Ideas for a healthier game economy

[rastaah]

I have actually neglected most skills etc but I do have the most needed And I did manage Animal handling but no I have hardly any skills also as I can't afford my recipes and such, some are very expensive. I am pretty much stuck, right now moving in real life so not playing a ton but will be again once moved and will try to work on money but again, this is the one part of the game I do not like as I see it as being a siren song for people selling pixel currency later as quite frankly I don't find it fun to never have any money.


just sayin' and might help to have a newbs perspective.

Having said that if any other people who are new have figured it out, let me know I would love to do better.

3 to 6k is not a lot when you have nothing for your character and can't afford most things.

[Yaksnot]

I disagree about player vendors, the idea is cute..i guess...but it doesn't work. Its seriously a shitty version of an Auction house. it sucked in AC it sucks here. sorry but that's just the blunt truth of it.

It could be reworked in that you buy space on an auction type board to keep the skill slots, but yea get rid of player vendors. its a complete pain in the ass to find anything and it honestly usually just faster to go out and farm something real quick rather than slog thru all the vendors.

only exception is if you want to power thru something and need like 20 of an item, but then of course there is no way to find the best price, on an item or even the item itself!, other than going thru every single vendor and writing down the name and location of the vendors that are listing that item for sale so you can compare and contrast the number of said item vs how many of that item is being sold by each vendor that you have located.

I honestly just see it as another bottleneck for time. The idea was kind of neat and reminiscent of AC, but with no quick way to find what you are looking for an compare prices, its just a complete waste of time.

I understand that some people like it this way and I wouldn't be surprised if most of the people that like it that way have either A) some gain by keeping the current system or B) don't realize there are other ways to do things or C) like some kind of role-play time sink bottleneck aspect of it.


my 2 cents on the vendors...

Yak

Edited for clarity and redacted where too much profanity

[Khaylara]

Not sure if my post was confusing but...what I said about player stalls was that they need to be better organized by sections exactly so we can find things easier and not spend half an hour browsing and getting increasingly aggravated. I have a different opinion on auction house type of games. I can't talk about AC but I loved AH and player stalls in other games. There's going to be no auction house in PG (as stated by Citan several times), the player stalls are here to stay so imo we should come up with suggestions to make this type of market work for the entire playerbase.

[cratoh]

I've been mulling over this for some time. What triggered me to post was another topic about work orders and the other trigger was realizing how much time I waste sifting through vendor stalls and consignment to find 1 ectoplasm or one gem to try an extraction.
So my ideas without any particular logic

1-make the vendor stalls cheaper but limit the types of items. For example if the room says "Potions" you can't place armors and weapons in your shop. Even NPCs refuse to consign certain items. Imo this system would encourage specialized shops, thus specialized crafts (not necessarily a craft like leatherworking or tailoring but also surveying, gardening etc).The stalls are currently too chaotic to find anything and there's no price competition when you simply have to check every single stall for a certain gem you eventually give in and buy it at 250 cause you don't have time to search ALL the shops.

2-remove the stalls kept for storage. If a stall is empty (the content is not shown) that stall should be closed. Maybe with a penalty for using it as storage room.

3-remove the option to sell things to certain NPCs or/and lower their money pool. For example Lamashu, Yogzi, Amutasa...they buy a lot of carpentry, tools, leather rolls etc which would be much better in player shops. Make it the viable way to sell things. I would definitely buy meditation stools, wood, many would buy tools etc from a shop that sells slightly above the face value and not double the price as it is now with used tabs. Just an example btw, the same thing can be said about the NPCs who buy scrolls, foods etc


4-remove work orders or account lock them just like player stalls, per account. I lvled crafts w/o work orders and it's doable. At the moment it only creates inflation and forces people into exploiting the system.Related, next point

