How would you balance the economy?

[manonfire]

#rEVOLution

[The7DeadlyVenomz]

I don't suggest rapid counters with my wear ideas, and utility on things like ragged cloaks wouldn't disappear until it became a bundle of rags. Weapons that were worn down wouldn't be useless until they broke. In fact, almost no equipment like item would rapidly degrade. We're talking about a timer for a typical, 2 hours of hunting a day, seven days a week, ranger's cloak expiring once a rl month, or, basically, 2 1/2 days of riding time. That's actually a decent amount, seeing as how we don't ride all the time, since we roleplay and tavern idle, you know. Plus all that money you just made out there riding now has a reasonable sink.

The only rapid timer would be food and hides and raw materials. Do you wanna guess why? Stockpiles in the kitchen disappear. Hunters for GMH houses have real work to do, since some of those hides are certainly going to spoil, and those plants are surely gonna dry into uselessness.

Nobles spend money on looking new. 

Methods of repair would be instant, too, like washing the blood out of stuff is. I'd do away with any delay on all cleaning and maintenance tasks.

[Erythil]

I don't suggest rapid counters with my wear ideas, and utility on things like ragged cloaks wouldn't disappear until it became a bundle of rags. Weapons that were worn down wouldn't be useless until they broke. In fact, almost no equipment like item would rapidly degrade. We're talking about a timer for a typical, 2 hours of hunting a day, seven days a week, ranger's cloak expiring once a rl month, or, basically, 2 1/2 days of riding time. That's actually a decent amount, seeing as how we don't ride all the time, since we roleplay and tavern idle, you know. Plus all that money you just made out there riding now has a reasonable sink.

The only rapid timer would be food and hides and raw materials. Do you wanna guess why? Stockpiles in the kitchen disappear. Hunters for GMH houses have real work to do, since some of those hides are certainly going to spoil, and those plants are surely gonna dry into uselessness.

Nobles spend money on looking new. 

Methods of repair would be instant, too, like washing the blood out of stuff is. I'd do away with any delay on all cleaning and maintenance tasks.

While your idea is interesting in theory and would certainly make trade in basic necessities more frequent, I think it would have several unintended consequences -- like people logging out if they don't immediately find something to do, or idling in their apartments naked.  Because every second you're not doing something to advance your character is contributing to the active decay of your net assets.

I also think that eliminating NPC food dispensers would be preferable to making food spoil, if you wanted to make acquiring basic necessities a bigger part of the game.

But having played Atonement and Parallel, I don't believe that working hard to acquire basic necessities is anything other than tedium.  That's just my 2cents.  Armageddon's harshness has always been more about theme than coded reality, I think for playability reasons as much as anything else.

[wizturbo]

Bring food prices to sane level. People would buy them more if a slice of cheese didn't cost 175 coins. Seriously how does anyone not clanned in this city eat? 300 coins for cookie? Are you kidding me?

I totally agree.  Being very rich, and still having to sustain yourself on cheap strips of meat or something because a tasty diet would cost literally thousands of coins per RL week seems insane.

[Pale Horse]

Roll up a Merchant.

Corner the market on clay gathering, salting, 'sid mining, etc.

Use all the monez I've horded to hire rangers, deck them out in expensive equipment and then tell them to go out into the wilds and use their wilderness stealth/beat things into unconsciousness to plant coins on random mobs.

Noob rangers die to mobs, leaving their expensive equipment behind.  Mobs now carry coins.  As the easy jobs are cornered, players now band together to hunt mobs for coin and gather supplies from dead bodies, leading to the mass extinction of every living thing in the Known.

Starvation sets in, everyone dies, economy is balanced at the lowest level.  Zero.

Old economy system is then scrapped so a new one can be built.  I'm with Badskeelz and value is now given in the trading of heads, limbs and blood.

[Saellyn]

Bring food prices to sane level. People would buy them more if a slice of cheese didn't cost 175 coins. Seriously how does anyone not clanned in this city eat? 300 coins for cookie? Are you kidding me?

