Question about the economy

[nathanstenzel]

I mean, how many dragon armors or CoL or whatever are made by one person per week or month.

 

Low number of these goods (and many others) being produced is caused mostly by a shortage of ingredients - in case of these two a bottleneck is shortage of binding stones. Within few months prices for them went from 6.5 to over 7.5 kgc per piece. Same for EME's needed for universal hoods. I know a lot of people willing to make high end armor and tailoring goods even below profit to earn current exp if only they could get enough of ingredients required.

<CLIP>

Cruella, look again. you quoted it as being from me, but it was a part of my quoting Khalai.

Please edit your post to directly quote him instead.

 

Thanks for making the change.

Edited January 16, 2009 by nathanstenzel

[Cruella]

A bit anal, but done Sorry for mistake. Now you need to correct your post above rofl

[Shadow_runner]

If you used my current 3 step plan, you could crack down on hoarding if you wanted too. By making the storage charge more for those rare items to be stored. Depends upon if you think this action is viable.

 

That would only lead to add this storage tax to the price of these items, making losses even worse...

 

Making people pay for hoarding and prohibit hoarding would make things only worse IMO, it is better to motivate people to USE those items rather than HOARD.

 

It's not a tax! It's a cost for storage. Tax is something you pay once you have an income. Set by governments. (Also a possible tool, for game.)

 

How do you motivate people to use this items? If you have too make at a loss? It's hard too do. So you have to fix the economy, so that all items can make 'some' profit. Depended upon supply and demand.

 

As to hoarding, this might be misleading. Assuming that someone is collecting ingredients just for one red, black and icy set, that required "to hoard" 30 binding stones and 12 EME's. In my opinion getting such amount on a market in game now requires either to pay more than these are worth or takes weeks. No suprise then that some people that think long term collect these and do not sell just to have them handy when needed.

 

This is totally understandable. However your looking at this from the point of the broken economy. The situation is this, so we action thusly. (Me included )

 

If this 'rare' stone where more readily available and cheaper, then there might not be a need to 'hoard' them. But if there where more readily available then they might no longer be considered 'rare' items. So this is a slippery slop indeed.

 

I don't pretend too have all the answers. Only Ent will know if 'mass' hoarding is going on. Rather than our 'regular' hoarding.

[Entropy]

As to hoarding, this might be misleading. Assuming that someone is collecting ingredients just for one red, black and icy set, that required "to hoard" 30 binding stones and 12 EME's. In my opinion getting such amount on a market in game now requires either to pay more than these are worth or takes weeks. No suprise then that some people that think long term collect these and do not sell just to have them handy when needed.

 

FFS, no one keeps the ingredients for 3 dragon sets. Using this justification, no one ever can be hoarding, because theya re jsut holdign the ingredients for all the swords and armors in the game.

[Lidda]

BTW, did you find a MMO with a better economy?

 

There is a game called EVE-Online. IMHO it has the most complex and best economy of all MMORPGs that I have ever played on. During the time I was playing nobody ever said a complaint about its economy and I can only praise it. Too bad that I'm not falling for the sci-fi/space themed games, I prefer fantasy instead.

 

Though I could imagine something similar in EL, I know that something like that will never be implemented since it will render the bots useless. Me, the average player couldn't care less about bots (I don't owe one, and almost never trade them) but I guess for Radu and Eternal Lands they are one of the main sources of income. What I find a bit morbid is that at the time of writing this post there were 450 players online and 177 bots. Ratio of 1:3, but hey as long as people are willing to pay for them, go for it.

 

 

In my opinion there are 3 easy, nonetheless radical changes to fix the current state of the economy.

1. Radically increase the harvesting time

2. Radically increase the amount of ingredients needed for items.

3. Radically increase the break rate. <- This is BS.

 

If you ask me I would go for the second one, but for maximal efficiency I would also consider a fresh start (maybe a new server).

