Economy Feedback and Suggestion
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The biggest thing I see with the in-game economy at the moment is that there are massive inputs into the games economy without sufficient drains. Marketplaces like the auction house are completely dependent on having a high volume of players that have a demand for the materials being sold. The laws of supply and demand being what they are, the system will most likely fluctuate between a glut of low tier items, and a glut of high tier items. With the constant influx of gold from mobs, the end result will be rampant inflation, as is common in virtually every mmo. In order to fix the problem there has to be sufficient drains to handle the constant influx of gold and goods. However, if the direct exchange is made from goods to gold, or gold to goods, then very little drains out of the system, even taking into account building, crafting, and the other drains that are already implemented.
My suggestion is to tackle it from multiple angles. First, create a donation vault for the city which players can put items into directly, but not take items from directly. Then require goods in addition to gold to upgrade city rank, taking the goods from the vault. Goods used to upgrade city rank would be removed from the game entirely at the time of rank up. Second, provide a city merchant that sells excess goods provided to the city. Vary the vender price based on volume of goods available, with the city collecting a tax for each sale. The city governor can set which goods they want to place on reserve so that they are not being sold at the vender.
Instead of receiving gold for their donations, players could receive other benefits tbd, such as buffs, tax exemption based on value of donations, access to larger or more plots, etc. The vender could also be set up with a sum of gold from the city treasury that could be used to purchase goods from citizens/residents, perhaps with daily limits per character to prevent abuse and throttle the influx of gold into the economy.
Additionally, trade caravans could be commissioned between the player ran cities and the server controlled cities, allowing excess goods to be funneled into the starting cities where they could be removed after a time, providing revenue for city initiating the caravan as well as providing something for players to pillage/guard.
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To your first point, there is a drain out of the system, its called PvP.
When you die, you lose some items depending on your Alignment status.
Plus you have durability that cannot be repaired, so items leave the economy.
Don't get me started on imbuing, the shear amount of materials you need to be imbued in tier2 is a lot.
You don't have to be imbued, but to be competitive in a PvP battle, the PvPers will be.
And the enchanting, which to make a full set of equipment to +5 will cost you around 100k-120k gold.
And you can lose it anytime.To upgrade a level of a city, you already have to pay a lot of gold, and resources in a way of meat and grains, and plus you have to upkeep the city every 3 days with a lot of meat and grains as well.
Grains can only be obtained by farming, and there is a finite amount of farming land you can put in a city.
Plus you have raids of a city, To initiate a siege you pay 20k or 30k gold depending on if the city is Village or Town.
And if the attackers successfully raided the city, they will get an upgrade worth of materials, so for example for a city that is above rank 10, it will be 50k gold, 80 sacks of grains and 40 sacks of meat, and if they don't have those materials at the time of the raid, they would lose a rank ( which is a level essentially).
Ah the cherry on top, when you die in a siege, you lose your equipment to, and you revive, so you can then go to a chest and take another set, and die once again.
So you essentially will have to have alot of sets ready if you want to defend your city.About the caravans, No, there shouldn't be AI run caravans, The system is made in a way that player have to be the Caravans, traders will check the market, will see whats needed in another city and will take the wagon, buy or obtain in one city and sell it in another for a profit, so the economy is always player run.
And no we don't need the donation system either.
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There are quite a few gold sinks ingame already.
First of all the city upgrades, which cost a lot of gold.
Then you have the plot purchases and taxes.
Then you have harbors.
Then imbuing and enchants.One thing I would like to see though, is a 6% tax applied to marketplaces. 3% gold sink, 3% to city coffers.
This way you are rewarded as a city to make your place a succesful trading hub.
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@Munch: I never said there wasn't any drain, but rather that there is not enough drains, and more particularly, there are not enough drains that an individual player can interact with. Right now you are playing an alpha build with, if we are honest, a tiny fraction of the number of players that the developer would (hopefully) expect at launch. And as for the limited number of plots, notice that the VAST majority of them are not being used, much less used to their full extent, and still there is a glut of resources.
PvP doesn't solve much, the gear doesn't cost much, and even with imbuing, unless sieges are happening every few hours, the problem will still exist. If there are enough players for sieges to happen every few hours, or even daily, the problem will be even worse as every player that is active within the game will make the problem worse every time they go hunting.
But since you brought up gold, I made 4k in 2 hours. That means your 20-30k is nothing if a whole town is working at it, even without taxes.
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I farmed around 50k in this alpha.
