Before you introduce player stalls, please fix the elephant on the road, Intrepid.

With player vendors coming in wave 2, people will now be able to trade resources.

What sounds nice on paper will turn into a nightmare, once you realise that inflation will skyrocket like it's Turkey 2024 - because caravans multiply money. You'll see the big guilds farm for a day or two, then rake in thousands of gold in the first week alone.

Everything will be priced at unreasonable prices, because money will be worth nothing, and only caravans will make sense as a money making activity. Good luck trying to buy some mats to craft your next herbalism sickle or lumberjack axe, when a copper ore will cost 250 gold. No way you can make enough money by farming mobs. You'll have to run caravans, too.

As we then enter the second month, hyperinflation will have taken over, and player stalls will fall out of use, because nobody will want money anymore if you can just create more of it out of thin air semi-afk than you can earn by selling mats, which are now worth more cash every day.

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Gizban

Andi wrote: »

With player vendors coming in wave 2, people will now be able to trade resources.

What sounds nice on paper will turn into a nightmare, once you realise that inflation will skyrocket like it's Turkey 2024 - because caravans multiply money. You'll see the big guilds farm for a day or two, then rake in thousands of gold in the first week alone.

Everything will be priced at unreasonable prices, because money will be worth nothing, and only caravans will make sense as a money making activity. Good luck trying to buy some mats to craft your next herbalism sickle or lumberjack axe, when a copper ore will cost 250 gold. No way you can make enough money by farming mobs. You'll have to run caravans, too.

As we then enter the second month, hyperinflation will have taken over, and player stalls will fall out of use, because nobody will want money anymore if you can just create more of it out of thin air semi-afk than you can earn by selling mats, which are now worth more cash every day.

If copper is selling for 250g... Go mine some copper and get rich!

Andi

majinash wrote: »

...

Caravans pump new money into the economy. Sinks are supposed to fix that, but they can't keep up with this faucet at this rate. Inflation will rise, which isn't so relevant for NPC services, which are designed to be sustained even without this one (and only by loot), but they will raise the prices of goods, since the money value will go down, while the value of mats will remain stable.
This will make it prohibitively expensive for new players, or people who don't do caravans, to purchase anything. Why would I sell 1 copper for 250g today if I can get 350 tomorrow, and 2500 next week. At some point, you'll do bartering, mats for mats, or items, and I don't think player stalls accept items as currency. This is a fail state for the server economy.
Besides, if you're a casual dad who logs in to play for an hour, or three on the weekend, you're now also forced to do caravans or gather and run a stall, if you want to be able to purchase anything off other players. The only kind of behaviour this would encourage is what you can see in HH on some servers right now, where higher level players just train lowbie parties to loot their corpses... and that's the perfect way to keep new players around.
This shit has a longer rat's tail than just "then go mine and sell your mats for 250g". I find it interesting how many people don't understand the problem, but then again, they also struggle with how tariffs work, so I shouldn't be surprised.

PS: I used to play UO on a private server named UO Forever. The general tip veterans gave new players was "make a miner/lumber and gather a few hours to get started". Do we want new players to first do chores, so they can start having fun later? And do we want them to have to ask other players how to get started in the first place?

Veeshan

Chicago wrote: »

definitely agree, maybe a CD on caravans so you can't just run them indefinitely.

you cant run them indefinitely you can run them till u run out of glint, its untradable so u have to farm it yourself

majinash

Andi wrote: »

Caravans pump new money into the economy. Sinks are supposed to fix that, but they can't keep up with this faucet at this rate.

This isn't something you can judge well right now. Money sinks tend to increase alongside progression and we're stuck at mid level in the game as well as certain events (like node wars) missing which are also gold sinks. I imagine when boats are added they'll end up as a massive gold sink as well.

I don't think we can say gold entering the game isn't balanced well with gold leaving the game at this stage.

Andi wrote: »

This will make it prohibitively expensive for new players, or people who don't do caravans, to purchase anything. Why would I sell 1 copper for 250g today if I can get 350 tomorrow, and 2500 next week. At some point, you'll do bartering, mats for mats, or items, and I don't think player stalls accept items as currency. This is a fail state for the server economy.

