SotA Economics - an opinion piece

Agreed.. my hope in writing this is that someone will say... hmmm, maybe there is some valuable information here... if not... priorities are a bit whacked and this game continues on its death march.

But seriously, this has really been a good thread.. low toxicity and overall great comments!!!

 

Indeed.. I try maintain some small hope and consider how the economy can receive a major overhaul post-launch and so I see a thread like this I'd really like to jump in head first but at the same time.. are the devs interested in making a major course correction when they seem to feel things are fine? I (and others) have been bringing up a lot of this stuff off and on since well before launch. A lot of the time we don't agree on the particulars BUT.. we all seem to agree that something's lacking here.

At the moment I'd just like to say this. I don't flipping care about the market value of COTOs on the macro level. I care about what the individual player sees on the ground. What does the economy part of the game experience feel like? Are goods affordable? Are they selling well? Etc..

 

COTO's are awful. Can't get the economy with one currency without adding another one on top of it. COTOs, in my opinion, are worth 3500gp because of the payment for taxes. Why they can be worth more escapes me.

 

World of Warcraft has WoW Token eve online has plex and many other games have something like it so it is nothing new an will always go up in price over time

 

Does anyone know why COTOs almost doubled in value recently ?

 

almost all the things on the add on store are now on the COTOs vendors

 

Coto value was kept down for the last 6 months because of the coto bug ( people were crafting houses and selling them to crown vendors for coto then sell the coto to resellers..as Titania stated like 70% i think of his coto were from people selling him exploited ones) ... That also led to a 400% increase in wood price ...as it used to be 15k-20k/1k and now its 60k /1k ...wood market hasnt recovered to this day and theres alot of people speculating on the wood market buying raw and selling refined .The bug has been fixed recently ( im amazed it went unnoticed for months) and thats when coto price exploded ..couple that with the recent additions to ingame coto stores and possibility to upgrade bundles with coto and the result is what we see today.

 

But what is the purpose of a COTO? Is it just a way to say that you can't buy "Gold"? In the end, isn't that what we are buying... gold? And since it is so easy to exchange COTOs for Gold... isn't that just Pay-to...? I'm serious here... I have played for some time now and can't figure it out. I can buy a bunch of COTOs. I can sell the COTOs for gold. I can then turn and buy all the high-end gear/stuff I want to enhance my character. Isn't that the definition of Pay-to-win?

 

Not really, because you can't win this game just by dumping cotos into it. You still have to play the game to level up to beat it.

If your definition of "winning" is "owning the biggest and best houses, and running the most successfull in game businesses", then yeah it is PTW.

Personally I'm not a person that really has any issue with that. They could easily solve this complaint by making more quest items decoable but not tradable (somehow),

so that people couldn't just buy all the banners, rare items and what not, but only commoditites.

At the end of the day, it's not really fun to just buy your way through the game. Most complainers about PTW are people that would secretly do the same thing but just can't afford to and are jelly, anyhow.

Anyway, it's waaaaaaay too late in the game's lifecycle to be worrying about that now. That ship done sailed in 2016.

 

many mmo's have been doing this for years it a way for ppl that can farm the gold to buy things on the cash Shop or even game time

 

I guess my definition of it is that I can buy COTOs, get gold, buy 3x3 set of armor and weapons, buy things like a warlock chain, fleet flute, ring of the lich, etc... Yes, I have to work my character but it sure makes it a lot easier and it gives me and advantage over those that just play.

 

You can, but even the best armor has a minimal impact in the game if you haven't grinded your skills all up.

And owning some of the best items in the game, I can tell you most are really not worth it. I mean half the good items in the game have some horrible drawback anyway because thats how they "balanced" it. lol.

Like the baccanal belt - you have to put up with barely able to see what's going on because of motion blur just to get a tiny strength buff. And the fleet flute i have to type /play and then time me hitting an escape key to get out of the damn animation every 30 seconds
just to use it. And those are some of the top items in the game. So it's like... meh

The end result of 1,000 hours of play, thousands of dollars spent (some just to help keep the game going and support it) is that I can't solo any damn thing (other than wyvverns and trolls) because I didn't want to be a mage like in every other game, and I even can't make it through the rise without at least one DPS person or healer with me. Heaven forbid if you're wearing cloth and you let me get within body slam range tho.

It is what it is.

 

almost every game has something like COTO's now of days

 

The other thing I would caution while on this topic of money and items and PTW and RMT, is that be careful what you pay for. There are some really overpriced items on various vendors. and likewise underpriced ones.

I know for a fact that armor I paid 40k for is available for 200,000 or 300,000 some places. You really have to shop around and think about it.

 

I've seen the same ring (reasonable diff in decay) for 5K, 10K, 40K, 65K... Its kinda crazy.

 

<-- yep always will be someone flipping items lol

 

In addition to recently adding more ways to spend them (including dungeons and keep/castle lots on crown vendors), it may also have been affected by excessive crafting of Death Potions to be sold to NPCs. There's been at least one guy I'm aware of crafting them every many hours every day for almost a month now. Throwing more gold into the economy devalues it, which raises the value of COTOs vs gold.

From what I've seen, most of them are less versatile than COTOs. They may be limited to game time credit only, and in WoW you can only sell them to someone else, who can then only cash them in, in a somewhat controlled market.

 

1 guy ? ... Half the server is crafting deadly potions

 

Hmmmmmmm..... okay. I guess i need to learn a hustle or two then.

 

Keeping this on the "economy" focus... this is the issue I have now with the Classless System. Sounds good but to quote a line from the Incredibles.. "When everyone is super... no one will be". How can we expect to have a profession (crafting side) when everyone can basically do everything???

Right now in UO Outlands I can go out and fight monsters... Once in a while I get a Paragon monster and if I kill it I get a Paragon chest. I can't open the chest due to lock picking and trap removal. So I call up Valor and he does it with his treasure hunter for me. I also pay him with items and stuff for his effort.

Jobe can build ships. Some of us are fishermen. We fish up nets and messages in bottles at higher levels. We go out with a team so we can handle the mobs. We often get treasure maps where we need someone like Valor to decode and someone to dig it up. Then we need the group to actually fend off the high end spawns. And we need Valor to open said chests. All of us get a cut and make money/get items for each of our professions.

Alchemister is a GM smith. I don't have to be because I employ his services. I share with him special treasure maps for high end ore and that allows him to make stuff to sell or to make things for the guild.

My point is we have to do this because the game is "Classed Based". Classless sounds good but I'm starting to believe it makes more sense for the solo / take care of themselves kind of people. These types of characters don't feed (as much) into a full economy and in turn that hurts it. In a class based system you are driven to interact with others for bartering and commerce.

Not to mention that the class based system makes the operation of a guild more useful to share needs and resources.

E.. the Bowyer, Deathmage, Brewer, Crafter, Fisher, Alchemist, Wood Worker, Smith, Cook, Tailor..