You know how much gold do I have right now? 500g.
There are truly a lot of gold sinks right now. You can never hold on your gold for long.
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I don't know where did you take the impression that they will only have a tiny fraction of people that they are expecting in launch, but you are very wrong, there are alot of people waiting for this game, and were playing it in previous alphas.
Now you see, you are not a critical thinking, because you can not think this one through.
Your whole prospective is flawed with 1 reason, There are no people in this alpha, Your whole prospective is with a server with no people, but you cannot see and think it through how it will be when the server will be full of people.
And as of the limited number of plots? yes there are limited number of plots on THIS world, and on this Island, there will be 9 of these island in the full game, and to be honest most of the players that are from a guild that owns cities, like mine for example ( Criminal Den), most of the guildmates don't have land plots, we all have our chests in the city, we don't even build houses because its not necessary at his point for us.PvP will solve much, PvP is the only reason why things will be valuable, and yes to be competitive in PvP, you will have to Imbue alot, and farming all the materials to imbue properly is ALOT, Mohican and I, we farmed for 3 days to imbue our gear, and this with an almost empty server, with a full server, with constant fighting, this will be 10 times harder and 10 times longer.
Again, your last point that you did 4k in 2 hours, Yes you did 4K in 2 hours, ON A SERVER WITH ALMOST NO POPULATION, it will take you 5 hours on a server with Population, and its not even a fact that you will be able to deliver this money to a safe spot before being killed by a pk.
And to make a set of +4 armor to be competitive in PvP, you need 120K gold, so do the math yourself.I am done here, you are clearly not built for this discussion, because you cannot think this one through.
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@Munch First, stop with the attitude and personal insults. Insulting me doesn't make you right. As for whether or not I am ignorant on the subject, I literally have a degree in game design and game development is my day job . So, no, I don't believe that I am ignorant on the topic. You don't have to agree with me. I could honestly care less whether you do or not. This comment was for the developers. That said...
In one of the last dev videos he essentially made a case for PVE w/o PVP, PVP light, and Full PVP. It's not so cut and dry as your 'pvp solves everything' idea. That's naïve in the extreme. You farmed for three days. Congratulations! How long will that last? Player have to hunt to mobs to reach the top end of the PVP game, simply by virtue of the way skills are acquired. Every one of those mobs will be dropping multiple items every single time they are killed, whether by you or someone else. The fact that it takes you, individually, some time to find the item you want doesn't matter in the slightest, because the items are still being generated constantly. If an item has a 1% drop rate, it will drop 1% of the time. That doesn't mean it will drop for YOU, but it will drop 1% of the time. If there is as much competition for mobs on higher population servers as you suggest, that means that the mobs are being killed constantly, with every kill spawning more objects into the game....constantly. Without knowing exact mob counts, drop rates, etc, it is not possible to calculate how many objects, but they won't be that scarce. It will be next to impossible for players to consistently maintain a sufficient drain, even on rare resources, to prevent the kind of economic inflation that occurs.
More to the point, your calculations appear to be missing a lot of variables. For starters, if you have a full server population all resources will flow into the system far, far faster than they currently do. Depending on server balance, if the distribution is split, to give you the benefit of the doubt, 20/30/50|good/neutral/evil | no pvp/pvp light/full pvp, capped at a solid 60 per city, and 32 cities. If those 60 people hunted low level bandits for 2 hours, pulling 4k each, that would add 240k*32 = 7.68m Gold pumping into the game's economy daily. In all likelihood it will be at least double that, if not more, although it will likely follow a Pereto distribution instead of being gained equally among all players, and it doesn't matter how that gold gets shuffled around unless it gets removed from the game. And that 120k gold you spent...where did it go? Taxes? To the auction house? Just how exactly did it get REMOVED from the game?
If they each filled up just a single horse drawn cart with heavy goods, (603230) 57.6k objects being added into the game. Light objects are worse because they respawn faster and can be carried at much higher capacity. Mob drops are the worst, because they spawn quickly and drop multiple objects per mob, even at the lowest levels. Couple that with 16 hour processing times for leather and the like and limited availability of land to put processing facilities (because there will be trade-offs between types of facilities, public vs. private plots, etc) and what you will end up with is a glut of low tier items flooding the market. They simply will not be able to be processed and/or consumed at the rate that they flow into the game. And those numbers don't even assume that people are really playing that much. Your description of your guild actually supports this assertion, because you will have a full guild donating and pooling resources instead of spending those resources on their own plots, and no doubt your guild will be attempting to min/max production on those plots. But, at the end of the day, it wouldn't get rid of the problem because if your guild was full and active daily they would overflow your capacity for both processing and storage in short order. The only reason you haven't seen it yet is because of server wipes and limited playerbase.
