Economy (and the state of the game)

[Arundel]

I'm hoping this post won't come across as a "whine" or a "sky is falling" type post as I've been accused of in the past. Let me preface this post by saying I genuinely want this game to succeed and have put a lot of time into it. I have had less time lately due to work but am still dedicated to the game. That said, everyone I know in game has noticed a similar problem: the economy is pretty dead. I'm seeing more merchant shops open now than ever before even in the "B" section which I've never seen before. Admittedly I have not played that long, but the population is really dwindling. I've heard people say that its just the season but this descent has been going on for 3 months or so from my observation. Rather than remain negative I wanted to try to take stock of what can be done to address these issues to ensure the best possible testing and launch.

1. Combat and changes. Erdrick had a great post in the patch notes for the August 28th patch and I understand he is a veteran with a lot of experience. I don't want to add much to it other than a caution that I think if some of these issues aren't resolved a huge portion of the population may leave in the coming months (as I have seen in the past few). I keep seeing nerfs to things, which is inevitable and hasn't impacted me really, but we also need changes to systems like threat, healing viability, mob hp, etc. Lets get to this and help the devs get this tweaked. I'm hardly the person to give advice here as I don't have a ton of experience with Gazluk - but from having played a lot of skills to 70+ with pretty solid gear I think Erdrick's post and a recent post by Andelas (in another thread if I recall) are spot on. I can link them if asked.

2. The economy. Currently we're losing players and testing is getting more tedious. We need to have the cost of the merchants drastically reduced to help all types of merchants. You have to be REALLY grinding to get enough stuff to sell to make 7-8k a day worth it. It doesn't sound like much but it can really reduce profits. Even when I sell 100k a day of items I'm losing nearly 10% to a "tax" and also having to compete with other players. Now with work I'm functioning more like an "average" player and not grinding as much so I might make 10k some days and that barely pays the tax - meaning I just basically deleted those items from my inventory and got nothing back. Removing or reducing the tax a lot could really help the economy by giving people incentive to keep a shop up. I'd say just make it something minimal and have shops auto-close if they reach 0 items (after 24 hours) - so we don't have empty shops but we can see more goods. The other main issue with economy is the number of players which will likely get a boost at Beta/steam launch.

3. Another issue is transportation and banking. I have made a post before but I'm going to be blunt here: the banking system is not acceptable. We spend more time micro-managing our inventory than testing. I get that in a "real" economy we can rely on other players to sell stuff - but absolutely can't right now. There is hardly anyone selling stuff. Rather than change systems permanently, you might consider temporarily buffing the inventory size of all banks and doubling our personal inventory to help reduce this tedium. After all, we are testing - and if we spend all our time testing an inventory mini-game.... well lets just say I can see why so many that I know have quit and verbalized this as their main reason.




I will make some more suggestions later, but I'm simply asking that the devs consider how "fun" the game is to test considering we have so few players to trade with or buy from. It is becoming a true hindrance to testing. Hell, I spend weeks grinding for things to test something when I could have figured it out in half the time or less if there were a reliable economy to purchase these goods from. Then I could make some detailed feedback on the issue or keep testing to discover "meta" issues like balance amongst skills. I hope that this feedback helps in moving the game in a better direction for testing and keeping players involved.

[Atis]

I login less and less, mostly because of storage management. It easily takes up to half of playtime. I cant just login and start doing a thing, I need to plan how much space it will take and free enough slots. Increasing baseline storage space and adding crates, backpacks and sacks to sort and move items would help a lot. I know Eric might have some different intended way to play in mind, well, this way doesn't work for now. Storage is a basic function, like combat, if it doesn't work well, whole game doesn't work, regardless of other features. I can't recommend P:G to people for now, I don't wish inventory curse upon them (dont mean in-game boss curse).

As for market, what is a point of having separate vendors in one place? Separate vendors make sense when you can place them freely in any place, if 99% of market is at one spot, Auction House would be better. I believe, many sales were lost because people couldn't be bothered to check all vendors for 578483468th time. If you could place vendor with "Best Milk Evah" sign and 100 bottles without fee near Braigon then personal vendors would help economy by creating local (Eltibule) market, securing a sale and rewarding proper placement. Right now they work like discounted do-it-yourself AH.

[Roekai]

the sky is falling the sky is falling



/s

[kazeandi]

You could make a /vsearch command that lists all player vendors by name that sell a certain item, that's a good alternative to auction houses.

[Arundel]

the sky is falling the sky is falling



/s

Thanks for your constructive post that contributed to the discussion. Some people around here seem to get very insecure if we try to improve the game (constructive criticism). Its hard to even make suggestions without someone claiming whining/pessimism. Sky is falling would be if I said there was no solution, instead I offered numerous solutions and my outlook is positive but realistic (we have had a huge drop in player base and everyone I know in game is concerned). If this bothers you, I'm not sure if you will help much in Alpha/Beta as constructive criticism is required for success.

For the record I LOVE this development team and the general direction of the game is brilliant. This is why I have put so many hours into a game that is only in Alpha. However, our small player base is going to determine the rest of the direction of the game since they want our feedback. I am only posting what so many in game have said, some people are very passive. I saw about 5 posts in guild/tells the day I made this that echoed numerous others I have heard in the past few months and I decided to be the voice for this. But I really do genuinely appreciate your feedback and useful dialogue.

[Arundel]

You could make a /vsearch command that lists all player vendors by name that sell a certain item, that's a good alternative to auction houses.

