There's still consumables like curatives and food, but it's a lot of potential comm/gold sinks that I've just artifact'd away, and from memory most stuff that's not a "consumable" can be made non-decay at this point. Which also leaves some trades kinda empty if they don't have a consumable.
How is having to buy food a gold sink?
Food requires comms and takes them out of the system, comms either take money out of the system or gives it to orgs which then generally take it out of the system by spending it on bigger things.
This is a relatively basic and obvious aspect of the trade system...
The actual issue noted in here though was that the items which consume a larger number of commodities such as weapons and armour are the ones able to be artifacted away.
Begging functions as a fall back if someone doesn't have enough money to maintain their stuff.
So now we'll force people into influencing even if they don't like it or don't want the skill? I assume you don't really mean it in that way, but, explain to me why so many of these encon threads read like, "As a merchant I want to do merchant stuff, I don't want to have to work hard at it like say Faragan does, but, here is a whole list of things that I want other players to have to do, that I probably won't bother with since as a merchant I really don't have to hunt or pk.
If you don't like influencing then wouldn't you be bashing? And if you don't like either why do you need curatives, weapons, armour, etc?
I'd also suggest that if you're reading things that way then you're not rather than really looking at the suggestions, primarily because a lot of the suggestions far more directly impact the merchant type players rather than anyone else. The second group that's mainly impacted would be the lowbies who are trying to make money because the suggestions include mechanisms for them to get comms to sell to merchants.
The primary suggested impact on bashers has been that more money should be flowing out to traders and that they should get rare drops that they can sell to traders. Seriously, people in this thread were complaining about trade goods not being available without much care for the fact that they were effectively demanding that "merchants" drop hundreds of credits on trades that aren't profitable.
Re-introducing a limited scarcity factor isn't going to crash the game. We know this, because there used to be scarcity in some form or other before changes to mechanics flooded the game with cheap and bountiful comms (comparatively). That's one of the reasons I remember designs having their comms suddenly doubled to an obscene amount, because there wasn't scarcity any longer. Re-balancing will mean a small hit to the way we are used to things, but we've been there before and survived just fine.
If you mean crash as in crash the server, then sure. If you mean crash as in cause people to stop playing then you can't say that because exactly that has happened in the past.
What makes you think there isn't some scarcity now? AFAIK there is less available milk in the game then there was in the time period you seem to be pointing at. Best I can tell less, fruit and eggs as well.
We probably have more metals now then then, but is there some reason that wouldn't correct over time?
What makes you think that there are cheap and bountiful comms now? What exactly is the line where a comm is cheap as opposed to not cheap? How do we know?
More importantly, explain exactly to me what scarcity does and what it accomplishes? Why is scarcity good for the game. Try not to be vague.
It would also be helpful if you can point to what commodities being more scarce brings to the playing experience? Is there something I am missing, will the game be better if we start telling newbies,
"No commodities for you. Maybe in time when you figure out the tricks?"
"Be sure to log in when the month changes!"
"Hey you spent an hour looking for rockeaters, but that person who brought credits off the website who doesn't give a damn about costs of goods, just bought up comms to 200 each!
"Or, you can buy them really overpriced in the plex (which is what I suspect would happen) and then make things no one wants to buy from you."
"Hate to break it to you kid, you can do everything right, but this isn't real life and many people price their goods to beat their competitors and many don't care if they lose money doing it." Points at 60k level 40 miniaturized figurines.
You can do all sorts of things to comms and comm generation that won't change much how merchants and wares are brought and sold in game.
Again, something which seems obvious. But the comms you've pointed out are less available are primarily used in a trade skill which non-decay really doesn't impact and pointed out that metals are more available which the primary trade that comes to mind for them is forging where everything can be made non-decay. We might see a dip in metals if there was a sudden rush towards something that required them.
Personally, scarcity in this sense is more a metric of need, particularly with how different trades have a tendency to lean towards certain comms which leads to the expectation that cooking is consuming more comms than forging. (Though, profitability is still in question given cooking artifacts and prices I've seen)
There's a pretty significant difference between the decay that lead to the welcome-back packs and having to buy some new armour every couple of RL months as an active player (looking at the aetherplex some weapons you might need to only replace once an RL year?).
