Problems with everyone being able to gather, craft, tame, etc...
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Hello,
As most of us have all played many MMOs over the years, I think the devs should strongly consider the market, and more so the game economy. I started off playing UO, and to this day, 25 years later the server is still up and people are still playing. Why is that? It clearly isn't the amazing graphics from 97. haha.
I think, in part, because the economy of that game really depends on EVERYONE to succeed. For example, I built an entire career as a miner selling my resources. I could do that be I invested a lot of time and money (and skill points) into becoming a top miner.
I've played a few beta stages thus far in Fractured. And I really do enjoy the game, with one major concern. Currently, it seems that everyone can gather every single resource in this game. Everyone can craft everything in this game. There are no KP investments, or talent point investment, or anything. Everyone is literally a Grandmaster gatherer, crafter, and tamer, from Day 1. The market will be unbalanced because of this. The cost of goods/services will be extremely low, and people would most likely be better of just farming bandits for money.
The problem with that, and it's a huge one, is supply and demand. Whenever literally everyone can gather, crafter, and tame, the supply, in the case the ability to supply the market, is 100%. Now there will be some folks out there who don't want to gather/craft/tame, I get that, so let's say 70%. IF it took KP or talent investment, that number would change significantly, because now instead of opening up to everyone and their brother for free and no investment besides time, you would make people choice wisely about their KP, Talent, and Time investments.
Without any sort of investment required (besides time), the demand to meet that supply is extremely low. Why? Because everyone can do it themselves. Why am I going to pay you to make me leather armor, when I can just do it myself in 5 min? The demand is really only going after those 30% folks from early.
Cost: Since basically everyone can gather/craft/tame, and you are only targeting those 30% and since 70% of the server can gather/craft/tame without issue, the PRICE of those items is going to be VERY cheap. Supply and demand. When the supply is high, and the demand is low, the price ends up being very low.My suggestion: Have gather/crafting/taming, take KP, talent points, or some kind of strong investment (besides just time), to increase the cost of those goods. Otherwise, you are going to end up with a server with little to no main gathers, crafters, or tamers. Why would anyone want to invest all that time, and risk of being PKed, only to be rewarded with a dirt-cheap market price?
The website discusses on the front page, different types of career paths. But currently in game, it seems that literally everyone can do all of those things. Therefore, the economy is going to be complete crap if you wanted to go down either of those career paths. I'm not knocking the game, it's just basic business principles being applied.
That is why games like UO and Albion Online are going to be played by some for a long time, those games are built around A- players having to invest points and time into gather, craft, tame (UO), and B- the market of individuals who can't do that therefore have to spend a fair market price to get those services.
Just my thoughts.
Have a blessed day.
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@ShadowLaw I agree with this. I'd like to see more defined non combat roles and people being able to make a living gathering, crafting and selling. Having the capability to do so should come at a cost so not everybody can do everything.
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This is an often discussed point.
While I did enjoy the classic crafting system, which is the one you described, I would invite you to analyze a bit more what is the Fractured approach.It is indeed a problem of supply and demand, as you correctly explained, but you are underselling a lot the value of "time", and you are not considering the value of "scarcity". Fractured is heavily based on those 2.
In UO, mining and crafting something if you had the skill was literally a five minutes job. In Fractured, crafting a suit of armor takes a lot of work and a lot of hours.
The economy of UO in fact was not really solid and had a lot of issues. Many shards imposed a limitation of one single char per account to patch this issue. That kind of supply system which was limited by the existance of dedicated characters, crumbled when pocket workers got into the picture. If you had the skill, you no longer had a need.
In the current system of Fractured, everyone has the skill to be a "dedicated worker", but not everyone plays a dedicated worker. Being a worker in Fractured isn't a matter of what you have, but of what you do with your playing time. It is not an investment of character skills, but an investment of personal play time.
Items have a value because they require play time (and facility time) to be crafted.
To this, you have to add the scarcity of resources. Ore nodes are very limited and with long respawn times. Trees are everywhere, but the good ones not so much and have a 12 hour respawn time. Good quality hides are probably the easier to access, but they weight a lot and those that hunt those mobs rarely get more than a few.
Gathering isn't something that you can do while doing other activies "Oh look a Yew tree! Let's chop it down!", because the heavy item system prevents that. Only those that are going around actually gathering will get the resources to craft. This is very important.Now, we never had a chance to test how good this works in the practice, so we can only look at it on paper. We never had a test which lasted long enough or with enough players to really see if the economy shapes up or not. A month into the beta, we may have something more solid to discuss.
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Total agreement with Spoletta on this.
Due to travel, harvesting, and crafting times there will be a corresponding price for the goods compared to how much gold coin they could have earned farming mobs in the same time.
