Economy

[Nyr]

Its a broad range of items Nyr, and the fact that common NPC merchants treat them so valuable is silly because, honestly, most NPC's wouldn't realize them for what they are.  Should I still email you on this, or has my point been made?

Yes, e-mail me on it.

edit to add that I'd specifically like to know about which merchants offer these prices.

[Sinna]

It would be awesome if PC's could hire NPCs to sell those crafts they make at price points they were free to set.  And buying land/buildings that required monthly maintence fees.  With options on lock/security quality, NPC guards hired, etc.

[musashi]

Actually to be honest I think that the economy (and the realism of the game world while we're at it) could be greatly helped if only nobles, templarate, and GMH folk had access to bank accounts to begin with. It'd be a bit more difficult for a homeless indie crafter to amass a ton of wealth if he was forced to carry it all on his back.

I'd totally agree with this if it was also easier to rent apartments with DECENT locks that aren't broken into every IG month.

If someone is willing to pay two large a month in rent, they should be able to keep their things reasonably safe, and not even need to use the bank.

Sure, staff could likely solve this problem by putting a few NPC guards in the hallways of apartment buildings on patrol and have the price of the rent in that building up'ed to reflect the added security, but I feel like when players complain about apartments needing to be more secure, what they are really saying is they want their apartment to be an impregnable fortress of solititude. Clan storage areas are good for that ... apartments are not.

My take on it is, if you're an unaffilited commoner and you have something super nice like silks and jewlery or an awesome mastercrafted weapon and you really don't want it stolen, you should be carrying it around on your person at all times, because that's about the safest you're going to be able to keep it without the larger safety net of a powerful orginazation.

The relative risk that comes with leaving nice stuff in apartments plus the lack of access to a bank account service would, in my opinion, curb a lot of the worst of the "fabulosly wealthy indie crafters who ruin everyone else's fun because they aren't poor like we want them to be". There just wouldn't be much point in amassing 80k in coins. It'd be too heavy to carry around and leaving it in your apartment would only keep it safe for so long.

[Sinna]

The relative risk that comes with leaving nice stuff in apartments plus the lack of access to a bank account service would, in my opinion, curb a lot of the worst of the "fabulosly wealthy indie crafters who ruin everyone else's fun because they aren't poor like we want them to be". There just wouldn't be much point in amassing 80k in coins. It'd be too heavy to carry around and leaving it in your apartment would only keep it safe for so long.

So very true.  It would also kinda hurt the burgler profession, but I have no problem with that class scraping by (as they should unless they are one of the elite "templar mansion breaking burglars") assuming everyone's in the same boat.

[Salt Merchant]

The relative risk that comes with leaving nice stuff in apartments plus the lack of access to a bank account service would, in my opinion, curb a lot of the worst of the "fabulosly wealthy indie crafters who ruin everyone else's fun because they aren't poor like we want them to be". There just wouldn't be much point in amassing 80k in coins. It'd be too heavy to carry around and leaving it in your apartment would only keep it safe for so long.

So very true.  It would also kinda hurt the burgler profession, but I have no problem with that class scraping by (as they should unless they are one of the elite "templar mansion breaking burglars") assuming everyone's in the same boat.

Removing access to bank accounts would just make money even more worthless than it already is.

[musashi]

The relative risk that comes with leaving nice stuff in apartments plus the lack of access to a bank account service would, in my opinion, curb a lot of the worst of the "fabulosly wealthy indie crafters who ruin everyone else's fun because they aren't poor like we want them to be". There just wouldn't be much point in amassing 80k in coins. It'd be too heavy to carry around and leaving it in your apartment would only keep it safe for so long.

So very true.  It would also kinda hurt the burgler profession, but I have no problem with that class scraping by (as they should unless they are one of the elite "templar mansion breaking burglars") assuming everyone's in the same boat.

Removing access to bank accounts would just make money even more worthless than it already is.

I don't believe you. Explain.

[musashi]

Here, let me try to give you a more detailed explanation of where I'm coming from.

