I'm going to try one more time, because I care about this issue and I'm very unhappy with the gold throttle.
There's no reason to dislike inflation itself. Inflation is only bad insofar as it creates distortions elsewhere in the economy. The two distortions it seems like people are unhappy with are 1) it's hard to break into the credit market and 2) practicing a trade creates no value for the tradesperson**.
I think the gold throttle doesn't help with either of these issues, and might make them worse.
For someone who can't buy OOC credits, the only real way you can compensate is to put in a ton of effort. Get free credits from achievements, and do a massive amount of gold farming. The IG hyper-rich have better things to do with their time, so you can get more gold than them by putting in the time and effort. The throttle/soft cap makes it so that the IG rich can essentially earn as much as the most hard-core farmer (and in fact will do so with a lot less effort, since they already have all the tools for fast bashing).
There's a good chance that well-crafted gold sinks will help dramatically. It will raise the marginal value of gold spent in places other than the credit market, so that those who already have many artifacts IG (i.e. have a low marginal value for credits) will spend their money elsewhere, allowing others to buy credits. I hope that the report is successful.
Since returning to the game at the beginning of this year, I got an IRE membership, so this will not be a huge blow to my artifact progression. If I were a poor college student and couldn't buy OOC credits, like I was 5-6 years ago when I last played, this would be a huge disappointment.
At the very least, I wish we could move the throttling to weekly thresholds rather than daily thresholds. Currently, it especially punishes those who have most of their play-time on weekends.
**I mostly ignored this, because I don't think there is a solution. The game is such that 1) there are many sellers, 2) search costs are nil, and 3) products are basically homogenous. Microeconomics tells us that this is the formula for perfect competition, in which producers earn 0 economic profit.
Yeah, Kurut has the right of it. @Estarra Do you guys have any rough numbers on how much gold is being put into the economy? You need to start planning gold sinks that pull gold out based on those numbers.
Pretend the number is 100 gold every 24 hours for all players and that fractional gold exists. What would you suggest the gold sink costs should be?
I'd say close to 100. More likely 80 or 90 but someone with a better handle on economics then me could give a more exact answer. I'm not sure exactly what the number should be and how the gold should be leaving the system. Having it constantly trickle out will have a different effect then a system build around stockpiling and then buying large items.
Without re-hashing too many of the arguments that have already been said, I think it is important to note that inflation also has the effect of de-valuing the "ton of effort" that people put in. In other words, as credit (and other) prices rise over time, the very same group of people that you say this throttle/soft-cap will short-change (ie. the hard-core farmer, the poor college student, etc) will actually be the ones who will continually find the basketball hoop of the fruits of their labour constantly moved higher and higher. If "think of the newbies" or "think of the poor, OOC-cashless-players" is our warcry, then inflation is inherently bad. The throttle/soft-cap will damage those groups that depend on grinding efforts to progress in the game only when said throttle/soft-cap is badly implemented - a daily limit (instead of a weekly one), as you said, is possibly one of those bad design decisions. A too-low threshold, as Falmiis pointed out, is also possibly another. However, if the throttle is at an appropriate level that doesn't punish people who put in a "normal" amount of effort while giving the high-flying bashers a glass ceiling of how much they can grind, then we can move toward the other portions of the equation - adding in more meaningful goldsinks and getting the right balance for gold injection vs gold removal.
The question really is, what is the "normal" amount of effort that we want to avoid penalising? Everyone will answer with "the effort I am willing, and able, to put in", even if it is 23hrs a day for that person. In other words, whatever the admin decide is the limit will always seem (and in fact, will always be) arbitrary. Why not give this scheme time to bear fruit and re-assess from there what adjustments need to be made? Because it is not really in dispute that something needs to be done. And throttling can be one part of a many-faceted approach. This first implementation will be unlikely to hit the perfect note - but we can't really decide how much, or even in which direction, to adjust - not until we see what changes result from it, anyway. In the meantime, our tax agent aka Sidd, can start brainstorming about the other parts of that equation which will, hopefully, at the end-game, help to curb the problems associated with this continual inflation.
