Saran's right about the balance between different ways to make gold. It's not just gold you're considering, there's also experience, daily credits, karma, esteem... Whereas with trade, you're only gaining gold. So I think it's entirely fair if you make a little more gold trading than the other methods, to make up for all the other stuff you're not gaining from your time and skill investments.
Maybe this could be the opportunity for trading to give daily credits, experience, credits, karma, esteem too! (here's to hoping)
Saran's right about the balance between different ways to make gold. It's not just gold you're considering, there's also experience, daily credits, karma, esteem... Whereas with trade, you're only gaining gold. So I think it's entirely fair if you make a little more gold trading than the other methods, to make up for all the other stuff you're not gaining from your time and skill investments.
Maybe this could be the opportunity for trading to give daily credits, experience, credits, karma, esteem too! (here's to hoping)
Possibly, though it's also not necessarily bad that trading doesn't give experience/esteem/etc because then those are also reasons to bash over trading, which is good because when there's different incentives for different activities it can encourage players to split their play time between them.
Daily credits might be nice though because you would need them to progress as a trader.
With aethertrading being removed, will there be adjustments made regarding aethergoop? Like another method for acquiring it, or its deletion altogether?
Hmm, if aethergoop does eventually get removed, then perhaps aethergoop crafting could be changed to use lessons as a commodity instead of goop, giving people with an excess of lessons a new way to spend them.
I'm hoping goop crafts could be moved more completely into the trade system.
Like have them created with a mix of regular comms as well as special comms which have limited availability to control the rate at which they can enter the game. Those comms could come from trades, questing, special shops, loot drops, whatever. For example, with aetherbuttons maybe they require comms from their relevant bubble. It could be some kind of special gathering thing or you could generate them through questing/bashing/influencing there.
We are still working on the final list of those changes but believe that Arts will be affected as well (losing tints) and all aethercrafting (buttons, scarves, candy) will be removed too.
Since Arts is in the list of reworking, a way to take down paintings without destroying them would be nice. What if I decide I want to keep this painting, but hang it somewhere else? I can move paintings in my RL house without destroying them. Need something like UNEXHIBIT <painting> to go with EXHIBIT please! Could be something to replace the loss of tints.
Hello everyone, a little late to the discussion but catching up on upcoming changes I'd like to ask few clarifications from those more familiar with the following part of the proposal:
---------------------- Snippet from the first post ---------------------- Mercantile skills themselves will switch to the proficiency system proposed before and require no lesson investment. Everyone will inherently have one Mercantile slot and that is all they will ever be able to have active. There are no locks in this proposal so if you want to switch your Mercantile skill, you will lose all proficiency in it. But worry not, proficiency will be gained daily by performing at least one skill action to get max daily proficiency - no grind necessary. The purpose of proficiency, as before, is to encourage specialisation and thus more interaction between various trades.
If I am reading this the right way, Enchantment - Alchemy - Herbs - Poisons, will require to be "relearned" when swapped between on skillflex dropping to 0% proficiency each time and will be limited to a single choice...regardless of an endowment of the arts or demi bonus tradeskill and...I believe seal of beauty. This is being done to: promote interplayer trades, stimulate economy between shops & promote the use of the marketplace to find people willing to setup orders.
............................................
I would like to ask the following questions:
If speed/commodities/success is what is affected by proficiency.
Will you have access to every spell/herb/potion/poison from the beginning ? If so, what will be the rate of speed of production at the different tier ? If alchemy creations can fail, will it mean a loss of all commodities ?
My concerns are the following:
Stocking a shop with one or two kegs of every potion available in alchemy & lorecraft (Not touching brewmeister) takes an absolutly ridiculous amount of herbs. Even holding 2000 of every herb in the rift before beginning will see you running out of stock since some take up to 8 herbs per sip created; that's 800 herbs of a single type per keg not counting extras. To keep a shop properly stocked can easily take a week or so of constant & focused work. That's not even counting enchantments & poisons, a little shoutout to my favorite poison to harvest - Pyrotoxin from the greymoors baby manticoor.
One could make the argument I should turn to other people, use the market aethers and even go buy from shops. Unfortunatly, I did actually attempt that before deciding to reach for an endowment of the arts. I even went as far as making hiring contracts (with RP fun to stimulate) in attempts to get people to help & fill in large orders. The results of my actions ended up leading to either waiting multiple weeks to receive the completed orders, I always did try to work with what people could resonably deliver. Shopping for herbs, either ended up purchasing at an extremely low price, due to a person's kindness in trying to help others at a loss or finding valuable herbs at extremely high prices (rosehips, horehound, weed & more) making it unreasonable. I won't even touch the trouble I had just securing an enchanter for regular goods. In the end, as much as I attempted to work with others to stimulate the economy, it simply was not a viable practice. Keeping the shop well stocked and answering the demand for goods required me to be able to juggle multiple tradeskills or breaks laws to purchase from banned orgs; just to ensure certain goods were available to all.
For these reasons, I can't help but be concerned about the time it will take to flip between these valuable skills, raise proficiency to acceptable levels, produce the goods (including failures) and then flip back to acquire more materials, which requires the entire cycle to start over again.
I should perhaps also mention the purpose for which I started all this shopkeeping, to help keep a regular stock of most usable goods for an org I care about and lend a hand to others, especially young ones in finding things they might otherwise have a hard time to acquire. Most of the funding is either sent right back into the shop, used for events that require monetary assistance and a little bit is always sent to raise funds in Guilds & Divine Order. This is very much - not - a request to turn a profit but simply to be able to stock a little bit of everything at a reasonable time investment.
--------------------------- Too long or didn't wish to read? ---------------------------
Even if proficiency requires re-learning mercantile skill on release, I am 100% A-OK with that. The difficulty comes from having to redo it every time on skill flex due to the lack of other people to trade with. If what I understood was right, please review letting us keep an extra mercantile skill with an artifact, demi or seal of beauty. If both skill flex and the extra tradeskill is taken away for mercantile trades it will have an unfavourable impact on shops and the goods available to those that visit them. Some of us really are just trying to keep things moving forward for our respective orgs & alliances and not for personal profit.
Maybe I'm wrong and everything will turn out fine, but for now call me concerned.
I didn't quote it, but I'll answer the questions here
Will you have access to every spell/herb/potion/poison from the beginning? Yes, you will have access to the entire skillset once selecting it.
