"Oh yeah, you're a naughty mayor, aren't you? Misfile that Form MA631-D. Comptroller Shevat's got a nice gemstone disc for you, but yer gonna have to beg for it."
What we need is a permanent version of the wayfaire, with games you can play for gold to win rare items. Maybe more villages need a sellable mount! BRING BACK WOMBAT MOUNTS!!!
Everiine said: The reason population is low isn't because there are too many orgs. It's because so many facets of the game are outright broken and protected by those who benefit from it being that way. An overabundance of gimmicks (including game-breaking ones), artifacts that destroy any concept of balance, blatant pay-to-win features, and an obsession with convenience that makes few things actually worthwhile all contribute to the game's sad decline.
5
EveriineWise Old Swordsbird / BrontaurIndianapolis, IN, USA
it would cost me a hella lot cause I have like 300 mines or something stupid like that (I don't even know anymore how many I have -.-;)
Whoa...
Maybe in the future, when we release things like this (or maps/genies), we need to put limits in.
Everiine is a man, and is very manly. This MAN before you is so manly you might as well just gender bend right now, cause he's the manliest man that you ever did see. His manly shape has spurned many women and girlyer men to boughs of fainting. He stands before you in a manly manerific typical man-like outfit which is covered in his manly motto: "I am a man!"
Daraius said: You gotta risk it for the biscuit.
Pony power all the way, yo. The more Brontaurs the better.
it would cost me a hella lot cause I have like 300 mines or something stupid like that (I don't even know anymore how many I have -.-;)
Whoa...
Maybe in the future, when we release things like this (or maps/genies), we need to put limits in.
there is and is not a cap on the mines, I still have to have a room for each and every one of them, and I have to go and upkeep each and every one of them if I want them to be worth anything so.. it is a bit of a drag to get full upkeeps. kinda why I have quit upkeeping over that past few months.
The soft, hollow voice of Nocht, the Silent resounds within your mind as His words echo through the aether, "Congratulations, Arimisia. Your mastery of vermin cannot be disputed."
it would cost me a hella lot cause I have like 300 mines or something stupid like that (I don't even know anymore how many I have -.-;)
Whoa...
Maybe in the future, when we release things like this (or maps/genies), we need to put limits in.
there is and is not a cap on the mines, I still have to have a room for each and every one of them, and I have to go and upkeep each and every one of them if I want them to be worth anything so.. it is a bit of a drag to get full upkeeps. kinda why I have quit upkeeping over that past few months.
I mean, they exist in aethermanses where it is permitted to be afk. It would be pretty easy to write a script to upkeep mines and just stay logged in all the time with tells/channels off. No ongoing personal effort required.
It is permitted to be afk in manses. It is not permitted to afk-harvest / generate resources (whether in a manse or not). Now, a player would be unlikely to catch another abusing this, but an admin might.
It's not? The automation does not generate gold or experience, I just reread the automation rules and it's not a covered case.
In any event, it would be very easy to create a scheme indistinguishable from you (say) walking to your computer where your character is idling in a manse (allowed), hitting a key to activate a script that takes a few seconds to run, and immediately going back to idling. Or you just using such a technique. Hard to tell the difference!
It generates resources that have a gold value (and can be traded directly for gold), which makes it a covered case. Arguing otherwise is semantics and trying to rules-lawyer out of what is the obvious intent of the rule (which often does not work out well for the nitpicker). Yes, you can make a system that abuses it, just like you can make a system that autobashes for you. That does not mean that you should, or guarantee that you will not get caught (no matter how foolproof you try to make it).
I wouldn't mind if the maps (which aren't affected by this change at all btw) just either gave coins or nothing, with maybe the chance of getting a coin increased very slightly to compensate.
@Portius makes a good point too. Usually I either don't do any hunting or I hunt for multiple hours in the same day (though maybe not all at once). When I do bother to hunt for gold, I can get incredibly high amounts of gold in a very short amount of time. 50k, even without gold buffs, is something I can get in maybe 20 minutes of bashing. These days I have very little incentive to go solo hunting other than for gold. I paid 750db for the Hand of the Demigod just so that I could dump 70 million essence to two of my friends. There's just no point to hunting for more than 20 minutes now.
