It happened because they got out of control and stockpiles of 10-200k of a single comm were becoming common, to the point where scarcity became non-existent in an economy that, while barely functioning as it is, relies on scarcity of commodities to exist. Money was not a concern, the game's health was.
Honestly this is one of the questions that admin really need to define internally in regards to what their goal is with the economy overhaul. ... Depending on which goal one is aiming for really will inform what route admin choose to take.
Sorry, Uzriel, if you did not mean this as a reply to @Ianir.
But, even if you did not, how are we four pages into this thread without a clear understanding of this one goal.
@Ianir, please explain what are the minimal requirements of scarcity and which systems require scarcity or makes the game unhealthy. Additionally, if not covered by that, if you would explain what exactly you meant by your comment so that we can dispense with many of these assumptions.
We maybe have 100ish players. With about 70-60 active (walking around, getting daily DC) over the course of a RL month. Out of that maybe 10-20 active crafters. People who design and craft on a regular basis because it's part of their play style.
We are going about this the wrong way. You cannot build a scarcity driven economy because we just don't have enough people for it to work. We are a tiny hamlet, where pretty much everyone knowns everyone. More or less.
What we must do is build an economy on player engagement. Use orgpoints as a commodity multiplier. IF you are particularly active in combat ...maybe your org gets #X more ore/metal type comms. Culture= food and daily necessities.
The '#' is based on the number of active crafters who craft. this is for the admin to look at.
Then I suggest we either update existing commodities quests and fix the grain, fruit, vegetables, metal and stone quests.
2)To prevent bottle necks. We need TWO ways of gathering commodities. One is the usual comms quest. (bring X to villager get coms) The other is an outside merchanics i.e caravans, insider trading, (discussed in the previous posts)
this way, conflict is still relevant and we get to generate commodities without being blocked by one trigger happy griefer or org politics. Everyone wins if our economy is based on -PLAYER ENGAGEMENT-
IF AND WHEN our player base grows big enough to drive a scarcity driven economy, it can be adjusted again, but adjusting the behind the scenes formula that guides commodity generation.
Similarly, we also have four/five other games to look at for guidance. My understanding is that after ~20 years of experience Starmourn was not launched only without non-decay but also with comments from Sarapis that it wasn't a planned expansion and it's even harder to get the equipment you need there. Achaea appears to have some artifacts that do replicate some enchants and a way to make armour permanent but scanning the lists there and in Aetolia it seems non-decay is much more reigned in than here. If decay is so detrimental to player experience and irrelevant to a healthy functioning economy you would expect Starmourn particularly to follow Lusternia's example as opposed to going in basically the opposite direction.
Lusternia is reliant on non-decay because it is a bandaid that has been applied to the supply issue with trade items rather than actually addressing the reasons why supply is an issue in the first place. Again, alternate methods for encouraging trade participation have been added, they have not resolved this issue. Aethertrades and goopcrafting don't make it worth my time to make food for shops, for example.
It is okay to speculate when there isn't anything better. However, when I just logged into Starmourn there was exactly one other player. So people aren't exactly beating down its doors for 'crafting done right' (yes, it is off peak for them).
I also can't get on board with non-decay being predominate because of a supply issue. Non-decay exists because some people really, really, really hate games where they have to manage their inventory and it also exists because of Lusternia's pay model, where people pay for convience items.
The other IREs are the most directly comparable games to Lusternia so we don't really need to speculate. If something was amazing or critical to the player experience then you would expect the other games to replicate it, especially when it comes to artifacts that do something ultimately as basic as making an item non-decay.
Your comments about inventory management and the monetisation model apply to all IRE games, also you note Starmourn in the quoted post but skim over the mentions of both Achaea and Aetolia neither of which ended up shifting to "free to play" like we did. Personally, it looks more a matter of some of the assertions are potentially more of a Lusternia specific thing than an IRE truism.
We maybe have 100ish players. With about 70-60 active (walking around, getting daily DC) over the course of a RL month. Out of that maybe 10-20 active crafters. People who design and craft on a regular basis because it's part of their play style.
We are going about this the wrong way. You cannot build a scarcity driven economy because we just don't have enough people for it to work. We are a tiny hamlet, where pretty much everyone knowns everyone. More or less.
What we must do is build an economy on player engagement. Use orgpoints as a commodity multiplier. IF you are particularly active in combat ...maybe your org gets #X more ore/metal type comms. Culture= food and daily necessities.
The '#' is based on the number of active crafters who craft. this is for the admin to look at.
Then I suggest we either update existing commodities quests and fix the grain, fruit, vegetables, metal and stone quests.
2)To prevent bottle necks. We need TWO ways of gathering commodities. One is the usual comms quest. (bring X to villager get coms) The other is an outside merchanics i.e caravans, insider trading, (discussed in the previous posts)
this way, conflict is still relevant and we get to generate commodities without being blocked by one trigger happy griefer or org politics. Everyone wins if our economy is based on -PLAYER ENGAGEMENT-
IF AND WHEN our player base grows big enough to drive a scarcity driven economy, it can be adjusted again, but adjusting the behind the scenes formula that guides commodity generation.
So to point out... an economy where comms fluctuate based on player activity is basically scarcity-based because you're driving player activity with the threat that if your org doesn't participate you'll get less comms. If you were looking to actually take scarcity out of the economy you'd just delete the trade ministry, give comm shops an infinite amount of comms, and set their prices either dynamically or statically.
Also, it's worthwhile to actually consider generation activities, we can keep tweaking villages but in the end they're really mostly static plus the variable from comm questing, adding more variables seems like it just makes it more complicated when we could instead do simpler things. Like having loot drops for some comms, farming for others, etc
Under this system, the baseline comms generated by tithing should be enough to not affect player functionality. we can never had 'free comms' or a truly player based engagement economy because people want conflict. This system just spreads the conflict across several layers.
2) That's what I mean by having another mechanic for generating comms. We have village quests then ...what you suggested? We need two methods of generating comms. First is village quest second is whatever the hell this thread suggested and works for us.