You are just losing me here. Are you not asking that pretty much everything decay? So how many times a RL month am I going to have to seek out a merchant? If it is an enchantment do I also have to seek out a jeweler? Do I have to sit there while they scribble down what the design looks like? Am I screwed if the design is gated in a way that needs specific designers? Do I have to hope my org has a jeweler or am I stuck logging out until one is available? Don't think that happens? I can't tell you the number of times people have turned down offers of free items to wait for someone who had designs more appropriate to their org.
And nothing you have proposed addresses undercutters as far as I can tell.
Realistically that sort of time frame isn't that dissimilar from patches in ffxiv where you generally have to go out and grind for your new gear rather than just popping quickly to a shop. It's like... what four commands to replace something, if doing that every couple of months is going to kill your motivation and engagement then you're probably not engaged in the game already. If the concern is actually for returnees you can just include the Bob-made items in the welcome-back packs as that's what they're here for.
A bit of apples to oranges. There are tons of items in Lusternia. The numbers of things here is a huge factor in what will work and not work.
Your FFXIV is designed that way specifically because the gaming market has moved away from exactly the sort of decay Lusternia has. Enough players hate it that it is not common at all in modern game design.
Instead, the market embraces items tied to level,which isn't going to help much here. Or wear and tear., which is a nightmare for small pop games unless implemented as a gold sink where you just run over to npc vendors or somesuch.
It's probably also worth noting that decay is a thing that has always been part of the game, non-decay lets you escape that and I think that's a contributing factor to the current state of the economy, it's pretty similar to self-sufficiency but it doesn't just reduce your need for other players, it effectively negates your participation in an otherwise necessary part of the economy.
I think you're overestimating the impact of decay. Most players aren't that artied out and even if the artied out ones suddenly had to deal with things decaying they're not likely to buy stuff from you, over the merchants who will always undercut most merchants or their friends who will just give them what they need.
When I mentioned this, I checked the aetherplex and found some trade goods like axes with over 360 months on their decay timer while robes had something like 60, so probably less than once a month. Also, I'll point out all of your questions already apply to newbies and others who haven't achieved high levels of non-decay.
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Realistically, from what I've seen in my time with MMOs no one ever really set up their economy like the IREs. The reason decay really isn't a factor in other games is because they have actual loops around equipment, they're either there to be quickly replaced as you level or generally pretty time consuming and/or expensive to acquire. I levelled some classes on XIV this weekend and went through multiple full sets of equipment rather quickly.
Like, at certain points the best gear in XIV requires beating some of the hardest bosses and hoping you can get the token you need, so that over the space of a few weeks (the weapon takes seven) you can work up the full set of gear. In Lusternia you go to the aetherplex and pretty much just need to pick which skin you'd like for the best weapon and armour you'll ever be able to get in the game, if you even need to buy a weapon.
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I feel like you're now arguing that decay, which in this post you seemed to initially be arguing was horrible and unmanageable is basically already affecting everyone and they're dealing with it?
Looking at enchantment more specifically, it looks like the magic bear is going for 30 credits? That's what ~300 credits, combined with a regulator and cube with an extra 75 credits to make the cube non-decay, that effectively negates the need to have a Spellcrafter once you're set up. On top of that, you've also reduced your need for jewellery stuff to practically zero (some people might still need power stones). So yeah, why should anyone invest the lessons into Spellcraft on the off chance someone might need one of those specific enchantments?
Cubes are to spellcrafters what herbs are to herbalists. Tune out, stock up and sell out. If a spellcrafter is making gold as a merchant it is likely because of recharges.
Enchanters, not Spellcrafters. Tinkerers seem like they have more stuff they can regularly sell and are basically the reason I haven't needed a Spellcrafter since magic items came out.
Profitability with cooking actually isn't too difficult if you're willing to invest the time into it, but it will be with a limited pool of possible commodities. Milk production is all-around low from the villages, but it's not too hard to farm up your own milk supply. I've probably generated ~3000 milk comms for myself over time and they all cost me nothing (or I got paid to produce them), or I bought them at 1gp per because the village in question had its price ceiling vs inventory hit.
You could just as easily do that with meat and fish, but poultry and egg would prove more difficult, and there's simply no way to manage that with fruit, vegetables, or grain.
The game's always been very strange in how it regiments and orders what you can/can't produce via player initiative versus playing the waiting game (village tithes on the weave).
You could also arguably be using all that time to just optimise gold generation via standard bashing, but eh, whatever.