5-don't allow dualboxing/multiboxing on multiple accounts for muling or any other purpose. One account should be enough. Let me detail why before anyone flames and the topic gets locked:
-multiboxing for storage on like 5 different accounts allows players to circumvent the whole storage-favor system. Why would anyone travel between their storage spots when they can stay in serbule and transfer wood, gems, bones to a separate alt for each material. Very convenient but not how it's intended to work.
-multiple accounts in a guild-coin pouches=inflation and unearned cash by one player.
-multiple mules=the materials get hoarded and used by one player and are not being circulated into the game market. The result is a player in "single player mode" who doesn't need to buy or sell almost anything. No need for any interaction with other players in the game market (at the moment many players do this because it's the only viable way to make cash or level tradeskills)
-work orders completed on multiple accounts
-player stalls on multiple accounts

6-Increase/adjust some of the prices. For example nobody is going to buy a piece of cheese if I'm selling it at real market value. I mean who's going to pay 2200-2500 for a piece of cheese. What goes into it-a stomach is 1500+, couple of mushrooms, 2 bottles of milk sold atm at 250-300 each, firkin/barrel/kilderkin (wood+hoops/slabs), some sort of textile like cheesecloth. My idea is adjust the face value for really valuable items like stomachs and apply point no 1 to create competitive pricing.

7-Also needed-decrease the amount of gear drops but increase their value. Same with crafted pieces, those should be even more valuable.The argument I made for cheesemaking can be easily applied to tailoring and leatherworking. A piece of purple max enchanted 70 gear is around 1k+. A vervadium sells with 3k minimum in shops (?!). Ofc we can farm it but i'm talking about the case in which we buy materials (that's how it usually works in a healthy economy, buy raw materials from others, sell the finished product, you make a profit, they make a profit).

No flaming please, discuss/add but keep it civil, if we start arguing it breaks the ToS and it gets locked. Bring arguments to support you ideas or to debate mine, no personal attacks. Thanks and looking forward to reading some other suggestions

Ok, so I'll have a go at responding to some of your ideas

1. Quite a few points here. I agree that they are very expensive, and could do with being lowered. The chaotic and totally user-unfriendly aspect could be sorted by a total rework of the vendor stalls area, and making them more like conventional brokers from other games. Make NPC brokers in each area. Have a weapon/gear room with a cloth armour vendor, leather armour vendor and heavy armour vendor. Crafter room with a harvestable item vendor (skins, animal parts etc) , gardening vendor with seeds, fruit, veg, flowers, an alchemy vendor with reagents, potions etc you see where I am going with this. Make it easier to list what you have for sale, and easier to find what you want to buy.

2. Quite agree, but by doing what I said in pint one you make this moot.

3. Quite disagree. Increasing favour to increase money pools is a core feature. It's also one of the only ways to recuperate cash spent making endless combines only made in order to scrape a few points to get next level. Your point that you would buy these items holds no water in reality because there simply isn't enough demand to make it viable. There are already a few stalls run by enterprising people who sell tools. And there are already people who sell wood and all the other stuff.

4. No. Why should someone be penalised for making alts? People enjoy making alts. Synergy skills for example from level 35 carpentry giving +1 hammer makes it worth levelling it - and levelling industry on extra toons is to be expected - making alts is expensive.

5. Muling is part of practically every game I've ever played. People who play a lot always seem to end up doing it. I'd rather it stayed. I have several mules and have stuff stored across multiple storage and alts. Doesn't stop me buying and selling stuff, and I certainly don't play in 'single player mode' so this point is erroneous.

6. The market value of cheese is not as high as the components, just because it is a pretty broken skill at the moment, on account of the way that stomachs are broken.

7. This makes no sense. Why reduce drops then increase value, that changes nothing. Crafted gear just got reduced in value, so yeah, Eric has now priced it at what he thinks it ought to be. I think it is a bit cheaper than it should be. The point about vervadium is really just off - here's why. Vervadium is used of course to max enchant gear. It's free to have a few goes each day making max enchant gear. In order to have extra goes, you need to buy vervadium from someone who doesn;t want to try themselves, therefore vervadium is a luxury item, so it will have a high out of wack price. That should not be included in any resale price. The whole buy/sell/healthy profit thing is not vald with vervadium.


