#SaveOurMines

Something something about capless, gm every crafting tree, no need to trade with others because they built a self sustain character, but want a circular economy.

Silvers so profitable cause so many people rmt for gold and buy out silver to push any and every crafting skill up.

 

#ProblemsInNovia

 

Yeah I was......need more players.

You said:

I'm saying that people are trying to sell at prices that are unreasonable given the playerbase and how easy the resources are to obtain. My view is that it takes a two pronged approach, firstly reduce the amount of resources available and secondly increase demand for items (items break easier, increase playerbase etc etc)

Nurfing resources is a good start as it is easier to control.

Prices of many items are just artificially high.

 

#CraftersUnite!!

Start selling our gear for ores only, no gold pieces!!

Want an nice + 12 chest piece? 2000 Silver ores please.... have fun mining in the nerfed mines

 

Sounds amazing......do it!

 

Just more players doesn't change anything.. because with more players come more miners and crafters. If the ratio of players don't change.. neither will the supply/demand.

Except reducing resources will raise the price which is what we don't want. Demand should be dealt with first.. Once items are moving we'll be in a better position to look at supply.

 

Bottom line is resources have been too easy to obtain, crafting was very broken at the soft launch enabling players to level very quickly and at low cost and the market is artificially way overpriced.

If its a choice between upsetting a handful of miners or breaking the economy........

#NerfEveryMine

 

I have an alternative to the nerf.

#EveryMinePvPZone

Problem solved.

 

Yes, the devs have said there are "stockpiles" of items on vendors that are not moving. Look at why that is. The pricing point, the benefit they offer to players over and above starter/pledge/addon gear, how much durability they have, etc. If players can't afford them, or they are within reach of better gear for slightly more effort/cost, then of course they are going to be skipped.

Something else to keep in mind is how generous our community is. Really, this is a wonderful problem to have, but I've seen Hospitallers and Welcome Quests giving away bundles of gear. Is done with the best intentions, but why would players buy gear that they can get for free? It might now be "as good", but just baseline crafted gear is a step above starter gear, and will last quite a while. And the step above that, to gear priced (unless the crafter takes a huge hit) at the hundreds of thousands, is jarring.

Supply has to come first. If ore and other goods are as skewed to the top players as gold is, the economy is pretty doomed. And for the love of all, please change Masterworking to use materials that actually fit in with the crafting skill. Tailoring and Carpentry have no business competing with Blacksmithing for mined ore! I personally don't see why Enchanting uses it either, but at least that isn't directly within the scope of crafting specializations.

 

I read through this entire thread and my takeaway is this:

Crafting is too expensive with too few rewards for the effort put in. It is a punishing grind that becomes less fun with each nerf and is less about enjoying the game, rather it's almost like a second job - one that we hope will get better, but it keeps getting worse. It seems to illustrate a fact (that is possibly lost on the Devs?) that crafters in general have reached a tipping point where they just can't take anymore nerfs that make things even harder than they already are.

If I am understanding things correctly, then I have to support the miners strike. There it too much stick and not enough carrot when it comes to crafting or in this case, mining. An economy where things cost more to make than you can sell them for is never going to be sustainable.

If I am not understanding things correctly...oh well. Another senior moment strikes, more brain cells have been lost to time and I'll just have to eat crow. Again.

 

Supply is meaningless if the bottleneck in the economy is on the demand side.

 

True enough. Not enough players yet to sell to. But another perspective is that people sell things for a high price because it costs too darn much to make anything and they want to see some kind of profit. Who wants to sell at a loss? In the real world, that's the road to bankruptcy.

 

This statement is a bit of a misnomer. Can you elaborate on how, within a specific market, the bottleneck could be on the demand side?

A bottleneck traditionally refers to the point of congestion within the "supply side" of a production system. Having said that, a surge in demand can create a bottleneck as infrastructures are designed to convey a constant level of service, but this is still a supply issue not meeting demand.

I've never heard of this happening so I would be fascinated to hear how it does!

 

If I understand this correctly, you're attempting to add more reward without changing the risk. That seems like a good response to the feedback in this thread, however I'm curious if it will improve the economic realities (as I see them).

