Discussion regarding the new economy balancing

Say whaaa....

 

the problem here is that the poor players don't have the gold to play, not that 10% of players have 90% of the gold.
what players need to something that points them down the road of how to make gold ex: farming sol town catacombs for the 1k+ gold you can get for clearing it

these wont help in the long run this is a case of "give a man a fish he eats for a day teach him how to fish and he will eat for a life time"
it also breaks the flow of game play if you have to run over to the oracle everyday to get your 500g allowance.

i doubt this will help from personal experience ppl have to farm the mats so they have the exp to skill up in crafting.

i would rather see a quest for using the skill because that would be part of the flow of game play instead of a dead stop.

the ideas they have are ok but strike me more as off the cuff answers and need a bit more time to bake.

 

We need to get away from the farming/grinding mentality. It makes the game a second job.....

 

But markets are sooo complicated..
Speaking of markets, players are supposed to be able to make work orders for other players for gold. But the crafting economy is completely broken so a lot of crafters don't have any gold to buy things with. No trickle down.

 

But the devs created the economy to mainly support this activity. They actually increased the amount of gold for vendoring wolf heads and other gathered items which ends up promoting vendoring instead of other players buying them. The main economic gold inflows are from grinding and gathering right now.

 

did not they say at one point that the game should "minimize grinding"? Ya I do know what it is now, but I cannot say it without repercussions lol.

 

I haven't heard them actually say it but I sense that what they're doing now is a temporary measure.. (at least I hope it is) to make things easier for some.. but it is by no means a long term fix.

 

PM me brother I will help you.

 

They could always adjust the amount of Oracle gold entering the game based on the level of the person doing the asking.

Say you get (500gp - Level * 10) gold instead. So low level people get a start and incentive to move around...while sooner or later higher level guys will move on to more lucrative money making schemes.

 

I don't think it will made a bit of difference at all, the top 10% will still have 90% of the gold... In addition to what they have now, they will be able to : visit the oracle, talk to the town criers and do the quests, so how does that mean I can buy silver for 800 ea or copper or iron or sooty bark or logs or any resource at all so I can craft items?

Now had they told use "how" they got the 90% of the gold, then maybe we could come up with some ideas, but I'm doing the same things I've always done and I'm earning squat, when now I need to spend 26 gold for 1 coal or curing salt or wax and I need to buy 100 of them just to start crafting...

When I gather, I get fewer resources than before, and my combat skills are still too low to go into hi skull area, so the more plentiful resources they broached will help me, but the underlying problem for me is x1 exp gain, so that's a different matter altogether...

So, how does one achieve 2 mil gold?
-buy cotos and sell them to NPCs (this is the easy way of buying gold for cash), so lets trump this and only allow 10 cotos to be sold per week or bi weekly or monthly, I think that would slow the influx of gold... If a player goes outside to buy gold from another player, isn't that a player to player transaction? So, no gold is created... Maybe there should be a player coin offered in the store, buy for half price or lower, it's only used to purchase gold from another player and store credit is issued to the player giving the coin for gold... Portalarium would get some cash and both players gets some store credit (maybe 1/2 what was paid or less)... The coin would be burned in the exchange, but gold transfered

-they play 24/7 in groups and kicka$$ on the same mobs over and over... Looting everything until everyone is overweight, then they go to sell everything but resources (those they put on vendors at high prices or use themselves)... There really isn't anything you can do if players group or play long hours, but I think the scenes (instances) should remember the players... I think the scene should scale the loot down after each player has looted a critter, after a player loots 5 rusty swords, then there is no more rusty swords spawned for that player, the longer you play the less loot you get... The scenes would also remember the last time you played in it, the more hours you play, the longer the timer goes, so you are forced to go into a new scene, then the next, and the next (you can't just stay in the same scene and farm, the more hours you play the longer the time has to pass before your loot table is returned to normal, so even if you went through all the scenes, your loot table would still give squat)...