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@Daarknes said in Economy Feedback and Suggestion:
Right now you are playing an alpha build with, if we are honest, a tiny fraction of the number of players that the developer would (hopefully) expect at launch.
@munch said in Economy Feedback and Suggestion:
I don't know where did you take the impression that they will only have a tiny fraction of people that they are expecting in launch, but you are very wrong, there are alot of people waiting for this game, and were playing it in previous alphas.
Try reading for comprehension before making an argument.
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Saying that you are not thinking critically is not an insult, is an observation of your perspective on things.
You are ignorant to everything, and the fact that you have degree in game design is even worse if that's your perspective on things, and you having a degree in game design doesn't say anything to me, or gives you any advantage in this discussion.
Because degrees say nothing, and degree in game design doesn't say nothing even more, because most of the games, that are designed by game designers fail miserably, just because those people are so arrogant with their " degree in game design" that they won't even listen to anybody else.So to your whole arguments that the more there are people the more items are drown into the economy, Yep its true, and the fact that it took me 3 days to farm the materials is only to me is right also, but you are forgetting 1 thing, there is trade and marketplaces in this game, meaning if the market will be flooded with those materials there will be people like me buying it, and what does it mean? that i pay the Market fee which they will add for sure, and there you go, a money sink.
It is actually worse for the economy that i would spend the time farming the materials than i would buy them, because me buying those items actually helps the economy, and money gets deleted, meaning more people, more people buying stuff, more money is being eliminated, meaning the economy is rolling even more.
The thing that is funny to me, in your whole argument is you are not taking into consideration the PKing, the PvP that people will be doing.
You have a degree in game design but yet you are not considering the biggest feature that drives the economy in this game, and its PvP.
You will not be able to simply farm a spot, or even move in the map freely when the server will be full, you will have gankers, you will have people camping farm site to not let you farm the money you need.
And its all maybe comes from you never playing a full loot PvP game, but that how it works, and hearing this from someone with a degree in game design is so much worse, because you should've know how a system like that affects the game, But hey if they never thought you this in the University or whatever you went to, how can you know it eh?
That's just shows even more that you cannot think critically.The 120K that i spent on the gear to make it +4, yes the money has been REMOVED from the game.
I do have a +4 gear, but you know what ? after playing with it for 2 days, half of the gear is already almost broken like 30/100 durability, and the sword is like 5/200 durability already.
So ye, my gear almost broke.
Or you forgot that there is a durability system in the game, and you cannot repair anything?
How could you miss that? You have a degree in game design, don't you?
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Ok, no need to get heated.
@munch yes, he is very wrong on many points, which are cristal clear to us that have played the game. That said, his feedback is still valuable, so let's correct him where he is wrong so that he can construct an opinion based on real facts.
@Daarknes you are making some incredibly wrong assumptions and logic jumps. I will try to point them one by one, so that you can decide what do you think about this game economy without being misled.
First of all, your biggest wrong assumption:
Depending on server balance, if the distribution is split, to give you the benefit of the doubt, 20/30/50|good/neutral/evil | no pvp/pvp light/full pvp, capped at a solid 60 per city, and 32 cities. If those 60 people hunted low level bandits for 2 hours, pulling 4k each, that would add 240k*32 = 7.68m
If those 60 people hunt low level bandits for 2 hours, pulling 4k each, they total something around 200k, not the 7,68m that you assume. That's because on this continent with 32 cities, there is simply no place where to farm gold for more than 150 players, and with anything more than 50 you will hit severe diminishing returns. This isn't World of Warcraft. The world isn't made to support a player base whose full playtime is supposed to be spent farming something. Most of the players will be doing a lot of different activities, only a small amount actually go around hunting gold dropping mobs.
And that 120k gold you spent...where did it go? Taxes? To the auction house? Just how exactly did it get REMOVED from the game?
Completely removed from the game. That's how the enchanting system works. Pure gold sink. It goes puff. Then your weapon breaks and those golds may have as well never existed in the first place. And that's only one of the many gold sinks a player encounters.
If they each filled up just a single horse drawn cart with heavy goods, (603230) 57.6k objects being added into the game.
