Problem: The Economy

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Comments

  • KarlachKarlach God of Kittens.
    Gold Saucer, Lusternia edition.

    Without the repetitive, soul eating jingle.

    I could get behind this.

    The divine voice of Avechna, the Avenger reverberates powerfully, "Congratulations, Morkarion, you are the Bringer of Death indeed."

    You see Estarra the Eternal shout, "Morkarion is no more! Mourn the mortal! But welcome True Ascendant Karlach, of the Realm of Death!


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  • Karlach said:
    Gold Saucer, Lusternia edition.

    Without the repetitive, soul eating jingle.

    I could get behind this.

    No deal.

    You get the jingle.
  • Versalean said:
    I would be willing to sit at a forge all day long if weapon stats were a thing. And that would require me to buy metal. I'd throw gold at it like it was up on the tables.
    I agree, and bring back REPAIR too. If weapon and armor still had stats forging wouldn't seem so useless as a trade skill.
  • @Karlach - just reading your post has given me an earworm of that ******* jingle.
  • KarlachKarlach God of Kittens.
    Versalean said:
    @Karlach - just reading your post has given me an earworm of that ******* jingle.
    I'm not sorry, know my pain.

    Seriously though, a funfare esque setting with goldsink minigames for short duration buffs or power/essence would eat my spare coin.

    The divine voice of Avechna, the Avenger reverberates powerfully, "Congratulations, Morkarion, you are the Bringer of Death indeed."

    You see Estarra the Eternal shout, "Morkarion is no more! Mourn the mortal! But welcome True Ascendant Karlach, of the Realm of Death!


    image
  • I think I'm blessed to not know what the jingle is.
  • LuceLuce Fox Populi
    Lilyin! said:
    I think I'm blessed to not know what the jingle is.
    @Karlach @Versalean @Deichtine o:)

  • The closest I've ever come to hitting the Abuse flag without actually doing it :>
  • KarlachKarlach God of Kittens.
    I did, then read your post.

    It's staying, it was earned.

    The divine voice of Avechna, the Avenger reverberates powerfully, "Congratulations, Morkarion, you are the Bringer of Death indeed."

    You see Estarra the Eternal shout, "Morkarion is no more! Mourn the mortal! But welcome True Ascendant Karlach, of the Realm of Death!


    image
  • edited October 2018
    I know this is kind of resurrecting a very old thread, but I wanted to take up @Estarra 's offer of suggestions for economy changes - and it seemed like this was the right place for it given the existing brilliant ideas here!

    I'd like to suggest the following implementation of replacing gold generation from mobs as follows:
    [Replacing Gold Drops with Loot]

    TL;DR version:
    • Trophies are sometimes dropped from killing mobs (eg. 'a piece of prized skin from a feral wolf, humming faintly')

    • Insights are sometimes dropped from influencing mobs (eg. 'a fragment of astounding truth from a wandering bard')

    • Remnants are sometimes dropped from killing spacemobs (eg. 'an intact evermorphing remnant from a gaseous cloier')

    Players can either trade these directly to an NPC in a nation or village to get some gold (depending on how much has been traded recently), or use them as enhancements to add secondary effects to crafted items, such as:

     - Get the right combination of trophies applied to the craft of a piece of clothing to have a very small chance of having a few seconds of mob invisibility upon entering a room.
     - Get the right combination of insights when crafting a piece of clothing to have a very small chance of converting x damage from a mob attack to a different damage type.
     - Get the right combination of remnants infused in the craft a piece of clothing to add a coloured suffix to the shortname ('a long-sleeved shirt of obsidian, shimmering with <gold>sunshine</gold>') and gain slightly more months before decay and a little extra prestige or warmth.

    The idea being that the craft effects are pretty minor, but make experimenting to find a cool effect a fun way of differentiating your wares from everyone else able to make exactly the same item.
  • @ElrynGreythane those are interesting ideas, though not sure how the playerbase would respond to it (any player reading--how would you feel if mobs no longer drop gold but rather you have to trade for them).

    In a practical sense, I think it may not be worth the time to divide different types of drops by the type of creature, i.e., we have thousands of mobs and hundreds of types, many of which aren't easily groupable. I'd suggest they drop "treasure" on death, and you have a simple 'treasure counter' (not sure I like the idea of "trophies" being body parts, thinking about people whose RP wouldn't really think of body parts as trophies). Treasure (and insights/remnants) could range in degree depending on size of mob (and a bit of chance?). Mobs to convert things would probably be Trader Bob and maybe one mob in each city/commune.

    Anyway, I like the 'effects' part too. Interested to see what people say regarding getting rid of direct gold drops.