It seems to me that whenever the latest economy thread comes around the exact same things get said over and over again and we always end up right where we started. I think it breaks down like this.

The perceived problem is that the characters who are supposed to be super rich, according to the docs, are in fact super poor; and the characters who are supposed to be super poor, according to the docs, are in fact super rich. Therefore there is a problem in the way the economy is coded and it needs to be changed.

Somebody usually says: Well what if everyone just showed self-restraint and kept their characters poor because they're supposed to be?

This doesn't ever really go anywhere because the honor system, as a rule, becomes less and less effective the more people you pump into it. We're a bit too big of a game for that to be a viable option. On top of that, even if everyone who was supposed to be poor showed self-restraint and kept themselves poor it still wouldn't fix the fact that the ones who are supposed to be super rich, aren't. In this situation, the best you could hope for is that everyone would be poor, except some of the poor folks would have clan compounds and be able to order the city militia around.

The actual root of the problem has to do with resources and how they are gathered. Resources in Armageddon are infinite. You can never strip an entire forest of trees, you can never hunt critters to extinction, and you can never mine the entire vein of obsidian. This means that people with more time on their hands and the inclination to spend it resource farming are going to, by default, amass more resources than those with less time to play.

They are also going to amass more resources than those who are forbidden to go out resource farming themselves due to IC restrictions ... like the fact that they are supposed to be super rich GMH family members, nobles, or templars who are above grebbing in such a fashion.

But the big catch 22 is that making those infinite resources finite instead does not work. It would probably just make the problem worse, in fact. The reason being that making the resources finite just means that the most motivated of the compulsive resource farmers mentioned above are going to take all of the resources when they spawn, leaving none for the folk who come later. This kind of situation can be seen on a small scale already. People camp outside the obsidian mines office in Allanak to be the first there in the morning to clean out the 500 coin a pay limit on obsidian they'll buy, and most of the common "we buy hides and furs and crap" shops are always filled up to the max on whatever hides and furs and crap are readily available in the immediate area. Making the resources finite just turns the economy into more of a WoW type situation where those with the more RL time to pump into the game claim the most reward, and that does nothing to fix the perceived problem of letting the rich be rich, and keeping the poor, poor.

So through the course of the thread, these two points get kicked around in one form or another back and forth until we finally come to a point where somebody says: Well, the GMH's, nobles, and templars, all get special perks and privlieges that coin just can't buy. So that makes it all ok.

It's true that they get special perks commoners can't get, but it does nothing to solve the problem we were actually talking about. Money. They still don't have as much money as the commoners who are supposed to be poor. So give or take a month and another thread on the ecnonomy rears its head because we didn't actually fix anything we just ran around in a circle, decided that the super rich have special perks instead of money, and let it sit for a month before picking the topic back up to run around in a circle with it some more.

Now, I agree that the GMH folk, the nobles, and the templar all have special perks that set them apart from the commoners, and I think that's a good thing. So after reading these economy threads for about a RL year now, my suggestion is actually fairly simple: Make the infrastructure required to amass obscene wealth a special perk of the people who are supposed to have obscene wealth, and just don't give it to the people who are supposed to be poor.

In order for the resource harvesting indie commoners that are always targeted in these threads to amass wealth, they need to have the infrastructure in place to allow them to do it. They either need a bank, or a super secure location to put the wealth in, otherwise their wealth is limited by what they can physically drag around with them.

Imagine for a moment if you will, a world in which the banks only deal with GMH family members, nobility, templarate, and the VERY rare commoner who has climbed their way up from the bottom to the highest reaches of society.

Commoners can still make money at the pace they can make it now, so the time required to amass x amount of coins doesn't change from what it is now, hence the person't style of play doesn't have to change either. What does change is how much coin they would want to make before stopping.

People would have to live more hand to mouth. They could still rent an apartment but they would be more inclined to go out and make this month's rent just before it's due, spending it almost immediately after aquiring it. People could still carry a few large around on their person to stay ahead of the rat race a little bit but anything more than that and weight and space issues would start to arise.