Forging has never been profitable and arguably the most sacrificial trade - no one really charges their new players in full for weapons, and most warriors pick it up anyways for the trans armour effect. I guess they make a small profit selling daggers to the few telekinetics and axes for cutting down druidic trees? But at least with the forging designs, all smelted weapons return the metals. So anyone paying close attention to decay doesn't really need to buy more metals if they have it smelt and remade as necessary.
That said, every time I might have caught my axe about to decay, I've failed to get it smelt and remade and just bought a new one.
While I do have ideas about how to handle the trades, I was suggesting moving even a step further back from that: What is the purpose of having each trade have a consumable item? The answer to that question informs the answer to the question at hand, and several others.
If the goal is for the tradesperson to make a profit, you see the essential problem unfold pretty rapidly: The best way to make a profit (i.e: make gold) is to bash. You have to unpack what's embedded in the idea of "profit", that generating a lot of currency holds value... which it manifestly does not do! There are loads of ideas floating around attached to just the barest sketches of how real world economies work. There's a looooooot of hubub about inflation pretty clearly without undertanding of why inflation is a problem in real world economies, and so on.
I suspect that value and profit are being conflated, when you're asking "how do we embed profit" what you're actually meaning is "how do we embed value" with profit being the shorthand. That's the important nugget here, that when we're talking about profit, we mean value! A return on investment, a benefit to the player for going to the effort of learning a skillset and putting time towards plying it. How do we make it such that the bookbinder has an incentive to create and trade kirigami, or the cook food? Certainly one way would be that they could trade for other things they need. In that case you generally want a fungible currency, but gold just categorically fails to do that, as described.
You can talk about how cheap or expensive forging is, but unless you address the questions "How is the forger encouraged to produce their product? If there's the potential to generate gold, why is that not a sufficient enducement?".
If we stop necessarily hooking "success with a trade" with "makes lots of gold", and think about what gold SHOULD signify things become much much more fruitful, imo. Gold, and other resources indeed, should be clearly understood to be units of time. Of person-hours of work. With that framework, a working and engaging system should a) value equivalent work equivalently, b) maintain value over time, c) reward specialization, and d) reward success.
Point A) (equivalency of work) is a matter incremental balancing, and can be done over time via existing mechanics and adjustments in the vein of the one kicking off this thread. No big deal, though I think that the trades and commodity functions need to be overhauled to insert the levers of balance to be twiddled in future.
Maintain value: The gold economy has two fundamental issues overall, which make it incredibly difficult to manage the economy over all.
The first is that generation is too widely variable. Even with changes to gold generation to push it towards quest giving, gold has always been SO WILDLY erratic so as to have lost all meaning. Players can generate new gold at such different rates that the high earners skew the entire market. I will get into this in part C, but while it's acceptable (and in fact desirable) to have "bashing" be an economic specialization, the wide - and more importantly ad hoc - way this is done screws everything.
The second is that gold, like every currency, has no inherent value. In Lusternia, there aren't functionally any reserve currencies as the states and administration don't take active economic measures. This means that the value of gold is ultimately connected to the value of the RL United States Dollar but is in total free fall controlled by a free market with few actors and wildly differing incomes and wealth. Free markets will always collapse in the absence of regulatory controls, they only exist within spaces carved out by policy. In other words, there's a feedback loop with the Dollar-to-credits-to-gold market that will drive the value of gold down forever, faster or slower but always down in aggregate. That's not a random or coincidental result of the hand of the free market, it's the natural and inevitable result of the hands off handling.
This is fixable. With the introduction of free-to-play, the administration is going to be pinning the value of credits in terms of time, for the very first time in the game. So if it takes you 2 hours to make 20 credits, why would you purchase 20 credits for much more than the gold it takes you two hours (or the equivalent units in trade activity)? Further, the orgs will be receiving a certain allotment of credits via some method. If some means of encouragement could be applied to the orgs, they could act as a backstop on the credit market, a large pool of the regular currenct (gold) reserve currency (credits) that responds to the market to pull in the slack - gold OR credits!
The most elegant solution to worthless gold includes providing incentives to orgs to play the biggest part in "sinking" gold, providing a pressure on the bottom of the economy to prevent it from spiraling downwards. If gold drops too much in value, the orgs should want to swoop in and suck gold out of the system en masse of their own accord. How exactly this structure should be arranged, I'm not sure. I've got some ideas, but only a few concrete ones that I've repeated many times to no avail. Between this backstop and a standardization of gold production alongside credit production with F2P, gold can be fixed.
