TenTonHammer: Crafting Article (Wednesday 9th October)

Yes. Exactly. I'm sure somebody will build a wiki that will list formulas for everything. And people will strive to be the first to report a formula so they can claim to have discovered it before anybody else. But if I discover a formula for something powerful, I will keep that knowledge to myself and sell as much as I can until the second guy discovers it and tries to undercut me. Is that Greed? I'll have to work on that.

 

And/Or sell "training classes" to a select number of crafters based far away from me

 

*eagerly awaits Vjek's reply*

 

In my experience when someone says "bad for the economy" its usually something that cost them a lot money or stops them from making a lot of money. That includes the real world as well.

I am not a math or economics wiz, but it does not seem to me that economies are stable things. They require a lot of work to maintain, and need different things at different times. I doubt this will be a problem as its just replacing what would normally be in loot tables anyway. Not to mention ratios, I am sure, will be adjusted as needed.

 

If anything wouldn't using some NPC-purchased PC-crafted goods as loot drops SLOW the rate of introduction of magically generated goods? This way at least there is a drain on materials and tools from the world to create the loot found on npc mobs.

 

This isn't a complex or tricky explanation. I'm not revealing anything new or extraordinary.

Set aside all other aspects of a hypothetical economy. Put in one infinite tap. (of gold). Take away all the sinks, or presume there are less sinks than taps, and what happens?

The sinks overflow. There is too much of whatever is flowing.
Every persistent multiplayer online game I've ever played suffers from this problem. SotA has the opportunity to fix it, and there's no indication they're going to do so. Hence my concern.

The results from this design are what has been observed since at least 1996 (starting with Meridian 59 and most recently with GW2). As I mentioned earlier in the thread if you have respawning/infinite creatures that drop items, and those items you can immediately take and sell, with no intermediate steps, to an NPC, and get gold, your economy will have too much gold.
It will also forever be plagued with gold farming, gold selling, and bots. That's the only mechanic required.

I'm not saying there aren't solutions. There are. However, none of those solutions have been enumerated, and having this ONE mechanic revealed, without context, leads to repeating all the mistakes of the past 15+ years.
If there are sufficient sinks, it's possible (although not demonstrated in 15+ years of "the devs are smart, don't worry!" attempts) having this mechanic in play wont be completely harmful to the games economy. Unlikely, but possible.

And no, Umbrae, this isn't about my personal greed. If you want more details about how *I* want to play, start a private conversation and I'll be happy to elaborate at length.

 

@vjek, I wasn't specifically referring to you. Just an observation when people talk about economies it very likely to be a person that likes to manipulating them.

 

So you're not saying that no other RPG lets you loot monsters and sell your vendor trash for gold...

...you're saying that they all allow it, but it's wrong, because it amounts to an infinite supply of gold.

Hmm.

Are you proposing a true closed system, where even the gold carried by monsters has to come from somewhere? That's interesting.

What if there were truly a fixed number of gold pieces in the game world? That would be an impressive technical feat, but I wonder how it work out...

Some vile Smaug-like dragon would probably wind up with all of it, lol. (Or, more realistically, some power-guild full of jerks...)

 

Well, I see it differently. If one discovers something powerful...oh they will keep it to themselves alright. But where we differ is that you state that you would sell as much as you can I assuming "in-game." No problem with that. My worry is that these items will NEVER hit the open in-game market. They'll be next to the prime land lots on Ebay. Great...

I'm also trying to wrap my head around how it will actually work for the player. Say Sir Frank becomes a Grand Master Smith. Word gets out that he can now craft the ultra-rare Sir Frank's Falcata of Death (+25, superior speed, and glows red). Sir Frank's life in game and out has just changed. Constant in-game messages. Constant in-game email/letters (if there is such a thing). Constant threads asking, begging, pleading for it. Of course, the backlash "hate" posts bemoaning the fact that Sir Frank isn't selling/giving them the item. It will be a constant all-consuming barrage. Real life will actually take a great gaming moment for Sir Frank and almost overnight...make it suck. Seriously, is anyone not seeing this happening?

 

So the answer is a closed system? Gold is a finite quantity? Like bdo says, what's then to stop some powerful group becoming the hoarders of said gold? Wouldn't the same things to restrict or limit the problems n either circumstance be the same for the most part?

What are you thinking as a replacement system exactly? It's and interesting idea that HAS been thought about before, but there have been few if any true benefits that did not have their own, possibly worse, down sides.

I'm curious how you think it can be accomplished better.

 

Nope. I see all the recipes data mined out of the sota single-player offline process, as Wsye pointed out.

 

@vjek

I cannot follow that link.

 

Sorry, here's what he said:

 

On this I suggested that dev's should give out (unique/new) recepies like Edelmann Beer, that only the person that knows it can teach forward. These would then only slowly spread throught the players or it could be that, say, event winners would hoard their knowledge of said recepie. This would lead to interesting markets and would give real nice value to knowledge that can only be tought to you by other player. This would on part of those said recepies make datamining totally worthless.

 

Sure, if Portalarium is willing to have online recipes mutually exclusive from offline recipes. I don't see that happening, but it's possible.

Also, there is always one person willing to give away everything they have for free, in-game, including recipes. Given the descriptions so far for crafting, you don't need to have the recipe in your book to craft the item. You can find it through experimentation.

Unless Portalarium is willing to exclude online-only recipes from being discoverable via experimentation. Again, possible, but would be incredibly unpopular and seen as bait-and-switch.

 

Thank you for posting Wyse's message. It was well written and I can definately see the problem. I believe that the SotA Dev Team has also anticipated this. And that is also why I believe your quote just above will come true. In this day and age, it is quite normal for there to be differences between the single player mode and the multi-player version of the same game. Actually, it's kind of expected. I would be highly disappointed if the "only MMO mode (whatever it's called)" didn't contain "new" crafting secrets. So...my previously stated example and my concern would still stand.