Prices in the new system

[Wytter]

Allright, I finally found some time to try out the new server, and there are a few prices that seem quite illogical.

 

Essences:

Essences are commonly used in magic, and now also in manufacturing etc. These are the buying and selling prices according to fred_penner:

 

      Sell      Buy

Fire    7.5     15

Water   4        8

Earth   5.5     11

Air     5       10

Spirit  4.5      9

Matter  6       12

Energy  5.5     11

Life    5       10

Death  10       20                                            

Health  3        6

Magic  10       20

Now this is a bit puzzling. The fire essence requires 2 flowers and 1 sulfur - and does not subtract any food points. Still this is the 3rd best in terms of selling price (and realistically the best in terms of selling price). The health essence, that is the cheapest essence of them all sells for 3 gp, allthough it uses 2 silver ore and 1 chrysantemum plus drains food points.

Fire essence also the easiest essence you can make - so this means that a person at 0 alch would be able to make the same as a person at 30 alch, which is simply unbalanced.

I'd suggest the following prices for essences (price levels should be in between the selling price of 0 and iron bars (25gp)):

 

      Sell      Buy

Fire    2        15

Water   4       15

Earth   4       15

Air     4       15

Spirit  6       15

Matter  7.5     25

Energy  9       25

Life    10      28

Death   12      30

Health  13      35

Magic   15      45

 

Yet, I do think that the price for bars should be raised as well, as they take very long time to get the ingredients for (plus, they require fire essences as well). I fear that the current system will cause many people to get money by making fire essences, instead of high level bars and the like - I don't think that was intended, but of course I could be wrong.

If you changed the prices to the above, you would still encourage player to player trading, as essences would be rather expensive to level magic, unless they're bought from players. By changing the prices on some of the bars, the prices that Trik buys weapons/armour for will become very unprofitable, hence encourage player to player trading, or just encourage people to sell the bars instead. It depends on what you want to do with manufacturing/alchemy.

 

Furthermore, Mira is selling mana potions for 5 gp each, but in order to make the vial for the mana potion, you need to pay Harvy 6gp + the ingredients required for the vial.

[Roja]

the fire essences are priced high because they are now required in manufacturing the bars and such...so we don't want people to just be able to buy a ton of them at the store-we'd rather them buy from newbies who can make them, that way the newbs earn money.

as for the other things..i'll chcek them out.

[Wytter]

Yes, I understand why you have a high buying price for fire essences, but I don't think that the normal selling price should be that high - it'll just make people make fire essences and sell them in a magic shop in order to make money.

You must also remember to give high level alchymists ways to make money on essences/bars that have far higher requirements for both creating them and not force them to make low level essences in order to earn their living :-)

[lucu]

I agree. What good is that i am level 56 alchemy, if the best way to make money is by making fire essences (level 0)?

[Puntif]

Harvy only charges 3 plus ingredients for a vial (but he used to say he would charge 6 - fixed now - he only says he's charging 3 plus quartz). It's cheaper to buy potions of mana and drink them for vials than to buy quartz from Harvy to get vials but if you mine your own quartz Harvy is cheaper.

[Wytter]

Ah, in that case you'd be able to get people convinced into mining the quartz for their potions by:

a) Mira should either stop selling low-level potions, or make the price higher

Lower the quartz requirement for 1 vial to i.e. 1-2 quartz.

You might also want to think about making it possible to make your own vials with crafting.

[Puntif]

but remember he's charging 7 gc per quartz so a vial using his quartz costs 38 gc - you'd have to sell a potion for quite a bit to make a profit if you don't harvest your own quartz (or buy it cheaper from a player character).

[The_Piper]

To make an iron sword, i need

10 iron bars

1 steel bar

2 fire essences

 

Creating these items takes me a lot of time and i have to sell the sword which takes time too. And i havent talked about the failures and losses of material at my lvls yet.

 

And i cant sell it for more than 200g because you can buy it for that price at Portland Blacksmith.

 

So if i use this time to make and sell fire essences or even pick flowers i can earn much more than 200g.

 

So, why should i start making iron swords?

 

To make trading easier, i would like to suggest shops run by players or guilds (propably guilds).

 

The shop is represented by an NPC, guild members give items to him and make a price for how much to sell to other players. And when sold, they can collect their money from that NPC.

 

Otherwise you will force every player to be only at Market Channel to buy or sell items. And we can join only one channel at a time, so this channel would be very crowded. And you cant stay at other channels to chat there, you MUST stay at market channel to sell your items.

