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Phase I of Alpha Two testing will occur on weekends. Each weekend is scheduled to start on Fridays at 10 AM PT and end on Sundays at 10 PM PT. Find out more here.
Check out Alpha Two Announcements here to see the latest Alpha Two news and update notes.
Our quickest Alpha Two updates are in Discord. Testers with Alpha Two access can chat in Alpha Two channels by connecting your Discord and Intrepid accounts here.
Comments
Maybe someone else didn't do the math, or likes to kill the spider boss, or had a quest to kill the spider boss or w/e, and that's why the market is inefficient like this. But right now, if you want spider fangs, it makes more sense to just buy them than to go out and try to kill the spider boss.
My (half-baked) idea is that when you kill the spider boss, you could get one spider fang that you can sell on the market, and one spider fang that you can't. Both can be used for crafting. Maybe they expire after some time, or a have a supply cap to prevent players from stockpiling the soulbound ones or something. For the purposes of killing-the-spider-boss for profit, you're still at 10g/h. But if you need to craft the dagger, then when the fangs drop you can use your soulbound fangs to craft with and then sell the other ones and you're up 150g. This means that killing the spider boss for crafting is now worth 30g/h.
What (I think) this does is dynamically create temporary player-specific economic niches (your most efficient farm changes based on what you need to craft) that would move faster than the market does. The player is now incentivized to go out and collect their own spider fangs instead of just endlessly mining. When they need hydra leather for their hood, they go kill hydras instead of mine, etc. At the extreme end of this, people stop interacting with the market (which would be bad).
Off the top of my head, if the liquidity is sufficiently low, the problem goes away. If there is 0 liquidity, there is no market. If you add a few arcane crystals, then you still have to go farm the rest yourself. The problem I'm describing doesn't exist on mostly dead wow servers, for example. You have to go farm shit yourself
That said, low-liquidity wasn't the impression I got from ashes. It doesn't seem to jive with their caravan design or honestly the art design (though the second one is more a feeling). I think part of putting the massive back in MMO will be high concurrent player counts, thriving markets in economic nodes, huge caravans, etc. I expect to see large volumes of commodities move through the system.
Doesn't ashes plan on having a BDO style gear overenchanting system? That seems like it's going to create constant supply/demand pressure for finished armor pieces (since they can be destroyed), as well as the resources used to enchant them. The market should respond to that sort of pressure by providing liquidity to reduce price volatility. So rather than new players leveling up and needing like 3-4 new chest piece a day on the FFXI server, you constantly need new chest pieces as max-level players over enchant and destroy/degrade their BiS chests. Other players respond to this demand by going back out into the world and mining more ore and skinning more beasts and filling up the auction houses, and driving that all around on caravans.
Pure speculation though
Do you want every player to be involved in every aspect of the game?
What do you understand the point of specialization to be?
In your example, it's again an opportunity for profit to buy the spider fangs (even if you don't want them) and sell them for a higher (more realistic) price. You make money, and you raise the price of spider fangs to match the effort it takes to actually get them.
If the market is flooded with spider fangs - why hunt for them?
I do believe that will be the tactic for guilds who want to hold monopolies on certain extremely rare resources.
"Only our guild is allowed to collect this"
Even so, it's another reminder of how different our priors are. I expect you'll answer maouw separately so I'll focus in on aligning a specific one.
I don't see the caravan system as implying a high liquidity.
Players always max out their inventory in MMOs. They put a pile of stuff in storage. Then they want to move it, and fill their own inventory to move it. If a player does this solo, and die, they lose a lot from any instance of dying.
If they instead gather their friend group of 8 and put 8x their inventory on a mule and the mule is durable compared to players, then any individual death in battle loses nothing for the travelers, and they can focus on 'protecting the payload'.
I have lots of issues with the way Corruption works, the Caravan system, and so on, but I can easily imagine 'making this sort of system and brainstorming the specifics later' so the fact that we don't know only bothers me a little.
