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:
- 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?
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Comments

  • I would love if we could generate commodities in our manse. Even if it was a steep artifact cost that we had to upkeep with gold or something. As a jeweller I've had the frustration of trying to buy metals (which are absurdly expensive) and raw gems for cutting (that I have to go across the entire basin to find corpses for). If it wasn't for the insane luck I've had with generating wondercrystals in game I'd be broke. I'd REALLY enjoy doing trades and merchant things if I didn't go broke just trying to break into the market.

    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.
  • Used to have manse generators, and in the name of scarcity to...SOMEHOW...fix the economy, that was removed. Unlikely to be reinstated. And they always had low 'per-weave' generation levels, but people would have several, farm them, get rich, and people complained without thinking what things would be like without cheaper than village cost comms available. So...meh.

    That said, the whole drive to diminish comm hoards may be valid on the surface, but not really feasible with high cost comm sinks that don't offer much. Research projects, by far the most wasteful loss of precious comms in the game currently just to upkeep, certain drain those reserves fast. But given generation is way lower than the cost and only a handful of Research projects are worth a damn using at a given time, it's been frustrating all around. Designed that way intentionally to prevent them being must haves, certainly understandable, but so expensive for so little gain.

    Either boosting village production, both base and when quests for said villages are performed (with new ones introduced?)...or dropping at least the Research black hole that is their upkeep would be nice.
  • Just to be clear here - nothing is off the table at this point in time. That's not to say that we're going to do everything that is brought up here, but we're willing to make big changes.

    Our main goal is to make changes to the economy that allows players to enjoy taking a part in it. 
  • Some comms are easier to generate than others. For example, for a bit of hunting work you can gather an awful lot of gems (just running through the undervault without project eternity nets me around 30). Compare that to fruit, which at the moment is in very hot demand, and the only way to generate it is to move furrikin between Estelbar and Acknor, a maximum of 4 at a time, per hour. Meanwhile, fruit is not only used in many, many cooking designs, it's the main commodity in goldentonic and kiwipunch (and the others but not so demanded), the most popular tonics that can't be traded for (like candies, scarves and buttons) and have to be made. Once bottle of goldentonic costs 50 fruit, which would take an individual many hours of waiting and potentially annoying orgs to move their farmers.

    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. 

  • LuceLuce Fox Populi
    Obviously my biggest wants are for the system to reward traders' time investment. Personally, I'd like for the system to be set up so that:
    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
    3) Any commodity sinks result in a net gain of goop, gold, or experience via the refining loop or the bashing/influencing loop
    4) Even artifact heavy players have at least a minor need to engage with the player economy
    5) Any gold sinks in place end up supporting item production or the bashing loop. (barring special events like the holiday shops or auctions)
    6) No sink feels like a chore that MUST be upkept.

    1 and 2 are to help curtail the 'winners keep on winning' issues and to make it so that players who want to engage with the economy without spending massive piles of gold can do so by investing time. 3 and 4 are to make sure that gold keeps moving instead of getting hoarded. 5 is to make sure that gold does eventually leave the economy, but 6 is so that players who sink the gold out see a palpable benefit for it.

    I've seen a lot of ideas tossed around but my take is that an ideal system would have all or most trades produce low-cost, short-effect items like kirigami, some medium cost, long-effect items like enchantments, and some expensive but long-term effects like armour. Ideally, all of the long-term things would also have some sort of upkeep associated with them that won't cause it to become counter-productive but might reduce its effectiveness if not kept up. These shouldn't feel like just another layer of necessity but should be really desirable (much like kirigami or goldentonics do.) Traders should be able to acquire commodities relatively easily, but may need to go out of their way to quest for them from time to time. Alternatively, make it so that ALL commodities are freely able to be purchased at a centralized commodity market at a markup, and orgs get gold when 'their' comms are bought from this marketplace, or can restock by buying from it (ie: orgs set buy and sell prices based on their stock levels, lowest sell price that can meet the demand gets the gold being offered by the buyer, highest buy price when a seller sells comms gets the stock being sold.) As a potential gold sink, give traders access to higher quality or rare ingredients from NPCs that offer benefits when used in a recipe or are just hard to come by (:cough: honeycomb :cough:), or offer temporary capacity expansions or commodity reduction buffs. (Or, y'know, the ability to buy vault keys for 500k-1m gold or something.)

