Player driven economy and crafting

This will be a very long post. I will try break it up with formatting so as to not just be a wall text. But you have been warned .

If it is easier you can read from the google doc I copy and pasted it from :-

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1IVY8EZKc82g-Ic7pNXuhq5DAUFJothtutwAYL06anHQ/edit?usp=sharing

Important note about scope
This is outside and not including the crown store goods. Which is and should be completely based on player supply and demand, without any NPC demand and is regulated and tied to the in game player economy by the in game gold price of COTOs.

About this post
I have been thinking about what I want from the player driven economy and crafting. I decided to write down my thoughts. I collated these thoughts into a list of design principles. These are like a checklist of things that I think new functionality in this space should be considered against when designing mechanics for the economy and crafting.

After collating these design principles I tried to think of mechanics that that would meet these design principles that would make the economy and crafting mechanisms in the game better. This is the second part of the post.

Feedback wanted
Feedback on your thoughts and anything you disagree with or think I missed would be appreciated. The only thing I would say is that if you don’t at least broadly agree with the design principles then giving feedback on the second part is probably not worth doing, or in fact even worth your time reading. If you don’t agree with the design principles you will not agree with the solutions I came up with to meet them. So you would better of just reading part 1 and giving your feedback on that part alone.

Design is always better when done collaboratively in my experience, no single person thinks of everything. But I have also found that having a starting point, often called a “straw man”, helps moved the discussion along.

 

PART 1 - DESIGN PRINCIPLES

A - Where possible the player economy should be prioritized over the NPC economy.
1) NPC buy price sets the minimum price by having an infinite demand at that price. So should be set low.
2) NPC sell price sets the maximum price by having an infinite supply at that price. So should be set high.
3) The player economy exists between the 2 above boundaries (A1 and A2).
4) Mechanics should exist with continuous (not one off) demand to players to try to keep the value to a player above the NPC buy price.

B - Player economy needs to scale with the player base.
1) As the player base increases the supply and demand for items should scale up linearly.
2) As the player base decreases the supply and demand for items should scale down linearly.
3) Try to make the supply and demand not skew with scale, so that the demand or supply does not hit the NPC price limits too easily.

C - All in game gold facets need to consume player active play time, including adventuring, gathering and crafting.
1) Gold faucet activities must only scale on player invested time, not just character online time.
2) Semi AFK multi boxable activities must not be gold facets.

D - Gameplay should be engaging and require the player to make choices.
1) Allow automation of repetitive tasks using in game tools. Watch out this does not violate the above principal (C2).

E - All activities in the game should strive to be casual player friendly.
1) Ensure low level activities yield rewards that are still in demand by high level players, but are not supplied by high level activities.
2) Ensure high level players have activities that is more efficient for their time than the low level activities. Making it inefficient for high level players to steam roll low level activities. Thus creating a supply/demand between lower and higher level players.
3) Diminishing returns on player levels should be implemented.

 

F - Limit economy growth, but don't try to have zero growth. Promotes liquidity in the economy.
1) Economy growth is good, sitting on assets should gradually erode their value.
2) Growth is good but hyperinflation needs to be avoided.
3) Where possible make player demand based on a non in game gold advantage to help avoid hyperinflation (F2).

G - All items in game should have player demand.
1) Avoid making items that do not participate in the player economy.
2) Avoid having item A that are better in all respects than item B. This generally ends up zero demand for item A unless item B is prohibitively expensive to item A.

H - Player time investment should "feel" like progression to the player.
1) Don't base everything on RNG alone.
2) Still allow "lottery wins" as they are exciting.
3) Avoid rare drops of rare drops, just make the first rare drop rarer. No excitement at the first rare drop otherwise.
4) For the "lottery wins" have other ways to get the items that progress slowly towards to goal to feel progression. EG 1 in 100 drop rate, also have a 100% chance to drop an item than you can use 200 of those items to get the item.

I - The player driven economy should be self regulating.
1) Ensure there is enough player demand for everything that as supply is saturated in one item and approaches the NPC buy price it becomes more efficient to "farm" for supply of something else. Market economies only work when there is demand.
2) Limit the amount of Dev intervention needed in changing the NPC buy and sell prices.