I'll leave the discussion of other priors between you and @maouw but add something to that side for discussion if you don't mind. My expectation is that the thing most likely to be stockpiled, etc, is something that most people might find frustrating. Repair mats for gear. You need a lot of these, but not so many that it's likely to require a meaningfully higher than FFXI liquidity.
Because it's one of the few economic factors that has a clear and known impact when it's depressed, and a timesink cost incentive to function. You have to repair your gear, someone has to supply the materials for this, it would be good to have large amounts on hand. If it takes 1h of gathering to repair 3h of dungeoneering, then I think the numbers approximately work (I'll 'show my working' if you want, but the numbers are long, and I do still hope to maybe make an MMO one day if Ashes goes in another direction, so take it on faith if you are willing).
So we have a huge and constant sink for materials with a high fluctuation in requirement (i.e. market tanks when no one needs to repair or decides not to care for some reason, and automatically tanks if everyone starts to gather the same items because that reduces dungeoneering time and therefore demand).
Alpha-1 had some implications, Alpha-2 will probably give us numbers that I can plug into the equations, which I don't think Intrepid will hide, since it will be about system testing, not 'letting people like me figure out the current niches'. I would really hope that they would let us at least see the real economic system during Alpha-2, that is, 'know how much Silver Ore it takes to make a Silver Ingot to repair a Silver Helm'.
However, you're missing some data from the Alpha-1 experience, I believe. I don't remember seeing much 'gatherer path optimization' YouTube content, is all I'm saying, but we did it, and it's... currently pretty easy, so your feelings from the art style are valid, but the system is built around 'concentrating resources in places so that when you have an efficient run, there will be conflict'.
I think of this as... 'naive', let's say, given human psychology, but there certainly isn't a better way to do it. In short, I feel that the Corruption system implementation is wrong, not the worldbuild. I'm keeping my alternative one as my own 'trade secret' though, mostly because I'm bitter and want the option to 'I told you so' all the people who kept going 'it'll be fine, it worked in L2' and similar.
I exist in the quantum state of 'wanting it to succeed so everyone is happy' and 'expecting it to fail just enough to make people who overconfidently assert it is good as is, shut up'. Sadly the third outcome is 'some set of people going 'working as intended, this is great!' while the game bleeds subs and becomes a ghost world. I don't want that one.
WoW is able to accomplish this by making it so that I have no other choice but to go collect 39 friends and raid Molten Core, Blackwing Lair, the Temple of Ahn'Qiraj, and Naxxramas once a week if I want the best gear for my character. I want to make sure that there is something like this in Ashes, where I don't realize that my fastest path to best-in-slot gear is to spend the next 1600 hours on the same 4-5 economic activities 12 hours a day depending on market conditions. I could do 60 different economic activities instead (and have more fun), but then it might take 2000 hours and I'd know in the back of my mind that I wasn't being efficient.
On an economic level, specialization makes it so that different people have different most-efficient farms in the same market, which creates individual niches. As Rae mentioned earlier, maybe clerics are better at killing scalerunners and fighters are better at killing gnolls and mages are better at killing wyverns, etc. Is this at the level you're looking for? Kind of a broad question - happy to elaborate more
So, the price of things isn't a function of the effort required to attain them. It's just based on supply and demand. Currently, there is a a market for spider fangs has a price point at 150g. Say that it's a highly liquid market and there are 20 of these fangs available at this price point, and people are crafting these daggers all the time because the server has tons of rogues. This isn't a low-liquid market where there are like two fangs and I can just buy them for 300g and put them back up for 400g. I would need a bunch of capital to try to manipulate the spider fang market and it would be a huge gamble. If I try to buy them for 150g and sell them for 200g, maybe someone is like "this guy is out of his mind" and then offloads the 3 they were keeping around for 165g, and someone else undercuts them for 160g and I'm wrecked.
It could be the case that spider fangs are underpriced relative to mining because people are killing the spider boss for other reasons. Maybe the spider boss is fun to kill, or fighters have a class quest to go do it, so a bunch of players end up getting spider fangs by accident, etc. The point is that there's some supply and some demand, and in the current market conditions it doesn't make sense for me to kill the spider boss if I'm just trying to be efficient. But! Killing the spider boss, and then killing the hydra, and then... etc would be a whole lot more fun than endlessly mining because I'm a specialized miner.
