On the topic of reducing gold drops, I think the player's level should be factored in - So when hunting for gold you'd be able to generate a reasonable amount at any level by hunting level appropriate areas, but would get minimal amounts when trying to farm areas below your level.
This is an idea that I think sounds good in theory, but won't work in practice. There are really very few 'level appropriate' aka challenging places for demi+ bashing, even though most of the population is demi. As long as area design and PvE mechanics move at the current pace, I don't really think this is reasonable.
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?
Credits. In a really good day, if no one has quested in my happy spot and I can muster the gumption, I can earn about two or three credits a day without cutting into my sleep or designing time.
Since the term has been thrown around, what is a "reasonable" amount of gold to get from bashing?
I don't think this is enough information to answer the question. How dangerous of bashing are we talking? How much risk is there? Am I also getting rewards like power? How good is the essence? How many consumables am I using? How close of attention do I have to pay? How much time do I spent moving around vs bashing? Astral mobs come to you, for example. Diggers sit in pits. Other mobs are more spread out and move.
On the topic of reducing gold drops, I think the player's level should be factored in - So when hunting for gold you'd be able to generate a reasonable amount at any level by hunting level appropriate areas, but would get minimal amounts when trying to farm areas below your level.
This is an idea that I think sounds good in theory, but won't work in practice. There are really very few 'level appropriate' aka challenging places for demi+ bashing, even though most of the population is demi. As long as area design and PvE mechanics move at the current pace, I don't really think this is reasonable.
I think the perception is bound to be skewed here, between low-investment players who are at demi versus the artied out ones with significantly more resistance and health. The gulf between the two is not insignificant, and leaves us at a point to consider what the actual mob levels are versus what we perceive them to be.
That's probably the trickiest bit with the gold scaling idea, imo.
I'm still an advocate for being careful with adjusting the current commodity system. I think it would actually be an interesting experiment to save the current storehouse numbers, and then just reduce all org stockpiles to 2000. Let the game take its course for a RL month and see what people think.
Only issue is that this will probably be the nail in the warrior coffin.
On the topic of reducing gold drops, I think the player's level should be factored in - So when hunting for gold you'd be able to generate a reasonable amount at any level by hunting level appropriate areas, but would get minimal amounts when trying to farm areas below your level.
This is an idea that I think sounds good in theory, but won't work in practice. There are really very few 'level appropriate' aka challenging places for demi+ bashing, even though most of the population is demi. As long as area design and PvE mechanics move at the current pace, I don't really think this is reasonable.
I think the perception is bound to be skewed here, between low-investment players who are at demi versus the artied out ones with significantly more resistance and health. The gulf between the two is not insignificant, and leaves us at a point to consider what the actual mob levels are versus what we perceive them to be.
That's probably the trickiest bit with the gold scaling idea, imo.
I'm still an advocate for being careful with adjusting the current commodity system. I think it would actually be an interesting experiment to save the current storehouse numbers, and then just reduce all org stockpiles to 2000. Let the game take its course for a RL month and see what people think.
Only issue is that this will probably be the nail in the warrior coffin.
While I agree with the commodity side of things..If you were reducing commodities across the game in stores, then I'd also recommend looking at what is needed for designs/trades and reducing those. Forging as a trade is not the only one commodity-heavy, Artisan is, too.
Bookbinding books and the like cost gold - perhaps (and I think the idea has been said?) a small gold cost to use trade benches would be a good idea, or a gold cost to make the design.
The only trade where commodities won't have too much of an effect is cooking. You make something with a high level cooking and you can get 2-3 portions of said food with 1 foodstuff amount of comms. Factor in spatula, you can get a base of 4 portions and sometimes 6, and then with the spectral cup curio you're getting 8-12 (of course % of the latter is low enough) - (also as a note, despite increased portion sizes when it comes to infusing foodstuffs with speed/constitution it does not affect this number. If you make 12 portions from 1 portion comms, you will be imbuding 12 individual items, not just 1)
Oh don't get me started on commodity requirements. Chandeliers and Thrones are easily the most commodity-heavy designs in Lusternia, both of them requiring a MINIMUM of 1,250 commodities, teasets next one down with 600+ - the highest cost for forging is 400+ for a 2-handed weapon, highest for tailoring is 200+. On that note though, artisan chandeliers and thrones last extremely long times - close to an RL YEAR. I'd be quite happy if the commodity cost and decay length were halved, even quartered.
If a city commodity shop was capped at 2,000 of a commodity, you're looking at potentially wiping out up to 2/3rds of a city's supplies of a commodity for a single design. That is also not taking into account that aetherplex shop rifts can be expanded to hold up to 6000+ of a commodity, which would give them yet another advantage over city shops in general, in an environment that already heavily favours aethershops, unless you were to revert their investment and refund the credits used to purchase the rift expansions - even then they would still have the commodities sitting in their rift since it is not particularly fair to go "Oh sorry, we've decided to restrict rift sizes, anything over the cap has gone poof!"
Bump up your suggested cap to maybe 10 times that (20,000 of a commodity) and it would be more realistic.
Never put passion before principle. Even if you win, you lose.
If olive oil comes from olives, where does baby oil come from?
If vegetarians eat vegetables, what do humanitarians eat?
Oh, I know they have longer decay times. I was thinking of instruments, too. But this is in the scenario where if commodity stores were reduced, then commodity amounts needed should be also looked at and adjusted accordingly.
I really don't think there needs to be any change to commodities in city stores, I feel like we finally used up the last leftovers of the commodity mine area. And honestly, commodities and designs as a gold sink would bring a lot more issues. If a newbie has to spend three RL hunting to gold cap just to get their first armour we will see even less new people.
