scrap.. and at the risk of overlapping ideas.. getting back to NPCs only buying appropriate goods in limited quantities.

    Ok.. I think I've written a long enough post.. if I don't stop here I'll never get any mining done... but yeah.. would love to see entire releases just focus on one or two major features to either flesh out or overhaul.. including the economy.
     
  8. Lace

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    Here is my 2 cent weigh in for what it is worth .. many before me brought up things I agree upon and some I do not.

    To me there exist 3 or more types of crafters .. those out for profit no matter the cost or embellishment on value, and those that want to be competitive and offer good items for reasonable prices and those that just are trying to recoup some of what it cost them to learn.

    With no global market new or inexperienced players can be preyed upon. I do not have a solution for that other than streaming and making more buyer beware videos folks,it makes me extremely sad when a live stream targets the most overpriced vendor in the world .. just saying ...

    For those wanting to understand pricing ..think of this
    Crafters tend to price things based on the cost of buying the raw materials and then refining them and then passing that along to the purchasers. I feel that this can overinflate the market because of the few with loud voices that just want to buy and not risk in crafting. They have been doing this in numerous games to date. Its not a bad thing to do, but when you have no visually competitive market, the sloths can win with a loud voice. and make new players feel overwhelmed in obtaining competitive gear for fair prices.

    When the price of those raw mats go up because of a lack of gatherers .. the price of the gear goes up necessarily. I feel that some in the design world of SOTA think that crafters are mining, growing and making all the things themselves and should force the price down, but with the constant nerfs to producer xp gathering in the form of spawns, they have doubled down on making it less so. (all hail double xp on producer nodes its not competition to hunting but it helps)

    Every time they nerf the mines because of the few exploits and I can count at least 3 times this has happened.. it affects all. These changes affect the buyers market where they don't want to spend more because it cost the pure crafter/non adventurer money. The honest gatherers see their profit margin decline as well .. and frankly you lose gatherers from the perceived gold per hour on adventurer per hour versus miner per hour

    Because the game touts the best gear is player crafted, why do you keep making it harder for resource gatherers when you know full well, their participation affects the market? Yes I understand the need to combat scripted gathering but rather than resource spawn time stagnation, the mob spawn times should be the variable where the gifted can get more ore thus the drive to level rather than .. no need to level we have to wait for ore spawns anyhow ...

    PAY MORE ATTENTION to how you change weapon drops, we go through feast or famine on wood scrap weapons versus metal scrap weapons .. it drives the market to ridiculous extremes every time you re-itemize a base mob class .. for 3 months we are wood scrap heavy then metal then wood .. STOP IT. Pay attention to the scrap potential before you change the mob weapon types and think of the effect that has on the economy. (you need to take a look at the minority of metal scrap producing weapons right now)

    FYI if you don't know port we are in a metal scrap famine.

    I could go on and on .. but many others have said some of my other thoughts already

    For a game that touts the best things made by crafters .. its time to look at resource balancing which has fallen to the wayside imho in lieu of combat balancing


    Don't hit me @Chris know this not you thing but want your metrics brought to gathering etc ...
     
    Last edited: Dec 5, 2018
  9. Tila Tenderfoot

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    Well said, Lace. Resource gatherers (miners specifically) now need to retool their skills to get close to the volumes they used to have.
     
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  10. Elrond

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    This also .

    I usually buy 100k scraps at 2.5-3g each.... now the price is 3.5-4g each ...im told its no longer profitable to scrap the weapons since they can get more on them just selling to NPC ... and they are right. Last time i bought iron at 25k/1k thats 100g /1 ingot without scraps ..with scraps at 4g each its 2 iron ore x 12 scrap = 50 + 48 gold = 98 gold /ingot .

    1 Iron ingot costs 100 gold without metal scraps
    1 Iron ingot costs 98 gold with metal scraps
     
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  11. Adam Crow

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    That is without factoring in refining skills and the increased yields they give.
    With gm refining efficiency it costs around 88.5 gold for an iron ingot without scraps and around 77 gold for one with scraps.
     
    Last edited: Dec 6, 2018
  12. Bowen Bloodgood

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    Been saying this since the beginning. Stuff needs to break! This is almost tricky in SotA because you also want gear to have enough longevity to for legendary status to be achievable while a piece of gear still has enough life in it for the achievement to be worth while.

    Legendary status??? Well, I am referring to a feature that has been long planned where weapons (and hopefully armors) can gain bonuses through use.. ie Elf Slayer after killing 10,000 elves or something.

