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Upcoming Economy Rework and Goals
As everyone is aware - one of our upcoming goals is to focus on the economy and re-working how it functions. The first part of this is really on us, which is to dig deep and determine how the mechanics of it function.
We're digging into the following:
We're digging into the following:
- aethergoop generation and sinks
- commodities production and sinks
- gold generation and sinks
The one thing that we still need to determine is what the eventual goals of this should be. Obviously commodity production is one of the big player concerns, but we wanted to open up this thread to give you, the players, a chance to give your input,
What would you like to see when we begin to tackle the economy?
The one thing that we still need to determine is what the eventual goals of this should be. Obviously commodity production is one of the big player concerns, but we wanted to open up this thread to give you, the players, a chance to give your input,
What would you like to see when we begin to tackle the economy?
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Comments
for the comm generation artifact you could put a hard limit on how many you can buy, and how many could be in your inventory/manse to prevent abuse. You could even make them very low daily amounts like you get from rubbing genies with diminishing returns.
Our main goal is to make changes to the economy that allows players to enjoy taking a part in it.
Manse generators did break a lot of things with those individuals that had hundreds of the things but i do feel perhaps having a cap could help address the issue, people could have a small but steady income of comms.
The change to piles and piles of comms being hoarded in shops probably helped with the glut, but now those sources have run out it's becoming obvious there are disparities. Magnagora has very good stockpiles on most things, and they are all available to purchase by our citizens - except my current bane, fruit, which we are so low on we've had to stop releasing stock and just let people buy the tithes as they come in. Upkeep on projects adds up very quickly, it's hefty. Generation generally speaking doesn't seem to cover demand and so we will eventually either across the board be fighting over comm quests individually or have people need to stop crafting.
Basically to me a goal is for everyone to fairly easily access what they need (comm shops, comm quests) but without returning to the territory of comms selling so cheap people are basically selling their wares for nothing - that is also not a healthy economy, no one really runs a shop for profit unless they have the right trades, but i feel like it would be nice for everyone, even entry level, to be able to be moderately competitive at the least.
A lot of us players are hoarders by nature. I've amassed a lot of my own commodities that I largely keep in holding to make sure I always have enough. I sincerely doubt I am alone on this. If the economy is tuned and rebalanced so that no one can ever comfortably hold away a few thousand of each commodity without destroying the market, then imo the market's been poorly designed.
When considering commodity scarcity, it'd be way better to just look at city/commune public holdings than private holdings. This always is a much, much better gauge of the perceived scarcity/value of commodities within that given org than whatever you might learn from peeking into everyone's rift and adding it all together.
1) Every commodity has at least one quest that can generate it that doesn't require players kill loyals,
2) Orgs are less reliant on village control for their comms
I'd like to see players able to do commodity quests to acquire raw comms, and for players with no other option to be able to go to an NPC to acquire a public design at a steep markup, though I'd also like it if tradesfolk could offer remote services by having something attached to shops that lets clients provide comms to spit out a finished product. (ie: Trader who is a bookbinder sets up an Origamatic in their stockroom, and from that point on they can PRICE DESIGN 24521150:24 and PRICE DESIGN VELLUM 42:2. From then on, anyone can wander into their shop and BUY VELLUM to pay 42 gold and get a sheet of vellum, BUY VELLUM COMM to spend a leather and 2 gold to get a sheet of vellum, BUY BOOKBIND 24521 to pay 150 gold and receive a deep indigo flame origami, or BUY BOOKBIND 24521 COMM to spend 3 vellum and 24 gold to receive the same origami.) This would free the tradesperson to offer multiple designs that might be otherwise cost prohibitive, or offer a wider selection of goods rather than needing to stock multiple of the same thing. Similarly, something like this could be used to ease pressure off of the people needing to find specific flavours of enchanter, alchemist, or any other rare trade.
If we're open to pipe-dream, full-blown overhauls of the system from the floor up and not just unretiring artifacts, tweaking numbers, and introducing new sinks to convert goods into gold and gold into stuff, something about Starmourn's system feels a lot more alive and dynamic than ours, or did when I was playing. Just being able to swap ingredients for different or higher tier versions that you went out and got yourself to have different effects made it feel like the time you invested in getting the comms actually mattered, and that you could be rewarded for tweaking and experimenting, and investing time in the execution of the skill, or trusting someone who had done so, or if all you needed was something cheap to fill a slot, you had that option too. However we'd need to completely redo how commodities are generated and how designs use them.
More ways to create comms in villages, and more obvious ways to do so. It's easy to make steel from iron/coal in some villages, but not gold/silver/platinum/iron. I still have no idea how to move geomycus between Ptoma and Ixthiaxa like you do in most village quests. The Delport/Stewartsville quest to move hemp farmers is slow and plodding (one at a time per hour, if I remember correctly) as opposed to moving a handful of silk spiders (Angkrag/Dairuchi), or steers between Paavik/Shanthmark, or farmers between Acknor/Estelbar.