3) behind the scenes admin will have to look at what players craft, what trades they are active in, how many players use what, dailycredits achieved ....and so on.
4) Making commodities artificially scarce -at the source- or making it disappear into sinks, like it's been done in the past will never work for us. We don't have the numbers to support it.
We have a baseline of comms + gold needed to support that comms, for any org to function. Then if they want comfort and ease of crafting, org points as used as a force multiplier. Hallifax ranks third this year, and glom last. Hallifax has been low pop (as I understand it) and glom is somewhere in the middle.
Low pop orgs aren't going to be penalized unduly. We all get enough comms to function without any effort, but it's not comfortable.
That is the difference. Baseline that allows us to function + a force multiplier generated by player activity.
Not scarcity driven sinks or limiting the commodities tap artifically.
Under this system, the baseline comms generated by tithing should be enough to not affect player functionality. we can never had 'free comms' or a truly player based engagement economy because people want conflict. This system just spreads the conflict across several layers.
2) That's what I mean by having another mechanic for generating comms. We have village quests then ...what you suggested? We need two methods of generating comms. First is village quest second is whatever the hell this thread suggested and works for us.
3) behind the scenes admin will have to look at what players craft, what trades they are active in, how many players use what, dailycredits achieved ....and so on.
4) Making commodities artificially scarce -at the source- or making it disappear into sinks, like it's been done in the past will never work for us. We don't have the numbers to support it.
We have a baseline of comms + gold needed to support that comms, for any org to function. Then if they want comfort and ease of crafting, org points as used as a force multiplier. Hallifax ranks third this year, and glom last. Hallifax has been low pop (as I understand it) and glom is somewhere in the middle.
Low pop orgs aren't going to be penalized unduly. We all get enough comms to function without any effort, but it's not comfortable.
That is the difference. Baseline that allows us to function + a force multiplier generated by player activity.
Not scarcity driven sinks or limiting the commodities tap artifically.
It's pretty straight forward though, if you're generating enough to not affect player functionality then there's not really much reason to engage for more. (Which is bad, needing and wanting things are drivers for engaging with games) Why would you need to have more comm quests, for example, if people have enough? Active players have reduced needs for comms so even if you're creating a potentially arcane system for rating player activity and generating comms in response that base would need to both generate enough if everyone needs them but also would generate too many as fewer active people actually require comms to create new things.
For 3), yeah, everything should be tracked but that's not really just an economy thing it's just so there's data there to base decisions off.
For 4), this is just wrong sorry. Games of all sizes from single-player games like Stardew Valley up to stuff like wow can implement scarcity, Lusternia isn't really special in this regard because numbers aren't the issue, the mechanics are.
Villages don't work because at the end of the day they're a mostly static answer to questions like...
What is the baseline of comms + gold? Is it enough to just maintain your projects without stretching? Enough to upgrade them in a certain amount of time?
What defines "comfort" and "ease" of crafting? What is "enough"? What would being penalized look like? And how do any of those really player focused goals actually translate to how villages function?
How does any of this even work given there's a real possibility that you could have zero villages? And also, what high end is reasonable when you consider orgs could hold a quarter or even a third of all villages in-game potentially for an extended period of time?
It doesn't matter if the game's population gets halved or doubles because villages produce the same amounts based on the variables they do. It doesn't matter if four people or forty are hitting the cap on all the quests in the villages. Same with org points, obviously its easier to cap with more people, but it doesn't truly reflect the number of players participating because a single active player can do the work of multiple less active players.
This is why something like Farming/Mining/etc looks ultimately simpler and more effective because you can shift to a mechanism that is directly connected to the number of active players by saying each player can have X farms/mines/etc.
You can determine how many comms a player should need every rl week/month/quarter/etc then link that back to how much can be generated through farms/mines/etc.
You can build in mechanisms to work around the expectation that maybe yeah only 20% of players might actually engage. Maybe each farm is enough for one player but you can have up to X, maybe players can allow other players to manage their mines for them like how you can have shopkeepers. But in a rather simple way the number of active players directly relates to the how many comms can be potentially generated at any given time.
And it also just wouldn't necessarily matter how well an org is doing for village revolts, if your org is having a bad time you can still generate player level stuff.
They're also really quite responsive because players will typically stop doing activities that are not beneficial to them in some way, so if a comm isn't valuable to generate you'd expect players to stop doing so. As oppose to villages which generate their base even if no one needs them and also have artificial limits due to the caps through quest limits (even if you added more)
AFAIK, Stardew Valley and WOW don't completely halt if resources dry up; there's always an NPC vendor somewhere that can supply your needs, albeit at a higher price. So, in essence, they do have infinite supply.
Which is why Trader Bob needs to be able to supply all the things (at higher prices). The ones he lacks are:
AFAIK, Stardew Valley and WOW don't completely halt if resources dry up; there's always an NPC vendor somewhere that can supply your needs, albeit at a higher price. So, in essence, they do have infinite supply.
Which is why Trader Bob needs to be able to supply all the things (at higher prices). The ones he lacks are:
pipe
pipetank
tinderbox
regulator
energy cube
teardrop
steam
dust
ice
slush
quicksilver
galvanism
sparkleberry
healing scroll
protection scroll
all the enchantments
all the armour
I may have missed stuff.
Unfortunately, you're conflating issues with Villages with issues with Scarcity as an element of game design and seemingly overlooking that what scarcity means can look different depending on the implementation.
Stardew valley might have an infinite supply of stuff, however, that doesn't actually matter because all that stuff becomes scarce because of the time, money, and effort required to actually acquire that stuff. You can't just go in with ancient fruit, a greenhouse, iridium sprinklers, and enough kegs from the beginning. You have to earn things incrementally over time by working within the (scarce) resources that you have and growing them. Which is also why it feels so satisfying when you've managed to really build out your farm because you've earned it rather than being handed it.
Same thing with WoW, it has resources like anima which you need to generate to be able to do other things. Because of the time and effort, it makes those rewards variably rarer than others which can elevate those things to become status symbols providing reasons to engage that you just wouldn't have if they were, again, just handed to you. Then there's also the more simple aspect that things like crafting, if all players just decided to stop gathering and crafting while some of that stuff would be available, the market would eventually just empty out.
