Bowen's Economy Analysis

But the point could be better if we had creative selling. Depends on what is in the bag. Maybe my stuff looks better than your stuff. oops that came out wrong *sighs* but hopefully you got it Maybe the pricing has some control but what if we could sell interesting sets?

 

I'm sure that your junk looks better than my junk.

 

Untrue, and proved in this game to be wrong, if the demand exists.
When you could make deadly poison potions for NPC sell price if nightshade was bought at 3 GP the price was 2.8 and next to none to be found. NPC buys for 2 GP. It is all about there being a demand (ie a reason that a player needs/wants to buy). Now i know that is actually under +1 GP, but that is 40% above NPC buy price.

The only reason I can think of to not have a global way to advertise selling is if you want to rip off newer player that don't actually know the price they SHOULD be paying. SWG used to have planet wide search, but you still had to go to the vendor to actually buy it.

 

If you want to say ag prices aren't bottom of the barrel go for it. They seem stupid low to me. Anytime I need a truckload it can be had for next to nothing.

I've got no problem with global advertising, although if you want another reason that others might have against it, how about "Why do I have to pay advertising fees to compete?" I'm sure we'll hear some of that, and it's a good question.

I just have no interest in a single buy location/auction house, I think it would be incredibly damaging to one of the most interesting parts of the game.

 

Yeah, I am not saying lets do away with house vendors and get an AH - I'd hate this personally.
I like that we've organized ourselves into markets and everyone has their niche.
I'm talking about something in-game that does what people are using forums/discord for NOW - advertising, preferably searchable, so you can actually find something you're looking for. And this opens up other opportunities to sell high demand items for cheap and while they are there, they may find something else on your vendor that they like.

If someone searches for say, teleport scrolls, they'll probably see them listed in 100 places. They may not go to the cheapest, distance is going to be a factor, as are things like quantity available, etc. I'm much more likely to pay a bit more for something if its close to where I'm going anyway or if its a vendor I know or a town I know is easy in and out and easy to find, than to set off across the world to save a few pennies.

Better example - we were doing some crafting and we needed more nickel. Insert 1 hour delay while 3 of us ran around trying to find nickel for sale, anywhere, in the quantity we needed that wasn't marked up to ridiculous prices. Its just unnecessary. In retrospect, it would have been faster for us to just go mine it!!

You want to sell things. I want to buy your things. Make it easier for both of us.

What I HATE, and what keeps me from shopping at all most days, is that I can hit 50 vendors and not find what I'm looking for despite promising vendor names. Looking for something specific is an absolute nightmare. For items that you need on a recurring basis, yeah, you learn which vendors are active and become a regular patron. Most of the time though, if I need a particular table, say for a deco project, I will either a) make it myself or b) use S-mart catalogue furniture mail order because either of these options are less hassle combing the world staring at load screen after load screen going to town after town trying to find someone who might maybe be selling a particular item at a maybe reasonable price.

 

The main reason I didn't bring this up is because it appears in the gold sink brainstorming thread that is linked to in the form of a fee based listing system. I was never really fond of the 'global auction' idea but in that thread it came up in a way lore friendly that I can really get behind. That said.. I probably should go back and include it as while I may be apprehensive about the implementation, I would not argue its effect.

 

Perhaps, BUT.. as it is it's not even feasible to bring prices down. That market has little choice here. Selling price should be influenced more by demand that production cost. If prices stay high because of demand it means enough players are willing to pay it and I'm fine with that.

 

I actually saw this happening a few years back when I was selling books on Amazon. Some sellers would start by pricing something uncommon really high.. then over time others would start trying to sell it and the price would just keep going down. I forget the exact numbers now but I had a book originally priced over $100 that finally sold around $40.. sellers just kept undercutting until someone bought it.

 

Yeah I'm all for that. Sorry I misunderstood.

 

I think this has been hashed out before, but I wanted to comment further...

"Low value means higher prices on crafted goods. Several factors drive down the value of in-game currency." this maybe technical, but this should reflect "Supply/Demand", so it should read: High prices = Low currency value and it's not only for crafted goods, but raw materials as well...

"NPC Vendors have unlimited resources to purchase loot making them limitless faucets. Whereas the demand for loot limits regulating loot input as the means to control currency input into the economy from selling to NPCs.

All NPC Vendors buy everything. There is no limit to which NPCs will buy any type of item. So NPCs which are already unlimited faucets are easily accessible. While accessibility to NPCs in of itself isn’t a bad thing, it does facilitate a rapid exchange of loot to gold."

We need a solution for this, I advocate:
-NPCs only buy 15 of a type of item...
-Players can goto another NPC and sell another 15 items of like type...
-These items should show on the NPCs buy list for sale...
-NPCs should buy at 50% of it's value, and sell at 100%, taking in wear/tear (SotA does this now)...
-Salvage value should equal 50% item value, less wear/tear...