Example: A player enters a scene (solo or grouped), that scene has 20 skeletons total, this player starts killing skeletons and once they kill 20, the loot table changes to 2ea coal, after 20 more kills, the loot is 1ea coal, after 20 more, no loot at all (scaling starts at 5 kills, drops sword from loot, then drops corpse wax, then another item, etc until nothing is left), but you still gain exp & skill... The NPCs in town won't buy the coal, they have coal, don't need it... You would need to go to a different scene to loot more skeletons, eventually drying that one up, and moving on to the next, each critter type would remember you, so the spiders would still drop loot, but the skeletons wouldn't... once you've hit all the scenes with skeletons, the 1st scene would have a timer start and a curtain amount of time would need to pass before those skeletons start dropping loot for you again... Each type of critter skeleton, elf, kobol, etc could drop coal, wax, creasole, curing salt indicating when your loot table has changes, but still have limited value...

 

The oracle is a boring waste of time in my opinion. I'd much rather know what my virtues are via titles and stuff like they did in UO over talking to the oracle. Even knowing I could gain 500gp from the Oracle is still not enough to make me want to waste my time talking to her. Especially since knowing that when it comes to PVP, removing the "oracle's protection" is only something that has to be done by one person in the game. Everyone else can pvp flag on the fly as long as some one else is already flagged so I guess I just think everything about the oracle is a boring pain and find the idea of fixing the economy through her extremely hopeless.

I'm on board with all of the other changes though. . .oh and someone shared this with me yesterday. I find it funny.

 

I don't think you can sell COTO's to NPC's. COTO's just moves the wealth around.



I don't have 2 million gold pieces...but I seem to be net gaining around 10k a day playing. So I thought I might share some of my gold gaining secrets.

First of all...I don't farm huminoids. If that was the only way to make gold I would go play something else. If they get in my way, I will murder them for their paltry items which I will scrap for parts. I don't sell their blood soaked stuff for gold. That would be morbid.

What I do farm is wolves. At my level, they drop 2 skins. Sometimes a head/suet/thrombus. The head I can turn into 80gp. The skins I keep and every once in a while, I buy up heads I find at vendors. Every skin/head is a hat = 80gp (less expenses)

While I am mostly a melee guy, I do use spells. So my reagent use is lower then most...so I can farm the reagents I use.

I do an excessive amount of mining. I sell off all (to NPC) the Tungsten I find since I have no use for it. It's worth 50gp each and I can get a couple 1000 gold for it from one mining run.

I don't own property...so I don't pay taxes. I don't want to own property..so I don't buy lottery tickets. By keeping gold sinks to a minimum, my only expense really is fuel for crafting. Since I am leveling up Enchantment and Masterworking....I use a fair bit of coal. I also use a lot of wax and salt..but they go into my profit making engine...hats.


This worked for me at a lower level, but I was forced to sell some things. I used to hit Crooked Shank a lot. Farmed the wolves for the skinning..then hit the skellies. Sell off the weapons. Buy silver since I couldn't mine it. When I got higher level, I hit Desolate Hills. Same scene, but higher level wolves/skellies.

It is definitely a lot easier to make gold at higher levels. I do remember struggling more when I was in my 20's. By the time I hit the 50's I was home free.

EDIT: I just looked at my bank and sorted by Value.

I am sitting on 13k worth of nickel. 8k worth of Suet. 7k worth of Constatan ingots. 7k worth of Emerald Ash Borers, and so on. All in all about 70k worth of stuff on the first dozen items if I was so inclined to just npc vendor it.

 

- First:
"We cannot simply increase the overall influx of resources and gold into the game because that will cause inflation and damage the overall health of the economy. It would also only further increase the disparity between the wealthiest few and the poorest masses."