Scarcity doesn't actually mean resources should ever really dry up, it happens in Lusternia because villages generating comms just doesn't work. Scarcity just provides a level of pressure/encouragement to do certain things, it helps to create a sense of value based on the time, money, and difficulty involved in acquiring stuff.
Taking your list of things Bob "needs" to supply... define "higher prices". Right now all of those have a value that's basically defined by players because in theory we have a rough, sometimes even subconscious, idea of the value of each item thanks to scarcity .
Without it.... well... What's the value of the comms required to craft each of those things? What factor does the cost of the lessons required to be able to craft one play and how do you determine the value of a lesson? Given the interaction between trades and arts, does Bob price as if he's omnitrans for crafting or not? When you look at things like herbs, particularly sparkleberry, what sort of factor does costs to acquire play? This isn't just overt costs, but also time and effort costs. Going around gathering herbs, for example, is time you're not directly generating money, potentially also downtime costs if you spend long enough on astral thanks to insanity. Does Bob price as someone with all the artifacts or none of them? This also loops back into some of the earlier questions because of how artifacts interact with things. Does Bob's pricing need to be reviewed if the admin release a nice new continent with a bunch of influencables that increases potential gold/hour? Same if comms continue to be rare, does Bob's pricing for armour go up if metal doubles in value?
edit: Also to note, scarcity also doesn't mean everything is hard to get, it's a spectrum. Less valuable things are easier to get which is often also why they're less valuable, same with the more valuable something is the harder it should be to get which is why it's more costly.
If you take any lesson away from Stardew Valley, it should be utility balance in commodity design. Fiber is an excellent example of this - don't need it for much other than a few scarecrows early game, and it can be tempting to sell it off for early profit even though it's just 1G per. But come mid-late game, depending on your set up, you might not be able to get enough fiber: especially if you want to fish a lot and build worm bins or wild bait.
If our current commodities are too inflexible to balance out in this way, then maybe reimagining them really is the best route. We don't really need all these varieties of cooking comms when the majority of them are just used for food and aetherpotions (and aetherpotions are mostly just fruit as is, which is deeply annoying with how heavy reliance is on fruit anyways). Just consolidate it all into a blanket food comm or animal/plant based food comms. And do we really need a pair of villages dedicated to specialising in rope (hemp)? Like it can be kind of thematically cute, but if villages are going to be such a heavy influence on commodities then it seems silly to put emphasis on one with few practical applications outside of hammocks and hunting/trapping. Rope's only started to get used up due to refining, and even then it was because it was so plentiful and dirt cheap compared to other textile alternatives.
If you take any lesson away from Stardew Valley, it should be utility balance in commodity design. Fiber is an excellent example of this - don't need it for much other than a few scarecrows early game, and it can be tempting to sell it off for early profit even though it's just 1G per. But come mid-late game, depending on your set up, you might not be able to get enough fiber: especially if you want to fish a lot and build worm bins or wild bait.
If our current commodities are too inflexible to balance out in this way, then maybe reimagining them really is the best route. We don't really need all these varieties of cooking comms when the majority of them are just used for food and aetherpotions (and aetherpotions are mostly just fruit as is, which is deeply annoying with how heavy reliance is on fruit anyways). Just consolidate it all into a blanket food comm or animal/plant based food comms. And do we really need a pair of villages dedicated to specialising in rope (hemp)? Like it can be kind of thematically cute, but if villages are going to be such a heavy influence on commodities then it seems silly to put emphasis on one with few practical applications outside of hammocks and hunting/trapping. Rope's only started to get used up due to refining, and even then it was because it was so plentiful and dirt cheap compared to other textile alternatives.
When you look at something like Fiber in the context of a multiplayer game it's also an example of where loot drops/incidental generation are pretty useful and just why people trade things at all.
It's something you end up with in abundance by doing other things (i.e clearing out space on your farm), but also other people can make greater use out of it than you necessarily can so people trade it (they could be at different points in progression or focused on different activities for example). As long as people are always doing the loot drop activity it'll always be entering the game so you can trade for it which will cut into your profits, but if you want to save money you can try generating it yourself it just means time away from other stuff.
In Lusternia, you could have astral/grimkeep/influencing/etc factored in by giving them loot drops because they're activites that players are always going to be doing.
Hope it's not too late to add some thoughts to this.
Sorry for the length but this is a very important subject for me. I've played Lusternia for years, with several breaks. Every time I return, what gets me back into it is designing things, crafting them, and selling them in my shops. It's actually a huge draw for a lot of players, whether they're vocal on the forums about it or not.
Maybe other MUDs and MMOs don't have decay, but they also don't have a robust system for designing unique items, crafting them, and selling them in shops. This is one of the wonderful features of Lusternia, and I, for one, don't want Lusternia to be as flavorless as your run-of-the-mill MMO.
If replacing stuff really bothers you in this one game, you can find a design you like, slap a rune on it, and never think about it again. That's fine! But please don't take away the option for those of us who do enjoy shopkeeping (and periodically shopping for new designs). Surely we can find a balance that suits both types of players.
Automation
Saran mentioned mercantile vs artisanal type trades. I agree with this observation. I feel that we've been trying to force a union between two different objectives, and it has caused tension.
I think we should lean into that difference and separate them out more fully so people can pursue their goals more clearly.
For a start, all the basics should be sold by NPCs. The only experience I have from other MUDs is Achaea. They had an NPC on the side of a public road who sold basic curatives. She sold them far more expensive than the going rate from other players (like 400gp for a vial of healing potion when the going rate from players was 50), but it was an option, at least. For some people, it was a last resort when they couldn't get anyone else to serve them, while others had lots of money and didn't want to bother tracking down a player with the appropriate trade (just like some people in this discussion).