This is important because with the changes, gold becomes a tool to use alongside credits to incentivize activity: writ broadly credits for individual action and gold interactive action. Right now, gold doesn't really serve any purpose but a minimum activity gate to playing the game because of decay mechanics.
As an aside, I think at the end of the day we've been dancing around a currency reset for a long time. There will probably need to be a transition period where either extra gold is pulled from the game on a massive scale, or (more likely I think) transitioned to a new currency
C) Reward Specialization: The fundamental idea of trade is that specializing and then trading the resulting goods results in improved efficiency and increased value per hour for everyone involved. In the context of Lusternia, the Economy might be a valuable part of the game by giving utility and value to being "That tailor guy", playing a functioning role in a community. Gives purpose!
In summary (to avoid another thousand words), the trades should be re-arranged such that trades that primarily have commodity outputs (Herbs, Poisons, Enchanting's charges etc.) should be balanced and designed such that more people can do them but they're slower and more standardized across the populace. You should want a large number of people doing these for a little bit of time, with it being easier to produce outputs the fewer number people are doing it (such that the system will autobalance itself around the population). The trades that have industrial outputs, that take raw comms and produce consumables as a result (Forging, Alchemy, Enchanting items, etc.) should have a standardized amount of time to do, and require more outlays. Aesthetic trades (Jewelry, Tailoring, etc.) should be taken a hard look at and not be structured (As in the skillset) like either productive or industrial trades.
Here's the important part though: there should be a specialization system like ship proficiencies, with the time required to perform various trades scaling up the more you focus on that one trade. You CAN still have more than one trade, but it's more efficient for you to focus on one and trade those outputs for the other trades than it would be to do all of them. Combined with the pressure to be more efficient, I think that this would add a lot more value to a skillset for a new character looking to pick up a trade, everyone else would prefer them to take up and specialize in a trade so that they in turn get more out of their own specialities. Kicker: producing gold (currency) should be one of the possible specialties.
D) Reward to success. This is tricky, and I'm sort of at a loss. The org pressure I mentioned before is a clear avenue to reward success in economics, in arranging a chain of production, industry, and sales because you need at least 2-3 discrete people to make this work well. The resulting excess currency can be pulled up by the org and in turn rewarded BY that org. Likewise, if the credit market is stabilized through the same mechanism and F2P doings, that would mean that there would be a more inherent benefit to success in economics.
Just to pull back the conversation to what was announced, we aren't looking at changing decay rates on items at this time (maybe in the future but right now the focus is on commodities). We are looking at capping city commodity stores (and comms in those stores won't decay). Also, anything stored in personal rifts won't decay. Commodities outside of commodity stores and rifts may start to decay rapidly so you'll need to either use those or find a rift or commodity store to preserve them. Putting them on the floor of a stockroom would probably still count as a place where they may decay rapidly (so no using store stockrooms to get around decaying commodities).
In any event, none of this is going into effect today or probably even next month. Just something we are considering for the future. BTW, I think some of the ideas in this thread are pretty interesting but keep in mind we have limited resources and are trying to keep to as close to the schedule we've outlined for ourselves.
As has been asked further up, is there a specific end goal with regard to the economy?
It seems like tweaking comm generation would be one of the later things to handle in economy updates given the demand for comms could change significantly when trades are looked at so all the tweaks would need to be done again later in that context. If it's working towards an planned outcome it's different though.
Comments
This is a relatively basic and obvious aspect of the trade system...
The actual issue noted in here though was that the items which consume a larger number of commodities such as weapons and armour are the ones able to be artifacted away.
If you don't like influencing then wouldn't you be bashing? And if you don't like either why do you need curatives, weapons, armour, etc?
I'd also suggest that if you're reading things that way then you're not rather than really looking at the suggestions, primarily because a lot of the suggestions far more directly impact the merchant type players rather than anyone else. The second group that's mainly impacted would be the lowbies who are trying to make money because the suggestions include mechanisms for them to get comms to sell to merchants.
The primary suggested impact on bashers has been that more money should be flowing out to traders and that they should get rare drops that they can sell to traders. Seriously, people in this thread were complaining about trade goods not being available without much care for the fact that they were effectively demanding that "merchants" drop hundreds of credits on trades that aren't profitable.
