I dont like the gold cap either. It turns hunting into a "dailies" style quest. You are discouraged from playing the game by your rewards stalling.
It also sucks for people who cant log in for an hour a day to hit the cap. Maybe they can only play on the weekends but can play 12 hrs straight. Gold cap has hit a bunch of niche players pretty hard and they've moved onto other IRE games because of it.
I don't agree with any harsher gold generation throttles or caps either, but do you think it would help if the throttle was per week instead of per day? Example, instead of a 50,000 gold cap per day replace it with a 350,000 cap per week.
Well, I guess the question is what you do need to spend 50k gold on? If it is easy to generate 50k gold in an hour without much effort, what do you do with all that gold?
Draconomicon.
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.
Well, I guess the question is what you do need to spend 50k gold on? If it is easy to generate 50k gold in an hour without much effort, what do you do with all that gold?
Wine, women and song.
But mostly credits and golden tonic
Not Ess. Totally not Ess. Probably Kistan but that only has one s
I don't get the cap at all. If somebody wants to farm gold all day let them do it - it means they aren't doing something else. And other people who are doing those other things are not farming gold. At some point, those two people will need to meet up to exchange their gold for their not-gold. That is almost the dictionary definition of the word economy. As long as they're not botting. And if the reason for the cap is that people were botting, then we're shooting at the wrong target.
What we were attempting to curb was the situation where Artie von Goldanbasha was able to generate 300,000 gold per day bashing only high yield zones nonstop but leaving those spots a barren wasteland. John Q. Lately, meanwhile, either doesn't know about these zones or can't get to or survive them enough to be able to leverage them and can only make 150,000 per day in the same time span, but still had to pay for the same curatives, beast upkeep, armor, and possible weapons, AND had to try to get more credits than Artie because he needed to play catch-up, all with prices that were set because Artie was able to pay them without sweating.
Random aside: If the gold cap stays, add a command to check how much gold you've earned since it reset so we can tell if we're close to hitting it or not.
Any sufficiently advanced pun is indistinguishable from comedy.
@Luce that is an issue. That issue is Artie versus John Q balance though. This is the issue with trying to isolate one problem. Everything builds on other issues. What is an issue for a demigod of 5 years is not an issue for a new/returning player.
I do believe Gold throttling should be a thing. Every thing has diminishing returns. I don't think there should be a hard cap period, but the returns should lessen exponentially. This doesn't fix the economy though. In order to fix the economy three things need to happen: 1. Gold sinks to offset gold generation (tie to #3) 2. Increase value of gold (Credits, Goop, Dingbats, Crystals are all unique of each other, and gold is just a way to buy credits). 3. Gold circulation (Velocity of Gold) Trade skills need revamped. Players need a reason to exchange goods and services for gold.
By not gold throttling you are just inviting botting, or near botting (just sitting window open, with some good basic AI to let you know if there is a say or tell or anything else popping in that isn't the norm). Which then leads to credit inflation because John Q Botter, can constantly buy all the available IG credits and win the gold auctions. Every IRE has seen this repeatedly, MKO's fishing and horse breeding destroyed the economy, toss in some bashing bots and everything was in the proverbial "shitter".
Yes this is a case of a few bad apples ruining things for everyone else but it is the reality of the situation.
I dont like the gold cap either. It turns hunting into a "dailies" style quest. You are discouraged from playing the game by your rewards stalling.
It also sucks for people who cant log in for an hour a day to hit the cap. Maybe they can only play on the weekends but can play 12 hrs straight. Gold cap has hit a bunch of niche players pretty hard and they've moved onto other IRE games because of it.
I don't agree with any harsher gold generation throttles or caps either, but do you think it would help if the throttle was per week instead of per day? Example, instead of a 50,000 gold cap per day replace it with a 350,000 cap per week.
What we were attempting to curb was the situation where Artie von Goldanbasha was able to generate 300,000 gold per day bashing only high yield zones nonstop but leaving those spots a barren wasteland. John Q. Lately, meanwhile, either doesn't know about these zones or can't get to or survive them enough to be able to leverage them and can only make 150,000 per day in the same time span, but still had to pay for the same curatives, beast upkeep, armor, and possible weapons, AND had to try to get more credits than Artie because he needed to play catch-up, all with prices that were set because Artie was able to pay them without sweating.