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  • Estarra said:
    In a practical sense, I think it may not be worth the time to divide different types of drops by the type of creature, i.e., we have thousands of mobs and hundreds of types, many of which aren't easily groupable. I'd suggest they drop "treasure" on death, and you have a simple 'treasure counter' (not sure I like the idea of "trophies" being body parts, thinking about people whose RP wouldn't really think of body parts as trophies). Treasure (and insights/remnants) could range in degree depending on size of mob (and a bit of chance?). Mobs to convert things would probably be Trader Bob and maybe one mob in each city/commune.

    Fair enough on dropping the grouping by source. I kind of wanted to add more potential sources of complexity than were immediately necessary (source, variant) so that the system has room to be expanded on later, and can be easily made more or less involved based on the testing of how fun it is... but I can understand that extra complexity may not be worth it in terms of coding effort.

    As far as selling treasure to only Trader Bob/an NPC in the city, part of the intent of the suggestion is to link gold rewards through an inversely proportional relationship to the intensity of player farming of that area/type. So it's not just adding a trivial step in between (instead of get 100 gold, it's get 2 treasure and sell 2 treasure to bob for 100 gold), but rather the dropped treasure has value which might be different depending on the commodity levels of nations and villages, which itself is going to decrease in value if every player tries to turn in the exact same treasure from the 'optimal' hunting/influencing/aetherhunting zone.

    I like the ideas from the other thread about reworking some of the harvesting tradeskills to link in with commodity generation as well, and I think the two aspects could add quite a bit of interesting dynamics to the 'economy game'.
  • I've been reading ideas for economy suggestions, especially player generating comms (mostly on the activity level thread-should probably consolidate economy discussion in this thread). In Lusternia, the idea was the village quests would increase the commodity production in that village (i.e., bringing cows to the dairy increases milk production in that village). I'm looking at the comm counters and it appears people are still doing these village quests (someone is really working Paavik!). 

    Anyway, a lot of the ideas that people are suggesting sound really good but they would be extremely time-consuming to implement. What I'm looking for, given all the suggestions here and in the activity thread, is one small thing we could implement to see how it goes over. For example, we could stop all milk production in-game and just have people milk cows for milk commodities. Basically, I'm trying to figure out a tiny step we can take and if successful, then can move on to expand (maybe one comm a week or whatever).

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  • XenthosXenthos Shadow Lord
    edited October 2018
    The issue with comm quests is that it is not very transparent.  The only people who can really see the impacts are those with revlog (trade ministers for the most part).  Everyone else has to "trust" that doing it is good for the org, but you don't actually see the numbers (and nobody else can see that you were doing it, either).

    Yendor tends to spam needed comms for Glomdoring because he can gauge what the results of his efforts are, but it is really hard to keep other folk engaged in that activity.  I get what you were going for, but the system is a little too complex and black-boxed for the average player to feel good about investing their time in it.
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  • edited October 2018
    Estarra said:
    Anyway, a lot of the ideas that people are suggesting sound really good but they would be extremely time-consuming to implement. What I'm looking for, given all the suggestions here and in the activity thread, is one small thing we could implement to see how it goes over. For example, we could stop all milk production in-game and just have people milk cows for milk commodities. Basically, I'm trying to figure out a tiny step we can take and if successful, then can move on to expand (maybe one comm a week or whatever). 

    I'm not really sure whether the playerbase generally would like these suggestions about shifting to loot from gold generation (would love feedback from anyone with more economic know-how!), but I've updated my Draft Proposal doc to have a final section about how only parts could be implemented initially, to see how it goes over.

    Yes, it's not quite as small as you're suggesting with one commodity at a time, but it could still be managed in little chunks?

    Edit: And I just want to note that one of the reasons I'd like to see gold generation eventually replaced with a tradeskill tie-in is to make actually using a tradeskill a more appealing wealth-generation pathway than what currently seems the most efficient - bashing/influencing for gold. That means that the bashing/influencing rewards have to be less than they are now, so I understand not everyone being super keen.
  • @ElrynGreythane - your proposal is one that could be more easily implemented (as opposed to creating lots of mini-quests or changing the crafting system, etc.).
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  • Please for the love of the gods, STOP trying to push for gold drops off hunting to be removed/diminished. No. No one wants that crap, the gold nerf/cap in the first place wasn't well received, stop it.

