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Alpha Two Phase III testing has begun! During this phase, our realms will be open every day, and we'll only have downtime for updates and maintenance. We'll keep everyone up-to-date about downtimes in Discord.
If you have Alpha Two, you can download the game launcher here, and we encourage you to join us on our Official Discord Server for the most up to date testing news.
The problem with having crates/caravans as a spammable gold faucet (ideas for replacement)
Zapatos80
Member, Alpha Two
I'm not sure what the general opinion is on this, but I see a big issue with gold as a reward for crates and caravans—it's basically an endless gold faucet that causes huge inflation in the economy. This also makes it a prime target for cheaters and RMT'ers.
Does anyone have ideas for other highly desirable rewards that these systems could offer without injecting new gold into the economy?
Suggestion: introduce tradeable items that bypass gold sinks, such as tickets to cover NPC fees of all types [IE repairs, fuel, processing fees, and so on]. By definition, these items will always sell to other players for the NPC price or less, and supply and demand would balance things out naturally and regionally. On top of that, you could add other appealing rewards such as scrolls you can pop for guild or artisan tree XP, crafting or processing aids, or temporary group/guild buffs—all of which could be traded with other players, making them profitable without any new gold/inflation entering the economy, even if those crates/caravans are being run 24/7—supply and demand will keep prices in check.
I really think there's a way to make caravan and crate rewards feel highly rewarding and profitable without the huge inflation problem we have right now. Curious to hear what others think.
Does anyone have ideas for other highly desirable rewards that these systems could offer without injecting new gold into the economy?
Suggestion: introduce tradeable items that bypass gold sinks, such as tickets to cover NPC fees of all types [IE repairs, fuel, processing fees, and so on]. By definition, these items will always sell to other players for the NPC price or less, and supply and demand would balance things out naturally and regionally. On top of that, you could add other appealing rewards such as scrolls you can pop for guild or artisan tree XP, crafting or processing aids, or temporary group/guild buffs—all of which could be traded with other players, making them profitable without any new gold/inflation entering the economy, even if those crates/caravans are being run 24/7—supply and demand will keep prices in check.
I really think there's a way to make caravan and crate rewards feel highly rewarding and profitable without the huge inflation problem we have right now. Curious to hear what others think.
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Comments
This could lead to the actual proper fluctuation on how much a caravan net's you based on the value the materials it is made of mean to the settlement and the overall funds it has available. Also can lead someone to make a different decision when making a caravan to just transport the materials up to the player market to make more money.
I also think there needs to be more interaction with what those materials sitting in a settlement do. A processing and then crafting commission would do a heck of a lot for immersion. Also allowing processor's and crafter's to earn settlement currency while boosting their skills.
Again all this if the settlements actually tracked what resources they had and used which might be asking a lot but I think is more in line with Ashes vision.
Players paid 200g in taxes yesterday? Half of that is used to building upkeep and the other half goes to any commodities coming in (first come, first served).
The timing of that money distribution is tied to prime-time and not server reset.
Make commodities available only at the same time, to avoid people sitting with dozens of crates right at the npc, waiting for the hour to tick over.
Everyone that wants to make big money fast will try going to bigger settlements, cause you'd have a higher chance of success (given you're fast enough), while smaller ones can still pay out a bit here and there.
Hell, let mayors control the ratio of money used for buildings and for commodities payouts and also tie that shit to the settlement type, and you got yourself a player-driven movement, cause if a mayor announces that their big city will have massive taxes for a day - tomorrow it's gonna be a whole-ass event of people going there with caravans/crates.
Brought commodities should be used when building stations and when setting citizen benefits in node currency shops. This way higher taxes could be justified, cause citizens will directly benefit. Could even put a slight multiplier on commodities if they're brought in by one of the citizens, so people can recoup their taxes a bit.
The faucet becomes much much weaker, while also way more beneficial for people overall, rather than just "grind mobs for glint, buy random otherwise-useless items, bring them to a settlement, multiply your glint Xfold".
To get enough of an audience for that gameplay type, you really have to lean into the sort of player whose enjoyment focuses heavily on 'the world changing'.
Unfortunately that player type focuses on that aspect so heavily, in my experience, that many other aspects of Ashes are negatives/detrimental for them.
If the target demographic didn't change, then I'd expect a lot of focus on finding the right types of 'rules' to represent 'sensible behaviour' (World Manager stuff) like what you're suggesting, but then how would that stand up to the current Guild Design? (genuinely wondering/asking, this isn't something I'd ever risk because I don't have the design skill level to conclude 'this is possible').
300 person guilds of 'people who are more interested in reacting to dynamism in a world than in dominance'? On multiple servers? That's not exactly a sure bet.
I can't think of another way to do rewards though. Maybe give selectable rewards, like, gold or materials. Maybe guild exp, or settlement exp. What else can they give the player? You wouldn't want to reward anything that's craftable for sure. The best thing is probably limiting gold rewards based of other factors in the source settlement and the destination settlement. Which I'm sure there's already some of that going on.
Couple of ideas:
Running a caravan from settlement A which is still developing to settlement B which is more developed give some boost settlement A.
If it's a guild caravan having it reward some guild exp.
Reward some player exp? (not a fan of this though) but would give a reason to run them as you level.
Reputation with both settlements.
Keep it selectable so you can choose your reward.
Maybe there's supposed to be high gold rewards from the caravans, with everything costing so much maybe you should have 20k gold at level 25...? I don't the point in having copper, silver or other pieces then. In the beginning levels you're broke as shit, so 1 gold is a lot, but after a little work 1 gold is nothing.
Caravans are an odd concept for me in Ashes. I'm moving commodities from point a to point b. But why? Is that supposed to fun? I'm a truck driver and everyone who's not in my guild is a potential attacker... I don't get it. Because it generates the gold in the game you'll have to do enough of it to what you actually want to do. Unless you can get gold another way.