Ways for an org to invest gold or perhaps spare anomalies to boost comm production in a village, or perhaps not. Most orgs are buried in gold, and have little use for it. Maybe a way to build a new construct in a village you own, which is destroyed when that village revolts but can be empowered in some way to boost production.
As far as I understand it, village generation is an issue because their outputs are more or less consistant modified by org governing styles and political structures as well as comm quests. Which also means they aren't responsive to what an org really needs so generation can be too low, similarly if needs are low they just keep chugging away creating unneeded comms.
I wouldn't be looking at manse generators as anything but a bad example because we know they didn't work. I'd instead be looking at Aetolia's farm system and seeing how well the admin there think that's working (I assume well as they're still looking to expand the system) because it has limitations, choices, etc.
Aside from non-decay basically reducing the need for traders down to consumables and newbies who haven't got non-decay yet.
Cooking has consumable buffs... but the two you can sell in shops are replaced by the wondercorn. Given every time it comes up the advice is "you should get wondercorn through your levelling crystals", infused foods seem to only have value to players below level 40, for platters, and 70, for cuisine and once you hit 80 and get the eighth crystal you can upkeep a permanent herofete on yourself without any downside.
Influencing buff has oils, wetfold, tattoos, and beasts but with charismatic aura and quiet mind you're at 6 universal, as you build the mask you start hitting 8 in each.
The runes cap you at 13 without fully investing in the bow curio collections so even if you dropped the superior runes to 3 rather than 5 there's the curios that will give you more than enough.
This is also before even looking at any possible race or class benefits. Trades are only going to make money if players actually need their goods.
Cooking is kinda bad for this given that to be able to reliably sell cooked goods for a profit you're looking at not only transing cooking as well as a spatula (300cr) and Pieman (3 wondercrystals), but even then the gold profit is only maybe double digits.
You also then have the spoon which in the current context it's kinda pointless cause if I wanted to I could write a trigger which would permanently maintain those buffs from the corn, but also it seems like it just halves your profit when you're actually selling them cause the buffs last twice as long?
Alternatively it seems like artifacts that instead give you more options might be healther because then for the base stuff people can still compete but you can gain access to more stuff.
If you look at the specs we have thirteen trades and it seems clear that it's just... too much. Only three have aethertrades, only five (or seven depending on how you want to count enchantment and alchemy) even have goop crafting.
Splitting them into Mercantile (trades that are meant to make money) and Artisanal (trades that are for designing/player customisation/etc) would let us have something like five mercantile trades which have every single necessity and the like in them, with all the other stuff just off in "artisanal" trades.
There would be some reworking as necessary and none of them should be class locked, but all the buffs, weapons, armour, curatives, etc would all be consolidated down and as necessary reskinned.
I would also heavily suggest that mercantile skills should be excluded from skillflexing and that you really shouldn't be able to get more than two. Artisanal is less of a concern. But a limit of two for mercantile really means you only need between two to four other players to be able to get any mercantile item which I don't think is unreasonable if we also look at the shops stuff mentioned further down.
The example here would be tattoos really, but enchantments are in a similar boat. To ensure ease of access to goods, basically everything should be sellable via a shop. Needing to find an enchanter to start a specific enchantment is an issue even though maintenance afterwards is trivial. Tattoos are really just a pain to get (pun intended).
But also on the other hand both of those examples also fall into the category of stuff that you only need the trader for once, barring reasons like losing your enchant or needing to change tattoos, so it's also not a service needed regularly enough to warrant someone always being ready to provide it.
I think this should be done in concert with the mercantile idea though because, for example, tattoos is a good candidate to be split. The actual tattoos might just becoming an artisanal thing with no mechanical benefit while the benefits from tattoos can be worked into on of the mercantile skills.
Most effective way to sell stuff, there are sooo many of them. But if you don't have one, it's kinda... good luck trying to sell things that could be sold in one cause you're competing with the entire aetherplex for convenience.
Something like starmourns variation where it seems like everyone can put stuff up for sale could make things more accessible to everyone and you could even implement taxes so that every sale could include a small gold sink.
Not an entire unique trade but more like, maybe moonwater is only available to the Wodewoses. Possibly going even further and having guild unique crafts require a guild workbench (in the wodes moonwater case you'd make it an rp thing about the alembic is actually blessed by the forest spirits or something which is why it's needed, handwave why we could do it before heh)
While moonwater and the equivalents are an example that's unique for each org, it seems like you could be pretty fine doing something like... If wetfold/kirigami moved out of bookbinding, maybe one one guild in each org can actually craft each and its skinned appropriately. Like maybe Listener kirigami is a token of the ancestors that you release to receive their blessings, but revelry maybe make a really awesome shot you down for the exact same effect just skinned differently.