@Synkarin: This change absolutely nerfs and devalues gold buffs. Sure, they're still increasing how much gold I get, but now I'm getting very little of it. Whereas before I was getting 2000 gold per mob with cookies, I am now only getting under 200 gold per mob. The cookies "generated" 1k gold for me before. Now it only generates less than 100.
Closest I would even try to skirt with that is to manually plot out the fastest course through the manse, manually choose what you want each type of mine to produce, manually walk the course, and have a trigger set up so that it automatically upkeeps whatever you told it to when you enter the room. If you aren't even using the manse for anything else (not that this is Arimisia's case) you could even title each room what you want to produce and trigger off of that it you want to be super lazy. Then just manually run through the manse once an hour or so until all of the upkeeps are done.
Seems to me that the ultimate point of that rule is that adding gold to the game in an automated way is problematic, not that you need to be active and manual to have other player's gold come to you or prepare for another player's gold to come to you. Is it allowed to automate breaking gems, a process that amounts to just SM ADD REPEAT GEMCUT? That's a process that prepares you to trade commodities directly for gold, and I'm pretty damn certain that is allowed.
Just like full 'autobashers' aren't allowed, but there are versions of autobashing that utterly common and therefore presumably allowed. Things that require you to hit "next target" to satisfy the requirement that you couldn't get up and walk away and still be bashing, but that otherwise handle all of the details of switching targets and so on.
Anyways, the point was: the time it takes to upkeep mines is not a real limit on their use. It's really easy to shortcut the amount of time to minuscule proportions with a mild application of effort put forth once. It's not difficult to come up with a technique that is within the letter of the rules, the established precedent of use for those rules, and the (nebulous and debatable) 'spirit' of said rules - whether or not you personally like it or would do such a thing.
There is a huge difference between cutting gems that have already been produced, and generating brand new gemcomms out of thin air. Why are you even trying to defend this?
The bottom bottom line of which, I guess, is that there should be a numerical limit on the number of mines/upkeeps a person is allowed, not just assuming that they're so inconvenient as to be self-limiting?
There is a huge difference between cutting gems that have already been produced, and generating brand new gemcomms out of thin air. Why are you even trying to defend this?
Because it's literally besides the point. The point is that "Ohh maaaaan, it's soooo hard to collect all these free comms, it's a real and true limit on the use of these mines" isn't in any way true. It's very simple to make it trivially easy. Leave your character logged in and periodically walk over to your computer and hit your "I'm upkeeping now" buttons. Slap an app on your phone that allows you to remotely log into your computer (or Lusternia) and push said button. These are both functionally identical and practically indistinguishable. You can hall monitor aether comm generation all you want, it does nothing to change that.
If it is beside the point, why did you bring it up and continually defend it as being valid? You have made it the core of your point, and are only relenting under pressure. AFK generation of resources (whether it be exp, gold, or anything else) is not okay and should not be encouraged. Yes, there are plenty of other legitimate ways to farm manse commplots. AFK routines are not one of them. Period.
Just make the gold cookies negate the gold-debuffs. Ur'traps are expensive for what they do, unless something major has changed, and gold-cookies have always been the least popular.
Effectively-infinite commodities are a major problem in Lusternia's economy. Stop acting like they are not, and stop acting like having to pay gold for things other than credits is unreasonable. It isn't.
The fact that equipment costs have dropped significantly since the time when the economy was more rubust, and that maintenance costs have decreased or ceased to exist for long-term players is not insignificant.
I don't quite have my finger on the pulse of the economy lately, but given how immobile it has been for the last few years, I can't imagine there have been dramatic changes. Re-standardize gold drops (nothing except smobs should be dropping more than 1000 gold). Find a way to suck commodities out of stockpiles and reassert their necessity and value. Recenter the economy on things that exist in the game (org expenses, trade skills, etc.) instead of things that only exist potentially (like player credit purchases).
Edit: And seriously, just partially-refund manse-mines and get rid of them. This was a short-sighted idea that has caused so many problems. Really.
I'm only "relenting" because it wasn't worth getting in a very technical fight over the point of the rules about it.. but it was pushed soooo ~heeeere weeee gooooooooo~!
