Just posting a few ideas/suggestions that may or may not help with the game. Please understand that these are from my own perspective and I may have not seen or taken other perspective that I am aware of, therefore the ideas are for discussion. Now I played from the initial start, but having a potato pc back then, it forced me to quit the game but observationally I have seen what the game was like in the beginning and thus I am comparing it now. I understand that the game has changed hands/devs etc a few times now which probably doesn't help with original premise or concepts of the game. Anyway to the main discussion. Crafting - I've always viewed the crafting possibilities in this game as quite special. So many skills to master etc but as there is no point crafting due to the cost of training it (not free - even if you mined the resources yourself, you still have to factor in time as a cost) and it does not have much profit. Some people will say that there is profit to be made but those people are the far, few and well established people. What I am talking about is the ability to craft items and make profit selling it to vendor npcs - by making the crafted item be worth more than the sum of the resources. This in turn drives the economy by creating more resource gatherers therefore more competition for selling and the demand would be there. It also allows more people to take up crafting. You could offset this by reducing exp gained for crafted items. Agriculture - what once was one of the main appeals of the game has been nerfed quite heavily. I understand and have read the past forum posts about risks vs rewards but agriculture has time cost to it. You don't get the reward straight away, there's an initial cost (buying planters, seeds and water) you have to wait for the crops to grow, even then cannot miss a watering episode. It is also limited by the amount of land or size of the plot you use. There are a few proposals here: 1) Keep the growth timers on the watering but if the crops do not get watered, the next "phase" is delayed until the crops have been watered, thereby extending the growth timers. An example is say the next watering phase is in 8 hours time, 8 hours has elapsed but you don't water it till after 10 hours, so the next watering phase does not start until 8 hours after the 10 hours. 2) There are only a few crops that have profit in them - garlic, nightshade, cotton and maybe pumpkins. If you standardised so that they make a marginal profit via npc, different crops can be planted too allowing more flexibility and variety It is a shame that crafting and agriculture has taken big hits over the years. There's definitely a niche here to cater for gamers after this playstyle. It is a shame that SOTA does not take advantage of this at all. Housing - Looking through several NPC towns, there are now lots available. There was such competition for these lots in the very beginning. Now all we see are the same players who have monopolised these areas and in a way it has shown the decline of SOTA over the years. Housing in SOTA is quite special with the amount of decorative flair I have seen people do on their homes. What makes housing difficult is the cost for the furniture - again this can be solved by allowing non-combat activities to have profit via npc selling. Not everyone wants to participate in combat all the time or at all. Some people prefer the pacifist and peaceful side of an MMO. Economy - Again several past posts shows a disparity in low, medium and high level in terms of gold obtained. Unless you know where to go or hunt, information is very limited and only a few people know where to farm. Even if you did know where to farm, it takes hours to earn enough to upgrade your gear. I feel this has limited a lot of players, probably added to their frustrations and made them quit. Like I said above, offsetting this with crafting, agriculture and fishing changes by allowing them to make profit with their activities, will help solve this issue for low levels and mid level players. Idea - Maybe SOTA can sell a potion of double xp with COTOS. I know this might be unfavourable for veterans but actually it may help get newer players upto speed to be more useful in terms of combat. The benefits are for newer players and those players with builds that cannot self-attenuate therefore making other builds more viable rather than the standard builds as posted in the forums. It would also allow the self-attenuating capped players to have more time to do other activities for the hour. SOTA can do so much more to drive the game in terms of economy. I believe they can also get more revenue in other ways with what has been stated above. Free to play players would be able to afford COTOS in the market, if the economy was fixed and this would in turn drive a COTO market and more COTO Crown store shop sales. The other activities would also supplement competitive real estates and deeds would be more sought after and again would lead to more sales for Catnip. It could also lead to more POT sales for them. Why I bother to post? I know some of the contents here would be berated or receive backlash from hardcore or die hard fans of the game saying that the game is fine. I am not saying that the game isn't fine as it is, but there could be so much more improvement in terms of QOL, target audience and increase player base. The SOTA community is probably one of the more helpful communities I have experienced but let's face it, the number of active players is ok but could be much better. So why post? I enjoy the game and would like to see it improve and gain more players to its side. I feel that CATNIP should try and get a slice of the niche crafting/farming/fishing play style player base along with the casual players.