    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.

    And it'd be nice if shop policies could be more granular in the way that manse permissions are, and to set separate buy and sell adjustments and have the largest modifier apply. Ie: PRICE POLICY ADD PERSON ROARK +20 -20, PRICE POLICY ADD ENEMY HALLIFAX REFUSE REFUSE, PRICE POLICY ADD GROUP GAUDIGUCH REFUSE -99, PRICE POLICY ADD GROUP TRASTO +0 +10 would refuse to buy comms from or sell to enemies of Hallifax, refuse to sell to Gaudiguchians but buy from them at 1% the price anyone else would get, and would sell at price to Trasto members, and buy with a 10% markup, but would charge Roark 20% more and pay him 20% less.

    I also wouldn't complain too much if comms got simplified as a whole and the lore restrictions in designs got a once-over. Durile metal, precious metal, stone, powder, gem, red meat, white meat, dairy, produce, rough textile, fine textile, bone, spice, herb. Let certain things qualify as those comms when raw (cows can fill in for red meat, dairy, and bone, sheep for red meat, bone, or either textile, clams can be white meat, gem, or powder, etc.) Commission a mortal reviewer task force whose sole mandate is to comb current designs and convert the comms (AND reduce comms if the pattern hasn't already had it reduced) and double check that they're lore-freindly, and poke trademasters for designs that aren't a simple conversion or aren't lore-friendly anymore. If we're in the design system stuff anyway, it'd be best if the members of a publishing cartel were able to see that their cartel was the one that published a given public design in case they want/need to adjust them (especially since when the comm squish happened, the publishing cartel was the only one that could request comm adjustments).

    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.
  • edited January 2021
    A clearer delineation between which villages make which commodities, and how much are created both in village stocks and city/commune stocks when comm quests are done. I think a refinement of what comms they bring to the orgs would be great; some villages make small amounts of comms that make no sense for that village.

    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. 
    Her voice firm and commanding, Terentia, the Even Bladed says to you, "You have kept your oath to Me, Parhelion. You have sworn to maintain Justice in these troubled times."

    Yet if a boon be granted me, unworthy as I am, let it be for a steady hand with a clear eye and a fury most inflaming.
  • XenthosXenthos Shadow Lord
    1) No more huge comm upkeep costs on research, and/or failing to upkeep research shouldn't drop you a level, but instead just deactivate the research until the upkeep is paid.
    2) Make generation more consistent; there should be valid ways to generate all kinds of comms.

    This is an idea that I'm not sure has come up before, but might have some potential:
    3) Consider if organizations / villages really should have commodity shops at all (centralized depots for selling commodities).  When organizations have them, you end up with the large "perceived gap" of administration saying "x comms exist" but players not seeing those comms.  Allow organizations to keep their stockpiles or add to them, but repurpose them to be just that - stockpiles - instead of the main comm shopping locations.  Villages shops have that weird "10 comms purchased at a time" cap with wildly fluctuating prices every time you buy 10.
    - You could then set up a set of different "traders" that have outposts along the highways.  Each of them has ties to certain villages, they sell on those villages' behalf, but aren't actually aligned with the villages.  Doing comm quests at the villages impacts the associated trader's supply & price, instead of at the village shops directly.
    - This detaches comms from org control entirely, and gives you a central place to look at / tweak incoming / outgoing comms, instead of the much more opaque distribution we've got going on now.  Org stockpiles are essentially removed from the equation, they're considered "sunk" comms, much like gold in the org bank accounts.  Prices can adjust on a more gradual scale (if more than 80% of the comms generated sold the previous weave, increase 5% - if less than 20% sold, decrease 5%, or something like that).
    - People have discussed having "comm caravans" moving to and from places; you could actually implement some kind of a competitive system here where you can hijack one trader's caravan and take it to another for some kind of a reward.  Maybe the traders have "special comms" that they're willing to part with when they have a leg up on the competition.  Some kind of system that isn't org-based in any way, at least not officially.  This isn't really a requirement, but it IS something that has come up before and could easily be a part of any movement in this direction.