New players generally wouldn't buy copper, they'd sell it and they'd hardly be worried about an investment like that when starting out. This is actually incredibly new player friendly as the inflated economy (as long as it includes harvestables lower level players can obtain) as it means they earn from harvesting at the same rate as the rest of the economy but they very quickly outpace the static NPC fees new players encounter (like buying your first artisan bags, early repairs etc).

But also caravans are a static gold gain from NPCs. We won't see exponential inflation if they outpace gold sinks, instead we'd see slowly decreasing (by %) inflation as the inflated economy makes caravans less and less profitable.

What you're describing would kill caravans. Why spent all your glint to make 100gold in a 1 hour caravan trip when you could harvest a single copper and sell it for 250g? At a certain point caravans would become so useless people would stop doing them entirely if inflation became such an issue.

The exception here of course is bots. Any form of limitless gold gain from NPCs is at risk of bots endlessly scaling the gold gain and that could absolutely cause inflation. This would more likely result in normal players never doing caravans and simply selling to peoples who control the bots (or who buy gold via RMT from botters) as is common in most MMOs that have this problem.

Andi wrote: »

This shit has a longer rat's tail than just "then go mine and sell your mats for 250g". I find it interesting how many people don't understand the problem, but then again, they also struggle with how tariffs work, so I shouldn't be surprised.

PS: I used to play UO on a private server named UO Forever. The general tip veterans gave new players was "make a miner/lumber and gather a few hours to get started

This is incredibly disrespectful. People who disagree with you don't by default not understand a problem, they just disagree with you. Also these two statements are absolutely at odds. I'm assuming the UP private server had an inflated economy and the solution for new players was to gather mats to sell to other players and you think that isn't a good result, but that's exactly the result people are saying when they reply "go mine and sell your mats for 250g" that you say isn't the solution. If that was the solution for new players on the UO server why wouldn't it be the solution here?

I just don't see how you think players being able to run a caravan to an NPC for a set amount of gold that doesn't scale with in game inflation will become mandatory. Those types of situations are the first things that become obsolete when inflation kicks in, not reinforced.

If you could buy caravan commodities with gold, and caravans could hold an infinite amount I agree that eventually everyone would just be doubling their gold every trip, making more and more and more endlessly causing hyperinflation where your first caravan makes 10 into 20, then 20 to 40, then 40-80 and at that rate by the 8th day you'd have 2,560 gold. But I don't think the system works this way you're limited both by glint and space. Even with infinite glint eventually you'd max out highest tier goods filling a caravan and that's the limit you could make. With a hard limit caravans will never cause runaway inflation and they would never drive the price of a good that takes 1min to harvest as high as the reward for the caravan which takes an hour to complete.

I don't disagree that maybe rewards need to be tuned a bit, just that I cannot see how the result you think will happen could happen and you haven't really said how it would, just that you think it would. I think this system's biggest flaw is that it's scalable with bots somewhat, however caravans being PvP enabled means players could quickly destroy large scaling botting operations and would have motivation to do so.

RocketFarmer

Current vendor price of copper is 5 cp for common rarity.

I figure players may be willing to pay up to 10x given current scarcity, mostly from hoarding since metal working is bottlenecked by copper and zinc. That would align it with Animal Husbandry as far as cost (although you’d have to add a 50% failure rate on top of metalworking to get in the ballpark of Animal Husbandry’s misery). Also possibly because people know it’s valuable but can’t do anything with it (they have calculated it is worth more that 5 cp per common ore, and rarer ores are worth far more than the vendor price). Doesn’t take a genius to realize that.

First economic change would be to move charcoal to novice level metalworking crafting and require that for novice metalworking (copper or zinc fragments). That would at least accelerate metalworking into apprentice level, which is where charcoal currently resides. That would help reduce demand of processing just the metal ores to progress.

