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Why we need enough material sinks to keep world alive and fun
Manueljf
Member
One of the key pillars of AOC seems to be an economic gameplay loop that makes the world feel interesting and have its resources be valuable
But for this to work we need to address a potential issue seen in other MMOS:
It is very common that over time, as too many players exploit resources, gather, process, craft and obtain currency, these resources tend to overflow the market, and after some period of time everyone is too rich and has access to everything, as anyone can have multiple alts with many different professions or just buy whatever with their huge reserves of gold.
This creates big inflation in all prices in the market. But the real concern is that once it reaches a certain point the world economy starts really feeling totally uninmersive and unrealistic. There is too much of everything. The whole economic gameplay becomes boring as hell. And most importantly the world itself starts to feel irrelevant or less interesting.
Usually games tend to "solve" this by launching new expansion, where players will need to spend bigger amounts of gold and new resources will appear to bring some fresh air. New types of minerals, herbs, alchemy potions of higher level, new crafts, etc, etc...
But it comes at the cost of making the initial resources, and areas where those resources were, obsolote and meaningless. It will make those areas of the world feel unimportant as only the new expansion zones will have relevancy and the new materials.
So, for the whole world to remain relevant and all areas and resources to still feel important, even when new expansions come or when the servers have few years of existence, we will need some new concepts to keep all resources and areas being meaningful and prevent hyperabundance and hyperinflation
I can think of some ideas for having some level of material sink besides the obvious sinks from PVP and wars:
*Enough consumables needed for all classes and professions to keep the economy flowing and vibrant. Some of the consumables should require even low level node materials so these areas stay relevant.
*Repair of gear needing not only currency but materials (confirmed).
*Castles requiring a heavy upkeep just to be maintained.
* Ships damaged requiring materials to be repaired, in order to restore the ship's hull integrity.
*Apartment, housing, freehold requiring a monthly rent different than the citizenship tax.
*Religious nodes temples requiring resources for rituals or whatever everytime the major wants to conduct a ritual that would give various buffs for citizens.
*Scientific nodes academies requiring investment of resources and gold to keep up with the researches in science for world buffs for citizens.
* Guards and some important npcs in lvl +3 nodes requiring some small payment each month. The mayor would have to decide how many guards they want to hire according to budget. Guards could be helpful for monster events and node wars, node sieges.
*Sieges needing resources (confirmed)
*All node and guild wars consuming resources in different ways.
*Animal husbandry requiring feeding of your animals constantly. Maybe have some soft feeding system for the mounts/mules.
*Making the cooking system relevant so players will wanna constantly be eating and consuming stuff for buffs and benefits.
*Node buildings needing Repair after sieges, events.
*Land management system having some mechanics that will require spending certain resources for healing unhealthy devastated lands.
*Events of hostile monsters that steal resources from players/markets if they fail the event and minor loss for player inventory if they die during event.
Etc, etc... what other ideas you got?
But the most important thing is to design all these systems in such a way that the relevancy isn't simply pushed ahead to the new expansions, new areas, new resources. No. The initial areas, resources and low tier stuff need to keep being somehow relevant otherwise the world inmersion and world aliveness will decay over time.
I wanna read all your thoughts and ideas about this. Hopefully Intrepid notices this concern.
But for this to work we need to address a potential issue seen in other MMOS:
It is very common that over time, as too many players exploit resources, gather, process, craft and obtain currency, these resources tend to overflow the market, and after some period of time everyone is too rich and has access to everything, as anyone can have multiple alts with many different professions or just buy whatever with their huge reserves of gold.
This creates big inflation in all prices in the market. But the real concern is that once it reaches a certain point the world economy starts really feeling totally uninmersive and unrealistic. There is too much of everything. The whole economic gameplay becomes boring as hell. And most importantly the world itself starts to feel irrelevant or less interesting.
Usually games tend to "solve" this by launching new expansion, where players will need to spend bigger amounts of gold and new resources will appear to bring some fresh air. New types of minerals, herbs, alchemy potions of higher level, new crafts, etc, etc...
But it comes at the cost of making the initial resources, and areas where those resources were, obsolote and meaningless. It will make those areas of the world feel unimportant as only the new expansion zones will have relevancy and the new materials.
So, for the whole world to remain relevant and all areas and resources to still feel important, even when new expansions come or when the servers have few years of existence, we will need some new concepts to keep all resources and areas being meaningful and prevent hyperabundance and hyperinflation
I can think of some ideas for having some level of material sink besides the obvious sinks from PVP and wars:
*Enough consumables needed for all classes and professions to keep the economy flowing and vibrant. Some of the consumables should require even low level node materials so these areas stay relevant.
*Repair of gear needing not only currency but materials (confirmed).
*Castles requiring a heavy upkeep just to be maintained.
* Ships damaged requiring materials to be repaired, in order to restore the ship's hull integrity.
*Apartment, housing, freehold requiring a monthly rent different than the citizenship tax.
*Religious nodes temples requiring resources for rituals or whatever everytime the major wants to conduct a ritual that would give various buffs for citizens.
*Scientific nodes academies requiring investment of resources and gold to keep up with the researches in science for world buffs for citizens.
* Guards and some important npcs in lvl +3 nodes requiring some small payment each month. The mayor would have to decide how many guards they want to hire according to budget. Guards could be helpful for monster events and node wars, node sieges.
*Sieges needing resources (confirmed)
*All node and guild wars consuming resources in different ways.
