Time to talk about economy!

Apologies in advance if this has been asked in the thread - I only got to page 6 after having read the whole thing in Dev+. And apologies for the wall of text. I think the question is are we concerned that a few pvp players will become too wealthy or that they will corner the market in rare resources? Or both?

What are the ratios of pvp "enhanced" drop rate rare resource zones to pve drop rate rare resource zones? And what will this enhanced drop rate be? My math is not the greatest so any advanced degrees can correct my math.

A few assumptions as I begin this long post:

1) The resource is gathered at a rate of 100% from each and every zone, pvp as well as pve
2) The numbers of resource nodes is the same in all of the pvp and pve zones for this particular resource

For instance if there is "blood wood" (or something along those lines) to be found in wooded areas and there are 5 pvp wooded areas and 25 pve wooded areas that ratio of zones is 1:5. If the enhanced drop rate in pvp zones is 5x normal, then the ratio of the drop rate of blood wood in pvp zones and pve zones is 1:1. This means that pve gatherers and pvp gatherers would both hold 50% of the market. If the enhanced drop rate is 2.5x normal, then the ratio pvp to pve is 1:2.5 meaning pvp would hold approximately 33% of the market and pve 67% of the market.

Fair enough. I think this takes care of the "cornering the market" part.

Now we need to mix in the number of pvp only and pve only players (assume neither will cross into the other zone).

Let's use the 1:2.5 ratio for this next bit of fun.

So lets say 10% of the population is pvp only. And all they do is gather blood wood all day long. They don't go to pve zones and the same holds true for pve only players. The pvp population has 82% of the "wealth" whereas the pve population has 18% on a per capita basis.

That looks like an insane discrepancy right? But keep in mind pvp holds 33% of the market, not 82%. And the cost to acquire the resource in a pvp zone should be greater than the cost in a pve zone.

Things we are missing:

1) The cost of acquisition of the resource - I think it is safe to say it will be more costly to gather in the pvp zone. If this is true then the "profit" on the resource goes down for the pvp group.
2) The distribution of pvp zones to pve zones with the same resource within an x minute walk - this will have an effect on the local market
3) And a whole lot mork that I can't think of right now.

Someone made a point of cartels like OPEC. In the end if the supply from the pve side (67% in my example) remains constant the pvp cartel will have little sway on the price of the resource. But that's a whole 'nother topic

What about a group dominating a single resource in the pvp zones to the detriment of other pvp players? I am hoping the world will be large enough and the distribution of zones wide enough to make this difficult to achieve. And even if you can achieve it remember - there will always be another group looking to take you out.

TLDR; The issue of personal wealth and cornering the market of a rare resource will depend on the ratio of pvp to pve resource zones, the ratio of the enhanced drop rate to normal drop rate and the cost of acquiring the resource. I think if balanced well it could work without too much fuss.

 

Can I request an auto-like feature just for Bowen's posts?

 

In a game where people were punished with stat loss so severe they couldnt play their character for 2 or 3 days, they still killed themselves for the bounty rewards.

 

Yes it does require a balancing act that means Port must spend active dollars to continually adjust the market forces. I doubt that will happen. So plug in the 50000 backers into your math and you have very few people controlling the majority od the rare resources and most people without anything close to equal access. Your math starts out fine but definitely misses the mark in completing the equation.

Use the assumption of 100 rares drops in x time equally. Use 50000 backers as the pretty darn close to accurate number announced by Port. Using your 10% PvP and 90% PVE
Then 100 rares for 5000 PvPrs and 100 rares for 45000 PvErs in the same amount of time
Which is.02% PvP gained a rare in X time while .002% PvE gained a rare. That is a rate of a 10:1 PvP vs PvE in acquiring a rare. That sounds like a controlled market to me.

So please continue your math and expound on it with the number of backers and your own increases drop rate for PvE at 1.25 and the rate skews even further into PvP favor.

Now if you use Ports estimate of 5% PvP it will skew even more to the PvP side. I smell hyperinflation or Port constantly adjusting drop rates after release which will be too late to stop the train from leaving the station.

 

Actually his math sounds about right to me. The shardfall zones are to be the area where these resources should be the most common. It seems to me that his point was that since this was supposed to be a resource found in the PvP zones, and scarecly in the PvE zones.

Correct me if I'm wrong @ShirZ , but since there are more PvE locations to gather resources the PvE players would be able to gather just as much of that material outside of PvP as can be gathered with PvP just because there are more PvE gathering zones. If half or more of the production of that material is found outside the shardfalls then why go to the shard fall in the first place?

