This is a market?

[Ruln]

D'oh. Sorry, you are right I didn't read carefully enough. I tend to get a little defensive anytime I see something about limiting harvesting. Apparently my brain checked out and my fingers did a little to much walking there.

[ttlanhil]

limited resources can be done a couple of ways. either in total or per player.

if it's per player you're just asking for illegal multiplaying

if it's in total then you're just asking for people to fight over resources, blocking, etc

 

also: limiting silver ore. this'd completely kill off the production of several items... why? because nearly all the silver would go into whatever is the most profitable use. like HE (anyone who thinks that general limits are gonna help needs to realise that there are some things that will sell in bulk)

 

and what about manu? leveling in that, after a while, is nearly all leather pants (or helms, which I found to be better after the rationality bonus, plus you get 2 gc back from no fails at trik, but it takes longer to move it all)... leather and thread are purchased, not mined. you can just say they have limited amounts, I guess, but then you still have the problem above

[Nidan]

Its not only hard for manufacturers to make money, fighters like me are having a tough time too. Fluffies only drop 0-10 gc now. If it takes me 1 heal each, that would make 4x7=28gc in HE cost alone. I wont add the price for Srs, because i make most of them on the spot, but it will cost me 2gc for wine anyway. So that is 25gc lost per fluffy on average. Of course they sometimes drop an item too, but since they break more equipment than they drop, adding this to the calculation won't help at all.

I could of course go to a troll spawn and kill those all day, but thats not much of a challenge. The best way to make money for me is to harvest flowers. Kinda sad when you are 92/96 a/d :S

 

btw: This post might look as a "Oh look at that p00r fighter"-whine post, but i just wanted to explain that there isn't coming a lot of money to the game from the fighters.

[Mr.Mind]

I will be straightforward and say that I truely do not understand why anyone is having difficulty making money. Even with the help of Flinto's production cost sheet, and the ease of selling flowers/ores, people are still complaining.

 

I have little symapthy for fighters. Learn to make your own HEs!

[ttlanhil]

I have little symapthy for fighters. Learn to make your own HEs!

how odd. you seem to be under the impression this is a single player game.

it's not.

it's a massively multiplayer game. that means people should be interacting. each player should be able to do the things they want and make money from it to pay other people to do everythig else (within reason, naturally, but the point is still there)

fighters fight, not alch. that's for the alchemists. (yes, EL claims that the lack of classes means you can do anything. partly true(*), but it doesn't mean you should have to)

 

which brings up another point... harvesting shouldn't be the big money spinner. sure, if you wanna specialise in that and the devs gave us some far higher level stuff to mine, it'd make sense for that to make a lot of cash (if there's a demand from the crafters/manu'ers), but the stuff a newbie can do is still the resort of people who have been playing over a year

 

*: not completely true because becoming a master of all skills takes far longer than mastery of one... and the split in PP because of varying needs means that you won't be as good as a specialist at the same OA anyway

[DemonCowboy]

I will be straightforward and say that I truely do not understand why anyone is having difficulty making money. Even with the help of Flinto's production cost sheet, and the ease of selling flowers/ores, people are still complaining.

 

and who's complaining? i just want the economy to make alittle bit of sense

[Mr.Mind]

I have little symapthy for fighters. Learn to make your own HEs!

how odd. you seem to be under the impression this is a single player game....

I say this because I have given up on suggesting, or even discussing improvements on the economy. I realize that there are more important things for the developers to work on, and saying any more about the economy is futile. Since there is obviously no big fix that will be in place (and work) any time soon, I would rather have people knowing how to exploit the current system than trying to push new ones.

 

The only way to get this kind of problem fixed is to first make it so extreme that it drastically affects gameplay for everyone, because that is when the developers begin to look at suggested solutions. I does not appear to me that the developers think the economy is bad enough to need "fixing". When serps are 2k maybe....

[Tofer]

While there are many wonderful ideas floating about for the improvement of the economy, basically it amounts to rebuilding the economic structure from the ground up which will take a good amount of time to accomplish and which will have no impact on you anytime soon. So I will disregard those things at the moment.