 

Or, i suggest my old idea about multi channeling: Listen and talk to only one channel, but listen to more than one channel. So ppl can chat at their favorite chat channel and watch whats going on on market channel. That would be VERY nice ;-)

[Entropy]

Unfortunately we do not have individual sell prices, they have to be a function of the sell price.

[Wytter]

Unfortunately we do not have individual sell prices, they have to be a function of the sell price.

Hmm, that complicates things. Would you make the selling prices individual if you knew that it would make it a lot easier to balance out the economy, and contribute greatly to a player-to-player economy?

By having a large buying price and a low selling price on commonly used items, it would definately make the player-to-player economy stronger.

[Entropy]

Yes, I would have made it differently, but then again that would mean much more work in setting the prices and such.

[Wytter]

Good thing you have some users on these boards that might be willing to help ;-) I think that it'll be necissary to have specific prices for each item in order to make people more reluctant to sell them to shops and instead sell to other players. But this would require that the other players can make a profit on buying the items as well (i.e. bars/manu)

[Malathorn]

if you mine your own quartz Harvy is cheaper.

Not even then, really.

100 mana potions from Mira would cost 500gp.

100 vials from Harvy would cost 300gp + 500 quartz.

You could sell him that 500 quartz for 0.7 gp each, that's 350gp.

So really 100 vials from Harvy cost 650gp. That's still 150 more than the potions from Mira.

Only 1.5gp per vial, but it adds up if you're making a lot of potions.

[Uberad]

This isn't the only area that dosent make since. Don't you guys do mathmatical modeling to see the result of what your coding?

 

I've been doing this on quite a few items and both the selling price / maunfacturing price / cog's (cost of goods sold) dosen't make any since?

take your leather Products which BTW is the only way to level up on mfg cost 10gc ea. Mfg of leather gloves requires 4 leathers 40gc and 4 threads 1 gc ea. then factor in failurte rates which even at lvl are 50% and the person trying to make this item loses money with every glove made not to mention he can't really sell it to anyone?

 

This game is respite with these kinds of issues. It may be alot of work to fix this byt it should be done. The prupose of this game is to make it enjoyable to play not fustrate everyone and see how anoying you can make it.

 

I'm not truying to slame anyone But I was taught if your going to do anything you should tey and do it right!

 

A mmrpg should have a model that your trying to implement. Your creating a world with rules and structure. You've done a great job from the technical side of it The intercation of the players the way the cahacters work the diffeent activities that people can do You are to be commended for. Now you need to focuss on The structure of your world. What are the social / econmic / physical relationships and interactions. They should be logical an consistent.

 

I'll proabbly get blasted for this sugesdtion but I'm sure I'm not the first nor the last to mention this ~ I'm not trying to piss anyone off or attack anyone.

[duran]

the economy before the reset was one where anything could be sold to a npc for a profit, well we ended up with a overflow of money in the game...

 

this is why item loss when makeing items where put in among other things. its still not perfect by a longshot but i think its better...

 

and i wonder why people belive that leather items are the only way to level manu...

 

but yes i do belive that some basic formulas should have been used when calculating the items prices as right now the selling sum is 1/10 of the buying sum and fixed something that dont realy give one any ways to finetune them and that when selling a item you should at least have your cost of raw materials coverd + a little something for the job. the question is how to remove the money from the people again later on...

[Uberad]

I'm at a loss for why mony in the game is a bad thing? And I'm not sure that money is the issue. Money is merily are barting insturment.

 

What I think your really sugesting is the law of supply and demand. When there is to much supply and to little demand there are anynumber of ways of solving this: 1 items could expire, We call this built in obsolesence Items wear out and expire Hence why we buy new cars. Same with weapons expecailly weapons swords need repair they break or are lkost in battle. Arour wears out. You should have quotas on Items in a game If Tit Items are to be really rare as intended make it so that there are only so many per population. You could use magic that gives the weapon a life expectancy. In other words tit reaures a magic spell to maintain its power or ability. Food should expire after awhile. Add finite capacity to NPC's so that not all itmes can be sold to NPC's like the 120 limit on harvest exp. Which BTW I still think is to low along with quanity of food which should really be change to a different counter like the HP or mana counter which can be grown like those. perhaps an enegery counter. Some of theses should be tied to nexsus By the way. If I have a lot of Human nexsus It implies I have more enegery to do other activites which would sugest and increase enegery capacity Like a marathon runner ~ not everyone can run a marathon that don't have the conditioning for it.

