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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.
Opinions on Commodities in AOC or MMOs?
TranquilAbyss
Member
I think it is worth it for the traders of the video game community to discuss the idea and purpose behind commodities in MMO we have played and in Ashes of Creation. This is not a decision of balance but should focus on purpose and systems/process around them. As an old EVE Online, I apologize in advance for the essay.
I kind of wish they showed the caravan system with player crafting resources or town/node upgrading resources. The problems I see with commodities are.
My concerns may be too sandbox focused and I know AoC is made to be a hybrid sand-park game. I played Voyage Century, which had a large trade system for moving commodities around the world, so I am not against the idea for a theme park game. I would like to see info on how they plan on balancing currency sinks and faucets (not numerical details just flow chart). It would be interesting to know what benefits commodities provide the destination nodes, other than just money through taxes. Commodities in EVE Online are ignored since there is enough player made stuff to move around.
I kind of wish they showed the caravan system with player crafting resources or town/node upgrading resources. The problems I see with commodities are.
- Commodities typically do not interact directly in the player economy (prices are not supply/demand driven). Meaning players have limited direct effect on supply chain and pricing, which may not have been explained yet.
- Commodities become a money printer into the economy (money faucet). Any time a npc just gives the player money for something it’s a money faucet that fills the economy like when the government prints more money, when this money is being spent by players it can contribute to inflation for the player economy. I wonder what money faucets are planned for Ashes of creation. I am guessing Commodities sales, Quest rewards?, maybe starting character money. Also the sinks that drain the money, I think there is are taxes, I guess buying stuff for the towns is the sink then. To me this implies that commodities are one of the first ways to generate gold for new players/servers.
- I hope commodities do not get balanced higher (money/time) than trading player generated and crafting resources so that people’s time is spent contributing to the crafting economy instead of focusing too much on moving commodities.
- It’s interesting that commodities have a perquisite currency to purchase them, meaning players must do another activity before being able to afford commodities. I would like to hear from a developer why commodities were designed this way. I think it was to drive players to go after other activities and make commodities secondary feature for money generation. The concern here is for trading focused players or groups, commodities require them to do other activities they are less interested in before trading commodities, but they could still move between town on mounts. Also was wondering about trading commodities to other players to move and sell them for you so players can focus on other activities. One thing I learned from EVE Online, when a mechanic someone enjoys is nerfed too hard to require hoops to start doing, they typically just go back to the game without these problems. Some people like trading aspects of games, like Euro truck simulator players. Being that AOC has a large world we may have to figure out how to provide early game transport income for those types of players.
My concerns may be too sandbox focused and I know AoC is made to be a hybrid sand-park game. I played Voyage Century, which had a large trade system for moving commodities around the world, so I am not against the idea for a theme park game. I would like to see info on how they plan on balancing currency sinks and faucets (not numerical details just flow chart). It would be interesting to know what benefits commodities provide the destination nodes, other than just money through taxes. Commodities in EVE Online are ignored since there is enough player made stuff to move around.
3
Comments
This is my request to all who interact with this thread, even if you wait until the thread's gone on long enough for you to have a more considered opinion, don't forget to put it in the other (or this thread might just get merged in anyway and possibly lose some of the flow).
I say let's go back to caravans being used to transport materials and players looting them from the corpse of the caravan.
I remember an answer Steven gave to "what's stopping players from carrying the mats on their inventories from one region to another" and he said that there will be other profits to running a caravan".
What we saw today is just that. The added profit of gold to intice people to this gameplay.
If AoC allows players to carry mats with ease from one region to another, I can see caravans being an RP activity. There wont be much pvp around them.
Todays update was the proof.
The Devs need to come out and say what the technical issue is and then perhals we can find new ways for the caravans to be impactful.
Imagination is limitless. There will be solutions.
What I really hope they do with commodities is to make them into goods necessary to build up certain aspects of nodes. For example, you can get basic ballistae for siege defenses just from regular wood and iron and leather and such, but to get the fancy Ballistae Of Doom for your node or castle, you need certain commodities from certain areas. Even if just for cool visuals in the node. You can get basic flags and banners, but if you get fancy cloth from other nodes, you can upgrade them to look all snazzy.
In other words, this does seem like a yet another "rich get richer" system. Nothing too new for Ashes, but I do think we're either at the limit of what's acceptable for that kind of design or we're reaaaal damn close.
