Economy Balance
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In player-driven economies there will always be an issue with an inflating economy like other games have: rs, albion etc. Each game has their own system to figure out on how to keep the economy balanced and i was really impressed by the complexity of some of those systems. Is there anything similarly planned for Fractured? Or do we have some ideas within the community?
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We should first know how all the traded stuff is moved. Will all and everything be physically carried between players and npc sellers? In this case, there will never be something called economy balance. Each city(market) will depend on the goodwill of certain active players. Since even travelling is nothing easily done in fractured, you can't just travel to a couple of cities to compare prizes and availability. If some of the goods are not travelling digitally from market to market, there is no such thing as economy balance, at least not for long. Moving trading goods is nothing what keeps players doing it over and over again. Not enough players anyway.
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To many unknown factors so far. How will the storage system be? I read somewhere there will be no bank or world wide access to your inventory in the house or vendors. We don't know if you must have a lot for a vendor or if we can own one or more.
We only saw a tiny bit of the loot system, so how can we earn gold? The quest system is also not in yet.
Since we don't know much about the crafting system yet we don't know how much any resource is worth.We will have to wait for more information before I even start thinking of "balance".
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@Sindariya said in Economy Balance:
The quest system is also not in yet.
We will have to wait for more information before I even start thinking of "balance".
Will there be a quest system at all? I have only read of the divine quests so far.
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Albion did few mistakes which affected negatively to economy. They created one main hub city Caerleon where they centralized almost everything from economy to fast traveling over the world. That slowly destroyed all other local economies. Now almost two years after this decisions, they are trying to fix this and making city/portal rework.
Second problem is biomes and resources what you can get from those. Game has 5 different biomes, 5 different resources and you can get 3/5 of those resources from one biome. In addition, those different biome types are too close to each other so you can basically get almost everything from almost everywhere. Its hard to create local economies and meaningful traderoutes with that kind of concept.
Albion's crafting is also too mass productive, which easily overfloods the markets. To prevent inflation games needs to implement more reasonable silver- and itemsinks to keep the economy healthy. After that supply and demand will cross better.
I will get back to Fractured situation later..
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@Goemoe said in Economy Balance:
Since even travelling is nothing easily done in fractured, you can't just travel to a couple of cities to compare prizes and availability.
Unless.. there could be fast traveling, which is usually free (in other games) when traveling naked. This possibility is implemented so people can more easily group up with friends and guild members and does not need to run long distances after killed and full looted. Then people uses this feature for market checking.
@Goemoe said in Economy Balance:
@Sindariya said in Economy Balance:
The quest system is also not in yet.
We will have to wait for more information before I even start thinking of "balance".
Will there be a quest system at all? I have only read of the divine quests so far.
I guess quests have minor role in Fractured, but I still hope we have some polished ones with meaningful, lore-driven, long journey and rewarding content.
And tasks inside knowledge system are like small quests anyway.
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@twitchjackyace said in Economy Balance:
Or do we have some ideas within the community?
All three planets have at least partly different resources, which is a good starting point to create local (planet wide) economies. People now needs to travel to gather/trade resources from another planets if they want to make some good profit or get access to some rare crafting recipes.
I still hope that Fractured will focus even more to localize the economies. This can be done with smart placing of biomes and resources inside a planet. Every town does not need to have easy access to all resources from that planet, and resources should be placed enough far from each other so local economies and markets can born. This will create interesting traderoutes for merchants around the world and even between planets.
Crafting has also a big role how the local markets and economies will work. In Fractured basic gear crafting will most likely be relatively easy, because lost gear is intended to be replaced without huge efforts. I understand that, because it promotes people to take part for open world activities and not fear to loose their precious stuff. However, this may have also downside. If crafting items is too easy, and massproductive, this can easily lead overflood the markets. In Albion Online I even saw situations where refined materials and crafted gear pieces where multiple times cheaper than the resources (of that item). So it was impossible to make any profit with crafting or refining. So quality over quantity would be much better choise from economy and crafting point of view.
One challenging part is to create working item- and ingame currency sink to prevent inflation.
Ingame currency can be removed from the game with repairstation payments, different kind of taxes from town services (like marketplace fees), buying VIP time, buying cosmetics, offerings for gods, fast travels and with a lot of more micro transactions options..
We need also to get rid of items, so there can be room for new craftable goods. Once again start with preventing massproduction. Because we have full loot system, that gives the game a chance to trash small part of lootable stuff. Also adding possibility to salvage items back to resources (just portion what originally needed) helps. Maybe some items can not be repaired for ever and those will decay with time and eventually break. Maybe already crafted items can be combined with together to repair and/or craft a more powerfull/different item.
Moreover, it is important to keep all resources needed and part of advanced crafting as well. That way every resource is still valueable the whole lifetime of the game.
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@Sindariya said in Economy Balance:
To many unknown factors so far. How will the storage system be? I read somewhere there will be no bank or world wide access to your inventory in the house or vendors. We don't know if you must have a lot for a vendor or if we can own one or more.