People might be tempted to spend more money, since holding onto it is less of an option than it used to be, and the thieves who break into apartments might even be less tempted to clean the whole place out now, because they don't have access to banks either. They can't go sell everything in an apartment and then carry their 22k to the bank for deposit, so they as well might have to change their style of play to a more hand in mouth routine ... ... unless they were part of a huge criminal syndicate with clan storage rooms to leave this huge amount of money inside. Now, all of a sudden, paying the local guild bosses of your city state protection money to keep your apartment from being completely cleaned out takes on a more tangible signifigance.

In a situation like this, the compulsive resource farmers might even, I dare say, be tempted to seek out the super rich for employment in exchange for being taken care of. They can't have a big whooping bank account of their own, but they can give the silly amount of coins they make to a noble or templar with the understanding that when they need something like new armor, money for a bribe, weapons, booze, spice, whores ... their patron will make sure they get enough of that money they gave them back, in order to pay for it.

This is where I'm coming from when I say that maybe taking bank accounts away from common nobody PC's would be a good thing for the game's economy.

[Grey Area]

Imagine for a moment if you will, a world in which the banks only deal with GMH family members, nobility, templarate, and the VERY rare commoner who has climbed their way up from the bottom to the highest reaches of society.

This is actually a pretty good idea.

[Aaron Goulet]

Aside from some other, very drastic changes that aren't likely to happen in Arm 1, I really can't think of a better solution than what musashi has proposed above.  It would be simple to implement, and really, as he points out, does a good job of regulating itself.  Also, as he points out, honor systems rarely work out as a game gets larger, even in RPIs.  Armageddon MUD already relies heavily on these, in comparison to other MUDs in the same classification, so a coded solution like this really does seem like a step in the right direction.

Masterfully done, musashi.

[Sephiroto]

I just had the following thought:

Average GMH salary: 300-700 coins/month.
Obsidian miner who -averages- 1 large chunk per IC day: ~11500 coins/month.
Obsidian miner who -averages- 1 small chunk per IC day: ~2250 coins/month.

[Aaron Goulet]

I just had the following thought:

Average GMH salary: 300-700 coins/month.
Obsidian miner who -averages- 1 large chunk per IC day: ~11500 coins/month.
Obsidian miner who -averages- 1 small chunk per IC day: ~2250 coins/month.

Ah, but are you factoring in food and water costs?  What about times when the player isn't logged in to hack at deposits?  I'm not saying that mining is by any means a profession with a low profit yield (in fact, the opposite is true), I'm just pointing out that there's hidden factors that detract from one's net profit, and make those numbers a little less sickeningly HUGE on the miner's side of things.

Still, this would make most clanned PCs cry, if they heard it.  Thank Tek/Muk most Zalanthans aren't bean counters, right?

[Lizzie]

Average GMH's salary is what it is, regardless of what the PC is doing. (supporting a RP/Code hybrid environment)

The only way a miner can earn that much, is if he spends all his time mining (supporting a code only environment)

I like Musashi's idea. If Clan leaders (not necessarily family members but whoever is responsible for paying employees, paying bribes, buying rounds at the bar, acquiring more plants for their Lord Noble's experiments, etc.)...had access to bank accounts and no one else did it could certainly help.

The #1 concern though with this, is that it would also encourage PCs to clutter up barracks that already have no room for more. My solution to THAT..would be a new command and object. A *trash bin* object. That allows you to pick up a bag full of stuff and pour it in the trash bin, where it becomes auto-junked. Add an echo of slaves taking it out and replacing it with an empty one if anyone has an immersion issue, but I'd definitely like to see that included in a situation in which people who are -already- stockpiling things in clan halls, will now have even more of a reason to do so.

[Nyr]

Thanks to those of you that sent me e-mails.  We can't make the economy of Armageddon perfect, but I think that I can at least improve these things with some small tweaks.

