If it's a player driven economy, why NPC vendors?

Ya, let's make the game even more of a job.

Some people try to play games to have fun, not work a second full time job.

 

Some do, some don't....Those that don't often come up with bad ideas, so it seems.

 

I'm so happy for him and his followers....
Unfortunately, he did not have the pleasure of playing SotA a month after persistence.

Our "markets" have not had sufficient time to satisfy the needs of the population as yet, and many people are struggling to make ends meet on the paltry loot that we are presently experiencing.
Adding more pain to the bulk of the population's current existence, would not be a wise move.

I respectfully submit, that your idea to remove NPC sales of common resources - would remove far more players than anything else.

Run that by Adam, and see what he says....

And be sure to give us a movie on his response.

 

How about the tax (fee) amount for selling items at PC vendors is reduced to be slightly less than NPC vendors?

 

just a reminder... UO had NPC vendors aswell... >.< you could even buy [edit]ore ingots [/edit] at npc vendors.

 

well you can buy ore also in UO from faction vendors but that came a bit later.

 

Completely agree at almost all.
We dont need the vendor with reagents, same for arrows(I`m an archer). My guildmate often goes to foraging the reagents and feel ok with it. Some reagents are not a problem at all(like spider silk). For other It could be easily balanced by increasing reagent plants ammount, fishing loot, put more regs into elemental loot and etc.
Then we have agriculture but it problem same as with crafting repair kits(I checked prices for whole manufacturing process - we need almost 10 times lower price on wood to able to sell it for 100 g.), it just not worth it.
As soon NPC vendors would kick offed we will see many people who gather regs on a sale, and in a few days market will adjust the price.

Baron and I liked your idea about tp scrolls too but I have idea who to make it soft - you can use teleport scroll with 5% of maximum weight, and if armor or weapon are those 5% it gain huge damage during the teleport.

Other will come on their place.

 

I'd have no problem with this as long as there were dedicated places where one could farm regs and fuels.
And I'm not talking about 3 or 4 plants dropping 3 or 4 each in an entire zone.
I don't think you should expect it to take more than 10 mins or so for a mage to gather the regs needed for an hour's combat. Any more than that is far too punitive.
Ditto crafting fuels. If there is to be no NPC availability, there has to be a way to get the thousands you need in a fairly short timeframe.

 

No, it's really not important to that at all.

If Portalarium wanted to impact the value of COTO's they could do that directly by simply walking into Owl's Head with an alt character and buying them all up from public and private vendors for in-game gold. No one would ever know, no one would care. Problem solved. They don't need an elaborate NPC system to do that.

Furthermore, they could (and will) continue to offer interesting features that you can only buy directly with a COTO, but can buy indirectly using in-game gold to buy the COTO from other players. No, the problem will never be making COTO's worth something, the problem will be making COTO's from being worth too much. And that's where ALL MMO's have a problem because inflation eventually catches up as the population of the game increases and more and more players figure out how to "beat the game". That is where the NPC system is useful and why Portalarium created it. The NPC's act as a gold sink to help delay or flush out inflation by undercutting player prices.

The problem I have with the NPC system is that it's very reactive. It allows the economy to screw itself up at the expense of the players until the developers manage it back to a new starting point. The players have very little impact on where the economy can go because the NPC's are anchoring all decisions. In some use cases this is a wonderful thing as it prevents some very tricky players (and guilds) from "creating" opportunistic bubbles that they profit from in the short term, but it can (and has) created long term (release wide) environments where players find it difficult to maneuver in a meaningful way, which results in some really stagnant game play.

I have absolutely no problem with COTOs, it's the NPC's that are problematic.

 

1. Question. If you take away the feasibility of self promoting Npcs without vice or individual greed, where is your source of economic stability to come from? (Players you will answer. Which players in a non self evident world will police their individual activities on their own for the good of each individual community?)

2. Wall Street. We don't have.

3. Example. Go to your local town. Close every shop, grocery store, petrol station etc. Implement this plan of plausible economic wonderment. How long do you live there?

4. Persistence does not equal viability as yet.

 

There sir, you just added stinking cloud or I supposed can be cloud kill, your call.

 

I disagree. Some base products should always be sold by NPCs. We already have dynamic sale pricing which makes it possible for players to undercut NPC prices.

 

Example: Go to your home town and create NPC's with unlimited goods and services for a fixed price. Just one of these will do. All your local small businesses will close in a week and no one will have a job. Which is exactly what's happening in the game right now.

Supply and Demand. This means that while some players will attempt to gouge everyone by selling worms for 25k each. Other players will undercut that person and be very happy to get 5 gold for each worm, selling to 100's of players and eventually making far more than the price gougers over time.