In addition you cannot get killed and looted for your materials if you're not in PvP mode so the odds of keeping the materials are much greater in PVE zones too. See the problem?

 

I'm not disagreeing with his point of view.

I am stating:

• his view provides an incomplete picture
• it is a delicate balancing act
• it is expensive in man hours to adjust code continually to account for drop rates
• it will be too late for Port to ever provide equality once the economy has been tilted in favor of the few

 

@abj9562 - I am not even pretending to know what their plans on for resource drops rates or how many pvp zone drops vs pve zone drops there will be. I was kind of thinking out loud. It is by no means the complete picture. If I wrote down everything I thought would go into the thought process nobody would read it. Way too long.

With respect to the number of people holding those resources you are correct. With a 1:1 ratio a few pvp players may hold half of the entire supply. But that is not a ridiculous amount in my opinion. It does not equate to controlled market. Now if you told me that 1 person held half of the entire supply that would be different.

What I was getting at is that if they can make it so that the rare resources are available outside of pvp zones in greater quantities (just not more with one swing of the axe) then it is doable.

@Isaiah - You are correct I was thinking along those lines. And yes it should be more costly (through weapon and armor deterioration, harassment, death, etc...) to gather those in a pvp zone.

I'm not a hardcore pvp person. I enjoy it once in a while. I'm not taking a stance on pvp vs pve. I'm just thinking about how it could work to make the game in it's entirety more attractive to each playstyle.

Thank you for reading

 

You do not feel that it is a controlled market with 10:1 rare resources in favor of PvP playstyle. At 10:1 that is the least favorable I have seen mathematically discussed. Many PvE players will disagree and say that is not offsetting the cost of PvP but is instead favoring one playstyle over another.

 

I think I understand what you are saying with the 10:1 ratio. One pvp player can gain 10x the resources that one pve player can in same amount of time, all things being equal. But there does not need to be a 10:1 ratio. They can fiddle with the drop rate and the number of pvp and pve zones that drop the same rare resource and what that ratio would be. Does it need to be constantly tinkered with? Probably not. The market can usually find an equilibrium.

At the macro level that 10:1 ratio does not change the dynamic of the marketplace. Using your example, and assuming that all resources gathered are put into the market, 100 rares go into the market from pvp and 100 from pve. 200 total. If that's the case then no, I still do not believe the market will be controlled by pvp players. A 50% share of a market does not give control. But we know that will not really be the case because not all resources go to market.

A player has 3 choices - Sell the resource; Use the resource; Horde the resource. If I understand the logic that Chris is using then the pvp player would be more likely to sell the resource in order to pay for the pvp upkeep which should cost more than pve upkeep. Does that mean that the pve player is more likely to either use the resource or horde it than to sell it? At what point does the pve player decide to sell the resource? I believe a person will usually sell a resource (or anything) when they believe that the benefit to selling outweighs the benefit of having or using that thing.

Will some pvp'ers become more wealthy than their pve counter parts just because of this? Probably not. And those that do are more than likely the hardcore people who will play the game like a job, pvp or otherwise.

 

You are a smart person. This is sound logic, and it is fitting that you chose this thread to begin posting some of your first posts because I thought Chris's post was really logical and it also helped make it easier to understand what effects the macro economy and what really makes no change. Your post is of the same pure logic.

There must be some kind of online course for Kolinahr or something. So much logic in such a short time. I'm going to check the O'riely School of Technlogy to see if they are offering some sort of Kolinahr at your own pace type course.

 

IMO you still keep ignoring the simple fact where the vast majority of PvErs will not have the resource or enough access to obtain it due to competition for the quantity available. 47500 people accessing fewer nodes than 2500 people are accessing.

At a 10:1 proportion PvP players will have the resource. So assuming market saturation for PvP occurs at that 10:1 rate. By the time every single PvP player (assuming 2500) has accumulated 10 apiece (25,000 total) and sold 9 (22,500) and PvE has gathered the same amount (25000) then all things being equal, everyone in the game has 1 of those rare items. But 9 out of 10 PvE players had to purchase their rare from a PvP person. Your argument still depends on an extremely serious effort to get the right balance. How do you balance the sale of a coveted item when demand is high. You can't there is not enough competition drive sales prices down to reasonable levels.

The risk of hyperinflation during the initial sales period will be extreme until the market is saturated. Now assuming the resource is consumable, market saturation never occurs or is seriously delayed until something bigger comes along and we repeat the cycle.

Keep 1 sell 9 is too powerful and will generate at a minimum the perception of an inequality. That perception alone can kill potential sales. I believe this risk is unnecessary and potentially volatile. Way too many games have died on the grapevine of hyperinflation. Should Port have a chance to try it, perhaps. However in the end a misstep in this arena could backfire in a lot of unintended ways.