I really don't think there needs to be any change to commodities in city stores, I feel like we finally used up the last leftovers of the commodity mine area. And honestly, commodities and designs as a gold sink would bring a lot more issues. If a newbie has to spend three RL hunting to gold cap just to get their first armour we will see even less new people.
Perhaps newbies should be given newbie-armour as a start off. They get a weapon and enchantments etc (some don't even know what they are).
- Add something that will buy your comms. Many rifts still have thousands of most commodities, so you are talking about a long time to really fix that.
- Drain the gold from the system before trying to adjust more things. I like the idea of gold for lessons or such, for those who don't need actual credits, and just want to learn. Auctions also good.
- Make doing commodity quests more helpful in villages, and ignore enemy status. Right now conquest is pretty much the only really worthwhile government structure due to power donations. Making the other things offer more incentive, by increasing comms donated, and making the quests have more of an impact, would encourage commodities to come from those systems.
- Sell a new area, costs gold and commodities for the winner. Silly, right? We could talk *wink wink nudge nudge*
- Create new catalyst objects. Lower the goop cost of items crafted with goop, require buying a catalyst component which would cost gold. Goop is actually generated over time for many people, but the trade off is credits right now. Exchanging goop for gold means people have to keep making gold (not just log in and rub genies or curio bits). Even if they are selling these items, they are still removing some gold from the system per copy.
- Sell special items for gold only. Limited use items, like 50K gold to give a room +1/13 health and +1/13 regeneration to use in bashing for 3 days. Maybe a room xp buff, or a one hour xp boost for a squad. Have a merchant that may alternate stock or such if needed.
- Make studs available directly for gold, for those who don't get the wheel, this gives them a way to do things. Add a scroll to show how the studs look, and add some new studs. Maybe for a larger gold amount, you can get a new type of stud made?
- Gold for custom stuff is always nice too.
- Potentially set a level you can always buy bound credits at that is a percentage lower than the current low market price, or a set number (play with this to avoid abuse). So instead of needing to play market and amass a set amount of credits (that gold goes to players), I could spend less and the gold goes away if I get it from the game.
Drop stuff: - The gold from begging in influencing should be lowered potentially. You can make gold on esteem, even if you hit the gold cap. This is also the best experience with the most buffs, at the lowest cost and risk. Influencing could take a demotion.
- Reduce gold level slightly on mobs that can be turned in. Right now you get gold from killing, plus potential turn in. Use the fact turnins are a thing to change this a bit, or make some turn in quests give less/no gold but add experience.
- Reduce gold drops from things you are substantially too strong for. If we suggest an area for level 40 and you are at 95, you are grinding gold from players who could use the area. Penalizing them for being in such a weak area may be reasonable. Note, this should be based on area... kephera aren't strong, but are in groups, and the area is usually higher level to bash safely.
- Add a way to raise the level of an areas mobs in some cases. For instance, being able to make gorgogs stronger would raise their level, but not instantly their gold. This should fade if the person who empowered them leaves, to avoid someone just screwing with little-uns.
The real problem isn't how much gold there is, but the problem is what you can spend gold on. Changing how much gold there is or how much gold is generated only changes the numbers. Example, I pay 4,000 gold per small silver cookie now, and after gold is modified I pay 1,000 because gold is now harder to get. Cookie generation stayed the same. This only hurts those without a huge stash. Basically, the rich become richer. I'm against lowering or reducing gold generation in any way because new characters will never catch up.
What is the problem with economy? It is purchasing power of gold. For example, the Petro dollar has some of it's value because it is used to buy oil. What do we spend gold on? Tonics, cookies, cosmetic items, buffs, other consumables, power, etc. The problem is that none of those things need to be hard to obtain because they enhance the gameplay. You don't want to hinder gameplay out of fear of using consumables. Also, let's look at why credits have value which is lessons and artifacts. There are plenty of artifacts that I will gladly spend money to obtain. Now, what is the goal of Lusternia? For me, it is to have fun, build a character, and stress relief. For IRE, it should be if not about making money at least about being sustainable. Any solution we come up with in game shouldn't affect either of those goals (players or IRE).
Now the question is how to make gold more valuable. In order to make gold more valueable, it needs more purchasing power. Right now the only reason gold matters is credits, buffs, and curatives. There are other reasons but those are the big ones. I suggest adding something that you can buy with gold. My suggestion is the ability to train skills skills for gold. This would bait me into spending more on credits to get those nice artifacts which now have value. Personally, I attest the idea of buying credits in order to convert to lessons in order to become a decent character. I would/will however purchase credits to buy an artifact. You could also make this type of training "non-permanent" which means the lessons gained this way could be lost on flex or forgetting the skill. That means if I want to flex I need to go the traditional route. This idea is an infant and can be nurtured several different ways.
@Estarra I would love to know your and IRE's thoughts on this!
Cons: *Possible hit to credit sales *Credit value
Pros: *Easier way to transcend skills. *Possible increase of credit sales for suckers like me that will want those artifacts now, but can't justify spending the cash buying lessons just to get to the point of buying artifacts. Basically, I'm waiting on elite to build my lessons, so no credit purchases for artifacts until I trans 4 or 5 more skillsets. *Gold sink *Gold value
PS: You'll eventually get my money, but it'll just be after I trans more skills.
Since the term has been thrown around, what is a "reasonable" amount of gold to get from bashing?
Some people feel the gold cap has already made it an unreasonable amount on the gold you can get from bashing.