Shouldn't the answer be pretty close to 100? I mean, even if the newbie who bashes up 1k gold to buy a sword doesn't spend that 1k on a gold sink, the person he gives that 1k gold should... Sure, there will always be those who stockpile gold for later, but in the end, all gold should either A) disappear through gold sinks, or "disappear" through inactivity. Right now, it doesn't, really.
That said, gold sinks should always be optional perks. You should be able to stockpile gold to use them on said perks at a later date, such as Ascension or seal challenges etc.
What about the comment earlier about wanting to have some inflation so that there is less incentive to stockpile?
Shouldn't the answer be pretty close to 100? I mean, even if the newbie who bashes up 1k gold to buy a sword doesn't spend that 1k on a gold sink, the person he gives that 1k gold should... Sure, there will always be those who stockpile gold for later, but in the end, all gold should either A) disappear through gold sinks, or "disappear" through inactivity. Right now, it doesn't, really.
That said, gold sinks should always be optional perks. You should be able to stockpile gold to use them on said perks at a later date, such as Ascension or seal challenges etc.
What about the comment earlier about wanting to have some inflation so that there is less incentive to stockpile?
Yeah, that's why 100% gold drain isn't a good thing, but (say) 80% gold drain might be. At present, I'd wager that almost all gold generated stays in the system.
Jadice, the Frost Queen says to you, "Constant vigilance."
Shouldn't the answer be pretty close to 100? I mean, even if the newbie who bashes up 1k gold to buy a sword doesn't spend that 1k on a gold sink, the person he gives that 1k gold should... Sure, there will always be those who stockpile gold for later, but in the end, all gold should either A) disappear through gold sinks, or "disappear" through inactivity. Right now, it doesn't, really.
That said, gold sinks should always be optional perks. You should be able to stockpile gold to use them on said perks at a later date, such as Ascension or seal challenges etc.
What about the comment earlier about wanting to have some inflation so that there is less incentive to stockpile?
Yeah, that's why 100% gold drain isn't a good thing, but (say) 80% gold drain might be. At present, I'd wager that almost all gold generated stays in the system.
Which is why the gold drain should be phased in slowly. Right now we're at almost certainly under 20%, so why not incrementally add in gold sinks, instead of dropping in a huge change?
Heavy handed changed are the ones that create the most chaos and unintended consequences.
Edit: I.E. start at 30%, bump up to 40% if it's ineffective, and so on.
From a game-mechanism perspective, I don't think it matter if the goal is 80%, 90% or 100%. It'd be impossible to create a system that pulls exactly 85.4% of the gold generated out again; rather, what we need are things that are attractive to use, are re-usable, and cost gold. We need something that people can put 100k into again and again and again; manses, our probably highest gold sink at this point, does not do this. Buying curios for gold does not do this either, as it has a finite use; once you get all the curios, that's it (although that being said, putting more curios for sale for gold would definitely not be a bad idea; even though it's a finite solution, it would work fairly well as a gold drain for some). All other gold drains we have (beasts, comms, etc) are all far too small to make even a dent in it; back in my "glory-days", as it were, I could make upwards of 2m gold per IC year, and I honestly don't have any use at all for any of that gold (and, quite frankly, 2m was what some people made per RL day before the changes, so it's not even that big a sum). I'm not interested in a bigger manse; the ones I have are plenty. I own all the curios that are sold for gold (at least as far as I can recall). All I do with my gold is simply put it on my pile; I haven't looked at it for a very long time now, so all I know is that I have "enough".
Oh, and just to be clear: I'm not advocating massively increased costs as gold sinks. The small-time gold sinks should stay as they are; no bumping the price of comms up by 400%. Rather, we need more "luxury" sinks; sinks that people can certainly go without, but are helped by in one way or the other.