*Animal husbandry requiring feeding of your animals constantly. Maybe have some soft feeding system for the mounts/mules.
*Making the cooking system relevant so players will wanna constantly be eating and consuming stuff for buffs and benefits.
*Node buildings needing Repair after sieges, events.
*Land management system having some mechanics that will require spending certain resources for healing unhealthy devastated lands.
*Events of hostile monsters that steal resources from players/markets if they fail the event and minor loss for player inventory if they die during event.
Etc, etc... what other ideas you got?
But the most important thing is to design all these systems in such a way that the relevancy isn't simply pushed ahead to the new expansions, new areas, new resources. No. The initial areas, resources and low tier stuff need to keep being somehow relevant otherwise the world inmersion and world aliveness will decay over time.
I wanna read all your thoughts and ideas about this. Hopefully Intrepid notices this concern.
0
Comments
Now it's there. Had a problem with keyboard. Initially the post was empty.
Repairing gear will require resources not just currency.
It has been stated many of the crafting patterns will require low end resources to craft giving a reason for max level to return to lower areas to gather materials.
Nodes will require upkeep money and resources. Buildings will require resources to build and repair in the event of an attack or just changing what is there. There are supposed to be monster attacks on towns as well. They can not delevel a node but they can destroy and damage buildings that will require resources.
Upkeep on freeholds and in town housing will be there as well. Cost is not stated yet probably have a good idea on the upkeep cost closer to the end of beta1 or beta 2.
These and more. But I agree long enough term and if there are not enough sinks to remove items and money from the game inflation will get out of hand. Hopefully there are enough sinks or they tweak them enough to slow in down.
https://ashesofcreation.wiki/Reactive_world
Good to know that there will be these material sinks. Hopefully, as you say, they put enough of those to maintain relevancy of the whole world and make everything seem alive. I hope there are events like a big badass greedy dragon stealing node treasure of gold when people get too rich or something.
All the things you mentioned as "problems?" ? Non-issue. Wont happen.
But the world pvp will just transfer resources from one player to another. I was just talking about the need for material sinking being heavy enough to prevent overabundance.
No you dont understand... let me explain.
The problems you describe are cause because the devs in other gamea said to themselves "wouldnt it be nice if we had basket weaving, and 50 more professions, that players can lv up, gather mats and make baskets and sell them to AH?"
Ye... that's not an mmo. There is no conflict of interests, disruptions, stalemates and loses. Everything is a matter of time and magnitude, since players cant TOUCH one another, STOP one another, except for pvp areas (instanced and sterilized).
The speed at which mats will be gathered, progression will be achieved both on character (both on combat/crafting) as well as node (community) will all be impacted on conflict of interest and cooperation.
The problems you mentioned happen in games where there arent any disruptions. You can pick rocks 24/7 with your guild of 1000 ***** and then run straight to the AH (which AoC wont have many).
Im bored...
You forgot open world PvP. End of story.
Dont tell me about item transfer again. Open world pvp mmos are much slower than your wow eso ff14 etc etc etc etc eyc etc etc.
The crafting of L2 was 1000 times harder than ESOs, and the gathering as well. There was no mats abundance.
Why? Because L2 was a well thought game and eso was a casual game.
I dont understand the concept of "obsolete material". For lower lv mats you needed 5 rocks. For high lv you needed 1500 (which also had to be processed for alloys).
Why would there be obsolete mats? Maybe because the devs in other games made.... a shallow game.
"You got iron ingot for lv5-10!!! You got steel ingot for 10-16!!! You got rubite ingot for 50-cp160!!!."
Bad design, aimed to excite all those single player game playera with fancy colors and "achievements". Fake depth/progression.
The node wars will be another big sink.
There's also ships that will be completely destroyed.
I understand there will be a lot of material losses due to world pvp. But there should be also other environmental or non-player related material sinks like repair of gear would be the classic example. But in my opinion other mechanics will also be needed besides repair of gear. I showed some examples in the initial post. It makes world feel alive and challenging.
That is very cool what you mention. Would be great to see also other non pvp related material sinks, softer of course, but just there enough to make world feel interesting and challenging, so even if you didn't lose your wars to other players you still have to maintain a stream of resources for the upkeep of freehold, mounts, guard salaries of cities, npc in building salaries, some event of mobs stealing some resources, node events or guild stuff that require materials, many consumables that will constantly demand resources, etc
I didnt mention material losses once. You didnt read what I said. You still dont understand.
I agree with all you say about other game bad designs and hopefully AOC doesn't go that way. But I still think some non pvp material losses are necessary for keeping things spicy
You mentioned twice now "non pvp".
And say there is no reasons to make changes due to what I said earlier.
There are no problems that need solving.
Also, the only source for gold is mob certificates. And the game will have a world manager that will control how much money you get from said certificates, and on top of that you'll have the fauna control system, where if you overfarm some valuable mob he might start spawning less often for a period of time which means that the overall value of the location will drop.
Whenever you take resources from someone else you don't get the full amount, meaning it's always a sink. I therefore think that unless you play on some carebear server where nodes never get destroyed the natural systems should do a lot to help keep the economy in check.
But of course we won't know until later on during alpha 2 how the system feels.
I didn't know about this sink when looting from players or caravans. I thought you got all of it. So yes, now that you tell me these things I would assume AOC would be relatively safe from problems mentioned. I also think Steven is smart enough to foresee this. Hope I am not wrong.
Good to know that there will be a world manager AI