If so, what will be the rate of speed of production at the different tiers?
Details have not been worked out exactly yet, but the goal is that being 100% proficient in a trade without artifacts will be more effective than someone at 0% with artifacts. Ideally, being proficient will take a lot of the 'grind' aspect of things out of it.
If alchemy creations can fail, will it mean a loss of all commodities?
Again, details have not been worked out, but being proficient will ideally mean that you'll have fewer failures. I don't know if we'll go to 0% at 100%, but being proficient will mean less failing. Failing would mean a loss of all commodities in that batch still.
As to the other concerns about relying on other people. Ideally, everyone can select one of these merchantile skillsets for free and instantly start making money from it. Nobody will need to invest credits into these skills before taking them, so more people should be able to take these trades and fulfill them. With proficiency making things better, people won't feel like it's a grind to use these trades and will be more willing to engage in or use them. This will ideally result in having plenty of people around that can provide these goods.
The worst-case scenario is that all these goods will be available via NPC merchants (albeit at higher pricing), so if players -need- something, they can get it anytime they want.
One could make the argument I should turn to other people, use the market aethers and even go buy from shops. Unfortunatly, I did actually attempt that before deciding to reach for an endowment of the arts. I even went as far as making hiring contracts (with RP fun to stimulate) in attempts to get people to help & fill in large orders. The results of my actions ended up leading to either waiting multiple weeks to receive the completed orders, I always did try to work with what people could resonably deliver. Shopping for herbs, either ended up purchasing at an extremely low price, due to a person's kindness in trying to help others at a loss or finding valuable herbs at extremely high prices (rosehips, horehound, weed & more) making it unreasonable. I won't even touch the trouble I had just securing an enchanter for regular goods. In the end, as much as I attempted to work with others to stimulate the economy, it simply was not a viable practice. Keeping the shop well stocked and answering the demand for goods required me to be able to juggle multiple tradeskills or breaks laws to purchase from banned orgs; just to ensure certain goods were available to all.
With herbs, at least, this was one of the reasons behind an earlier suggestion for some kind of "buy order" system (like what we've got with the curiomarket) as it seems like that would help traders get materials out of players who don't have shops and help those players make a profit more easily without one.
That said, six mercantile trades without any class or low/high magic requirements is a significantly different set up to what we currently have. Like, everyone who focuses on what would be aethertrades could also pick up a mercantile for profit increasing the number of traders for these skills. I also wouldn't be surprised if orgs also eventually put up helps pointing out things like "an easy way to make money can be to gather herbs and sell them to alchemists", even down to like "these particular herbs tend to be the most in demand so focus on them and then move onto these and so on". It's just got to be worth their time.
One could make the argument I should turn to other people, use the market aethers and even go buy from shops. Unfortunatly, I did actually attempt that before deciding to reach for an endowment of the arts. I even went as far as making hiring contracts (with RP fun to stimulate) in attempts to get people to help & fill in large orders. The results of my actions ended up leading to either waiting multiple weeks to receive the completed orders, I always did try to work with what people could resonably deliver. Shopping for herbs, either ended up purchasing at an extremely low price, due to a person's kindness in trying to help others at a loss or finding valuable herbs at extremely high prices (rosehips, horehound, weed & more) making it unreasonable. I won't even touch the trouble I had just securing an enchanter for regular goods. In the end, as much as I attempted to work with others to stimulate the economy, it simply was not a viable practice. Keeping the shop well stocked and answering the demand for goods required me to be able to juggle multiple tradeskills or breaks laws to purchase from banned orgs; just to ensure certain goods were available to all.
With herbs, at least, this was one of the reasons behind an earlier suggestion for some kind of "buy order" system (like what we've got with the curiomarket) as it seems like that would help traders get materials out of players who don't have shops and help those players make a profit more easily without one.
That said, six mercantile trades without any class or low/high magic requirements is a significantly different set up to what we currently have. Like, everyone who focuses on what would be aethertrades could also pick up a mercantile for profit increasing the number of traders for these skills. I also wouldn't be surprised if orgs also eventually put up helps pointing out things like "an easy way to make money can be to gather herbs and sell them to alchemists", even down to like "these particular herbs tend to be the most in demand so focus on them and then move onto these and so on". It's just got to be worth their time.
In that spirit, I would like to suggest expanding the directory on a larger scale for mercantile goods at least. It's current iteration is an amazing tool that I use myself to keep track of the goods sold in the commune, address shortages & even modify my own ledgers. It is incredible for quickly identifying shortages and fixing it or letting an excess of product, sold by another shop at reasonable pricing, get purchased instead of making more.
I even note sales vs production to make more stock available if demand increases ♥.
Let's build on this!
Adding the ability for the directory to cover shops from other cities/communes would significantly increase the available stock. You can build on the RP laws by having this turned into a priv that can be turned off or on by the OrgLeader/Minister of trade for specifique cities/communes. This solution would stimulate the economy, promote inter-org relations beyond combat and feel like a step in the right direction to address issues with overstocking as well as the shortage of goods in specific orgs.
These are the benefits I could see from putting this in practice:
-RP wise reinforcement of trade laws in the hands of those who make them -Promoting exploration & inter org relationship of players, growing their world -Improving competitive pricing available to all -Stimulating the economy by giving access to a much larger range of goods (instead of them sitting in a shop)
Why not push forward one step further and help link the economy between all allied nations? This kind of feature would really change the economic landscape in my eyes.
One could make the argument I should turn to other people, use the market aethers and even go buy from shops. Unfortunatly, I did actually attempt that before deciding to reach for an endowment of the arts. I even went as far as making hiring contracts (with RP fun to stimulate) in attempts to get people to help & fill in large orders. The results of my actions ended up leading to either waiting multiple weeks to receive the completed orders, I always did try to work with what people could resonably deliver. Shopping for herbs, either ended up purchasing at an extremely low price, due to a person's kindness in trying to help others at a loss or finding valuable herbs at extremely high prices (rosehips, horehound, weed & more) making it unreasonable. I won't even touch the trouble I had just securing an enchanter for regular goods. In the end, as much as I attempted to work with others to stimulate the economy, it simply was not a viable practice. Keeping the shop well stocked and answering the demand for goods required me to be able to juggle multiple tradeskills or breaks laws to purchase from banned orgs; just to ensure certain goods were available to all.