I will say, I'd love to participate in the discussion, but don't have a free clan slot to do so, so I'm more or less limited to forum-chair quarterbacking, I suppose.
To address one of Mrak's points though, at least some of the IG Hyper Rich have a tonne of gold because they have nothing better to do than to bash gold in the really good spots. The gold they generate is unrelentingly huge because they're good at bashing, but is a byproduct of that grind rather than the ultimate goal.
It's a very strange economy here, wherein the best way to gain wealth is to be a pure consumer. There are no real costs associated with materials, but also no real way for most people to locate or create raw materials directly (aside from the mines.). The mines undermine the scarcity of materials, as do receiving hundreds or thousands of them from genies, maps, stockings, etc that are repeatable without much effort.
Actually, coming at this from another angle: How much do the mines produce at maximum again, and how much do the wheel, genies, maps, stockings, and presents contribute on average?
It actually occurs to me that the orgs themselves, if they have a mind to and the coffers for it, can probably sponge up some of the excess freecoms by offering a reasonable buy price for them that creates a marginal profit even from buying aethercomms and reselling them. It would take a little coordination and the understanding that the org is going to lose a LOT of money in the short-term, but orgs could effectively place a floor the aethercommodity prices.
I may draft a Board proposal for that later, actually.
0
SylandraJoin Queue for Mafia GamesThe Last Mafia Game
(Re: "think of the poor newbies" argument: Just chiming in to say I make most of my gold from selling bardic credits that I hoard year long to sell as necessary for my needs. Which is to say this technique isn't limited to those who spend money on credits.)
"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."
@Sylandra I used to do a similar thing in MKO, one of my main sources of income. Actually later bought credits for the sole purpose of selling them for gold. I really should write a few stories if I intend to stick around, me and bashing are usually not on speaking terms, and I like things like estates, designs, etc.
It actually occurs to me that the orgs themselves, if they have a mind to and the coffers for it, can probably sponge up some of the excess freecoms by offering a reasonable buy price for them that creates a marginal profit even from buying aethercomms and reselling them. It would take a little coordination and the understanding that the org is going to lose a LOT of money in the short-term, but orgs could effectively place a floor the aethercommodity prices.
I may draft a Board proposal for that later, actually.
All that does is flood a lot of the "locked up" gold from orgs back into the game... that is the opposite of what we want right now (until there is another sink to throw it at).
It floods the gold but absorbs some of the free commodities, which are also part of the reason trades are suffering and villages are essentially worthless.
If it's done right, the orgs can essentially set the prices for commodities and they and villages can compete in the comm market, which means they'll take a bit of that gold back eventually by being the source of last resort but also the only game in the market that still has stock.
Aethermines will still turn a profit, and people who want to speculate can do the legwork to grab up comms from the plex and resell them to the orgs. It probably shouldn't be enough to compete with proper bashing, but should be enough to be an option for the cash-strapped.
Plus if the prices get to the right point, village comms will start being something other than a joke, and will resume their (theoretically) intended role of removing gold from the players completely.
The talk about commodities is a little weird, because even absent comm mines, it doesn't really sink any gold out of the game. It sort of does in that it puts the gold into org coffers, which moves a lot less frequently, but I'd wager that no one pays gold to npcs for comms at any point.
In other words, comm mines are only a problem in so much that they prevent gold from getting pooled in organizational coffers - who only really charge any gold for the commodities out of a sense of tradition.
EDIT: In other words, it makes more sense to do the opposite and use orgs to sponge up gold, not comms.
Mostly my angle is that it would be an absolute shame for us to make gold worth something, but not be able to give mercantile/trade-based characters meaning or value.
Everyone is agreeing that the game's economy is not healthy, and that it is literally impossible these days for a shopkeeper to turn a profit, but just making gold itself more valuable isn't going to help.
Other ideas are all focused on either limiting the influx of gold or creating an immense egress of the same. The other side of the coin needs to be addressed as well, to wit: give commodities value again, then give everyone access to a method of turning effort into comms directly.