 

As a final note, I dare to say that things got here because there was no BIG PLAN, things were implemented one at a time - they were always tried to fit into the already existing framework. You simply cannot put bricks on top of each-other and hope that the result will be a shiny castle.

[Entropy]

Yes, well, those solutions are obvious, and I wanted to apply them, but there was always a pretty big opposition. And except for the higher breaking rate, they'd require an items whipe too.

[Cruella]

As to hoarding, this might be misleading. Assuming that someone is collecting ingredients just for one red, black and icy set, that required "to hoard" 30 binding stones and 12 EME's. In my opinion getting such amount on a market in game now requires either to pay more than these are worth or takes weeks. No suprise then that some people that think long term collect these and do not sell just to have them handy when needed.

 

FFS, no one keeps the ingredients for 3 dragon sets. Using this justification, no one ever can be hoarding, because theya re jsut holdign the ingredients for all the swords and armors in the game.

 

FFS, I would if I only could get enough of them. It has taken me 2 weeks to get 10 bindings, using channel 3 adds, asking friends and a buying via bot.

 

And I'm even not a manuer, I do not use these by myself, I ask top manuers to make items for me. I assume they need way more than me to level their skill at reasonable pace.

 

By the way, there are people who keep 1 million of tree mushrooms in sto - are they hoarders? Anything wrong with that? I know a guy that collects EWE's - he buys them and puts in sto, never uses any. Anything wrong with that either? Maybe that's what people enjoy. Some people enjoy grinding for every resource, others might prefer abundance of them. I'm concious however that economy based on abundance of goods require substantial investments in bandwidth, hardware and database size so might not be an option for EL at all. I still miss my castle, tower and 3 houses, thousands of items in houses and bank and 27 millions of gc's in the other game I've been playing before quitting (not due to economy but due to skill caps - leveled 5 chars to the max in 7 skills eah, there was nothing more to be done really there).

 

I suspect a main problem of EL economy lies in a small playerbase and low number of new players. In other games where there are thousands of people on the server in the same time, it is way easier to get or sell anything on the market. It is virtually impossible there for one player or a small group of players to screw up prices for certain item since a market is more resistant to overproduction and dumping. Also a healthy proportion of new players to veterans ensures that a market for low level supplies is quite significant, which is not the case in EL where majority of people can no longer be considered as new to the game with about a half of being "veterans".

Edited January 16, 2009 by Cruella

[Silvatica]

Actually you dont have to do a complete swipe of item - you can do a squeeze instead.

 

- To stop people from hoarding stones put stones in a special place in storage - a slot for valuables. And only give players X slots - say 25 available slots for valueable items - and make them non-stackable in storage. That way no one may have more than X valueable items in storage of the types you don't want people to hoard. The rest of them they are then forced to sell on the market. This is not only applicable for stones but also for enriched essences and magical items or anything hat you would like to make sure there is not an ambundance of. Ok some might use guild bots to hold those items but its only X more for the whole guild so its not a too big problem.

 

 

- Have a limit in total number of items in storage or a limit in EMU stored at storage. That way no one can hoard into storage and are forced to sell the items that is just saved for a special day when alching is profitable and they want to sit and make items for the whole day. Of cource this could be added with a way for people to buy more storage space - the first 10000 emu is free and to get 20 000 emu cost 10 000 and to get 30 000 emu cost 100 000 and to get 50 000 emu costs 1 000 000.

 

Currently there is a shortage of EFE on the open market even though I know people with 10 of them in storage. Forcing them to sell them would make them more available and would lower the prices for them. Both of the above ideas will lower the value of the items people have in storage.

 

I would like to point out that if you increase the harvest time it will become much more harder to get experience in the game so that many new-commers will have a hard time to get to the levels that the current players are at. One way to combat that is to increase the experience given for making items. I.e. if you double the harvest time you should also double the experience given to players for making the items so that new players have a chance to get to the levels that old players are at.