I know it sounds scary on the surface because MMO's don't have real player driven economies. But this is the correct answer, remove the NPC's. It will work.

@DarkStarr Because we'd be removing gold sinks however, we'd have to find a new way to get money out of the economy, and to do that we'd probably have to make hunting, fishing, gathering (etc), licenses taxed players regardless of if they were making money or not. This would pull constant money out of the economy to reduce inflation, and challenge players to make more money than the operating costs (taxes) to run a business. It would also make players more specialized (which would be awesome) because the more you tried to do the more taxes you'd pay.

 

Prevalent all over the USA as of now, you have an assortment of Petrol based stations that could be equivalent to NPCs. These stations sell everything from medical (aspirins, eye drops, etc.) to dairy products. Also your Sam's club, Walmart's etc. are also very much equivalent to the in game NPCs. I have thus far to see this desert oasis of local business's closing. They seem to be co-existing very well in this RL environment. Ergo, supply and demand are not all the factors to a healthy economic scenario.

 

Removing NPC vendors is a non-starter.

NPC vendors pay next to nothing currently so this is a non-issue. If anything, we need to greatly pay what NPC vendors will pay for crafted items and such so the single player offline economy works, and so we can get player crafted gear in the loot tables.

 

People do not really want to play medieval simulator, unless they have paid to shortcut their way into the castle in town. Then they will be happy to proclaim how they are providing free food and lodging and tools for those who are digging up the clay, shoveling the sand, and chopping up rocks so they can get the bricks to expand their castle walls into the neighboring lot after razing the wood shacks these peasants that are now his serfs used to live in.

I suggest those who actually want to play a serf go to Wurm Online, an indy sandbox medieval simulator where this is actually a reality. Never heard about it even though it has been around for ten years? If those serfs are having so much fun supplying basic resources to the economy, then it should be much more popular game. It has a brisk biz in skilled account selling because everyone wants to be the baron, nobody wants to be the serf.

Since I do not want to play the serf whos job is wringing chickens necks so that the Barons can go on their grand hunt...I vote no. Simulated supply and demand is perfectly fine because these jobs are best done by NPC, nobody wants to play a 24/7 serf in a game.

However I do think they can still add crafting reagents into gathering profession, if someone truly wants to be the expert gatherer and have people beating a path to their door because they undercut NPC prices, let them have their fun. Charge to rent public crafting stations to keep the gold sink in the game, those being self sufficient will collect enough rusty swords while gathering to afford it. Those crafters that need stably priced reagents will write delivery contracts with the best gatherers, which is something the NPC cannot do.

It is not like the organic dairy delivering milk to your door went under because 7-11 started selling milk. Both can exist, best of both worlds of stable supply at the NPC, cheaper bulk orders at the expert gathers, without forcing people to play months of serfdom to start the game. Like Wurm Online you can add quality to commodities, which gives another reason to use skilled gatherers over the serf NPCs, just don't make me play that serf.

 

That's not a very accurate statement and is a massive over-simplification of (what became) capitalist theory. In his morality writing he made it clear that it didn't necessarily result in equitable or 'fair' distribution, only that it was efficient. He was writing more about why the lords of the land didn't need to tell their peasants what to do, learn, and sell - those would be figured out. This was more about the enlightenment than what we view it as now.

Why this matters? Because it simply doesn't translate into a game, as I've written elsewhere. You don't have infinite suppliers and buyers, you do have transaction cost, and so forth. Furthermore, you have very limited number of goods which exist in this market, so you can't really have specialization the way a large capital relies. Plus the purpose of a game is to have fun and bring enjoyment, that's not why 'real' markets exist. As I tell students, the market doesn't really care about you.

TLDR, supply and demand models don't really work in a micro-scale economy like a game.

Unseen Dragon

 

I didn't say anything about being fair. I was talking about being efficient. Which in my mind would be far better than fair. The whole point of a player driven economy is that there will be winners and losers. Ya know, like most games have?

Really? How do we know that? When has it happened before?

 

You end you reasoning with the exact problem as to why not.

Figure those out and come back.

 

Because people have been writing about economic models for a long time and what is required for a capital market to work and a game doesn't translate into those models. I mentioned many factors which don't fulfill the needs. This is why most (all) games create a tier of built in mechanics, like NPC vendors, to stop it falling apart of being too manipulated.

So if one is going to propose that they have solved this and can remove the stabilizing mechanics (like NPC vendors), that should require a ton of evidence and data and not just a passing reference to something which doesn't even apply.

Unseen Dragon