With herbs, at least, this was one of the reasons behind an earlier suggestion for some kind of "buy order" system (like what we've got with the curiomarket) as it seems like that would help traders get materials out of players who don't have shops and help those players make a profit more easily without one.
That said, six mercantile trades without any class or low/high magic requirements is a significantly different set up to what we currently have. Like, everyone who focuses on what would be aethertrades could also pick up a mercantile for profit increasing the number of traders for these skills. I also wouldn't be surprised if orgs also eventually put up helps pointing out things like "an easy way to make money can be to gather herbs and sell them to alchemists", even down to like "these particular herbs tend to be the most in demand so focus on them and then move onto these and so on". It's just got to be worth their time.
In that spirit, I would like to suggest expanding the directory on a larger scale for mercantile goods at least. It's current iteration is an amazing tool that I use myself to keep track of the goods sold in the commune, address shortages & even modify my own ledgers. It is incredible for quickly identifying shortages and fixing it or letting an excess of product, sold by another shop at reasonable pricing, get purchased instead of making more.
I even note sales vs production to make more stock available if demand increases ♥.
Let's build on this!
Adding the ability for the directory to cover shops from other cities/communes would significantly increase the available stock. You can build on the RP laws by having this turned into a priv that can be turned off or on by the OrgLeader/Minister of trade for specifique cities/communes. This solution would stimulate the economy, promote inter-org relations beyond combat and feel like a step in the right direction to address issues with overstocking as well as the shortage of goods in specific orgs.
These are the benefits I could see from putting this in practice:
-RP wise reinforcement of trade laws in the hands of those who make them -Promoting exploration & inter org relationship of players, growing their world -Improving competitive pricing available to all -Stimulating the economy by giving access to a much larger range of goods (instead of them sitting in a shop)
Why not push forward one step further and help link the economy between all allied nations? This kind of feature would really change the economic landscape in my eyes.
Yeah, it sounds like something that could be neat to factor into some kind of alliance mechanism. It'd also be good to list manse shops that are connected to the relevant orgs portals in their directory as well so you only have one place to check.
Both make it easier and more convenient to see what's available but for me there's a bit of a disconnect given you've got the design intention of making it really easy for anyone to start gathering stuff but being able to sell stuff as easily means getting access to a shop on some level or you're stuck with tracking down buyers in person (which is an issue leading to some of the changes making everything sellable in shops)
"Nobody will need to invest credits into these skills before taking them"
Just quoted something from Orael above. Given this, what consideration do you plan to do for those who have already spent many lessons on multiple trades? Lesson refund is one thing, but for someone like myself who has all the trades i can take at the moment, and have no interest in ever learning a new class/have all other skills transed, could a credit refund be considered instead?
What thoughts do you have thus far on trade artifacts and spectral trade curios?
We already stated that we would look at allowing lessons to be traded in for credits and allowing the trading in of trade artifacts. I don't know that we'll do trade-in on spectral trade curios though as those are gained through performing the trade as well as by aethergoop so it'll be trickier there. We'll consider it though.
Sorry the last question should have been elaborated, i was wondering if you plan to have something similar by way of trade arties to work with trades/tweak existing ones or outright remove them.
I haven't read the entirety of these related threads, so sorry in advance if this has already been addressed, but considering the potential influx of new Herbs users post-change, it may be beneficial to take a look at some of the mechanics to avoid confusion/misunderstandings.
Because Herbs relies on a shared pool of resources, players are naturally very concerned when that pool is depleted, either accidentally or maliciously. However, there are circumstances that can be beyond an herbalist's control that lead to depletion. Specifically, demesne effects and dormancy each contribute to the decay of plants in a room. The only way to prevent this decay, from what I understand, is the GUARD ability in the NATURE skill, although the description implies that this only protects against dormancy, not demesne effects. Either way, this can result in rooms being completely depleted of herbs, and because of the way the LASTHARVEST skill works, the person listed there will most certainly take the blame. This problem is especially prevalent on Astral, where people constantly put up melds for bashing and sometimes forget about them, and I imagine it will only be exacerbated when more herbalists enter the fray.
One possible solution is to clear an individual's name from LASTHARVEST if the plants in the room are destroyed because of natural or unnatural decay. This would absolve said person of blame, but I could see people intentionally harvesting down to 1 herb and letting the plants die naturally, with no one the wiser.
An alternative would be to note the amount of plants that were left in the room when the person had finished harvesting, so that if they do leave less than 5 plants in a room, they can be clearly held responsible.
As for solving the depletion issue, I'm less certain of the ideal fix. I think a start might be to allow all herbalists to use a version of Nature's Guard ability, and if it doesn't already work against meld effects, I think it should strongly be considered allowing it to do so, because melds are way more difficult to predict than dormant periods.
I think that it's possible there will in general be scarcity issues when the new changes roll out, but my fears could totally be unfounded! Again, sorry if I've retread ground that's already been covered earlier in these threads, but thank you for your consideration all the same.
It may also be worth considering whether the herb growing mechanism adds enough to the game in comparison to the headache.
If not it seems like you could potentially do something like make it that peak months refresh the herbs nodes to full even if they've been stripped and fiddle with numbers like the maximum that can be in one spot at once. Which would shift herbs slightly to be, if you can see it then it's fine to harvest.
Lastharvest was added to the game to stop strip-harvesters from being able to deplete herbs entirely and stay anonymous.
The mechanic around dormancy/decay of herbs in general is not engaging. Why can't they be hardy enough to never completely run out. Recently i used nature's gift to regrow horehound in almost the entire balach swamp, an area that sees no melds - is it normal for an entire area to lose so many of the plants during dormancy? if so, the mechanic is ridiculously broken because it really wouldn't matter too much if you left 5 or zero (personally i aim to stop at 10, though group harvesting makes that more tricky to hit spot on) as you'd likely lose every one anyway. Maybe someone who knows the behaviours more comprehensively than i could elaborate on whether that is normal of dormancy.
tl;dr limited resources are already unfun and herbalism is slow and arduous, making a way to just not deal with lost herbs at all would be great. X number regrow per day, no matter what. Everyone wins!
Once upon a time, it was just as common for a full room to die as an empty room during dormancy. I think we got it changed so a full room is less likely to die - but the chances of death for a room with 5 or 10 isn't that much different. You shouldn't be harvesting during dormancy at all (or the month before) if you want them to survive.
