Commodities Discussion (Continued)

Xenthos · April 2020

I did not want to reply to Jolanthe in the other thread, but as usual when I point at something as being a problem I tend to have a solution in mind.

My preference would be to stop treating commodities as being the end result of the economy. The quantity of them should not be an indication of how well/badly things are going, because they are essential to gameplay. Without them the game breaks.

Quick solution: 1) Set all villages to have a flat sell rate of all commodities they sell (not affected by buying or doing comm quests), and 2) Give villages an infinite number of comms to sell.

What does this do? It makes comms a consistent, persistent gold sink (instead of dumping gold into org comm shops you are throwing it out of the game). You can make prices higher than what orgs are doing if you want, and let orgs with supplies / income sell theirs cheaper if they want, but there will never be an issue of actually running out.

Long term:

1) Give all comms a price range. Every month each village rng rolls its pricings to fluctuate them. Set the supply to 500. If it all gets bought out, the village is restocked with another 500 and the price increases by 20% (until the next month change).

2) Only commercial governments get passive tithes from villages.

What does this do? It makes orgs choose between comm generation or power. It makes comms something that good / active trade ministers might run around on shopping expeditions to stock up their central depot when prices are good, but also keeps people from ever running out of basic necessities.

Could easily do more tweaks as necessary, but this would completely reposition commodities into a gold dump instead of a limited resource that needs to be doled out as miserly as possible to ensure that any remain at all.

Kali · April 2020

I think it'd be lovely to see the game without massive stockpiles of comms in reserve (Maybe even remove passive comm generation from villages altogether) and a better and more comprehensive set of commodity quests to make gathering comms worthwhile, either to sell to others or use in your own crafting.

Mboagn · April 2020

Stockpiles are necessary because commodities are used in necessary things: weapons, armour/robes, jewelry for enchantments. So, disruptions in comms inordinately affects newbies, and this seems like a terrible game design. Sure, the newbie population is small now, but we shouldn't balance it around that!

If, however, people are dead set to removing stockpiles, then the active generation needs to be ramped way, way up. x100! Why? Well, for example, you can only get 16 rope commodities per hour: 4 from ping-ponging hemp farmers between Stewartsville and Delport, and 12 by murdering the farmers for their hemp. That's not at all sustainable.

Thinking about this more, I would caution against treating commodities as a "conflict system" because, as I've said, commodities are greatly needed by the nooblings. People may say, "Well, if you don't want your nooblings to go without, then you should perform better in revolts or do more commodity quests!" That's terrible! We shouldn't be cannibalizing each other's newbs. We must either divorce commodities from necessities (like what Starmourn did), or vastly ramp up production (like what Achaea did/is trying to do?).

Alexandria · April 2020

I had an idea about tying purchases in org shops to an increase in production of comms, if I ever get around to typing it out in real words.

Comm stockpiles would be less trouble if they weren't in the hands of relatively few people. Bob from That City Over There's 150k platinum in reserve doesn't do much for Jane from Over Yonder if Bob is sitting on it for the next ten years in fifteen different shops that don't sell them.

Sapphira · April 2020

What would be the purpose in revolts/claiming villages if comm generation was no longer tied to them?

Also newbies do not generally need to buy comms in bulk, I'm not sure why they don't buy from villages already, I do! Often the price there is cheaper than our comm shop anyway. However for bulk/larger purchases I see why it is not appealing. Perhaps villages should have an endless supply and raise the ability to buy more at a time (Or have larger stockpile) so there is always comms available at reasonable prices for crafting. Owning the village could be a bonus rather than the necessity.

I agree about what others have said about the giant hidden stockpiles - if they can't be accessed by most to purchase/use then their existence means nothing to the majority of people in the game and it seems flawed to make rulings about comms assuming that because they exist, there is an overabundance.

Tridemon · April 2020

Power generation, conquest pool, denial of territory to enemies.

Saran · April 2020

If you have infinite comms and mostly static prices... what's the point of having comms at all?
Every design pattern could just be given a gold price to create which is taken as part of the crafting process, you could make the equivalents of "spell component pouches" for skills that require components, and the need for comms balancing would be gone.

The reason to have comms seems to be that they could, in theory, run out and they act as a gold sink (directly for villages and indirectly for orgs) for creating things and using abilities. The previous suggestions of moving comms to active generation by players (i.e gathering/farming/mining/etc) are in line with that, demand should only really be an issue if it's intended, we also know the model generally works given it's how most mmos work.
Villages under the active generation model could give bonuses to generation linked to them (The mining villages might let you access their mines on top of what's in the "wild") and they could also act as a comm sink by buying excess comms for a price that could provide a baseline for player trading.

Xenthos · April 2020

There's a huge difference between a text MUD and gathering in most MMOs. In those games, travel time is actually a thing. If you want to go gather, you need to run around- find new nodes / spawnpoints of things, keep running, stay actively chasing them. The respawn time also tends to be considerably faster than here. You can spend an entire play session farming one thing until you're bursting. There's nothing like that on Lusternia, even rockeaters will can all be wiped out by one person long before they start to respawn.