All orgs would have access to the same stuff in the end, and each guild should be pretty much equivalent, it's just an avenue to increase the relevance of guilds and promote their identity.
At least this way, people who are actually in those dead guilds can turn a profit off of exclusive access to stuff.
edit: Also, it needs to start being addressed, how many players are being lost because the guild they'd be interested in is dead so they don't get engaged with the game.
Obviously it doesn't solve the commodity issue; in fact, it would create a greater need for commodities if now everyone needs to buy new sets of jewelry/robes/armor every ~6 RL months for enchantments, holding runes, etc.
Repairing and mending come into an issue of trader availability, but alternatives are basically a restoration item that the trade makes. (I.e if you need to restore robes you have to get something from a tailor)
My personal favourite right now pretty much that the restoration should use an actual item of the same type. Like, if you have a lyre you need a lyre or at least another instrument that you basically sacrifice to add its decay time to yours. i.e Runed Lyre has 12 months left, New Lyre has 100 months, sacrifice new lyre to runed and now runed has 112 months left.
Non-decay stuff would just become inert and useless until you sacrificed something to add time back onto them.
As far as the commodity issue, yeah but you can also address comms in ways that makes it responsive. Decay just can give you a rough idea of how many comms are needed per player rather than a variable from entirely dependent on trades to basically no requirement for trades ever.
Instead, I will echo the idea for Aetolia's farming or Achaea's mining systems. Essentially, players can work on a plot of land and have it produce commodities. Producing commodities costs gold (depends on the commodity in question). This is more flexible. If, for example, there is a lot of gems floating around the market, then ideally the price for gems would drop and it would become unprofitable to continue mining gems. People will then move to mining other things until gems become desirable enough that their price rises and it becomes profitable again.
It all sounds very capitalism, but it can work particularly because it'll be easier to 'switch business focus' in a game rather than in the real world where some poor employee will have to bear the brunt of a shifting market.
As to what form these plots of land will take, there's a couple of options.
Aetolia's is actual plots of farmland which you...farm. Each player can get their very own farmland.
Achaea's is more competitive (but also harsher to new entrants). Lodes pop up all over the continent every now and then. Miners rush to send their workers in to mine it. Only one player can work a mine, and players can attack each other's mines.
The way Achaea handles stockpiling is that there is an absolute limit to how much a player rift can contain. Otherwise, you need to buy extra storage space in a facility. It costs something like 1 gold per RL day per 1000 units of a commodity, rising exponentially? So you can stockpile, if you want, but it'll cost you a bit.
The biggest commodity drains on Achaea are player houses (costs commodities to expand/improve) and city improvements (sort of like our constructs and researches). There are some deadweight commodities (like iron, which has never been profitable to mine but is excellent for new miner training*) and some really valuable commodities (silver, the one that people will fight over).
Overall, I think this kind of system works because it is flexible. You can opt not to mine something if it's not profitable. You can opt to stockpile a commodity and try and manipulate prices. You can be charitable and sell for below your mining cost.
It also has the benefit of being a huge gold sink (mining itself will delete gold in the form of the worker wages, plus the cost of storing comms).
* Players hire NPC worker groups to mine stuff. The NPCs earn 'experience' as they mine so they can mine faster/fight off invaders better
Explorer (80%), Achiever (53%), Socializer (53%), Killer (13%)
Bartle Taxonomy
(test yourself)
Essentially, it would be great to have a village, but you won't be gutted for not having one, either.
And I'd like to add that, I think, the Achaea administration doesn't look at the amount of commodities floating around the game, but at the prices at which the commodities sell on the market. Sure, there are millions of stone being sold in the market. But most of them are selling for above the market price of the stuff, meaning they're essentially irrelevant. The market isn't buying them but the owner of those commodities is still paying gold for storage. A gold drain.
Explorer (80%), Achiever (53%), Socializer (53%), Killer (13%)
Bartle Taxonomy
(test yourself)
We need to consider casual players too who don't or can't spend hours to farm commodities or gold for regular upkeep. A system that rewards those who are willing to work more (present example would be spend time to comm quest, get free comms in your pocket), but still allows those who are time poor or not interested in that avenue to access comms (present example, org and village comm shops exist). A casual or more time poor player should be able to engage in crafting/selling, even if someone with more time can do it more cost effectively should they choose to work for it. Like daily credits - you may be someone who logs every day and does all their dailies and get max credits (and you'll get more benefit by way of income) or log in less regularly, and still manage to earn something, if not all 20 - still benefiting.
One thing i love about Lusternia is that you can be whatever class/guild and still a merchant - you don't have to be one thing or another. Your choice of owning a shop or trade doesn't lock you out of being an equipped fighter, for example, or spending all your time rping over grinding doesn't prevent you from accessing craftables and literally anyone can be a designer. Whatever happens, i hope there is always a way to be casual about shopkeeping but still able to get what you need, even if it means paying a little more gold or whatever for convenience.