However, they are supposed to also:
1) Have a higher chance of growing back the next month, and
2) If a room is full, have a higher chance of "spreading" to nearby rooms.
This is why bigger areas, unless intentionally stripped, tend to recover. Swamps suffer from being small and also constantly harvested, which ends up with them not having as much chance to thrive.
Once upon a time, it was just as common for a full room to die as an empty room during dormancy. I think we got it changed so a full room is less likely to die - but the chances of death for a room with 5 or 10 isn't that much different. You shouldn't be harvesting during dormancy at all (or the month before) if you want them to survive.
However, they are supposed to also:
1) Have a higher chance of growing back the next month, and
2) If a room is full, have a higher chance of "spreading" to nearby rooms.
This is why bigger areas, unless intentionally stripped, tend to recover. Swamps suffer from being small and also constantly harvested, which ends up with them not having as much chance to thrive.
2) Is why I tend to leave rooms with multiple exits to same terrain full or near full, in hopes it might "spread." I don't know if it actually benefits more than one neighboring room though.
Adjusting how herbs grow or some swamp-centric solution would be nice.
Maybe change Nature Domoth bonus for double capacity of chosen herb to be for bonus for all herbs of chosen terrain type, inversely proportional to number of herbs that grow in the terrain? Ex. Sparkleberry is only herb of Astral, it gets same 2x bonus as before. Swamp has three herbs, so scale to 1.34x (60 + 20) bonus?
tl;dr limited resources are already unfun and herbalism is slow and arduous, making a way to just not deal with lost herbs at all would be great. X number regrow per day, no matter what. Everyone wins!
I think it's less that they're limited and more that they're destructible combined with automatic recovery mechanisms that are really dependent on area design to actually work.
Limits inform value, it's just a matter of the right mechanic to do so.
The intention
behind removing gold drops was to nudge players towards focusing on
making gold from trades rather than from bashing. We have often heard
complaints that it is much faster and easier to go hunt rather than make
money through trade. We have hoped to move gold generation to quests
and corpse turn-ins (and buff both), and, of course, trades. A not
insignificant part of the reason was also the ease with which it would
allow us to control the flow of gold into the economy.
Instead,
we will retain gold drops (through hunting and influencing), aim to
control all inputs better, and seek alternative/easier means of making
money from trade (more on that later). That means that down the line
gold drops might be lessened but definitely not removed altogether.
Where needed, quests and turn-ins might still be adjusted too. We have
pretty extensive data gathering systems in place for commodities, gold,
and goop, and will be monitoring the situation.
Economy 2.0 is purposed as being optional and a person should be able to interact with it as little as they want. However, if you make merchanting the best gold source, it no longer becomes optional. Not everyone wants to quest. Not wants to (will want to) be a merchant. The people that just want to bash (and get their gold from the kill itself, rather than dealing with turnins and hoping someone didn't kill the turnin mob) shouldn't be punished for the not taking part in the economy by having much less gold generation to their choice in activity.
Gold from being a merchant is too dependent on not serve undercutting. A merchant, when the only investment into the trade is time (poisons, herbs, arguably enchantment), can just sell their stuff for 1gp and undercut everyone if they really wanted.
1) Quoting us saying we're not going to remove gold drops, but we may look at them and make adjustments
2) If people are selling things at 1gp, you can buy that stock, and sell it to the NPC that's buying it for more and make gold.
But if you keep/buff gold drops and someone is able to make 10K from that, but a merchant is able to make 15K from selling things, then you still have the same problem (one thing being faster/better at gold generation) just in the other direction.
That's not really the full picture though.
If Caedir spends all his time hunting/begging, his gold/hour might end up being lower but he's also generating exp/essence for himself as well as corpses and esteem that could be offered for further benefits including generating karma for the benefits that it can provide. On top of that Caedir would likely get ticks for daily credits if he isn't capped for the day. Bob on the other hand might only trade and in turn gain more gold/hour but he also wouldn't be gaining all those extra resources that Caedir got in the same time and would come out of it with just gold. Someone who does both wouldn't get as much gold as Bob or as much of the extra resources Caedir gets but on the other hand they'd get more gold than Caedir and more extra resources than Bob.
Whch is basically fundamentally how trades and economies appear to work in most games, trades are generally pretty great at making money but you're sacrificing time you could be spending generating other forms of currency along side gold. Even to the point that like, Caedir could potentially sell esteem to Bob who wouldn't otherwise be generating it, improving the gold Caedir earned from his time bashing.
What's stopping Bob from using that extra time he has from just popping out a couple crafted items and going hunting like Caedir to make up the difference? I think you underestimate the amount of time it takes to bash up that much gold as opposed to how quickly someone can simply craft items. I sell esteem in my shop currently and in a day (RL DAY) of nonstop bashing i might be able to get around 30k esteem which at 10g per unit (1 more than I sell for) I'd get 300k. Whereas someone who can gemcut, in a few hours stands to make upwards of 500k to 1mil just gemcutting with a hammer and selling the salt/sulfur they get to people who break goop items.
That's not even mentioning the amount they make selling aethertrading items in their shops/selling the goop items they get from refined items.
I haven't read the entirety of these related threads, so sorry in advance if this has already been addressed, but considering the potential influx of new Herbs users post-change, it may be beneficial to take a look at some of the mechanics to avoid confusion/misunderstandings.
Because Herbs relies on a shared pool of resources, players are naturally very concerned when that pool is depleted, either accidentally or maliciously. However, there are circumstances that can be beyond an herbalist's control that lead to depletion. Specifically, demesne effects and dormancy each contribute to the decay of plants in a room. The only way to prevent this decay, from what I understand, is the GUARD ability in the NATURE skill, although the description implies that this only protects against dormancy, not demesne effects. Either way, this can result in rooms being completely depleted of herbs, and because of the way the LASTHARVEST skill works, the person listed there will most certainly take the blame. This problem is especially prevalent on Astral, where people constantly put up melds for bashing and sometimes forget about them, and I imagine it will only be exacerbated when more herbalists enter the fray.
One possible solution is to clear an individual's name from LASTHARVEST if the plants in the room are destroyed because of natural or unnatural decay. This would absolve said person of blame, but I could see people intentionally harvesting down to 1 herb and letting the plants die naturally, with no one the wiser.
An alternative would be to note the amount of plants that were left in the room when the person had finished harvesting, so that if they do leave less than 5 plants in a room, they can be clearly held responsible.