[Niamh]

You can never strip an entire forest of trees, you can never hunt critters to extinction, and you can never mine the entire vein of obsidian.

This is not true.  Deposits are finite.  If staff finds that excessive logging is taking place somewhere, they will make the world react accordingly, and people who frequent that spot will find that there are less and less trees, then eventually none if the amount of trees taken from there isn't curbed.

[Lizzie]

You can never strip an entire forest of trees, you can never hunt critters to extinction, and you can never mine the entire vein of obsidian.

This is not true.  Deposits are finite.  If staff finds that excessive logging is taking place somewhere, they will make the world react accordingly, and people who frequent that spot will find that there are less and less trees, then eventually none if the amount of trees taken from there isn't curbed.

Bold for emphasis. Niamh, the main thrust of this thread is that all "balance" to the economy currently relies on players and staff to monitor and/or self-monitor, and that the code does not support said balance. Yes, IF the staff finds problems, they can fix them. But until/unless the staff notices a problem, the problem remains. These things -are- infinite. They're coded that way. To remove the ability to mine in a certain room, a staffer has to make it that way. Until the staffer steps in, it -is- infinite, or, infinitely renewable via game reset. The world doesn't react accordingly. The staff has to intervene. We're trying to come up with a way that prevents the need for staff intervention, or prevents the frustration we already have, because when we ask for staff intervention, the staff needed to intervene, isn't available at the moment and by the time they are available, PCs Amos, Malik, and Talia have already spent 20 hours each logging 2 forests worth of trees from a single room and spam-crafted them into 1000-sid boxes.

[Sephiroto]

Ah, but are you factoring in food and water costs?  What about times when the player isn't logged in to hack at deposits?  I'm not saying that mining is by any means a profession with a low profit yield (in fact, the opposite is true), I'm just pointing out that there's hidden factors that detract from one's net profit, and make those numbers a little less sickeningly HUGE on the miner's side of things.

Still, this would make most clanned PCs cry, if they heard it.  Thank Tek/Muk most Zalanthans aren't bean counters, right?

Indeed, Aaron.  That statement was to be thought provoking, that's all.

Your average 'sid miner isn't goign to make that much money because they're not going to mine every day and the merchants only buy so much product during any given period.  But the point is, any PC can make a KILLING if two conditions are met.  1) Be proactive and productive and 2) Stay alive.

Most of us don't play degenerates.  We play hard workers and we make lots of coins.  Disporportionate amounts..., especially when not restricted by clan rules.

[musashi]

What Lizzie said. Yes of course staff have the ability to change the world around but no offense, that hasn't really been an effective enough measure to change the perceived problem of, the folks who are supposed to be rich being poor, and the folks who are supposed to be poor being rich -- because this thread keeps coming up month after month and it always hashes out the same complaints, like I mentoned before.

Since staff are just people with a finite amount of time to dedicate to the game like the rest of us, I don't feel like asking them to follow resource farmers around to micro manage their grebbing practices by changing the world around behind them is the way to go about trying to fix things.

And even if staff DID do that for every grebber 100% of the time ... we would just end up in the same situation I mentioned above, where those with the time and inclination to go resource farming strip an area clean and nothing is left for the more casual players.

I think it's been pretty blatantly observed that making the resources finite in any sense is not the way to fix the problem, only the way to aggrevate it.

[Aaron Goulet]

I still like musashi's proposed change to the banking system, for the record.

[ianmartin]

SOOOO, what we are accomplishing from this thread is to help screw burglars and prevent people from selling items to npc shopkeepers that REALLY REALLY REALLY like them.  Congrats to whoever likes to do this.

[Synthesis]

If you forced people to carry all their coins around in their backpack, every raiding scenario would impose a catastrophic loss on the PC, leading to more people simply running before the scenario could begin.