 

1. Items should not be bought by NPCs for more then it costs to make them. This is a false conclusion held by many somehow believing NPC merchants behave in anyway like players. They don't. If you let NPCs buy at a price for more then it cost to make then players will produce thousands and thousands of said items and sell them to the NPC. Sounds good as you make some money and the items never make it into circulation; but then players never learn to market their product. Who cares if noone buys; one might think, the NPC will. It takes away from the multi-player aspect of the game. Bargaining, haggles, market in general will become a thing of the past. NPCs should buy for slightly less then it cost to produce or maybe at the break even point. Thus those wishing to produce thousands for exp can still sell to NPC without too much hurt, but to make any money you will have to deal with the player market.

 

2. Unskilled and unworked products should sell for very little. Newbs do not need a bunch of money. Why is anyone even worried about how a newbie can make a bunch? The more skill and workmanship needed to produce an item the more value it should add (this will not always be able to hold true, but is good general rule when planning items) thus a high lvl manufacturer should be able to buy metals and FEs and gems and whatever else they need and still make a profit when selling on the market. This keeps the new players in work as well as offers profit and a reason to produce various items. Not just the item that gives best exp for the gc you have to spend in making it. This means that flowers, and even fruits and vegitables should sell for very very little with possibly a cap on how many bought from a player in one game day. Why should a tavern buy fruit from you when it is 10 steps from their door? They owner can go get it himself. Removing certain harvestables from maps and making them more valuable in that map for that reason might give the newb with lots of time a job running flowers, or fruits over from a couple maps away to sell to a NPC

 

3. Fighters are making very little lately. But upping the drop rate of items will just cause an influx into the economy dropping prices and they will still make very little. Instead various quests by city officials and such should be implemented so that a fighter can go off kill whatever he is supposed to kill and get payed for it. By limiting how often a fighter can get such a paid quest from a NPC and having quests on various map from different NPCs you will populate many underused maps, give a reason for fighting other then just to gain skill and allow fighters to earn GC in a way that will not add more material items to the game. Setting up these quests in a databse will allow you to edit them easy and tweak them should they be paying too much or not enough.

[Nidan]

 

1. Items should not be bought by NPCs for more then it costs to make them. This is a false conclusion held by many somehow believing NPC merchants behave in anyway like players. They don't. If you let NPCs buy at a price for more then it cost to make then players will produce thousands and thousands of said items and sell them to the NPC. Sounds good as you make some money and the items never make it into circulation; but then players never learn to market their product. Who cares if noone buys; one might think, the NPC will. It takes away from the multi-player aspect of the game. Bargaining, haggles, market in general will become a thing of the past. NPCs should buy for slightly less then it cost to produce or maybe at the break even point. Thus those wishing to produce thousands for exp can still sell to NPC without too much hurt, but to make any money you will have to deal with the player market.

 

2. Unskilled and unworked products should sell for very little. Newbs do not need a bunch of money. Why is anyone even worried about how a newbie can make a bunch? The more skill and workmanship needed to produce an item the more value it should add (this will not always be able to hold true, but is good general rule when planning items) thus a high lvl manufacturer should be able to buy metals and FEs and gems and whatever else they need and still make a profit when selling on the market. This keeps the new players in work as well as offers profit and a reason to produce various items. Not just the item that gives best exp for the gc you have to spend in making it. This means that flowers, and even fruits and vegitables should sell for very very little with possibly a cap on how many bought from a player in one game day. Why should a tavern buy fruit from you when it is 10 steps from their door? They owner can go get it himself. Removing certain harvestables from maps and making them more valuable in that map for that reason might give the newb with lots of time a job running flowers, or fruits over from a couple maps away to sell to a NPC

 

3. Fighters are making very little lately. But upping the drop rate of items will just cause an influx into the economy dropping prices and they will still make very little. Instead various quests by city officials and such should be implemented so that a fighter can go off kill whatever he is supposed to kill and get payed for it. By limiting how often a fighter can get such a paid quest from a NPC and having quests on various map from different NPCs you will populate many underused maps, give a reason for fighting other then just to gain skill and allow fighters to earn GC in a way that will not add more material items to the game. Setting up these quests in a databse will allow you to edit them easy and tweak them should they be paying too much or not enough.