That's the thing, right? Hunting the spider boss for spider fangs is less economically efficient than mining, so why do it? Going to the swamp to kill the hydra is less economically efficient than mining so why do it? Eventually, I'm down to like 4-5 activities that I can do as an efficiency-maximizer and I think that's a huge shame. I think killing bosses and different NPC types and gathering different resource types and traveling to different places in the world is a bunch of fun! I don't want to run the bridge over and over! I just want for it to not be the most efficient thing.
Yeah, the bulk of my MMO experience has been in New World, FFXIV, BDO, WoW, GW2, and Albion, which have all been high-liquidity games when the server populations were healthy. I just assumed Ashes would follow suit when I made the original post (which was an assumption that definitely deserved to be challenged).
1:3 ratio of farming-to-repair to using-your-gear-in-dungeon sounds pretty gnarly to me! I trust that's an upper bound?
Re: caravan system. It's mostly about, IMO, how smooth the gathering curve is. One extreme is that you have very plentiful resources (like in New World) and so you can gather 1000 logs per hour (like in New World). You're able to make it so that you can refine these raw, plentiful mats into something actually valuable (and I know they want processing to be a system). It makes the gathing curve much more palatable. Say that I need 1000 logs, and I smoothly hit that number over time, gathering more-or-less continuously. Getting to 1000 logs fills your inventory and now you need to make a caravan run.
The other side is that I have to hunt for an incredibly rare tree or whatever that I chop to give myself a single log. It takes the same amount of effort to hunt / find this one tree (WoW had the same system, called the black lotus and people hated it) as finding 1000 logs in the other game, on average. Finding this log immediately fills up your inventory and now you need to make a caravan run.
Both games have the same amount of caravan runs, and the same average wealth of players running around in the world, but the variance in the second game is insane.
I guess what I'm saying is that I think low-liquidity would solve this problem, but I think in a high-population game, I don't think it would be fun, either, for other reasons.
My position isn't anywhere near strong enough at this point to say something like "I think ashes will be high-liquidity". It was when I made the post (but I didn't even know I had the position), but now I don't know! I'll wait for more evidence on that front
This same conflict is in your half-baked solution. If Martha the Herbalist has a bunch of soul-bound ores, she's far more limited in what she can do with them compared to someone who specializes in mining. If they were tradable she could at least sell them. Whereas the specialized miner would smelt the ores whether or not they're soul-bound.
Cool, so we're on the same page here.
Some leading questions (feel free to push back, I just think it helps communicate where I'm coming from):
Are these niches equal? equally supplied? equally in demand? equally preferred for fun?
What does this mean for the inter-dependent nature of the economy - will it be balanced or unbalanced?
Should choosing to specialize be less economically efficient than doing a non-specialized alternative?
Is the choice to grind a form of specialization?
So what factors drive supply and demand in videogame economies? Coz in my answer, "effort required" is a major contributor to supply - is it not in yours? Also, the context was about exchanging gold to skip the effort of acquiring raw spiderfangs (or whatever commodity) yourself. Is it therefore not THE major factor influencing your decision to buy (15g/h > 10g/h)?
Yeah, it doesn't make sense, and it would be more fun to not specialize, but if we undermine the efficiency of specializing, then we undermine the whole intent of specialisations - which is what I want to avoid.
I previously said we can increase the movement of niches by increasing competition.
Perhaps what would satify you better is if the economy was more of a puzzle to optimize?
The best way I can see this being implemented is with diminishing returns forcing you to switch activities, or its more friendly twin: Earning opportunities to boost activities that are different to what you are currently doing. If you could do this with very non-linear systems, and have a network of economic activities whose optimizations are influenced by non-economic in-game activity - it would be an optimization puzzle that would occupy the brain a long time before it figures out the optimal loop.
What does equality mean when applied to a niche?
I'm having trouble gauging where you think my economic knowledge is. Would it help you if I told you that my day job is I'm a mechanism designer in crypto-finance? Not trying to flex or shove around papers or anything, but maybe that'll help shortcut the convo or set expectations.
