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You can download the game launcher here and we encourage you to join us on our for the most up to date testing news.
Alpha Two Realms are now unlocked for Phase II testing!
For our initial launch, testing will begin on Friday, December 20, 2024, at 10 AM Pacific and continue uninterrupted until Monday, January 6, 2025, at 10 AM Pacific. After January 6th, we’ll transition to a schedule of five-day-per-week access for the remainder of Phase II.
You can download the game launcher here and we encourage you to join us on our for the most up to date testing news.
Currency Value Display - What is a reasonable amount of gold someone should be trading with.
Lash
Member, Alpha Two, Early Alpha Two
How much gold do you think is a reasonable amount to exchange for an end game item. Do you want them to keep the numbers on the lower end (2-3 digits, 10-100 gold) or do you expect to see some rather large values (6-7 digits, 100,000-1,000,000) or somewhere in between. Should they use lesser currencies like bronze, copper, or silver to keep the numbers at the high end lower (A simple display change). I personally would prefer if we do not have to trade with millions of a currency and I am in general a fan of smaller numbers to keep things simple. Just curious what the general sentiment is around currency values and how they are displayed.
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Comments
Agreed. Copper and silver should be useable as a currency for most goods with dipping into your gold reserves for more costly purchases. But gold needs to mean something. If we're slingin around thousands or tens of thousands of gold for items then I think the current system would need a revamp. The player should feel the pain of spending 100 gold
But, if that mob drops certificates worth 1/100 of a gold coin, then we will need smaller denominations with which to make smaller in-game transactions. Perhaps a silver coin worth 1/10 of a gold and a copper worth 1/10 of a silver (1/100 of a gold). Without the smaller denominations it would be difficult to make small transactions like selling some fish with a total value of 1/50 of a gold piece. Therefore, I suspect that they will go with a lvl 20 mob dropping 5 or 10 gold, meaning a gold coin isn't particularly valuable (like $5 US) which will mean that the rare, high-end item will be going for large amounts of gold.
It is a reasonably good bet that one or more of the developers have a good background in economics in general, and game economics specifically, to design a workable and efficient system where they can monitor inflation, money supply and velocity, and other relevant variables. Needless to say, gold selling for real money totally screws up the economy for all players. It is like counterfeiting huge sums which decreases the value of honestly earned gold.
You said endgame item.
As an economics player, I can tell you that the game does not work if you do not need to pay at least 60,000,000 for an endgame item. Not at the scale and with the prerequisites Ashes uses.
It becomes 67,000,000 in order to simplify some bottom-level values without them causing a certain effect where players ignore the costs of certain things when they should not.
From there you can obviously go much higher, but I prefer that they don't.
Further explanation would turn into a design document.
I would also not want infinite money generators. So Questgivers have a treasury to work out of.
No useless money generating items, akin to the "grey trash" in WoW for example.
How long does it take to process the raw materials and how much did they cost. How long does it take to assemble all parts for an item and how much did they cost. How long does it take to level the crafting skills to perform the wanted tasks. At all the steps someone will want to make a profit, and so the prices will go up and up. That's on the item side of the equation.
Or we could simply barter sheep for wood or something. Direct trade for the perceived values of items.
Divide all of your design document values by 67,000,000 and you will have everything exactly the same
No, because the point is that there is always a thing in the game that needs to have a value of between 1 and 10 Cu.
It is starting from that one thing, that forces the values up to 67,000,000.
Legendary Gear must be worth at least 6,000,000 times as much as the item in the game that can be obtained with the least possible effort.
This was actually purely a question of displayed values. Do you want to type in or display a 6-8 digit number whenever you trade for an item or would you rather have a simplified version of this without large values. The actual value is based on too many factors for 1 forum post. This is about how value is represented in game basically. They could force values to some extent by not giving out much raw gold but that is another discussion.
We know that gold only comes from trading in the certificates and from castle taxes (cause node ones stay within the system). So what if the certificates from all levels of mobs were traded for the same amount of gold?
Certificates would have to stop dropping after a few levels difference between the player and the mob, so that high lvl players couldn't just grind low lvl mobs. So the gold value of any mob would be the same, while the mats value would get higher throughout the levels.
I'd assume trading would have way more barter in it than just "gold for items".
Is there some super obvious shittiness in that kind of approach that I'm missing? Haven't really fully thought this one through, just seemed like an interesting idea that I don't think I've seen anywhere else.
Doesn't work. Materials have to have a benefit, and Materials are always, strictly speaking, easier to gather than certificates.
I wouldn't worry about it. With a bunch of former EQ Devs and Jeff's experience probably having been explained throughout the early team and to Steven, this is the point where I expect the least concern within their economy, especially based on what I saw in Alpha-1.
I don't mind babbling about it, I'm just trying not to derail the whole thing.
Short version, certificates explicitly need to be considered separately from this or exploits will appear and disappear so fast that it will make your head spin and the entire economy of the game will devolve into 'people who can spin it to keep ahead of Intrepid's Economy Managers', which we can surmise they will have because they intend to tweak the value of Certificates in Nodes.
(I personally disagree with Certificates EXISTING, far less having a base value, but I don't know why they decided on this, so I will not question it until I see it working in its intended form).
The underlying systems of Ashes create an Econ Tree that nearly any decent economist can work out from first principles in a few hours at worst.
60,000,000 isn't REQUIRED, it's just the absolute easiest to balance and least likely to result in exploits. Is it worth pushing it lower (again, for top grade endgame legendaries) if it opens up potential exploits or holes? Obviously my vote on that is 'no'.
I agree 100% with your reasoning here.
However, the above can be reduced to 67 currency units fairly easily.
Simply have copper, silver, gold and platinum, with each currency being worth 100 of the previous.
This would make 1 platinum worth 1,000,000 copper, meaning an item worth 67,000,000 base currency (copper) would be worth 67 platinum.
As far as I am concerned, this will always be the best way for a game to do currency.