IRE's draw has a lot to do with the fact that it is Free To Play, by being able to buy credits In Game with earned gold you can advance to top tier without having to spend RL money. The gold cap has already made this a huge chore to do, taking far longer than needed, and causing more people to spend RL money. Removing gold drops more would take whatever remains of that motto and throw it in the trash.
Not everyone has the time to do 4 hour quests that may only be done if not already on cooldown from the last person doing it to make 1000 gold.
Not everyone enjoys questing, period.
Not everyone wants to be enemied to every area, and a number of orgs that protect those areas, in the game, because they are forced to hunt sentient mobs only to get 500 gold.
Not everyone has disposable income to buy credits off the website.
Speaking for myself, if gold was much harder to acquire than it is now, my 'maybe' for staying another year would likely turn into a 'no' because I don't like questing for the most part, I don't have time for questing for the most part, most quests just frustrate me. I get my gold from bashing, because Trades are not Trades, they are just crafting skills that everyone can have all of, so my options are bash for gold or quest for far less gold.
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?
50k gold is not a lot, it amounts to 2 credits or 12 lessons.
With a gold cap of 150,000 that means at best if you spent every coin you earned you would generate 42 lessons a day, taking roughly 40 RL days of bashing to learn one skillset fully. That's not spending money on anything else (curatives, armour, buffs) and hoping credits are selling low. This seems perfectly reasonable to me, given the amount of artifacts, skillsets, wonderitems, curios that are in the game and are "required" for Top Tier combat.
Not everyone in game is clearing 50k an hour too. Don't get fooled into thinking a couple outliers represent the entire game. If everyone was clearing 50k an hour, nobody would be, because the way they are doing it is by bashing seldomly bashed areas, which would no longer be the case if everyone was doing it.
As an example. I bash only one area, because I can do it while I am sitting in my truck at work and waiting on contractors to do their thing so I can do my thing. If I start bashing at 8am I might hit gold cap by 4pm. I often don't hit it. Many players play far less than I do and when they do they are not bashing as much as I am. The few that are hitting gold cap in 1 - 2 hours are using that fact, that not many people are really bashing, and they are not bashing every area.
Esteem is great, but it certainly is not 250,000 gold per RL day. I have had 100,000 units of esteem sit in my shop for RL weeks before selling at 10gp per. Esteem sells in bursts or small quantities for the most part.
There is also a big mislead in Ess' statement. Selling esteem is not generating new gold, it is gold changing hands, often gold coming from bashing, going to people who generate esteem.
It still sells though and you have to smooth it over the period. Waking up to that million gold was not awful I imagine
Yes, smoothed over the period = 47,000 gold a RL day made. Less than if I had bashed and again it is not generating gold, it is someone else generating gold and then giving it to me. Since you need to generate Esteem by influencing you are also not bashing while influencing and most influencing is not charity so you can't really argue the fact that you make gold while influencing in considerable to bashing amounts.
In fact Esteem selling is probably the most "trade" like skill there is in Lusternia. You spend time generating a product and someone spends time generating the income to buy your product.
If nobody was spending time generating that income though, because they couldn't any longer, then esteem would never sell.
I really don't think there needs to be any change to commodities in city stores, I feel like we finally used up the last leftovers of the commodity mine area. And honestly, commodities and designs as a gold sink would bring a lot more issues. If a newbie has to spend three RL hunting to gold cap just to get their first armour we will see even less new people.
Perhaps newbies should be given newbie-armour as a start off. They get a weapon and enchantments etc (some don't even know what they are).
I've kind of always assumed that every guild hands out free plate. The Consortium certainly keeps some 1 gold plate in its shop, and I used to mail it out to new Sentinels back when they still existed. Is this not more or less universal?
Letting guilds conveniently send out newbie packs might be a useful thing to code. Assuming most new people don't stick around, it could functionally sink a decent number of resources while being useful for the ones who do stay.
Any sufficiently advanced pun is indistinguishable from comedy.
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?
combat supplies. You could spend 50k to top up your herbs/vials/poisons after a decent sized fight.
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.
My suggestion: Remove Gold Cap Remove Mobs getting more gold the less they are bashed. Create more Gold Sinks
You end up with people still gaining gold slower, but not being restricted to the point of bashing specific spots, cause "nobody else bashes them so you can make your gold cap" and hoping nobody beat you to them cause you only have a couple hours a day to play or feeling like they make so little gold they can't advance far in the game anyways.
There are some good ideas for gold sinks and interesting mechanics in this thread, but ultimately just addressing gold creation vs gold removal and doing nothing else doesn't fix the economy. You're either going to overdo it and there won't be enough gold dropped for people who need to get established/don't have permed everything, or underdo it and gold will still build up albeit more slowly. *
Again, the real issue isn't "Numbers have gotten really high", because there isn't any intrinsic value to gold, the actual value of a gold piece isn't attached to anything because there are so few things of durable value you can buy with it. If there were 5 times as much (or as little) gold in the game, we'd be in just about the same situation except that... manse rooms and clans would be less or more expensive in terms of time required to generate the funds. More gold sinks are great, but they really only put a low floor on how much gold can be in the game without it becoming frustrating for players.
IMO the core intervention needs to be something that causes gold to move around the playerbase more, in addition to changes designed to curb inflation and diversify demand. You just will not be able to fix bashing efficiency problems, there will always be a "production class" in the game that generates most of the gold in existence. What you need to do is give them reasons to give that gold to players who are doing other, non-bashing activities. Otherwise why do those activities? They're interesting and make the game more interesting, but there aren't any incentives to do them, if you want gold for whatever reason: you bash. Adding in more reasons to want gold doesn't change that, you'll still just... grind if you want the gold, instead of pursuing a trade, shopkeeping, designing, roleplaying, administrating, or what have you.