This could also help during off-peak times and if the playerbase ever dips as low as it was a couple of years ago (though hopefully it never will). The introduction of packaged artisan goods came while I was dormant, during that very low point of activity, and I think it was a step in the right direction towards optional self-sufficiency. It didn't do away with artisans serving you one-on-one, it just offered an alternative for those who didn't want that or couldn't find it.
Same with being able to buy your own deactivated cube from a shop. It used to be such a pain to find a jeweller who could make one! I was surprised a similar method wasn't applied to enchantments and other services.
Kerith has an awesome set of totem rings - a different design for each totem spirit. She stocked a couple of each in her Seren shop, expecting someone to buy them and have enchantments put on them, like she had done, letting them choose which enchantment they wanted on which totem spirit. Except nobody has. Because it's such a pain to find an enchanter to do that.
And now, if you don't like a design, you can just hide the ring, so people buy based on the enchantment rather than the design, which makes designing jewellery feel pointless. It also makes it feel pointless to shop for designs that actually suit your character, which devalues the rich RP that Lusternia is known for.
But if you could buy the designs you want and then go rub a cube or whatever to apply the enchantment you want... both sides would be satisfied. And it would be easier for enchanters to recharge that cube every thousand uses, than to figure out which designs to apply them to, find a jeweller to make them, and have 50 rings taking up space on their stockroom floor (let alone actually trying to serve customers in person).
Another thing that could be automated is mending/repairing. If the players who hate to replace their clothing and jewellery could pop into a shop, do something automated like recharging from cubes to extend the life of their item, and be on their way... that'd be a lot less hassle for them than tracking down a tailor or jeweller.
And let's face it, nobody does track down a tailor or, especially, a jeweller - because not only is it a hassle, but it's not cost effective. It's far cheaper to buy new than to repair jewellery, and in some cases, the same could be said for mending. I'd definitely support lowering the cost for those services. Make it cost something reasonable and put it on an automated thing in a shop. Then tailors and jewellers are more likely to actually make money off those services, while being able to focus on creating new designs. (Also, please automate things like padding, pockets, and knots.)
I propose:
- NPCs or shops sell basic goods - pipes, tinderboxes, vials . . . basically all the things you can currently make in Arts.
- If that would devalue the Arts skill too much, make it a miniskill. It already feels kind of niche, since paintings and such aren't used as much as they used to be and, well, not everyone is into art. It already feels like those parts were forced in as afterthoughts; iron buckets aren't very artsy!
- Then, if people want their items to look nice and personalized, they can apply sorcelglass. Artisan pipes should also be sorcel items. It feels more intuitive and consistent, anyway.
- They can then apply runes if they never want to have to replace the things. I mean, people are doing that anyway. Just... make it more automated.
- Allow runed items to be sorcel'ed over, so if they change their minds or a new design comes along, they can replace the design they have. This would also encourage people to keep making new designs.
I would also support designs instead of items. Basically what I said about buying basic items from NPCs and then applying sorcelglass - just extend that concept to everything. Buy a plain grey dress from NPC, apply the design you want to it.
Comms
Aethertrading
I'm not going to pretend I understand market theories, or even how org stockpiles work. I've never been an aide to the trade ministry or anything like that. I will say what I've noticed as a crafter, though.
A lot of the discussion has been about overall scarcity, talking about the old mines we used to have, then getting rid of them because of hoarding... But the scarcity I'm seeing is very uneven and specific to certain commodities. In Serenwilde, a few comms are sold out as soon as they're stocked. It's usually cloth and leather, which are used in ridiculous quantities by aethertraders. And since tailoring items are more profitable than the other aethertrades, it's the most popular.
This unevenness has made it impossible for me to keep my shops stocked. It makes me sad when my regular customers ask when I'm going to restock because their favorite gown needs replacing and I can't find enough cloth to sew it. When we can't do basic things like that with our trades, something is very wrong.
I wasn't here when aethertrading came out, but it feels like it was a half-formed idea that hastily got shoved into the game without the consequences being considered. Only a quarter of the trades can participate, and even those three are unevenly profitable. And there seems to have been no adjustment made for the enormous impact it's had on certain commodities.
I propose:
1. Make it available to all trades,
2. Make them equally profitable so people don't choose their trade based on that alone (and yes that does happen),
3. And either
a) increase the supply of the comms most likely to be needed (although then people would just use designs that feature other comms and deplete those instead), or
b) reduce the amount of refining needed (and if that means reducing the payout accordingly, that's fine)
Aethertrading is nice (I guess?), but I feel like yet another competitive get-rich-quick scheme for a select few is less healthy for the game than making sure the trades work as intended at their basic level.
How comms are acquired
In Achaea, they came out with a system where you could gather comms from the wilderness. I wasn't playing much at that point so I really don't know the details. I believe gathering was a skill you could learn. For Lusternia, I think it makes sense to be a low-level ability in a common skill like Environment.
You could have metal ore sites scattered around the mountains, wood to be gathered in forested areas (but without actually cutting down trees, just gathered as a resource), animal goods to be gathered from farms, fruit collected from orchards... and if enough of those places don't exist in the game already, there could be a new area that contains all of them.
However it's carried out, I think it makes sense to have it a simplified process that's accessible to everyone. Then things like crucibles would just be extra, maybe for those who want to aethertrade.
I definitely don't think comms should be tied to forced org conflict, certainly not more than they are already. Lusternia is already too competitive and it already has enough problem with one or two orgs dominating the game, while one or two other orgs are empty and miserable. Conflict should always result in positives (like getting credits for winning bardic), never negatives (like being unable to access commodities needed to craft necessary supplies).
Orael's questions
1) Is the economy actually a problem for everyone or just a certain subset of players (like newbies etc)?
I would say it's a problem for the majority of players. No, not everyone - people for whom money is no object can always buy their way out of this problem like any other problem - but enough of us that it needs to be addressed. Also, even if it were "just" a problem for newbies, it would still be a problem - unless you're okay with us never acquiring new players who want to stick around...
2) Should trading and economy be pushed as a viable gameplay route (ie, Merchant players that can make money as their IC identity and role)
- Is this currently an option?
I hope I answered this adequately above.