Beyond having a small population, there is one thing that really bothers me about our economy. Crafters are often Miners. Miners are often crafters. They're really two separate professions and should be balanced as such. What I've read in this thread is that many crafters also mine and many miners also craft, and while I'm not saying they should be 100% mutually exclusive I do think that's our biggest problem.

A miner should really be concerned with getting ore to market and selling it based on the time and effort it takes to collect, but also in the hopes that they can gain loyal customers (i.e. crafters) that will come to them frequently because they know there will be supply and because they know that the price will be fair. However what I see is that crafters want to go out into the mines, get adventure XP for killing easy stuff, get crafting XP for minning, get enough ore to feed their crafting addiction while also getting enough to sell to other players. Essentially I see SOME players min/maxing the economy to "get rich" in the mines, while other players that may spend less time and be less efficient are trying to compete and can't as the mines become more challenging.

Meanwhile the economy that supports this behavior is broken as there are only three clear sources of wealth.

1. Random drops, Artifacts, Cabalist Items, etc...
2. Gathered Commodities, Gold and Silver Ore being the prime wants.
3. Purchased Goods, COTO's and Add-on Store/Pledge Rewards.

There is a 4th source of wealth, Player Made Goods, that is not working as intended. From my perspective it's for the same reason stated above. Crafters are often Miners. Miners are often crafters. But all are "players" and essentially they're all competing with each other and not with "other miners" or "other crafters". What ends up happening is that one player seeks to min/max the economy and find the best spot to mine gold or silver ore, get artifacts, and leverage that to create "wealth" in the form of in-game gold, COTO's, or even real world cash. They can always craft stuff for themselves if they really want to, or they can buy it from other players. But because minning and artifact collection doesn't require players to have expensive gear, there's really no need to craft anything. Crafting because a luxury skill that only pays off if you're one of the top crafters or you meet a certain niche demand. The real markets are listed 1-3 above and there's no crafting required to be successful there. In other words, once someone has (for example) 1000 gold ore, they can get real world cash or in-game gold that they could not get for a player made crafted item. The values are not perceived as the same and player made goods are not thought of as being worth much. In fact, to some players having a finished product that required 1000 gold ore to make might be worth only what you could scrap the item for.

So I believe we need to find a way to close that loop and require miners (and other gathers) to have better equipment to be efficient. Equipment that they would have to buy from player crafters. That means that if you're miner you couldn't "make your own minning gear" because it would ruin the economy (just like it's doing right now).

I believe we need to rethink how random drops impact our economy. I think we should lower the durability of artifacts so that they are used up after just a few hundered uses and they should not be able to get repaired with a COTO. This would make them more in line with potions and they would be used more in PVP and for larger monsters and not as everyday items that would replace player made goods.

I think we need to weave crafting back into the economy so that it compliments what's working now and it's no longer a luxury skill. I also think that the best miners should be the ones that don't craft themselves and are specialized in mining ore (maybe in teams).

Yes, some of our problems are based on low population, but not all.

 

Mabey the +3s will be more than junk then. I think they want to get away from the +12 or its crap mentality in the game today. And give some meaning to the low level crafters.

+10s&12s are easy to make I can push them out like hotcakes as it is.

 

These conditions have been brought up repeatedly.. there's a ton of crafted goods sitting on vendors not being sold. They're overpriced for starters and part of the reason for the pricing is the difficulty in training skill and the number of resources required to make what is perceived as quality gear worth selling.. Only it's not selling. Gear lasts a long time if you keep repairing it and repair is relatively cheap, easy and fast. Thus.. demand is low.. prices are high.

Reducing supply will only make the situation worse.. not better.. leaving it as is will not harm or improve demand.. ctlbut also won't make it better either.

Simply increasing supply probably won't do much either as crafters will just be skill building.. and the other factors keeping demand low will still keep demand low. (ie gear lasting a long time.. and being over priced).

I'm waiting to hear where there's a problem with not having enough ore. If this was the case that doesn't explain why there's so much product not being sold.

What exactly is the issue with supply here? Apart from the worry about it becoming harder and less fun to obtain?

 

I might as well throw in my two cents from two different perspectives.