I think this could be useful, I think part of the reason they are utilizing the merchants (other than it being old school) is that it hurts auction house botting a lot. I'm not sure if a bot could be designed to read the code from such a search and go to those shops to buy the items (doubtful, since the order is random) but that is the only flaw I can see with this. Once the game is out or even in Beta and we have all the rooms full of merchants it will nearly be mandatory that we have some search feature.

[Arundel]

I login less and less, mostly because of storage management. It easily takes up to half of playtime. I cant just login and start doing a thing, I need to plan how much space it will take and free enough slots. Increasing baseline storage space and adding crates, backpacks and sacks to sort and move items would help a lot. I know Eric might have some different intended way to play in mind, well, this way doesn't work for now. Storage is a basic function, like combat, if it doesn't work well, whole game doesn't work, regardless of other features. I can't recommend P:G to people for now, I don't wish inventory curse upon them (dont mean in-game boss curse).

As for market, what is a point of having separate vendors in one place? Separate vendors make sense when you can place them freely in any place, if 99% of market is at one spot, Auction House would be better. I believe, many sales were lost because people couldn't be bothered to check all vendors for 578483468th time. If you could place vendor with "Best Milk Evah" sign and 100 bottles without fee near Braigon then personal vendors would help economy by creating local (Eltibule) market, securing a sale and rewarding proper placement. Right now they work like discounted do-it-yourself AH.

As I said in my other reply, auction house botting has ruined most recent MMO's. I am generally an economically minded player and attempt to make large amounts of money and the number one fun-killer is auction house bots. They suck items out of the community by cheating, normal bots that grind at least provide items to the community or generate currency to buy your items. I find AH bots to be the most harmful and the current system appears to stop them unless people can do a heavy amount of manipulation of data to search player shops with a bot, and even then it should be easy to spot them and report them.

[Atis]

What does stop bot from manually searching all vendors, farm some XP, log different character 15 minutes later, search again, rinse and repeat? Time interval and path are partially randomized like 600-1200 seconds and start with different vendor every time to hide pattern. I really doubt a tiny team can effectively watch market all the time to clear non-obvious bots.

[Arundel]

What does stop bot from manually searching all vendors, farm some XP, log different character 15 minutes later, search again, rinse and repeat? Time interval and path are partially randomized like 600-1200 seconds and start with different vendor every time to hide pattern. I really doubt a tiny team can effectively watch market all the time to clear non-obvious bots.

I'm not even sure this is why the team has chosen this system, but its definitely harder to bot. Keep in mind players items are in a random order, so its much harder to write commands for a bot to search. My understanding is the bot would also need to be able to search the code (or packets) to determine what items are placed in the shop because it can't "see" them physically and the order. The team wouldn't be the ones catching them, in a small shopping area like this if someone can't spot the repetitive nature of bots like this then I'd be shocked. I have reported bots for years in MMO's and one that was at the shops would follow a pattern that would be easily discernible.

To summarize, auction house bots are easy to write because they are given simple commands and can buy all of a certain item with zero effort and essentially remove it from the market. If this game went the route of an auction house I'd quit before launch because I know the outcome. Having played numerous MMO's in the past few years that use auction houses they always end up the same with dozens of AH bots grabbing items and the only people that can detect them are the game's team since we can't see their actions (standing still, in a crowd usually) on the AH and report them. The effect that they have on an economy is oppressive and allows a person to manipulate the economy and make massive amounts of money with no effort or actual skill.

[Atis]

I'm not even sure this is why the team has chosen this system, but its definitely harder to bot. Keep in mind players items are in a random order, so its much harder to write commands for a bot to search. My understanding is the bot would also need to be able to search the code (or packets) to determine what items are placed in the shop because it can't "see" them physically and the order. The team wouldn't be the ones catching them, in a small shopping area like this if someone can't spot the repetitive nature of bots like this then I'd be shocked. I have reported bots for years in MMO's and one that was at the shops would follow a pattern that would be easily discernible.

To summarize, auction house bots are easy to write because they are given simple commands and can buy all of a certain item with zero effort and essentially remove it from the market. If this game went the route of an auction house I'd quit before launch because I know the outcome. Having played numerous MMO's in the past few years that use auction houses they always end up the same with dozens of AH bots grabbing items and the only people that can detect them are the game's team since we can't see their actions (standing still, in a crowd usually) on the AH and report them. The effect that they have on an economy is oppressive and allows a person to manipulate the economy and make massive amounts of money with no effort or actual skill.

Bot would search all entries, order doesn't matter. Naturally botting requires reading packets but it can be done by sniffing packet exchange between legit client and server or bot can play via normal client by reading client's memory. Unity is a popular engine with open documentation and I doubt there is serious encryption implemented.

There wont be anything extremely repetitive unless botter is dumb. I already described that in my previous post: you would see same character checking vendors maybe once an hour, then switching character and checking 15 mins later from different end of marketplace. With hundred players in Serb it will be hard to track them by player's efforts only. You would need devs to check days worth of logs to find a pattern. You caught bots who were run by amateurs, at same time there could be dozens of them near you and you never noticed.

If you limit everything you would hinder bots but also legit players. Checking vendors 1 by 1 all the time is a huge hassle. Piling up time sinks increases minimal time requirement for getting anywhere in game. While you are happy about current market, there are 20 players who love economics but cant afford extra hour a day just to check vendors. Game keeps you and repels them.

I'd prefer vendors that can be placed anywhere outside of small no-deploy zones (doors, NPCs). P:G towns are empty anyway, might all well populate them with vendors. That would turn market's weakness into strength, players would be able to create local markets anywhere. New guy wants to check Kur and finds vendor with "Cheap Warm Clothes" sign in Hogan's keep. No need to sift through all vendors in Serb and consignments beforehand.