Upcoming Economic Balance Changes

Understandable. I go at it alone as well, but in order for me to be a reasonably good crafter, I also needed to learn how to fight and defend myself because I had to gather my own resources. Unfortunately, it's just the way it is. You may need to compromise a bit if you don't want 'charity' from others.

 

I may be a 10% person. I am at the Lord level. All of my gold is collected by adventuring and selling the loot. Adventuring also supplies the loot for salvage. I have sold nothing except for 4000 arrows since the wipe. I am at level 70 or so and still have not gotten a set of gear I am satisfied with. Melee type character, spend about 3 hours a day in game. I am training blacksmith mastery atm and spending a lot of time collecting silver ore. I pretty much never spend my cash for items, but for repair, mats and COTO. I buy every COTO I find that is by my estimation selling at a lower price than what I think the final value will be.

 

I'm definitely in the bottom 90%, by choice . I've been a grindy grinds-a-lot in every other game, I'm just not interested in doing it here to be honest. I get having regs for every spell like the Ultimas but at this point, I'd probably sit out until things settle down economy-wise. I doubt I'd bother wanting to work just to keep my spells fueled daily. I'm sure at some point, I'll be able to play normally and do ok. Not looking to be a millionaire so it's not asking much. If not, I'll just log in and be a hermit in my manor house. LOL.

 

so what is with working on order-base with ressources the people bring you: Focus on 2-3 crafts and tell them that you will craft the stuff for them if they bring the mats and a very small sum of gold (enough for the fuel and tools). To get a base sortiment of mats just go to 1-skull areas to gather some basic hides, wood, cotton or different stuff you need for your craft. If you find metal and don't need it on your own sell it at a vendor (in 10-stacks) for 45-50g per ore ... that's the normal price in the moment at public vendors. Do that in Central Britanny or Owls head (that's the nearest spots I know where to sell near to the Bear Town (I'm a long time friend of Tahru )). Vendors in PoTs are only good for guild internal transactions in the moment because the players focus at the trading hot spots most times.

If you want to make money with crafting alone (and have an own or access to a lot) try growing some cotton and sell it for the profit (or own usage). If you do it right you gain some nice coin cuz each plant gives 10 cotton (if watered 3 times) for a "investment" of 32gp and you can sell it for 10+ per cotton if you don't need it yourself. You can also grow stuff in a basement (but it takes 10 times longer ... I have 550 plant plots in my 2 basements ^^).

Also, if you are ablte to get some wood try making teleport or recall scrolls by buying the reagents next to the pulp you need. You can sell them for 200 or even lower (150-180 is a nice price which is bought quick) with still having some profit out of it. If you have some supply of gold you even could buy the wood for it (try use woodscrap as well cuz scrap saves you half the chopped wood you need for processing it and it's way cheaper (or self made by salvaging bows for example).

There is allways a way, but nobody tells you that it's an easy one

 

It's not that I don't care, it's just that the only way I have to reduce prices is to re-list the item and pay another 11% fee (unless I've missed something?).

 

Well it's not working. Public vendors are over-flowing and my vendor is too far off the beaten path. It's either recoup some of my cost via NPC or salvage. But that's still not a reason to screw crafters.

 

I missed that part, thanks. I don't see how it would matter as a gold tap, if someone wanted to run to all the POTs to accumulate 20k gold it would take a lot longer than just killing stuff would.

Though I don't think it will increase or decrease traffic in my town either way.

 

A good start that only works for a subset of the oldest of backers? I don't think so. The only people with water lots are the ones with Tax Free Founder lots. (EDIT: I guess that's why you said "planters" too. I still don't like the idea of anything that favors water lots in the game as anything other than bling.) And there still isn't any source of serpent scales to farm yet, is there? (I sure can't remember seeing any serpents slithering around!)

We also still need to be able to somehow farm fuels. I recall hearing about coal nodes, but haven't yet seen one, and that's all I've heard of so far.

Actually the problem is that we had a brick wall economic recession with the loot nerf, and it's hard to react on a scale of a few days to something like that. That's too short of a time for people to accept that last week's price is gone, and more so that waiting a few days while continuing to mine more ores at the same rate with lower demand isn't going to help get it back up. The (IMHO very steep) 10% public vendor fee also discourages quick repricing for those without a fee-free vendor, who are the ones that need to sell stuff more than the rest.