 

1. If a product is hard to make and the profit is very very low (maybe 1gc, or even breaking even) this won't be much of a problem. If you can sell a steel shield for 300gc to an NPC, it might still be worth trying to sell it for double of that on the market

 

2. Good point, a bit hard to implement tho. It's kinda sad when i am harvesting flowers for money, next to a player that plays for 3 days, while i have played 3 years, and make exactly the same amount of gold..

 

3. Indeed, this would be a nice idea. An easier idea is to just increase the gold drop rate of some monsters, not their item drop rate. How do you think you would feel if after months of training you are finally able to finish off a fluffy rabbit, and it turns out to drop 3 gc, or even better, no bag at all? :S

 

I think the conclusion is that balancing an economy is an extremely difficult thing. Because a long time ago there was a BIG inflation (where beaver furs sold for 5k gc each!), the devs are now putting in an effort to at least not have such a situation again.

[Tofer]

1. If a product is hard to make and the profit is very very low (maybe 1gc, or even breaking even) this won't be much of a problem. If you can sell a steel shield for 300gc to an NPC, it might still be worth trying to sell it for double of that on the market

 

2. Good point, a bit hard to implement tho. It's kinda sad when i am harvesting flowers for money, next to a player that plays for 3 days, while i have played 3 years, and make exactly the same amount of gold..

 

3. Indeed, this would be a nice idea. An easier idea is to just increase the gold drop rate of some monsters, not their item drop rate. How do you think you would feel if after months of training you are finally able to finish off a fluffy rabbit, and it turns out to drop 3 gc, or even better, no bag at all?

 

 

1. True even very little profit would be OK. The big point is that selling to NPCs should not the a major source of income or any sort of player market just disappears except for a very few items. Like a serp is still best sword and still will be a market for it no matter what. But just about all other weapons that could be made and sold to npc for profit would be, then just save up money and get a serp.

 

2. Yep hard to impliment all at once. Small things more often and then heavily tested. We are a beta game, lets start acting like it.

 

3. Originally I was thinking of mentioning just increaseing gold drop. But in the end it is still but a temporary patch and has much less control then a payed quest system. I think from past experience we can see that making a change and hoping for the best doesn't work so well. Future changes should have better control tools planned into them

[DemonCowboy]

1. True even very little profit would be OK. The big point is that selling to NPCs should not the a major source of income or any sort of player market just disappears except for a very few items. Like a serp is still best sword and still will be a market for it no matter what. But just about all other weapons that could be made and sold to npc for profit would be, then just save up money and get a serp.

 

i just wanted to point out that if u had read the suggestions in place they were not greared to make much off of the NPC especially my ideas and clmates put the math behind my idea while i was merely thinking of end result

 

but the ideas listed on the first pagecan also be controlled and balanced and can also impact the player market if it gets out of control because the NPCs would in effect b setting the floor and the ceiling in which the player market operated because a player is not going to buy an item from a player for more than the NPC is going to sell it for nor will they take less for it then the NPC would because in the ideas on the first page selling to NPCs u'd barely break even it wouldn't be worth the time u invested into making it or even harvesting it and would be an effective way just to make SOMETHING on what u'r trying to sell instead of it collecting dust in u'r inventory for the end of time - imo that's all the NPCs should be for a good way for the devs to controll the gold/items in the game and to give a place for a player to b able to dump thier items to get if nothing else their money back so they can keep going.

[Tofer]

NPC prices are not needed to set a ceiling, free market will do that. If you sell for too much someone else will just pruduce and undersell you. That is how things go, and should go. Thus the market price regulates itself rather well. (Smith's invisible hand theory) Of course adjusments need to be made and controlling the rate of materials coming into the world as well as some controls and products leaving the world allow these controls without the devs having to decide the proper range of prices for you.

 

There does need to be a floor, because in game a player has no problem making his character suffer by eating poor food, sleeping on the cold ground, and working his fingers to the bone for no set hourly rate. Because players see harvestable items as "free" prices could drop drastically to nothing if no minimum was set up by NPCs to control this.