To answer directly - no, of course the niches won't be equally supplied or have equal demand or equal preference for fun. All you would need to do is show a market with a single commodity that has a single statistically different demand curve to show otherwise.
Can you clarify what you mean by "balanced" here?
Generally, specializing is more efficient than not specializing, because specializing takes up-front investment while not specializing doesn't. This means that there is more labor-supply for non-specialized niches, so those can be filled more easily and the market equalizes more quickly in those areas. There will be exceptions for when it's exceptionally unfun or tedious, or whatever, but that's the idea.
I'd say so, yeah. If you know the gnoll-killing-route better than someone else, you can earn more g/h killing gnolls than the average gnoll-killer.
Oh, no doubt, the effort is a major factor influencing folks willing to supply an asset at a particular price point. It just isn't the only one. Like I said, say that you had a quest to kill the spider boss, and you didn't even know she dropped fangs. You and 2000 other warriors have all done that quest. That'll generate ~67 fangs on average. Those warriors were killing the boss just for the quest completion and the fang was like a nice little bonus.
There are also folks that actually like doing raiding content, or enjoy fighting difficult bosses. They'll get together with the homies, loot or not, and go kill the boss. If they wind up with materials to sell at the end, cherry on top.
Another one is pure speculative value. Look at the NFT market - the prices are absolutely bonkers. People pay upwards of $400,000 for cryptopunks. It's not because it took $400,000 worth of effort to generate a cryptopunk (it didn't), it's because they're speculating on a future price.
Anyway, point here is that effort spent is just one piece of the puzzle.
As for the calculus about the mine to buy vs farm spider decision, yeah - that's about effort. It's an effort minimization problem for a particular subset of players that are trying to be efficient with their time.
I would love it if the game made it so that the least-effort option was to farm the spider boss instead of mine, but I feel like I've said that enough!
And also, yeah, I'm not at all married to the particular solution I'm presenting. Maybe before we even start going down that path it would make sense to validate that you're convinced that what I'm talking about is even a problem worth solving (so that we don't all get confused).
It could end up being enough if there are sufficient recurring different activities to do that are generally more efficient than whatever your default most-efficient-thing is. As in, if on tuesdays at 9pm there's a witch that spawns in the forest that drops an earring that sells for enough to make the whole endeavor worth 60 g/h for the folks who can get there, and if contesting the various world boss spawns tends to be worth 90 g/h on average, and if there's a nearby high-value bounty, that tends to be 50 g/h, and ...
If there's enough sort of "conditional" events that crop up but aren't always available, and when none of that stuff is around you have to fall back to mining if you want to be efficient then it definitely reduces the pain a lot.
This ends up being similar to folks in real life that have their local restaurant scene figured out and always know which restaurant has a killer deal on tacos or gin+tonics, no matter when you want to go out.
And as for your suggestion - yeah, having external market forces also helps a bunch. I'm not just forever farming dreamfoil if something comes in and artificially crashes the price of dreamfoil or inflates something else that I can do. Like if, for this week only, agility potions require 1/10th the amount of dreamfoil they normally do, then now there will be far less dreamfoil demand. Or, if they make it so that a dragon crashes in and reduces the spawnrates of lumber by razing a forest, then that'll shift all of the market dynamics and hopefully make it so maybe I'm not just forever farming dreamfoil.
I see what you need now! But unfortunately I have no idea if Ashes will offer it.
MMOs with an extremely wide range of different materials and a lot of intermixing of those materials in products. This is the other thing that FFXI does so 'right' that might have been missed.
It might be a little hard to get all of it without going overboard, so just push back on whichever part of this I'm leaving out. I am likely to 'forget to mention' parts, it's like trying to describe to someone every thing in your apartment, some things are so 'obvious' you forget that they are there, but the layout won't make sense to others.
It's a tier thing. You don't go mining for Darksteel. You go mining for Iron and Darksteel is the rare drop from mining. Therefore you're guaranteed Iron, but not guaranteed Darksteel. But Iron isn't hugely profitable. So if you don't like mining, you don't mine, because if you only got Iron, it would feel like a waste.