I'd like to see them try a lower public vendor fee like, say, 5%. Or even a demand-driven fee (capped at 10%), like the demand-driven NPC vendor prices. That could really give a good kick to the PVs in smaller towns. (Note that in FFXI the listing fee was 1%-2%, capped at 10k, and everybody had an implicit portable private vendor on their afk character, with a 1% purchaser tax in some areas to avoid congestion, so there is a lot of room for adjustment there.) The public vendor fee is a tax that hits most the people who don't have either a fee-free vendor or some kind of external network to connect with buyers to do manual trade sales.

Port devs, do you have any data correlating player wealth with how much of their money goes into vendor fees? It seems to me like that's a gold sink that could hit new players the hardest.

 

One solution can be the implementation of dailies with options for rewards... for example: lower the population of undeads in x zone (a quest given by the mayor of y city) and as rewards you can choose : 10 of each spell reagents, 10 ores, 10 leathers, 10 of each fuels, 4 tools, 4 repair toolkits, bundle of 2000 arrows (and all have 0 value so cannot be selled) or something like that (better balanced of course, maybe around 500gp in value) .

That way depending on your build, when doing the daily you can have some of your adventuring costs solved.

 

Well, you gotta ask yourself, do you really think that keeping prices that high will sell anything?

 

[QUOTE="Elwyn, post: 649815, member: 160002"

Actually the problem is that we had a brick wall economic recession with the loot nerf, and it's hard to react on a scale of a few days to something like that. That's too short of a time for people to accept that last week's price is gone, and more so that waiting a few days while continuing to mine more ores at the same rate with lower demand isn't going to help get it back up. The (IMHO very steep) 10% public vendor fee also discourages quick repricing for those without a fee-free vendor, who are the ones that need to sell stuff more than the rest.

I'd like to see them try a lower public vendor fee like, say, 5%. Or even a demand-driven fee (capped at 10%), like the demand-driven NPC vendor prices. That could really give a good kick to the PVs in smaller towns. (Note that in FFXI the listing fee was 1%-2%, capped at 10k, and everybody had an implicit portable private vendor on their afk character, with a 1% purchaser tax in some areas to avoid congestion, so there is a lot of room for adjustment there.) The public vendor fee is a tax that hits most the people who don't have either a fee-free vendor or some kind of external network to connect with buyers to do manual trade sales.

Port devs, do you have any data correlating player wealth with how much of their money goes into vendor fees? It seems to me like that's a gold sink that could hit new players the hardest.[/QUOTE]

Hard to disagree with you on the lower Public Vendor fee. It is "strange" however that it is the people that are using the public vendor, that actually DO follow up and lower the prices, I gues to be competitive, while the people having their own vendor, never do. Does the fact that we actually HAVE a public vendor, destroy the market?

 

No. We have parallel systems of economy and that is good. They should be improved. More access to different ways of economy reduce the power of monopolists and this will grant the chance to establish a well balanced system. We have several ways to sell items already:

NPC-Vendors (min-price with impact of sold items / Missing: Possibility for player to buy somewhere else, sell these items to npc-vendors and lower the price again. If prices go up by trade - why not down by trade as well?)
Player-Vendors - taxable and taxfree (prices completely free - personally I would like to see more buy-offers but this will come if the game develops further ..)
Public Vendor (every trade is connected to a sales-tax / I would like to sell 15 or 20 items but 10 is OK at the moment)
Direct Trade (buyer and seller agree via "what social channel however" to trade ingame items and currencies / Missing - obviously not intended: trade only for ingame gold, COTOs or shop-credits .. so the RL-money would stay with Portalarium and not be drowned in illustres paypal- or bank-accounts ...)

l would like to see in the future faster auctions (1 week is far too long) with different tax-rates and maybe a global auction with a very high tax-rate (e.g. 40 - 50 %).
The idea of caravans to transport items has been discussed earlier. Maybe - to begin somewhere - it is not necessary to move a mule through the landscape. It would be an approach to establish ware-houses where I can drop-off items which will be offered at a remote public vendor and if it got bought will be transported automatically from ware-house to public vendor for a higher tax-rate (e.g. 30%).

Regarding trade and economy it is important to satisfy the needs of different play-styles and personal game-time. Reducing the various ways of trade shouldn't be an option.

 

I agree sorta with this. But at times the rich usually have a merchant and can list things they want to purchase. The problem I've found is that no one seems to look at trying to meet that part of the trade. They are only about getting what they want and not about providing what is needed. I don't think I'm "rich" but I notice with my vendor that no one wants to supply (or no one looks at the tab) what is requested by a private vendor even when paying 2-3 times what an NPC would pay. This is either because they aren't looking or they are wanting to use all the products wanted to increase their own crafting skills instead of making initial funds.

 

It might be the case where people don't RTFM and are not aware that the player vendors can also buy items from players via the listing system as well.