In my dream world they'd just start selling dingbats or credits for ridiculous amounts of gold which would also let them control the value of a credit. But I know that's not going to happen.
Goldflation aside, the problem with shopkeeping is that unless you put in a lot of investment there are certain people who can just stock the basic necessities that people will buy on a day-to-day basis so much more efficiently than everyone else. I doubt it's unprofitable for this particular group of people as they manage to consistently keep their stock levels high despite getting a lot of business but it's a saturated market with many people dreaming of becoming a shop keeper when the reality is that unless you're in it for niche, design based stuff you probably won't get any custom at all.
Everyone is agreeing that the game's economy is not healthy, and that it is literally impossible these days for a shopkeeper to turn a profit, but just making gold itself more valuable isn't going to help.
To a degree, it actually will. Right now, shopkeepers are having a hard time turning a profit because there are too many trans tradespeople who don't value gold at all; they'll make stuff for people and even supply the comms, simply because they have no real interest in making gold. This means that those are the people who everyone turns to, and those who charge a decent amount for their work (comms+time+markup) will get no customers because of their higher price.
By increasing the actual value of gold, and giving it a purpose, you will also reduce the number of those tradespeople. A larger amount of shopkeepers will start charging a decent amount for their goods, and people will simply have to pay that amount. Will it increase the cost for clothes, weapons and armor? A bit, perhaps, but in the long run, I think it'll be healthy for the economy.
I'm really not a fan of taxes but there's other ways to put in minimal gold sinks which add up quickly over time across a lot of players. Things like adding in a fee for classflexing/skillflexing, even if it's just 5-x,000 gold, similar to posting up designs. The same could be done with news posts if it's just a few thousand (Though these figures are how I feel at the current state of the economy and with the gold throttle how it is that's already 10% of your daily possible income at base...)
[Edit: This fee would still have to work with the artifacts in order to make any visible impact but if you are invested enough to have a tam/cord I'm pretty sure you'll have the 5k to swap.]
(I'm the mom of Hallifax btw, so if you are in Hallifax please call me mom.)
== Professional Girl Gamer == Yes I play games Yes I'm a girl get over it
Guard variants, 'mercenaries', maybe, that cost gold instead of power (so, like in other IREs). 1000 gold to summon, 1000 gold of upkeep per weave. Then maybe Commercial governments can lessen their summon/upkeep to maybe 800 gold or whatever.
Either that, or have a mob with a really promising thing that you get for turning its corpse in, who has attacks that deal damage based on the amount of gold in your packs/on your person, or who takes a percentage of the same, to encourage putting gold in banks and therefore locking up a percentage of it. And retool the bank tax to be taken out on deposit, not withdrawal, so that you can always have a good idea of how much you have.
If you don't want or need the reward, you don't need to fight it, but it should be something enticing enough that Xenthos will give up a billion gold in order to get it. (picking on Xenthos because I'm reasonably sure he actually has 10b gold.)
I guess you could also just drop it in a manse or storeroom though...
(As an aside, was I the only one annoyed that the lifedebt was paid off during the intro for citizens of the commercial empire in ToP? That was going to be a driving force for my space mercenary crew, dammit.)
Everyone is agreeing that the game's economy is not healthy, and that it is literally impossible these days for a shopkeeper to turn a profit, but just making gold itself more valuable isn't going to help.
To a degree, it actually will. Right now, shopkeepers are having a hard time turning a profit because there are too many trans tradespeople who don't value gold at all; they'll make stuff for people and even supply the comms, simply because they have no real interest in making gold.
By increasing the actual value of gold, and giving it a purpose, you will also reduce the number of those tradespeople. A larger amount of shopkeepers will start charging a decent amount for their goods, and people will simply have to pay that amount. Will it increase the cost for clothes, weapons and armor? A bit, perhaps, but in the long run, I think it'll be healthy for the economy.