If you like mining, that feels like 'a bad day' but not 'a waste of your time' any more than 'farming in BDO and not getting the big money drop for the area'.
The next layer is the fact that with 8 different ingredients for one 'synthesis', and a massive amount of different materials, there's always a chance that one of those will be in low supply, then you have to compete for it. When it's in low supply the price goes up above the efficiency point if you have any related skills.
So if 'there's very little Darksteel because no one got lucky', you can try to make money with something 'more efficient' but 'efficient' is almost always 'the lucky drop from doing some equivalent', whether that be fighting mobs for stuff or gathering.
So if you aim to make 5x of some armor piece and your profit margin is 40k on the piece, and you go to buy the last component and there are only 2x because no one 'got lucky', then you can't make them, right? Then you 'wait for someone to get one'.
Anyways all this depends on one more data point that is implied, not sure how aware you are of it, but, more numbers!
A server is expected to have 15,000 registered accounts at launch and upgrade over time to 50,000 (presumably as more people drop off). Given the standard MMO activity numbers, that gives us around 60,000 player-hours per day max.
103 nodes, despite the fact that they will be different in size, we can still average their functionality at 600 player-hours per node, per day. Assume that half of this is leveling up without much economic benefit, or hanging around in town, again, averaging between those who go hard all the time, and people like me who play multiple games, for 300 player hours left for actual economic 'work' per day.
You're a crypto guy so you know what happens now, right? If everyone agrees on value of a coin, it moves fast. If everyone spreads out over 60 coins, it flows differently. Same for stocks (on my side, that's what I do now, figured I would put all that data gathering, number crunching, predictive algorithm power into raw MONEY, mwahahaha).
Economic niches in high liquidity games are like playing stock markets, you just constantly move to whatever you think everyone else is going to assume has value, next. MMOs give you the option to corner markets and have real value instead.
So, high requirements across the board for making armor and certain things, interdependence of processors (let's say we get to around where FFXI is, with 20 types of ore/ingot, 15 Woods, 30 herbs, 10 miscellaneous for a total of 75). Now we've got 4 player-hours a day for each item, not even counting fisherfolk.
I expect that higher liquidity would exist in Metropolis nodes, but outskirts style village nodes would have less of these, and focus on gathering up rare items. But whereas I expect (using standard sigma variance) there to be 1500 player hours available in the Metropolis, I only expect 80-120 player hours available in the outskirt villages.
On the day that the village's main fisher doesn't log in, you hope the secondary can provide them all, wait for it, or go get your own fish because now it is explicitly more efficient to go get your own fish if your next shipment or plan or 'competitive edge against the village two nodes over' relies on you making those 30 Mordant Dye or whatever within 2 days.
tl;dr if you want variety, live in a smaller node? If Ashes fails to make 'living in any node other than a Metropolis node' meaningfully inefficient for economic growth, I feel their whole model will be painful anyway.
I wasn't trying to be condescending - you're a crypto specialist, I'm an amateur theorycrafter.
I'm not using over-simplified words because I'm trying to dumb things down for you, I'm trying to dumb things down for me (coz I don't have the specialised vocabulary to be precise with what I say here).
Thanks for bearing with my shenanigans, this sentence distilled everything for me: As I said before I do not want to compromise on freedom of economy, and would rather chase solutions related to interdependence of systems and player-to-player friction, because of the MMO part of MMORPG.
I like your examples of dragons burning forests, and bosses on spawn timers - but I think what that's missing is an element of player friction. If other players can collectively trigger the razing of the forest, or the spawn of the boss (instead of set timers, randomized or not), this changes your economic optimization from a PvE puzzle to a very complicated PvP (PvX?) puzzle that suddenly makes alliances etc really important.