If we have a functioning economy, the people who can't bash that area (or don't want to) will be selling things to Artie to make their money. Artie bashes to get their items, they make those items to get his gold (which they of course then trade to other producers for their items.)
The problem is that if you're bashing for gold to buy credits, that's not a functioning economy, because the production of credits occurs entirely outside of the economy. Until players can make something people want as much as credits, it's going to skew things toward activities that produce gold and away from activities that trade gold.
The problem is that if you're bashing for gold to buy credits, that's not a functioning economy, because the production of credits occurs entirely outside of the economy. Until players can make something people want as much as credits, it's going to skew things toward activities that produce gold and away from activities that trade gold.
That is a functioning economy, because you're trading a resource that you earned through playing for another commodity - it is functionally the same as spending that money in a comm shop.
The only problem with the equation is that it doesn't reduce the total gold in existence, but just shifts it around. If I buy credits from you, my gold goes to you. So I am making gold out of nothing, and then just passing it to someone else. This is why selling lessons is such a beautiful solution, that gold would be removed from the ecosystem and deleted.
See, what you just wrote makes perfect sense to me. Yet it would logically to my mind result in "IRE economies cannot work". And yet Lusty's has felt especially broken to me right from the start.
I came in two years ago and almost jizzed at the mass of awesome tradeskills and how they linked and were interdependent. I got my 300 credits ready to trans a tradeskill right in the face, and when I asked WiseMan what the best skill was, he sat down with me and did some maths and said
"You know what, son? If you want to wisely invest those credits and make money, then you should sell them on the open market. You will never make as much from any of your tradeskills as you will by just selling the credits."
FOOT, MEET EPEEN.
There is something especially wrong with Lusty's economy, despite ostensibly having one arm tied up its back just like the other IREs.
Every IRE game has grappled with the 'faucets vs. sinks' problem to some degree or other.
One thing I love about Lusternia is that nearly everything in the game is player created, but the drawback to that is that nearly everything player created has little to no cost other than time. If they had seeded the game with 'sunk cost items' from the start, gold would have value outside of credit purchases and manse upgrades.
By that I mean, tailoring could require thread that sells from a shop. Forging would require grommets and tempering salts, which you'd have to buy from a shop. Alchemy would require wax stoppers and filters, which you'd have to buy from a shop. This would give items a floor cost that cannot be reduced no matter how 'free' someone considers their time to be.
The problem is that if you're bashing for gold to buy credits, that's not a functioning economy, because the production of credits occurs entirely outside of the economy. Until players can make something people want as much as credits, it's going to skew things toward activities that produce gold and away from activities that trade gold.
That is a functioning economy, because you're trading a resource that you earned through playing for another commodity - it is functionally the same as spending that money in a comm shop.
The only problem with the equation is that it doesn't reduce the total gold in existence, but just shifts it around. If I buy credits from you, my gold goes to you. So I am making gold out of nothing, and then just passing it to someone else. This is why selling lessons is such a beautiful solution, that gold would be removed from the ecosystem and deleted.
Your 'only problem' is a big part of why it's not a functional economy, disproving your first point.
Also: sell me lessons, I will turn them into curios, sell those for credits, and buy more lessons. Please tell me what day this releases so I can abuse the math before it gets fixed/nerfed.
Your 'only problem' is a big part of why it's not a functional economy, disproving your first point.
I just meant that the cited example is transactional and perfectly valid. The ability to buy credits on a market is by itself not flawed. The economy has serious issues, but the ability to buy credits outside the game and sell them in game for gold isn't one of them.
Also: sell me lessons, I will turn them into curios, sell those for credits, and buy more lessons. Please tell me what day this releases so I can abuse the math before it gets fixed/nerfed.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but that's the goal right? You are spending gold to buy a resource that other people find desirable (curios), which you can sell to players for something that you find desirable (credits), and the gold you spent is removed permanently from the economy thus not contributing to inflation.