On a MUD, if you put in enough things with a low enough spawn time for someone to be constantly grinding, you end up with a flood of those comms (the closest we have is rockeaters). Travel time here between nodes/spawnpoints is essentially nil, with celerity- you can farm the whole UV in a shockingly short period of time (four areas that combine into a huge part of the game!). If you make all comms as continuously grindable as an MMO's nodes, we're going to burst with stockpiles since we can hit so many more nodes in such a shorter period of time. After all, manse mines could only generate 10 comms each per day, and how much did people get out of those? We've already seen what happens when it's deemed that there are "too many comms" in the game.

Another issue is that MMOs tend to have more players than these games. There's a much larger quantity of people who are going to go farming, ensuring that there's always stuff available. I think trying to pin production on Lusternia's playerbase is problematic; if you take steps to ensure that people aren't generating floods of comms, you then end up with the potential for not being able to generate enough to have available and shortfalls (which means that a lot of coding work was put in and it didn't even solve the issue we're discussing!).

Further, most MMOs have items drop. You don't even need the commodities for most things; your basic stuff you get just by playing the game. Commodities might be used for slight stat improvements or for specific quests, but the game isn't built around having them available as a requirement to simply play.

I want commodities to stop being treated as something that needs to be rare/limited because of how critical they are to simple gameplay tasks (unlike the other games you reference). If it's possible to do active generation in a manner that isn't going to get us right back in this situation that we're in right now, and also ensures that they are available, then great. Given coding resources, I'm pretty sure that's simply not going to happen any time soon. How many things are in the queue already? This shortage drive has been causing issues for quite a while now and it's only getting worse. And we've been talking about economy issues for far longer than that. I don't think it can just sit on the backburner, so I'd like to see something done sooner that is actually achievable.

TL;DR: My concern with active generation is that if you make all other commodities even as "farmable" as rockeaters we're going to have more than we know what to do with in a relatively short time, and we'll be told that we have too many and need to start dumping them again. As long as we treat commodities as being something that has to be scarce, this is always going to be a fear in my mind, and that's why I want to see them viewed as a necessity rather than a limited resource.

End of TL;DR, more text: There is a way to test this though. Set up a few "basic" commodities; things that the game fundamentally requires. Let's say... iron, grain, and cloth. The three basics. With these you can design weapons and armour (perhaps not flashy, but functional), food (perhaps not tasty, but filling), and clothes (never win a fashion show, but will keep your acrobatic-self from shivering out of your own skin). Let the other comms be "luxury" comms; keep them as they are for now.

Then implement a way to farm them like you can for rockeaters and gems. Perhaps let rockeaters be refined into iron (should be easy). Have a bunch of sheep-like creatures invade a number of the Prime areas, equal to rockeater numbers in total. Put a bunch of plants that can be pulled up in outdoorsy areas, similarly equal, that are turned in for grain. Let the playerbase farm them and see what the income is like, and if stockpiles stabilize. If it turns out well, you can expand it. If it generates too many comms, at least it's of only 3 types and it's easier to reconsider alternate paths. At least this is hopefully more achievable than "active generation for all commodities in the game" which I simply don't see happening for... a while.

Something needs to be done, though.

Edit: I realized that I forgot instruments in the last paragraph, despite them being an important thing too! Wood would be needed for those. Wood's kind of an awkward thing at the moment because you can generate a ton of it, but only a small number of people can ever farm it (whoever chops the trees first once they finally grow up). So it's long periods of nothing followed by a burst. We'd have to discuss something in that regard; just making Glom/Seren's trees grow faster would probably flood us with a ton of wood (and a lot of raiders looking for wood). Maybe just make trees outside Glom/Seren automatically grow as saplings on day change, can never grow more than a sapling, but can be chopped for 1 wood? In-org saplings are not choppable for 1 wood, they need to grow up big and strong first.

Saran · April 2020

Xenthos said:

There's a huge difference between a text MUD and gathering in most MMOs. In those games, travel time is actually a thing. If you want to go gather, you need to run around- find new nodes / spawnpoints of things, keep running, stay actively chasing them. The respawn time also tends to be considerably faster than here. You can spend an entire play session farming one thing until you're bursting. There's nothing like that on Lusternia, even rockeaters will can all be wiped out by one person long before they start to respawn.
On a MUD, if you put in enough things with a low enough spawn time for someone to be constantly grinding, you end up with a flood of those comms (the closest we have is rockeaters). Travel time here between nodes/spawnpoints is essentially nil, with celerity- you can farm the whole UV in a shockingly short period of time (four areas that combine into a huge part of the game!). If you make all comms as continuously grindable as an MMO's nodes, we're going to burst with stockpiles since we can hit so many more nodes in such a shorter period of time. After all, manse mines could only generate 10 comms each per day, and how much did people get out of those? We've already seen what happens when it's deemed that there are "too many comms" in the game.