 

Nice! I Tahru (auto-like) this.

 

Yes and no. Yes, it requires an algorithm. No, it's not that hard if you abstract it far enough with variables. It's doable. One good SQL statement.

Provided that's actually the right way to go.

BTW - A big Tahru to everybody for the return of sanity and civility to an important subject.

 

Not to go too far afield.

There are the streamlined steps to be done in a business environment.

Write it, test it, get it tentatively approved, apply to QA server, test, check results, get formal approval, place it on the public server, check results again. This if and only if it runs flawlessly. If not then iterations occur throughout this process. It can get expensive even with SQL. It also takes time and therefore salaries to be paid to do all this. Time also means while it is on the QA server, perhaps for a week, it is still a week with the economy running amuck. Yes they could post a hotfix but if that is also wrong you compound the issue. So my point is they have to work very hard to get the economics right for everyone not just for a small select few to make them feel warm and fuzzy.

Now on my personal website I do all the above so it does not cost me much time. In a business environment each of these people has to be paid and it takes time from some other task waiting in the wings. That compounds the issue even further. There is a reason why some bug fixes tend to be ignored, usually when the cost of correction is high and the return is low.

 

You're preachin' to the PMP choir, brother. And you're right. That said, the fact remains that this is one straightforward requirement that could be included in a development sprint. (I wouldn't dream of something like this being done as a dedicated release, no matter what the priority.) So, yes, all of those steps are necessary. But bundled into a Release, the LOE should be minimal.

Again, assuming that is the right solution.

 

The post was directed more at the audience who might not know. I can you see you are definitely in the know!

So we pretty much agree Port just needs to get it right before we go to final release. I also think most of the people here want that very much. Only a few seem to be statistical outliers demanding their way or the highway.

 

I was asked in a private chat if this was just a joke or not. It is indeed a joke but I am serious in that I like his post and I like Chris's post. The whole Spock thing is just me acting cuckoo.

Chris's post in this thread is indeed my favorite post in a long time and it makes me excited because it was full of good stuff. this @ShirZ guy posted another post that I think makes good sense, right or wrong he made a point that was very thoughtful and I felt he deserved some of the vulcan love that Chris got earlier.

So anyway welcome to the community @ShirZ I like your posts so far. Keep them coming.

 

@abj9562. I see what you are saying and I agree that it would be problematic in the sense that most people (mostly pve players) will have to buy the rare resource. But wouldn't that be the case anyway? It is a rare resource. And if 1,000 drop per day for 50,000 players that means 49,000 of them won't get that resource that day.

The problem is that on paper pvp players will have a bigger slice of the pie per capita. I agree that the perception could do more harm than good.

Speaking of perception, why should it be just rare resources that drop more frequently? Why not resources in general and then leave the drop rate of rare resources the same in both zones? I'm not sure if the majority would deem a higher number of pine wood chunks per chop so unfair. Or animal hides. It would just be a different means to the same end... more money in the pockets of pvp players who theoretically would drain that coin more quickly than a pve player?

At the end of the day they will decide what that drop ratio should be. And it may well turn out that it's a sliding ratio that could depend on the population and what they think the ratio of pvp to pve is at any given time. As they pvp population ratio to pve population grows maybe the drop rate grow as well, or vice versa.

 

Oh I agree PvE/crafters will most likely have to grind for gold or resources to obtain rares from whatever source they pursue. With the PvP zone available as a quick shortcut draw utilizing the sheep to wolves concept.

The per capita argument is a major sticking point for PvE/Crafters in general. I personally believe a general increase in non rare resources instead or rare resources would be less argumentative IMHO. However, it was Portalarim who wanted the whole sheep wolves concept to exist and that has not settled well with PvE and crafters in general. (Don't ask me why they want to upset the majority of players. Find a shrink to explain that one.)

Anyway, the sheep to wolves concept combined with the per capita rare resources argument drives most PvE/crafters insane. So, if Portalarium announces an acceptable ratio or implements a sliding ratio to control hyperinflation it will do much good to ending the whole argument for most everyone. However there will always be extremists and minority opinion holders from both sides who may never cease the discussion.

 

I think a major mistake most people are making here is that they are going to make THE rare resource more abundant in PvP zones. Instead, they are making A rare resource more abundant in Pvp zones. If you look at the current release we have two rare resources, tin and nickel. One makes white iron the other makes Meteoric iron. Which is better is debatable. I believe that is the intention, make it a choice between flavors instead of one being the best. If this is the case then one group corners the market in one resource, another will just be a better choice due to price.