Having a bunch of gold in the game is less of a problem if that money is constantly moving around, and if it's plausible to make as much money doing anything else as it is creating it via bashing. Combine a circulating economy with broad-appeal gold sinks and the gold will settle out of the system MUCH more efficiently anyways.
The problem is that it's just so efficient to generate gold from bashing, and the only thing of value you can buy with gold is credits. Because trades require such an extreme credit investment, you're not ever going to make back that investment. However, IF trades were a more efficient way to get gold in the long run AND IF there was something you could get via gold but not via credits you would in effect have an engine for turning credits into other non-credit purchased items. Because trades would provide an alternative means to bashing for getting gold, you wouldn't need to be measuring in how many credits you make back in gold (which you never will) but will have spent those credits for long term investment into a second useful resource, good, or service you wanted.
The folks who are the most efficient at bashing at gold also tend to be the ones who have the least incentive currently for giving that gold to other players, because they're far more likely to have artifacted out vials and gear.
They allow linking to five fluids each, halving usage of each of those fluids and obviating the need to purchase firefly sigils or gems for vials. The number of fluids they linked is a relic of the pre-overhaul curing system that had dramatically more fluids. In the new system, each artifact vial should link to one, at most two different fluids. In addition perhaps every third sip should be free, instead of every other. This is still a pretty potent benefit per credit or dingbat spent, and is comparable to the old effect in the context of the different curing system where each curative sipped is of different value.
Having a bunch of gold in the game is less of a problem if that money is constantly moving around, and if it's plausible to make as much money doing anything else as it is creating it via bashing. Combine a circulating economy with broad-appeal gold sinks and the gold will settle out of the system MUCH more efficiently anyways.
Super interesting post! I agree with 99% of what you said, especially the stuff about making trade skills matter as much as bashing. But isn't this part the opposite of how real economies work?
Idle money does not contribute to inflation, because it isn't being spent. The higher the velocity of money, the more its being traded around, the higher inflation gets. Getting money sunk out of the economy into either true gold sinks or city coffers where it won't be spent again should be an important part of any updates.
But I'm definitely not an economist or anything, so someone might be able to weigh in on this better.
It might be nice to see all the trades get a little TLC and a few extra benefits/boosts to spread around. I remember when oils were first released for alchemy. When was the last time anything that significant got added to a trade? Been quite a while.
Doubly so if you can start stressing some new commodities in the process. Making everything wood/metal heavy is old hat. You could straight up delete the game's storehouses of rope and coal, meanwhile, and they'd bounce back pretty quick because literally nobody cares. A fact made all the more hilarious by the fact that we have two villages (Delport/Stewartsville) that specialise in hemp/rope production.
They allow linking to five fluids each, halving usage of each of those fluids and obviating the need to purchase firefly sigils or gems for vials. The number of fluids they linked is a relic of the pre-overhaul curing system that had dramatically more fluids. In the new system, each artifact vial should link to one, at most two different fluids. In addition perhaps every third sip should be free, instead of every other. This is still a pretty potent benefit per credit or dingbat spent, and is comparable to the old effect in the context of the different curing system where each curative sipped is of different value.
I'm a huge fan of how Lusternia's artefact vials currently work, tbh. As a monk, I keep a whole host of poisons in my liquid rift, and by comparison, I remember spending like half my retirement credits on vials during my brief tenure as a Templar in Aetolia (and that was when I had more of them). [edit: Also, it's worth noting that access to creating vials isn't gated behind the more limited access trade skills but rather Arts.]
Honestly, also, though, while I've far from read every post in this thread, and while I will say that while many of these things are probably true and less incentive to buy tradeskill-produced items from other players is going to make the game's economy less like a real one, I'm someone who really appreciates being able to opt out of that whole experience by spending credits. I have limited time to play, and I prefer to spend that time either RPing or PVPing or doing some other activity I enjoy more than hunting down forgers on MARKET.
Also, while that doesn't necessarily invalidate the complaints voiced here, I think it's worth considering newbies' ability to produce gold versus veterans, too. In an ideal world, they would always be taken care of by their guilds, but what happens when they roll in a place where that (at least temporarily) isn't the case?
Again, I can't say I've read everything posted here, and I can't claim that I have the answers or anything, but that's my personal perspective on what I understand of the stated problems.