*That's not a terrible "solution", by the way: having gold still slowly accrue in the system is a good thing if you have periodic escape valves. It's a lot easier to periodically vent off gold than it is to periodically infuse gold into the system. Having big org expansion drives or gold auction type events handles that quite nicely.
Is there data on how much gold is generated in the game versus how much is removed from the game? If not that would be interesting, even more so if somehow an index of how much gold changes hands could be assembled. In theory that could be constructed by combining all shoplogs, plus revlogs (for trade ministry and taxes), as well as credit sale gold transfers. That wouldn't capture all gold movement, but it should be most of it.
The idea behind gold generating the longer you leave a mob alone is (I believe) to stop a high leveled basher from farming gold by bashing a high level area over and over. The gold drops are still based on levels, with a percentile modifier that goes up over time. So, it's a bashing behavioral fix, not economic and it works from that angle. The problem is that it amplifies the amount of gold a high end basher gets exponentially, as they will be able to bash out areas restricted to other players. They already have a gold generation advantage as a result and now because they're bashing a little-visited area they're getting more gold.
First: the gold generation ramp up should be slower. Second: Flatten gold generation base values significantly, if not to totally flat so that as you go up in level the base gold generated by a mob does not increase at all. For high level areas, the amount of gold generated will still be higher than the gold generated in a low level area because fewer people can or will grind there. It just won't be higher via three scales. It's that way now because you A) get higher base gold, get higher gold multipliers because of bashing difficulty, and C) bash faster because you're a higher level and get more crits, as well as any artifact bonuses you have. You accrue huge amounts of gold (and again, have zero reason to spread that around).
Earlier in the thread it was pointed out that making things more expensive would hurt low gold earners. Someone else pointed out that newbie essentials could be supplied by orgs, like guilds. That's exactly what I meant in the other thread about orgs potentially being the engine of the economy! If the ORG has a reason to siphon gold off members, they will want to generate incentives for the high gold earners in their org to hand over gold. That gold can be redistributed to crafters to benefit newbies. This helps because A) It gives an incentive for people to pursue a trade, can set a floor on prices* ("The org will pay me 30k for this armor, not going to sell to you for 10k when I can just sell to the org"), C) Takes stockpile gold and moves it around.
Then wide base gold sinks kick in. If you've got nickle and dime reasons that everyone is expected to buy into one way or another, you've got flat gold drains in. The problem is that the few people who produce loads of gold tend to just sit on it, and it doesn't drain away. If you split that gold up and move it around a bunch, it is more likely to fall into one or another gold drain and go out of the game. Beyond just making it less of a trap to participate in interesting activities, it helps to remove gold.
IMO the only really big ticket drains that will work are organizational level gold drains. Otherwise, just not enough people will buy in for it to make a long term difference. That, and big ticket items tend to be permanent, so you'll have a rush of people buying in and then a teensy trickle everafter from new players. See Tattoos, assuming that you paid big bix for your tattoos (which many people around when they came out did not, and they're still benefiting just the same).
*Kind of. Of course, one tradesperson can supply literally the entire game with tradegoods with ease.
RE: Commodities I don't think it really matters making them more or less scarce or making things cost greater or fewer commodities. Frankly, I don't think there's a fundamental problem with the commodities from a macroeconomic vantage. For the individual consumer, the fact that the amounts needed and the relative rarity of the commodities varies hugely between crafts and comm types is frustrating. Comms just don't matter, because no one buys them from commshops that sink the gold out of the game.
That said, if something is done to gradually reduce personal stocks of comms and there are changes to the trade system to create a demand for comms (more than there already is), it would bolster what's by far the biggest pseudo-sink in the game: org comm shops. The key thing then would be to give orgs a reason to want to accrue gold so that they actually price comms competitively. Increasing or decreasing the number of comms flowing to orgs would have some effect on the price of comms and therefore the flow of gold to coffers, but nowhere near as much as increasing the practical value of the gold in the coffers would.
Changing more of what flows to orgs from being a passive benefit of having villages to being something active would provide some intrinsic value to the comm themselves: the time/effort it requires to generate the comms. Only if there's something you actually want to do with them though, otherwise it'll just further depress interest in frill items like furniture. I can't really think of a way to make this interesting without a from scratch redesign.
So in other words: In addition to baseline, cheap, repeating "broad base" gold drains that basically everyone wants to buy into and flattening the exponential gold curve, the next thing should be giving ORGS a repeating but much stronger gold sink that makes them want to soak up gold. That suddenly makes comms and the comm shop matter, as well as giving org governments something to do that isn't hallmonitoring.
Here's an idea, partially from another ire game It may be rough/painful, but try this in this order.
Anyone who has a trade that is able to have designs can now submit their own designs, at a 5k gold cost. These designs are private to that person. Maybe gate this beyond Virtuoso or so skill level.
Delete non-org cartels. Anyone who was in that cartel when It is deleted gains a copy of that design in their repertoire. Deeded cartels' designs are added to their org' s list.
Personal designs decay. You have to pay a small fee every 90-180 days or so for each design you wish to keep. Decayed designs become inactive and can't be made until re-upped.. If a design is inactive for 180 days, it is deleted.
Designers can pay gold to add a noun to their design. You want to make a wall mirror as an artisan? Add "mirror" to your designed wallfeature for 10k gold before you submit it.
Why not leave cartels in, but change their function?
So I agree: Allow players with the design trades to submit designs as they will, and those designs are private. Remove the ability to submit public designs.