 

I guess the main point is that using NPCs to set a floor AND ceiling is a poor long term solution, and instead creating methods to control the flow of wealth into and out of the community are needed. What we lack is scarcity, the backbone of any market. There must be a limited number of items as well as a demand or no market price can be set (where supply & demand curves intersect).

[Mr.Mind]

I completely agree with tofer. Except it is not only harvestable items, but items that can be bought in the EL store that players are beginning to see as "free".

[flinto]

I just thought that I would add my thoughts to the debate. Yes I believe that something needs to be done, but what and why?

 

Well let me answer why first. My spreadsheet shows that many items (if not most) sell for less than the base cost of the raw ingredients. Why would this be? well lets look at tit short swords. the market for these is dead and the reason is that the price for a tit long is about 800gc now (due to monster drops) - well the efe required to make one is 3-5 times more expensive on its own. Why would anyone want to buy a tit short when they can get a tit long for 4 trips of flowers extra! So what am i forced to do? keep loads in storage or dump them on the ground and let them go poof or sell them for way under the raw cost of the materials.

 

So why are tit longs selling for 800gc - well they are monster drops I here you say - so it is free to me and therefore 800gc is reasonable! Well so would 5gc be reasonable then if that is the attitude. It is these monster drop items that have a big impact on the market.

 

If items can be manufactured then they shouldn't be monster drops - I am quite happy for the monsters to drop things that are no manufacturable by players or occasionally a huge stash of gc

 

Would this fix the problen - well not initially by would help to increase the prices of swords in the long term

 

However, our market has a bigger issue. There is not enough demand for the supply (the base consumption is not large enough due to 2 factors: A small user base and not enough loss of items.

 

1. There are not enough players to keep the flow of goods going without a price crash and therefore there has to be artificial props

 

2. There is not enough damage and loss - when we die anything that is not dropped on the ground should disappear out of the game - this would get the demand for goods going. Additionally if the damage reate was increased this would also get the demand increased. I am now att/def 40/44 (not very high I know) but i can tell you how many swords I have broken (2 iron and 2 tit shorts one of which I repaired and the other pre-owned one I left on the floor in IP to its fate). The iron ones were drops and the shorts i have 70 off in storage. As for medallions (i have finally broken one!). Yes somethings do break often (like leather boots and pants and therefore there is a slow market for these).

 

Sorry for the ramble - well what is my conclusions.

 

1. We need to fix monster drops

2. We need to prop up prices for two reasons

2.1 the market is too small to be without it and look what happened to shield prices when trik dropped his price for iron shields! The market for shields is shot to pieces - I would suggest NPCs do not pay less/more than the cost of the raw materials are worth to other NPCs)

2.2 to halt further deflation and to stop everybody wanted the best items straight away

3. change the damage/loss formulae of the game

 

 

Anyway sorry for the unstructured argument I was typing with my brain out of gear

[Tofer]

I was reminded of an old adage yesterday. Perfection is the enemy of good. I thought that i tied in so well to a discussion of the marketplace that I would mention it.

 

So some tips when thinking of ways to help the market.

 

1. Realism is good for roleplay and to make things more intuitive. But too real isn't feasible, after all players do not treat their characters real (when was last time you washed your toon's shorts?) Tools for balance and stability that allow for a slowly changing market are paramount.

 

2. The game is not supposed to be easy. Get a first person shooter and God mode for that. Suggestions whose point is to make the game easier belong on the cutting room floor. The game should be difficult and get more difficult as it progresses. The monetary return should be inversely proportional to the difficulty. Thus very easy new things make very little money, the much more difficult things make proportionally more money. This has to be true for all actions. If you let even one or two slip by (harvesting lilacs for example) then everyone will quickily become aware of it and that will be where people focus their attention for money.

 

3. Use a variant of Ockham's razor. The simplest of codes and ideas that meet the needs should be used. Suggesting more difficult methods to address a problem in the market then others already forwarded is a waste of your breathe and shows a lack of knowledge of programming. Of course, not all ideas address all sides of an issue so don't just round file your idea, just rethink it a bit to make it simpler.