Secondly, you can increase the complexity of the specialization tasks and give them deeper gameplay - for example, make pickaxes modular so you choose specific types of handles/pick heads with socketable enchantments that have different performances depending on the resource type (e.g. rich veins vs magmatic deposits vs etc.) Now then, we all know pickaxes have 2 sides, PLUS I always imagine mining sometimes requires you to stop picking to sift through the damage you've done. You can make this a fully interactive experience instead of "press E to mine". The big downside here is that we're only obfuscating the optimization, which is why I'd prefer the interdependent solution. That said, you could implement both of these and it would be more interesting. (ideally, you would want to make all your basic systems as interesting as the combat system)
Phew! Lot to take in. Let me see if I'm digesting this correctly. There are two main points - the first is that rather than having stuff like black lotuses in WoW (extremely rare, extremely valuable herb), you have relatively plentiful resources that have a low% chance of generating a rare resource. WoW has this as well - thorium veins always give 2-4 thorium ore, but have 3% chance of giving a valuable arcane crystal. Then, we want to base our crafting recipes around having multiple different rare resources like this simultaneously, that way it increases the chance that one of them isn't available for purchase. If one of them isn't available, then boom! the novelty has been created.
I think this is solid.
The second point is about how we can napkin-math how many player-hours/day will back each asset. The more markets and the more assets, the more divided the limited players hours get. WoW is able to be so liquid because there are only two markets: the horde market and the alliance market.
I have a couple of concerns here - the first is that sure, I could choose to play in an illiquid market in the same way that I could choose to go do whatever economic activity I want, but the whole problem I'm trying to avoid is having to choose between fun and efficiency. Liquid markets tend to be more efficient, and so I'll almost certainly have to put myself somewhere thriving. I hope I'm wrong and it's incredibly profitable to be a small-town villager or something, but I really doubt that'll be the case.
The second is that I speculate that the liquidity will heavily pool in the economic nodes. Economic metropolises have auction houses linked to their vassal nodes, which if I'm understanding their influence model correctly ends up being a significant market. Anyone not in an economic node has to decide to either peddle their goods on their low-liquidity village "market stall", or make the trek to the multi-node-market thriving metropolis market. Liquidity tends to draw more liquidity, and I think all this stuff will pool. Hope I'm wrong here!
And all I can say to that is that I deeply, fervently, hope so too.
I believe it's possible, but I'd need a couple thousand players to make sure. Simulants are still only simulants. Whether I pull them from BDO or the Nasdaq, they're still just simulants, and YouTubers/streamers continue to mess with models worse than ever.
We should hope they have an economist on staff?
Yeah, I think that would be a huge win. I would be willing to give up some freedom-of-economy (because I don't think it's binary) in order for the game to make it so that the most efficient thing was also the fun thing, but if we don't have to, I certainly don't want to!
I think in a lot of ways, that's exactly what a siege is. I expect the war economy to be absolutely massive. Players will need consumables to use to kill each other with, ammunition will need to be made, the actual siege scroll itself is costly, the node needs resources to build defenses, etc. The process of the siege itself creates a huge amount of dynamic demand. In the aftermath, a new guild comes in and puts new projects up on the town board and that creates new demand pressure.
That's also a good point - you can definitely tackle this from the side of "make the actual economic activity itself more fun". I've played over 10000 hours of super smash bros melee at this point on the same 5 stages with the same 2 characters, and I'm able to do that because the activity itself is super fun. Part of why I dread the 5-minute bridge run loop in diablo 3 and spending 1200 hours mining in exchange for all the best equipment is that it's dreadfully uninteresting gameplay.
You say that, but... hahaha. Just own it - if we treat it as taboo, then it becomes even more taboo.
Even before this thread, you've proven yourself a strong voice of reason - which is why I feel I can say what I want coz I take it that more often than not people like you and rae (and others) will challenge lopsided thoughts helpfully.
Although, after reading this: and this:
I'm getting the impression that rae is silently judging us all, hiding aces up his sleeves and planning for world domination. The perfect villain twist setup
That's totally fair, I do tend to think in black and white (coz it's so much easier and I'd argue leads to more minimalism).
Also, just to be clear @Azherae the corruption system is TOTALLY fine.
I'm keen to see how you'll break it.