 

Another solution to that it will be harder to gain experience if harvest time or ingredients to make items is increased is to wipe some experience from all exisiting players too. If you double harvest time you also might want to remove half the experience and half the items of existing players so that new players get the chance to catch up.

 

A complete wipe would be devastating for the economy since it would make hard to get items so much more valuable - removing a portion leaves some of the items in the game and will not lead to hyper-inflation in prices for hard to come by items.

Edited January 16, 2009 by Silvatica

[korrode]

- To stop people from hoarding stones put stones in a special place in storage - a slot for valuables. And only give players X slots - say 25 available slots for valueable items - and make them non-stackable in storage. That way no one may have more than X valueable items in storage of the types you don't want people to hoard. The rest of them they are then forced to sell on the market. This is not only applicable for stones but also for enriched essences and magical items or anything hat you would like to make sure there is not an ambundance of. Ok some might use guild bots to hold those items but its only X more for the whole guild so its not a too big problem.

I know it'd piss some people off, but this sounds like a decent idea imo

[Schmurk]

- To stop people from hoarding stones put stones in a special place in storage - a slot for valuables. And only give players X slots - say 25 available slots for valueable items - and make them non-stackable in storage. That way no one may have more than X valueable items in storage of the types you don't want people to hoard. The rest of them they are then forced to sell on the market. This is not only applicable for stones but also for enriched essences and magical items or anything hat you would like to make sure there is not an ambundance of. Ok some might use guild bots to hold those items but its only X more for the whole guild so its not a too big problem.

I know it'd piss some people off, but this sounds like a decent idea imo

I've proposed something like that a long time ago and I've even proposed to have a limit depending on related skills. For example someone with a good a/d could store more rostos than someone with a low a/d.

Almost everybody was against this idea and some people even said that it was against freedom. The funny thing is that in only a few days similar ideas have came up in this thread.

I still think that it would be a really good idea and would solve some problems...

[Cruella]

- To stop people from hoarding stones put stones in a special place in storage - a slot for valuables. And only give players X slots - say 25 available slots for valueable items - and make them non-stackable in storage. That way no one may have more than X valueable items in storage of the types you don't want people to hoard. The rest of them they are then forced to sell on the market. This is not only applicable for stones but also for enriched essences and magical items or anything hat you would like to make sure there is not an ambundance of. Ok some might use guild bots to hold those items but its only X more for the whole guild so its not a too big problem.

I know it'd piss some people off, but this sounds like a decent idea imo

 

Fidel's economy of Cuba where you were allowed to have a pair of shoes every two years :/

[korrode]

RL vs EL, cant compare.

[Cruella]

Mindsets are comparable no matter where they originate from

 

anyway - peace, back to grinding

[Burn]

- To stop people from hoarding stones put stones in a special place in storage - a slot for valuables. And only give players X slots - say 25 available slots for valueable items - and make them non-stackable in storage. That way no one may have more than X valueable items in storage of the types you don't want people to hoard. The rest of them they are then forced to sell on the market. This is not only applicable for stones but also for enriched essences and magical items or anything hat you would like to make sure there is not an ambundance of. Ok some might use guild bots to hold those items but its only X more for the whole guild so its not a too big problem.

 

Only way that would work is to include in this list EVERYTHING that generally has a higher value than the lowest-valued item. If including enriched essies that would be EWE. Otherwise anything left out would become the hoarded items.

 

By everything, that includes hydro bars, worth more than any enriched essie and many stones. 25 would not allow for the 50 needed to buy a nexus.

 

You got 23 of the slots taken for some project. You take flowers down to sulfur and wow, 3 EFEs! (Chances are incredibly slim, but happened to me with EMEs, so go along with it.) You head up and, crap, you're screwed.

 

This would not solve the problem, just transfer it, be it to items left out of the list, or even just to massive gc hoarding.