As for solving the depletion issue, I'm less certain of the ideal fix. I think a start might be to allow all herbalists to use a version of Nature's Guard ability, and if it doesn't already work against meld effects, I think it should strongly be considered allowing it to do so, because melds are way more difficult to predict than dormant periods.
I think that it's possible there will in general be scarcity issues when the new changes roll out, but my fears could totally be unfounded! Again, sorry if I've retread ground that's already been covered earlier in these threads, but thank you for your consideration all the same.
Honestly. I feel like once everyone can take herbs this is going to have the opposite affect as desired. People are going to strip the land barren of any harvestable plants in days. The best way I can figure to avoid this is to either make plants produce less but instance them so that everyone gets a rng amount per harvest from each plant, OR increase the regen rate for each plant so that more people can get something from them per day. (Also i'm not sure exactly how they work but harvesting gloves produce a potentially higher yield of herbs per HARVEST does this pull from the total that the plant produces or does this just work like the quill and just magically 'poof' you got double the product from the same amount of supply?
Honestly. I feel like once everyone can take herbs this is going to have the opposite affect as desired. People are going to strip the land barren of any harvestable plants in days.
With how often various plant populations are neglected as is, I have a hard time believing this would happen - not without significant changes to the harvest mechanics that would make it waaay easier to do this.
Sparkleberry, which is the most profitable herb, is frequently left alone for months at a time, and I rarely ever see any evidence of other people harvesting in Pandaemonium, which is literally dozens (if not ~one hundred) of extra available rooms.
People are -very- happy to pay some form of premium on convenience, though whether or not that amount is enough to motivate the masses to engage is another story. Lots of stuff just isn't going to be profitable unless people accept paying more over doing it themselves, and if we want to enable more people to do it themselves then I say okay (frankly, I think most will just give up due to the tedium before going back to buying out of convenience).
The intention
behind removing gold drops was to nudge players towards focusing on
making gold from trades rather than from bashing. We have often heard
complaints that it is much faster and easier to go hunt rather than make
money through trade. We have hoped to move gold generation to quests
and corpse turn-ins (and buff both), and, of course, trades. A not
insignificant part of the reason was also the ease with which it would
allow us to control the flow of gold into the economy.
Instead,
we will retain gold drops (through hunting and influencing), aim to
control all inputs better, and seek alternative/easier means of making
money from trade (more on that later). That means that down the line
gold drops might be lessened but definitely not removed altogether.
Where needed, quests and turn-ins might still be adjusted too. We have
pretty extensive data gathering systems in place for commodities, gold,
and goop, and will be monitoring the situation.
Economy 2.0 is purposed as being optional and a person should be able to interact with it as little as they want. However, if you make merchanting the best gold source, it no longer becomes optional. Not everyone wants to quest. Not wants to (will want to) be a merchant. The people that just want to bash (and get their gold from the kill itself, rather than dealing with turnins and hoping someone didn't kill the turnin mob) shouldn't be punished for the not taking part in the economy by having much less gold generation to their choice in activity.
Gold from being a merchant is too dependent on not serve undercutting. A merchant, when the only investment into the trade is time (poisons, herbs, arguably enchantment), can just sell their stuff for 1gp and undercut everyone if they really wanted.
1) Quoting us saying we're not going to remove gold drops, but we may look at them and make adjustments
2) If people are selling things at 1gp, you can buy that stock, and sell it to the NPC that's buying it for more and make gold.
But if you keep/buff gold drops and someone is able to make 10K from that, but a merchant is able to make 15K from selling things, then you still have the same problem (one thing being faster/better at gold generation) just in the other direction.
That's not really the full picture though.
If Caedir spends all his time hunting/begging, his gold/hour might end up being lower but he's also generating exp/essence for himself as well as corpses and esteem that could be offered for further benefits including generating karma for the benefits that it can provide. On top of that Caedir would likely get ticks for daily credits if he isn't capped for the day. Bob on the other hand might only trade and in turn gain more gold/hour but he also wouldn't be gaining all those extra resources that Caedir got in the same time and would come out of it with just gold. Someone who does both wouldn't get as much gold as Bob or as much of the extra resources Caedir gets but on the other hand they'd get more gold than Caedir and more extra resources than Bob.
Whch is basically fundamentally how trades and economies appear to work in most games, trades are generally pretty great at making money but you're sacrificing time you could be spending generating other forms of currency along side gold. Even to the point that like, Caedir could potentially sell esteem to Bob who wouldn't otherwise be generating it, improving the gold Caedir earned from his time bashing.
What's stopping Bob from using that extra time he has from just popping out a couple crafted items and going hunting like Caedir to make up the difference? I think you underestimate the amount of time it takes to bash up that much gold as opposed to how quickly someone can simply craft items. I sell esteem in my shop currently and in a day (RL DAY) of nonstop bashing i might be able to get around 30k esteem which at 10g per unit (1 more than I sell for) I'd get 300k. Whereas someone who can gemcut, in a few hours stands to make upwards of 500k to 1mil just gemcutting with a hammer and selling the salt/sulfur they get to people who break goop items.
That's not even mentioning the amount they make selling aethertrading items in their shops/selling the goop items they get from refined items.
I've had a good pair of hours yield nearly a million gold if I time it so that I can get wonderpie turnins on two or three rounds of Illithoid. I did not, in fact, see my second comma in Luce's funds until I stopped trying to make money off of gems and esteem and just went bashing for it. And I'm trans jewelcrafting AND enchanting, have the enchanting artifacts, and don't gemcut unless I can use a mallet.
The intention
behind removing gold drops was to nudge players towards focusing on
making gold from trades rather than from bashing. We have often heard
complaints that it is much faster and easier to go hunt rather than make
money through trade. We have hoped to move gold generation to quests
and corpse turn-ins (and buff both), and, of course, trades. A not
insignificant part of the reason was also the ease with which it would
allow us to control the flow of gold into the economy.
Instead,
we will retain gold drops (through hunting and influencing), aim to
control all inputs better, and seek alternative/easier means of making
money from trade (more on that later). That means that down the line
gold drops might be lessened but definitely not removed altogether.
Where needed, quests and turn-ins might still be adjusted too. We have
pretty extensive data gathering systems in place for commodities, gold,
and goop, and will be monitoring the situation.