The idea here is that if everyone wants to spend some amount of gold on gold sinks, be they true or pseudo-sinks (coffers), you want the gold to circulate enough that one chunk of 10k gold passes through as many hands and has as many people as possible skim some off into gold sinks. So if you say spend 1k gold on... upkeeping a cigar habit any additional gold generation you make won't go to your cigars: you're already spending that gold. If some of that additional income goes to another player, they may not have previously been spending on cigars because they aren't generating as much gold, and now they can and that gold will sink out of the game instead of hanging around.
This is why it's REALLY REALLY important that repeating, constant, relatively low impact gold sinks receive focus. This kind of scheme doesn't work if the purchases are one-and-done things (though some of those would be nice). In addition to making generating large quantities of gold for luxuries more of a specialist thing, and giving the "gold generating class" reasons to pass that gold around to others, you need to have constant ways that gold will drain out, so that people have a reason to keep wanting to move gold around over time. You need to drive demand and if the only way you do that is by one-off gold drains, you're going to need to keep inventing new ones forever to keep established characters coming back to the well.
In real economies money doesn't just come out of nowhere as a function of time spent working, that's the key difference besides complexity. Because gold doesn't have value pinned to anything like real currencies do (either literally a la gold standard or more modernly the credit value as set and tightly regulated by the issuing government) things don't really work quite like a real economy. That said, the source of currency devaluation in lusternia is the constant and progressive money supply with no growth in the economy to match - give people a reason to want to grow the economy (come up with new services to pull gold from each other) and you can alleviate some of this. Again, bring people back into the economy constantly.
That's tricky as hell, and is one of the reasons that I think it's a great idea to try and come up with some ways for orgs to spend consistent gold and have players come up with new ways to shift gold around. One such gold sink can have a much larger quantitative impact when pitched to orgs rather than individuals because orgs deal with gold on a much larger scale. You can price things in hundreds of thousands or even a million plus gold and actually expect pretty consistent expenditures from an org, where the vast majority of players just won't invest that much over and over - and the few that do become REALLY entrenched in those expenditures (see cartelchat), potentially causing issues down the line. Someone brought up commune shop upgrades and that's a good example... except that those upgrades are one-and-done, big burst of gold left the game and then the sink dried up.
An example of what I mean: let's say gold drops have been slashed across the board. Flatten the extra gold dropped per moblevel, reduce the scalar gold for unbashed areas, reduce the number of creatures that drop gold. Shift more gold generation to quest and activity gold which is less affected by crits and doesn't include some high tier areas.
In this model, newbies might have a hard time getting enough gold to get started with the game. Okay, up the amount of gold given by the collegium but take that gold from the org coffers. That way, if the orgs want to cover that gold lost they need to give incentives for players to donate to the org.
Orgs should also be given a reason to actually want guards en masse, and should pay upkeep on guards in gold. There should be something that orgs can do on their own with only minimal oversight from patrons to sink gold to achieve player goals and provide amenities.
I think the biggest and brightest point to me is that we need people wanting to work in the economy. It doesnt really matter about gold gen or such if people are not wanting to craft and trade, use all the trade skills and staff shops.
To me the answer to that is a bit of a review on all the trade skills to make sure they are all interesting and useable in the economy. I know we have a few reports on tattoos already to try and fix how bad it is as a trade and I think more stuff like that would be a very good thing as a basic starting point.
I would be willing to sit at a forge all day long if weapon stats were a thing. And that would require me to buy metal. I'd throw gold at it like it was up on the tables.
I think the biggest and brightest point to me is that we need people wanting to work in the economy. It doesnt really matter about gold gen or such if people are not wanting to craft and trade, use all the trade skills and staff shops.
To me the answer to that is a bit of a review on all the trade skills to make sure they are all interesting and useable in the economy. I know we have a few reports on tattoos already to try and fix how bad it is as a trade and I think more stuff like that would be a very good thing as a basic starting point.