    Maybe making villages not jack their rates up every 10 comms bought at such a steep rise to inflate the values of comms, and drop the comm requirements on certain designs (like Greatshields vs regular shields in Forging, they literally have the same value and Great offers no bonus over non yet are as expensive comm-wise as they were pre-overhaul when they actually offered better value in protection), and prices won't be as inflated as they are. Small things fixes a lot more than massive, sweeping changes that overcompensate, more often than not.
  • Shango said:
    Please for the love of the gods, STOP trying to push for gold drops off hunting to be removed/diminished. No. No one wants that crap, the gold nerf/cap in the first place wasn't well received, stop it.
    I can understand some resistance to having to do extra steps/interact with other systems to get close to the same gold rewards, so your opinion is fair enough.

    From my perspective though, the economy in Lusternia seems pretty broken. There are two main things that stand out to me as potential problems - first that gold sources are pretty much static faucets, and secondly that wealth-generating items (genies, wonderitems, maps, urtraps, etc) have flooded the system with lucrative, stackable income streams.

    Introducing dropped loot with variable/craft-driven value is intended to help mitigate the first issue.

    Personally, to address the second I'd love to see all the generating items reworked (have them all give a chance of either a single tradeable coin or various non-tradeable consumables, but limit every character to 3 coin spins per game month, then make sure the wheel gives sensible rewards with the new restriction in place) - but there's no way that touching real-money items is going to be approved or liked.

    Anyway, I'm not saying this loot idea is the perfect solution by any means - I'd be interested to hear what you think are the main problems with the economy, and how you'd see them improved? Are you saying comm scarcity is the biggest problem?
  • There are two main things that stand out to me as potential problems - first that gold sources are pretty much static faucets, and secondly that wealth-generating items (genies, wonderitems, maps, urtraps, etc) have flooded the system with lucrative, stackable income streams.
    You're missing the third: there's barely anything for sinks.
  • Also none of the 'wealth generating items' generate gold anymore. At all. So if we're looking at gold income, that's dried up, else you've not been playing enough to know that despite it being about a year now.

    If it's other resources like aethergoop, it's bound now, so THAT market died entirely as none are generating any to actually trade with. So no, stifling generation isn't the way to go and should never be the focus. Like the real world economy, would you suggest fixing the economy being to lower the minimum wage to $4/hr as a way to fix things? Wouldn't make any sense save for those that already have sufficient reserves of revenue. It's just not the logical way to address any economic issues.
  • Shango said:
    Also none of the 'wealth generating items' generate gold anymore. At all. So if we're looking at gold income, that's dried up, else you've not been playing enough to know that despite it being about a year now.
    Actually, the coins that I have generated can result in rewards that lead directly to gold.

    But you're quite right, I was speaking more generally about wealth (in any of the multiple currencies we have), not just gold itself. If I can generate multiple artifacts I wanted that would otherwise only be available by turning my gold into credits and buying them (putting aside direct credit purchase), then effectively I've kept that gold circulating which has a net outcome of extra gold in the economy. I'm aware this isn't as easy to quantify (what if I wouldn't have bought them without winning them as a prize, etc), but I think it's still a factor. I guess another way of looking at it might be that they reduce the impact of the existing gold sinks that we have.
  • If I can generate multiple artifacts I wanted that would otherwise only be available by turning my gold into credits and buying them (putting aside direct credit purchase), then effectively I've kept that gold circulating which has a net outcome of extra gold in the economy.
    You can't turn gold into credits. You can exchange gold for credits, but that gold goes into someone else's pocket and is still in the economy.
  • Oh true, there's no way to purchase them direct with gold.
  • So...yeah. Harming means of generating gold isn't at all the way this should've ever been approached.
  • Okay, to bring this back on track. I'm looking for suggestions for baby-steps to help improve the economy that we can implement now (like this weekend).
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  • Karma blessings purchasable with Karma OR gold.

    Buying credits with so many gold coins directly, with CREDITS FOR SALE posted by players being less expensive so setting it at maybe 50k per credit, or to help cap the market setting it at the value desired as maximum so players NEED to undercut to actually sell?

    Poteen blessings purchasable from the city/commune teacher for a set amount of gold, half the value granted by Poteen pots themselves for level of buff. Else Vital blessings purchased for the same at maybe 1/10 value.

    Denizen shops selling basic trade items like Beauty, Acquisitio, armour etc for a set value, again setting the baseline for everyone else not to go over unless they add more comms to it, with the armor/weapons lacking enhancement slots so trades still are the better route to go towards. In that case, the sans-enhancement slot items being the lower end price to set a basis for the rest. 'Lead by example'

    After this auction, a monthly auction of temporary artifacts, purchasable with gold, wouldn't hurt either. Else rentable artifacts for a time for set values of gold too, for those lacking credits.