3) Is there a route to allows players to both engage or not-engage as they see fit (ie Opt-in?).
- Is this a worthwhile path?
I think there is, and I think it's worthwhile to do so.
4) Would a better option just be just to nuke the economy and not even worry about it and only fix the commodity issues and call it a day?
- This option would be along the lines of just making basic supplies available in a shop. People can choose to have shops, but they'll have to understand that literally nobody has to or will engage with them outside others that choose to. The only worry about a glut of things would be to preserve db space rather than any economical issues?
If you're okay with losing about half of your already-small playerbase and seriously piss off a lot of people who have poured their time, energy, and money into this community for years... then sure, go for it. But if you want to put in the effort to find a balance, I honestly think a solution that satisfies everyone is very doable.
- Allow runed items to be sorcel'ed over, so if they change their minds or a new design comes along, they can replace the design they have. This would also encourage people to keep making new designs.
I wasn't here when aethertrading came out, but it feels like it was a half-formed idea that hastily got shoved into the game without the consequences being considered. Only a quarter of the trades can participate, and even those three are unevenly profitable. And there seems to have been no adjustment made for the enormous impact it's had on certain commodities.
This is how it be, and perfectly sums up my feelings on the matter. I have all the goop artifacts I could ever want now thanks to utilizing ridiculously cheap craftables (yes That One) and Psymet. It feels scummy, and it is scummy, but were the system a little more...developed, I guess, I don't think the disparity between peak performance and what the non-optimized player could do would be so gross. I'm interested in seeing that change, because aethertrading (and constant skillflexing) has cheapened tradeskills as a whole and made them gimimcky.
Crumkane, Lord of Epicurean Delights says, "WAS IT INDEED ON FIRE, ERITHEYL."
-
With a deep reverb, Contemptible Sutekh says, "CEASE YOUR INFERNAL ENERGY, ERITHEYL."
- Allow runed items to be sorcel'ed over, so if they change their minds or a new design comes along, they can replace the design they have. This would also encourage people to keep making new designs.
This is already a thing you can do, luckily!
My reading of this is more using existing designs as skins rather than customisation which really should be more for things you can't reasonably achieve within the design system.
i know you can use sorcelglass over an artifact vial whenever you want, the concept of 'sorcelglass' something-or-other to read over things like runed jewellery/pipes/clothing seems pretty cool to me too. Avoiding decay but also keeping a purpose for new designs.
It happened because they got out of control and stockpiles of 10-200k of a single comm were becoming common, to the point where scarcity became non-existent in an economy that, while barely functioning as it is, relies on scarcity of commodities to exist. Money was not a concern, the game's health was.
Honestly this is one of the questions that admin really need to define internally in regards to what their goal is with the economy overhaul. ... Depending on which goal one is aiming for really will inform what route admin choose to take.
Sorry, Uzriel, if you did not mean this as a reply to @Ianir.
But, even if you did not, how are we four pages into this thread without a clear understanding of this one goal.
@Ianir, please explain what are the minimal requirements of scarcity and which systems require scarcity or makes the game unhealthy. Additionally, if not covered by that, if you would explain what exactly you meant by your comment so that we can dispense with many of these assumptions.
I'll answer this his place, but I'm not really sure what you are trying to get at, which is why I didn't answer it initially.
I'm not sure if you understand the intention of this thread - but the intention of this thread was to get player opinions on the economy and what it should look like so that we, the admin, could make sure that our final goals with any changes would reflect the same things the players want as well. It doesn't do us any good to make changes that all the players hate, so that's why we're four pages in without a clear understanding of any goal - because the goals at that point have not been set (They have been now, we're working on the proposal and will ideally have that posted Soon(tm), it's a lot though so it'll take some time)
As to the second part, I don't understand your question here - Ianir was answering a question based on commodity generators that were over-producing comms to insane levels and they were removed due to that, in an attempt to improve the economy. I don't think there are any assumptions being made here, he just answered a question. Again, this thread was not intended to get all the fixes for the economy but instead to get player input to help shape our goals when looking at any changes.
Can we get an update on what things are looking like at this point, please? This thread has been up a while, hopefully it's given a bit of guidance, but at some point it'll be more beneficial to discuss actual proposals (even if very tentative) vs. the nebulous "everything" we've been doing so far.
Yeah sure - the update is I'm currently putting together the proposal/plan on the changes we want to make. This will be presented to other admin first for their input and then brought to the playerbase at large.
Forewarning - I do think there there will be some things that people don't necessarily like, but I'm hoping the trade-offs will be worthwhile. We're trying our best to create a system that will allow players to be as involved/not involved as they want, but there will be choices to be made.
I'll answer this his place, but I'm not really sure what you are trying to get at, which is why I didn't answer it initially.
...
As to the second part, I don't understand your question here - Ianir was answering a question ...
@Ianir, please explain what are the minimal requirements of scarcity and which systems require scarcity or makes the game unhealthy. Additionally, if not covered by that, if you would explain what exactly you meant by your comment so that we can dispense with many of these assumptions.
To me it sounded as if some scarcity is required or demanded by design. If so, what, why, and how much. The ideas we offer should take into account any minimal requirements you will impose. Is there some design reason either players or orgs should be struggling to find commodities. If so, what's the goal of such? It is as if the Admin are saying 'too much' but never 'for what'.
I don't think you are understanding the intention of this thread.
This thread was to gather player input on what our potential goals should be. Not how to fix it, not how to solve the problem, but what players want to see in our game economy so that when we come up with a proposal, we come up with something that hits on what players in general want.
Obviously, you've seen varying ideas of what people want here, and it's all something we're taking into consideration, and trying to do our best to make the greatest amount of players happy with our end result.
So to answer your question - I don't know the answer to your questions here. I do think that if we want an economy that people can participate in and try to use to make gold etc, that some level of scarcity is needed, but I do not know the exact amount that is. It is one of the things we will be addressing and what we initially come up with may need further adjustment after it's been in place.