Again, something which seems obvious. But the comms you've pointed out are less available are primarily used in a trade skill which non-decay really doesn't impact and pointed out that metals are more available which the primary trade that comes to mind for them is forging where everything can be made non-decay. We might see a dip in metals if there was a sudden rush towards something that required them.
Personally, scarcity in this sense is more a metric of need, particularly with how different trades have a tendency to lean towards certain comms which leads to the expectation that cooking is consuming more comms than forging. (Though, profitability is still in question given cooking artifacts and prices I've seen)
When I mentioned this, I checked the aetherplex and found some trade goods like axes with over 360 months on their decay timer while robes had something like 60, so probably less than once a month.
Also, I'll point out all of your questions already apply to newbies and others who haven't achieved high levels of non-decay.
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Realistically, from what I've seen in my time with MMOs no one ever really set up their economy like the IREs. The reason decay really isn't a factor in other games is because they have actual loops around equipment, they're either there to be quickly replaced as you level or generally pretty time consuming and/or expensive to acquire. I levelled some classes on XIV this weekend and went through multiple full sets of equipment rather quickly.
Like, at certain points the best gear in XIV requires beating some of the hardest bosses and hoping you can get the token you need, so that over the space of a few weeks (the weapon takes seven) you can work up the full set of gear. In Lusternia you go to the aetherplex and pretty much just need to pick which skin you'd like for the best weapon and armour you'll ever be able to get in the game, if you even need to buy a weapon.
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I feel like you're now arguing that decay, which in this post you seemed to initially be arguing was horrible and unmanageable is basically already affecting everyone and they're dealing with it?
Enchanters, not Spellcrafters. Tinkerers seem like they have more stuff they can regularly sell and are basically the reason I haven't needed a Spellcrafter since magic items came out.
You could just as easily do that with meat and fish, but poultry and egg would prove more difficult, and there's simply no way to manage that with fruit, vegetables, or grain.
The game's always been very strange in how it regiments and orders what you can/can't produce via player initiative versus playing the waiting game (village tithes on the weave).
You could also arguably be using all that time to just optimise gold generation via standard bashing, but eh, whatever.
Forging has never been profitable and arguably the most sacrificial trade - no one really charges their new players in full for weapons, and most warriors pick it up anyways for the trans armour effect. I guess they make a small profit selling daggers to the few telekinetics and axes for cutting down druidic trees? But at least with the forging designs, all smelted weapons return the metals. So anyone paying close attention to decay doesn't really need to buy more metals if they have it smelt and remade as necessary.
That said, every time I might have caught my axe about to decay, I've failed to get it smelt and remade and just bought a new one.
If the goal is for the tradesperson to make a profit, you see the essential problem unfold pretty rapidly: The best way to make a profit (i.e: make gold) is to bash. You have to unpack what's embedded in the idea of "profit", that generating a lot of currency holds value... which it manifestly does not do! There are loads of ideas floating around attached to just the barest sketches of how real world economies work. There's a looooooot of hubub about inflation pretty clearly without undertanding of why inflation is a problem in real world economies, and so on.
I suspect that value and profit are being conflated, when you're asking "how do we embed profit" what you're actually meaning is "how do we embed value" with profit being the shorthand. That's the important nugget here, that when we're talking about profit, we mean value! A return on investment, a benefit to the player for going to the effort of learning a skillset and putting time towards plying it. How do we make it such that the bookbinder has an incentive to create and trade kirigami, or the cook food? Certainly one way would be that they could trade for other things they need. In that case you generally want a fungible currency, but gold just categorically fails to do that, as described.
You can talk about how cheap or expensive forging is, but unless you address the questions "How is the forger encouraged to produce their product? If there's the potential to generate gold, why is that not a sufficient enducement?".
If we stop necessarily hooking "success with a trade" with "makes lots of gold", and think about what gold SHOULD signify things become much much more fruitful, imo. Gold, and other resources indeed, should be clearly understood to be units of time. Of person-hours of work. With that framework, a working and engaging system should a) value equivalent work equivalently, b) maintain value over time, c) reward specialization, and d) reward success.
The first is that generation is too widely variable. Even with changes to gold generation to push it towards quest giving, gold has always been SO WILDLY erratic so as to have lost all meaning. Players can generate new gold at such different rates that the high earners skew the entire market. I will get into this in part C, but while it's acceptable (and in fact desirable) to have "bashing" be an economic specialization, the wide - and more importantly ad hoc - way this is done screws everything.