Economy 2.0 is purposed as being optional and a person should be able to interact with it as little as they want. However, if you make merchanting the best gold source, it no longer becomes optional. Not everyone wants to quest. Not wants to (will want to) be a merchant. The people that just want to bash (and get their gold from the kill itself, rather than dealing with turnins and hoping someone didn't kill the turnin mob) shouldn't be punished for the not taking part in the economy by having much less gold generation to their choice in activity.
Gold from being a merchant is too dependent on not serve undercutting. A merchant, when the only investment into the trade is time (poisons, herbs, arguably enchantment), can just sell their stuff for 1gp and undercut everyone if they really wanted.
1) Quoting us saying we're not going to remove gold drops, but we may look at them and make adjustments
2) If people are selling things at 1gp, you can buy that stock, and sell it to the NPC that's buying it for more and make gold.
But if you keep/buff gold drops and someone is able to make 10K from that, but a merchant is able to make 15K from selling things, then you still have the same problem (one thing being faster/better at gold generation) just in the other direction.
That's not really the full picture though.
If Caedir spends all his time hunting/begging, his gold/hour might end up being lower but he's also generating exp/essence for himself as well as corpses and esteem that could be offered for further benefits including generating karma for the benefits that it can provide. On top of that Caedir would likely get ticks for daily credits if he isn't capped for the day. Bob on the other hand might only trade and in turn gain more gold/hour but he also wouldn't be gaining all those extra resources that Caedir got in the same time and would come out of it with just gold. Someone who does both wouldn't get as much gold as Bob or as much of the extra resources Caedir gets but on the other hand they'd get more gold than Caedir and more extra resources than Bob.
Whch is basically fundamentally how trades and economies appear to work in most games, trades are generally pretty great at making money but you're sacrificing time you could be spending generating other forms of currency along side gold. Even to the point that like, Caedir could potentially sell esteem to Bob who wouldn't otherwise be generating it, improving the gold Caedir earned from his time bashing.
What's stopping Bob from using that extra time he has from just popping out a couple crafted items and going hunting like Caedir to make up the difference? I think you underestimate the amount of time it takes to bash up that much gold as opposed to how quickly someone can simply craft items. I sell esteem in my shop currently and in a day (RL DAY) of nonstop bashing i might be able to get around 30k esteem which at 10g per unit (1 more than I sell for) I'd get 300k. Whereas someone who can gemcut, in a few hours stands to make upwards of 500k to 1mil just gemcutting with a hammer and selling the salt/sulfur they get to people who break goop items.
That's not even mentioning the amount they make selling aethertrading items in their shops/selling the goop items they get from refined items.
Gold isn't the only thing in the economy though, it's not even the only currency. Essence is a currency to spend on character upgrades, esteem/corpses are convertible into a currency with divine essence, and daily credits on top of the actual gold that you can generate. Family honour is also generated for those in families but that's not currently spendable.
In your example, why is it a bad thing that you gain less gold when you're also getting those other rewards? You've given an example of a game set up to encourage desirable player behaviour, gems need to be cut and if you want gold the best route is to trade. If you want both essence and larger sums of gold then you mix it up and both bash and trade.
There's also the question of why the gold is being accumulated? As long as you're generating enough gold to sustainably bash comfortably, wanting more seems like a signal that there are other parts of the game that you want to engage in. Which would really mean that there are things in the game that would reward you for trading to get that gold, just like there's demigod perks/powers that reward people for accumulating large amounts of essence.
Ideally, those things that feel rewarding funnel that extra gold towards sinks. But @Luce has shown how much more could be made from bashing. Based on that and your estimate, a gemcutter is, maybe, breaking even with the basher on gold while also not getting any of the other currencies... so why would you cut gems? Seems like the gemcutter is basically just providing a public service that has an opportunity cost when you could get the rewards for essence and gold from bashing.
I haven't read the entirety of these related threads, so sorry in advance if this has already been addressed, but considering the potential influx of new Herbs users post-change, it may be beneficial to take a look at some of the mechanics to avoid confusion/misunderstandings.
Because Herbs relies on a shared pool of resources, players are naturally very concerned when that pool is depleted, either accidentally or maliciously. However, there are circumstances that can be beyond an herbalist's control that lead to depletion. Specifically, demesne effects and dormancy each contribute to the decay of plants in a room. The only way to prevent this decay, from what I understand, is the GUARD ability in the NATURE skill, although the description implies that this only protects against dormancy, not demesne effects. Either way, this can result in rooms being completely depleted of herbs, and because of the way the LASTHARVEST skill works, the person listed there will most certainly take the blame. This problem is especially prevalent on Astral, where people constantly put up melds for bashing and sometimes forget about them, and I imagine it will only be exacerbated when more herbalists enter the fray.
One possible solution is to clear an individual's name from LASTHARVEST if the plants in the room are destroyed because of natural or unnatural decay. This would absolve said person of blame, but I could see people intentionally harvesting down to 1 herb and letting the plants die naturally, with no one the wiser.
An alternative would be to note the amount of plants that were left in the room when the person had finished harvesting, so that if they do leave less than 5 plants in a room, they can be clearly held responsible.
As for solving the depletion issue, I'm less certain of the ideal fix. I think a start might be to allow all herbalists to use a version of Nature's Guard ability, and if it doesn't already work against meld effects, I think it should strongly be considered allowing it to do so, because melds are way more difficult to predict than dormant periods.
I think that it's possible there will in general be scarcity issues when the new changes roll out, but my fears could totally be unfounded! Again, sorry if I've retread ground that's already been covered earlier in these threads, but thank you for your consideration all the same.
Honestly. I feel like once everyone can take herbs this is going to have the opposite affect as desired. People are going to strip the land barren of any harvestable plants in days. The best way I can figure to avoid this is to either make plants produce less but instance them so that everyone gets a rng amount per harvest from each plant, OR increase the regen rate for each plant so that more people can get something from them per day. (Also i'm not sure exactly how they work but harvesting gloves produce a potentially higher yield of herbs per HARVEST does this pull from the total that the plant produces or does this just work like the quill and just magically 'poof' you got double the product from the same amount of supply?
It might happen sure, but it seems unlikely. People would be forgoing one of the other choices to have herbs and if it were happening then the skill would become less and less valuable to have so people may as well switch to something else. Even if you were just wanting it to gather curatives, if everything is being stripharvested then there won't be any so you might as well switch to alchemy because the market would also likely be flooded with herbs from people trying to undercut each other.