Hopefully when people start to check out the store advertisement on the forum and Discord,they will be more inclined to travel to the specific store and buy/sell what they need, which might be more productive than trying their luck at public vendors.

Not having the marketplace posts listed on "What's news" page make me missed out the postings of items I need several times at this point.

 

Possibly. I have even listed to buy things on the public vendor and haven't had any bites for a variety of scales of requests. I even experimented for 10 pine wood at a value of 30 each just to see if it was a price thing and no one was interested.

 

So because it kind of fits I'm going to mention the result of an experiment that I ran.

How many of you here would buy a diamond for 1g? Probably all of you

How many would come to graff island to get it? Seeing less hands and that's fine. Some still would.

How many of you bought a diamond from a vendor for 1g last night? 1

How many knew there was a diamond for sale on graff island for the last WEEK for 1g. No one except me (that vendor did make a few backer reward sales in the interim).

Now, as I've said many times I picked my lot based on NOT having people walk past it constantly. It's physically impossible for me to even have neighbors with the current map (in fact one of the closest lots vacated). I will never be an economic power and I knew that when I moved in.

The point is the inability to connect sellers and buyers Ingame is a huge problem, even if you are selling something useful for a bargain.

This can only be solved by a global search or at least a regional one. I walk by 20 or so towns on my way from graff island to Brittany, there is no way I'm stopping in each of them to find even the crier much less every vendor in them.

And after spending a month trying to find gm chain armor in the major cities I'm done doing even that. (Or will be as soon as I find a good supplier).

 

This brought to mind my first few months in UO and how I handled being dirt poor and unable to afford reagents at all. A few good friends taught me that being a tailor was a lucrative business. So we started by buying spools of thread, making cloth, making clothes and selling them to the NPCs. This went on for WEEKS. We saved up our gold. Then we moved on to tailoring leather armor when our skills got high enough and selling this to NPCs. This went on for weeks. Once our bank accounts got high enough, we were able to move on to magery. We could afford to at that point. And it was fun to find our way in the world. By the time I quit playing UO (still have account), I had a huge home and millions in the bank. And I'm a weekend warrior at best.

I've thought in my mind that this will be similar in SotA. I only use reagents to make my recalls scrolls and ONE FIRE SPELL which I don't use much yet. I'm a terrible fighter but risk life and limb to get cotton and wood for what I need to make for my home. This weekend, I succeeded in hitting the 10k mark in the bank in what - 6 weeks? And that feels good. It feels like accomplishment. I don't look at the points and levels on the screen except to find out if I have enough experience to add a new skill or spell I want.

As for vendors, I had a signature on the Stratics forums that advertised my vendor that sold plants and scribed items. I made very good gold at that. And my home was in the middle of absolutely no where. I put the coordinates in my signature. I even did a website that had my items and prices. I advertised on the forums regularly. Doing this maintained my multi-millionaire status for many years. LB said they will be looking for ways to have a vendor search feature in the future. How many years did it take for UO to implement that? A decade?

I think we all need to keep in mind that SotA still hasn't launched. And after that, it will change and improve constantly. In the meantime, we will all find our way though and hopefully have fun doing it.

*gets off soapbox*

 

I really dislike hearing it hasn't launched. It has launched as there is now persistence and what you do know can affect you in the future. That is launched.

And yes while they may be balancing out systems still there isn't the need to make mistakes made in other games that have solutions. No one wants to go through all the same problems another game went through.

I still think an easy solution is to have something like a bulletin board that is filterable. Make it like it's magical for novum to be met. The viewer can filter down what they are looking for like a search engine but it's done by magic. It can either be done by manual notes people put on it. or it can be linked to all private vendors.

I'd like to see manual notes as RPG elements could be implemented by people if they like to have a party formed or something. But ultimately I can see that being a risk so would understand some form of controlled/automated bulletin board populated.

We need a way for players to help drive activity in SotA which will also help with the economy and help crafters who don't want to keep combat skills up to date. And for this to work crafters need to be more realistic about the value of their products. If you want to charge a high profit price for something you need to pay out a little more for the mats to keep it interesting for those that gather them IMHO.

 

I've mentioned this several times and still believe that this is the way to go.

 

I don't understand why crafting has to be at nearly impossible to achieve levels. This shouldn't be the 'challenge'. DIVERSIFY the crafting trees so that it's not possible to be everything. And make professions more achievable within those specialized fields. Not easy but not god awful hard. The sooner people can begin to be useful to each other the sooner this game takes off. Lastly, UO had this down and was only ruined by duped gold. Why is it so hard to replicate the old system in many respects when it was a proven one? Just some rambling.