You may transfer your design to another player as you wish, but this removes it from you and there is a transfer fee. You may also transfer your designs to a cartel, which acts like a library of designs - much higher transfer fee. Existing public designs default to a World Repository that lives on Avechna's peak, you may check them out temporarily for a fee . Publishing to the public directory could possibly work like publishing books does, and perhaps even there could be rating and contests related to designs like book publishing! Your org cartel functions much the same way, perhaps with a different fee structure.
Players could be able to designate a personal cartel in which designs that decay are preserved indefinitely, but with a higher cost to reactivate. That way, all the old designs that already exist in cartels don't vanish, and you don't need to chunk out gold ad infinitum to keep them alive. You only have to pay out if you actually want to *make* them.
-It's easier to design items "out of the box" -It's easier to have unique personal items than it is to make public designs, unqualified good.* -No more necessary cartel clan clutter -Meta-economy of trading patterns is created -There are small, palatable costs instead of big one-off costs (cartel purchase) -Designs of yore aren't just deleted
That said, it would incentivize each person to make a small number of things compared to their own catalogue if it costs to switch. Needs more thought, but the cartel system as-is is.. not good.
*In other words, your average tailor or whatever has a direct incentive to create unique clothing items because it's cheaper than making public items or org cartel items. Everyone's catalogue shrinks, hopefully making clothing less generic.
Can we please step away from focusing on designs so much? honestly, I very much doubt that there's more then maybe 5% in change at all if we adjust anything about designs. It's a -very minor- part in the whole economics part, it'll hurt those people that like to design a lot. Design's already have a good gold sink attached to them as well ( 1 million gold to make private designs isn't a small thing for most people. Ain't for me either, each cartel is still an achievement to me ).
There are simply said, a -lot- of bigger fish to fry then designs.
As an attendum to that, removing / change public designs will only result in one thing: Having a lot less choice on already very bleak public selections. Personally I'd rather not curb that further, I already groan everytime I try to quickly furnish a room and realize that there's like 5 or so public designs that I could even live with. if am lucky there's -one- okay one.
I agree that the problem isn't simply that 'the numbers are too damn high.' This is also why (at least most) of the 'if you change gold production you have to change the price of x' arguments fall flat for me. No. Then you just end up in the same equilibrium at another order of magnitude. If the price of x needs to adjust, let it be the result of market forces.
I think people got very caught up on 'take gold from mobs' and did not keep reading. If mobs drop bits, and you can trade bits for gold (at village or basin wide diminishing returns to manage the total amount of gold in a logical and actually simulated way) AND if that gold - directly or hand-wavingly - is provided by the village from the gold they are paid by the city for cheap comms, then you're starting to cook with fire. Yes, prices of things will change. Right now, as has been pointed out, everything is either incredibly expensive or dirty cheap, and a lot of expensive things only need to be bought once (or once per RL year).
I think the points about increasing the value of gold is important, and that those steps alone won't solve that - you need gold to have real value, so that people see the benefit in margins and there are market forces beyond what currently exists - mass competition with few competitive advantages (mostly artifacts, that will rarely pay themselves off at all).
- Potentially set a level you can always buy bound credits at that is a percentage lower than the current low market price, or a set number (play with this to avoid abuse). So instead of needing to play market and amass a set amount of credits (that gold goes to players), I could spend less and the gold goes away if I get it from the game.
This is the 'reserve currency' idea from my OP, except I would not have it as a variable cost (that would remove the cushion against inflation), and I suggested dingbats for less direct tradeoff with website purchases. A static gold cost for bound versions of currency with real and set values would actually drain gold from the economy in a way that would not just turn it into another saleable currency (since they would be bound). Leaving the only options as player-sold means the gold never leaves the economy.
I do not support 'merely' removing gold drops from non-sentient creatures - that is like wiping your nose and declaring your cold is cured. The reason (beyond simple logic) why it's bad for mobs to drop gold is that the gold is created ex nihilo. You need currency quantities to be relatively stable and circulate (which, as has been pointed out rightly, means you need worthwhile things to spend it on).
The failure of the economy to even approximate a simulation (it is instead a facsimile of a simulation at best) means that all economic production is effectively worthless, all the economic artifacts and curios are traps, as are trade skills (unless you like the combat advantages - which I do!).
Comments
That's probably the trickiest bit with the gold scaling idea, imo.
I'm still an advocate for being careful with adjusting the current commodity system. I think it would actually be an interesting experiment to save the current storehouse numbers, and then just reduce all org stockpiles to 2000. Let the game take its course for a RL month and see what people think.
Only issue is that this will probably be the nail in the warrior coffin.
Bookbinding books and the like cost gold - perhaps (and I think the idea has been said?) a small gold cost to use trade benches would be a good idea, or a gold cost to make the design.
The only trade where commodities won't have too much of an effect is cooking. You make something with a high level cooking and you can get 2-3 portions of said food with 1 foodstuff amount of comms. Factor in spatula, you can get a base of 4 portions and sometimes 6, and then with the spectral cup curio you're getting 8-12 (of course % of the latter is low enough) - (also as a note, despite increased portion sizes when it comes to infusing foodstuffs with speed/constitution it does not affect this number. If you make 12 portions from 1 portion comms, you will be imbuding 12 individual items, not just 1)
If a city commodity shop was capped at 2,000 of a commodity, you're looking at potentially wiping out up to 2/3rds of a city's supplies of a commodity for a single design. That is also not taking into account that aetherplex shop rifts can be expanded to hold up to 6000+ of a commodity, which would give them yet another advantage over city shops in general, in an environment that already heavily favours aethershops, unless you were to revert their investment and refund the credits used to purchase the rift expansions - even then they would still have the commodities sitting in their rift since it is not particularly fair to go "Oh sorry, we've decided to restrict rift sizes, anything over the cap has gone poof!"
