SotA Economics - an opinion piece

I do think that this thread focuses on gear too much. It is possible to have an ecomony that gear consumption is not the primary way to remove crafted goods from the economy.

Archage has no durability, the only way gear is consumed is RNG on upgrading it. But gear is not the primary thing that consumegs gatherables and crafts made by players. Trade goods that can be sold to the NPC is the primary consumption, that have to transported and are the items subject to PvP loot.

I have said before, I would like castle sieges, if they are still on the roadmap, to consume player crafted goods. So investing X swords (have to have a crafter's name) etc could level up the tier of the NPC's on your side. Something like that.

Regards
Spung

 

Well I don’t know how you guys get so rich. I would love to buy your armor if I could afford it. I have many hundreds of hours in game and it is a struggle to keep up on just reagents. I am more of a casual gamer, but if three hours of play, I made 5k. That was a good day. I spent almost all of that restocking my reagents. I had to use monthly cotos to repair my armor as I can’t afford that 60k weapon. That doesn’t even include taxes on deeds. If you don’t have a vendor in a market town, you really are stuck with farming mobs and selling to NPCs.

To add to this, I have limited time to play. So trying to find a vendor to fill a buy order takes more time. If you realistically took away NPCs from buying anything, what can I do when I am out of a magic reagent? Ok wait till the time passes and he has some stock, well that just ended my play time. That just isn’t fun. You need NPC vendors for newer players and players that don’t want to be crafters. As player base deteriorates you will need them even more.

 

As an aside, I never buy reagants. I figured that out once I discovered where to find them in the wild. Roadside plains/forest skeleton encounters have a ton of mandrate root, and some garlic. The forest encounters tend to have a bunch of nightshade. North Midmaer Way, I think it was, has a ton of garlic along the roadside.

Some of that can be a struggle at lower levels, but I just got in the habit of foraging as I went, and I put thousands of excess reagents on my vendor. I mention it, because it seems like a lot of people scoff at the idea of just gathering them from adventure zones.

When I want money, I mine. Either Elysium or Spectral mines. Even selling everything from Spectral to the smith in Soltown (who gives a better price than normal vendors for this type of stuff), I'm making 6-7k an hour. Even better if I sell to players. Silver from Elysium always sells well to players.

(And yes, I realize I'm saying this after having said I think NPC vendors should have a gold cap, which I still think should happen)

 

I do gather and farm reagents, but it’s those black pearls and crafting reagents that hurt the worst. I did not know about selling ore to vendors though. Thank you for the tip.

 

That may be a good example of my point, actually. Well-established, high-level players have access to endless gold faucets, while new players struggle to make ends meet.

Some see increasing loot drops for selling to NPC vendors as QOL improvements. I see it as anti-QOL, or at least QOL-neutral, as it's not fixing the core issues. If we didn't have endless gold faucets, we wouldn't need property taxes to be major gold sinks... and property taxes, to me, have been the single most oppressive thing about the game.

 

No I understand higher players have an easier time staying wealthy, but I think that is realistic sadly. Someone gets in on the ground floor, makes a good product and sells a bunch before others. There will always be rich people in a consumer economy. This being a game we want to make it less frustrating than real life. I can see shop vendors running out of money for a day being realistic, but I can always cash my check at a bank during given hours. We do have vendors with hours, so there is some attempt there to be realistic. You can move buying certain good to certain geographical areas, but finding them again is just more of a time sink and with such quick travel, not a big deterrent to trying to keep things local.

I think the loot changes were more to make killing more interesting. Why get your group together to kill a nasty big spider if it only drops 5 spider silk. I think crafted gear should be best in game, I think Coro repair for it should go away, mobs can still drop artifacts, add identify scrolls to see what they are, have crafters make the essence to repair them, but here have a piece of that recipient drop from regular random mobs so adventurers have a way to get coin back from crafters, add more consumable augments to attach to gear and things as loot. Have less reliance on npc vendors by adding crafting reagent nodes or farm options. I would stop scrolls and repair kits from dropping as loot. Maybe the only gold we earn in game is from npc mobs and quest rewards; with the exception of outskirts areas to get players started. Then maybe we can remove taxes, but add a login time limit so empty lots aren’t taken up. Maybe Port can make some money on deed upgrades from adding farm space on your deed, increasing house limits, something of that nature.

I don’t know if any of that would realistically work. Of course a small player base really hurts those kinds of reliance. People can’t make enough vendor sales to pay their taxes and whole POTs go up for sale.

 

I'm not high end but I can hold my own, when I'm playing. First thing, ditch anything bigger than a Village house. I have town deeds, village deeds, row deeds... I live in a Row House. If you are going to grown things then get a Village Lot, put two rusted greenhouses on it, live in the basement. This right here will stem most of your outflow. If you need cash to fund anything else...

1. Mine ore or get Wood - best selling stuff in the game
2. If you are at a level where you can grind higher mobs, do that. Grind in Twin Foothills or the Rise.

Seriously, cut you costs as much as possible and sell Materials like Ore/Wood to buy vendors in Novia Market. 100 silver ore is bank! I always just played around and when I needed some cash just grinded enough to get what I wanted.

 

I think the biggest advise I could give to newer players to get gold is avoid animals, kill humanoids.

Animals take to long to harvest. Yes it can be good producer XP, but do that when you are higher level and can aoe 5+ at a time in a tier 5 zone. Then you make the decision to grind some producer XP rather than make gold.

Another good tip, you can loot while harvesting. So bring the mobs to that cotton bush, harvest the cotton bush (and hope for a beetle) and loot all the humanoids while it is harvesting.


Regards
Spung

 

Maybe not a home, but a dungeon.

 

Was never intending to pose a rhetorical question as to imply an absolute.. but I'll follow up with.. what percentage of players actually own a dungeon? That they wish to decorate like a traditional 'dungeon' ?

There are almost always exceptions to any rule.. but they are generally few and far between.

 

Maybe, but there are people who want the items, and your question implies the answer "nobody" to a degree.

I'd hate to see the junk go away. Maybe just be looted about 1% as often.

 

I never said anything about them going away. The problem is that apart from the very few people who want it as décor.. they're utterly useless. I've made a few suggestions here in how to deal with that that neither involved removing them or reducing their drop rates. ie let us salvage them..

 

How do you make your money? Do you sell things to NPCs, or do you sell to other players? Selling to NPCs is intentionally not supposed to be a good way to make money. Don't sell junk weapons to NPCs, sell ore and wood to other players. I don't have "gold faucets", I find out what people will pay good money for that takes low enough effort to get, including buying things for resale. Like the saying goes "buy low, sell high".

If the zone isn't too thick with mobs, it might be possible to use a pet to "distract" them. It may help to use Silent Movement to get them to see your pet first, as SotA currently has a way too high "first sight" aggro value. (If the mob sees you first, and other people start beating on it, it takes a while for it to turn to someone else.)