We only saw a tiny bit of the loot system, so how can we earn gold?
I am pretty sure we are not going to see world-wide inventory system, because that will destroy idea of local economies. However, I am quite sure we can have some local inventory space from different towns. Maybe this costs something and/or is behind town progression.
I guess there will be some kind of local marketplace or shop system where to sell and buy goodies. I actually hope, that there would be different kind of market/trading/merchant options which can be unlocked via town progression.
Ingame currency will come into the game most likely by killing humanoid mobs and finding treasures from the open world. I expect not to see animals and creatures to drop nothing more than some resources.
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@Goemoe @Sindariya Fractured won't have any quests besides divine quests.
I believe it's possible to transport goods between cities by using caravans. Players will also have their own carts and wagons. There will be no global auction house system so you will see a lot of local economies. Players can build their own player-owned shops in cities to sell goods.
There are no banks in Fractured. Items can be stored in your own house and guilds can store goods in warehouses built in their cities.
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@Specter Thx for the information, seems like I mixed some things up. One basic question: Will ingame currency be an item that can be lost or stored or is it something outside of the item system?
@Tuoni
I agree that the crafting system will play a major role but I'm also worried about the NPCs selling and buying stuff. What I don't want to see are ressources that can only be gained by buying from NPCs. That is a nice gold sink but I really hate such things.
Also NPCs should only sell basic stuff what you can craft in mass. Everything higher should be only made and sold by players.
Fast travel is often the dead to every local economy. The economy will than just establish at those travel points. So we have to have a close eye on the travel between the planets.
What I found mostly annoying where caps on prices. I had once a game where you could sell stuff only 5 times higher than an NPC would pay for it to prevent gold sellers (pure gold transfer was not allowed). But some ressources were really hard to get and in the end noone sold it, because you never gained the price is was worth and other were willing to pay.
On the other hand there were always ressources that were good for gold farming because the NPCs bought it always at the same high price, but noone sold it to crafters because it was not worth the gold the NPCs gave.So what I would love to see is, that NPCs buy stuff but if they get more than needed they would drop the price and later raise it back. For example, the NPC has an internal limit of 200 branches. He has not bought any so far and offers 5 gold per piece. So player A sell 50 branches, the NPC drops the price to 4 gold. Player B sells 150 branches, price drops to 2 gold. Next day the NPC has consumed some of the branches and the price goes up to 3 gold again till it is back to 5 gold if noone sells branches to him. This way players could say they buy branches from players for 3 gold and depending on the NPC market price he will be able to get it or not.
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@Sindariya said in Economy Balance:
@Tuoni
I agree that the crafting system will play a major role but I'm also worried about the NPCs selling and buying stuff. What I don't want to see are ressources that can only be gained by buying from NPCs. That is a nice gold sink but I really hate such things.
Also NPCs should only sell basic stuff what you can craft in mass. Everything higher should be only made and sold by players.Well I hope there won't be any NPCs, which are selling stuff or buying those from players. Then we do not have a player-driven economy anymore. So yeah let's hope devs are not even consider this as an option for ingame currency sink.
@Sindariya said in Economy Balance:
@Tuoni
Fast travel is often the dead to every local economy. The economy will than just establish at those travel points. So we have to have a close eye on the travel between the planets.It depends how the fast travel will be implemented. It can be done so economy won't hurt by it making it cost ingame currency, and way that it costs more than you most likely can get from those items you are wearing or carrying. I am not a huge fan of fast traveling, but few are fine so people can more easily meet up and play with each other.
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@Tuoni One the livestreams had a lot of information about traveling. Here's a good summary.
@Sindariya said in Economy Balance:
@Specter Thx for the information, seems like I mixed some things up. One basic question: Will ingame currency be an item that can be lost or stored or is it something outside of the item system?
I have no idea. Might have been answered in one of the livestreams but it's hard to remember everything that has been said.
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@Specter said in Economy Balance:
There are no banks in Fractured. Items can be stored in your own house and guilds can store goods in warehouses built in their cities.
This bothers me a little bit.. What if merchant travels to other cities to sell stuff. Maybe the markets are not pleasing enough and he decides to not be selling. Where he puts all his stuff if he wants to do some other activities in far away from home? He can not take all those stuff with him if he goes for gathering or taking part of open world PvE/PvP actions. And same with every open world activities, I can easily be dead very far away from home and I have no chance to store extra gear sets to closest town to jump back in action. No warehouses chests or banks? Really? How this works then?
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@Specter said in Economy Balance:
@Tuoni One the livestreams had a lot of information about traveling. Here's a good summary.
"The devs are considering allowing players to build portals between 2 towns. If they decide to allow this, you will not be able to take any items/equipment through those portals. There would also be limits on how often you could use it."
Yeah, I found this one from there. Thank you for that.
This sounds pretty nice option and something what fast traveling should be. This could also be build inside town progression system and maybe contracts between different towns. It can also be ship or carriage routes if that portal thing sounds too easy solution.