I didn't count them, but I estimate around 500 mining nodes in the map. They have an 8 hour respawn time. 1500 ore minerals added to the game each day in the ideal case where all nodes are mined on cooldown. That means around 220 ingots (each ingot takes 5-9 minerals, depending on the required heat). Each player wearing metal, breaks around 1 weapon every 4 days and one armor every week. That's around 2.32 ingots per day. The full capacity of production of all mines can cover less than 100 players wearing metal.
Leather/cloth numbers are completely different and indeed there is a problem there. We have many threads on the matter where you are welcome to partecipate.All of this, without even taking pvp into consideration.
So, given that those are the actual numbers, do you still believe that there is a problem of inflation?
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Both of you have interesting points, and BOTH of you make some wrong assumptions.
@munch PvP is not going to be full loot open everywhere on any planet but Tartarus, so your PvP projections are flawed
@Daarknes You are looking at things with an eye to optimum gathering/collection/production and that is not the case.
Players will often prioritize their inventory and leave items on mobs to not be collected whatsoever. Other players will stockpile items for future use, and neither sell those items, nor use them but hold them in perpetuity.
You are also looking at the game with the "sliders" of difficulty and production set to Alpha Testing standards for no more than a month long testing phase with limited population. Neither of you, nor any of us, really, knows what those sliders will be set to once the game goes live. They are still playing around with all the numbers all over the board and will continue to do so all the way up until launch one would assume.
As @spoletta stated, there are several money sinks in the game. In an alpha, typically money is undervalued because other mechanics are what's being focused on and tested. The true Economy of the game really won't start to show until late Beta at the earliest. Once we know the more finalized costs for things like portals to the other planets and asteroids, transportation(however it is done) to the other 2 continents on our home worlds, final shipyard costs, final upkeep and upgrade costs for towns, Percentages of overall taxes that the game sinks from the various things you do in game, like crafting and selling. All of that will adjust.
YES, in those places where PvP is high, you will find a lot more degradation of equipment as PvP combat tends to go through durability a lot faster than mob combat. Thus, you will have a lot of equipment leave the resources of the game and need to be replaced. That is not to mention the equipment that the losing player has to replace because it was looted from them, while the looting player can't sell 'used' equipment in the marketplace. Once the durability of something goes down at all, it is no longer sellable.
YES, the Economy is a concern in the building of the game. That being said, there is no need to sling slurs and name calling over it. You can get on your soap box and claim all kinds of credentials about game design and how long you've been testing...shoot, I've played and tested MMOs since they started in the 90s, and I TAUGHT Game Design. doesn't mean I'm the world's biggest expert on the game. (Granted, I may act like it sometimes, lol) all opinions have merit, just remember that in an Alpha state, you are nowhere near where you can judge the final product's viability.
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@munch Didn't miss those things. They simply don't do enough to combat the issue. Time will tell.
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Well you also have PvP on this world we are playing now, yes the Goods will only lose 2 items, but they will lose their inventory.
And the reds will lose everything.
So yes, there will be alot of pking on this world, and people will not be able to farm freely and to move freely in the world all the time.Its like the Red Zone in Albion, you will not have PvP all the time here, but you will have enough.
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@munch They are still playing with the PvP on Syndesia, there is a chance that PvEers might be able to flag themselves in such a way that they can't really be PvP'd at all. Time will tell. The mix between the worlds is still way up in the air, but sufficient PvP to count as a massive gold sink is not guaranteed by any means right now.
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I seriously doubt that we will ever see that kind of flagging, also because this test has actually run very smoothly pk wise. There were a few cases of PKing, but rampant PKing was hardly an issue.
Even if we don't consider PvP at all though, the game right now has probably too many gold sinks as it is. We've got the opposite issue. Gold disappears too fast, and with more players it will only get worse.
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@spoletta Well the PKing is not rampant, because there are no players.
When you will have people farming, and people PvEing, you will see alot of new PKers emerge.
That's just how it all works.
Nobody wants to be flagged right now, running around the whole map not finding anyone to kill for hours ( been there, done that).
For example your city has Coal, i bet you when the game comes out you will want to sell Coal, and you will have few people in that Coal mine, pking everyone that wants to gather some, making people buying from your city's marketplace, same with every location and every mine.Ports will be camped out too, general farming spots too.
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I'm not on a soapbox about being right, I simply do not appreciate being called ignorant for expressing an opinion that someone disagrees with. I expressed a concern, not a certainty. Having a degree in game design or working as a game dev doesn't make me right, but it does qualify me as not ignorant on the topic of game economies.