    I don't really have a comment on goop or gold generation at this point.  Might have more to say as more ideas come forth in that regard, especially in the realm of sinks - at this point my stockpiles are high, and thus I don't pay any attention to what's coming in for me.  Better for those who are actually focused on the generation to start that off.
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  • edited January 2021
    Long list around the trading aspects of the economy. Realistically some of this has even been a thing since launch, it's just that over time population shifts have made it an issue. 
    • Active generation that can link to need
      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.

    • Review trade goods in the context of artifacts/wonderitems/curios/demipowers/etc
      • Actual need for trade goods
        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.

      • Trade artifacts
        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.

    • Set up two sub-categories of trade, Mercantile and Artisanal(?), then rework trades into them.
      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.

    • Look at how we sell goods to other players

      • Unsellable goods

        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.

      • Shops 

        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.
  • An idea I've been toying with recently, mostly in line with the idea of the mercantile skills, is giving guilds some unique crafts.
    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.
  • Saran said:
    An idea I've been toying with recently, mostly in line with the idea of the mercantile skills, is giving guilds some unique crafts.
    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.
    Please no, that will only make the issue of some guilds not having high populations even more apparent.
  • edited January 2021
    Uzriel said:
    Saran said:
    An idea I've been toying with recently, mostly in line with the idea of the mercantile skills, is giving guilds some unique crafts.
    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.
    Please no, that will only make the issue of some guilds not having high populations even more apparent.
    Unfortunately it came to mind because I've also seen stuff over time where players are just actively grouping together into one guild and it's killing off the other two because there is no reason not to so long as you've got someone willing to put up with being in a dead guild to maintain anomalies. (arguably, guild targetting for certain stuff even encourages this behaviour)

    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. 
  • Full disclaimer, I don't know nearly as much about the details of the economy and commodity generation as the people who have already commented, but one thought/idea I had to at least create a bigger demand for trades/crafts is to get rid of the "permanency" of items that have runes attached to them (clothing, armor, jewelry, etc.). These items can still be upkept (i.e. repaired/mended) but if allowed to decay, then the rune just ends up back in the person's inventory. This would make it so that everyone at constant intervals needs crafts/trades and thus interacts with those individuals more, shops become useful again because people are looking for items (not just newbies), and it has the added bonus of allowing a rune to be freed up when the item decays. The current artifacts for removing runes could still be useful before an item has decayed.

    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.
  • Balian said:
    Full disclaimer, I don't know nearly as much about the details of the economy and commodity generation as the people who have already commented, but one thought/idea I had to at least create a bigger demand for trades/crafts is to get rid of the "permanency" of items that have runes attached to them (clothing, armor, jewelry, etc.). These items can still be upkept (i.e. repaired/mended) but if allowed to decay, then the rune just ends up back in the person's inventory. This would make it so that everyone at constant intervals needs crafts/trades and thus interacts with those individuals more, shops become useful again because people are looking for items (not just newbies), and it has the added bonus of allowing a rune to be freed up when the item decays. The current artifacts for removing runes could still be useful before an item has decayed.

    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.
    There's been a couple of suggestions to this end over the years.

    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.
  • edited January 2021
    I agree with a lot of the things said here, especially about making it so the ability to produce different commodities is more consistent, and doesn't require conflict-type activities. I'd also like to observe that, when balancing the commodity production levels, Lusternia always seems to forget that making commodity stock levels right for trades like Jewelry, Cooking, and Tailoring makes them impossibly hard for Artisan which uses 10x as much and is especially heavy on some of the harder-to-produce commodities. While some commodity levels for artisan crafts could stand to be adjusted (30 commodities to make a box with a capacity of 4 that only lasts a few years, compared to what 30 will get you in most trades?), many of them are fine to cost as much as they do, since they will last a long time (and often forever due to stasis gems). But if you balance an economy around a certain level of scarcity while thinking of things that take 20+ comms for an item, you end up making a trade that takes 200+ comms impossible to ply.
  • I think we need to move away from the mob-conversion model of commodity generation (Kill/bring critter to mob to get comms). It doesn't scale well with population. For example, 10 rockeaters can hour can comfortably support maybe 10 players. But what happens if we grow our population to 20? Would we need to expand the rockeater population every time the player population fluctuates? Do some players just have to live without rockeater products? This is bad because it's inflexible; even worse, it hits new players harder.