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@Tuoni said in Economy Balance:
@Specter said in Economy Balance:
There are no banks in Fractured. Items can be stored in your own house and guilds can store goods in warehouses built in their cities.
This bothers me a little bit.. What if merchant travels to other cities to sell stuff. Maybe the markets are not pleasing enough and he decides to not be selling. Where he puts all his stuff if he wants to do some other activities in far away from home? He can not take all those stuff with him if he goes for gathering or taking part of open world PvE/PvP actions. And same with every open world activities, I can easily be dead very far away from home and I have no chance to store extra gear sets to closest town to jump back in action. No warehouses chests or banks? Really? How this works then?
You have to decide before hand, you can't do everything at once. I can imagine that perhaps a bank guild will founded, that help you with that. I myself play with the thought to create an auction house.
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@Sindariya Well I can not decide when I die so it is kind of hard to think all before hand..
Also if people can not store stuff outside of home and guild bank, it will make all activities far from home really annoying. You can basically play mostly in your own hoods.. That sounds kind of bad. I really need an answer from DS side. @Specter
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@Tuoni said in Economy Balance:
@Sindariya Well I can not decide when I die so it is kind of hard to think all before hand..
Also if people can not store stuff outside of home and guild bank, it will make all activities far from home really annoying. You can basically play mostly in your own hoods.. That sounds kind of bad. I really need an answer from DS side. @Specter Actually I wonder all the time. The devs tell of removing the "grind" out of the game but add many tedious sounding things into it. After all, each player has a different understand of 'grinding' Some like leveling and quesing a lot. The advancement of the RPG char is the core of such games. Renaming the actions to do so, does not change the system.
Having to carry stuff around, though weight and space matter, might annoy quickling.
Having to explore to get Fractured XP, named knowledge points sound fun, but if you encounter difficult climate conditions large distances away from any access to your belongings might annoy quickly.
Having to reequip your char x times a day because your robbed and or killed many times a day might annoy quickly.
Trying to reach virtually unreachable areas in the game to up you skill, only because you need Tartarus as a beast or Arboreus as a demon will not feel great either.All this might quickly be viewed upon as grind. It is the risk vs. reward spiral which keep game like this interesting. Which is good. No game like this can work without features some people will name 'grind'
Back to economy: For my understanding, there will come no money from any creature but humanoids. If npc traders only sell minor amounts of money for the players loot, I don't see much money entering the economy at all. The localized markets will spread even this. All the devs have to do is offering tiny amounts of money for easy to loot stuff and selling 'convinience' items like food or drink at every corner. After all, humans tend to be lazy.
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@Goemoe said in Economy Balance:
If npc traders only sell minor amounts of money for the players loot,
pay, not sell. I tried to edit the post above, but it always told me, some spam filter will prevent it
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@Goemoe said in Economy Balance:
@Goemoe said in Economy Balance:
If npc traders only sell minor amounts of money for the players loot,
pay, not sell. I tried to edit the post above, but it always told me, some spam filter will prevent it
I hope that mobs and animals does not drop any vendor trash, which are meant to sell just like that. All loot should be meaningful, either money (from humanoids) and/or resources used for different crafting.
I personally hope, that consumables like food and drink are also player crafted and we can not buy those from NPCs. Those can easily be part of cooking.
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@Goemoe said in Economy Balance:
@Tuoni said in Economy Balance:
@Sindariya Well I can not decide when I die so it is kind of hard to think all before hand..
Also if people can not store stuff outside of home and guild bank, it will make all activities far from home really annoying. You can basically play mostly in your own hoods.. That sounds kind of bad. I really need an answer from DS side. @Specter Actually I wonder all the time. The devs tell of removing the "grind" out of the game but add many tedious sounding things into it. After all, each player has a different understand of 'grinding' Some like leveling and quesing a lot. The advancement of the RPG char is the core of such games. Renaming the actions to do so, does not change the system.
Having to carry stuff around, though weight and space matter, might annoy quickling.
Having to explore to get Fractured XP, named knowledge points sound fun, but if you encounter difficult climate conditions large distances away from any access to your belongings might annoy quickly.
Having to reequip your char x times a day because your robbed and or killed many times a day might annoy quickly.
Trying to reach virtually unreachable areas in the game to up you skill, only because you need Tartarus as a beast or Arboreus as a demon will not feel great either.All this might quickly be viewed upon as grind. It is the risk vs. reward spiral which keep game like this interesting. Which is good. No game like this can work without features some people will name 'grind'
You have really valid points here. Grind can be defined few ways and players experience it differently. Fractured means by grind repeating same stuff over and over again, and I am really glad they have chosen this kind of approach for progression. However, I am a little bit concerned how much there will be pointless traveling especially if our storage possibilities are really limited. Some people can call that easily grind, to me, it is not, and I categorize it as walking simulator. However, it does not matter how people sees this concern, at the end the result is the same, time consuming and not fun activity.