I don't really think it follows that making gold more valuable (by making it more scarce) will reduce the number of trades people. You have to directly combat the problem of a huge number of tradespeople who have no interest in making profit. I think you can start by:
1) Remove the (big) user-only combat benefits from trade skills, particularly the big trans trade benefits of Tailoring, Tattoos, and Forging. These combat perks encourage people to learn the skills even if they have no investment in the economic aspect of the trade skills. This leads to a host of tailors who only incidentally make clothing, and do so at or below cost.
2) Make trades opt-in. Require a credit investment to join a crafting skill, and discount the lesson cost by some similar amount. Again, that might encourage only people who actually have an interest in supplying the economy to buy in.
Hopefully, if it becomes more reasonable to accrue existing gold at rates comparable to those at which you can simply generate new gold by bashing, it will become possible to make back your credit investment in a reasonable time frame, putting profit on shopkeeper's radars.
Part of that is making there be some reason to want to accrue gold outside of purchasing credits, because it may never be possible to reasonably make back your credit investment with gold wealth through shopkeeping. In other words, there needs to be enough value in gold independent of credits to be potentially equivalent to the credit investment of being a tradesperson.
I'm really not a fan of taxes but there's other ways to put in minimal gold sinks which add up quickly over time across a lot of players. Things like adding in a fee for classflexing/skillflexing, even if it's just 5-x,000 gold, similar to posting up designs. The same could be done with news posts if it's just a few thousand (Though these figures are how I feel at the current state of the economy and with the gold throttle how it is that's already 10% of your daily possible income at base...)
[Edit: This fee would still have to work with the artifacts in order to make any visible impact but if you are invested enough to have a tam/cord I'm pretty sure you'll have the 5k to swap.]
Can we please not add any more silly tolls for classflexing? Lusternia already has the most barriers to spending loads of credits on new skillsets out of any IREs.
1) Remove the (big) user-only combat benefits from trade skills, particularly the big trans trade benefits of Tailoring, Tattoos, and Forging. These combat perks encourage people to learn the skills even if they have no investment in the economic aspect of the trade skills. This leads to a host of tailors who only incidentally make clothing, and do so at or below cost.
Going to start trying to limit responses to one idea at a time just so that we can get better feedback through the reaction buttons.
I'm not sure completely removing them will fly, but maybe sticking them much, MUCH lower in the skillsets, so that those who want the combat perks don't need to invest heavily to get the perk and hopefully just pick it up and stop at the perk, like some folks do with virtuoso Dramatics/Influence/*magic/Discernment/Combat/Discipline (admittedly though some/most of these also have skills you push for past virt.)
How attractive would paying gold to have NPCs use your full name or honourifics be?
ie: You can pay the Institute Herald x gold, and for the next y time, NPCs will call you Doctor Shevat, or you pay the Gossip lady z gold, and for the next q time, NPCs call you High Templar Kalas Ixion. (He's a Kalas, right? I can't check.)
Two things: 1) Until we get design books, crafting things for people is always going to be a headache for me. I want to get it done as quickly as possible. Give me the comms, I give you the item I made, and we're done. I do not even want to hear the "how much do I owe you?" question because I find the whole experience so unpleasant and would rather move on to other things. 2) I have lots of gold. I have little I care about to spend it on. Why on Earth would I demand people pay me their gold when I just don't have any use for it?
If you want crafting to make a profit for craftspeople again, you must deal with both of those points. Make crafting more enjoyable (or at least less onerous) and give the people who have the skills a reason to ask for gold for their services.
Comments
There's no reason to dislike inflation itself. Inflation is only bad insofar as it creates distortions elsewhere in the economy. The two distortions it seems like people are unhappy with are 1) it's hard to break into the credit market and 2) practicing a trade creates no value for the tradesperson**.
I think the gold throttle doesn't help with either of these issues, and might make them worse.