It functionally makes no difference when you're talking about generation in an area that allows afk-ing, unlike all previous forms of generating resources. he difference between semi-automating comm mine resource generation and afk generating it is marginal in terms of the effect on the game, which cannot be said of other forms of automation. The fact that you're adding free commodities into the game for no cost is the problem, regardless of on how automated a basis this effect occurs.
That makes it a dramatically different beast than automating for competitive resources, with an entirely different set of ethical obligations, lowest of which is "is technically against the rules". If it makes you feel morally or ethically superior to strictly avow the possibility or utility of using higher levels of automation, go for it. Just don't expect that everyone else is gonna follow along just because - That's why I keep defending it, because it's a really silly nonsense masturbatory sticking point seemingly intended to make people feel better about possible choices they make to not automate.
I don't have comm mines. I don't automate comm mines. I don't automate bashing (at all, in any way, even very mild forms) because I find it really boring either way and just... don't bash anymore. I have never been dinged for any rules breaking. It's dumb that I'm being made to feel like I need to defend that, but there it is.
Effectively-infinite commodities are a major problem in Lusternia's economy. Stop acting like they are not, and stop acting like having to pay gold for things other than credits is unreasonable. It isn't.
This is a problem that stretches beyond comm mines. Player orgs have no incentives to price commodities at competitive values, as they both generate large numbers of free commodities and have such a low demand for the resultant gold influx. If commodity mines and private sellers of commodities did not exist, it's conceivable that the six player orgs could conspire (along with village commodity sellers/admins) to artificially inflate the gold cost of commodities, precipitating gold into org bank accounts where it's effectively out of the game.
It's also really true that low/non-existant upkeep costs are an issue too. Some scheme like the above, helped along by mechanical changes that create incentives for player orgs to take those steps, could help to pick up the slack in that part of the economy. However, it will take much longer for those changes to take effect if players only need to engage with the commodity system once in a blue moon. A larger need to use commodities on a daily basis would make the economy in general move more.
One way to do that would be to introduce more woodchem-like commodity costs to other classes. In other words, make it so that every class requires at least some use of gold-costing reagents to function. That way, everyone needs to engage with the economy at some level beyond just purchasing cures in bulk.
There are other artifacts that dramatically increase the length of time most players can go without needing to spend gold. For instance, the overhaul has dramatically buffed the strength of artifact vials. A larger portion of combat curatives now come in liquid form, meaning that you only need to pay for half as many sips to gain the same effect. It also takes a much smaller investment to get enough links to cover all your curatives.
Reducing the power of these artifacts to something like every third sip being free and only linking to three liquids instead of five would still leave them well worth the cost, while diffusing some of the problems.
Off the top of my head, a possible change to the mines would be for them to cheapen the cost of a particular design as if they had provided the commodities, but without actually generating commodities that can be traded away. Perhaps they generate commodities that quickly decay and that can't be stacked with regular commodities. That way, they're still providing approximately the same value to the owner without flooding the market with commodities. You'd still have a possible issue of people contracting with huge mine owners to get the same benefit they do now, but that would require more active participation than purchasing things from an aethershop, and that friction would lower the impact of the effect.
Interesting note: Aethershop Ari sells almost all of the cheapest commodities available, sometimes by fairly wide margins. I wrote a script that automates calculating prices for crafting designs based on the cheapest available commodities outside of the villages, so I check the three org comm shops available to me and automated scrubbing PORTAL SEARCH SHOPS for the cheapest aethershop so that I could generate a list of the cheapest comms.
I'm only "relenting" because it wasn't worth getting in a very technical fight over the point of the rules about it.. but it was pushed soooo ~heeeere weeee gooooooooo~!
It functionally makes no difference when you're talking about generation in an area that allows afk-ing, unlike all previous forms of generating resources. he difference between semi-automating comm mine resource generation and afk generating it is marginal in terms of the effect on the game, which cannot be said of other forms of automation. The fact that you're adding free commodities into the game for no cost is the problem, regardless of on how automated a basis this effect occurs.
That makes it a dramatically different beast than automating for competitive resources, with an entirely different set of ethical obligations, lowest of which is "is technically against the rules". If it makes you feel morally or ethically superior to strictly avow the possibility or utility of using higher levels of automation, go for it. Just don't expect that everyone else is gonna follow along just because - That's why I keep defending it, because it's a really silly nonsense masturbatory sticking point seemingly intended to make people feel better about possible choices they make to not automate.