Bump up your suggested cap to maybe 10 times that (20,000 of a commodity) and it would be more realistic.
If olive oil comes from olives, where does baby oil come from?
If vegetarians eat vegetables, what do humanitarians eat?
- Drain the gold from the system before trying to adjust more things. I like the idea of gold for lessons or such, for those who don't need actual credits, and just want to learn. Auctions also good.
- Make doing commodity quests more helpful in villages, and ignore enemy status. Right now conquest is pretty much the only really worthwhile government structure due to power donations. Making the other things offer more incentive, by increasing comms donated, and making the quests have more of an impact, would encourage commodities to come from those systems.
- Sell a new area, costs gold and commodities for the winner. Silly, right? We could talk *wink wink nudge nudge*
- Create new catalyst objects. Lower the goop cost of items crafted with goop, require buying a catalyst component which would cost gold. Goop is actually generated over time for many people, but the trade off is credits right now. Exchanging goop for gold means people have to keep making gold (not just log in and rub genies or curio bits). Even if they are selling these items, they are still removing some gold from the system per copy.
- Sell special items for gold only. Limited use items, like 50K gold to give a room +1/13 health and +1/13 regeneration to use in bashing for 3 days. Maybe a room xp buff, or a one hour xp boost for a squad. Have a merchant that may alternate stock or such if needed.
- Make studs available directly for gold, for those who don't get the wheel, this gives them a way to do things. Add a scroll to show how the studs look, and add some new studs. Maybe for a larger gold amount, you can get a new type of stud made?
- Gold for custom stuff is always nice too.
- Potentially set a level you can always buy bound credits at that is a percentage lower than the current low market price, or a set number (play with this to avoid abuse). So instead of needing to play market and amass a set amount of credits (that gold goes to players), I could spend less and the gold goes away if I get it from the game.
Drop stuff:
- The gold from begging in influencing should be lowered potentially. You can make gold on esteem, even if you hit the gold cap. This is also the best experience with the most buffs, at the lowest cost and risk. Influencing could take a demotion.
- Reduce gold level slightly on mobs that can be turned in. Right now you get gold from killing, plus potential turn in. Use the fact turnins are a thing to change this a bit, or make some turn in quests give less/no gold but add experience.
- Reduce gold drops from things you are substantially too strong for. If we suggest an area for level 40 and you are at 95, you are grinding gold from players who could use the area. Penalizing them for being in such a weak area may be reasonable. Note, this should be based on area... kephera aren't strong, but are in groups, and the area is usually higher level to bash safely.
- Add a way to raise the level of an areas mobs in some cases. For instance, being able to make gorgogs stronger would raise their level, but not instantly their gold. This should fade if the person who empowered them leaves, to avoid someone just screwing with little-uns.
Okay, that is all on my quick list, for now....
What is the problem with economy? It is purchasing power of gold. For example, the Petro dollar has some of it's value because it is used to buy oil. What do we spend gold on? Tonics, cookies, cosmetic items, buffs, other consumables, power, etc. The problem is that none of those things need to be hard to obtain because they enhance the gameplay. You don't want to hinder gameplay out of fear of using consumables. Also, let's look at why credits have value which is lessons and artifacts. There are plenty of artifacts that I will gladly spend money to obtain. Now, what is the goal of Lusternia? For me, it is to have fun, build a character, and stress relief. For IRE, it should be if not about making money at least about being sustainable. Any solution we come up with in game shouldn't affect either of those goals (players or IRE).
Now the question is how to make gold more valuable. In order to make gold more valueable, it needs more purchasing power. Right now the only reason gold matters is credits, buffs, and curatives. There are other reasons but those are the big ones. I suggest adding something that you can buy with gold. My suggestion is the ability to train skills skills for gold. This would bait me into spending more on credits to get those nice artifacts which now have value. Personally, I attest the idea of buying credits in order to convert to lessons in order to become a decent character. I would/will however purchase credits to buy an artifact. You could also make this type of training "non-permanent" which means the lessons gained this way could be lost on flex or forgetting the skill. That means if I want to flex I need to go the traditional route. This idea is an infant and can be nurtured several different ways.
@Estarra I would love to know your and IRE's thoughts on this!
Cons:
*Possible hit to credit sales
*Credit value
Pros:
*Easier way to transcend skills.
*Possible increase of credit sales for suckers like me that will want those artifacts now, but can't justify spending the cash buying lessons just to get to the point of buying artifacts. Basically, I'm waiting on elite to build my lessons, so no credit purchases for artifacts until I trans 4 or 5 more skillsets.
*Gold sink
*Gold value
PS: You'll eventually get my money, but it'll just be after I trans more skills.
Some people feel the gold cap has already made it an unreasonable amount on the gold you can get from bashing.
IRE's draw has a lot to do with the fact that it is Free To Play, by being able to buy credits In Game with earned gold you can advance to top tier without having to spend RL money. The gold cap has already made this a huge chore to do, taking far longer than needed, and causing more people to spend RL money. Removing gold drops more would take whatever remains of that motto and throw it in the trash.
Not everyone has the time to do 4 hour quests that may only be done if not already on cooldown from the last person doing it to make 1000 gold.
Not everyone enjoys questing, period.
Not everyone wants to be enemied to every area, and a number of orgs that protect those areas, in the game, because they are forced to hunt sentient mobs only to get 500 gold.
Not everyone has disposable income to buy credits off the website.