The second is that gold, like every currency, has no inherent value. In Lusternia, there aren't functionally any reserve currencies as the states and administration don't take active economic measures. This means that the value of gold is ultimately connected to the value of the RL United States Dollar but is in total free fall controlled by a free market with few actors and wildly differing incomes and wealth. Free markets will always collapse in the absence of regulatory controls, they only exist within spaces carved out by policy. In other words, there's a feedback loop with the Dollar-to-credits-to-gold market that will drive the value of gold down forever, faster or slower but always down in aggregate. That's not a random or coincidental result of the hand of the free market, it's the natural and inevitable result of the hands off handling.
This is fixable. With the introduction of free-to-play, the administration is going to be pinning the value of credits in terms of time, for the very first time in the game. So if it takes you 2 hours to make 20 credits, why would you purchase 20 credits for much more than the gold it takes you two hours (or the equivalent units in trade activity)? Further, the orgs will be receiving a certain allotment of credits via some method. If some means of encouragement could be applied to the orgs, they could act as a backstop on the credit market, a large pool of the regular currenct (gold) reserve currency (credits) that responds to the market to pull in the slack - gold OR credits!
The most elegant solution to worthless gold includes providing incentives to orgs to play the biggest part in "sinking" gold, providing a pressure on the bottom of the economy to prevent it from spiraling downwards. If gold drops too much in value, the orgs should want to swoop in and suck gold out of the system en masse of their own accord. How exactly this structure should be arranged, I'm not sure. I've got some ideas, but only a few concrete ones that I've repeated many times to no avail. Between this backstop and a standardization of gold production alongside credit production with F2P, gold can be fixed.
This is important because with the changes, gold becomes a tool to use alongside credits to incentivize activity: writ broadly credits for individual action and gold interactive action. Right now, gold doesn't really serve any purpose but a minimum activity gate to playing the game because of decay mechanics.
As an aside, I think at the end of the day we've been dancing around a currency reset for a long time. There will probably need to be a transition period where either extra gold is pulled from the game on a massive scale, or (more likely I think) transitioned to a new currency
C) Reward Specialization: The fundamental idea of trade is that specializing and then trading the resulting goods results in improved efficiency and increased value per hour for everyone involved. In the context of Lusternia, the Economy might be a valuable part of the game by giving utility and value to being "That tailor guy", playing a functioning role in a community. Gives purpose!
In summary (to avoid another thousand words), the trades should be re-arranged such that trades that primarily have commodity outputs (Herbs, Poisons, Enchanting's charges etc.) should be balanced and designed such that more people can do them but they're slower and more standardized across the populace. You should want a large number of people doing these for a little bit of time, with it being easier to produce outputs the fewer number people are doing it (such that the system will autobalance itself around the population). The trades that have industrial outputs, that take raw comms and produce consumables as a result (Forging, Alchemy, Enchanting items, etc.) should have a standardized amount of time to do, and require more outlays. Aesthetic trades (Jewelry, Tailoring, etc.) should be taken a hard look at and not be structured (As in the skillset) like either productive or industrial trades.
Here's the important part though: there should be a specialization system like ship proficiencies, with the time required to perform various trades scaling up the more you focus on that one trade. You CAN still have more than one trade, but it's more efficient for you to focus on one and trade those outputs for the other trades than it would be to do all of them. Combined with the pressure to be more efficient, I think that this would add a lot more value to a skillset for a new character looking to pick up a trade, everyone else would prefer them to take up and specialize in a trade so that they in turn get more out of their own specialities. Kicker: producing gold (currency) should be one of the possible specialties.
D) Reward to success. This is tricky, and I'm sort of at a loss. The org pressure I mentioned before is a clear avenue to reward success in economics, in arranging a chain of production, industry, and sales because you need at least 2-3 discrete people to make this work well. The resulting excess currency can be pulled up by the org and in turn rewarded BY that org. Likewise, if the credit market is stabilized through the same mechanism and F2P doings, that would mean that there would be a more inherent benefit to success in economics.
It seems like tweaking comm generation would be one of the later things to handle in economy updates given the demand for comms could change significantly when trades are looked at so all the tweaks would need to be done again later in that context. If it's working towards an planned outcome it's different though.