 

 

All that said a long term idea to help create a hierarchey in the manufacturing jobs I presented here http://www.eternal-lands.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=22386

Hopefully a natural progression will ensue and sections of each market will be produced mostly by those within a specific skill range. This would help slow production into the economy by the simple method of limiting the number of people producing each range of items.

[Damned_Angel]

You are missing the point....

 

Monster drops and bots ruined the economy. End of story...

 

 

A countinuous flow of tit longs for instance from monsters ------>tit long is never manued and the price is just silly ~800gc (And requires EFE)

 

The first step---->no more drops.

The second step------> floors and ceilings for all items (including in bot's lists).

 

Third step: more complicated way to make the items (for instance for a sword you make the blad in one blacksmith's shop, you make the handle in another's, etc and you merge the parts in a certain place....) If you are a crafter you make the ring from scratch: bars--->rings, gem--->polished gem, polished gem+ring = ring.

Why not this recipe to everything?

[cayuga]

i have to say that you score a point there.

[Tofer]

I rarely miss points

 

But seriously. No more drops is just not an option at moment. It would take a rethinking and restructing of the way fighters can make money. Just removing drops without a completely analyzing the impact on fighters would only make things worse. A slow removal of items over various updates from the drop lists in addition to more dropped gc and additional ways for fighters to earn gc is the only way to go here. The effects can be monitored and adjusted without such a drastic shock to the game.

 

Bots are player made and decided and so need no floor nor ceiling. If a bot can sell for less then you or buy for more then you and make a profit then you either are charging too much and need to restructure your production or the bot is charging too little and will soon be out of business. NPCs don't need to set a ceiling (though they do and it can't be helped; it isn't needed for an economic system) Ceilings are only needed in the case of monopolies; and the only monopolies are those run by NPCs anyway and they already have a set price. They do need to set a floor as I explained earlier.

 

Items do need to be made more complicated, with many more steps for the higher lvl items and means to encourage players to produce only those items within a certain skill window so that high lvl players aren't producing all the leather boots as well as titanium serps. (just and example don't get all excited)

 

I think the best thing overall would be to find a programmer with some good economics education to review the various suggestions and start working. Any takers?

[DemonCowboy]

But seriously. No more drops is just not an option at moment. It would take a rethinking and restructing of the way fighters can make money. Just removing drops without a completely analyzing the impact on fighters would only make things worse. A slow removal of items over various updates from the drop lists in addition to more dropped gc and additional ways for fighters to earn gc is the only way to go here. The effects can be monitored and adjusted without such a drastic shock to the game.

 

well instead of eliminating drops all together just change the ratios of coins being dropped and just drop non-manu items such as leather or books, or wine (stuff already dropped in some cases) but add harvestable items in place of like swords and the like or if a manu item is dropped it should b few and far between

Bots are player made and decided and so need no floor nor ceiling. If a bot can sell for less then you or buy for more then you and make a profit then you either are charging too much and need to restructure your production or the bot is charging too little and will soon be out of business. NPCs don't need to set a ceiling (though they do and it can't be helped; it isn't needed for an economic system) Ceilings are only needed in the case of monopolies; and the only monopolies are those run by NPCs anyway and they already have a set price. They do need to set a floor as I explained earlier.

i think they should set ceilings for 1 reason and 1 reason only - convenience some1 doesn't want to waste time on the market channel then they should b able to go to a NPC and pay all the market will bear for it

and that's just a partial ceiling neway - some1 breaks a leather glove (pickaxes should b make manufacturable) and they're in a bind instead of them walking back i for 1 will sell them 1 of my extras on the spot - for a a price even above the NPCs price that way they don't have to spend time walking

 

besides i don't want a real life economic system i want 1 that isn't such a pain to deal w/ if u want a real economy go play Entropy Project - u'll pry do alot better there - i'm here to role play and have fun keeping things only as complicated as i want to make them for myself if i want to spend higher prices at an NPC because i don't want to deal w/ the market channel that day so be it if i want to b cheap and make it myself i should b able to do it for a good deal cheaper than it costs to buy the item i want it to make sense yet not b near as complated and full of hastles as the economy on THIS side of my monitor - i deal w/ that enough thank you!!