You can make more now from farming then the old days. They increased the gold return for selling to npcs on cotton, mandrake, and garlic (by lowering the cost of water x10). Those reagents are also heavily used for crafting potions, which allows you to sell them for even more to players. Pumpkins and barley are also crops players will buy up large quantities of (especially when dbl xp is running). I honestly don't think adding the ability to sell other crops to npcs at a profit will change anything at all. I do however think the other farmable products should have a reason for players to buy them. Similar to pumpkins and barley. That would make farming a more interesting activity in my opinion. As for crafting, are you aware that in the past when you failed an enchantment or masterwork, the item was completely destroyed. Poof, gone forever. They also added a mastery skill to each crafting tree so that you can reroll and choose 3 new enchants/MWs multiple times on an item. Crafting use to be extremely punishing, and took tons more time to level up than it is now. Gathering the highest tier nodes in the early days gave you about 500-1000 producer xp and meticulous collection did not give you any extra experience back then. I'm a bit confused when you say they have taken big hits over the years?
Excellent! Thank you for your response Adam. This is the type of perspective I am after. I have to admit the bit about breaking the item I completely forgot about. Your post has reminded me of that difficulty and I have been perhaps maybe too overly critical of the crafting changes. So with the crops: it would be good to have comparable crops to what you said above. Farming I remember used to have it's own following of players as it catered to the type of activity and playstyle some people are after. It appears almost all have moved on or on a hiatus to see if any positive changes will come about. To say it though, I do think that farming had positive elements in bringing demand for land and deed values and was easily accessible for low and mid players. I definitely agree that creating use or reasons for the other products would be a positive move forward to allow for the variety. Now for the crafting: As you said they made some positive changes towards crafting and I admit that I completely forgot about the details you explained above. I do still think that crafting should have some outlet so that it could be better for newer players and mid players in terms of investment to get it going. If you view it, the ability to earn gold to buy mats is quite a daunting task for new and mid level players. I do not know what it is like when you are high end in terms of gold making so I do not have that perspective. You could argue that players can farm their own mats, but farming for an hour to collect and then able to make a few pieces of items can be quite off putting. Also when you calculate that you could make a lot more selling the raw materials, it can be hard to give crafting a go. In terms of big hits: I'm referring to agriculture being more profitable in the past and partly the reason for it's popularity and for some this was the only goal they wanted. It kinda made lots and housing more lucrative and sought after and it made certain cities more abundanct. Brewing was also one - brewing allowed for farmers to sell their products to brewers who in turn saw their investments (time and money) with good returns. Since there is little to no profit (the player demand isn't that great these days due to reduced player base, therefore getting a market portion isn't that viable) considering the associated crafting involved i.e. making casks etc, it has fallen on the wayside and is not considered worthwhile getting into. I still see some players stashing their old whiskeys in case things change again. There used to be a real playermarket in the forums too. Almost daily there were posts as to the resources being sold, even real estate and pledges. I don't know if this is the impact of discord but i highly doubt it since there is not that great deal of activity there either. There were resource gatherers in game that would be hawking their wares aplenty as well. Anyway like I said, thank you for your response Adam and I appreciate the time you put into the response. Perhaps I am either being optimistic for this game to give it another lease of life to capture newer players or I would like to see some change due to the difficulties I personally see getting into the game (I understand this is biased but there are themes from older posts in the past essentially reflecting the same). I also don't know if this is just because SOTA is 10 years old and has it's own critics that doesn't help attract new players or that players won't try the game first to see what it has to offer. But I do know we could all agree that we want SOTA to thrive a lot more
I thought one of the whiskeys still generates quite a bit of profit, but im not 100% sure. I just do enough brewing so that I have a personal supply for myself, so someone else would have to confirm that. As for crafting, I personally buy and sell crafting ingredients. I'm lazy though, so I price my stuff for convenience and you can usually find better prices for most of the stuff elsewhere. My goal has always just been to provide a spot for players to grab whatever crafting ingredient they need, without having to hunt around. If you want to make a profit crafting items for players, it can be a very daunting task. Everyone plays differently and uses different builds and decks. It takes extreme knowledge about the game and you have to put the effort in by advertising or even streaming. Coswald is currently busy and hasn't been playing much, but he is a perfect example of how you can make some great profits through crafting. He is great at pricing his goods, expensive for the really hard to make, nearly perfect pieces. And then he has mid range and even discounted pieces, usually at a loss to sell to new and mid-level players. While selling at a loss seems strange, you can make so much gold off that one near perfect item, the items you sell at a loss or break even are really just bonus. It's a way to recoup some of the lost materials for the items that don't come out as planned. The player base issue unfortunately is something I completely agree with you. I still love the game and play regularly, but the demand for items is definitely lower. I've had to lower my prices in a lot of cases, and honestly I need to do another round of that for most of my materials. My personal issue is, if I lower prices too much, I can't keep up with the demand by myself, even with this player base. So if you want to become a profitable crafter it is still a very viable profession here. I am always looking for help with my vendors in Novia Market. I have been stocking the main alley vendors, almost by myself for a long time now. It's a lot of work, so I just do what I enjoy and most of those vendors are sadly neglected. Please don't take my responses like I'm trying to say the game is great and we don't need changes. We could definitely use some positive changes to crafting and the economy, so I always try to get these discussions going. Even after 10 years I'm still holding out hope that we get some different ideas that help improve the player base. You never know who will come up with a great idea, so these discussions are potentially very valuable to the game. Thanks for bringing this up, and i appreciate your input! I can always use help with my vendors in Novia Market. So if anyone wants to help to become a crafter or needs a location that gets good traffic, please reach out to me. There's lots of gold to be made, even with this size player base. Just remember, it's not only the devs who control how big the player base can be, this game is a pretty awesome sandbox. Don't underestimate what you can do for the game, even as a single player. The more active we all are as a community, can help bring more players in. Events, contests, player quests etc. all make the game more attractive and have the potential to bring in more players each and every day!