Not saying that it's necessarily bad, but it definitely adds to the nicheness of the game.
how do you expect people to buy and sell stuff if they cant make an initial amount of money to buy stuff from other players?
so are we all going to keep our initial amount of money forever then and trade with just that? or are we all going to trade apples for horses?
when the server opens, I will ask for 5 apples for my sword, but in a few months, i will ask for 20 apples. and in a year, i will ask for a 100 apples for the same top tier sword. there is still inflation.
also, you talk about people who might not be interested in doing some activitie other than crafting to generate money or as a prerequisite for crafting, implying it shouldnt be like that. but what about people who like doing those activities? or people who dont want to do crafting? why are they not important as well.
you arent forced to do caravan runs with commodities. you can just gather stuff, craft and sell and make money that way.
other players will do the caravan runs
and other people like me will just farm mobs and sell the glint or however is spelled (monster certificates) without caring too much for caravan runs, unless im doing them with the guild or something.
other people will play the market.
there are many different ways to make money.
additionally, good luck getting a developer to come here and answer you, or to show you internal documents lol
I prefer to trade with NPCs rather than gamers and avoid player economy.
Since Ashes is a PvX game... makes sense to me that there would be an NPC economy as well as a player economy.
We'll have to test to see how well IS nails Commodities.
If it is just an alternative to resource trading, it will hurt the player driven economy, because less resources will be transported, which will lead to more scarcity. Scarcity itself is wanted but it will be very hard to balance the profitability. One will very quickly be disregarded if the other is more profitable.
They said it will be a major way for players to turn their glint into money. I see a problem there. Players who hate the caravan system will either sell the commodities at the node where they bought them (it had a gold price right there), or use a different method to spend their glint. If it is the most profitable way, you might force people into gameplay they don't want to participate in.
People who want to play the economy will use their caravans anyway and in the most profitable way. So all the system will/can achieve is to lessen resource transport and weaken the player driven economy.
The only way it makes sense is, if it's more closely tied into the mayoral/node system, but the comment about the major way to turn glint into money contradicts that. We'll see.
now, keep in mind we have BOTH available, trading is still a thing, transporting stuff and selling at auction houses and shops will still happen, the livestream focused on showing something new which is the NPC trade packs (commodities) and I loved this idea
Anyone else wanna handle this or do I have to do it?
Do we even have anyone left that Liniker actually LISTENS to?
I present this a consideration on how people may spend their times in multiple roles in the game and people want to play MMO's not forced to play other roles. People often try multiple roles out over time. But at the end of the day the limit, I think I forgot to write into that section, was a player's time. Glint seems to be a soft gate to me about when people can start doing commodity trading. I am unsure if that is a good design.
I agree no one is forced to do caravans. I am a bit confused by the design between soft gating traders with glint and handing out glint to all player bound to generate cash. I think this concept is worth discussing further so I mentioned it. This seems to be similar to the concept of junk loot which just get sold to a merchant vendor, but I think this maybe harder to balance all the different commodities in the towns.
Feel free to list the other ways for money will enter the economy (aka being printed). Since commodities seems like one of the levers players can pull to print currency, I was interested in exploring the concept as a part of this discussion.
I am used to EVE Online which has a very open development process with dev blogs and pictures and charts. A player council who communicate with the developers year around. A fanfest where players can ask the devs directly in person. The least we can do is ask for more details.
I find it hard to see how both systems can be balanced. Maybe if NPCs caravans moved the commodities it would provide a reason for players to attack them to keep pvp content interesting between attackers and defenders. But my concern with players choosing between moving and selling crafting resources on the market or them choosing to move and sell commodes will be determined by how much the player can make doing ether of these things. I am curious if their will be a limit to amount of commodities available in a town every day or something to nudge traders to move player generated items. Yes, this point it is all speculative. But keep in mind player time is limited, and caravans take a bit of time and effort to move through the world. I am mainly spooked by commodities since IS originally made a point of this being a very interactive game world and to me introducing the commodities system takes attention on the player market/action house and that demand (player time) is focused on the npc hunter lodge commodities traders. With the potential of glint to unnerve some of the trader focus gaming community and commodities potential to take away attention/demand away from moving gatherables. I know this is only alpha 2, just I just see this as a fork in the road that hopefully get nudged another way.
Wtf. Did you watch the stream at all? The whole commodity system is the opposite of a gold sink. It's the major way for players to convert their glint into gold (direct quote). Selling them at a different node multiplies the gold you get. The only sink they mentioned, is when a caravan gets destroyed and even that is not a gold sink. Up to that point it's just player time(in the form of glint) converted into a tradable item. At no point (except when you buy the caravan) does the system remove gold from the game.
*cough*You mean like the usual ways like gathering, crafting, refining, hunting, questing?