Speaking for myself, if gold was much harder to acquire than it is now, my 'maybe' for staying another year would likely turn into a 'no' because I don't like questing for the most part, I don't have time for questing for the most part, most quests just frustrate me. I get my gold from bashing, because Trades are not Trades, they are just crafting skills that everyone can have all of, so my options are bash for gold or quest for far less gold.
Create gold sinks, not remove gold generation.
50k gold is not a lot, it amounts to 2 credits or 12 lessons.
With a gold cap of 150,000 that means at best if you spent every coin you earned you would generate 42 lessons a day, taking roughly 40 RL days of bashing to learn one skillset fully. That's not spending money on anything else (curatives, armour, buffs) and hoping credits are selling low. This seems perfectly reasonable to me, given the amount of artifacts, skillsets, wonderitems, curios that are in the game and are "required" for Top Tier combat.
Not everyone in game is clearing 50k an hour too. Don't get fooled into thinking a couple outliers represent the entire game. If everyone was clearing 50k an hour, nobody would be, because the way they are doing it is by bashing seldomly bashed areas, which would no longer be the case if everyone was doing it.
As an example. I bash only one area, because I can do it while I am sitting in my truck at work and waiting on contractors to do their thing so I can do my thing. If I start bashing at 8am I might hit gold cap by 4pm. I often don't hit it. Many players play far less than I do and when they do they are not bashing as much as I am. The few that are hitting gold cap in 1 - 2 hours are using that fact, that not many people are really bashing, and they are not bashing every area.
Esteem became the new gold because it was not capped!
100,000 gold plus 10,000 esteem @ 15 gold each = 250,000 gold
Totally not Ess.
Probably Kistan but that only has one s
There is also a big mislead in Ess' statement. Selling esteem is not generating new gold, it is gold changing hands, often gold coming from bashing, going to people who generate esteem.
Totally not Ess.
Probably Kistan but that only has one s
Yes, smoothed over the period = 47,000 gold a RL day made. Less than if I had bashed and again it is not generating gold, it is someone else generating gold and then giving it to me. Since you need to generate Esteem by influencing you are also not bashing while influencing and most influencing is not charity so you can't really argue the fact that you make gold while influencing in considerable to bashing amounts.
In fact Esteem selling is probably the most "trade" like skill there is in Lusternia. You spend time generating a product and someone spends time generating the income to buy your product.
If nobody was spending time generating that income though, because they couldn't any longer, then esteem would never sell.
#GoldSinksNotGoldNerfs
Letting guilds conveniently send out newbie packs might be a useful thing to code. Assuming most new people don't stick around, it could functionally sink a decent number of resources while being useful for the ones who do stay.
combat supplies. You could spend 50k to top up your herbs/vials/poisons after a decent sized fight.
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.
Remove Gold Cap
Remove Mobs getting more gold the less they are bashed.
Create more Gold Sinks
You end up with people still gaining gold slower, but not being restricted to the point of bashing specific spots, cause "nobody else bashes them so you can make your gold cap" and hoping nobody beat you to them cause you only have a couple hours a day to play or feeling like they make so little gold they can't advance far in the game anyways.
#GoldSinksNotGoldNerfs
Again, the real issue isn't "Numbers have gotten really high", because there isn't any intrinsic value to gold, the actual value of a gold piece isn't attached to anything because there are so few things of durable value you can buy with it. If there were 5 times as much (or as little) gold in the game, we'd be in just about the same situation except that... manse rooms and clans would be less or more expensive in terms of time required to generate the funds. More gold sinks are great, but they really only put a low floor on how much gold can be in the game without it becoming frustrating for players.
IMO the core intervention needs to be something that causes gold to move around the playerbase more, in addition to changes designed to curb inflation and diversify demand. You just will not be able to fix bashing efficiency problems, there will always be a "production class" in the game that generates most of the gold in existence. What you need to do is give them reasons to give that gold to players who are doing other, non-bashing activities. Otherwise why do those activities? They're interesting and make the game more interesting, but there aren't any incentives to do them, if you want gold for whatever reason: you bash. Adding in more reasons to want gold doesn't change that, you'll still just... grind if you want the gold, instead of pursuing a trade, shopkeeping, designing, roleplaying, administrating, or what have you.
*That's not a terrible "solution", by the way: having gold still slowly accrue in the system is a good thing if you have periodic escape valves. It's a lot easier to periodically vent off gold than it is to periodically infuse gold into the system. Having big org expansion drives or gold auction type events handles that quite nicely.
The idea behind gold generating the longer you leave a mob alone is (I believe) to stop a high leveled basher from farming gold by bashing a high level area over and over. The gold drops are still based on levels, with a percentile modifier that goes up over time. So, it's a bashing behavioral fix, not economic and it works from that angle. The problem is that it amplifies the amount of gold a high end basher gets exponentially, as they will be able to bash out areas restricted to other players. They already have a gold generation advantage as a result and now because they're bashing a little-visited area they're getting more gold.
First: the gold generation ramp up should be slower. Second: Flatten gold generation base values significantly, if not to totally flat so that as you go up in level the base gold generated by a mob does not increase at all. For high level areas, the amount of gold generated will still be higher than the gold generated in a low level area because fewer people can or will grind there. It just won't be higher via three scales. It's that way now because you A) get higher base gold,
Earlier in the thread it was pointed out that making things more expensive would hurt low gold earners. Someone else pointed out that newbie essentials could be supplied by orgs, like guilds. That's exactly what I meant in the other thread about orgs potentially being the engine of the economy! If the ORG has a reason to siphon gold off members, they will want to generate incentives for the high gold earners in their org to hand over gold. That gold can be redistributed to crafters to benefit newbies. This helps because A) It gives an incentive for people to pursue a trade,
Then wide base gold sinks kick in. If you've got nickle and dime reasons that everyone is expected to buy into one way or another, you've got flat gold drains in. The problem is that the few people who produce loads of gold tend to just sit on it, and it doesn't drain away. If you split that gold up and move it around a bunch, it is more likely to fall into one or another gold drain and go out of the game. Beyond just making it less of a trap to participate in interesting activities, it helps to remove gold.