I have, and will continue to, work on data acquisition for just that conversion. If a player decides my prices are too expensive, they are welcome to do it themselves and then find my prices were not as I did my homework and based my prices off of the time it took to harvest and create the item.
Other players who put goods up for lower prices will see their time devalued, and likely stop. Those who put them at higher prices will not get it sold, and lower. This is the nature of the open market. The best part is that because all markets are local there is the addition of travel and opportunity costs. so while you could look at another market from this market and see there is a better price two towns over, is it worth the trip?
As a moderate crafter I had no problem selling ingots when I wanted to at good prices (1.5k-3k each) since those more interested in PvE or PvP had more access to coin than interest in crafting, and they were more numerous.
The only place where this has not been the case is food goods... and that is mostly because of bugs -sigh-
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I agree with @spoletta and @OlivePit on this.
There has been complaints about the time sink involved in some crafting, but when you consider that's the "investment" side of crafting, you come to realize it will keep the market viable in the long run.
As to gathering, remember also that in Alpha, the availability, or Saturation of some resources is probably set to a different level than it will be at full release and there are a lot more resources and recipes planned that haven't been implemented yet. Couple this with world specific resources and a higher stable population and the real value for crafted goods goes up considerably.
No shared bank means goods must be transported safely from one market area to another as well, so entire groups will probably be dedicated to just moving resources from one area safely to another, at varied risk levels.
Everyone can gather we r/craft/tame is meant to be a feature of Fractured, and putting that behind a class/build/archetype wall would defeat the feature element of it.
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What's with all these people acting like professionals and experts who don't know what the hell they're talking about.
The game has absolutely zero reason to develop a whole second sphere of gameplay around the civic professions. Why not? Because it's a glorified MOBA, not a world simulator. They don't care about anything that is not directly relevant to combat balance. They didn't even want to add taming and are only doing so in a limited form as a stretch goal.
Even if they did, your idea would not change anything. Why not? Because it only takes a couple weeks for the server to be saturated with high-level crafting characters, after which point your grinding-based gateway is outdated and may as well never have been there. It won't even stop players from "doing it themselves" - you are aware you can have more than one character on an account, yes?
Fractured's economy will be fine as long as the speed at which resources can be acquired remains reliably slower than the speed they are consumed. Unlike Ultima Online, you can't repair weapons or armor in Fractured - you have to get all the materials for it, including for its enchantments and whatever other enhancements, and make the whole damn thing again. And while that's only five to ten minutes for a common wolf-leather armor set and a rock on the end of a stick, it's hours to days for each full set of god-metal you need for your high-end world boss tank(s). Not only that, but you won't even be able to get them if you can't wrestle control of them away from the other guilds or out-compete everybody else against a world boss.
You know what that means? It means making things is inconvenient, so some people will pay other people to do it, not because they can't do it themselves but because they can't be assed to.
Ultima Online is anything but inflation-proof and your insinuation that it is is laughable; did you forget insurance? It's still around because it's the boomer MMO. That's the only reason.
Fractured isn't Ultima.
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@FibS
"Rock on the end of stick" made me crack up. Thanks for your response !
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There's also the point of why should this MMO be like other MMO's?
I like that everyone can do everything gathering and crafting wise.
I also like the ones where you have to choose a gathering type and/or crafting profession.The idea of having to spec into a gathering or crafting thing is kinda stupid to me; if the dev's wanted people to only be only to gather a certain type of resource and/or only be able to do one crafting type; then they should have just made it where players are given a quest to choose such or a choice on char creation.
If the idea of everyone being able to do anything, gathering/crafting-wise, bothers you in a game; then don't play those games, and so Fractured isn't for you.
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This post is deleted!
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I guess we can agree to disagree. I am speaking from business viewpoint, since that is what I have and that is what I have taught in the past.
The fact of the matter is the cost of the goods or services provided if everyone can do gather/craft/tame it WILL be lower than if it was had a more difficult barrier of entry. It's basic supply and demand. I don't think anyone is going to try and debate that?
You can debate time, sure, but every game has time involved in it. I can't think of a MMO that didn't take "time" to do anything. "Scarcity" or resource? Look at the map, it literally tells you where the resources are (AND has a clock telling you when to come back)... in UO it was completely random at least, with the top tier having like 0.0025% chance or something ungodly low of being mined or chopped. It would literally take you weeks if not months of mining/chopping to get enough material of resources to craft with (with a grandmaster gatherer which took a lot of time to level, and time to mine the rare resources), or if you wanted to sell them, each ingot would be priced like 1500 gold per, again, because the ability to farm that material was so damn rare. That difference, btw, is what makes the price higher, because not everyone can craft the material that takes skillpoints, because not everyone has skill investment.