That disparity occurs because of the Cantillon Effect - which postulates that the first ones receiving the newly created money benefit the most from this policy. As the money circulates throughout the economy, demand from services and products closer to these people who first received the money increases, which drives prices up. Simply put: the first ones who receive the money buy goods costing the old, cheaper price; The last ones receiving this money, which already circulated and drove prices up, buy goods costing the new, "inflated", more expensive price.

This is a very simple and logical concept which should always be on the mind of anyone in charge of balancing the in-game economy.

Well, this situation leads to two possibilities on how to "perfectly balance" the economy:

1. There is a fixed amount of gold available in-game - either already circulating or underground waiting to be mined. Just like real life gold. Or just like bitcoin.
2. There is a fixed exchange rate from dollars to in-game gold. Say the developers fix the exchange rate in 1:1 - 1 USD = 1 Gold coin. This could be managed from the SotA store, for instance, and there could even be a fee paid to the SotA store in order to "intermediate" this exchange. In real world this is called Currency Board. A currency board differs from a central bank in that they cannot, by law, purchase government treasury bonds and other assets - they work only to exchange foreign money into local money in a fixed exchange rate.

Well, option number (1) means that the price of in-game gold will fluctuate relative to USD. Both options lets you think of SotA as another country - for real. As people get interested in the game that drives up the price of in game money (1) or expands the in-game monetary base (2). Thus the economy gets more "vivid" as the interest in the game increase. It also affects the interest rate, which is closely related to people's time preferences: savings, investing, consuming now or later, and so forth - but let's not get so specific.

Anything different from (1) or (2) means having to constantly adjust NPCs, quests, vendors, whatever, because eventually things get unbalanced once you cannot get at least one variable fixed (either the size of the monetary base - amount of available gold - or the exchange rate relative to a foreign currency). By adopting either (1) or (2) you also create another incentive for people to play the game by facilitating entrepreneurial activity in-game - which can generate real world profits.

- Second:
"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."

Please take into account that once things are balanced, that balance settles around the Pareto Principle, which states that "roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes". That pattern can be observed in nature and also the economy. We can expect, then, that around 20% of players will hold around 80% of in-game gold. The best that can be done is to facilitate crafters activities (entrepreneurial activity) by having some sort of constant in the economy: (1) or (2) - thus facilitating the economic calculation by the economic agents (players).

So: creating more money, either by having the oracle distribute it, or simply increase players bank accounts will not do any good. On the contrary - it will harm the economy, creating an unreal incentive for a non-productive activity (visiting the oracle), and shifting players preference towards this activity, which means that instead of crafting and creating real items to increase the productivity of the economy, people will simply go visit the oracle. As that happens, Cantillon Effect shows up: these people start wasting their money consuming goods, which increases prices, increases the unbalance. The next step will be that the ammount of money the Oracle gives away has to increase, and the process repeats... And disparities increase.

 

Just picking up on tid-bits of what folks have said over time.. the most likely scenario is they're using specific builds that do a lot of AoE damage to kill a lot of humanoid mods all at once. Also miners in high yield mines can make quite a bit selling the special ores like tungsten to NPCs for a quick turn around.

 

I'm going to have to try doing the wolf hats, my tailoring isn't high enough just yet. I had thought they had lowered the amount you get from NPC's; is it still profitable or do you incur a loss?
I've been hanging on to my Tungsten since I'm sure at some point there will be a use for it. I'm a bit of a hoarder haha. I hate getting rid of anything that I 'might' end up using in the future.

I think I am always broke because I don't sell any of the weapon/armor drops from mobs and salvage everything & also because of the cost of the fuels. What I do end up doing to save some money is check the crafting vendors any time I am in a new town to see what the cost of some fuels are and if it is at the lowest possible price (ie: wax = 4gp, curing salt-8gp, coal=6gp - I think those are the lowest prices off the top of my head), I will buy a stack that I can afford and throw it into the bank for future use. It would be nice if we had more coal deposits we could mine & if we could render fat from animals into tallow (wax).

