The Regional Economy. Still Possible post R57? & an idea.

That is EXACTLY how a player driven economy should work. So the reseller plays on economies of scale, or at least i used to in the games where i played in the player market more than I do in this game.
The player time thing was why i suggested an export tax, not a wait for boat type thing. So there is no time investment, but instead an unavoidable tax component.

The refined goods example i think is a bad example, as i'm not convinced it is the low price on player time, but instead the high price players associate with the producer XP that they can get semi afk.

 

I think a tax could work, provided that it was balanced in such a way that there'd be benefit to moving bulk goods (cheaper rates) otherwise we get back to the do-it-yourself option.

I still worry over the number of systems that will need to be limited in some way to make such a thing possible, and stress that moving us to a pure player driven economy can happen with or without regionalisation. The regionalisation certainly can add a unique flavor (cherry wood from the perennial costs makes furniture with a slightly different look, for example) but I think we're putting the cart before the horse a little bit. Lets add player obtain-ability to all the fuels and reagents (craftable tools, craftable molds, symbols, locking mechanisms ...all the 'crap' on the crafting vendor? Players need to be able to make it, in reasonable amounts.). To address the loss of cash sinks, lets remove the ludicrous infinite-pockets blacksmiths who pay top dollar day after day for endless amounts of junk - this stuff should be used for scrap and components only, dwindling the faucet to coin drops or selling finished (crafted) products to the npc. There's still a lot of refinement needed on the stuff we've got now without adding new stuff and a whole tax/export/import system.

I'd surely love to see the economy come to life...and all you folks with the boats? You can now become smugglers and move stuff avoiding the taxes for the price of a moderate virtue hit and risk of bein' caught by the law.
Meow.

 

I do agree, making the economy more a player run economy by removing things that are sold and bought by the NPC i would prioritise over making regional markets.

But if Port want regional markets it has to be something that is done from the outset rather than retro fitted. Otherwise you are generally having to take something away from the player base and that NEVER goes down well. A half thought out system would also just be something that would make people complain, so either has to thought about for episode 2 or just abandoned.


Regards
Spung

 

Yes, they were talking about that over two years ago and never got around to it. With the current state of less devs then before, it's even less likely to happen. No regional resources, no regional economy. Literally the only regional "resource" is a small number of recipes.

They've been making with recipes and some other things like seeds and fruits and vegetables on grocery merchants be only available in some places, and people already complain. They also have demand pricing, but we don't have enough population for that to kick in except for recipes on release day. Screwing with the prices in regions might be interesting, but most of these things are available cheaper through agriculture anyhow, so it really won't change much.

 

Once upon a time, I played a game called Archeage. Archeage has two primary continents, broken down into regions. Different regions have different climates (Desert, Temperate, Tropical, Arctic, etc). While any crop can grow in any climate, they grow fastest in their native climate. What Archeage has that's sorely lacking in SOTA is trade packs that you can run for different purposes. However, prices get run down when large quantities of packs are turned in, so there's always risk involved. They had an in game tool that let you know how much a given destination was paying for packs at that time (70%-130% or something like that)

a) You can run them within a continent for gold. The further the distance, the more gold you make. In addition, if the end zone is a PvP zone, you get significantly higher prices on sale. The trade packs were bought by specialty NPCs. It was a nice way to make gold, but time consuming. To move a trade pack, you have to wear it. Wearing a trade pack prevents the ability to recall or teleport., and it reduces your walking speed by quite a bit. Once you've made enough gold, you can purchase a donkey. Riding the donkey is faster than walking, but still slow. Eventually you could make your way up to tractors that could carry multiple packs. You could continue to upgrade those so you could get to a point, IIRC, where you could haul 9 trade packs.

b) You can run them to the opposite faction continent for rare components used in crafting. This is the only way to obtain these special crafting components. To get to the other continent required a boat used to sail across the ocean. Opposite factions zones are generally open PvP against *you*, so a lot of risk involved. I generally ran what I call reverse trade runs (Craft a pack in an enemy territory and run like hell to the ocean, get out my boat, and sail back to my side). So you had a large initial risk (Being killed while crafting the pack or immediately after you finish), some risk sailing back, and then no risk on delivery (in general). There were also large (but slow) merchant ships that could carry something like 21 packs that were generally used in guild runs. They had a major risk of being attacked by galleons from other guilds while they were crossing the ocean.

c) You could run them to a neutral full time PvP zone that also had a 3rd faction present for even more gold or an extremely rare crafting component. This usually involved doing the run as a guild.

Many years before these newfangled graphical MMOs showed up, I played a MUD called Medievia. In Medievia, different major cities had specific goods for sale that could only be bought at those locations. You could buy a cart of those goods and transport them to another city. When transporting carts, you could not teleport/recall/fly on a dragon, so you had to walk to your destination. Along the way, you'd be ambushed by random encounters of various types, trying to steal your goods. This again was usually a guild activity, as the mobs were *very* tough. If you died and were unable to clear out the random encounter before they destroyed your goods, you lost it all. In addition, they had a neat mechanism called "catastrophes". A particular city would get hit by a catastrophe that would last X number of hours. If you managed to run a caravan into the city and sell near the end of the catastrophe, you could make massive amounts of gold. But you also risked being killed by the catastrophe mechanism itself (Like meteors). In that case, there was a high likelihood you'd lose your goods as well. In a catastrophe run, you had to vie with the Random Encounters, other players rushing to beat you there for the best prices, and the end catastrophe. The prices dropped rapidly as goods were sold, so timing the whole thing was critical. For non-catastrophe scenarios, you could query a vendor in City A how much they were buying goods for from other cities, and then figure out how much risk for what profit you wanted to take on to run there. Generally, it was best to run a variety of goods (Player A takes X, player B takes Y, player C takes Z). Each commodity had a different weight and prices, and you could only carry so much weight in your personal caravan. I used to maintain a script that would query a vendor in a given town, and tell you the highest profit margin runs overall, or from specific cities. Sadly SOTA lacks any real scripting interface for in-game mods. :/

In any case, things like this would give people activities other than grinding crafting and adventurer XP to engage in.

 

The crafting, farming and trade you describe in Archeage is almost identical to what I experienced in BDO and it was fun and fascinating there as well, if a little slow. Challenging and slow is not popular with the SOTA player base.

It requires lots of sub systems, and I can't see Port having the time or priorities to do this any time soon, however my point was that even with recent changes, it's still entirely possible to develop a regional trade model at some point. I wasn't arguing for it to be done yesterday nor exact how it should be implemented.