I suppose all I can ask for then, is that if I'm listened to, or folks see me as a voice of reason, I'd rather it be because of how much sense my writing is making and not because they see my name or remember my job title and start head-nodding.
One of the tenets of the bayesian way is to always-be-updating (your priors)! This could reasonably be called "silently judging"
If Rae turns out to be a villain, I hope it's at least the fun, dramatic kind of a villain. Not the boring, effective, make-everything-slightly-worse-for-your-self-benefit kind of a villain.
You thought it was a simple forum poster, but it was I! DIO.
I'm more of the 'desperately try to help and support everyone while they tell me how wrong I am, then at the last moment when I know they're all about to lose or die for not listening, grab all their stuff and take the only escape pod' villain.
I would love to have the ability to say:
The first 4 are all called "orders", and they go in the book. For what this looks like in real time, have a gander at https://pro.coinbase.com/trade/ETH-USDC
the last 2 are just filling those orders, and they allow transactions to happen instantly. You don't just have to post your auction up and wait for someone to buy it. If someone has posted a willingness to buy at a price you're willing to sell at, you're just done! Instant exchange. This makes price discovery massively easier and more fair for both sides of the market. Otherwise, if you have some rare item, this is the play pattern:
You create a bank alt
"Want to sell Cloudkeeper Leggings for 1000g"
Then you get 30 whispers immediately wanting to buy your leggings. This lets you know that your price was too low, so you delete the bank alt, transfer the leggings to a different bank alt and try again.
"Want to sell Cloudkeeper Leggings for 10000g"
If you never get a whisper then you found an upper and lower bound. You just keep repeating the process until you zero in on the price and then sell. It's terribly tedious. Much, much better is if all of the folks who want to buy cloudkeepers could just list the price they're willing to buy them at. Then, all of the other folks can see what other folks are willing to pay. The buyers and the sellers are able to understand the fair price very fast.
This methodology has some problems in MMOs that it doesn't have in real life, but you may not see them as problems, so I'll ask, (also point out something from the Vassal Node thing for those who might not have followed the link).
Basically 'can you say you are willing to pay more than you actually have?' and all the issues that come from either doing that, or the countermeasures.
And now, just random stuff from that page that affects a lot about this conversation.
Auction houses enable players to list items at the Economic node in which the auction house is located.[6]
A listing fee will be charged to list items in the auction house.[6]
Normal, discourages constant price hedging too.
Vassal nodes of the auction house node will be able to view items that are listed on that auction house, regardless of node type of the vassal node.[6]
Ok, knowing what's for sale is always nice.
This will be possible through an auctioneer emissary NPC in that node.[6]
Makes sense. But wait, why is it just 'view items'...?
Data relating to auction houses, such as price history, volumes, average prices, may be available to players via a mayor-constructed service building in their node.[8]
Ohhhh.
Items cannot be listed in non-economic vassal nodes.[6]
Uhmm...
Items listed are also visible in community boards (bulletin boards).[5]
Wait then why do we need the auctioneer emissary? Is that just for when the vassal node is economic too?
Integrated auction houses allow players to purchase items directly from remote auction houses.[5]
The Economic Metropolis thing. Got it. Sounds important.
Purchases of materials and gatherables will be automatically deposited within the listing node's local warehouse. Players will need to travel to that warehouse to retrieve them. Players wishing to move these items elsewhere will need to utilize the caravan system or other type of transportation.[7][6]
Listing node... so... non economic nodes don't receive gatherables or materials to their location when they buy them, period. Got it.
Purchases of anything other than materials and gatherables will be mailed to the purchaser.[7]
Mailed where? Do I have to be a citizen in this case?
Just figuring out what clarifications to ask for next month, so let me know if all that made the same sort of sense to everyone else.
There's a more complicated way where you're over-collateralizing your position somehow, and if the collateralization ratio crosses particular thresholds, you get liquidated. The second one is fun for finance folks, but I think it's overkill in a video game!
And yeah, what I more-or-less what I expect to happen is that the economic nodes will have so much more convenient markets, and there will be enough people who have fun playing traveling merchant, and enough third-party websites that just index all of the low-liquidity, low-population nodes, that the effective merchants will just create arbitrage scripts. They'll get an email alert whenever the price of some item in node 53 is low enough that you can buy it, transport it to the highly liquid metropolis, and be economically efficient for your time.