J - Promote inter-selling between different crafting professions.
1) Make recipes that use components made by different crafting trees.
2) Make the components by the other professions not affect the quality of the end item, so that high level players are not limited to finding comparable level players of other professions (helps with E).

K - Make level progression "feel" meaningful.
1) This is a hard tightrope to walk with the diminishing returns (E3).
2) Have some items scale with level (while still diminishing) on quality. But only some to not violate the casual player friend (E).

L - Making similar quality of types of items within a category should be comparable.
1) Ensuring making an "epic" item A is the same order of magnitude of effort as making an "epic" item B for the different types of item within the category of items. EG An epic wand should be comparable effort as making an epic polearm. Example of the inversion of this is MW and ENC that all types only give 3 options but the total number of options change between types, so getting exactly what you want is not comparable between types - this is bad.

 

PART 2 - Proposed changes to the economy and crafting

If you have got this far, congratulations .

Introduction
This is some ideas I have had to changes to the economy and crafting to align them with the design principles above. As stated earlier if you disagree with the design principles you will disagrees with the proposed changes.

Not all these ideas are mine, some I have read from the forums or heard from discussions with players in game. Some are “borrowed” and adapted from other games I have played. Unfortunately I will not be able to give you credit if a change originated from yourself, I will not remember who said what. If you recognise something as something you proposed, thank you and feel free to post.

About the proposed changes
I’m not in the RP and lore, so I will leave trying to tie these mechanics into the game world to more imaginative people than myself. I like systems and understanding systems, so this deals just with the mechanics. If you have ideas how these changes can be linked into the lore etc of Novia please post with these.

Scope and effort of these changes
The scope and effort of some of these changes are big. This is not changes that can be made in a single release or maybe even before episode 2, even if high priority was given to them.

Hopefully they could be implemented in a staged approach that fits the agile way Port works. With each stage increasing the health of the economy and crafting. As the game evolves some of these changes could make less sense, but hopefully the design principles will always stand.

Exact values in the changes
I will put values into the proposed changes, but these are more for illustration than the actual values, so don’t get hung up on if you think a value is too high or too low. Port has more information than me to balance these values. I will try to explain why I picked certain values to illustrate what the changes are trying to achieve.

Order of changes
Although change 1 is large, i think this has to be implemented before change 2 and 3. The item sink in the current masterwork, enchanting and exceptional is required for the economy, but doing change 1 or something that achieves the same goals removes the demand problem to make change 2 and 3 possible.

The other changes I don’t think has dependencies.

 

CHANGE 1 - Increase demand for everything in the player economy - TRADE GOODS

Market economies only really work when there is demand for items. No amount of limit to supply will make an item worth anything in a player driven economy unless there is demand.

Create a new item to the game called trade goods. This item is created by exchanging an amount of any items till the total value of all those items is at a threshold. I’m going to propose 10k gold as i think that is a about an hour worth of farming. The value used is not the value in the inventory, that is a ransom value rather than the NPC value. Instead for each item use the highest available NPC buy price for that item as it worth for exchanging to a trade good.

Now you have a single item that equivalent to if you took all those items and went and sold them to the NPC in blocks of 10k gold.

Demand is now needed for this trade good, which in turn creates demand for every item in the game. This is based on what I saw in Archeage. Create an NPC that will “buy” these trade goods in exchange for something.

This NPC will exchange 1 trade good for a service to the player. The things I thought of were
1) In game gold.
2) Buffs to the player.
3) Crafting XP.
4) Remove Attenuation.
5) Drop only crafting recipes.
Please give feedback of other rewards that you would like and therefore would have player demand.

I put in game gold so this needs to consume player active time to justify being a gold faucet.

 

I propose having 2 NPCs in the world, in either new or repurposed adventure scenes. 1 is a PvE scene the other is a PvP scene.