In my own opinion a healthy economy is driven by ease of commodity trade between players. One way to kill a healthy economy is to stifle the way that cash flows into it. Another way to stifle a healthy economy is to make player to player trade difficult.

[Khaylara]

"7. This makes no sense. Why reduce drops then increase value" - Imho too many drops in places like DC, nexus, lab, gk, most not even worth keeping for sale because of their low price (unless we save space by distilling ofc). I thought getting less drops that would have a higher value would be good.
I do think crafted gear should be pricier than dropped gear. It's harder to craft than to kill 1 elite so I figured the reward should be higher. And for max enchant it should be even higher because vervadium and winterprize don't grow on trees. Again effort-reward.
Gear wise what I meant was the price of any gear should be a tad higher than it is.

"Another way to stifle a healthy economy is to make player to player trade difficult." - at the monent IT IS difficult at least that's what I think. I just spent 20 minutes browsing shops for 1 item that's probably not even for sale. I'm better off going to farm it at this point. So if anyone sells it, their loss I just don't have the patience to browse all that jumbled mess in the citadel.

"4. No. Why should someone be penalised for making alts? People enjoy making alts. Synergy skills for example from level 35 carpentry giving +1 hammer makes it worth levelling it" I do not understand this part but my reasoning is just leveling industry on 10 toons shouldn't be enough to fill high level work orders. If those toons have the skill to craft the items, sure but crafting with 1 toon and distributing to 10 sounds like an exploit to me. Also Industry leveling is fairly easy imho even without transferring items.

[sudostahp]

"Another way to stifle a healthy economy is to make player to player trade difficult." - at the monent IT IS difficult at least that's what I think. I just spent 20 minutes browsing shops for 1 item that's probably not even for sale. I'm better off going to farm it at this point. So if anyone sells it, their loss I just don't have the patience to browse all that jumbled mess in the citadel.

AC had a plugin that addressed this perfectly. /trade !search vervadium

Any tradebot with the item would reply that it was in stock. Citan could even set it to reply with a price and location of the vendor.

Simple, elegant solution that doesn't require rent-a-vendors to have any restrictions or complications.

[Yaksnot]

Not sure if my post was confusing but...what I said about player stalls was that they need to be better organized by sections exactly so we can find things easier and not spend half an hour browsing and getting increasingly aggravated. I have a different opinion on auction house type of games. I can't talk about AC but I loved AH and player stalls in other games. There's going to be no auction house in PG (as stated by Citan several times), the player stalls are here to stay so imo we should come up with suggestions to make this type of market work for the entire playerbase.

-shrug-

It needs to be easier to use, and until people can find items faster and compare prices it will never be anywhere near fully utilized. I understand people use them and I have personally made thousands upon thousands of councils from them. bless you people. But I wont be touching them until they get reworked. For me it is an absolute frustration, that is zero fun and something i will absolutely avoid until fixed.

again its a cute idea but needs to have a command to be 1) easier to find items and the ability to 2) compare the price of items

-shrug-

Yak

[Khaylara]

@Yaksnot that's why I thought it was important we have a suggestions thread. And I can't pretend to know anything about implementing sudostahp's idea but it sounds good.

[cratoh]

I really don't see what the big deal is about having a broker as we basically have already just got loads of individual brokers. Anyone can run around and find what price soemthing should be by demand and price accordingly - the current system just makes it really annoying, and time consuming in a laggy area.

[Extractum11]

time consuming in a laggy area.

Yep, I find myself going through the vendor stalls less and less because of this. Especially when half of stalls have the same stuff at the same price every single day. Having a centralized broker could help combat some of the ridiculous price gouging.