 

- Have a limit in total number of items in storage or a limit in EMU stored at storage. That way no one can hoard into storage and are forced to sell the items that is just saved for a special day when alching is profitable and they want to sit and make items for the whole day. Of cource this could be added with a way for people to buy more storage space - the first 10000 emu is free and to get 20 000 emu cost 10 000 and to get 30 000 emu cost 100 000 and to get 50 000 emu costs 1 000 000.

 

You just killed the IEDP perk. As well, Shroom eaters can easily go through 10k of shrooms in a day or two if they're primarily mixers. Mixers can sit sit and mix all day, special day or not, and do regularly. That requires actually having the ings. 10k shrooms = 30k emu, leaves little room for anything else. I can go through 2k+ FPs in a good mixing day. That's 10k emu.

 

You're not suggesting anything that will save the economy here. You're suggesting completely ruining any form of game play for all who are primarily mixers.

 

Currently there is a shortage of EFE on the open market even though I know people with 10 of them in storage. Forcing them to sell them would make them more available and would lower the prices for them. Both of the above ideas will lower the value of the items people have in storage.

 

Your sig suggests why they are at the least not selling to you. I'm sure you'd love anything that would force them to sell to you at a price they've never sold for in the 8-9 months I've been here.

 

I don't make FEs as often these days due to changes in what I've been doing in game, but I did make a couple k 2 days ago, got an EFE, and sold it. They're still out there.

 

 

if you double the harvest time you should also double the experience given to players for making the items so that new players have a chance to get to the levels that old players are at.

 

And higher level players, getting double on the higher-level items they make, would be even more higher. Applying basic math to this sentence kinda nullifies it.

 

 

If you double harvest time you also might want to remove half the experience and half the items of existing players so that new players get the chance to catch up.

 

Trying to piss everyone off? Get on everyone's never-sell-to-again list? I worked hard (and put a lot of time in) for my experience, as did everyone else. 9 months of play = completely deleting 4.5 months of my time playing. People playing longer than me will have even more reason to be pissed. Fixing things doesn't require MASSIVELY screwing everyone over. I would not be in the least bit surprised if people walked away from EL if this happened. Quite a few of them. Even I'd wonder if it was worth it if such things happened, and I'm still relatively new compared to the long-timers this would screw even more. Someone who'd been playing for 4 years and getting 2 years of their play wiped over your suggestion should be looking to get you permanently pk-able on any map for even suggesting this.

 

 

And, after it's done, and people finally get back to where they were... you'd be right back where you started. With less people since they got pissed and quit. Not a solution that would work long-term.

 

 

People hoard expensive items because any use of them causes their value to drastically decrease. No amount of limiting what people can have is going to change that. Using them causes too many items to appear that TPTB don't want easily accessible to everyone. Storage limiting, destroying people's long-time work, etc. are at best bandages that will eventually fall off (and cause other problems in the meantime).

 

I'm no economy genius, but the one thing I do know is sudden changes like these suggested are NOT going to have any effect in the long-term, they'll just transfer the problem. Even having only been here a short time compared to a good number of people here, I've seen drastic changes occur (mostly affecting harvables, but others such as the made-makeable uni hoods causing a sudden new interest in EMEs and even saving stones), and in the end the players adjusted around these changes, and nothing is really that different.

 

A long-term plan, slowly implemented and tweaked, is much more likely to succeed. The problem obviously is coming up with that plan, Drastic instant changes don't work, and the ones that have been made so far have shown that. People are still managing to play just fine, albeit with some gripes, so there's no need for the insta-changes that keep getting suggested. There's time to plan ahead and make slower transitions that have a much better chance of succeeding. (I definitely don't have those plans or even ideas for them, but I'd trust such thought-out changes coming from devs a lot more than drastic spur-of-the-moment things that have proven futile thus far, yet keep getting suggested here.)

 

 

 

Lot of words just to say: Look at long-term, slowly-implemented ideas, not drastic sudden changes that will only succeed in moving the problem elsewhere.