These NPCs exchange their reward for single trade good. As more trade goods are created in the world the NPC increase the reward. This is not instant, the amount of these trade goods creates the ceiling for the reward. Over time, say 5 times per hour at random intervals, it ticks up the each reward in an amount proportion to amount of players in adventure scenes until it hits the hard cap ceiling or the ceiling defined by the number of trade goods crafted.

The idea of this is that more players in the game creating trade goods the more demand there is, so scales with the player base. The reason the tick change amount per time is scaled on amount of player in adventure scenes is to try to balance the demand for time zones. The demand will increase quicker when more players are playing. The random intervals helps to stop players gaming it and knowing exactly when the reward will increase.

Then each time a reward is bought it ticks down the reward for that reward on that NPC. This means the PvE, with less risk, NPC will likely always give lesser rewards than the PvP NPC, were the player is taking more risk. This give the non PvPer a reason to be the victim as the PvP reward NPC will, as stated earlier, likely always have the higher reward. But people that never want to PvP can compete with each other to hand in to the PvE reward NPC at the right moment.

1) Gold reward scales from 11k (+10% from NPC buy price) to 20k (+100% from NPC buy price). For this an exercise would need to be done to ensure that ALL NPC sell prices are at least 300% higher than the buy price.
2) Each Buff scales from 1 day to 7 day duration. There can be many of these.
3) Crafting XP scales from 100k to 200k. (as i reckon 10k is about an hours farming and so is 100k crafting XP)
4) Remove attenuation token scales from 5 to 20. (make you need 10 tokens to remove attenuation)
5) Drop only crafting recipe token scales from 5 to 20 . (make you need 10 tokens to get to pick a recipe)

The rewards themselves are in the form of in game items so are also part of the player economy. Allowing players to trade rewards and don’t need to use then when they collect the reward.

If all the NPCs are at max reward and more trade goods are created that extra demand is lost, stopping people stockpiles huge amounts to force up the reward.

 

For both scenes
This scene should have a single zone in. At this zone in is a banker. This is so there is no advantage to where the scene is in map, everyone can just get the trade good out of their bank.
A player can only carry 1 trade good at a time in their inventory. This is to ensure that it scale linearly with time invested.
Teleport to zone or friend will always teleport you to banker, regardless of if you teleported out of a different spot.
Follow is disabled in the scene so you can’t have a “train” of alts going to the NPC.
No mobs in the scene, this is for all players of all levels.
Show the current rewards on the scene info on the overworld map and you can ask the banker the current rewards so you don’t waste your time doing the scene to find the rewards are at the floor.
More than 5 minutes idle in the scene kicks you to the overworld map forcing you to do the time sink again. So you can’t just camp the reward NPC waiting for the reward to increase.
Anything else you think this needs for balance?

For the PvE scene
This scene has the following attributes

All player move at the same rate - So the player time investment is the same for everyone

The is a significant distance between the banker and reward NPC with different routes to the NPC. The different routes are different gameplay to get to the reward NPC.
This would not be unlike the Boreas Colossus scene.
Suggestions for different gameplays
1) Just the very long route.
2) Jump puzzle.
3) Riddles.
What this is trying to achieve is that it takes active player time to get to from the banker to the reward NPC.
Please suggest other interesting and fun things to create this time sink.

For the PvP scene
This scene would have the following attributes :-

Open PvP where the there is no ransom, instead you will always drop the trade good.

You get a immunity buff while within 5m of the banker so that you are impossible to kill. Any mechanism found to kill a player within 5m of the banker is considered an exploit. The fighting starts on the journey not at the start line. This is a game of cat and mouse, the goal of the cat is to take the trade good off the mouse and hand it in themselves. The goal of the mouse is to escape and get to hand it in themselves.

Reward NPC with the same 5m mechanics as the banker. You got to the finish line you are now safe.

Reasonable distance between the banker and the reward NPC to give the attackers a chance to catch you.
Any other suggestions you have to make this a fun and rewarding game of cat and mouse?

 

CHANGE 2 - Masterwork and Enchanting changes

As said earlier, i think to do this change, change 1 has to happen to free masterwork and enchanting from being the huge item sink it currently is.