1) Some on these posts complain about ore being so easy to obtain and I will use Elysium as my example. I have been mining there since they changed the outlay of Superstition Canyon where I made a lot of money with copper/tin/beetle carapaces. Fortunately a friend named Bow Vale took me to Elysium to try my luck there and I thank her every day for her assistance. I died several times until I improved my skills to the point where I kill everything in sight fast enough to mine a very conservative 175 ore per hour. Not only does it give me the gold for my effort and time but I have also gained a lot of xp from those mobs inside there which at a low adventure level 89 works just fine for me. Yes I have sold and continue to sell ores/carapaces to two particular buyers for igg which I then sell for Store Credit. I will continue to do that until I have saved enough Store Credit to buy the POT City Water Lot Deed to drop my pirate galleon without having to pay real cash. Bottom line effort + time = results in my book.

2) From a potential future player perspective; Many are looking at these forums while thinking whether it is worth buying this game. If they see contant complaining on this board it will definitely reduce the extra players we plan to attract. Devs, we need these changes that you guys want to change to be done on a slower scale, i.e. unclone one mine, check results for 3 months then decide if you want to unclone another or if a different tactic is needed. I know I will now hoard all my gold/silver as I am sure in 30 days this post will probably be duplicated when Elysium gets "Uncloned". One final note for the Devs: Many of the potential new customers you want to attract to increase the player base may only be able to afford or wish to invest $40.00 to test it out. I will be glad to show them how to get everything they want without spending another dime but we need the availability of resources to do it. Crafters will also like the idea of a higher population as that may mean new customers for them.

*Gets off his soapbox*

R/Boris/El Pirata

 

Yes your points are valid, it would reduce the supply of the big +14s and such and make them waaaaaaaay more risky to make. But ull be seeing +4s and 5s popping up all over.

 

Hello there. It's not about not having the risk. Its about an empty mine or an empty any other scene.

 

@Bowen Bloodgood Thank you for indulging me on this, I love getting into the game economics because the are FASCINATING and completely dysfunctional! As you point out my friend.

What you are describing though is still a supply issue, not demand. To your point, currently in-game there is a plentiful supply of high priced goods that the consumer just isn't buying. Specifically, this can be seen in what you could call the "SotA Equipment Market" (weapons, armor, etc.) Now normally, this would be a great thing for the consumer, as this surplus and lack of sales would precipitate crafters to sell their goods at a lower price. Which I am sure they have to some extent, but not enough to increase the demand. Again, supply issue. The demand is there, but is being inhibited by the bottleneck of a flooded SotA Equipment Market and non-competitive pricing.

Here's the problem and you hit the nail right on the head, "They're overpriced for starters and part of the reason for the pricing is the difficulty in training skill and the number of resources required to make what is perceived as quality gear worth selling." Due to the sink in time, money and resources, crafters are forced to price these goods at a point that makes them virtually unattainable to all but the most wealthy of players. I mean, it would be one thing if they could write the loss off as a deduction towards any taxes they owed on a property deed/lot lol.

To the point of this post, I feel that Portalarium is going about this in completely the wrong way. If they increased resources (not being a crafter I am assuming this is the most expensive part of the game in both time and/or money) but still kept training skill advancement the same, theoretically prices of goods would drop and the diversity of products would increase. To @Brass Knuckles point, you would then see a more varied listing of items, +3, +4, +5, etc., along with the pricier big ticket items i.e. Obsidian Plate +10, made by those who have the higher skill training to make them. This would impact the "SotA Resource Market" (Ore, wood, etc.) but eventually (again theoretically) even that would balance out as highly trained GM crafters shift to buying the ore instead of harvesting it themselves. Reduced cost in production turns into a reduced cost to the consumer. Again, not being a crafter this is my outside perspective looking in.

Another bottleneck in the supply side of the various SotA markets, is the lack of a centralized "marketplace" for consumers and vendors to come together EASILY to sell and buy goods. @Lord Andernut and his New Britannia Market as well as the folks @ Novia Market do an EXCELLENT job of trying to ameliorate this problem, but it clearly isn't enough because of limitations placed on those PoTs. I know this has been discussed before, but I continue to believe that the only way to increase crafter/vendor sales is by having a centralized market that allows for the consumer to see exactly what is available and at what price.