Maybe with the bank exempt Merchant Houses and Noble employees from withdraw fees charge unaffiliated pcs way more to withdraw or deposit once they account reaches a certain size. Enforce better rp about it. If you are a hunter you should never more than 3k in your bank account at any time ever.   I tend not to let my Aides ever keep more than 5k at any time. Its really not hard to find things to spend it on...its just hard to find things that aren't so ridiculously overly inflated if encourages you to hoard coin.

Better Houses options...On most other muds these days you can do all sorts of cool things with housing. Its a huge money sink, just buying simple tables and chairs..more furnishing options would be a plus. A mud I tried out recently pulled coin out of your bank account to auto pay for feeding animals or servants you could buy. You could build farms which had a yearly upkeep cost as well and actually grow things. I -never- had enough coin in the game. I felt like I was always always struggling for enough coin to eat and feed my chickens with. In that same vein let pcs that have a proper social rank ( the Great/minor Merchant Houses or Nobles) to keep a slave have guards or just an npc servant to stand around the house. It would give Borsail something to sell more often and be something rich pcs could throw money at. Hit their account by x amount of coin each month to afford that npc servant or whatever.

Yes but how did you even know how much money your aides have...?

[musashi]

I'm not too sure I'd do anything to the actual economy. I mean, nothing to vendors, banks, etc.

But I would create code so that everything wore out. Almost everything, that is.

All foot-wear and clothing, including packs, belts, etc, on a room-counter adjusted by quality and material. Repaired clothing would bear the repaired flag. Packs which were allowed to go to the farthest reachs of wear would become unusable. Sandstorms, by the way, would alter the room-counter a lot. You might go into a blinding storm with new clothes and come out of it with most of your new, unflagged gear now tattered.

All weapons, on a hit counter, obviously determined by quality. Only some weapons could be repaired - those that were would bear the repaired flag. I'd also add sharpening kits to repair edged weapons. Blunt weapons would generally not be repairable.

All armo ... wait, that's fine. I'm good with this. Also, add a room-counter.

All food would go bad, based on a IC-time counter. Raw food would go bad far faster. Dried food and nuts would remain good for the longest.

All liquid would evaporate on an IC-time counter.

All mounts would age and die.

All wagons would require repair via the wagon-crafting skill, based on a room-counter. Walla, use for wagon parts AND the skill.

All pet objects would age and die, based on an IC-time counter.

All hides would have to be tanned within an IC week, or spoil. This mirrors RL by the way, but is way more lenient. 'Tool' required for tanning hides? Salt, or brains. This is also a mirror of a real method, and the one most likely to be used by our Zalanthans.

Wood would rot, based on an IC-timer AND usage-timer. So your chair would eventually break a leg and you'd need to go buy another.

Jewlery would become dull, and require a polishing kit to return to an un-flagged status.

I'm sure I'm forgetting stuff, but you get the idea. Simply by eliminating anything that lasts forever, you create a giant money sink and you allow people to visually see the harshness of the world. You create business for everyone, and uses for things previously considered flavor.

Oh, and anything on your person when you logged out would have the counter stopped. It would be silly to have a newbs clothes go to tattered status because he stopped playing for a couple of IC years, or his food to go bad while he's off-line.

I like the idea of all good breaking down, but I would rather the break down be based on use rather than time. Time is more realistic ... but I feel unfair to sporadic gamers over ones who play often.

Having the wear and tear be based on use strikes me as better for playibility's sake so that people who log in from time to time don't always have rotten food and tattered clothes waiting for them.

[Mordiggian]

Perhaps something those shiny new builders could get set up to do. Just have a full staff member review it and hit the okay button after they've built it.

There are still technical barriers that would limit the rate at which recipes can be added because of the way the game works at a code-level.

On top of that, it really is the equivalent of data entry. There are tens of thousands of items in the game, even if you exclude items that shouldn't have crafting recipes (like a piece of ruined clothing) and the process of assigning and implementing recipes for them is probably the number one least exciting thing staff or builders can do. Even if the code wizards set up a way for Builders to access the crafting tool, Builders aren't required to work on any given project. They pick what they would like to commit to from a list of projects that have been approved for Builder assistance.

This isn't to say that adding crafting recipes is something we aren't doing. It's just a slow, ongoing process. When a player in one of my clans orders a clan-specific item that has no recipe, I build one for the object in question. When I build new items for a given project, I include recipes where they make sense to exist.