The idea of this is to still have RNG but at the same time have some certainty of maximum cost.

Move the enchanting and masterwork to a consumable like gem socketing. This way they can be bought and sold on vendors.

When you craft these enchanting and masterwork items you pick the type gear it is for. This brings up the same options as now where you get a random list of effects. The amount of effects you get to pick from is a percentage of the total available effects. For enchanting add the gem ones too as you will get more options anyways as there are more options to be percentage of.

The percentage of options keeps all the gear types having the same chance of you getting the effect you want.

The basic enchanting and masterwork skill does become kind of useless, at least beyond GM when you have all effects, so make the percentage of choices you get scale on that skill level.

Then create recipes for applying, that everyone can do, takes the item and relevant item type of effect item. This recipe uses an effect item plus additional blanks of the same items that are consumed. Depending on the number of masterworks or enchants on the gear the amount of blanks needed increases. All effect items can be crafted into blank items, so when you get effects you can consume the unwanted effect items rather than just creating more trash in the economy.

Edit added 05/03/2019 20:39 UTC.
You can not apply the same effect item twice, so it balances with current system. Stop people adding 3 major strength enchants for example.

Additionally as you now have no failures make it also consume ancient essence to apply to higher end gear, increasing the cost and consumption of artefacts in the game. So the 3rd and beyond also consume one or more ancient essences.

Low level masterwork and enchanters can level up by making and selling blanks to higher level crafters, as there effects items will be weaker and have no demand. For a blank the effect and strength of the effect does not affect the final result so this does not hinder the high level crafter.

 

It seems from the chance numbers the dev have decided 2 is the normal and the chance falls off a cliff after that, so i suggest to consumption to apply the effect be something like :-

1st masterwork or enchant applied cost 1 effect item.
2nd masterwork or enchant applied cost 1 effect item plus 3 blanks.
3rd masterwork or enchant applied cost 1 effect item plus 15 blanks plus 1 ancient essence.
4th masterwork or enchant applied cost 1 effect item plus 40 blanks. plus 2 ancient essence.
5th masterwork or enchant applied cost 1 effect item plus 190 blanks plus 4 ancient essence.

This keeps very good gear expensive, due to the amount of blanks (ie silver/gold) and ancient essence required to apply, but a known expensive not an RNG one.

That a lot of information so here is 2 worked examples.

Low level chain chest piece with 1 masterwork.

Blacksmith makes the chain chest.
Blacksmith master worker makes masterwork chain chest effect item.
Player or crafter can apply the 1 effect item to the chain chest.

Normal level chain chest with 2 specific masterwork and 2 specific enchants

Blacksmith makes the chain chest.
Blacksmith master worker makes chain chest masterwork effect items until they have the effects they require.
Blacksmith master worker turns other unwanted effects into blanks.
Enchanter makes chain chest enchant effect item until they have the effects they require.
Enchanter turns other unwanted effects into blanks.
Player or crafter can apply the 4 effects at the following cost
1 master work effect item
1 master work effect item plus 3 masterwork blanks
1 enchant effect item
1 enchant effect item plus 2 enchant blanks

And so on using the list above.

This does break their proposed change for crafting specialisation. Personally, I don’t like the specialisation solution to removing the RNG, it just makes specialisation required to compete. This makes it less casual friendly.
Instead make specialisation reduce the amount of blanks you have to use to add effects. If this is between 0 and 25% (at level 200) then it is useless for 1st and 2nd applies. So making normal gear is just as competitive for non specialists, but specialists can make 3rd + cheaper. As a non specialist i can still do it, it just cost more. Give you a reason to find a high level specialist crafter to apply you 3rd and above effect items. 2 or less you can do yourself and not have to wait on other players.

 

CHANGE 3 - Change to exceptions

As said earlier, i think to do this change, change 1 has to happen to free exceptionals from being the huge item sink it currently is.

Now that the minimum demand for items is set by change 1, exceptions can have some more certainty.

I would suggest to still keep the exceptional chance as we do now, this is an advantage of levelling your crafting skill. But in addition add a new recipe that turns 6 identical non exceptional gear items into an exceptional gear item of that type.