Items do need to be made more complicated, with many more steps for the higher lvl items and means to encourage players to produce only those items within a certain skill window so that high lvl players aren't producing all the leather boots as well as titanium serps. (just and example don't get all excited)

i agree to a point, that was also part of y the financial reward system i was thinking the end result on - no i know very little about programming and don't mean to even think of sounding like i do that's y my suggestion was on the end result and had no math in it. if the economy becomes stable a high lv player would find it much more rewarding to make a tit serp again instead of making boots because the financial reward would be better but i think essences are almost but not quite right as far as manu goesi think they should b lower levels and made w/ more common materials i mean emeralds for magic essences? when u use them at lv3 mag? what's the sense in that? it only makes things harder to get started for those who decide to go the hard route and make their own materials it shouldn't cost them more to make it then buy it when they're too low lv to get the ingredients.

 

*off of the subject - ppl say that RICH are the 1s driving down the prices and that IS true but thats because we keep looking for flaws in the current patchwork market to exploit to make it cheaper some of which we have even posted in the guest commentary part of our board http://richtimothy.com showing u how to make feasting pots free for u for example and we do this to show how bad the market is so we can get a fair stable economy that makes sense (getting rich in the process is just a bonus) and when there is 1 that makes sense then it'll b harder if not impoossible for us to exploit the market to give us the advantage.*

[Learner]

Keep in mind that since people can buy & sell as they wish price floors & ceilings are either useless or artificial restrictions on the game. NPC Buy/Sell prices put effective floors and ceilings for items that are bought/sold, but there is no reason why players can't go beyond their prices if they wish or can provide additional services (such as delivery)

[DemonCowboy]

Keep in mind that since people can buy & sell as they wish price floors & ceilings are either useless or artificial restrictions on the game. NPC Buy/Sell prices put effective floors and ceilings for items that are bought/sold, but there is no reason why players can't go beyond their prices if they wish or can provide additional services (such as delivery)

 

 

tht's true but that's not the problem - the problem is that the player market is too unreliable at times - there's not enough players that what's made can always b sold in a decent time frame at a decent price - that's y we need an NPC economy that makes senst - yeah we could still sell below or buy above NPC for matters of convenience but if something's not selling to other players right away we need a way to dump it even if it is for just over cost - so we can keep producing and if we can't find an item on the market we need to b able to get it even if it does cost alot more than we could get it from another player - is what we're going for here that and it just needs to make sense 5 quartz and 3gc - isn't a 3gc vial it's like a 12gc vial from what that quarts could have sold for yet u can buy a vial w/ something in it for 5gc

[Damned_Angel]

The drop problems

 

1. The books could become the a very good gc exit from the game ------>by limitating the book selling/buying thingie only to npc's. - So no more books dropped would let the gc exit the game.

 

2. Armed skelleton droping titanium chainmail - getting one after 10 of them isn't really normal ----> armed skellies are much lower than trolls ---->will make the tit chain get down and down like the tit long....

 

3. So i keep my idea no more final-items drops and no more book drops could be a first step to solve the problem

 

Realism

 

1. Troll dropping bear summoning for instance - i never saw a troll summoning anything...carring such knowledge is in a way strange.

 

2. armors without a scratch ----> i suppose the killed troll armor - lol - could be damaged at least if he is hit by my fists and sword

 

3. Chimeran's dropping books is not realistic....really i don't doubt the intelligence of the chimerans but ...lol

 

Suggestions:

 

1. Either drops are parts of items ----->like thread for spiders which is magnificent.

2. Either drops are for instance: cyclop eye, troll tongue, ogre hand -----> items that can be used in powerful potions or something.

 

3. Manufacturing/crafting/mixing to be allowed only in certain space. And recipes to be more complicated to get to final product (using the crafting pattern)

 

4. reintroduction of some items in the manu cycle: ex: tit long.

 

 

Note: I guess is normal to have a steady market before new items would be introduced. Otherwise there would be heaps of items and soon due to the large number of people making them, the market would uber deflate again.