I went into more detail with Achaea's because I'm more familiar with it. The main point I wanted to make was to divorce comm generation from mobs.
Explorer (80%), Achiever (53%), Socializer (53%), Killer (13%)
Bartle Taxonomy
(test yourself)
How villages can be tied in beyond an extra passive comm generation, I'm not sure. They're such a big part of the conflict mechanics I would hate to see them completely devalued.
Also another big no to making runed items decay or adding too much "upkeep". There gets to be a point where upkeep and gold sinks just become tedious unfun mechanics to maintain. My fear with an economy and trade overhaul is that for the sake of making trades more profitable we end up with a whole assortment of tedious extra little things to maintain constantly.
Also having seen how other games handle shop stuff better than we do it's really not a big deal to replace/restock stuff when it decays and its more worthwhile to bother stocking it when there are more regular customers around rather than just newbies.
Re: casual players. Active generation ideas I've seen mostly just don't impact them negatively because there's still a desire for a market to sell comms so they acquire them from there.
Ideas like Aetolia's farming are casual friendly because you can get one farm, do a little work on it every day (or even pay for a mob, which cuts into your income a little), get your harvest, make a bit of profit. But more invested players can get more farms, maybe there's more efficient ways to do stuff, there's denizen requests for raw comms which you can spend time fulfilling, etc.
Also time invested in the trade/comms economy, outside just designing, is basically time spent purely on a profit activity so if you're looking at gold/minute it should be the best for getting money. Basing, Influencing, and Questing all give xp/essence, gold, corpses/esteem to offer, and potentially other rewards.
Tattoos
Let's just go ahead and tie in Tattoos with Kata. Monks are the only ones who can use it, and they are hindered economically if they choose to focus this. It does provide huge benefits, but again... Only to monks.
Poisons
Open this up to those with Knighthood, Stealth, Hunting, or more. This one benefits a lot of classes, but not a lot take it up, I feel like. Allow those well versed in some of the poison heavy afflicting classes to learn poisons along with guild skills.
Gathering
It's been mentioned a lot, but some sort of active way to generate comms would be fantastic besides corpse turn in. The amount is so finite and cringey to hear how long some folks grind for gems is anxiety inducing. If we could have a skillset akin to "Herbs" where in certain environments, you are able to gather materials from said environment.
Just nothing weirdly complex like Aetolia. I mean love me some Stardew Valley, but woof. Kudos though to Aetolia for the complex system of comm generation...
Also the tediousness argument with decay is kinda amusing at this point.
- We're at a point where realistically players would only really be needing a quick trip to the plex once every couple rl months for some items and others seem closer to once an rl year.
- With audit warnings there wouldn't be any surprise decay. With the idea of sacrificing an item to add time to another, and setting it up so you can do it once the item is showing on audit, you could potentially just need to make a trip to the plex at some point within the 25 days before it decays.
- With the mercantile/artisanal split it would likely only impact things in the mercantile category.
Particularly once players start scripting and automating things, this is liable to take minutes, if that long, at worst every few weeks, depending on how your decay lines up.On the flipside, doing this provides a reason for people to actually bother stocking these items regularly and actually addresses the issue that it can be hard to get necessities because there's no great value in stocking them while also aiming to more fully utilise what we already have to make trades feel worth while.
Previously, we have tried adding more stuff. Goop crafting is a prime example here and we seem to be hitting a limit on extra stuff we can jam into trades given it only got to five trades.
We seemingly also now have proof that adding extra stuff doesn't really resolve the issue of those necessities being readily available because it doesn't actually address the actual issue.
I think the general desire I've seen has been to completely excise any class or low/high magic connection.
Right now, I'm a monk purely because someone needed tattoos, if we made that part of kata it doesn't really change that aside from not needing to invest lessons into a trade with no great benefit to me. Poisons is kinda similar, if you start opening it up you might as well just remove the restriction.
Gathering
Node style collecting has been suggested which seems similar, it does lead into questions like...
There are variations of this, mostly it comes down to one where they're a global resource (i.e everyone can see the same node, one person gathering prevents others) and another where they're an individual resource (i.e each player sees a set unique to them). Herbs is basically the first with the added bonus of potentially destroying nodes through strip harvesting.
Herbs is also, basically, just global passive generation with a cap which I'm not sure works for this?
Because it's based on the number of rooms of a type in the game things will be more or less rare based on what the admin build rather than what the economy needs.
Haven't hit complexity in Aetolia, for what I've done it's just tend some sheep every day for like 10 minutes and then sheer them when they start producing wool then chuck it in the processing stuff. Starmourn is kinda the same afaik they just have dynamic generation of targets in space based on economy needs afaik.