I made my second tier mage armor in fractured pretty quickly because all it involved was farming spiders in one area. Heck I even enchanted all 5 items or whatever, just with material I had from farming "stuff." The cloth comes from giant spiders, the crystallized magic came from the other spider, both in the same area. I am not sure what you're talking about when you speak of time or scarcity of resources in this game. The map literally lists where to go, and the resources tell you when they're going to respawn again!
Seems to me that folks are betting on people not farming basic crap in this game. Which to me, they most likely will anyway just to learn the spells from the mobs or at the very least earn KP. If you want to learn mana drain, attack spiders. Spiders in the same area drop the same crap you need to make higher end mage gear. lol. They're already there. Are players going to throw out the crafting material because they're too lazy to ride back into town to craft? If you are betting on that to increase demand, yeah... I'm not taking that bet. Are you? =P
It doesn't make sense...
At the end of day, you can discuss time, travel, harvesting, whatever, IF there was a more difficult barrier of entry, those goods/services WOULD cost more. Period.
"Selling leather armor set, 500 Gold"
"Nah I'll just spend 30 min farming, earning KP, earning abilities and craft my own. Thanks""Enchanting mana regeneration - 250 gold per item!"
"Yeah, I think i will just walk over the enchanter table and do it myself.""Selling tamed horses! 50 gold!"
"Yeah I have 6 in my backpack from when I was riding to X area on the map to mine ore. I just stopped and cast a net on them. It took like 20 seconds each."In all of these examples, because there is literally no barrier of entry, players are going to most likely say no and do it themselves. Now if there was a barrier to entry, KP, talent points, something, now the future buyer has to debate, do I want to spend all the time to gather this stuff, AND spend the points to enter that barrier, ie crafting X, OR do I want to spend gold to get leather armor, mana regen, or a horse, and press on hunting bandits or whatever.
@FibS -I never said UO or any game for that matter was inflation proof. I said that game had a more balance supply and demand, same with Albion online, and they do and they will with the current fractured game. And I am taking about classic UO, there was no insurance, try again. Also since you stated repairs, only the skilled crafters would repair, which again, created a difficult barrier of entry, and folks were able to make a career repairing items, and selling their repair deeds. Again, another example of barrier of entry driving supply and demand. Oh gee, "it takes hours to farm gold ore." "Hours" Wow mate, I'm taking about MONTHS and you're talking about hours... lol Also to note FibS- in Albion online, the T7 and T8 resources are all controlled by guilds, AND there is a barrier of entry of having the skill to MINE the ore or CUT the trees. In AO, you also have a gathering SET or armor and gathering tools to increase your chances, again because the material is so rare.
You speak of this game as a "glorified MOBA" well, that's NOT how the devs are selling this game as. LOOK AT THEIR WEBSITE. It literally talks about different careers; "Crafters and Merchants", "Farmers and Shepherds", "Miners and woodcutters."
Best,
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I didn't buy the eternal pack JUST to be a crafter. Crafting is a side hustle IMO. I do plan on investing heavily in crafting, it just won't be the only thing.
There's gonna be lots of people who have no interest in crafting and will buy goods. Especially since there's no level restriction on gear. A noob could in theory (if i understand correctly from my one alpha) where god tier gear. If that's correct its kinda game breaking IMO.
Is there a level cap(i know we don't have levels per se) or skill point cap? Or is it once all KP are collected that's it?
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It is obvious that costs will get higher if you add another limitation. That doesn't mean that it is good. If the supply becomes too low, then everything simply stops working. You need to find the right balance between supply and demand.
Now, you have brought as an example the spider silk. Indeed the materials related to tailoring are (IMO) not that well implemented. They are easy to carry, easy to find and require almost nothing to be crafted. They are very WoW like. Kill the mob, craft the gear. You will find many threads on this topic. If your experience comes from having dealth with these kind of materials, I do understand your concern. The cloths though are an exception to the Fractured system, not the rule.
For the other materials, while the map could tell you where they are, while you can check when they respawn... it doesn't change the fact that there are quite few around, in a system where the equipment breaks, so there is a constant sink of materials. Also, players will not farm basic crap, for a simple reason. No fast travel! That basic crap is 20 minutes away!
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There is a skill point cap of sort. Learning all the skills and getting 60 talent points. This means studying all monsters, finding all areas, all resources and all pages.
And yes, there is no "level" restriction on gear.
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Right, so why waste precious points on being able to gather more wheat at a time, or harvest more wood/stone/metal? Resources, aside from animals are pretty locked down as it is. 6 hours for a stone node? Either a few people are gonna get it all, or many are gonna get a few
Crafting is locked behind city research. I'm not saying i agree with this approach, in part because i've never played an RPG or MMO that didn't have levels and where a character didn't improve over time. Like with Skyrim or ESO. Clear progression paths, being able to craft better gear improves with skills and time.