    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
    It's pronounced "Maggy'!

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  • edited January 2021
    Oh, and as for villages, maybe they provide a boost to relevant commodities. For example, if Gaudiguch has Southgard, then the workers of Gaudiguch players will be assisted by the Southgard miners. They will, therefore, produce more metals. Or something. Estelbar will send assists for producing grain and fruit, etc. 

    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.

    It's pronounced "Maggy'!

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    (test yourself)

  • Decay is one of the most frustrating things in the game and i have very deliberately spread my runes across my enchantments and the like to avoid it - and i can make most of my own things!

    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.


  • XenthosXenthos Shadow Lord
    You make Achaea's system sound very unappealing / unfun somehow, Mboagn.  I'm really not sure that we should be fighting over basic comms.
    image
  • edited January 2021
    We don't need to keep the fighting part, it's dumb and bad for people who are just getting into the system. Could opt for Aetolia's farming plot mechanics, which I think can't be attacked?

    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.
    It's pronounced "Maggy'!

    Explorer (80%), Achiever (53%), Socializer (53%), Killer (13%)
    Bartle Taxonomy
    (test yourself)

  • My own KISS principle suggestion on commodities generation is giving each city an npc to turn in commodities for refining and doing a pass to make sure there's a more level playing field on comm quests (more fruit/veggies/wood/metal).

    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.
  • I like the idea of plots you can set to a specific commodity, with villages making them more profitable if they're aligned to the city. So if you have a fruit farm and your city/commune is in control of a fruit producing village, your plot is more productive, but even if it's not, you can still work it. Maybe everyone can only have 1 or 2 plots but can change the plots to a different type, but with a gold/something expenditure and time cost? So you can't just parkour around things.
    Bookbinder by trade! Designer of most other things.

    image
  • Sapphira said:

    Re: decay. Sure, but also let's be honest we've had so many years of economy "fixes" that have avoided addressing non-decay and that's part of the reason we're in the current situation.
    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.
  • I have really been enjoying the idea of changing the way we interact with some trades... Some thoughts that jump out at me during the discussion could be eliminating some of the unused Trade, and baking them into class appropriate ones.

    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. 

    • Ocean/Swamp/River/Freshwater: fish
    • Desert/Underground/mountain: metals, marble, coal, gems
    • forest/valley/jungle: precious, precious fruit

    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...

  • Uzriel said:
    My own KISS principle suggestion on commodities generation is giving each city an npc to turn in commodities for refining and doing a pass to make sure there's a more level playing field on comm quests (more fruit/veggies/wood/metal).

    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.
    Given we are in this situation right now because of trying simple and quick fixes it seems rather evident that the KISS principle doesn't work for a system as inherently complex as the economy.



    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.

  • A few things:

    On research upkeep - Remove the lose a level. I would even go far as to move the research devices into a public section of the org, one that everyone can access. This would allow anyone to put anomalies/ comms/gold into it. Research privs (upgrade, select, end) can remain with guilds.

    Making things decay and require upkeep I think is just annoying and not a fun. I think trying to make trades as any sort of money maker is a lost cause in today's game. Too many well established characters can undercut everyone and still make profit (even if that profit is only a few thousand). Losing something because  you take a break is also not fun to come back to a bunch of things you liked decayed (and might not be able to get back)

    I personally would love the idea of aethermines in some form coming back. I think org-level mines that even the lowest leveled newbie could do effectively could be nice. I'm not sure how you could make it so it isn't annoying to do but not so mindless you just script it.  Or perhaps that isn't the goal. If the goal is just to get comms into the system as fast as they are going out, perhaps something mindless works.
  • Lorina said:
    I have really been enjoying the idea of changing the way we interact with some trades... Some thoughts that jump out at me during the discussion could be eliminating some of the unused Trade, and baking them into class appropriate ones.

    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. 

    • Ocean/Swamp/River/Freshwater: fish
    • Desert/Underground/mountain: metals, marble, coal, gems
    • forest/valley/jungle: precious, precious fruit

    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...
    Trades

    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.
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