[BadSkeelz]

My ways for dealing with the economy:

Don't earn money from NPC merchants. Earn money only from clan pay, handouts from rich PCs (who typically have stipends), and dead bodies.

Play a combat character who only crafts for his or her friends (if they even have a crafting subguild) and buy as much of your gear from PCs as you can, and you rapidly stop giving a shit about the fucked up state of NPC merchants and the larger economy. The only thing I buy regularly from NPCs anymore are consumables.

[Lizzie]

My ways for dealing with the economy:

Don't earn money from NPC merchants. Earn money only from clan pay, handouts from rich PCs (who typically have stipends), and dead bodies.

Play a combat character who only crafts for his or her friends (if they even have a crafting subguild) and buy as much of your gear from PCs as you can, and you rapidly stop giving a shit about the fucked up state of NPC merchants and the larger economy. The only thing I buy regularly from NPCs anymore are consumables.

You know, I tried that not long ago. Turned out no one wanted anything I had available. Either they had no use for it themselves, or they already had plenty, or they were perfectly capable and willing to get it themselves and not have to pay anyone for it at all. So - I backed down and ended up selling almost exclusively to the NPCs. I kept my balance at the bank low, considering how much I know I -could've- made. I think the highest I went with that PC was 5500 sids, accumulated over a few RL months.

[CodeMaster]

My ways for dealing with the economy:

Don't earn money from NPC merchants. Earn money only from clan pay, handouts from rich PCs (who typically have stipends), and dead bodies.

Play a combat character who only crafts for his or her friends (if they even have a crafting subguild) and buy as much of your gear from PCs as you can, and you rapidly stop giving a shit about the fucked up state of NPC merchants and the larger economy. The only thing I buy regularly from NPCs anymore are consumables.

This is a good point ... I think placing these kinds of voluntary "conducts" on yourself is one of the best ways to go.  A couple ideas I've had but never implemented:

One weird idea I've had rattling around is to make a character with a weak stomach who would only be able to eat items that started with a letter corresponding to the current OOC two-week period (B for the second two weeks of January, for example, so belshun fruit or something?).  When you get to the X's it's time to starve and drink ale.

Another fringe character might view coins as a source of bad luck and misfortune, and would deal only in trade with PCs and NPCs (in the latter case, only ever use offer <my item> <NPC's item>).  This would introduce a new learning curve where you'd have to determine which items would actually be light and valuable and desirable enough to be useful for this.

If you're a real D&D nerd you could incorporate your own dice-roll into whether or not a weapon became too worn out for you to use after a fight and toss it on the ground or junk it afterward.  Could encourage you to use cheaper alternatives on your pot shot kills, which would make more sense.

[Desertman]

I once played a religious zealot half-elf who was basically following Jesus (though I didn't call it that obviously) and would shun the very concept of the amassing of wealth as an atrocity against the poor.

His goal in life was to help people and be a "good person".

He started out as a "chuckle character" for me but I actually ended up really enjoying playing him until he died to a gith randomly. Rest in peace my breed. Your soul has gone to a better place.

Not really "related", but you guys reminded me of it heh. Thanks for the memories.

[FantasyWriter]

Bring food prices to sane level. People would buy them more if a slice of cheese didn't cost 175 coins. Seriously how does anyone not clanned in this city eat? 300 coins for cookie? Are you kidding me?

Maybe with the bank exempt Merchant Houses and Noble employees from withdraw fees charge unaffiliated pcs way more to withdraw or deposit once they account reaches a certain size. Enforce better rp about it. If you are a hunter you should never more than 3k in your bank account at any time ever.   I tend not to let my Aides ever keep more than 5k at any time. Its really not hard to find things to spend it on...its just hard to find things that aren't so ridiculously overly inflated if encourages you to hoard coin.