I've been pretty blunt that I think the current comm issues are primarily player-driven. There are tens of thousands of comms sitting in org stockpiles that are not being let out. I understand that they are not being let out because players are wary about comm generation and are trying to preserve them just in case, but it just shows that scarcity is also not something that you can put a number on and more factors come into play than just 'how many comms are in the game'. It's a multiple-faceted issue that can't be answered simply by throwing the numbers you seem to want on it.
Maybe add in more sources of particular comms, like meat, taken not only from cows but moose, rabbits, sharks.
Make it also seasonal, so let's say during the summer seasons, there are more cows in the road than in winter plus comms like wheat and flour are more abundant.
Give also players to create raw commodities, like a simple quest to help miners mine to help increase output (limited, of course, say a few times per hour), help farmers harvest wheat or you pick up fruits in the wild and sell them to the fruit vendor that will increase production for that particular product and be rewarded in meagre gold.
Give also shop keepers the ability to add a restriction where you can only buy this item from their shop up to a certain amount per day(s)/month/year so that you don't have that one person hoarding up everything cause they have the gold.
I've been pretty blunt that I think the current comm issues are primarily player-driven. There are tens of thousands of comms sitting in org stockpiles that are not being let out. I understand that they are not being let out because players are wary about comm generation and are trying to preserve them just in case, but it just shows that scarcity is also not something that you can put a number on and more factors come into play than just 'how many comms are in the game'. It's a multiple-faceted issue that can't be answered simply by throwing the numbers you seem to want on it.
I've been told from players that it's unfeasible for Serenwilde, even with all the villages IHC have been holding for ages now, to fund just the 3k comms a year needed for research maintenance and if we did it's projected we would quickly run out of comms. But also on her own Jolanthe was able to grind and fund the last few upgrades and maintenance while she was Seneschal.
If both are true it seems concerning, cause then the amount a single person can generate through comm questing and crucibles seems to have a massive impact but the system itself doesn't seem to engage people so when the one person doing things disappears things become unsustainable.
In this particular aspect it's also kinda a question of like... projects are org level benefits, there's not even any benefit to guilds for them other than possibly trying to extort stuff out of orgs in exchange for keeping them up, but it's apparently calling on individual player investments to keep them running rather than stuff on an org level.
Just nixing comm upkeep costs for researches while reviewing this would be nice - this thread has been up a while now, and that feels like it would be a pretty simple modification that would at least do something beneficial for everyone.
I'm not really interested in opening a debate, the worst-off org has enough stockpile in their commodity reserves to upkeep their research objects for the next 1.75 years. Other orgs have enough reserve for closer to 5 years of upkeep. Each object has 3 different commodities you can upkeep with.
This doesn't account for other commodity uses and I've already acknowledged that commodity input needs addressing (which this revamp will accomplish) but this is why I'm saying it's primarily player-driven.
My statement was more in evidence that there isn't a simple answer to 'what level of scarcity is required' than it was to start a debate.
Edit: I did double-check that the numbers I see are the same numbers that org leaders see, and they are. It's Serenwilde's prerogative to choose how they want to deal with their commodities and research upkeep.
It is the administration's job to ensure that organizations feel that they have enough to handle required upkeep as well as making resources available for necessary day-to-day needs, because when the two are competing, day to day tasks lose (and players do too).
You're the ones who made this sink in the first place, it's incredibly unreasonable to then point at players and say they're the ones to blame for the result... when the sink was never even needed in the first place.
Edit: And before you say "Just skip upkeep a bit," look at the costs for upgrading. Missing upkeep means you burn insane amounts of resources. The cost has been sunk, and we are required to keep sinking it to avoid an even greater loss.
This whole 'prerogative' argument really bugs me, actually.
Let's say you have 3 kids, and you take them all to the arcade. You buy $10 worth of tokens, and give all of them to the oldest, Bob. You tell Bob that he has to win 100 prize tickets, or you're going to charge him 50x that $10 output in his allowance. When the other kids clamor for tokens, you tell them that it's Bob's prerogative what he wants to do with them. He can share or not, whatever, it's clearly his choice! But you've also designed the system in such a way to make sure that Bob isn't going to be likely to share, because he's likely to be penalized if he does.
Is this really Bob's "prerogative," or is the system just poorly designed in the first place?
As I said, I'm not interested in debating this. I've acknowledged the main reasons why players are holding on to them and that we're going to take actions to address it.
Any chance you'd be willing to apologize for / retract the "prerogative" argument, then? I don't see how that's in any way conducive to any goal trying to be reached, and it doesn't make it feel like you're understanding the reason for why players are acting the way they do with the resource crunch. We really don't feel like we have a choice here at all.
Comments
Sorry, Uzriel, if you did not mean this as a reply to @Ianir.
But, even if you did not, how are we four pages into this thread without a clear understanding of this one goal.
@Ianir, please explain what are the minimal requirements of scarcity and which systems require scarcity or makes the game unhealthy. Additionally, if not covered by that, if you would explain what exactly you meant by your comment so that we can dispense with many of these assumptions.
The other IREs are the most directly comparable games to Lusternia so we don't really need to speculate.
If something was amazing or critical to the player experience then you would expect the other games to replicate it, especially when it comes to artifacts that do something ultimately as basic as making an item non-decay.
Your comments about inventory management and the monetisation model apply to all IRE games, also you note Starmourn in the quoted post but skim over the mentions of both Achaea and Aetolia neither of which ended up shifting to "free to play" like we did. Personally, it looks more a matter of some of the assertions are potentially more of a Lusternia specific thing than an IRE truism.
So to point out... an economy where comms fluctuate based on player activity is basically scarcity-based because you're driving player activity with the threat that if your org doesn't participate you'll get less comms. If you were looking to actually take scarcity out of the economy you'd just delete the trade ministry, give comm shops an infinite amount of comms, and set their prices either dynamically or statically.
Also, it's worthwhile to actually consider generation activities, we can keep tweaking villages but in the end they're really mostly static plus the variable from comm questing, adding more variables seems like it just makes it more complicated when we could instead do simpler things. Like having loot drops for some comms, farming for others, etc
4) Making commodities artificially scarce -at the source- or making it disappear into sinks, like it's been done in the past will never work for us. We don't have the numbers to support it.