I don't have comm mines. I don't automate comm mines. I don't automate bashing (at all, in any way, even very mild forms) because I find it really boring either way and just... don't bash anymore. I have never been dinged for any rules breaking. It's dumb that I'm being made to feel like I need to defend that, but there it is.
I too have zero comm-mines. And while the difference in effect might be marginal, the difference in the argument itself is not. If you are building your entire premise on the fact that people are cheating, you're inherently undermining your own argument. Surely, then, all one has to do to combat it is to just go after the cheaters.
It's an argument that obfuscates the fact that there are far many other ways that one can make harvesting manse farm plots take almost no time or effort (note that some are even posted in this thread, and I am not debating them). I am, however, adamantly opposed to any argument that wants to mainstream cheating or claim it's acceptable just because it's possible to do nearly the same thing without it. "Nearly the same" is not the same as being "the same".
Stick with that, and stop defending AFK automation please.
The problem with adding woodchem-like commodity costs to other classes is twofold. It's going to affect different populations very differently for one thing, either because the person in question might really notice any reasonable upkeep cost due to having massive stockpiles and/or high commodity generation or because they just...don't use the kinds of skills that a cost like that could reasonably be added to. Influencing, for instance requires few buffs that aren't already consumables (I guess you could add a tincture cost to performance, but why?), and there are at least a couple of players that really only log in to do trades-related stuff, or stage and library stuff, or administrative things like GM/GA who would only see a recurring cost once in a blue moon even with no artifacts. While other players without access to those resources and stockpiles who show an interest in bashing or pvp are disproportionately punished for it.
Not just newbies, but if Sylandra decides tomorrow that she doesn't like the cut of Arimisia's jib and wants to DO something about it, then she suddenly has not only Lusternia's already unforgiving PvE to PvP learning curve, but she also needs to worry about dozens of commodities she had no reason to keep in stock. Meanwhile, Arimisia is sitting on a couple of artifacts that mean her armor/robes don't decay, her weapon never needs replacing, and she already generates so many commodities that there may as well not be a cost for her skills at all.
And the second issue is that, as Cyndarin pointed out, it's just busywork for the sake of trickling comms out of the system while it's being flooded at the other end. The net difference between how things are now and how they'd be after is that Arimisia would make a second, slightly larger mint than she already does. That's it.
Village commodities are not infinite, though, and unlike with gem-mines, their production quantities can be monitored and adjusted by the administration.
Turn them off entirely for a while (leave the manual quests), in conjunction with implementing new, larger maintenance costs (how about making those constructs cost 10x more in terms of comms? Maybe guards need to be equipped with armor/swords/etc., and frankly, they could do with a pay rise. 250 gold or whatever it is for indefinite martial service is something even Hallifax should sniff at.)
There's a lot or reasonable, and ic-justifiable things that could be done to leach the bloat out of the economy that aren't straight up preventing individuals from striving.
It's not necessarily about introducing costs to everything.
Right now, commodity and upkeep costs already affect different populations to differing amounts. The amount of things a druid has to buy is a lot lower than the amount of things a warrior has to buy, including more expensive armor, weapons, and poisons. Warriors need to engage with a much wider portion of the economy than any other class!
I'm talking something like removing the arts ability to generate blank tarot cards, and requiring instead that tarot cards be bought from a denizen shop for (say) 100 gold a pop, that takes that 100 gold immediately out of the game. This kind of low-grade gold sink hits everyone, but for a manageable and reasonable amount - you can get that much gold from turning in two vermin. If everyone had at least that kind of base low grade gold drain, administration at least has a lever they can adjust to slow goldflation's pace. Achaea has done something to this effect, and I think it has helped a lot.
This wouldn't touch the big stockpiles people have, but nothing that direct will. I'm pretty sure that the only way to pull big gold stockpiles out is through giving cities and communes incentives for having organization stockpiles and tools to reward rich players for dumping their gold reserves without unduly punishing everyone else for not having said reserves.
EDIT: So yeah. It's not a cure-all, because nothing is. It's just a good technique for handling things alongside other fixes that patch other issues in the economy.
I do have to jump on the board with everyone else and point out that this seems like you are nerfing hardworking people who get into the game and bash/influence/quest every day to earn their gold.