whiskey generates profit. only reason i don't do it is because it seems to be a tedious process, at least to me. at least one player has shown me his giant warehouse full of casks and he makes a tremendous amount of gold each time he cycles them overall i think crafting is great. there are some ui changes i would make in the interface. but the process right now seems good.
The devs had it right in the beginning. Crafting, including farming, should always be a gold sink. Having it be otherwise ensures that you're economy will exponentially inflate turning your game into digital Zimbabwe unless you have draconian gold sinks. SotA's small size is the only reason gold still has any value on player vendors. As with most things SotA, the devs followed up that good idea with a misstep, by tying XP gain to crafting consumption, they inadvertently changed the formula, ensuring years of fruitlessly trying to pilot the economy like a plane with the controls randomly welded together under the console.
Always have baffled me how casually people can talk about economics while obviously knowing jack sh*t about it. Although it's quite simple, in the end: it's all about the maths – therefore, also all about the Pentiums. But I digress. Since you seem fond of convoluted analogies let me recycle a French one for you: whether for SotA or for Zimbabwe, you can't just pull your finger outta your butt and see which side dries up first to know for sure where the wind's coming from. I know, I know, it's way easier to do that than to open GAMS and actually put in the work... Not much I can do about that. Now, you got a real point to make? Let's hear it.
Pretty sure a lot of farmers can relate. First things first: thank you for your involvement. The farming cooperative* I'm a part of cycles 850 slots, all within greenhouses (= timers halved). Maybe that's not much compared to other farmers, but let me tell you that's more than enough to start pondering ways of 'bettering' the whole system – and pondering I did, a lot, over the years. Especially about what always was the main issue for me considering my hectic lifestyle: missed watering timers. Allow me to share part of my thoughts about them: 1/ There's this idea of stopping plant growth if they've not been watered (my daughter would tell you: 'Yeah, BUT, plants don't stop growing when you don't water them, that just makes no sense'. Since I'm not sure what would or would not make sense in a world where I can resurrect dead people and have a giant spider fight on my behalf, I won't go there ); 2/ There's also another idea: implementing 'self-watering' pots and beds, where you add 4 units of water** when planting then let the growing follow it's natural course (These, of course, would be obtainable via COTOs only. But they raise new questions: How much would they cost to make? And can they be indeed be made? The revenue stream they'd generate, would it be enough? Would it be relevant?) Now, missing a watering timer is a pain in the you-know-what because of the loss you have to take when it happens. So we tend to grow plants slower. We also tend to plan ahead – I lost count of all the times I told myself: 'Nope, I ain't planting anything today, 'cause I know for sure I won't be able to water', and I can't be the only one. (I'm pretty sure they've factored that in when they designed the system. In this, farming is a gold sink that is both direct and indirect - that's why, imho, it's so effective.) As of today, the only two farming activities (that I know of) that are comfortably profitable (= making a reasonable profit selling to NPCs without having to rely on other players' involvement) is cotton farming and whiskey distilling. Between these two: cotton is cheap to set up, not too tedious to produce, and can be sold right away – but it has to be planted often, therefore leading to higher risks of missed watering timers; when whiskey requires investments beforehand, is quite tedious to cycle, and can take a lot of time to mature – but you only need to plant barley every know and then, decreasing the risk of missed watering timers. But whichever road suits you best, they both work and they both lead to reliable profit. If a QoL improvement for watering were to be added, we'd probably have to see their profitability reduced to counterbalance the change. I don't have access to the data therefore I can't do the math, but in all logic – asking for it would mean shooting ourselves in the foot in the long run. As always, just my two cents, and hugs all 'round. Eve' *We share all our greenhouses, meaning every member has access to ALL planting slots according to a set planning, whatever the size of their own lot (but the less planting slots they contribute, the less time slots they get – it's only fair). This is the solution we came up with to decrease the risk of missed watering timer to the minimum. With such a system, if you need ten thousand units of barley, but only own 60 planting slots in your row greenhouse, you won't have to go through 10 planting cycles – you just need to do one. **4, period. No '10%' rule here.