The demand will be for weapon smithing, armor smithing and jewelry crafting. But the overall reduced demand for processing metals should help keep prices lower. May also want to consider smaller scale crafting for those skills to progress them more incrementally. For example, each weapon or armor piece has subcomponents that are needed (not necessarily more metals). Could also see better/more variations of weapon or armor sets requiring different combinations of materials (and some apprentice level weapons or armors may need novice level subcomponents or it’s an option to help crossing over from novice crafting to apprentice crafting, or from apprentice crafting to journeyman crafting, and so on). In other words a more gradual transition. Slower progress being better than spending 8 hours searching the Riverlands for metal ores and coming up empty, therefore making zero progress.

Now my view on supporting armor and weapon smithing is to only have them able to repair armor or weapons (ditto for jewelry), with the capability of those players to setup stalls to provide such services to improve their skills (albeit at a much lower percentage than crafting something outright). Or arrange a drop off to repair service with a time frame to complete the repair. Also, some repairs should require materials in addition to payment if the durability is below 50%. The overall goal is to get as much out of the general vendor and into player responsibility. Oh, and Tanks should get a 50% discount, or some kind of deal for being a repeat customer. A wise armor smith should get to know the tank community to acquire win-win arrangements.

Also factor that node development is tied to resource collection, and a lot of resources at that. Are the demands for metal ores too high compared to other resources? Should they be? Would seem this is one of the levers to fine tune things. How much is this based on the decision of the mayors, with the ore market pricing increase being a part of the consequences of that decision. There’s more than taxes, and inflation is more like a tax on all goods or property. For this reason, I see inflation as a mechanism of a node and a factor in who controls that node. Perhaps other nodes need tariffs to address the abuses of one node that may affect them negatively. That could be gold or any other resource.

Vendor selling of resources is the current destruction method to keep the amount of resources low. Player stalls can help with that by reducing this destructive force. Even just offering 6 cp per copper ore would keep more copper in circulation.

But to offset any form of inflation there must be some form of destructive force. Too much copper leads to inflation that requires some destructive method. I think tying copper to repairs helps with that. Too much gold leads to inflation, so some similar cost of doing business has to be a destructive factor for gold. If there’s too much gold on hand, then things have to change, such as the exchange rate for caravan goods (cost more and sell for less) or glint conversion (glint used for goods as mentioned or more gold for glint as the value of gold has depreciated). What gold inflation does is reduces the buying power of gold you already have. So gold inflation is not good at all for node or guild treasuries.

Also the economy must model losses due to inefficiencies. Max efficiency must have some loss of production as well as production costs. I see more of the latter in the current design except for enchanting (which does have a point where you “destroy or lose” the enchantments you have purchased). Another introduction to inefficiencies would be to allow the processor attempt to take multiple common resource and convert to an uncommon resource, and so on. Metal processing is all about purity of the metal and/or its composition (such as steel). Don’t think this is in the design, but would greatly increase the destructive nature of the activity for a chance of something better (risk vs reward). So how much legendary wood should it take to craft that legendary bow. Currently there’s no efficiency factor to that production as loading up 10 or 20 logs produces the same quantity of timber. Reality would be some range of expected outcomes. The reality in bow making is that it may take sorting through 10-20 or even 100 logs to find the heart of that log that makes a quality bow. Oh, and we need Yew trees for that, but that’s it’s own rabbit hole. Point being is that a produced resource is not just input raw resource and output same quantity of processed material. You will have a certain percentage of waste material. Perhaps those 10 logs produce 1 bow quality stock and limbs and 8 units of wood chips that could be used for something else, and 1 unit of waste material that mighty have other utility or is just junk. A novice may require more attempts to obtain that one good unit, so the player will need to factor that risk in their attempt. Do they invest 10 logs or 20 or maybe even 50, plus the equivalent costs to process that much material and fuel costs.

Caravans as a system are too young and underdeveloped. So the market aspects of the caravan system, and some would even say the PVP portion, simply is not ready. And perhaps caravans should produce node currency rather than gold? Or the option would be more node currency and less gold. Perhaps you want currency from each node to support a broader range of activities. But to me caravans are not really ready to be part of the overall economy and seem to be more of a gold sink for now (and cash cow if PVP doesn’t work correctly).

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