Water - Value of Time VS Cost To Buy needs attention soon

I've been doing calculations, and I came to a realization that I'd like to bring to the attention of the devs. While it might seem a minor matter, I believe it is having a detrimental effect on the stability of pricing of grown goods in the player economy.

The problem: Water is too cheap to buy vs the time it takes to gather the same amount of water.

I'm giving time a value based on the lower end of this post on lot taxes that indicates how much (as of July) the devs were seeing people make per hour. I'm using this value as a guide because the devs used it when setting lot taxes.

From the lot taxes post, I'm taking the value of player time as 3500g/hr, which is the lowest value of the range. (Before someone non-dev says "But, water is free if you gather it!".... er, no, it's not. It takes time, and someone could be spending that time adventuring for gold instead. If someone prefers to spend that time gathering water for growing crops, then it should have an equivalent value.)

To grow one crop from seed, you need 16g worth of water (4 x 4g), or 48s of time to gather (4 buckets of water, each taking 8s animation + 4s for human attention/reaction). To calculate the value of 48s of player time (3500g / 3600s ) * 48) = 46.7g. If you are a machine and minimize the human interaction time more, you could lower the time value of water gathering to 38.8g (2s of human interaction delay). So for the purposes of this post, I'll use the range of 38.8g - 46.7g time value.

g = gold
tv = time value

So, to grow one crop from seed to maturity, you need:
16g of purchased water vs 38.8g - 46.7g tv.

Which gives us a value of 1 water bucket:
4g (npc) vs 9.7g - 11.7g tv (player)

I don't know if the devs are intending on removing purchasable water buckets in the future or not, but in the short term, I would suggest that the price of water be raised and/or the gathering mechanic be tweaked.

As it is now, there is little point in being able to draw water by hand because the player time value is so much higher than the gold cost of purchasing it.

Some short term suggestions to make the costs comparable:

• Keep the current water gathering mechanic unchanged. Raise the price of vendor water to 10g - 12g each to more closely match the time value.
• Leave the price of water on the vendor alone, and change each water gathering result to product 3 buckets instead of 1 bucket. (Vendor water 4g vs player time value 3.2g - 3.9g.)
• Raise vendor water to 5g - 6g each, and change the water gathering result to 2 buckets instead of 1. (Vendor water 5g - 6g vs player time value of 4.85g - 5.85g.)

On the basis of less clicks is better (I've had carpal tunnel in the past) my personal favorite is option 2, produce 3 buckets per draw rather than 1.

I hope this feedback helps.

 

they have already determined that "player" game time in this game is pretty much irrelevant.

They have made it so skills take at least 25% longer to train.

Things have moved much to "fast" from the beginning

Some cool downs are exorberant.

movement overland is designed to take "time"

SO until they actually get the game completed and all the other "Items" input and balanced then they can look at the "time" constraints.

 

what about "Salvaging" the water buckets to retrieve Wood pulp

for me the issue is that the wood buckets are myracolously created by the water well...

everything on SOTA crafting is completely broken.. today (like latest 15 releases) it's necessary to destroy a forest to make a bow...

where is Greenpeace?

for me .. developers needs to start from zero and re-make all recipes...

to make a water bucket.. it's necessary to have a wood bucket

 

I disagree - if it was irrelevant to the devs, they wouldn't be basing any pricing on how much time it takes to earn that gold. They have also stated that the growth of a stable player economy is important to them as well.

My OP is in regard to the cost of producing a subset of goods, and how the varying value of the basic item needed to produce that subset is destabilizing the already in flux player economy. You need a solid base to grow from, since after that you have the varying costs of seeds, time taken to grow, and the amount of yield to factor in.

While I agree that they can't look at everything at once, that doesn't mean they aren't looking at anything at all. There are some things that do need to be looked at sooner rather than later, and they're doing that. Some thing that can cause wild fluctuations in the cost of producing a whole group of goods is one of the things they should look at sooner IMO, if, as I believe, they want the player economy to have a chance to stabilize somewhat.

*cough* That's another battle for another day for me. I do agree that the amount of trees you need to make a bow is rather... alarming to say the least.