It's pretty straight forward though, if you're generating enough to not affect player functionality then there's not really much reason to engage for more. (Which is bad, needing and wanting things are drivers for engaging with games)
Why would you need to have more comm quests, for example, if people have enough?
Active players have reduced needs for comms so even if you're creating a potentially arcane system for rating player activity and generating comms in response that base would need to both generate enough if everyone needs them but also would generate too many as fewer active people actually require comms to create new things.
For 3), yeah, everything should be tracked but that's not really just an economy thing it's just so there's data there to base decisions off.
For 4), this is just wrong sorry. Games of all sizes from single-player games like Stardew Valley up to stuff like wow can implement scarcity, Lusternia isn't really special in this regard because numbers aren't the issue, the mechanics are.
Villages don't work because at the end of the day they're a mostly static answer to questions like...
It doesn't matter if the game's population gets halved or doubles because villages produce the same amounts based on the variables they do. It doesn't matter if four people or forty are hitting the cap on all the quests in the villages.
Same with org points, obviously its easier to cap with more people, but it doesn't truly reflect the number of players participating because a single active player can do the work of multiple less active players.
This is why something like Farming/Mining/etc looks ultimately simpler and more effective because you can shift to a mechanism that is directly connected to the number of active players by saying each player can have X farms/mines/etc.
- You can determine how many comms a player should need every rl week/month/quarter/etc then link that back to how much can be generated through farms/mines/etc.
- You can build in mechanisms to work around the expectation that maybe yeah only 20% of players might actually engage. Maybe each farm is enough for one player but you can have up to X, maybe players can allow other players to manage their mines for them like how you can have shopkeepers. But in a rather simple way the number of active players directly relates to the how many comms can be potentially generated at any given time.
- And it also just wouldn't necessarily matter how well an org is doing for village revolts, if your org is having a bad time you can still generate player level stuff.
They're also really quite responsive because players will typically stop doing activities that are not beneficial to them in some way, so if a comm isn't valuable to generate you'd expect players to stop doing so. As oppose to villages which generate their base even if no one needs them and also have artificial limits due to the caps through quest limits (even if you added more)Which is why Trader Bob needs to be able to supply all the things (at higher prices). The ones he lacks are:
- pipe
- pipetank
- tinderbox
- regulator
- energy cube
- teardrop
- steam
- dust
- ice
- slush
- quicksilver
- galvanism
- sparkleberry
- healing scroll
- protection scroll
- all the enchantments
- all the armour
I may have missed stuff.Explorer (80%), Achiever (53%), Socializer (53%), Killer (13%)
Bartle Taxonomy
(test yourself)
Unfortunately, you're conflating issues with Villages with issues with Scarcity as an element of game design and seemingly overlooking that what scarcity means can look different depending on the implementation.
Stardew valley might have an infinite supply of stuff, however, that doesn't actually matter because all that stuff becomes scarce because of the time, money, and effort required to actually acquire that stuff.
You can't just go in with ancient fruit, a greenhouse, iridium sprinklers, and enough kegs from the beginning. You have to earn things incrementally over time by working within the (scarce) resources that you have and growing them. Which is also why it feels so satisfying when you've managed to really build out your farm because you've earned it rather than being handed it.
Same thing with WoW, it has resources like anima which you need to generate to be able to do other things. Because of the time and effort, it makes those rewards variably rarer than others which can elevate those things to become status symbols providing reasons to engage that you just wouldn't have if they were, again, just handed to you. Then there's also the more simple aspect that things like crafting, if all players just decided to stop gathering and crafting while some of that stuff would be available, the market would eventually just empty out.
Scarcity doesn't actually mean resources should ever really dry up, it happens in Lusternia because villages generating comms just doesn't work. Scarcity just provides a level of pressure/encouragement to do certain things, it helps to create a sense of value based on the time, money, and difficulty involved in acquiring stuff.
Taking your list of things Bob "needs" to supply... define "higher prices". Right now all of those have a value that's basically defined by players because in theory we have a rough, sometimes even subconscious, idea of the value of each item thanks to scarcity
Without it.... well...
What's the value of the comms required to craft each of those things?
What factor does the cost of the lessons required to be able to craft one play and how do you determine the value of a lesson? Given the interaction between trades and arts, does Bob price as if he's omnitrans for crafting or not?
When you look at things like herbs, particularly sparkleberry, what sort of factor does costs to acquire play? This isn't just overt costs, but also time and effort costs. Going around gathering herbs, for example, is time you're not directly generating money, potentially also downtime costs if you spend long enough on astral thanks to insanity.
Does Bob price as someone with all the artifacts or none of them? This also loops back into some of the earlier questions because of how artifacts interact with things.
Does Bob's pricing need to be reviewed if the admin release a nice new continent with a bunch of influencables that increases potential gold/hour? Same if comms continue to be rare, does Bob's pricing for armour go up if metal doubles in value?
edit: Also to note, scarcity also doesn't mean everything is hard to get, it's a spectrum. Less valuable things are easier to get which is often also why they're less valuable, same with the more valuable something is the harder it should be to get which is why it's more costly.
If our current commodities are too inflexible to balance out in this way, then maybe reimagining them really is the best route. We don't really need all these varieties of cooking comms when the majority of them are just used for food and aetherpotions (and aetherpotions are mostly just fruit as is, which is deeply annoying with how heavy reliance is on fruit anyways). Just consolidate it all into a blanket food comm or animal/plant based food comms. And do we really need a pair of villages dedicated to specialising in rope (hemp)? Like it can be kind of thematically cute, but if villages are going to be such a heavy influence on commodities then it seems silly to put emphasis on one with few practical applications outside of hammocks and hunting/trapping. Rope's only started to get used up due to refining, and even then it was because it was so plentiful and dirt cheap compared to other textile alternatives.
It's something you end up with in abundance by doing other things (i.e clearing out space on your farm), but also other people can make greater use out of it than you necessarily can so people trade it (they could be at different points in progression or focused on different activities for example).