Also, for anyone that is interested Extra Credits did a nice
about hyperinflation in MMO's. Maybe not as good as some others I've seen or read, but it is a nice TLDR for folks that are short on time.@spoletta said in Economy Feedback and Suggestion:
If those 60 people hunt low level bandits for 2 hours, pulling 4k each, they total something around 200k, not the 7,68m that you assume. That's because on this continent with 32 cities, there is simply no place where to farm gold for more than 150 players, and with anything more than 50 you will hit severe diminishing returns. This isn't World of Warcraft. The world isn't made to support a player base whose full playtime is supposed to be spent farming something. Most of the players will be doing a lot of different activities, only a small amount actually go around hunting gold dropping mobs.
32 cities, 60 players each, 4k per player per day, so (60 x 32 x 4000), for clarities sake. And that was based on a light assumption of 2 hrs. Later in my argument I mentioned the Pereto Distribution which is the 80/20 rule. On a server of 2k people, an average of 400 will generate 80% of the gold wealth that flows into the game. The same is highly likely to generally hold true for other resources and player distributions.
@spoletta said in Economy Feedback and Suggestion:
I didn't count them, but I estimate around 500 mining nodes in the map. They have an 8 hour respawn time. 1500 ore minerals added to the game each day in the ideal case where all nodes are mined on cooldown. That means around 220 ingots (each ingot takes 5-9 minerals, depending on the required heat). Each player wearing metal, breaks around 1 weapon every 4 days and one armor every week. That's around 2.32 ingots per day. The full capacity of production of all mines can cover less than 100 players wearing metal.
Hence the reason I said large items, which includes wood which spawns 6-8 pieces per spawn.
@spoletta said in Economy Feedback and Suggestion:
So, given that those are the actual numbers, do you still believe that there is a problem of inflation?
Yes, actually. For starters, if metal is that rare players will use more wood and leather items, which are not as rare. The problem is a cumulative effect that will appear over time. It will not happen instantly. In the beginning, it won't seem to exist at all because of high demands for goods. Then housing saturation will set in, reducing wood/stone consumption. Then workstation saturation will set in as players complete their buildings. Bear in mind that this will occur even if they raise the building technologies to include stone walls and castles and such. It won't remove the problem, only delay it. Eventually, even things like coal and metal ore will become super saturated.
Of course, anyone is welcome to disagree and I would be happy to be proven wrong. Time will tell. That's the beauty of predictions.
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@GamerSeuss said in Economy Feedback and Suggestion:
YES, the Economy is a concern in the building of the game. That being said, there is no need to sling slurs and name calling over it. You can get on your soap box and claim all kinds of credentials about game design and how long you've been testing...shoot, I've played and tested MMOs since they started in the 90s, and I TAUGHT Game Design. doesn't mean I'm the world's biggest expert on the game. (Granted, I may act like it sometimes, lol) all opinions have merit, just remember that in an Alpha state, you are nowhere near where you can judge the final product's viability.
I'm an old timer like you, and I don't claim to be an expert, I just claim to not be ignorant. There is a world of difference between the two. Yes, the game is in an alpha state and it will change. Yes, the economic balance will change as a result of any number of changes that can be made between now and beta. It is, however, fair to say that this is something that should be looked at and consideration should be given to before the game reaches beta because the process of rebalancing an entire economy that late in development is very difficult.
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@Daarknes Wood has never had value in the first place.
There is too much wood in the game, and it is not even considered valuable, nor stone.
But Ore do, because there are only certain locations that a specific ore can be obtained, so you will have to go to that mine, maybe paying the port fees to get there first, and you will have to mine from that location, mind you the Nodes are with a limited number, and never forget about you can be also pked, whilst mining those ores.
So you will end with a situation where a city near those nodes will control the mines, and will sell the ore that is closest to them, and the other city with another ore will do the same.
So when another city will need that ore that the other city will have, they will be trading for that material.No, you having a degree in game design does not qualify for you to not be ignorant about game economies.
Because most of the games, that are being made by game designers, have AWFUL economies, and this whats end up killing those games.Your commend about money, you will not have nearly as many people as you are saying farming money, first of all you have a limited amount of farming spots for gold, with a limited amount of mobs in them and with a respawn time of 10 minutes.
There are not enough farming spots for 1920 people to farm 4k gold each from.
Seems like you are just taking the example of you farming 4k gold in 2hours, on an empty servers, and not understand that this number cannot be replicated when the server will be populated spread on all the population.