For someone who can't buy OOC credits, the only real way you can compensate is to put in a ton of effort. Get free credits from achievements, and do a massive amount of gold farming. The IG hyper-rich have better things to do with their time, so you can get more gold than them by putting in the time and effort. The throttle/soft cap makes it so that the IG rich can essentially earn as much as the most hard-core farmer (and in fact will do so with a lot less effort, since they already have all the tools for fast bashing).
There's a good chance that well-crafted gold sinks will help dramatically. It will raise the marginal value of gold spent in places other than the credit market, so that those who already have many artifacts IG (i.e. have a low marginal value for credits) will spend their money elsewhere, allowing others to buy credits. I hope that the report is successful.
Since returning to the game at the beginning of this year, I got an IRE membership, so this will not be a huge blow to my artifact progression. If I were a poor college student and couldn't buy OOC credits, like I was 5-6 years ago when I last played, this would be a huge disappointment.
At the very least, I wish we could move the throttling to weekly thresholds rather than daily thresholds. Currently, it especially punishes those who have most of their play-time on weekends.
**I mostly ignored this, because I don't think there is a solution. The game is such that 1) there are many sellers, 2) search costs are nil, and 3) products are basically homogenous. Microeconomics tells us that this is the formula for perfect competition, in which producers earn 0 economic profit.
The question really is, what is the "normal" amount of effort that we want to avoid penalising? Everyone will answer with "the effort I am willing, and able, to put in", even if it is 23hrs a day for that person. In other words, whatever the admin decide is the limit will always seem (and in fact, will always be) arbitrary. Why not give this scheme time to bear fruit and re-assess from there what adjustments need to be made? Because it is not really in dispute that something needs to be done. And throttling can be one part of a many-faceted approach. This first implementation will be unlikely to hit the perfect note - but we can't really decide how much, or even in which direction, to adjust - not until we see what changes result from it, anyway. In the meantime, our tax agent aka Sidd, can start brainstorming about the other parts of that equation which will, hopefully, at the end-game, help to curb the problems associated with this continual inflation.
Heavy handed changed are the ones that create the most chaos and unintended consequences.
Edit: I.E. start at 30%, bump up to 40% if it's ineffective, and so on.
To address one of Mrak's points though, at least some of the IG Hyper Rich have a tonne of gold because they have nothing better to do than to bash gold in the really good spots. The gold they generate is unrelentingly huge because they're good at bashing, but is a byproduct of that grind rather than the ultimate goal.
It's a very strange economy here, wherein the best way to gain wealth is to be a pure consumer. There are no real costs associated with materials, but also no real way for most people to locate or create raw materials directly (aside from the mines.). The mines undermine the scarcity of materials, as do receiving hundreds or thousands of them from genies, maps, stockings, etc that are repeatable without much effort.
Actually, coming at this from another angle: How much do the mines produce at maximum again, and how much do the wheel, genies, maps, stockings, and presents contribute on average?
I may draft a Board proposal for that later, actually.
I used to do a similar thing in MKO, one of my main sources of income. Actually later bought credits for the sole purpose of selling them for gold. I really should write a few stories if I intend to stick around, me and bashing are usually not on speaking terms, and I like things like estates, designs, etc.
If it's done right, the orgs can essentially set the prices for commodities and they and villages can compete in the comm market, which means they'll take a bit of that gold back eventually by being the source of last resort but also the only game in the market that still has stock.
Aethermines will still turn a profit, and people who want to speculate can do the legwork to grab up comms from the plex and resell them to the orgs. It probably shouldn't be enough to compete with proper bashing, but should be enough to be an option for the cash-strapped.
Plus if the prices get to the right point, village comms will start being something other than a joke, and will resume their (theoretically) intended role of removing gold from the players completely.
In other words, comm mines are only a problem in so much that they prevent gold from getting pooled in organizational coffers - who only really charge any gold for the commodities out of a sense of tradition.
EDIT: In other words, it makes more sense to do the opposite and use orgs to sponge up gold, not comms.