 

Introduction of new rings would balance the crafting skill, though taking into consideration the possibility for all these rings to use new gems/ore i guess the price for the actual items would get down like hell...

 

5. different cooldown times for some consumable items according to their importance: i guess damage ring should have a much lower cooldown than dissingagemnent for instance, due to the fact that 10 damage is an effect equal to....like 1 hit.

Edited February 10, 2006 by Damned_Angel

[Learner]

Keep in mind that since people can buy & sell as they wish price floors & ceilings are either useless or artificial restrictions on the game. NPC Buy/Sell prices put effective floors and ceilings for items that are bought/sold, but there is no reason why players can't go beyond their prices if they wish or can provide additional services (such as delivery)

 

 

tht's true but that's not the problem - the problem is that the player market is too unreliable at times - there's not enough players that what's made can always b sold in a decent time frame at a decent price - that's y we need an NPC economy that makes senst - yeah we could still sell below or buy above NPC for matters of convenience but if something's not selling to other players right away we need a way to dump it even if it is for just over cost - so we can keep producing and if we can't find an item on the market we need to b able to get it even if it does cost alot more than we could get it from another player - is what we're going for here that and it just needs to make sense 5 quartz and 3gc - isn't a 3gc vial it's like a 12gc vial from what that quarts could have sold for yet u can buy a vial w/ something in it for 5gc

If the NPC's buy above (even just barely) the cost to make an item, it becomes a place to dump goods and flood the game with gold. Then you will have massive inflation as people mass produce and sell goods to NPC's.

 

The only way NPC's can be permitted to buy above the cost to make things, you need to make sure there are intelligent limits that aren't too artificial or prone to abuse.

[DemonCowboy]

If the NPC's buy above (even just barely) the cost to make an item, it becomes a place to dump goods and flood the game with gold. Then you will have massive inflation as people mass produce and sell goods to NPC's.

 

The only way NPC's can be permitted to buy above the cost to make things, you need to make sure there are intelligent limits that aren't too artificial or prone to abuse.

 

 

well couldn't a in stock program (like i said, i'm not a programmer) be added to the buying NPC's? like they buy up to a certain limit - but say items in inventory drop if sold or at the rate of so many an hr? (RP purposes the NPC would sell to other NPCs as well - best way i could think of to explain) to keep the gold the gold from flooding the market still making it preferable to sell to players because most of the time the NPCs won't buy in bulk at least not that often, but ppl could sell a few maybe to buy another book or more materials that can't b harvested or something

Edited February 10, 2006 by DemonCowboy

[duran]

deja vu (or however you spell it)...

 

i skipped most of the last page, and skimmed the rest, nothing new from where im looking...

 

i recall i tryed to push the idea of dropable parts or other items that was not directly usefull for a fighter, but that would be used in creating other items. this way a fighter have a market element while not being selfsupplied by item drops and similar. the topic got more or less stonewalled into oblivion (atleast thats how i view the reactions to it).

 

another topic is rareity, there we have a multitude of options. like spawning flowers as if they where bags so that the player have to activly look for them rather then just find a bush and park his butt until inv is full.

 

ok so it will lead to more infighting but the question will have to be, is it worth it? there is allready infighting about monster spawns...

 

another option is to sharply increase the time it takes to make one item.

however, this means that we allso have to sharply increase the xp gained pr item. in the end this should lead to a decrease of items in rotations.

 

and i have done exactly the same thing as some others here, put the value of diffrent raw materials vs the value of items made from said materials into a spreadsheet. very interesting numbers (making a iron chain mail from parts bought from a npc comes out as 10 times more expensive then buying the same armor directly from a npc).

 

problem is that entropy have selected a very simple way of setting the npc buy and sell prices. you set one, and the other is 1/10 of the set value. to be able to tune the economy more correctly, one needs to be able to set each of those values independently...

 

basicly i see nothing new in this thread, but that does not mean there is no value in this thread.

 

i think a part of the issue with this economy is that you have to go into the code of the server to tune some of the stuff. this means that its the allready hard working coders that have to do it. therefor its not done as they have other issues (like say adding new monsters, items and places) to deal with.