Game Economy

As one who gave up on crafting, I will add my two cents on a viable solution.

1) Keep armor/weapon decay as it is, you will have or want to replace armor/weapons eventually.

2)Let crafters actually make a profit while working their way up the ranks. Have the NPC vendors buy their “Junk” gear at a modest profit (i.e. regular non except no MW/no enchants at 1k, exceptional no MW/Enchants 2k and plus 2 or higher up by 1K accordingly.

This allows apprentices to afford crafting, pay for the materials required and motivates them to improve while also allowing the junk that does not sell to disappear,

@Chris, @DarkStarr, think about this as a way for crafters to survive and thrive. Maybe now it’s not so unreasonable to have my favorite crafters to make the specially crafted swords or armor knowing they can make a profit with the pieces that don’t meet the customer’s desire. R/Boris/El Pirata.

 

"Mistake" gear we list at rock bottom prices,decent pieces we'll try to recoup like 50% of cost, but true crap sometimes for the same as vendor value, so like, less than 200g for a bronze piece with the wrong stuff on it. Still can't move it.
This is like selling a piece of armor that cost in excess of 10k gold just in materials use for less than 200g, and STILL cant sell it. This is poor, poor design. Players dont want this crap, but there's no alternative. If I could melt it and get even half the ore back that'd be a better scenario.

I put it in a public cache chest and even at the grand price of free some stuff has been sat in there for months. Its just garbage. The RNG is serving no purpose except to fill the world with trash. The answer is not to make all gear wear out faster, the answer is to reduce the amount of utter crap being created.

 

Right now crafting is both a time and gold sink. It would be nice if it was something that a player could do to earn gold, but like most mmos the only way to earn money is murder.

 

BTW, where is your vendor now where you sell all your goodies??? All the stuff I have bought from you over time now is starting to finally wear down (6+ months later).

 

@2112Starman
At the moment we've not got a lot of inventory; we only tend to make things if working on our own upgrades and sell 'leftover bits' from that or other orders. High end gear unfortunately doesn't really turn a profit, but occasionally we''ll have a few decent not-quite-right things on there. As far as making things for the express purpose of selling, just to recoup cost and break even I'd have to price them way out of what most people will pay.

There's a vendor in front of my house in Rinzai called "Things for Fighting" where random stuff goes. We have another in the market in Ordinis Mortis called Shiny Objects where we tend to put only "better quality" stuff. All of the 'really bad' failure stuff is on another vendor in Ordinis called "Fishy Business" ( at the first restaurant, on the river) which sells really cheap items targetting at new players for whom it is better than nothing. If we ever get to where we have a lot of inventory to move we may look at getting a place in some of the other big markets but most of our stuff we do on word of mouth basis.

Actually as I'm typing this I'm smelting but I have three people stood at my workshop explaining what they want and handing me bags of random crap. Typically we work for materials exchange but have reasonable enough inventories to supplement some mats and invoice for anything used. It was actually remarked that this adds a nice roleplay element, customers coming to the shop and getting a consultation.

 

I just craft my own augmented/epic Armor and weapons with no enchantments. I just ignore all Armor and weapons on Vendors as they only contain garbage.

If I do want something specific, I will just email that person and ask for a price for it (and provide the raw materials).

 

I tried to buy but what i need is out of my income range (need, not fancy)
So i do it myself.
Failures are scrapped (price the npc pays not worth the time walking there and selling it)
IF I actual buy from other players the experience (going through hundreds of vendors) regulary leaves my soul scarred.

Sota lacks an market that should be at the locale enviroment (city) be searchable, you zone in, you ask an npc/pinboard about boots and all vendors stocking boots light up.

As it is no reason to craft for others, do not want to spend playtime with the hassle of marketing goods in an chaotic market..

 

We want at cost; or slightly below for a proper market. Say we spend 25k on acquiring 10 useable items after Mastercraft and we loose out 7 of those to failed enchant. What's left is 1 mid-good item.

The recoup cost without gold/silver means we need to sell at near 10k for bad pieces... Which we don't often do.


I tend to keep my bad tier stuff on a junk vendor; normally at a start price that covers the cost of the item. Anything that was mastercrafted is about 1k higher per smtier

 

A part of the problem is basic supply and demand. With most people trying to be crafters, of course there's going to be much more stuff available than people to buy it. The economy will even itself out as more people decide to give up crafting.

It's yet another way Portalarium can't win.

If they increase the decay of items, people will ptch a fit.
If they reduce the RNG loss on crafting, then there'll be even more high-end stuff on the market, devaluing it even more, making the profitability even worse than it is now.
If they try to split adventuring and crafting characters, then people will wail about the game becoming P2W because now those with more money will afford second characters (or will otherwise be an ineffective move).
If they do anything like item loss through death (not decay - loss), people will howl.
If they increase the materials recovered from salvaging, that'll devalue the raw materials, and cause supply/demand issues, and people will scream.
If they increase the gold payout, selling to vendors, that'll be a major faucet into the economy, devaluing gold, and doing who-knows-what to the COTO market, and people will convert into a sphere of plasma.
(While I like the tax reduction coming up, likely being the largest gold sink, I guess we'll see this effect in action anyway)

If Portalarium meddles too much in the economy, pitchforks and torches flood the streets... yet people seem to want them to do precisely that, for what's at least partially a player-created problem.

The economy needs more players... hopefully fewer of which want to craft, and who want to buy. Problem there is, crafting is about half the game... and the rest isn't that deep or intricate to keep people busy. I don't know how to get more players. There's a lot that people turn their noses up at... some of which makes me wretch, and I'm a long-time player.

 

In Eve Online, whenever people make too much of good XYZ, the prices drop. People stop making it. That's what a player-driven economy is supposed to do.

Then again, it works better in Eve, because ships/items are constantly being destroyed. That's something we may have to suck up and get used to, for the sake of the economy. Or continue complaining about crafting.

 

If taxes are really an big goldsink i want to see the numbers first to believe it, given how many, me included, not not have an house even if they could.