Like getting stuff to get the player driven economy started and going? You can't mean that, right? Much better getting gold from a NPC without contributing in any way to the economy.
I miss read this at first as well. I think he was just agreeing with my point of viewing the MMO economy as a balance of faucets and sinks. I added some stuff in [] brackets on how I understand it.
"Like it, its a solid way to introduce a reliable source [faucet] of income[,] with gold sink [possibly taxes]"
I reread it twice now and the only sense I can make out of it is that he thinks:
player to player trade=no gold sink
player to NPC trade = gold sink
Yes, p2p trade is a pure handshake deal, where noone else is involved and gets a share.
Everything else in that paragraph is just nonsense. If it is a reliable source of income depends on how you obtain your glint. If you get it from raiding caravans for example, it is not reliable at all. You might fail, or not find a caravan at all, so no income. It also depends on, if you buy and sell commodities at the same node, or if you transport it to a different node. Then you run the risk of being raided yourself, so not reliable.
How is trading an item with a NPC a goldsink???
You didn't buy that item with gold, but you get gold out of thin air. You introduce gold into the game. Yes you paid with glint, which you could consider to be a different kind of currency, but that's just changing the location of the gold mint to whichever method you used to obtain the glint. It doesn't change the fact, that the commodity system at no point removes gold from the game economy. On the contrary, even if you remove the glint issue completely and say you can buy commodities with gold, it would multiply the gold by just bringing it somewhere else. And all of that is newly minted gold, from a NPC source, out of thin air.
They multiplied the value of the commodities by a factor of x7-8. The number might change, but even if you just double the value of your stuff for that short of a distance, it would be huge. And that value is not deducted from a player, but directly generated by the system.
The problem is, that this system is in a direct competition with the player driven economy. Which is not in itself bad, but it will be very hard to balance the two.
I have not heard one convincing argument so far, that convinced me of the value of adding this system. Imo, everything this system does is better achieved by the resource trade system alone.
For the purposes of this discussion, are we only counting things that only NPCs create and probably only NPCs 'use'?
For example if my Guild's Farmer gets some good onions, and then we 'craft' an Onion Barrel, and ship it to another node where it is sold (either to NPCs OR players), does the fact that we made the Onion Barrel disqualify it from this conversation?
I think it adds immersion if you make the onion barrel - either given to npc or human, and I'm all for immersion. I feel commodities bought for tokens is a strange concept when the commodities can be traded back for gold. If the commodities are worth gold why aren't they sold in gold?
I see what you are saying, but how would you "kick off" your ability to run these? if you have no gold... Say I bought all the commodities I could using my starting gold from quests and I got beat up and my lunch money got stolen... what now? Are you saying that they should be able to be bought from glint and gold? I think the whole thing collapses if I can't farm up a way to get my income started/built/building. Wouldn't making it a gold buy in make the certs/glint totally obsolete?
In the Onion Barrel example, here is what I see would happen.
My Lumberjack gathers wood, my Miner gathers iron, I process the Iron to Barrel Rings, my Carpenter takes those, and the wood, and makes Barrels.
My farmer brings the onions and we fill 'em up and make Onion Barrels. Sometimes the node is buying those with some well established upper limit purchase order that the devs control easily.
Profit.
If our node doesn't need the Onion Barrels but another Node does, we Caravan up and take them over there. Profit. It doesn't matter whether it's a purchase order from the Node NPC citizenry or 'a bunch of players planning to make the biggest pot of Onion Soup ever', at that point. Sure, the gold faucet part is NPC only, but I'm moreso saying that we never needed one.
Every step in the Onion Barrel creation is just players playing the game within their Node. What do they even need Gold for? Taxes I guess? Taxes on what though? Using the Processing station to make the Barrel rings?
There should always be gold faucets, but this one doesn't need to exist in my opinion.
Personally, I'd scrap Glint and just have mobs drop Gold, Silver and Copper. Nothing wrong with Gold, Silver and Copper...Monster Certificates made sense at the time. Monster Certificates were trash items in any other game and the trash items were novelties in far reaches of Verra. However, Glint is a strange concept not relate to anything but Gold Acquisition. I ask you - why not just have Gold Acquisition?
Because they needed a Bound Currency.
I fear the answer to 'Why?'
Yeah, so treat it like currency. Currency is involved in tetris and shouldn't be in the resource section of the inventory. Space is a premium for gatherers already and the 'Glint' takes 6 slots unless you stock pile and go over stack limits and then the 'glint' takes even more. I tell you - we've all been turned into 'Gatherers'.