Comments
Daily credits might be nice though because you would need them to progress as a trader.
Like have them created with a mix of regular comms as well as special comms which have limited availability to control the rate at which they can enter the game. Those comms could come from trades, questing, special shops, loot drops, whatever. For example, with aetherbuttons maybe they require comms from their relevant bubble. It could be some kind of special gathering thing or you could generate them through questing/bashing/influencing there.
Since Arts is in the list of reworking, a way to take down paintings without destroying them would be nice. What if I decide I want to keep this painting, but hang it somewhere else? I can move paintings in my RL house without destroying them. Need something like UNEXHIBIT <painting> to go with EXHIBIT please! Could be something to replace the loss of tints.
Hello everyone, a little late to the discussion but catching up on upcoming changes I'd like to ask few clarifications from those more familiar with the following part of the proposal:
----------------------
Snippet from the first post
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Mercantile skills themselves will switch to the proficiency system proposed before and require no lesson investment. Everyone will inherently have one Mercantile slot and that is all they will ever be able to have active. There are no locks in this proposal so if you want to switch your Mercantile skill, you will lose all proficiency in it. But worry not, proficiency will be gained daily by performing at least one skill action to get max daily proficiency - no grind necessary. The purpose of proficiency, as before, is to encourage specialisation and thus more interaction between various trades.
If I am reading this the right way, Enchantment - Alchemy - Herbs - Poisons, will require to be "relearned" when swapped between on skillflex dropping to 0% proficiency each time and will be limited to a single choice...regardless of an endowment of the arts or demi bonus tradeskill and...I believe seal of beauty. This is being done to: promote interplayer trades, stimulate economy between shops & promote the use of the marketplace to find people willing to setup orders.
............................................
I would like to ask the following questions:
If speed/commodities/success is what is affected by proficiency.
Will you have access to every spell/herb/potion/poison from the beginning ?
If so, what will be the rate of speed of production at the different tier ?
If alchemy creations can fail, will it mean a loss of all commodities ?
My concerns are the following:
Stocking a shop with one or two kegs of every potion available in alchemy & lorecraft (Not touching brewmeister) takes an absolutly ridiculous amount of herbs. Even holding 2000 of every herb in the rift before beginning will see you running out of stock since some take up to 8 herbs per sip created; that's 800 herbs of a single type per keg not counting extras. To keep a shop properly stocked can easily take a week or so of constant & focused work. That's not even counting enchantments & poisons, a little shoutout to my favorite poison to harvest - Pyrotoxin from the greymoors baby manticoor.
One could make the argument I should turn to other people, use the market aethers and even go buy from shops. Unfortunatly, I did actually attempt that before deciding to reach for an endowment of the arts. I even went as far as making hiring contracts (with RP fun to stimulate) in attempts to get people to help & fill in large orders. The results of my actions ended up leading to either waiting multiple weeks to receive the completed orders, I always did try to work with what people could resonably deliver. Shopping for herbs, either ended up purchasing at an extremely low price, due to a person's kindness in trying to help others at a loss or finding valuable herbs at extremely high prices (rosehips, horehound, weed & more) making it unreasonable. I won't even touch the trouble I had just securing an enchanter for regular goods. In the end, as much as I attempted to work with others to stimulate the economy, it simply was not a viable practice. Keeping the shop well stocked and answering the demand for goods required me to be able to juggle multiple tradeskills or breaks laws to purchase from banned orgs; just to ensure certain goods were available to all.
For these reasons, I can't help but be concerned about the time it will take to flip between these valuable skills, raise proficiency to acceptable levels, produce the goods (including failures) and then flip back to acquire more materials, which requires the entire cycle to start over again.
I should perhaps also mention the purpose for which I started all this shopkeeping, to help keep a regular stock of most usable goods for an org I care about and lend a hand to others, especially young ones in finding things they might otherwise have a hard time to acquire. Most of the funding is either sent right back into the shop, used for events that require monetary assistance and a little bit is always sent to raise funds in Guilds & Divine Order. This is very much - not - a request to turn a profit but simply to be able to stock a little bit of everything at a reasonable time investment.
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Too long or didn't wish to read?
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Even if proficiency requires re-learning mercantile skill on release, I am 100% A-OK with that. The difficulty comes from having to redo it every time on skill flex due to the lack of other people to trade with. If what I understood was right, please review letting us keep an extra mercantile skill with an artifact, demi or seal of beauty. If both skill flex and the extra tradeskill is taken away for mercantile trades it will have an unfavourable impact on shops and the goods available to those that visit them. Some of us really are just trying to keep things moving forward for our respective orgs & alliances and not for personal profit.
Maybe I'm wrong and everything will turn out fine, but for now call me concerned.
Thanks for reading
-Afollia
Will you have access to every spell/herb/potion/poison from the beginning?
Yes, you will have access to the entire skillset once selecting it.
If so, what will be the rate of speed of production at the different tiers?
Details have not been worked out exactly yet, but the goal is that being 100% proficient in a trade without artifacts will be more effective than someone at 0% with artifacts. Ideally, being proficient will take a lot of the 'grind' aspect of things out of it.
If alchemy creations can fail, will it mean a loss of all commodities?
Again, details have not been worked out, but being proficient will ideally mean that you'll have fewer failures. I don't know if we'll go to 0% at 100%, but being proficient will mean less failing. Failing would mean a loss of all commodities in that batch still.
As to the other concerns about relying on other people. Ideally, everyone can select one of these merchantile skillsets for free and instantly start making money from it. Nobody will need to invest credits into these skills before taking them, so more people should be able to take these trades and fulfill them. With proficiency making things better, people won't feel like it's a grind to use these trades and will be more willing to engage in or use them. This will ideally result in having plenty of people around that can provide these goods.
The worst-case scenario is that all these goods will be available via NPC merchants (albeit at higher pricing), so if players -need- something, they can get it anytime they want.
That said, six mercantile trades without any class or low/high magic requirements is a significantly different set up to what we currently have. Like, everyone who focuses on what would be aethertrades could also pick up a mercantile for profit increasing the number of traders for these skills.
I also wouldn't be surprised if orgs also eventually put up helps pointing out things like "an easy way to make money can be to gather herbs and sell them to alchemists", even down to like "these particular herbs tend to be the most in demand so focus on them and then move onto these and so on". It's just got to be worth their time.