[Zamirah]

- Have a limit in total number of items in storage or a limit in EMU stored at storage. That way no one can hoard into storage and are forced to sell the items that is just saved for a special day when alching is profitable and they want to sit and make items for the whole day. Of cource this could be added with a way for people to buy more storage space - the first 10000 emu is free and to get 20 000 emu cost 10 000 and to get 30 000 emu cost 100 000 and to get 50 000 emu costs 1 000 000

I think we got the astro in game because we should do different things, dependent of it.

We use stones to find out when the best time is to mix valuable items.

 

I use to harvest flowers when my astro is bad, if my storage was limited, would I log off and play another game.

 

And I think with limited emu in storage would some items never be made,for 1 refined vegetal mixture is needed 200 flowers x 12 - 2400 emu and it's without vials, gypsum and food.

 

Guess there will be very few made in game.

[Cruella]

- Have a limit in total number of items in storage or a limit in EMU stored at storage. That way no one can hoard into storage and are forced to sell the items that is just saved for a special day when alching is profitable and they want to sit and make items for the whole day. Of cource this could be added with a way for people to buy more storage space - the first 10000 emu is free and to get 20 000 emu cost 10 000 and to get 30 000 emu cost 100 000 and to get 50 000 emu costs 1 000 000

 

50 hydro bars project :

 

Ingredients:

 

Coal - 43200

Iron Ore - 71000

Red Rose - 28500

Red Snapdragons - 28500

Sulfur - 28500

Total food - 144250

 

Multiply by EMU. Think once again.

[Tauren]

Think about it. In the game, if you want to make fire essences. The only thing that you 'have' to buy is leather gloves. Even these can be made in due course, so the only thing that you than have to buy is 'leather' to make the gloves. Gold coin wise that is.

 

Everything else in the above example can be made for 'free'. Time input into the game and you produce the goods. Which currently sell at 3 to 3.5 gold coins each. With a chance for making an EFE, which currently sell for around 7,000 gold coins each.

 

Until there is some costs added too production. Then the economy will always been broken, in my view.

 

A real life example is:

 

You pay money for: house, food, bills, etc... So you 'need' to earn enough money for those first, before you can really do anything else. (Unless you like dept.)

You seem to persist that time does not equal money. Everything in the game can be made for free if you work from scratch, therefore there is a broken economy. This is wrong.

It is more like saying: 'You go out to buy a hatchet to chop down trees to use the logs to build your house. But even then, you could even make the hatchet yourself. So all you need to buy is the metal bit...'

 

Everyone does 'earn' money for the produced items they ultimately have. Hardly no one goes out to create armours from pure scratch. If they did, you can consider them to be naturalists in a real life situation.

[Silvatica]

- Have a limit in total number of items in storage or a limit in EMU stored at storage. That way no one can hoard into storage and are forced to sell the items that is just saved for a special day when alching is profitable and they want to sit and make items for the whole day. Of cource this could be added with a way for people to buy more storage space - the first 10000 emu is free and to get 20 000 emu cost 10 000 and to get 30 000 emu cost 100 000 and to get 50 000 emu costs 1 000 000

 

50 hydro bars project :

 

Ingredients:

 

Coal - 43200

Iron Ore - 71000

Red Rose - 28500

Red Snapdragons - 28500

Sulfur - 28500

Total food - 144250

 

Multiply by EMU. Think once again.

 

Already thought about it.

 

You can actually make 50 hydrobars without ever having to use a bag or storage. Gather the resources to make 1 iron bar and 8 steel bars - make the bars and do it twice to be able to make one s2e - do that 10 times and you can make a hydro run and then make a hydro bar.

 

Do the above 50 times and you have 50 hydro bars.

 

So most can do the whole thing without even having to access storage. However storage helps a lot since you don't have to worry of losing all those hydro bars when doing the hydro runs.

