Not enough stomachs drop to warrant the skill. There several critters that should, that don't... They're just stupid rare.
Not enough stomachs drop to warrant the skill. There several critters that should, that don't... They're just stupid rare.
"Craft items and sell to players. This forces me to progress very slowly since I have to depend on a variable player market to level up my skill. I'm going to guess there's not going to be a lot of demand for rough leather gear, for example. This may also force me to to take a loss selling these items if the players trying to level a given skill oversupply the available market"
Replying to this part-You are right, aside from tailoring gear with pockets, crafted gear in general is near impossible to sell to players, there are too many skill variations for that (I tried). I would say the NPCs like Joeh or Larsan will have to stay, it's pretty much a standard in games to have weapons, armors and accessories NPCs. I was really in this case talking only about some of the NPCs, why sell amazing skinning knives or statues to Yogzi when players would definitely buy them. At least that was my logic, maybe a bit extreme. Let's say lower the options instead of removing them in order to force some useful things into the players market. Players buy their tools mostly from used tabs anyway where they pay double the price the crafter got for them. Nobody benefits, it's just NPC cash sink.
Maybe people have other preferences when they buy off player stalls, I pretty much buy anything that's well priced (i.e.gems at 150-200) even if I don't need them straight away. Scrolls that I know are rare (maybe friends need them), faded books, notus records, leather, wood, femurs, poetry, even flowers. So sell them to me not to Jesina or Marna:P
At least that's the end goal for me, I don't know if everyone feels that way and I'm no specialist in MMOs economy. It just seems better to have player interaction on a market than player-NPC interaction for everything.
Last edited by Khaylara; 04-04-2017 at 08:47 PM.
Have not read the thread except the original post , my input is as a low level and just starting I have never had enough money to buy anything I want, I struggle daily and have nothing and no money. I have done some work orders, I have done things and I make no money. My girl has about 3k and never had more than around 5 or 6k ever. (Level 25 in some stuff)
I would not want to see anything changed for the worse, this could be a game breaker for many. I don't want it easy or I'd have posted and complained about how hard it is but to read a post to make it harder, had to stay something <3
~~Sparkle~~
A single player would be capable of supplying the entire server with adequate amazing skinning knives, utility knives, and organ knives. Since multiple servers have toolcrafting, prices are driven down near cost.
Equilibrium is an important concept in economics. Prices stabilize where the supply curve meets the demand curve. As supply increases, demand decreases. There's no market for most crafted items since most folks either have the skill, or have a guild mate that will do it for free. Work orders pick up the slack in the system and make crafting profitable through an artificial market. Even the most expensive skill in the game, Cheesemaking, will never be profitable.
As for new players selling stomachs and poetry books under market value, while markets are efficient, there are inefficiencies in markets that can cause undesirable outcomes. Another player mentioned a tooltip on items with a current outstanding work order. That's hella smart.
I agree with this heartily. Ideally, store owners should be focusing on specialized shops. I don't think it should be forced, but I do think it should be incentivized. Most of the stalls are just totally random stuff and it really kills any interest in checking them.
One improvement would be to have a shop's decorations be automatically updated based on what you have in stock, so if you have six stacks of gems, a stack of flower seeds and two pieces of random gear in stock, it'll show the gem decorations whether you like it or not.
Another nice feature would be the ability to reserve slots for a specific item to allow easy restocking and to notify customers if you're out of stock temporarily.
For example, one of your main sellers is baked beets. You decide to make a reserved slot of baked beets. If the stack in that slot runs out, it will show up to customers as "Buy 1 for 6000 councils : Baked Beets(Out of Stock)". You can then swing by with a stack of baked beets and hit "Auto-Restock" and it would automatically refill that slot with the same pricing information.
I don't agree with this however. NPC used tabs have a significant factor in the market price of items. If you can buy it off someone's used tab whenever you want, then there's no way players will be able to sell it for more than double face value. It prevents people from driving the market prices of things to ridiculous levels, unless those things are also ridiculously rare and/or never vendored. Vendor money should also be a viable option to fund your adventures if you're the kind of person who hates player economy.
Don't agree with removing work orders, but they absolutely NEED to be account locked just like stalls are. In addition, muling/multiboxing should be straight up banned, end of story. It leads to issues with storage, it leads to issues with supply and demand, it leads to issues with inflation, it leads to issues with player stalls. I will be sad to say goodbye to my music alts and their gardening buffs, but honestly even that is something that really shouldn't be allowed.
I know it's something that would cause a lot of stress within the community, and would be very difficult to enforce, but if you discourage it enough the practice will just naturally die out once other options become more convenient.
Suggestions include
-Alleviate the need for mules. Add more storage that is more easily accessible, increase stack size on problematic items like milk, crafting supplies, etc. Add more ways to increase your max inventory.
-Set starting inventory really, really low. Compensate by drastically increasing the bonus inventory slots granted by endurance.
-Make tailoring pockets add an endurance requirement so that you can't deck out a level 2 mule with +40 slot rags.
-Make trade window capacity scale based on inventory size. A mule with level 4 endurance and their tiny 15 slot inventory will only be able to transfer 3 items at a time, which would add a lot of frustration to the muling process, particularly to those without multiple monitors.
I think in the case of some value dissonant items, like stomachs, that the solution should be to make their rarity match their existing face value. The fact that stomachs are work 1500c a piece is unforgivably broken and is the kind of thing that should be hotfixed imo. Even if it's just a temporary solution until animal husbandry comes out, stomachs should be cheap and plentiful. You should be able to get them off every sheep and cow and deer you come across, and one stomach should be yielding much MUCH more than a single rennet. Their market value should be 5c, just like their face value.
