Upcoming Economic Balance Changes

~The Bar Tender and the Adventure Hero~

We've often said that our Bartended can make a living as one of our game's goals and I think that's achievable. Yet when that same simple bartender has 7 GM rated combat skills, "then that is no simple bartender".

Our high combat skilled players must cost more to operate. We can try and entice them that they need some wonder potion or combat related consumable, yet the economic minded player will forgo such products.

High Damage Out = High Consumption In

To be that simple bar tender, food producer, tailor, blacksmith, ext, if they are truly what they are then their consumption rate must be kept down by limiting their own character's combat abilities.
There's no way around it... ...
~Time Lord~

 

One thing they could do to make having much gold a bit of a problem.
Give coins weight.
I guess then need to be able to place gold in the bank but bank can have a negative interest.

Would partly be possible to bypass this by using Alts however.

 

Probably along the lines of your quest for the Soltown fires? You have an option to answer truthfully or play the fool - for which you have to be accurate according to the advice on quest text.

 

I actually support coins having weight. They do not need to consume a bank slot to deposit, but will consume bank weight also. Yes, alts can help mitigate, but I still think it would be worth doing.

 

I easily make enough gold to pay for the reagents I use for the following spells:
Chain Lightning
Lightning
Fireball
Blink
Shield of Crystal

... IF I'm farming for gold.

If I'm not purposely farming certain areas for gold, I do not make enough gold to cover my reagent costs or just barely break even. That's the biggest issue I'm finding. I'd like to go out and explore the many other unique scenes that I haven't been to yet, but it's just not sustainable to do that considering how much I lose on reagents then. The game currently forces you to either intentionally farm gold in very limited areas that have enough return, sit in a mine all day farming nodes to sell, or just be broke and use a reagent free deck. That's my biggest issue with the current system. The 500 gold per day from the Oracle will not fix the reagent cost issue. So instead I guess I'll be out chopping more trees and sitting in a mine all day today once again after work.

 

I kind of fall in the care / don't care camp. I care that the devs care and doing what they think is right, but I don't care if some are filthy rich in the game. It has little to no impact that there are uber rich people in the game. But it does matter if a significant percentage of players are too poor to participate in the economy. Alms to the poor.

 

Do you have all of these abilities locked at low skill?
Or are you using a pure reagent spell deck and spamming it all?
Or are you fighting over level and having to cast lots of reagent spells per kill?
Or are you sitting in town and trying to spam up Blink and Shield of Crystal out of combat to boost skills?

I have trouble figuring out just what you guys are doing to be burning so much money on reagents. I have Earthquake, Shield of Ice, Soothing Rain, and Lightning - along with Ice Fist and Ice Arrow as reagent free and have no problem breaking even with reagents. I sell zero farmed resources because I either craft it myself or give it to guildmates - and I haven't yet sold anything to another player. My only profit is in killing monsters right now. Unless I am hunting exclusively wolves, I end up doing okay. In fact, I've still been slowly earning money despite also having to pay large costs for wax and curing salts...

Not targetting this at you directly, but I have a feeling people are filling their decks with reagent only spells and then being surprised at how costly that is. And then they overreact with the reagent free deck. I've always played a balance and the only time I had to FARM gold was during the stingy vendor phase. But that wasn't for reagents, I made enough for those. It was purely due to crafting costs.

 

I really do think that skill gain and progression play a role. Once I started really focusing & over using T4 spells, I started purchasing regs instead of grabbing from a stockpile in my bank.

I also don't use a mage implement unless I am straight up training or not playing my solo deck, so that burns a few more.

Have a decent amount of gold due to +7 and higher item sales plus weapon farming for a week pre-nerf.

I do salvage 90-100% typically though, if working my crafting hard. The amount of raw mats required is insane unless you use the scrap recipes for ingots/wood

Definitely scared to be a property owner this soon, and would rather contribute to other's passions

 

I am disturbed by the political nature of all these economic discussions. IRL you can cross the globe and find out what the end result of these experiments will hold. If I wanted to play a game that mirrors the failed economies of the world it looks like perhaps this one is developing that way. Why not just take the final step and confiscate everyone's gold? Put a chest of public eternal armor supply, weapon supply and mat supply in every town. Why not really go the distance and remove all the silly quests too?

 

lots of discussion here. which is awesome. I'm sure the devs are reading this. and I'm sure they already have in mind the direction they plan to take.

but.....

I wish they were a more active participant in these chats. even if it was just a post saying. "good stuff. I'm still watching this thread."