In that spirit, I would like to suggest expanding the directory on a larger scale for mercantile goods at least. It's current iteration is an amazing tool that I use myself to keep track of the goods sold in the commune, address shortages & even modify my own ledgers. It is incredible for quickly identifying shortages and fixing it or letting an excess of product, sold by another shop at reasonable pricing, get purchased instead of making more.
I even note sales vs production to make more stock available if demand increases ♥.
Let's build on this!
Adding the ability for the directory to cover shops from other cities/communes would significantly increase the available stock. You can build on the RP laws by having this turned into a priv that can be turned off or on by the OrgLeader/Minister of trade for specifique cities/communes. This solution would stimulate the economy, promote inter-org relations beyond combat and feel like a step in the right direction to address issues with overstocking as well as the shortage of goods in specific orgs.
These are the benefits I could see from putting this in practice:
-RP wise reinforcement of trade laws in the hands of those who make them
-Promoting exploration & inter org relationship of players, growing their world
-Improving competitive pricing available to all
-Stimulating the economy by giving access to a much larger range of goods (instead of them sitting in a shop)
Why not push forward one step further and help link the economy between all allied nations? This kind of feature would really change the economic landscape in my eyes.
@orael
Thank you so much for those clarifications.
Both make it easier and more convenient to see what's available but for me there's a bit of a disconnect given you've got the design intention of making it really easy for anyone to start gathering stuff but being able to sell stuff as easily means getting access to a shop on some level or you're stuck with tracking down buyers in person (which is an issue leading to some of the changes making everything sellable in shops)
Just quoted something from Orael above. Given this, what consideration do you plan to do for those who have already spent many lessons on multiple trades? Lesson refund is one thing, but for someone like myself who has all the trades i can take at the moment, and have no interest in ever learning a new class/have all other skills transed, could a credit refund be considered instead?
What thoughts do you have thus far on trade artifacts and spectral trade curios?
Because Herbs relies on a shared pool of resources, players are naturally very concerned when that pool is depleted, either accidentally or maliciously. However, there are circumstances that can be beyond an herbalist's control that lead to depletion. Specifically, demesne effects and dormancy each contribute to the decay of plants in a room. The only way to prevent this decay, from what I understand, is the GUARD ability in the NATURE skill, although the description implies that this only protects against dormancy, not demesne effects. Either way, this can result in rooms being completely depleted of herbs, and because of the way the LASTHARVEST skill works, the person listed there will most certainly take the blame. This problem is especially prevalent on Astral, where people constantly put up melds for bashing and sometimes forget about them, and I imagine it will only be exacerbated when more herbalists enter the fray.
One possible solution is to clear an individual's name from LASTHARVEST if the plants in the room are destroyed because of natural or unnatural decay. This would absolve said person of blame, but I could see people intentionally harvesting down to 1 herb and letting the plants die naturally, with no one the wiser.
An alternative would be to note the amount of plants that were left in the room when the person had finished harvesting, so that if they do leave less than 5 plants in a room, they can be clearly held responsible.
As for solving the depletion issue, I'm less certain of the ideal fix. I think a start might be to allow all herbalists to use a version of Nature's Guard ability, and if it doesn't already work against meld effects, I think it should strongly be considered allowing it to do so, because melds are way more difficult to predict than dormant periods.
I think that it's possible there will in general be scarcity issues when the new changes roll out, but my fears could totally be unfounded! Again, sorry if I've retread ground that's already been covered earlier in these threads, but thank you for your consideration all the same.
If not it seems like you could potentially do something like make it that peak months refresh the herbs nodes to full even if they've been stripped and fiddle with numbers like the maximum that can be in one spot at once.
Which would shift herbs slightly to be, if you can see it then it's fine to harvest.
The mechanic around dormancy/decay of herbs in general is not engaging. Why can't they be hardy enough to never completely run out. Recently i used nature's gift to regrow horehound in almost the entire balach swamp, an area that sees no melds - is it normal for an entire area to lose so many of the plants during dormancy? if so, the mechanic is ridiculously broken because it really wouldn't matter too much if you left 5 or zero (personally i aim to stop at 10, though group harvesting makes that more tricky to hit spot on) as you'd likely lose every one anyway. Maybe someone who knows the behaviours more comprehensively than i could elaborate on whether that is normal of dormancy.
tl;dr limited resources are already unfun and herbalism is slow and arduous, making a way to just not deal with lost herbs at all would be great. X number regrow per day, no matter what. Everyone wins!
Adjusting how herbs grow or some swamp-centric solution would be nice.
Maybe change Nature Domoth bonus for double capacity of chosen herb to be for bonus for all herbs of chosen terrain type, inversely proportional to number of herbs that grow in the terrain? Ex. Sparkleberry is only herb of Astral, it gets same 2x bonus as before. Swamp has three herbs, so scale to 1.34x (60 + 20) bonus?
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Limits inform value, it's just a matter of the right mechanic to do so.
That's not even mentioning the amount they make selling aethertrading items in their shops/selling the goop items they get from refined items.
Gold isn't the only thing in the economy though, it's not even the only currency. Essence is a currency to spend on character upgrades, esteem/corpses are convertible into a currency with divine essence, and daily credits on top of the actual gold that you can generate. Family honour is also generated for those in families but that's not currently spendable.
In your example, why is it a bad thing that you gain less gold when you're also getting those other rewards?
You've given an example of a game set up to encourage desirable player behaviour, gems need to be cut and if you want gold the best route is to trade. If you want both essence and larger sums of gold then you mix it up and both bash and trade.
There's also the question of why the gold is being accumulated? As long as you're generating enough gold to sustainably bash comfortably, wanting more seems like a signal that there are other parts of the game that you want to engage in. Which would really mean that there are things in the game that would reward you for trading to get that gold, just like there's demigod perks/powers that reward people for accumulating large amounts of essence.
Ideally, those things that feel rewarding funnel that extra gold towards sinks. But @Luce has shown how much more could be made from bashing. Based on that and your estimate, a gemcutter is, maybe, breaking even with the basher on gold while also not getting any of the other currencies... so why would you cut gems? Seems like the gemcutter is basically just providing a public service that has an opportunity cost when you could get the rewards for essence and gold from bashing.
Even if you were just wanting it to gather curatives, if everything is being stripharvested then there won't be any so you might as well switch to alchemy because the market would also likely be flooded with herbs from people trying to undercut each other.