(Emphasis mine.) I think this is basically what I was trying to get at. I was definitely wrong when I said that buying credits is outside of the economy, because for some reason I forgot you're getting them from other players. But you're still buying something that originated from outside of the economy. If bashing is the best way to earn gold for that, that's what you'll do. You're not reliant on people providing inputs into the economy the way you are when you buy player-made items. If I want a cartel, I'll sell a hundred credits or I'll bash for two weeks, but I certainly won't turn to my tradeskills to provide that kind of cash, especially within that same timeframe.
As someone with really long stretches of inactivity, the majority of my credit purchases are specifically made in order for me to opt out of the economy, from my bandolier and vials, to my aethersuit, to my Tam. I want to be able to hop on and play when I get the urge to do so, instead of coming back to a bunch of decay messages and hoping I stashed enough gold to get back on my feet. I understand how convenient being able to avoid scouring the market for things can be and how nice it is to be self-sufficient.
However, I realise that I'm also exactly the kind of person who makes having a vibrant economy difficult. If 10% of your population really loves crafting and trading, it doesn't work. If 10% opt out entirely, and they're also the most likely to be able to generate tons of gold from bashing, it doesn't work. As much as I'd hate to lose the utility and freedom to come and go on a whim that I've built up, I'm not sure I see a way for gold sinks to really grow teeth and have an effect on much beyond newbies unless you start to really trim back on being able to buy your way out of them.
Basically, while I certainly don't like what she's saying, I agree with @Enya.
(And as far as the velocity of money goes, @Jaspet, according to the macroecon class I'm currently taking, inflation is basically defined as the general price level of the economy rising. Velocity seems related only as a(n inversely correlated) metric for the demand for money; that is, as prices rise during a period of inflation, you want to be holding assets instead of cash, because the value of money is dropping, so you try to move the money you have as quickly back into the market as you can in return for more stable assets. Conversely, in a deflationary period, prices are falling and the value of money is increasing, so you want to hold on to cash. If you have the means to do so, you should in theory convert other assets that are underperforming into cash, then repurchase anything you want once the prices stabilize, basically making a profit by not buying anything. This is, of course, why economists prefer to target a low inflation rate instead of trying to aim for full stability and potentially undershooting into deflation.)
What we were attempting to curb was the situation where Artie von Goldanbasha was able to generate 300,000 gold per day bashing only high yield zones nonstop but leaving those spots a barren wasteland. John Q. Lately, meanwhile, either doesn't know about these zones or can't get to or survive them enough to be able to leverage them and can only make 150,000 per day in the same time span, but still had to pay for the same curatives, beast upkeep, armor, and possible weapons, AND had to try to get more credits than Artie because he needed to play catch-up, all with prices that were set because Artie was able to pay them without sweating.
If we have a functioning economy, the people who can't bash that area (or don't want to) will be selling things to Artie to make their money. Artie bashes to get their items, they make those items to get his gold (which they of course then trade to other producers for their items.)
I was talking about two seperate players spending their time bashing. Johnny in my scenario is doing the same things as Artie, just not earning as much because he doesn't crit as often, doesn't hit as heavily, needs to spend more on curatives (from various artifacts), and makes less gold than Artie for the things he does kill (old golden cookies). This combined with artifacts making some trades less useful or outright useless was why artisan, bookbinding, and forging were the only trades able to charge a relatively stable price (and tailoring until everyone could wear plate+aethersuits nailed that particular coffin shut) for thrones, origami, and armour.
But even if trades are made a viable route to money again, it's just going to mean that the only people able to sustain themselves through bashing are going to be those like Artie who are able to opt out of most of it and generate as much gold in as little time as possible. Artie will still set the prices for the new economic model, even though he's only interacting with about half of it, because he's the one producing the gold side of the equation in the greatest amounts.
Meanwhile the only way to be competitive in the trades arena will be to have a full set of different artifacts so that you're using the trade efficiently. The only cooks who make a decent amount of money will be the ones with the full cooking curio set(s) already, the silver spoon, the spatula, a full Wondercorn, and probably a few more I'm missing. Enchanters will only turn a profit with gloves and powerplex jewels, and probably only if they have a cube rune to sell charges. Forgers are already generally losing money unless they have a mallet because they can only really sell to midbies and everything requires so much metal. And the list goes on.