 

*whispers*
I'm sure they are speed reading through to pick up any original ideas. But one of the humorous things I find about our Portalarium is their ability to "perform...

Spoiler

... as if they are actors on a stage" This, "our Portalarium team" are the pioneers that created the gaming world of MMORPG. Before our SOTA, they taught all other gaming companies how to do it. WoW owes allot to them as well as every single MMO of the planet Earth's history.
Some things like the economy going haywire are the unavoidable waves as if launching a ship. Everyone seeing the launch wonders if the great wave will harm anything, yet the boatyard who launched the ship knows that it's normal and routine.

But they do keep listening for those truly unique ideas! Otherwise most all our comments are a copy of a copy of another, or from another game who learned quickly to copy Richard Garriott's best ways

It's like a snake eating it's tail ~TL~ They are brilliant role players!

 

This assertion implies that the cause(s) of success or failure in a system can be readily perceived when in reality the cause(s) may not be readily evident. First, we need to understand what characterizes success or failure for the speaker, because success as "the good of the population" will differ from success as "the good of the tyrant". Second, success or failure in any socio-political or economic system may be a consequence of external inputs. For example where the cause of failure is not an element of the system itself but instead corruption, or lack thereof.

 

This might also afford an opportunity to make the lockpicking skill more meaningful, as well as a real use for bags, sacks, and backpacks as well as locked chests in wealthy neighborhoods.

Yes, I could see that working out quite well. Imagine the hue and cry!

 

~Bring On the Heavy Burdon of Gold~ I'm beginning to like it!'
This is a truly unique idea which would differ SOTA from every other game. The more comments I see on this, I see that "gold by itself" is more of nothing within that design. It's ramifications are much deeper than just superficial.

Soon, the rich character would need a carriage to carry them around, their houses would be a constant turn over of lesser valued goods out to allow the more expensive in, "a condensed wealth" of sorts.

Gold doing nothing is a worthless value to the game. The idea has logic, because our characters don't have a family to feed or a retirement to save for. This makes saving obsolete!
I think I'm for this new strangeness!

Not being able to move fast is it's most beautiful design governor within it. If one was a hoarder of gold, no matter if it was an alt character or not, this would mean that the character becomes operably almost useless.

"As useless as the gold that they harbor"!



I'm on the band wagon with " @curt " Totally Feudal!​

@DarkStarr

Spoiler

[/MEDIA]

~Time Lord~

 

weight on gold would not actually fix anything. gold in uo had weight they ended up putting things in place like the banks issuing checks.

putting a weight on gold is basicly saying you can only have have xxx amount of gold per account. then after that I have to throw it away.

besides why is there such an issue with people having alot of gold there is nothing wrong with having gold or saving up gold. that's in it self is not the issue with the economy.

 

So, "what are you going to do with all that gold?"

There's only so much gold within the game, which is something unique about our game. If that gold is serving no purpose, then what is it there for? There's no need to have so much gold and it needs to be spent.

Dependents such as children we don't have here, yet dependents as in poor friends who can't get any gold because we have all the gold need the gold.
"So, what's it good for?"
~Time Lord~

 

If I am not mistaken, gold horders can sway the economy by flooding the marketplace and manipulating prices. This game has a system set in place that the npc's change there prices accordind to sales trends. If someone goes around and can buy out all the npc's at a low, then the npc's raise the prices. The horder then can place products cheaper on his tax free vendor and turn a proffit.

 

This is a perfect example of one of the good things in the player economy. The price increase by the NPCs is the underlying problem, corrected somewhat by the player who buys low and sells high (but still lower than the NPC). I realize that people think that the NPC price goes up because the rich guy buys a lot. Without his purchases the prices would still go up due to purchases by crafters (mats). The rich guy jumping in and making a few coin ends up good for the economy because the net sale price people are faced with ends up being lower than it would otherwise be. Meanwhile the rich guy stands ready to buy the crafter's wares.

 

Will the PoT Oracle Confirmatory NPC building become functional in conjunction with this?

 

~Our New Player Beggar Britannia~
I am growing tiered of hearing that our new players are becoming beggars and in need of charity from our current gold hoarding system.
I don't have a retirement account needed for my in game character. I have no family that needs feeding in our game either.

Please slow down the rich, by adding weight to our gold. Choose the most expensive thing in our game and base the weight of gold on this amount, to slow our characters down by 1/2 their normal speed when we have empty wallets.

Get rid of this environment of charity, by burdening those who have it and speeding those who don't.

~Time Lord~