Examples of other items that were once like this and have since been fixed includes: Tufts of fur, wool, lemons, fish scales, powdered mammal
Other value dissonant items, primarily poetry books, should have their face value adjusted to match their rarity. I don't entirely agree with just how rare poetry books are(especially now that the skill is required for bard), but I do think they should be rare and valuable, and the face value should reflect that. Recipe scrolls are a good example of what poetry should be like. You get your rare drop, it's face value is 3500, you instantly know that this is hard to get and worth a lot to people who need it.
This, I'm not really sure how to feel about. I think in order for dropped gear to be nerfed, transmutation needs to be buffed significantly, otherwise dropped gear is totally useless and the only reason to do dungeons is for the max enchanting crystals. This is already sort of the case for crafters, but that's another topic.
Also, in order for crafted gear to be buffed, armor vendors would need to be nerfed significantly, which is not a good plan, and dropped gear would need to be buffed astronomically.
I think currently, the best system for selling gear is to have customers commission gear to be crafted and pay for the raw materials consumed, with a markup for skilled labor and profit. There's really no other way to predict what will sell, because you have no idea what skills potential customers are using, what level they are, what mods they want, and what items they want. A system that facilitates gear crafting commissions would a do a lot to improve that slice of the economy.
My idea is an advertisement board that would allow crafters to advertise and outline their services and customers to find people who can make what they need. Sort of like player work orders, but reverse. Combine that with improvements to custom chat channels, and you have an excellent foundation for crafting commissions.
I like the idea of made-to-order, player crafted gear. I know that I'd happily pay a few hundred thousand for a set of gear with the skills I want. It would mean I wouldn't have to store the materials, and there would be a considerable margin for the crafter. The problem right now is that the system is too random to support it, and it's too much of a gamble for either party. We also need more crafting specialization -- one character shouldn't be able to create every leather working and tailoring recipe. There are also no rare recipes, which is the solution that other games have offered.
I'd be happy to give up my mules if existing storage wasn't so inconvenient, but I feel that this is also unenforceable and a lost cause. What's the difference of playing two accounts and having a main account and a mule account? You can play two accounts, but just play one at once.
Figuring out a better storage system is going to be important for the new GUI, and I'd support better storage scaling depending on character level if it were more convenient to access items. I find myself often just buying whatever I need instead of trying to remember where I stashed a stack of maple or oregano. I just want a single bank vault that's convenient to access. Perhaps instead of unlocking slots with NPCs, slots could be unlocked in a vault by raising favor with certain NPCs. There's no benefit in forcing players to keep spreadsheets and spend time running back and forth.
I think you guys are right about not removing some items from vendors but I don't really know how to fix this: there were quite a few shops which had tools at base value (mine included at some point) but people wouldn't get them from the shops, they'd still go to used tabs. Yes, I normally craft for free when people ask but I wanted to offer them at base value for others that didn't ask but needed them. So basically there's no competition between player stalls but competition between a player stall and an NPC used tab.
Maybe increase the mats needed (especially because there are options now to get a lot of metal slabs) and increase their base value? Don't really know tbh but that's how we make money sometimes, craft a bunch of leather rolls and sell them to Lamashu. Then someone actually shouts to buy great skins or whatever. I'd rather sell to players.
"Also, in order for crafted gear to be buffed, armor vendors would need to be nerfed significantly, which is not a good plan, and dropped gear would need to be buffed astronomically."
Hox, could you please detail this? I don't understand the nerfing part, I was just thinking to increase the face value of items tagged as "crafted by ..."
About gear crafted on demand at high prices the idea is great if there's demand. The rng involved in crafting gear is a bit of a downer but if I can sell a piece of max enchant yellow with about 30k (and people could transmute it to customize it) it would probably balance the cost without requiring materials from the "customer".
"I agree with this heartily. Ideally, store owners should be focusing on specialized shops. I don't think it should be forced, but I do think it should be incentivized. Most of the stalls are just totally random stuff and it really kills any interest in checking them. "
"Forced" only by the fact that you wouldn't be able to add weapons in a shop placed in the "Potions" room, that's all. Just to make the shops easier to browse.
Last edited by Khaylara; 04-05-2017 at 03:07 AM.
Limiting inventory based on endurance is far too harsh to new players in my opinion. I regularly run out of space on the newbie island as it is.
Now, if you want to limit the number of items you can trade at a time based on endurance, that could actually be an interesting proposal to limit the attractiveness of mules. I wouldn't want to ban mules outright - it's hard to police and if storage in the game can be sufficiently adjusted that most players don't feel the need to create mules, I don't think it matters if a few players want to keep mules around to store their special town dresses or whatever.
I like the idea for the vendors, but perusing them is really tough with the UI right now.
Anything to make the shops easier to interact with would be awesome.
My suggestions are meant to improve the ways for newer players (like yourself) to make cash. Atm the whole system is catering to older players who have maxed crafting skills and the possibility to get involved in trades or complete high level WOs sometimes multiple times .
If you could afford a stall you could sell the raw materials you make for a better price than you sell with at the NPCs. Simple stuff like a stack of pork, if you sell at the NPC you get 1k, if I buy it from that NPC I pay 2k. Why not sell it directly to me for 1.8 k? You make extra money, I pay slightly less than I'd pay to Fainor, everyone wins. Providing I don't stash pork on my army of alts (cause ideally I wouldn't be allowed an army of alts) I should buy it from you, the newer player. That would be a good trade system.
At least that was my logic, I probably didn't transfer thought into text that well
PS 3-6 k for level 25 is not bad at all considering you're training skills while leveling. Not trying to make things easy for newer players per se, just more balanced.
Last edited by Khaylara; 04-06-2017 at 05:56 AM.