    Still if you think about it logically, such gear should be rare and would only last that long if the owner kept very good care of it. So what I have proposed before is that gear has a % chance to break based on low durability, and this only after X amount of repairs or major repairs. New gear should have enough life to be worth the price you paid for it, BUT if you don't care for the gear and allow durability to drop to low to many times, then breakage should be a very real possibility.

    We already have a form of pseudo breakage in that 0 durability turns off the item's stats, but it's still repairable. I would suggest complete breakage making the item unrepairable, or in the very least causing rapid reduction in 'primary durability' or just reducing it to 0 entirely. (I'm not a fan of things going *poof*). An early argument from the devs was that they didn't want things breaking on people in the middle of combat but we have ample warning of low durability now so it should never be a surprise to anyone.

    If you don't need to replace gear than who are crafters going to sell to? Breakage is a means to maintain demand for crafted gear lest you end up with a saturated market with low demand to move goods.

    At the same time, a well kept item should last a very long time but that requires regular maintenance which quite frankly I'd expect only a small percentage of players to do well (if properly balanced) since being lazy would increase the risk of breakage.. (ie darn my sword's durability is low.. I'll get it repaired when I'm done here in 20 minutes.. -5 minutes later- *snap* damn it!)
     
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  13. macnlos

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    @Lace - well said and I agree with you.

    We keep saying the “economy” as if it is a thing. The economy is a collection of systems and interconnections. Every thing in the world has the ability to affect the “economy”. I would be extremely impressed if any of the Porters would actually take the time to do a full state of the economy. Yeah.. who decorated the best dungeon is pretty cool but that is along the lines of arranging deck chairs on the Titanic. Take the time to discuss the economy in detail, where they are having issues and where they are going and when. If they really have a grasp on the issues, it will help generate from faith to stick it out. If they don’t have a grasp... we’ll then at least we know what to expect. Poor economy means poor game.
     
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  14. Elrond

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    Yes without refining skill.

    Also lack of scraps means less fuel bought from NPC less gold coming out of the economy. If you refine 10k iron without scraps you only use 2.5k coal . If you use scraps you need 5k coal for 10k iron . Then on the manufacturing procces ( armor/weapons) you have to use more fuels again if you have 5k ingots instead of just 2.5k ..more gold out of the economy ....

    Adding gold and silver scraps will also result in more gold out of the economy ... as more fuel is bought from npc to refine .

    Subtle changes like these ( making certain items hard to find) do affect the economy . When the price for dropped weapons was increased like 100g +/weapon the amount of scraps they yield should have been increased also ... you take out scraps from the game and you ruin a decent gold sink.
     
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  15. Adam Crow

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    Fyi all elite skeleton footman mobs have two handed hammers that don't drop patterns when salvaged. They're only valued at 75 so you can get quite a bit of metal scrap from them. I've had no problem keeping up with my metal scrap supply thanks to them.

    I do agree with you guys though, some more thought needs to be put into the economy when changes to drops are made.
     
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  16. oplek

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    Threads like this frustrate me. I've brought up the fundamentals of the economy before... with all due respect to Chris, he's not an economist. So here we are trying to gets Port's attention, and they're like "idk.. economy seems fine... now let's get back to work on dancing fish!"

    A lot of this was mentioned here, but my vote stands behind:

    1) Limit the NPC vendor cash. Maybe they get 100g/hr regeneration to a max amount. People buying stuff adds beyond that (at a loss). Otherwise, they run out.

    2) Crank up the quest gold. Doing the Middle Downs quest might net you 5k. It'd be one-time, and would help jumpstart new players.

    3) With few exceptions (such as eternal patterns), virtually everything should eventually be removed from the game. We don't need a thousand chairs per player. There needs to be some kind of mechanism to destroy chairs. Or there's no economy. We either suck it up, or there's no economy.

    Of course, adding more players would help with #3, but we can't keep adding players in perpetuity. We need to be able to fundamentally have an operating economy that can work with a static number of players.
     
  17. oplek

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    ... and also maybe have property taxes scale based on some metric.
     
  18. Vladamir Begemot

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    Just a note for anyone who's not a serious crafter but using these numbers, they are simplifications that left out ingot mold and fuel prices, which add 7 total, and one more if you're using a tool that isn't invincible.
     
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  19. Vladamir Begemot

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    I think you're looking for @Bzus
     
  20. Adam Crow

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    Actually it's 6.5 with an indestructible tool and 7.5 without :p
     
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