 

The point is there are creative ways to address these problems. I Agree that failure rate does add to value of doing activities but I believe that if you state a rate that you can do a certain activity Then the rate of failure should dramatically drop off once that rate or higher is achieved. It should not be a failure rate that is excesive. It just annoys people! Think about it a person goes through all the effort to achieve a lvl to accomplish a task and then finds that means thay only experience a 50% failure rate at the given lvl! That means they have to spend 2X as much and harvest 2X as much materails and then they can't even sell it for what the materail cost when the failure rate is factored in. And oh by the way when they lose ingfredents they lose all the ingredents and 0 exp to boot. At least give them the experience. Often we learn more through failure than sucess.

 

Any ways that is my point of view and sugestions ~ but I know it takes real effort to program these factors Saying it is 100x easier than programing them .

[duran]

money is bad when people start stockpileing it like bill gates and gives away 2 mil+ to newbies. it basicly shifts the whole economy out of posision...

 

and the chance of looseing parts when makeing something i think is a flat 30% if you fail or something like that, personaly i would like to see that decrese over time but as you have to fail first and the chance to fail descreses as skill goes up then i guess it kinda decreses the chance of bad failures to hmm, maybe they should get exp for failures or bad failures, say half of what you would get normaly perhaps?

 

nexuses shows a centering of activity not a incresed ability, the stats are there to indicate increase in ability so food level should maybe be hooked to one of them.

 

i agree that items should expire but we cant add durability to items unless the whole item system is changed (this is allso why we cant have items with special modifications without creating new items for every variation) and entropy fear the increase in load on the server. what can work tho is a break chance tho. say you go up against a rabbit with a sword, you miss and you end up breaking the sword, maybe it can even break as you put to mutch force in the blow and hit your target or if the attack is parryed the enemy breaks it. same can be done with armor. this should maybe be modified by skill and the stats/skills of your opponent...

 

there is allso the problem that fighters dont depend on shops or craftsmen for the weapons as monsters have a bad habbit of dropping the weapons needed. now i can see a max number of serpents and so on that can exist in the world at any one time as a benefit here, in fact i think i argued for it at one time. one other iteresting thing to try would be to have shops buy and sell into a stockpile if the item can be made or harvested, this way you have to rely on the people in the game to keep the stockpile filled. one could even have the stockpile be decresed at random times so that if people dont keep selling to npcs then there will be no items to buy from them either even if people dont by from them that mutch (the unknown third party that trik represents maybe?). in any rate the items vanish over time...

 

i am allso wondering about the sanity to have fruits and vegetables (the 2 items between bread and cooked meat) being available free of charge out in the field. the vegetables gives you 15 food point and the fruits gives you 20, more then needed to keep you going. i personaly have started the habbit of going to portland, pick up about 20 fruit and then going into the crystal mines to harvest crystal and iron ore for matter essences. basicly i have no expences and i earn about 4 gold pr essence made. the food system was introduced to try and add a expence for the craftspeople in the game, but that require that the items needed to recover food is not made freely available by harvesting. there could be was to change this i guess, maybe create a salat and fruit cake item that the inns sell. then have them converting vegetables, raw meat and fruits into those 3 items on maybe a 1 to one basis, so instead of goign there as just dumping of the items you go there to have your meat cooked, your vegetables be turned into a salat and your fruits be made into a fruit cake. the only items that can be bought without a base item should be bread, and as that item is so low on food return i dont see a problem with that. this way you cant harvest food for free any more and the craftspeople have a continual drain on theyre income.

[Lyanna]

Ah, in that case you'd be able to get people convinced into mining the quartz for their potions by:

a) Mira should either stop selling low-level potions, or make the price higher

Lower the quartz requirement for 1 vial to i.e. 1-2 quartz.

You might also want to think about making it possible to make your own vials with crafting.

 

- The first is a good idea. In fact, why DID Mira start selling potions again? I never understood that. But nevertheless, I feel she should at least stop selling potions of mana and minor heal. They're important for newbies to make if they want to level in potion, and with Mira constantly selling, who's going to buy them off players?

- Quartz requirement is fine as it is.

- Generally, although my income comes from potions, I'm against the ability to craft vials, as that would eventually flood the game (in the long run). Right now, going to Harvy is a bit of a hassle, but it keeps potion-makers from getting too comfortable. The whole point of this is to make vials NOT so easily obtained.

 

duran, your idea of getting taverns to cook the food at a 3 to 1 raw-cooked item conversion is very good. Creates that extra bit of challenge, and finally gets rid of that annoying question: "How do I cook this meat?"