I guess my question for @Estarra is do we want to reward people who put effort into the game or people who just pay cash to get their free stuff through things like dingbat mines, genies etc? This 50k diminishing returns (which seems really extreme given @Falmiis' numbers) is really punishing people who are getting out there and working hard.
I think there are potentially better ways to address this than diminishing returns on hard work.
"Oh yeah, you're a naughty mayor, aren't you? Misfile that Form MA631-D. Comptroller Shevat's got a nice gemstone disc for you, but yer gonna have to beg for it."
I have always thought that successful orgs should be taxed with upkeep commensurate with the greater benefits they reap. Rather than throwing bonus on top of bonus, success should give opportunities to invest in perks.
A village = another place to stick a guard stack that pays for itself AND extra power AND free comms An aetherbubble = 1000 free power AND a collection of unique perks.
Pick only one of these benefits, and make the costs of maintaining an empire more realistic. It applies to comms as to the conflict system in general. These commodities gluts in orgs are symptomatic of larger strongest-get-strongerest snowballing problems that have also been a long-term problem in the game.
Introduce a new type of commodity. I'm gonna call them pure commodities, but it should be something more interesting. Assume that there's a pure version of every existing commodity.
Villages produce pure commodities for their org equal to X% of their normal production. X should be low. This gives a reason to care about village production.
Maybe add pure commodities directly for players as a quest reward. Do this sparingly if at all. It would allow access for orgs that can't produce a specific commodity at their villages.
No artifacts can ever produce them. Make this a hard rule, or you're just expanding the current problem.
Pure commodities are not used in any sort of basic requirement for playing the game. You should always be able to produce cures, weapons, armor, and whatnot without them.
Add a small number of pure commodities as a requirement for things that are useful but not necessary. Thrones, for example. Useful objects that are not for new players.
Let people spend pure commodities to speed up production. Spend X pure gems to enchant twice as fast for a while, or to put Y charges into a cube on a single balance. Make it stack with the artifacts.
Add in a few design nouns for basic products that always require pure commodities. Plate equivalent with 'armor' as its noun, for example. There's no mechanical benefit, but it opens up the option of expending more resources to get more design flexibility.
That allows people who have artifact commodity generation to keep using them to drive down the price of basic things, but it makes village production meaningful for people who want status symbols or mass production (presumably of cheap stuff.) It's quick, dirty, and almost certainly inferior to plenty of other options. But it does offer a chance at meaningful commodity-esque resources without crippling aethermines.
Any sufficiently advanced pun is indistinguishable from comedy.
Comments
Maybe in the future, when we release things like this (or maps/genies), we need to put limits in.
In any event, it would be very easy to create a scheme indistinguishable from you (say) walking to your computer where your character is idling in a manse (allowed), hitting a key to activate a script that takes a few seconds to run, and immediately going back to idling. Or you just using such a technique. Hard to tell the difference!
@Portius makes a good point too. Usually I either don't do any hunting or I hunt for multiple hours in the same day (though maybe not all at once). When I do bother to hunt for gold, I can get incredibly high amounts of gold in a very short amount of time. 50k, even without gold buffs, is something I can get in maybe 20 minutes of bashing. These days I have very little incentive to go solo hunting other than for gold. I paid 750db for the Hand of the Demigod just so that I could dump 70 million essence to two of my friends. There's just no point to hunting for more than 20 minutes now.
@Synkarin: This change absolutely nerfs and devalues gold buffs. Sure, they're still increasing how much gold I get, but now I'm getting very little of it. Whereas before I was getting 2000 gold per mob with cookies, I am now only getting under 200 gold per mob. The cookies "generated" 1k gold for me before. Now it only generates less than 100.
Just like full 'autobashers' aren't allowed, but there are versions of autobashing that utterly common and therefore presumably allowed. Things that require you to hit "next target" to satisfy the requirement that you couldn't get up and walk away and still be bashing, but that otherwise handle all of the details of switching targets and so on.
Anyways, the point was: the time it takes to upkeep mines is not a real limit on their use. It's really easy to shortcut the amount of time to minuscule proportions with a mild application of effort put forth once. It's not difficult to come up with a technique that is within the letter of the rules, the established precedent of use for those rules, and the (nebulous and debatable) 'spirit' of said rules - whether or not you personally like it or would do such a thing.