We don't have enough information to say that with certainty, for all we know, Glint can be used as a crafting component like Black Powder or Magic Powder or whatever other terms the latest Korean games choose to use for this component of gameplay.
See I agree with both you and Neurath on your points. But similar to @NiKr I love just grinding mobs and farming mats from them. Is there any value there? Again, this is pure conjecture but I foresee literally all low level mats being sold in bulk for 1 bronze (wolf pelts/fangs/scales/whatever). So does that mean I need to pick up something crafting/processing to add value anywhere or do I specifically need to become a bandit? Sure I can see someone being a caravan guard for some cut of gold, but I know for one I will never need one outside of my friends and I would need to seriously be convinced to hire anyone I don't already know can carry their weight in terms of outside help.
I feel pretty confident in stating I am part of the 10%ers that almost all of us on the forums are going to be in terms of engaging with the game if we choose to play it. But it feels like that would leave a pretty big void for a large group of people who can't really commit to the economics/timesinks that are higher level profitable work.
With all that said, maybe I am just creating a mountain out of a molehill in this case since I see what you are getting at in the need for NPC commodities/glint in this environment at all but still is something worth notating.
I remember in A1 - There was a rare boss we farmed. The Monster Certificate that dropped was worth 500 gold a time. One days grind could pay for several houses. Now the Glint is worth only 1.50 gold in the video we saw and that was epic glint purchase to my knowledge. A higher format than the blue monster cert...so, in some ways the devs have nerfed the gold acquisition but in other ways the multipliers have broken the gold acquisition methods. I don't like detached methods.
I agree here, it's hard to make an economy from the ground up that works this way, but the question would be, if the game is supposed to be interconnected and social, and you farm up 'Rabid Hides' all day at low level, shouldn't someone out there be making a 'Rabid Mantle' or 'Rabid Hide Leggings' for all those adventurers who need gear now?
That person should be buying something from you. But it doesn't have to be that way either. Non repeatable quest paths work well, I'm basically just describing the FFXI leatherworker's guild random first quest.
"Gather me 7 rabbit hides and I will teach you how to make a Rabbit Mantle."
"Ah good you have brought me them, now watch me."
"I will keep this mantle, here's 400 gil for your trouble, I encourage you to make your own if you like."
Every player who interacts with this gets a small amount of cash, but only once. Will RMT find it worthwhile to make a new account to get 400 gil? Maybe they did that early on, idk, but if you can make most things yourself or find someone to make them, you don't have to care much about RMT except as 'the way to get ahead of other people'. And for that the less overall money in the economy at the start, the better.
Sorry if I went off on a tangent, it's just that I already come from a main game where literally all people do to make money is fight mobs and farm mats from them, I've been watching how this works for years. I so regret not having saved that term paper...
When stepping through this logically, I love the idea of there being a receiver of the mats I am farming at all times (not at 100% efficiency, but at least enough to make a living) and the layer of "here is how you make a low level thingamabob that you can sell using the mats you are getting there" as a divergent way to make money. But looking at glint/commodities I keep landing on the feeling that they way the system works almost looks/feels like dailies in terms of "Input X work, receive Y reward in gold" at both it's base glint>gold and glint>gold>caravan. It feels like a smallish/midish timesink that rewards with just flat gold for the people who detest crafting/processing or can't connect with the larger infrastructure (admittedly I am a mule/worker in most cases in my friends groups because they are crazy crafters and usually take care of me with gear/gold for the stuff I get them). I think in a perfect world, we don't need glint if we can just sell player goods to player nodes to the same effect. It would just be a redundant system at that point, but until I can get a pulse on the economics of this game in A2 I don't think I will have a good feeling around income until I see all these together and how the great material problem is handled.
Cause Steven said that taxes and citizen fees are paid with glint. And if glint is bound then you can't get it any other way. So literally everyone will have to grind mobs to survive. Want to be an artisan? Fuck you - grind mobs. Want to be a pvper/pirate/merc? Fuck you - grind mobs.
This then implies that the gold faucets will always be open, because everyone will be made to farm money (glint). Which means that all the gold sinks would have to be real big as well, cause otherwise we get huge inflation. Which means that people who don't farm enough don't get to be citizens.
Hell, we could have a fucking hobo war of non-citizens who don't have to pay any fees, but get to absolutely profit off of their glint. And they can PK/attack anyone they see, because they don't care for node rep or whatever. And if they successfully contest farming spots, then citizens might not be able to afford living.
Fuck, is Steven making a post-apocalyptic hellscape of absolute lawlessness with this system? Citizenless guilds are now meta
@Nikr Steven: 'I'm against grinding in MMOs. You won't need to grind in Ashes.'