Better Houses options...On most other muds these days you can do all sorts of cool things with housing. Its a huge money sink, just buying simple tables and chairs..more furnishing options would be a plus. A mud I tried out recently pulled coin out of your bank account to auto pay for feeding animals or servants you could buy. You could build farms which had a yearly upkeep cost as well and actually grow things. I -never- had enough coin in the game. I felt like I was always always struggling for enough coin to eat and feed my chickens with. In that same vein let pcs that have a proper social rank ( the Great/minor Merchant Houses or Nobles) to keep a slave have guards or just an npc servant to stand around the house. It would give Borsail something to sell more often and be something rich pcs could throw money at. Hit their account by x amount of coin each month to afford that npc servant or whatever.

One of the things I was most looking forward to with Arm Reborn was the talk about being able to grow plants and raise herds of livestock.  If anything like that ever gets implemented, I'll probably never play anything else.

[Taijan]

Oh good, I'm not the only one who got inordinately excited about the thought of Zalanthan Harvest Moon.

[Erythil]

Bring food prices to sane level. People would buy them more if a slice of cheese didn't cost 175 coins. Seriously how does anyone not clanned in this city eat? 300 coins for cookie? Are you kidding me?

Maybe with the bank exempt Merchant Houses and Noble employees from withdraw fees charge unaffiliated pcs way more to withdraw or deposit once they account reaches a certain size. Enforce better rp about it. If you are a hunter you should never more than 3k in your bank account at any time ever.   I tend not to let my Aides ever keep more than 5k at any time. Its really not hard to find things to spend it on...its just hard to find things that aren't so ridiculously overly inflated if encourages you to hoard coin.

Better Houses options...On most other muds these days you can do all sorts of cool things with housing. Its a huge money sink, just buying simple tables and chairs..more furnishing options would be a plus. A mud I tried out recently pulled coin out of your bank account to auto pay for feeding animals or servants you could buy. You could build farms which had a yearly upkeep cost as well and actually grow things. I -never- had enough coin in the game. I felt like I was always always struggling for enough coin to eat and feed my chickens with. In that same vein let pcs that have a proper social rank ( the Great/minor Merchant Houses or Nobles) to keep a slave have guards or just an npc servant to stand around the house. It would give Borsail something to sell more often and be something rich pcs could throw money at. Hit their account by x amount of coin each month to afford that npc servant or whatever.

One of the things I was most looking forward to with Arm Reborn was the talk about being able to grow plants and raise herds of livestock.  If anything like that ever gets implemented, I'll probably never play anything else.

I have long wanted to develop an RPI centered around the theme of exploring and developing a new frontier, with all the tree-chopping and field-sowing that entails.  But I cannot program, so it shall never be.

[Barsook]

Go ahead and boo this post, but this keeps on coming up in my mind.  Remove the NPC shops and use the merchant and merchant houses to deal with PC to PC sales.  Well maybe for for all items, but most.  I do know the problem which is it would be hard to catch the merchant PC and get the orders ready, but hey, I'm just throwing it out.

[Erythil]

Go ahead and boo this post, but this keeps on coming up in my mind.  Remove the NPC shops and use the merchant and merchant houses to deal with PC to PC sales.  Well maybe for for all items, but most.  I do know the problem which is it would be hard to catch the merchant PC and get the orders ready, but hey, I'm just throwing it out.

I saw this system in action on the reboot of SoI, and I don't think it works.  It's especially difficult for off-peak players.

[Barsook]

Would be better if the NPC shops were only open during off-peak or no?

[bardlyone]

Given how many torches and basic items and flavor rp items and general items at large can't be crafted, that sounds like a horrible idea. And the majority of these items don't come from merchant houses, so they shouldn't be sold by them.

Edit to make sense of the thought. >.>

[Barsook]

Oh, yeah, I forgot about that.

[bcw81]

#MakingHouseTorchnext.

[bardlyone]

Oh, yeah, I forgot about that.

Don't get me wrong, I absolutely love it in concept. I just think that it would be untenable until every item that SHOULD be in the game world is craftable by players, otherwise it would really f things up.

[MeTekillot]

#MakingHouseTorchnext.

house illuminati(on)

[FantasyWriter]

How to fix the economy?
Obsidian coins. Do away with them. Shit would be get real.

[The Silence of the Erdlus]

All mounts would age and die.

Mounts can already age to the point where you'd rather slaughter them than deal with it anymore.