Smiths should give you more for metal items, but cooks should give you more for rusted pans/utensils... As Well as alchemist give you more for square jars/vials, every type of NPC should have a "wanted" item that they give you more gold for than the other type NPCs, I think SotA already does this, but sadly cooks and alchemist don't give more, they just buy the items for 1 gold each, which should be changed...

Unless you're a beginning player, I don't think a level 100 bothers to sell the chaff, as you say later, they just take the Gold as loot and fight many mobs for hours... If they do take the chaff, then it's a buddy teaming with them to do so.... I've sold many chaff items and the total gold didn't amount to much, but if done enough it would be a large amount... I personally scrap the chaff items, as the scrap is more unfull to me as a crafter... I think everything that drops as loot should have/be salvageable value...

I know it won't change much if a player can simply goto another NPC to sell the rest, but it will be time consuming and if you put on 24hr timer before you can sell again to each NPC, it may be worthwhile to have the player go to another region to sell more...

" ‘Chaff’ loot can only be sold. A lot of the ‘flavor/decor’ loot has no function other than decor. It cannot be recycled in any way other than being sold. More of this kind of loot means that much more currency input.", I think all loot items should be salvageable...

"Ineffective gold sinks. Once a player reaches a certain capacity to earn gold, there isn’t enough for them to spend it on. Where as low level or casual players have a hard time keeping up with market prices.

A balanced system of gold sinks should be reasonably fair regardless of your income level. Yet both the cost of materials to craft and the amount of gold generated by high level players produce crafted items most player cannot afford. "

1st, there are two camps here, the Adventurers and the Crafters, and I agree they need to be balanced, but they're clearly not, Crafters are the Gold sinks, and adventurers are the Gold faucets...
2nd, I think market prices are artificially inflated, due to lack of competition (everyone is selling at the same price they see on everyone else's goods)...

If you want more "Luxury items", that won't work for long, kind of like buying furniture, once you have a set, you don't need anymore...

As I suggested before: Gold needs to be a diminishing return commodity at the high end, replace the Gold with items of worth, items that Crafters need, like: iron hilts, sword blades, wood handles, wood poles, wood timbers, bolts of cloth, straps, metal bindings, etc, also include these items in the higher materials too... And in meaningful amounts that can replace the Gold in the loot... If NPC pricing included all the materials required to create the item, even at the low end of raw material NPC pricing, at the amounts we need to make these items, they could be selling for a high price even to an NPC....

Build a symbiotic relationship between the Adventurer and the Crafter, I know an adventurer won't want to run a vendor, but if NPCs buy everything and list them back, then a Crafter needs to purchase those items from the NPC... It kind of closes the loop without using Gold as a medium... Well it is the currency, but adventurers can sell on a public vendor for a higher price, but they must be reasonable about it, find the optimal price, not just what everyone else is doing... If crafters buy from NPCs then the gold is a sink, from public vendors it's player to player...

That's why we still need a Global market board, to aid players in being competitive... At least when players sell to each other, no new gold is created, the crafters get components, adventurers get old gold...

 

On the global thing, I agree, I was only talking about advertising buy and sell orders, not an instant delivery system.

For the economy there needs to be a global increase in player demand for EVERYTHING. This demand needs to be never-ending, not a one off spike. The NPC buy price should be the floor for sell price, not the worth of the item. Or once the supply demand cycle is proved to work just stop NPCs buying anything.

Then market forces will deal with the rest. If copper ore is too cheap people will prioritise mining other ore for example.

However this can not, to my mind, be achieved by tweeking the numbers we have now. A global solution is needed. A mechanic(s) that consumes anything and everything that has value to player greater than selling it to the NPC.

Maybe I should start a thread for ideas for mechanic(s) that fit the above design criteria.


Regards
Spung

 

While I agree with most of what you said, the above thing just creates an annoyance. It will make selling things more tedious yes, but things will still get sold, net impact on faucet will be nil, people will travel around, and use alts, and so on and so forth, and it may change behavior (IE, I go find somewhere to dump my crap EVERY time I get full, instead of throwing it in a box to deal with later), but the only impact from adding this sort of limit is a quality of life hit. I think we need to increase usefulness of items so that NPC dump is an absolute last resort, or simply make certain items not have value to the NPC to begin with. I'd be fine if the only use for junk weaponry was scrap, for example - bump up what you get from salvage and leave currency out of it.

The problem is at the moment the crafters have all the sinks. No crafter has the extra money to go buy crap off the NPC, crafter must fight as much as any adventurer simply to pay for fuel, recipes, and any resources they don't want to farm themselves. Unless the whole "can't make money as a crafter" decision is reversed (which seems unlikely, as Port have done everything they can to aggresively stamp out any possible way to make even the smallest profit from the 'faucet') this is not a viable. Again, it would be better if these items simply wouldn't get vendored except as a last resort.