Like, I get what we're going for here, but in order to make trades a viable route to wealth we'd need something like a writ system, wherein tradesfolks are able to give stuff to NPCs a number of times a weave/year in exchange for gold, and we'd need to introduce aspects to trades that artifacts can't bypass, AND we'd need goldsinks outside of the tradeskill system that take nibbles out of your wealth.
Random aside, but having an area set aside with either minigames or mobs that drop things people will want, that cost gold to get into, might make for a decent sink. IE: An area what costs 15,000 gold to get into for 10 minutes, where greased pigs run around like frightened livestock, but one of them has a Fidget Spinner of Fate, which you can use for a massive chunk of exp/essence, spin or feed to a nexus for a chunk of power, or traded in packs to a nearby broker (probably nookie's cousin Thomas) for a Czigany coin. (and as an anti-frustration bit, all you need to do is kill the pig in question and the gatekeeper gives you the FSoF, or hitting the 10 minute mark just makes the pigs all vanish, to avoid killing it at 9:59, having the thing drop and being unable to pick it up before time is over.)
Comments
But mostly credits and golden tonic
Totally not Ess.
Probably Kistan but that only has one s
I do believe Gold throttling should be a thing. Every thing has diminishing returns. I don't think there should be a hard cap period, but the returns should lessen exponentially. This doesn't fix the economy though. In order to fix the economy three things need to happen:
1. Gold sinks to offset gold generation (tie to #3)
2. Increase value of gold (Credits, Goop, Dingbats, Crystals are all unique of each other, and gold is just a way to buy credits).
3. Gold circulation (Velocity of Gold) Trade skills need revamped. Players need a reason to exchange goods and services for gold.
Yes, what @Portius said!
Yes this is a case of a few bad apples ruining things for everyone else but it is the reality of the situation.
I'd much prefer this.
The problem is that if you're bashing for gold to buy credits, that's not a functioning economy, because the production of credits occurs entirely outside of the economy. Until players can make something people want as much as credits, it's going to skew things toward activities that produce gold and away from activities that trade gold.
The only problem with the equation is that it doesn't reduce the total gold in existence, but just shifts it around. If I buy credits from you, my gold goes to you. So I am making gold out of nothing, and then just passing it to someone else. This is why selling lessons is such a beautiful solution, that gold would be removed from the ecosystem and deleted.
I came in two years ago and almost jizzed at the mass of awesome tradeskills and how they linked and were interdependent. I got my 300 credits ready to trans a tradeskill right in the face, and when I asked WiseMan what the best skill was, he sat down with me and did some maths and said
"You know what, son? If you want to wisely invest those credits and make money, then you should sell them on the open market. You will never make as much from any of your tradeskills as you will by just selling the credits."
FOOT, MEET EPEEN.
There is something especially wrong with Lusty's economy, despite ostensibly having one arm tied up its back just like the other IREs.
One thing I love about Lusternia is that nearly everything in the game is player created, but the drawback to that is that nearly everything player created has little to no cost other than time. If they had seeded the game with 'sunk cost items' from the start, gold would have value outside of credit purchases and manse upgrades.
By that I mean, tailoring could require thread that sells from a shop. Forging would require grommets and tempering salts, which you'd have to buy from a shop. Alchemy would require wax stoppers and filters, which you'd have to buy from a shop. This would give items a floor cost that cannot be reduced no matter how 'free' someone considers their time to be.
Also: sell me lessons, I will turn them into curios, sell those for credits, and buy more lessons. Please tell me what day this releases so I can abuse the math before it gets fixed/nerfed.
Edit: Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but that's the goal right? You are spending gold to buy a resource that other people find desirable (curios), which you can sell to players for something that you find desirable (credits), and the gold you spent is removed permanently from the economy thus not contributing to inflation.
The problem is that it's just so efficient to generate gold from bashing, and the only thing of value you can buy with gold is credits. Because trades require such an extreme credit investment, you're not ever going to make back that investment. However, IF trades were a more efficient way to get gold in the long run AND IF there was something you could get via gold but not via credits you would in effect have an engine for turning credits into other non-credit purchased items. Because trades would provide an alternative means to bashing for getting gold, you wouldn't need to be measuring in how many credits you make back in gold (which you never will) but will have spent those credits for long term investment into a second useful resource, good, or service you wanted.