You could still get lucky and with high skill the RNG should beat the 6 to 1, but if you get very unlucky, you have certainty that after 5 failed non exceptionals the 6 will either be exceptional or you can consume the non exceptionals to make a certain exceptional.


CHANGE 4 - Player Vendors

There are few things I would like to see for players vendors

1) Can be buy or sell part stacks like you an NPC vendor.
2) Stack different items into a trade bundle and set them to be an exception to 1 so you can sell whole armour set etc.
3) All items that are commodities, ie have no additional stats (eg durability),be in the buy order list. This is basically everything that stacks in the game.


CHANGE 5 - Refined materials

Allow player to refine as do now that gives XP. Or you put it in a hopper and it takes 1 hour per 300 crafts done on or offline for you, but you get no XP. This works for everything but the final stage of crafting. So you can make components and refined materials.

The refining speed skill becomes useless at higher levels, so this can scale the 300 per hour number, making the auto craft quicker, but not as quick as doing it manually.

Low level crafter may refine until the XP for refining is insignificant, then they will move to choosing to miss the XP for convenience.

Standing at table watching a bar go up is not fun and interesting content.

Quick win, add wood pulp into the refined materials so it get the refine bonus.




Phew, hopefully that does not take as long for you to read and understand as it did for me to write…

As I said feedback welcome.


Regards
Spungwa

 

reserved

 

What you are purposing is a rework of almost everything. Considering the current system and what still needs to happen in the long term this would take many years of changes with the current back log. The current system seems to work pretty good as is from my perspective. There are some good ideas though I just cant see them reworking all the systems to support this in the next few years.

 

While I agree there is a lot of discussion on what "can" be done, as Xee said. I hope we keep this thread on topic as to "what" should be done. Figure out what it should look like first, which is what Spungwa posted here, then after the feedback review to see what can be done and how to get there. Thank you for the insight on this stuff, I've glanced it but really want to read through it slowly... which I will.

 

Not sure that is true, obviously i don't know the code but from a mechanics point of view. I tried to make this use tweaks to mechanics already in the game.
So i'm not sure this is as much work as it appears.

Change 1, is change to nothing, it is all new or existing. Yes work but not rework.
The tech for the reward scaling would have to be made. This is probably not small.
Debuffing near an mobs exists for the banker, just have a mob under the floor that is 1 pixel to reuse the tech that debuffs you immunity, just not sure it can be done out of combat.
They have a mechanism for changing rule set and PvP looting in scene due to obsidian trial loot changes and level capping scenes.
Rest is in the game so is just making 2 new scenes (i say just ).

Change 2 is just new recipes and removing the old ones and adding some new items for the effect item. They now have the tech to add more stats to items, may have to hook that into the MW and ENC picking. They even demoed the tech of that transferring to another item with large pumpkin. That is all that is required that I can think of.

Change 3 is one new mechanic for checking something is the same item type when it does not stack to make sure 6 of one type of item make and have 100% exceptional chance. So one new tech for a new type of recipe.

Change 4 is new tech i imagine.

Change 5 i would expect to be able to reuse some of the brewing mechanics.


Regards
Spung

 

While taken as a whole it is a really daunting set of changes, some of the changes (bit by bit) could certainly be done.
The combining 6 nonexceptionals into one for example, while certainly would need some tech to make it work, is essentially adding 1 recipe that would give a great QOL boost to crafters. While you'd still be subject to the low % chances, you'd at least be able to guarantee a 1 in 6 (or better) which is a lot better than we have now. The materials still get used up. Would help with all the 'junk items bloat' we see.

The vendor change (list a stack, and people can buy quantity) I know has been on the "asked for list" for a while, so that one may be complicated, oh, but it would be glorious!

Same with the refined materials. We have brewing casks that can make things 'mature' on a 'timer' so tossing ore and coal in it should work in a similar way. People could still choose to smelt for efficiency% but for the large quantities of chaff like....say, wood pulp crafting ...this would be excellent.