Effectively-infinite commodities are a major problem in Lusternia's economy. Stop acting like they are not, and stop acting like having to pay gold for things other than credits is unreasonable. It isn't.
The fact that equipment costs have dropped significantly since the time when the economy was more rubust, and that maintenance costs have decreased or ceased to exist for long-term players is not insignificant.
I don't quite have my finger on the pulse of the economy lately, but given how immobile it has been for the last few years, I can't imagine there have been dramatic changes. Re-standardize gold drops (nothing except smobs should be dropping more than 1000 gold). Find a way to suck commodities out of stockpiles and reassert their necessity and value. Recenter the economy on things that exist in the game (org expenses, trade skills, etc.) instead of things that only exist potentially (like player credit purchases).
Edit: And seriously, just partially-refund manse-mines and get rid of them. This was a short-sighted idea that has caused so many problems. Really.
Vive l'apostrophe!
It functionally makes no difference when you're talking about generation in an area that allows afk-ing, unlike all previous forms of generating resources. he difference between semi-automating comm mine resource generation and afk generating it is marginal in terms of the effect on the game, which cannot be said of other forms of automation. The fact that you're adding free commodities into the game for no cost is the problem, regardless of on how automated a basis this effect occurs.
That makes it a dramatically different beast than automating for competitive resources, with an entirely different set of ethical obligations, lowest of which is "is technically against the rules". If it makes you feel morally or ethically superior to strictly avow the possibility or utility of using higher levels of automation, go for it. Just don't expect that everyone else is gonna follow along just because - That's why I keep defending it, because it's a really silly nonsense masturbatory sticking point seemingly intended to make people feel better about possible choices they make to not automate.
I don't have comm mines. I don't automate comm mines. I don't automate bashing (at all, in any way, even very mild forms) because I find it really boring either way and just... don't bash anymore. I have never been dinged for any rules breaking. It's dumb that I'm being made to feel like I need to defend that, but there it is.
This is a problem that stretches beyond comm mines. Player orgs have no incentives to price commodities at competitive values, as they both generate large numbers of free commodities and have such a low demand for the resultant gold influx. If commodity mines and private sellers of commodities did not exist, it's conceivable that the six player orgs could conspire (along with village commodity sellers/admins) to artificially inflate the gold cost of commodities, precipitating gold into org bank accounts where it's effectively out of the game.
It's also really true that low/non-existant upkeep costs are an issue too. Some scheme like the above, helped along by mechanical changes that create incentives for player orgs to take those steps, could help to pick up the slack in that part of the economy. However, it will take much longer for those changes to take effect if players only need to engage with the commodity system once in a blue moon. A larger need to use commodities on a daily basis would make the economy in general move more.
One way to do that would be to introduce more woodchem-like commodity costs to other classes. In other words, make it so that every class requires at least some use of gold-costing reagents to function. That way, everyone needs to engage with the economy at some level beyond just purchasing cures in bulk.
Reducing the power of these artifacts to something like every third sip being free and only linking to three liquids instead of five would still leave them well worth the cost, while diffusing some of the problems.
Interesting note: Aethershop Ari sells almost all of the cheapest commodities available, sometimes by fairly wide margins. I wrote a script that automates calculating prices for crafting designs based on the cheapest available commodities outside of the villages, so I check the three org comm shops available to me and automated scrubbing PORTAL SEARCH SHOPS for the cheapest aethershop so that I could generate a list of the cheapest comms.
It's an argument that obfuscates the fact that there are far many other ways that one can make harvesting manse farm plots take almost no time or effort (note that some are even posted in this thread, and I am not debating them). I am, however, adamantly opposed to any argument that wants to mainstream cheating or claim it's acceptable just because it's possible to do nearly the same thing without it. "Nearly the same" is not the same as being "the same".
Stick with that, and stop defending AFK automation please.
Not just newbies, but if Sylandra decides tomorrow that she doesn't like the cut of Arimisia's jib and wants to DO something about it, then she suddenly has not only Lusternia's already unforgiving PvE to PvP learning curve, but she also needs to worry about dozens of commodities she had no reason to keep in stock. Meanwhile, Arimisia is sitting on a couple of artifacts that mean her armor/robes don't decay, her weapon never needs replacing, and she already generates so many commodities that there may as well not be a cost for her skills at all.