As long as people are always doing the loot drop activity it'll always be entering the game so you can trade for it which will cut into your profits, but if you want to save money you can try generating it yourself it just means time away from other stuff.
In Lusternia, you could have astral/grimkeep/influencing/etc factored in by giving them loot drops because they're activites that players are always going to be doing.
Automation
I would also support designs instead of items. Basically what I said about buying basic items from NPCs and then applying sorcelglass - just extend that concept to everything. Buy a plain grey dress from NPC, apply the design you want to it.
Comms
Aethertrading
I wasn't here when aethertrading came out, but it feels like it was a half-formed idea that hastily got shoved into the game without the consequences being considered. Only a quarter of the trades can participate, and even those three are unevenly profitable. And there seems to have been no adjustment made for the enormous impact it's had on certain commodities.
I propose:
How comms are acquired
Orael's questions
I would say it's a problem for the majority of players. No, not everyone - people for whom money is no object can always buy their way out of this problem like any other problem - but enough of us that it needs to be addressed. Also, even if it were "just" a problem for newbies, it would still be a problem - unless you're okay with us never acquiring new players who want to stick around...
I hope I answered this adequately above.
I think there is, and I think it's worthwhile to do so.
If you're okay with losing about half of your already-small playerbase and seriously piss off a lot of people who have poured their time, energy, and money into this community for years... then sure, go for it. But if you want to put in the effort to find a balance, I honestly think a solution that satisfies everyone is very doable.
This is how it be, and perfectly sums up my feelings on the matter. I have all the goop artifacts I could ever want now thanks to utilizing ridiculously cheap craftables (yes That One) and Psymet. It feels scummy, and it is scummy, but were the system a little more...developed, I guess, I don't think the disparity between peak performance and what the non-optimized player could do would be so gross. I'm interested in seeing that change, because aethertrading (and constant skillflexing) has cheapened tradeskills as a whole and made them gimimcky.
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Sorry, Uzriel, if you did not mean this as a reply to @Ianir.
But, even if you did not, how are we four pages into this thread without a clear understanding of this one goal.
@Ianir, please explain what are the minimal requirements of scarcity and which systems require scarcity or makes the game unhealthy. Additionally, if not covered by that, if you would explain what exactly you meant by your comment so that we can dispense with many of these assumptions.
I'm not sure if you understand the intention of this thread - but the intention of this thread was to get player opinions on the economy and what it should look like so that we, the admin, could make sure that our final goals with any changes would reflect the same things the players want as well. It doesn't do us any good to make changes that all the players hate, so that's why we're four pages in without a clear understanding of any goal - because the goals at that point have not been set (They have been now, we're working on the proposal and will ideally have that posted Soon(tm), it's a lot though so it'll take some time)
As to the second part, I don't understand your question here - Ianir was answering a question based on commodity generators that were over-producing comms to insane levels and they were removed due to that, in an attempt to improve the economy. I don't think there are any assumptions being made here, he just answered a question. Again, this thread was not intended to get all the fixes for the economy but instead to get player input to help shape our goals when looking at any changes.
Forewarning - I do think there there will be some things that people don't necessarily like, but I'm hoping the trade-offs will be worthwhile. We're trying our best to create a system that will allow players to be as involved/not involved as they want, but there will be choices to be made.
To me it sounded as if some scarcity is required or demanded by design. If so, what, why, and how much. The ideas we offer should take into account any minimal requirements you will impose. Is there some design reason either players or orgs should be struggling to find commodities. If so, what's the goal of such? It is as if the Admin are saying 'too much' but never 'for what'.
This thread was to gather player input on what our potential goals should be. Not how to fix it, not how to solve the problem, but what players want to see in our game economy so that when we come up with a proposal, we come up with something that hits on what players in general want.
Obviously, you've seen varying ideas of what people want here, and it's all something we're taking into consideration, and trying to do our best to make the greatest amount of players happy with our end result.
So to answer your question - I don't know the answer to your questions here. I do think that if we want an economy that people can participate in and try to use to make gold etc, that some level of scarcity is needed, but I do not know the exact amount that is. It is one of the things we will be addressing and what we initially come up with may need further adjustment after it's been in place.
I've been pretty blunt that I think the current comm issues are primarily player-driven. There are tens of thousands of comms sitting in org stockpiles that are not being let out. I understand that they are not being let out because players are wary about comm generation and are trying to preserve them just in case, but it just shows that scarcity is also not something that you can put a number on and more factors come into play than just 'how many comms are in the game'. It's a multiple-faceted issue that can't be answered simply by throwing the numbers you seem to want on it.
Make it also seasonal, so let's say during the summer seasons, there are more cows in the road than in winter plus comms like wheat and flour are more abundant.
Give also players to create raw commodities, like a simple quest to help miners mine to help increase output (limited, of course, say a few times per hour), help farmers harvest wheat or you pick up fruits in the wild and sell them to the fruit vendor that will increase production for that particular product and be rewarded in meagre gold.
Give also shop keepers the ability to add a restriction where you can only buy this item from their shop up to a certain amount per day(s)/month/year so that you don't have that one person hoarding up everything cause they have the gold.
If both are true it seems concerning, cause then the amount a single person can generate through comm questing and crucibles seems to have a massive impact but the system itself doesn't seem to engage people so when the one person doing things disappears things become unsustainable.
In this particular aspect it's also kinda a question of like... projects are org level benefits, there's not even any benefit to guilds for them other than possibly trying to extort stuff out of orgs in exchange for keeping them up, but it's apparently calling on individual player investments to keep them running rather than stuff on an org level.
This doesn't account for other commodity uses and I've already acknowledged that commodity input needs addressing (which this revamp will accomplish) but this is why I'm saying it's primarily player-driven.
My statement was more in evidence that there isn't a simple answer to 'what level of scarcity is required' than it was to start a debate.
Edit: I did double-check that the numbers I see are the same numbers that org leaders see, and they are. It's Serenwilde's prerogative to choose how they want to deal with their commodities and research upkeep.