A pretty simple answer for the issue with travel time as a limiter is just alternate limiters. FFXIV has a few different types of nodes for example which spawn a specific point on the day cycle (which is about 70 minutes long) so you're generally stuck. Aetolia's explanation for their once a day "ylem" instance is that spending more time in there would make you sick. They also limit generation from farms because a farm is a specific number of rooms and that's it. Which is different from the manse mines which were limited to how many manse rooms you had (i.e unlimited)?

Xenthos said:

Another issue is that MMOs tend to have more players than these games. There's a much larger quantity of people who are going to go farming, ensuring that there's always stuff available. I think trying to pin production on Lusternia's playerbase is problematic; if you take steps to ensure that people aren't generating floods of comms, you then end up with the potential for not being able to generate enough to have available and shortfalls (which means that a lot of coding work was put in and it didn't even solve the issue we're discussing!).
Further, most MMOs have items drop. You don't even need the commodities for most things; your basic stuff you get just by playing the game. Commodities might be used for slight stat improvements or for specific quests, but the game isn't built around having them available as a requirement to simply play.

The only reason comm generation is an issue at all is that for years people have been frustrated that trading isn't really a viable activity. It's absolutely necessary for the game for people to invest in trade skills and making gold to get an actual ROI has, from what I've seen, always been considered a vain hope. (Designing things for people gets mentioned, but really you don't personally need the skills to write up designs) Which flows into the symptom that other people encounter where it's difficult to acquire things that are needed. Pinning production on the playerbase makes the system adaptable, there are methods that can be used to pull people into the generation systems, and methods for dealing with excess (For example, being able to sell comms that have been devalued too low to npc shops) which also provide baseline prices. The suggestions have been to create a system which everyone is ultimately feeding into even if what they're doing doesn't seem like an "economic activity", with the aim that they grow and shrink as the game does.

Xenthos said:

I want commodities to stop being treated as something that needs to be rare/limited because of how critical they are to simple gameplay tasks (unlike the other games you reference). If it's possible to do active generation in a manner that isn't going to get us right back in this situation that we're in right now, and also ensures that they are available, then great. Given coding resources, I'm pretty sure that's simply not going to happen any time soon. How many things are in the queue already? This shortage drive has been causing issues for quite a while now and it's only getting worse. And we've been talking about economy issues for far longer than that. I don't think it can just sit on the backburner, so I'd like to see something done sooner that is actually achievable.

I would point out that, from memory, I was warned against trades as being unprofitable when I started playing back in 2004/2005. So from my understanding, it's been a complaint for basically as long as the game's been out, we've seen minor fixes over the years and we've seen the situation get worse. Your arguments about the impact it's having are why the economy should be prioritised rather than being patched with another quick fix and put off (which is what's been happening over years). Finally sitting down, tearing the whole thing apart and then rebuilding it in a way that gets players to engage with it while ensuring the basics are available. As far as I understand it, the economy was close to next up on the priority list anyway.

Xenthos said:
TL;DR: My concern with active generation is that if you make all other commodities even as "farmable" as rockeaters we're going to have more than we know what to do with in a relatively short time, and we'll be told that we have too many and need to start dumping them again. As long as we treat commodities as being something that has to be scarce, this is always going to be a fear in my mind, and that's why I want to see them viewed as a necessity rather than a limited resource.

I guess... TL;DR these concerns are things that can be addressed by going through holistically, rather than just treating the latest symptom.

Xenthos said:

End of TL;DR, more text: There is a way to test this though. Set up a few "basic" commodities; things that the game fundamentally requires. Let's say... iron, grain, and cloth. The three basics. With these you can design weapons and armour (perhaps not flashy, but functional), food (perhaps not tasty, but filling), and clothes (never win a fashion show, but will keep your acrobatic-self from shivering out of your own skin). Let the other comms be "luxury" comms; keep them as they are for now.
Then implement a way to farm them like you can for rockeaters and gems. Perhaps let rockeaters be refined into iron (should be easy). Have a bunch of sheep-like creatures invade a number of the Prime areas, equal to rockeater numbers in total. Put a bunch of plants that can be pulled up in outdoorsy areas, similarly equal, that are turned in for grain. Let the playerbase farm them and see what the income is like, and if stockpiles stabilize. If it turns out well, you can expand it. If it generates too many comms, at least it's of only 3 types and it's easier to reconsider alternate paths. At least this is hopefully more achievable than "active generation for all commodities in the game" which I simply don't see happening for... a while.
Something needs to be done, though.

We already have an example for player-generated resources, herbs and poisons. Poisons are needed for some while herbs are a basic necessity, I don't remember ever having too much trouble getting any herb I've needed, and at this point it looks like there's tens of thousands of nearly every herb needed for health, mana, and bromides which could be the most basic necessities (as newbies need them for newtown. Then you start needing armour when things can hit back, curatives when things start afflicting, and so on).

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