And the second issue is that, as Cyndarin pointed out, it's just busywork for the sake of trickling comms out of the system while it's being flooded at the other end. The net difference between how things are now and how they'd be after is that Arimisia would make a second, slightly larger mint than she already does. That's it.
Turn them off entirely for a while (leave the manual quests), in conjunction with implementing new, larger maintenance costs (how about making those constructs cost 10x more in terms of comms? Maybe guards need to be equipped with armor/swords/etc., and frankly, they could do with a pay rise. 250 gold or whatever it is for indefinite martial service is something even Hallifax should sniff at.)
There's a lot or reasonable, and ic-justifiable things that could be done to leach the bloat out of the economy that aren't straight up preventing individuals from striving.
Vive l'apostrophe!
Right now, commodity and upkeep costs already affect different populations to differing amounts. The amount of things a druid has to buy is a lot lower than the amount of things a warrior has to buy, including more expensive armor, weapons, and poisons. Warriors need to engage with a much wider portion of the economy than any other class!
I'm talking something like removing the arts ability to generate blank tarot cards, and requiring instead that tarot cards be bought from a denizen shop for (say) 100 gold a pop, that takes that 100 gold immediately out of the game. This kind of low-grade gold sink hits everyone, but for a manageable and reasonable amount - you can get that much gold from turning in two vermin. If everyone had at least that kind of base low grade gold drain, administration at least has a lever they can adjust to slow goldflation's pace. Achaea has done something to this effect, and I think it has helped a lot.
This wouldn't touch the big stockpiles people have, but nothing that direct will. I'm pretty sure that the only way to pull big gold stockpiles out is through giving cities and communes incentives for having organization stockpiles and tools to reward rich players for dumping their gold reserves without unduly punishing everyone else for not having said reserves.
EDIT: So yeah. It's not a cure-all, because nothing is. It's just a good technique for handling things alongside other fixes that patch other issues in the economy.
I guess my question for @Estarra is do we want to reward people who put effort into the game or people who just pay cash to get their free stuff through things like dingbat mines, genies etc? This 50k diminishing returns (which seems really extreme given @Falmiis' numbers) is really punishing people who are getting out there and working hard.
I think there are potentially better ways to address this than diminishing returns on hard work.
B-)
A village = another place to stick a guard stack that pays for itself AND extra power AND free comms
An aetherbubble = 1000 free power AND a collection of unique perks.
Pick only one of these benefits, and make the costs of maintaining an empire more realistic. It applies to comms as to the conflict system in general. These commodities gluts in orgs are symptomatic of larger strongest-get-strongerest snowballing problems that have also been a long-term problem in the game.
Vive l'apostrophe!
Introduce a new type of commodity. I'm gonna call them pure commodities, but it should be something more interesting. Assume that there's a pure version of every existing commodity.
Villages produce pure commodities for their org equal to X% of their normal production. X should be low. This gives a reason to care about village production.
Maybe add pure commodities directly for players as a quest reward. Do this sparingly if at all. It would allow access for orgs that can't produce a specific commodity at their villages.
No artifacts can ever produce them. Make this a hard rule, or you're just expanding the current problem.
Pure commodities are not used in any sort of basic requirement for playing the game. You should always be able to produce cures, weapons, armor, and whatnot without them.
Add a small number of pure commodities as a requirement for things that are useful but not necessary. Thrones, for example. Useful objects that are not for new players.
Let people spend pure commodities to speed up production. Spend X pure gems to enchant twice as fast for a while, or to put Y charges into a cube on a single balance. Make it stack with the artifacts.
Add in a few design nouns for basic products that always require pure commodities. Plate equivalent with 'armor' as its noun, for example. There's no mechanical benefit, but it opens up the option of expending more resources to get more design flexibility.
That allows people who have artifact commodity generation to keep using them to drive down the price of basic things, but it makes village production meaningful for people who want status symbols or mass production (presumably of cheap stuff.) It's quick, dirty, and almost certainly inferior to plenty of other options. But it does offer a chance at meaningful commodity-esque resources without crippling aethermines.