IMO the only really big ticket drains that will work are organizational level gold drains. Otherwise, just not enough people will buy in for it to make a long term difference. That, and big ticket items tend to be permanent, so you'll have a rush of people buying in and then a teensy trickle everafter from new players. See Tattoos, assuming that you paid big bix for your tattoos (which many people around when they came out did not, and they're still benefiting just the same).
*Kind of. Of course, one tradesperson can supply literally the entire game with tradegoods with ease.
That said, if something is done to gradually reduce personal stocks of comms and there are changes to the trade system to create a demand for comms (more than there already is), it would bolster what's by far the biggest pseudo-sink in the game: org comm shops. The key thing then would be to give orgs a reason to want to accrue gold so that they actually price comms competitively. Increasing or decreasing the number of comms flowing to orgs would have some effect on the price of comms and therefore the flow of gold to coffers, but nowhere near as much as increasing the practical value of the gold in the coffers would.
Changing more of what flows to orgs from being a passive benefit of having villages to being something active would provide some intrinsic value to the comm themselves: the time/effort it requires to generate the comms. Only if there's something you actually want to do with them though, otherwise it'll just further depress interest in frill items like furniture. I can't really think of a way to make this interesting without a from scratch redesign.
So in other words: In addition to baseline, cheap, repeating "broad base" gold drains that basically everyone wants to buy into and flattening the exponential gold curve, the next thing should be giving ORGS a repeating but much stronger gold sink that makes them want to soak up gold. That suddenly makes comms and the comm shop matter, as well as giving org governments something to do that isn't hallmonitoring.
So I agree: Allow players with the design trades to submit designs as they will, and those designs are private. Remove the ability to submit public designs.
You may transfer your design to another player as you wish, but this removes it from you and there is a transfer fee. You may also transfer your designs to a cartel, which acts like a library of designs - much higher transfer fee. Existing public designs default to a World Repository that lives on Avechna's peak, you may check them out temporarily for a fee . Publishing to the public directory could possibly work like publishing books does, and perhaps even there could be rating and contests related to designs like book publishing! Your org cartel functions much the same way, perhaps with a different fee structure.
Players could be able to designate a personal cartel in which designs that decay are preserved indefinitely, but with a higher cost to reactivate. That way, all the old designs that already exist in cartels don't vanish, and you don't need to chunk out gold ad infinitum to keep them alive. You only have to pay out if you actually want to *make* them.
-It's easier to design items "out of the box"
-It's easier to have unique personal items than it is to make public designs, unqualified good.*
-No more necessary cartel clan clutter
-Meta-economy of trading patterns is created
-There are small, palatable costs instead of big one-off costs (cartel purchase)
-Designs of yore aren't just deleted
That said, it would incentivize each person to make a small number of things compared to their own catalogue if it costs to switch. Needs more thought, but the cartel system as-is is.. not good.
*In other words, your average tailor or whatever has a direct incentive to create unique clothing items because it's cheaper than making public items or org cartel items. Everyone's catalogue shrinks, hopefully making clothing less generic.
There are simply said, a -lot- of bigger fish to fry then designs.
As an attendum to that, removing / change public designs will only result in one thing: Having a lot less choice on already very bleak public selections. Personally I'd rather not curb that further, I already groan everytime I try to quickly furnish a room and realize that there's like 5 or so public designs that I could even live with. if am lucky there's -one- okay one.
I think people got very caught up on 'take gold from mobs' and did not keep reading. If mobs drop bits, and you can trade bits for gold (at village or basin wide diminishing returns to manage the total amount of gold in a logical and actually simulated way) AND if that gold - directly or hand-wavingly - is provided by the village from the gold they are paid by the city for cheap comms, then you're starting to cook with fire. Yes, prices of things will change. Right now, as has been pointed out, everything is either incredibly expensive or dirty cheap, and a lot of expensive things only need to be bought once (or once per RL year).
I think the points about increasing the value of gold is important, and that those steps alone won't solve that - you need gold to have real value, so that people see the benefit in margins and there are market forces beyond what currently exists - mass competition with few competitive advantages (mostly artifacts, that will rarely pay themselves off at all).
This is the 'reserve currency' idea from my OP, except I would not have it as a variable cost (that would remove the cushion against inflation), and I suggested dingbats for less direct tradeoff with website purchases. A static gold cost for bound versions of currency with real and set values would actually drain gold from the economy in a way that would not just turn it into another saleable currency (since they would be bound). Leaving the only options as player-sold means the gold never leaves the economy.
I do not support 'merely' removing gold drops from non-sentient creatures - that is like wiping your nose and declaring your cold is cured. The reason (beyond simple logic) why it's bad for mobs to drop gold is that the gold is created ex nihilo. You need currency quantities to be relatively stable and circulate (which, as has been pointed out rightly, means you need worthwhile things to spend it on).
The failure of the economy to even approximate a simulation (it is instead a facsimile of a simulation at best) means that all economic production is effectively worthless, all the economic artifacts and curios are traps, as are trade skills (unless you like the combat advantages - which I do!).