Are you disagreeing with me or just being crude? Back in the day that'd land you a two day suspension on this forum, though I guess those days have passed. As I said, crafting / farming in a vacuum shouldn't generate a profit. The reason should be obvious, if you can turn 100g into 110g at no risk and without interacting with other players, then you can turn 110g into 121g and so on generating as much profit as your time invested allows. Since nothing stops as many players from doing this as can fit on the server, and taxes on lots are a fraction of their potential profit, this ensures substantial inflation, as has been seen on ever other MMO that follows this pattern. This isn't something you need an advanced degree to understand, if players can generate gold without engaging in the economy, you get unrestricted inflation. I'm not contesting that farming takes time management, however, SotA isn't a cookie-clicker so I don't see how that alone justifies a guaranteed profit. Also, I'm not saying that other parts of the original design haven't also been changed over the years, weapons and armor used to have a useful life measured in days, controls points used to matter beyond infinite grinding, but one of the core tenets was that profit comes through engaging with the economy. If that's no longer important, management might as well start selling fountains in the cash shop that give you a few gold every time you interact with them.
So you had a real point to make in the end. Yay! I'll get back to it in a minute. I wasn't disagreeing with you, merely mirroring your tone to point out that: 1/ You don't need a degree either to understand that comparing a game to a real country is neither relevant nor intellectually honest; 2/ Rants devoid of arguments (but ain't that a pleonasm?...) won't lead anyone anywhere. Bonus stage: Threats won't work with me, and neither will the good old 'my account is older than yours so my word has more weight than yours' fallacy. If you feel wronged (and it's your entire right to feel that way), I suggest you report me so the moderators ban me. Now that we seem to be back to discussing constructively and in a civil and respectful manner: I now see your point – and it makes sense. In most of known games, to counterbalance inflation you have to do the exact opposite of what's being done in RL. This is one of the main differences between SotA and Zimbabwe: buying copper ingots for real will be cheaper than buying copper wire, because the transformation process (ingots -> wire) will add value. But such a transformation will require investments, skills, etc – so not something just anyone will be able to do. When in most games just about any player can do that, quickly, low cost, zero risks. So allowing them to make a profit through NPCs is definitely not a good idea. They're supposed to make their profit through other players. About that, I wholeheartedly agree. But... Wait a minute... Considering the fact that inflation is still a huge issue in most games that went down that path... Are we sure that substracted value is the only variable coming into play? Follow-up question 1: what would be the real reason behind SotA's almost non-existent inflation? Follow-up question 2: which efficient sinks would be considered acceptable by SotA's community? Because, in the end it's all about retaining players. The game itself can't go down the substracted value route, can it?
Sort of. Reality is a bit messy compared to a game, but while a pile of copper ingots is going to be worth less than that same copper spooled into copper cables on the open market, a scrap dealer is going to pay more for the ingots. That's how NPC vendors are designed to work, they are scrappers that allow players to recover some value for their items, but the less processed the better. By design, players are the market, NPC merchants are scrap dealers. The devs have three levers they can use to control inflation. They can control the sinks, the faucets and the in-game money to real world money conversion rate. Fiddling with all three at the same time is a mess, so SotA went with controlling the faucets, namely value was only supposed to enter the economy in the form of harvestables and monster drops in proportion to how much gold was being removed by sinks. This didn't work, same as it didn't work for OU, because folks hoard like crazy and they immediately drained all the value out of the pool. So they released the brakes on the faucets but didn't ramp up the sinks because players hate sinks and they they didn't try to use the conversion rate because controlling an economy that way does take a degree in economics. I play every year or two, there is always plenty of inflation on actual items of worth, such as deeds and the like, but the demand for almost everything else is so much lower than the supply and the economy is so inefficient that it's hard to track. Even watching the price of Crowns doesn't work as the devs can control the drop rate to keep the Crown to gold exchange rate steady. Basically, if 99% of what is on vendors at any given time wasn't dross, inflation would be more obvious. That's the million dollar question, you find an answer and every MMO company will pay you for it. The easiest answer for SotA would be to introduce massive sinks that players can or should pay into. Wars, titles of nobility, expeditions into the unknown, all were historically huge sinks of wealth, but they all are an awful lot of work and buying a new model off the Unity store rigging it for SotA is faster and gets folks plenty excited. The unfortunate truth is that the reason we are having this conversation at all is that the only players SotA has left in any quantity are those that like to watch the number go up, they don't play to explore or compete directly against other players, they just want the number to go up. Making a game that those other groups will want to play without annoying the existing fan base is another one of those million dollar questions.