Indies would rarely be able to hire the Byn for contracts, and they wouldn't need to anyway, because the excess coin generated by such contracts currently would only be a hindrance under the new system.  There goes a significant amount of money and interaction for the Byn.  Independent crafters would stop selling the cool shit that PCs want and just get by hand-to-mouth by crafting forks and spoons and bullshit that nobody buys, because what's the point of crafting a cool silk dress that some rich Oashi aide might wear, when you can't really -do- anything with that extra 500 'sid?  I'd go so far as to say the independent merchant would completely vanish, because the ONLY thing the merchant class is good at is amassing incredible amounts of coins and using it to pay people to do everything else for them.

Your local criminal elements would suddenly find themselves without loot-laden PCs to shake down, and the trick-down economies in the 'rinth and desert-raiding communities would simply dry up.  Newbie grebbers who actually greb shit for indie crafters who don't want to spend the time doing it themselves would no longer have job opportunities, because again:  what's the point of paying someone to go out and greb obsidian shards that you can ultimately make hundreds of 'sid on when that hundreds of 'sid is just going to weigh you down and make you a target? 

I think the suggestions musashi presents are a great way to fix the problem of the rich-being-poor and the poor-being-rich, but they're also a great way to ruin the game in the process.

[AmandaGreathouse]

Well put, Synthesis.

I think too much emphasis is being put on the raw amount of coin people have.

Indies will never be as good as clannies. You can NEVER buy and sell a noble. Some of the hyperbole used is so... ridiculous. With a static caste system, it doesn't matter for shit if you had 10 BILLION sid, you'll never be as good as that noble. You'll never be as good as your shit-poor clannie equivalent. Because they are, simply put, better than you. You have money to throw around, sure, but you don't have an entire merchant/noble house at your back if you fuck up... or to keep people from fucking you up.

Sure, it's not perfect, it never was meant to be perfect. Unless all you people who like to play hard-working pcs want to play hardworking pcs who still die in the streets all the time because of hunger and thirst. Let's face it, you want to make people realistically poor, let's do this. No starting coin. No starting food. No starting water. Make salting pay one sid/piece, make mining pay 1/10th of what it does now.

Congrats. See how shitty it feels to run into the same brick wall over and over, killing ALL fun for the sake of realism? But hey, at least we're all starving now. Because, you know, we should all be shit-poor, right?

/end snark / sarcasm.

No, but seriously. Yes there is a conflict in (COIN ALONE) coin made between the documentation and game reality. BUT, after all these years, it's helped shape a lot of aspects of the game. There's a reason why Synth's post is so well written... It makes indies literally the very BOTTOM of the food chain. Which is true. But if you fuck with them too much, it's going to collapse the whole thing.

[Schrodingers Cat]

What if 'normal' character bank accounts had a top limit of a thousand coins?  But other important establishment people had unlimited bank capacities?  I think that would make things much more manageable.

[ianmartin]

SOOOOOOO, options:

1.  Increase GMH pay
2.  Screw all indies

Let's take a vote.

[AmandaGreathouse]

One thing I think would fix things would be to simply increase the pay to family members of gmhs/nobility. Something like 5 small/week (IG week) for gmh people, and 1k/IG week for nobles.

Because, truthfully, it's really NOT that the GMHs/nobility are poor.

It's that they have so many things that the coins need to go to that they go quickly.

They actually have a RATHER substantial amount of coin.

But if they made a LOT more, they could just throw it around like it was no object, like for example... nobles being trendy enough to keep up the newest fashion and still having tons of sid to buy templars, pay aides, be kickass.

As to GMH employees and noble house employees: Your pc superiors now have tons of sid to throw around. So if you do well, you will, too.

[ianmartin]

Here's what I have seen.  I have had a character that amassed so much dam sid that he didn't know what to do with it.  I had EVERYTHING and i do mean EVERYTHING, silt skimmers and the like and could do just about what he wanted.  HOWEVER, that gets boring and old REALLY fast.  Believe you me, it's just NOT worth it to acquire all that wealth with nothing to spend it on.  There are too many limitations on the game right now to make that much money worth it.  I would not recommend it to anyone.