The MW/Enchant as consumables, I love it, but it is as mentioned, quite the overhaul.

 

With regards to trade goods, I'd actually segregate these a bit more to make them appealing to different playstyles.

For "trade goods" I imagine this is something you have to craft, which probably has some component pieces, lets say for the sake of example, that 'trade goods' were made from say, 100 bolts of cotton. You'd have to grow/pick/acquire the cotton, buy the fuel, refine it all up, and craft the final item, taking time and consuming materials. Could do this with anything, not just agriculture. Lumber could be trade goods, or even metals, tamed chickens, whatever.
Turning in this item could function as a daily quest (or so many times daily quest, perhaps different ones...?) that gave a currency which could be used to purchase the 'reward'.

For the crafting route, I'd suggest the rewards be either gold (scaled by demand and by cost of the tradegood, so you are making a little money but not a lot, for the time spent), a bit of crafting XP (say, 100k or so, since that's not as much as you can do in an hour's gathering, but enough to be worthwhile) , or a recipe token which could be exchanged for a supplybundle recipe of your choice. (Please, lets stop with the random).
This would segue well from the requests for something like a crafting daily work order.

For the other route, instead of trade goods, lets have "Contraband."

This would work similarly, in that one would have to transport the "contraband" to a designated place but while carrying "contraband" you are flagged. (LB actually talked about something like this in an earlier video that someone posted not too long ago). The rewards would work similarly, turnin would either give gold (more than for tradegoods, due to more risk), a set amount of adventure xp (like, a decent amount, for the time it takes, not some sad 8k, but more like 300k+, or an attenuation removal token).

I think these rewards align more closely to the priorities of the different groups. One's crafty, one's fighty. Everyone can do all of them but some will like one route more than the other. Only one tradegood or contraband could be carried at a time, and there needs to be a significant timesink in the creation /acquisition of it.

While you could make new scenes for these commodities, there's no reason why existing scenes couldn't just have an area or npc added to them. In the sake of contraband, it might actually be more fun if you put the 'turnin destination' in a random city, would have people going all over the place with their contraband, and if they get killed, the killer "loots" the contraband instead of equipment ransom and then they can go turn it in.

We'd have to work out where contraband comes from, whether its also crafted, or obtained via some other means.

It sounds complicated, but really I'm only seeing a couple of quest npcs really being needed with flags to accept item, give reward and the tech to flag you if you're carrying contraband goods.

Opens up a lot of possibilities.

I could craft contraband and sell it on my vendor, and people could buy it and go do their turnins. You'd see people trading tradegoods of different types if the system was expanded to have different rewards for different things, etc. or perhaps on different days/months? Add in fluctuating demand and we're really on to something. Everyone turns in cotton cause its easy, so reward for it goes down, so people start turning in buckets of apples, and so forth.

 

As you can use ANYTHING with a NPC buy value, surely all play styles can do this.

EG if you do agriculture make your trade goods out of cotton, if you "farm mobs" use dropped weapons and armour. You can use anything you otherwise would have sold to the vendor. Nearly all play styles create "vendor trash" that's how player get in game gold.

If you don't want to do the hand in just sell them on your vendor for someone else to hand in.


Regards
Spung

 

The reason i did not pick to consider the time sink on the acquisition is that that is already factored in the NPC buy price, so the trade good mechanic just make that gold faucet bigger without additional active player time needed.

If the time sink was on the crafting time then is violates the semi afk multi boxable principle for the time sink that is the gold facet. I could have 5 toon all creating trade good at once even it the bar took 10 minutes to go up, which also incidentally violates D1.

 

tldr

 

This could work. So the time sink is finding the NPC. Then after say 10 is handed in it moves. I say 10 because in the PvP scenario i could imagine a guild run to hand in a bunch as trade goods and go on mass to counter act the PvP.

As well as guild NPC hunts as we did with the white wyverns.

The hide and seek game could be time sink for the PvE reward NPC.

I would have a known place for the PvP reward NPC, so that PvPers have somewhere to camp. The time sink is less important as the real cost is the risk.