All the silverware and crap we pick up should give metal scrap, the maps/paintings could give wood pulp - and not some sad 1 scrap each, but actually make them worthwhile. The empty jars/etc. should give glass. You're absolutely right that all this chaff is completely pointless to pick up and while at first it was a cool novelty the reality is nobody is ever going to need 446 rusty spoons, I don't care what they are decorating. We can't up the gold value because too much gold already, so give it some sort of other use.

 

I think everyone's over thinking this, its pretty straight forward.
1) remove anything in the loot table that can be made by players, unless its for example an item that has been sold by a player to a vendor.
2) Remove or reduce RNG from MW
3) Adjust recipes so they use player crafted/produced items (ie pine barks for wheat as an example)
4) Find ways for players to produce consumables ( bee hives for wax. etc, creosote could be a cooking recipe)
5) Centralised item finder through oracle interface - this has other advantages in that vendors don't then need to be at the front of the POT, guilds could make small markets within those towns, etc.
6) Only sell goods on NPC vendors that can be got by players when inflation or money needs to be controlled (Monetary Policy) i'e if copper is suddenly 100g stick it on vendors at 50g for a period of time
7) If there is no demand for a player made resource, either see 3 or make an NPC merchant quest for it, or just remove it from the game until there is a need for it (Fiscal policy)

I'm pretty sure that resolves almost all the problems and helps create a player run economy and most could be implemented virtually overnight.

 

Some good insights in OP but too focused on currrency issues, if this were correct there will be an inflation in crafted items and raw materiais, but those price are also low. Gold ore in 2017 - 55 gp each now is 45 . The lack of demand for everything is the major issue, the low population and no need to replace things are the major causes. I didn´t noticed any commodites inflation.

I´ve been farming and running a shop specialized in rare components since 2017, i noticed some things:

Issues:

1) My gear have hundreds of hours of intense farming and its not close to by replaced.
2) The majority of artifacts are just crap, have zero demand and i can get tons of them daily.
3) All rare components i know have their marked prices dropped in the past releases. For example: Ashen heartwood have dropped from 10.000 to 3500 gold each; Elven speed and precision strings from 8.000 to 4.000.
4) Tons of potions from loot, and the drinking time don´t worth their use.

My suggestions for a better demand in SOTA

a) More durability loss from gear use, specially on avatar´s death; We need to replace gear more often.
b) Crafting specialization, give a more powerfull stats and less RNG for specialists. This reduce the jack of all trade players and increase the need of players interaction.
c) Faster refining process, the time sink is insane and i usually use alts for this task. You lose a lot of play time and XP while refining and it increase the time to craft things. The refining time skill should be boosted.
d) Unique crafting components from artifacts with a chance to obtain by salvaging. With sighly less power and side effects the artifact system would be complete with this feature. Arties should be incorporate to the crafting system like Torc Daw handles and axe/mace heads does
e) Potion power and buff time should be increased, the drinking animation should be large reduced.

 

Or we can go nuclear - Eve style...

1) Everything is destroyable (except eternal patterns/deeds), and frequently destroyed.
2) All selling to NPCs is eliminated. Some things can be bought from NPCs, like recipes. Even fuels would be player-gathered.
3) All money comes originates from quests, or bounties paid on killing monsters.
4) Elimination of global stash/bank. You actually have to move things around, and you can lose it trying.
5) Taxes and fees are additional sinks

There's no maintenance/repair on items. Ships/stuff don't break down. They're just destroyed.

Whether anyone is still playing after such a drastic change, is another question.

 

Here is the dilemma:
a) This won't increase total demand, instead of buying a new 20k bow, folks will either buy a series of 2k bows, become self-sufficient, or quit because adventurers don't like being treated like sheep to be shorn regularly.
b) Alts ahoy, in fact I suspect that may folks around here have already worked up a bunch of alts in preparation for this
c) Maybe, but is SotA didn't have long stretches of boring gameplay it'd barely have gameplay at all.
d) SotA already has more RNG crafting than any game I've played. I'm all for doubling down on your strengths but I can't imagine that increasing the RNG further is going to win new players.
e) Maybe, but that just sounds like an excuse for Port to make them near mandatory like they did with food.

Overall, as an adventure that dabbles in crafting, I avoid the economy as much as I can. I give away anything that is decent that I don't need or want and I rarely buy anything as I assume folks are trying to rip me off.

 

You don't think the prices of crafted gear is inflated at all?

 

If it was crafter's would making money, they generally aren't.

 

Players tend to do which ever they deem the least amount of effort. Whether that is buying, or doing the work to craft.

 

Matter of definition I suppose. I would argue that RNG forces inflated prices. If everyone could make a piece of gear in one go, prices in general could be much lower.