I don't currently spend any money on reagents that I am currently using because I am using what I have been able to forage and from what I have gotten from mob drops. ( I have hundreds of each, except for Serpent Scales since it seems that the only viable way to get any amount is to purchase it since you can rarely get it off caster mobs).

 

The wolf/bear hat sells for 80gp. It takes 2 straps and a head to make. 2 straps come from 1 leather and you get 2 leather from 2 hides.

So its 8gp to make 2 leather.
8gp to make 2 straps from one of those leathers.

then 24gp wax to make the hat.

So the math is 24gp + 8 gp + (one half) 4gp = 36gp.

Sell for 80gp nets 44gp profit.

When I was low level the hats sold for 100gp, and the drop rate on elder wolves was 100% not that long ago.....now the drop rate seems to be about 1/3rd. So for every head I end up with around 3 hides...on average. For the lower level wolves its a lot worse.

If you can...buy up any heads that sell for what you are willing to stomach. My goto price is 20gp or less/head.

Its not a quick way to make money but it is consistent. If you kill wolves/bears...heads will roll! Just save them until your tailoring is high enough...I leveled tailoring just to make the hats. Just bear with it and wolf down those hides.

 

He's a man of principle!

 

awesome thanks! I just need to raise my tailoring level. I have over 200 bear & wolf heads sitting in the bank waiting for me

 

There truely is still a lot to do to turn this already great game into a truely awesome one. To see our otions we first have to identify the different playstyles of players and how they would like to play the game. Starting with the basic playstiles like fighter, adventurer, hunter, resource gatherer, crafter, merchant over additional variations like PvP/PvE, Solo, Friends-Only, Multiplayer and u to details like "likes to play story driven", "likes to play sandbox", "likes to play ..." You see, there are alot of different playstyles to be taken into account (and my list is far from complete). The challenge now is, to give as many of those different playstyles a home in SotA. I doubt there will be a way to find something for truely everything. Based on that, the Designers need to decide where to go.

As far as I understood their idea, the designers want this world and it's habitants (that's us players) to tell our own stories and creating our own Economy. There will be a storyline to follow to give us some idea and guidance for our own stories, but the bulk of it is ment to come from us. So what needs to be done is, to give us players the tools, to do so. Some are already there, others still need to be implemented. The other huge challenge will be, to give us inhabitants of this world a mean to make a living in this world, one way or the other. That's what this threat is all about. Crafters need a way to get the resources and skills to make and sell their goods. This is already there and seems to be working quite ok so far. Now the non-crafters need a way to play THEIR game and make enough money to afford what the crafters build and the merchants sell. Here is the point we really need some design- and development action now. Playing the game needs to be more than just grinding for money, resources and xp. Much of that can and will come from the players (and already does so), but the game needs to teach it's way to new players as well and for us players to fill this world with more live, we need more tools to do so. It would be really great to get some comments from the design-team, what they have planned, so we will get a more complete picture of SotA as it might be, when it's more complete.

 

Devs, this isn't rocket science 90% of the wealth is held by 10% of players because you designed an economy that focuses wealth at the top.

I'm not exactly casual, but I can't see myself investing more than 10 hours a week on SotA, and probably less than 5 on weeks where something more interesting is released. Because of this many economic activities are closed to me.

1. I will never be able to sell via a public vendor. Due to the limits on my time, I can't produce items at a low enough cost to justify vending them at market rates. All items I craft will either be broken down immediately to gain more skill, or sold to NPCs.
2. I'll never own property. I setup a house a few wipes ago and it was boring. Housing is mostly just bragging rights at the moment, so I'll probably just invest in more bank slots.

There's other odds and ends that I can participate in to any real extent, guilds, PvP, etc., because I can't invest the time and real money the 10% can. But, as I said, that's how it's designed, percent of time invested and real money invested are the two best ways to accumulate money in SotA.