 

 

Since making 50 hydrobars is the biggest projekt most do - its fairly safe to say that a big storage is not really needed - its just make it easier to have items when one need them and also means one can save more then one can carry.

 

PS The EMU needed to make a refined vegetal mixture is about 20 EMU - 5 each of 4 types of potions that each weight 1 emu.

Edited January 16, 2009 by Silvatica

[Cruella]

ROFL

 

Sorry, you have no idea what you are talking about.

 

Here, I provide you a link to the post on the biggest projects people do :

 

Biggest projects

 

FYI, my current project is 600 hydro bars, 110 done lol and I'm still quite a noob hehe

[ProHibited]

I wonder what happens when NPC's stop buying stuff in large quantities. The mass produced items would need some other use tho, some genius can come up with an idea for that.

[Dilly]

Since making 50 hydrobars is the biggest projekt most do - its fairly safe to say that a big storage is not really needed - its just make it easier to have items when one need them and also means one can save more then one can carry.

 

 

How do you know what 'most' do? To me what you just said is a very random assumption.

And why would it be so wrong to first stock up on all the ingreds and only mix when you have them all gathered in storage? You may not mind numerous trips to storage to drop off your finished bars.. I do. And I'm fairly certain that many others do too.

 

Seriously.. this makes no sense whatsoever to me.

 

At this moment, I have in my storage about 74k ironores, around 30k FEs, nearly 20k bones and about 18k silver ore. Will that be there in a week? No. Is this just a one off thing? No. Believe it or not, people DO stock up and actually use what they have in store at a later point, and the later point isn't always 3 years from now.

 

So what if people have 20 EFE in storage? I had that about a month ago. Yesterday I used up the last one of those. Just because there are hoarders, does that mean the people that actually use the stuff that's ingame have to be punished for that?

[Cruella]

Personally I simply burn ings in schools for double exp rather than hauling mass produced stuff to NPC's.

 

Nevertheless since every new player starts with harving flowers/veggies and selling them to NPC's I seriously doubt it will ever be entirely removed.

[Burn]

Already thought about it.

 

Therein lies the problem. Thinking and doing are two different things.

 

I don't think you grasp how extremely difficult that would be just by "thinking about it". Never did the hydro run, but I have made 100-batch of S2Es. That in itself would have been extremely painful without decent storage, doing a full 50 hydro bar project would be unthinkable.

 

You're officially challenged. Make just the S2Es if you don't wanna hydro run, they'll sell quickly. Just make 'em from scratch, in the manner that you described. Let's see if your thoughts are truly feasible.

 

Er, get your storage down to 50k emu first, guaranteed it's not. Most people who've been around a while that have that in just flowers.

 

 

Don't forget in the end, EL is a game, supposed to be fun. Making things painfully hard is not fun. Get to work.

 

 

Oh, and when you're done, ask yourself how much you changed the economy just by doing things in a more painfully difficult manner.

Edited January 16, 2009 by GoodDay2Die

[Zamirah]

You can actually make 50 hydrobars without ever having to use a bag or storage. Gather the resources to make 1 iron bar and 8 steel bars - make the bars and do it twice to be able to make one s2e - do that 10 times and you can make a hydro run and then make a hydro bar.

 

So you are going to ask for people to sell you coal and FE for 1 iron bar and 8 steel bars on market ?

Or du you harvest everything ?

If you think we should harvest everything, how about the fighters, who only have human nexus and sell coal and flowers to get money for their HE and SRS ?

Do they need to get nexus and make theur own HE and SRS ?

Or ask on marketchannel every time they want to train ?

[Silvatica]

And why would it be so wrong to first stock up on all the ingreds and only mix when you have them all gathered in storage? You may not mind numerous trips to storage to drop off your finished bars.. I do. And I'm fairly certain that many others do too.

 

The EMU of the iron for a steel bars are many times more EMU to haul. So if you hate hauling bars you should really hate hauling iron ore. You have to run alot more if you have to move the iron ore to the storage before mixing.