The folks who are the most efficient at bashing at gold also tend to be the ones who have the least incentive currently for giving that gold to other players, because they're far more likely to have artifacted out vials and gear.
They allow linking to five fluids each, halving usage of each of those fluids and obviating the need to purchase firefly sigils or gems for vials. The number of fluids they linked is a relic of the pre-overhaul curing system that had dramatically more fluids. In the new system, each artifact vial should link to one, at most two different fluids. In addition perhaps every third sip should be free, instead of every other. This is still a pretty potent benefit per credit or dingbat spent, and is comparable to the old effect in the context of the different curing system where each curative sipped is of different value.
Idle money does not contribute to inflation, because it isn't being spent. The higher the velocity of money, the more its being traded around, the higher inflation gets. Getting money sunk out of the economy into either true gold sinks or city coffers where it won't be spent again should be an important part of any updates.
But I'm definitely not an economist or anything, so someone might be able to weigh in on this better.
Doubly so if you can start stressing some new commodities in the process. Making everything wood/metal heavy is old hat. You could straight up delete the game's storehouses of rope and coal, meanwhile, and they'd bounce back pretty quick because literally nobody cares. A fact made all the more hilarious by the fact that we have two villages (Delport/Stewartsville) that specialise in hemp/rope production.
Honestly, also, though, while I've far from read every post in this thread, and while I will say that while many of these things are probably true and less incentive to buy tradeskill-produced items from other players is going to make the game's economy less like a real one, I'm someone who really appreciates being able to opt out of that whole experience by spending credits. I have limited time to play, and I prefer to spend that time either RPing or PVPing or doing some other activity I enjoy more than hunting down forgers on MARKET.
Also, while that doesn't necessarily invalidate the complaints voiced here, I think it's worth considering newbies' ability to produce gold versus veterans, too. In an ideal world, they would always be taken care of by their guilds, but what happens when they roll in a place where that (at least temporarily) isn't the case?
Again, I can't say I've read everything posted here, and I can't claim that I have the answers or anything, but that's my personal perspective on what I understand of the stated problems.
This is why it's REALLY REALLY important that repeating, constant, relatively low impact gold sinks receive focus. This kind of scheme doesn't work if the purchases are one-and-done things (though some of those would be nice). In addition to making generating large quantities of gold for luxuries more of a specialist thing, and giving the "gold generating class" reasons to pass that gold around to others, you need to have constant ways that gold will drain out, so that people have a reason to keep wanting to move gold around over time. You need to drive demand and if the only way you do that is by one-off gold drains, you're going to need to keep inventing new ones forever to keep established characters coming back to the well.
In real economies money doesn't just come out of nowhere as a function of time spent working, that's the key difference besides complexity. Because gold doesn't have value pinned to anything like real currencies do (either literally a la gold standard or more modernly the credit value as set and tightly regulated by the issuing government) things don't really work quite like a real economy. That said, the source of currency devaluation in lusternia is the constant and progressive money supply with no growth in the economy to match - give people a reason to want to grow the economy (come up with new services to pull gold from each other) and you can alleviate some of this. Again, bring people back into the economy constantly.
That's tricky as hell, and is one of the reasons that I think it's a great idea to try and come up with some ways for orgs to spend consistent gold and have players come up with new ways to shift gold around. One such gold sink can have a much larger quantitative impact when pitched to orgs rather than individuals because orgs deal with gold on a much larger scale. You can price things in hundreds of thousands or even a million plus gold and actually expect pretty consistent expenditures from an org, where the vast majority of players just won't invest that much over and over - and the few that do become REALLY entrenched in those expenditures (see cartelchat), potentially causing issues down the line. Someone brought up commune shop upgrades and that's a good example... except that those upgrades are one-and-done, big burst of gold left the game and then the sink dried up.
In this model, newbies might have a hard time getting enough gold to get started with the game. Okay, up the amount of gold given by the collegium but take that gold from the org coffers. That way, if the orgs want to cover that gold lost they need to give incentives for players to donate to the org.