I played Ultima to death back in the day, it was my favorite RPG series ever until Bethesda came along, don't think i played UO at all because i couldn't afford the sub fee.
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@ShadowLaw As @spoletta said, if your judging purely from Mage Armor, your not really getting the whole picture. 'Light' Armor is notoriously the easiest armor to gather with almost no real time sink.
Medium Armor requires tanning hides, which take like 8 hrs each, require a Tanning Tub, and currently run the risk of being swiped if you don't watch the tubs closely or have them set up on your personal parcels.
Heavy Armor takes at least 8 hrs to refine as well, and you can only refine 1-2 ingots per Smelter, and it carries the same drawbacks as Medium does with someone coming along and swiping your goods.
Add to this, Metal nodes are in specific areas of the map and can be camped and controlled by PvPers on Syndesia and Tartarus at least. They require a Wagon or Cart to move, and this slows you way way down. With no fast travel, that means very few people will invest in making the Heavy Armor and Metal Weapons that require ingots. When it comes to hides and Leather, again, different types of hide drop rates and spawn areas will be adjusted when the game goes live. They also weigh enough that people grinding out their KP will seriously consider whether to carry those hides around or leave them on the corpses of foes or drop them in the wilderness.
The time-sink system in Fractured can create a supply and demand situation to keep markets, crafting, and gathering relevant without too much tweaking.
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@ShadowLaw said in Problems with everyone being able to gather, craft, tame, etc...:
"Selling leather armor set, 500 Gold"
"Nah I'll just spend 30 min farming, earning KP, earning abilities and craft my own. Thanks"
they most likely will anyway just to learn the spells from the mobs or at the very least earn KP.And when you are maxed on KP with that mob? When you would have to travel 20 min to get to where that mob is to farm it? when there are more than 500 people on the island and so there is actual competition for farming the mob? When traveling to the mob location involves risk of PK due to popularity of the area (shadow vale prime example)? Do you have private access to two tanning tubs (or 32 hours to use one twice)?
"Enchanting mana regeneration - 250 gold per item!"
"Yeah, I think i will just walk over the enchanter table and do it myself.">Do you have the right gem stone on hand? the right imbuing materials? is the enchanting table taxed? Is it even available to you as a non citizen? Is your one house allowed placed at a town which offers the tech?
each ingot would be priced like 1500 gold per, again, because the ability to farm that material was so damn rare.
Yea... I was selling my ingots at 1500 gold coins each for copper, 2000 for iron, 3000 for exotic alloy. And I'm not a 'master gatherer', I just was willing to spend the time to gather and smelt while others were not. The fact that they sold at those prices also shows the point.
"Selling tamed horses! 50 gold!"
"Yeah I have 6 in my backpack from when I was riding to X area on the map to mine ore. I just stopped and cast a net on them. It took like 20 seconds each."
Good for you ! That is not the norm as shown by the fact that horses are bought sold in the market (I sold my extra horse for 100g this test) and all the posts in global of 'where are the horses'.
All in game examples of barriers and market conditions that have been consistently stable for the past tests where the thing in question was implemented (eg imbuing gems).
In the beginning there may be increased incentives to do your own farming - kp and skills- but shortly those will dry up for you, while remain for others who are new or just have not gotten to that mob yet. So after your first three weeks of game play you will be looking at competing for mobs that would only net you materials and no kp alongside players who are there for the kp and materials vs just paying gold for the materials.
In addition after playing a few weeks you will likely have some 'favorite mob' to fight for gold coin supply due to an excellent counter build or just the lower competition for the mob. Thus it makes business sense to go with the sure gain and trade it in for assured return of desired item via market, instead of chasing a riskier chance with multiple barriers to self sufficiency.
Final point is that you are not the norm group, I am not the norm group. The norm group are the casual players who make up the majority of the gaming population who want instant gratification and take comfort in knowing that their gold coins (which they get from doing the 'fun' activities of adventuring with their other casual friends) will provide that in the markets and likely also feed a underground black market of using real money exchanges for items, because they would rather spend their time adventuring instead of harvesting and crafting.
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Interesting
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just like real-world economics, there are many views and none of them have enough information from all points of view to be the correct answer. This is a never-ending debate where nobody is right about the solution.
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I do like that players have a freedom to do all the professions if they want to, however, I agree with op that some kind of progression system e.g. for gathering, crafting, farming and such would be nice. System which rewards those who focus more on professions than others. This would also set progression goals for professions which would be interesting for people who like to work with lifeskills, perhaps kind of similar unlock/progression system as skills and abilities have could be a good starting point.
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I disagree, but it doesn't matter because it looks like we are indeed getting a progression for crafting.