    Buyable lessons with gold from city/commune teachers. Even for those omnitrans, they can still classflex, spend gold to make up for it, trans THOSE skills, classflex to preferred, spend gold to make up for lesson loss, bam. Ton of gold taken out, with good value put in. Piggybacks on the credits for gold system idea above, with the value set high enough to still make buying off the site more efficient.

    Those are a few ideas focused on gold sinks that might help.
  • XenthosXenthos Shadow Lord
    edited October 2018
    Estarra said:
    Okay, to bring this back on track. I'm looking for suggestions for baby-steps to help improve the economy that we can implement now (like this weekend).
    What about something simple, like:
    1) Doing a commodity quest gives you a commodity as well as putting one in the village store (it has to do the village store part so it still increases tithing), and
    2) Each village posts how much they're going to tithe at their next tick (so you can see how doing the comm quests helps it out).  Put a board in the village's commshop that you can read.

    I would think that would take less coding and provide much-needed transparency, plus it lets you do some immediate "we can go do this to get comms" instead of the current "grind and maybe buy some comms 10 at a time while the price to get your milk.

    Long-term, if we keep with the current commodity system, you really need to accept that report that I put in which allows for alternate methods of getting certain comms for quests (like metal comms).  It's not a revamp to how the commodities themselves work, but it would at least allow people to go grind for the stuff they want and see what the impact is when they do it.

    I'm not going to say that this is a thorough fix.  There're definitely bigger projects that can be done, but if what you want is something now then make the commodity quests you already have something that people feel good about doing to help their org (and themselves too!).  It's at least something?

    Edit: Some of the gold sink ideas proposed above would probably be great too.
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  • Oh hey shango beat me to the 'rent artifacts with gold' idea.
  • edited October 2018
    Estarra said:
    Okay, to bring this back on track. I'm looking for suggestions for baby-steps to help improve the economy that we can implement now (like this weekend).

    The absolute best baby step would be to sit down figure out what the economy should actually look like. As mentioned previously the economy of the game is part of the core of the game it seems like a waste of time to not only code in something but to potentially add new things that you might have to take away from players later on an actual review of the economy. (Particularly with a focus on the two questions of "Is this fun?" and "Is this engaging?"

    Baby steps have been tried before, their ineffectiveness is why we're still talking about this now. 

    edit: Just as a suggested problem statement "the economy is too simplistic". Introducing a level of complexity enables things like, putting a wear and tear fee on refining workbenches, drain a little gold for every comm refined while also increasing the minimum value for refined comms.

    Shango said:

    Buying credits with so many gold coins directly, with CREDITS FOR SALE posted by players being less expensive so setting it at maybe 50k per credit, or to help cap the market setting it at the value desired as maximum so players NEED to undercut to actually sell?

    Denizen shops selling basic trade items like Beauty, Acquisitio, armour etc for a set value, again setting the baseline for everyone else not to go over unless they add more comms to it, with the armor/weapons lacking enhancement slots so trades still are the better route to go towards. In that case, the sans-enhancement slot items being the lower end price to set a basis for the rest. 'Lead by example'
    The first would only really work if it was that we sell credits to it as well because otherwise we're just generating credits? Similarly, I'd expect you'd find numbers floating a hair under 50k.

    Minimums for item costs tend to work better with comms because they provide a base value which then builds up through the crafting process, I feel like there's a really awkward point between being downgraded far enough to not be worth it and too far to not be a consideration.
  • LuceLuce Fox Populi
    edited October 2018
    Honestly one of the main concerns for using commodity costs as a baseline is that some professions alter the cost, either by making something that lasts longer (creating more value per commodity spent) or by making something for fewer effective commodities based on whether you have the artifact. As an example, I'm a chef with a spatula but (and I'm just picking on someone at random here and have no idea if they are a chef or have a spatula) Kalnid is a chef who does not. For 20 meat, 3 veg, 2 grain, Kalnid can, at Transcendent skill level, produce 2 or rarely 3 platters per COOK, and probably ~10 rounds of COOKing per coal spent. For the same 20 meat, 3 veg, 2 grain, I produce between 4-6 with a reliable 4 and an uncommon 5 plus the odd 6. In the same amount of time, I can produce about 45-50 more platters than Kalnid. If I push for balance bonuses, I can also squeeze a few more COOK commands per coal burned, which is going to factor into my costs overall. In order for Kalnid and I to be competitive, he has to take a loss on commodity costs.
    It's less egregious for some professions like Tailoring and Forging, but even in those, the market price will be set by the tradesman with the artifact, and novices/those without 200-400 credits to burn have a much harder time making a profit, if they can do so at all.
    Moving commodities to a time investment rather than a gold one would certainly help in that regard, but only if we (the players) self-police to prevent spatulas from bringing the price of bread to a single sovereign per loaf.
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