This means that node 53 becomes even more of a wasteland. Any time there's a reasonably priced item, some big-city folk comes in to scoop it up to move it to an economic node. It creates the perception that If you want to actually buy anything as a regular consumer, you should just travel to the economic node since your local market is barren or overpriced. I don't think it'll take a particularly long amount of time to get to the nearest market anyway.
The liquidity pools and gathers more liquidity
My general design solution to these sorts of things is to 'twist' them, not 'fight' them, since obviously fighting raw economics is a losing battle in so many ways. "Twisting" allows for creativity on the part of the designer, and all sorts of things come up, so I think I just wanna watch and see what they do.
"Dragon attacks the bank because there's too much gold and they want to take it to sleep on."
I suggest you check out the economic system Eve Online has. It works really well IMO, with the buy and sell orders, and goods having to be transported physically between systems by players. I hope they do something like that for Ashes.
Not everything in Eve would work in Ashes obviously, but it's been a successful MMO for 18 years with a fully player driven economy.
Presumably, I'm going to need a lot of ISK to get all of those ship parts, right? So, I start doing some math on the most efficient way to earn ISK. Turns out, it degenerates into working a job in real life with a reasonable salary, buying 500 PLEX for $20, and selling 500 PLEX for 1.5M ISK. Welp.
If I don't let myself do that for whatever reason, and limit myself to not buying currency (other player don't have this limitation), then now there should be some most-efficient-way-to-earn-ISK, right? How frequently does that most-efficient-way tend to change, or do you find that you tend to be repeating the same activities over and over if you're trying to min-max?
Does Eve avoid the farm dreamfoil to buy spider fangs problem I described above?
I don't actually know what it is currently like tbh. It's been a minute since a played. And the plex system does make things different for Eve compared to Ashes for sure.
But when I did play, I felt like there were many good ways to earn ISK in the game depending on your goals. Sure, there were some better than others, but they almost always involved accepting more risk as well. Eve Online and Ashes have some things that are similar in how PvP is always an option. Even in high-sec, if you carry something expensive or fly a really fancy ship, you might get jumped and lose it all.
For Ashes, I think the PvP aspects of the game will help diversify whatever is considered the most optimal ways of earning gold. If a certain area or way of making money is really good, people will fight over it. All that fighting alone will lower the income potential of the activity, and suddenly other ways may seem more profitable. If gathering dreamfoil is really profitable, like in your example, other players who find out will gank you and take your stuff potentially, thus quickly making it much less profitable, meaning you will start looking for other ways.
Yeah - this is basic econ, right? If there are only so many fish in the pond to catch per hour, then if I'm fishing alone I'll do better than if 10 people join me. Congestion and all that. Then you get into specialization and what I was talking about above with limited-time recurring events and whatnot.
What tends to happen though, and you'll typically notice this in real life as well, is that once stuff settles, the amount of congestion in the lanes themselves follow their own statistical distribution. Once you know how much congestion there tends to be, and how profitable things are given congestion, and how many different things your character is specialized for, it tends to be that you only actually have a few different optimal economic activities that crop up on a day-to-day basis, unless the devs explicitly try to design around this, like what happened with diablo 3 and the bridge.
Like, if you want to be economically efficient tomorrow, do you go to work again at your same job, or do you try something novel? You probably just go to work at whatever you're specialized at, same as everyone else. Then you take your efficiently earned cash and buy the stuff you want.
What I'm saying is that MMOs get to design the economic game, and they are afforded the opportunity to make it so that the optimal solution is also the fun one. It's just that it doesn't happen by accident.
If you pick the path you enjoy the most, regardless of whether it is the most optimal for you at that time or not, it will end up eventually being the optimal path for you, as well as the most enjoyable path.
If you pick a path based purely on how optimal it is for you today, then tomorrow when that changes, you are stuck with it as you have started specializing.
It's a matter of player choices not game design, imo.