Orgs should also be given a reason to actually want guards en masse, and should pay upkeep on guards in gold. There should be something that orgs can do on their own with only minimal oversight from patrons to sink gold to achieve player goals and provide amenities.
I think the biggest and brightest point to me is that we need people wanting to work in the economy. It doesnt really matter about gold gen or such if people are not wanting to craft and trade, use all the trade skills and staff shops.
To me the answer to that is a bit of a review on all the trade skills to make sure they are all interesting and useable in the economy. I know we have a few reports on tattoos already to try and fix how bad it is as a trade and I think more stuff like that would be a very good thing as a basic starting point.
As someone with really long stretches of inactivity, the majority of my credit purchases are specifically made in order for me to opt out of the economy, from my bandolier and vials, to my aethersuit, to my Tam. I want to be able to hop on and play when I get the urge to do so, instead of coming back to a bunch of decay messages and hoping I stashed enough gold to get back on my feet. I understand how convenient being able to avoid scouring the market for things can be and how nice it is to be self-sufficient.
However, I realise that I'm also exactly the kind of person who makes having a vibrant economy difficult. If 10% of your population really loves crafting and trading, it doesn't work. If 10% opt out entirely, and they're also the most likely to be able to generate tons of gold from bashing, it doesn't work. As much as I'd hate to lose the utility and freedom to come and go on a whim that I've built up, I'm not sure I see a way for gold sinks to really grow teeth and have an effect on much beyond newbies unless you start to really trim back on being able to buy your way out of them.
Basically, while I certainly don't like what she's saying, I agree with @Enya.
(And as far as the velocity of money goes, @Jaspet, according to the macroecon class I'm currently taking, inflation is basically defined as the general price level of the economy rising. Velocity seems related only as a(n inversely correlated) metric for the demand for money; that is, as prices rise during a period of inflation, you want to be holding assets instead of cash, because the value of money is dropping, so you try to move the money you have as quickly back into the market as you can in return for more stable assets. Conversely, in a deflationary period, prices are falling and the value of money is increasing, so you want to hold on to cash. If you have the means to do so, you should in theory convert other assets that are underperforming into cash, then repurchase anything you want once the prices stabilize, basically making a profit by not buying anything. This is, of course, why economists prefer to target a low inflation rate instead of trying to aim for full stability and potentially undershooting into deflation.)
But even if trades are made a viable route to money again, it's just going to mean that the only people able to sustain themselves through bashing are going to be those like Artie who are able to opt out of most of it and generate as much gold in as little time as possible. Artie will still set the prices for the new economic model, even though he's only interacting with about half of it, because he's the one producing the gold side of the equation in the greatest amounts.
Meanwhile the only way to be competitive in the trades arena will be to have a full set of different artifacts so that you're using the trade efficiently. The only cooks who make a decent amount of money will be the ones with the full cooking curio set(s) already, the silver spoon, the spatula, a full Wondercorn, and probably a few more I'm missing. Enchanters will only turn a profit with gloves and powerplex jewels, and probably only if they have a cube rune to sell charges. Forgers are already generally losing money unless they have a mallet because they can only really sell to midbies and everything requires so much metal. And the list goes on.
Like, I get what we're going for here, but in order to make trades a viable route to wealth we'd need something like a writ system, wherein tradesfolks are able to give stuff to NPCs a number of times a weave/year in exchange for gold, and we'd need to introduce aspects to trades that artifacts can't bypass, AND we'd need goldsinks outside of the tradeskill system that take nibbles out of your wealth.
Random aside, but having an area set aside with either minigames or mobs that drop things people will want, that cost gold to get into, might make for a decent sink. IE: An area what costs 15,000 gold to get into for 10 minutes, where greased pigs run around like frightened livestock, but one of them has a Fidget Spinner of Fate, which you can use for a massive chunk of exp/essence, spin or feed to a nexus for a chunk of power, or traded in packs to a nearby broker (probably nookie's cousin Thomas) for a Czigany coin. (and as an anti-frustration bit, all you need to do is kill the pig in question and the gatekeeper gives you the FSoF, or hitting the 10 minute mark just makes the pigs all vanish, to avoid killing it at 9:59, having the thing drop and being unable to pick it up before time is over.)