Everyone is agreeing that the game's economy is not healthy, and that it is literally impossible these days for a shopkeeper to turn a profit, but just making gold itself more valuable isn't going to help.
Other ideas are all focused on either limiting the influx of gold or creating an immense egress of the same. The other side of the coin needs to be addressed as well, to wit: give commodities value again, then give everyone access to a method of turning effort into comms directly.
By increasing the actual value of gold, and giving it a purpose, you will also reduce the number of those tradespeople. A larger amount of shopkeepers will start charging a decent amount for their goods, and people will simply have to pay that amount. Will it increase the cost for clothes, weapons and armor? A bit, perhaps, but in the long run, I think it'll be healthy for the economy.
Things like adding in a fee for classflexing/skillflexing, even if it's just 5-x,000 gold, similar to posting up designs. The same could be done with news posts if it's just a few thousand (Though these figures are how I feel at the current state of the economy and with the gold throttle how it is that's already 10% of your daily possible income at base...)
[Edit: This fee would still have to work with the artifacts in order to make any visible impact but if you are invested enough to have a tam/cord I'm pretty sure you'll have the 5k to swap.]
== Professional Girl Gamer ==
Yes I play games
Yes I'm a girl
get over it
== Professional Girl Gamer ==
Yes I play games
Yes I'm a girl
get over it
If you don't want or need the reward, you don't need to fight it, but it should be something enticing enough that Xenthos will give up a billion gold in order to get it. (picking on Xenthos because I'm reasonably sure he actually has 10b gold.)
I guess you could also just drop it in a manse or storeroom though...
(As an aside, was I the only one annoyed that the lifedebt was paid off during the intro for citizens of the commercial empire in ToP? That was going to be a driving force for my space mercenary crew, dammit.)
1) Remove the (big) user-only combat benefits from trade skills, particularly the big trans trade benefits of Tailoring, Tattoos, and Forging. These combat perks encourage people to learn the skills even if they have no investment in the economic aspect of the trade skills. This leads to a host of tailors who only incidentally make clothing, and do so at or below cost.
2) Make trades opt-in. Require a credit investment to join a crafting skill, and discount the lesson cost by some similar amount. Again, that might encourage only people who actually have an interest in supplying the economy to buy in.
Hopefully, if it becomes more reasonable to accrue existing gold at rates comparable to those at which you can simply generate new gold by bashing, it will become possible to make back your credit investment in a reasonable time frame, putting profit on shopkeeper's radars.
Part of that is making there be some reason to want to accrue gold outside of purchasing credits, because it may never be possible to reasonably make back your credit investment with gold wealth through shopkeeping. In other words, there needs to be enough value in gold independent of credits to be potentially equivalent to the credit investment of being a tradesperson.
I'm not sure completely removing them will fly, but maybe sticking them much, MUCH lower in the skillsets, so that those who want the combat perks don't need to invest heavily to get the perk and hopefully just pick it up and stop at the perk, like some folks do with virtuoso Dramatics/Influence/*magic/Discernment/Combat/Discipline (admittedly though some/most of these also have skills you push for past virt.)
ie: You can pay the Institute Herald x gold, and for the next y time, NPCs will call you Doctor Shevat, or you pay the Gossip lady z gold, and for the next q time, NPCs call you High Templar Kalas Ixion. (He's a Kalas, right? I can't check.)
1) Until we get design books, crafting things for people is always going to be a headache for me. I want to get it done as quickly as possible. Give me the comms, I give you the item I made, and we're done. I do not even want to hear the "how much do I owe you?" question because I find the whole experience so unpleasant and would rather move on to other things.
2) I have lots of gold. I have little I care about to spend it on. Why on Earth would I demand people pay me their gold when I just don't have any use for it?
If you want crafting to make a profit for craftspeople again, you must deal with both of those points. Make crafting more enjoyable (or at least less onerous) and give the people who have the skills a reason to ask for gold for their services.