Broken Economics and NPC Vendors

[Grapes]

Wow, I mean just, wow. Let me start by saying, you don't know the documentation rules if you never join a merchant house clan. Merchant house clan members, who, have to be promoted before ever getting the permission to sell, have to sell only to specific vendors. They cannot sell, typically, to their own clan vendors. They are also typically not allowed to haggle with their clan vendors, and depending on agreements, they may be unable to sell to other merchant house vendors too. To do so would be to invite some, possibly severe IC backlash.

To encounter this kind of argument probably shouldn't be surprising to me, but merely confirming that, most of you have no clue what you're talking about.

EDIT: You could say indie merchants have the quickest path to riches, but trying to crack down on that is like shooting yourself in the foot.

[Hauwke]

Edit: To take out the snark because I am not a complete asshole.

In a more on topic section of the post, Coin is absurdly easy to get your hands on with enough playtime depending on what you do. Making a few thousand coins every rl day can be done with enough time, even on hard-coded jobs.

[Grapes]

CAN be? I know for a fact you can stack some 10-20k a RL day if you have no obstacles. That is not the point, and such methods have nothing to do with haggle or NPC vendors. The thing is if you're making that kind of coin you need to stop and ask yourself if you might be overdoing it, and find a way to RP your character in a more realistic manner, and start paying characters who CAN'T make that kind of coin for small jobs with your ill-gotten gains. You don't set the bar to someone who has no life.

[Riev]

The few I've seen do that, and NOT doing it to pad their own pockets, are doing it to try and create a 'trend'. Like how Kadian shops sometimes only have certain colors in stock, I've seen (rarely, of course) Salarri who decide that this month, they're putting in a bunch of scrab shell armor into the shops, but they offer it to the shop at 0 coins. Just so people can have access to a common good at REAL prices, not what some Merchant decided.

I always thought it was a great way to get the crafters learning to make, say, a bunch of shortswords. Its Short Sword month! We've got four different kinds of swords, and one very special kind usually available only for personal orders!

Unfortunately, that butts out indie merchants but... hey. Buy your own stand in the bazaar.

[Armaddict]

Making a few thousand coins every rl day can be done with enough time, even on hard-coded jobs.

I -think- I'm just reiterating what Grapes said.  This will always be the case, because if you make it absurdly hard to get coin based on someone having that kind of time to generate coins, you end up making it impossible for people who don't have that kind of time.

This has always been the justification in my head for why food is expensive; at least when you're logged in longer, you have to eat more.  I'm not certain if that's the best way to reflect things though.

[Riev]

Making those few thousand coins on coded jobs requires doing nothing but that job, day in and day out. If stamina regeneration affected hunger/thirst, it might balance out the amount of time people spend on these jobs, considering being in a city environment seems to keep you from being hungry/thirsty as quickly.

So if you spend all day, Dawn to Dusk, shoveling out a stable.... at the end you're going to be hungry enough to spend half the coin in food. If you spend just the morning, you might make enough for an ale in the evening and still have half a day to do something fun.

[nauta]

So if you spend all day, Dawn to Dusk, shoveling out a stable.... at the end you're going to be hungry enough to spend half the coin in food. If you spend just the morning, you might make enough for an ale in the evening and still have half a day to do something fun.

I played a dung scraper a bit ago when there were tons of crashes each day.  Each crash reset the poop in the stable which meant I barely scraped by, and probably wouldn't have if I didn't know where to buy/find cheap food at the respawn spots.

Armaddict has the right of it: while a lot of people like playing the 'jobs' game, in general there's a tension between making it hard to survive and making it such that all you do is log in and do coded actions with no time for RP scenes.

Fortunately, Arm has about 20 years of tweeking gone into the various economy systems.  There's still a lot of tweeking that can happen too.

My favorite item in the economy remains arrows.  They are expensive enough that it makes you think twice about wasting sid on them, and they are time-consuming enough to make that it also makes you think twice about wasting them.  And unlike other things, they are actually useful for coded things, so there's always a demand.

[Riev]

I've always liked various food items. It can be difficult, even with Merchant barter, to find things that are profitable, but once you find the 3-4 things that will make you some coin, it can be easier to scrape by.

At least we're not in the "buy this one OVER ABUNDANT NEW ITEM, craft it into a simple weapon NOBODY USES, and sell it for 400 coins" anymore. Or chests. My god, chests.

[Jihelu]

My favorite activity on my year played merchant was making absolute shit tons of money both making diamonds + silk related items.

That being said not everyone has the luxury of working diamonds, but those were more or less my 'four items' I made to make coin.
I'm not proud of my self.

[Grapes]

That's interesting, Reiv, putting items in the merchant house shop you belong to for zero coin. It is a really neat way to promote products that rarely load, if at all, in the shop inventory ICly. Indie merchants really need no pity, once the horrible grind is over it's all about finding suppliers, shelling out coin to keep the market going, and dumping finished goods in the shops the Merchant houses don't sell to, namely, their own shops, and making sure not to poo all over the market by overstocking items other merchants may be selling.

It's hard to blame a PC, or the player themselves, for being savvy at making coin in an acceptable IC manner, then spending some of their earnings on some luxuries from time to time. That's one complaint I've heard before, is that once a player gets their ideal kit together they really have no other coded use for their extra earnings. Kudos to players who can find reason to spend their coin instead of hoarding it. So they bought a cask of wine, in doing so, they have created a plot with a wine-selling PC in addition to funelling out excess profits for a valid IC reasons.

And if Joe Dirt Grebber ever oversteps and takes to wearing silks and jewels? Well, I think we've seen that story play out before. If they're not HIGHLY important to the right people, they may find themselves relieved of their goods, potentially in a fatal manner. I'm not sure the economy is particularly broken, as it's up to the player to regulate their own earnings and  spending. The problem is any applied "fix" without proper forthought could break the economy in such a way as to make the game unplayable for some players, which, will not help retention.

The complaint seems to be that indies are amassing more coin than "wealthy" noble houses. This  may be true, but you also need to take into account that a noble's wealth, and that of their servants, is not purely reflected in "coin" form. Nobles can and often do purchase goods and services beyond the reach of what any indie could possibly aspire to, and that's not all, their house feeds them the GOOD stuff, no tough strips of meat for these bad boys. Full-time bodyguards at their beck and call (those MUST be costly), armies of slaves, and an unbelievable amount of status, power, and protections. Nothing Joe will ever touch in his short life with a one-hundred foot pole.

[Molten Heart]

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[Riev]

Its also difficult to put it in terms of "Nobles get better things" because honestly, they don't.

Metal is so rare that outside of that one Tuluki buying a silver ankle bell, its almost never seen and kill for 'just because'. Silks are arbitrary, and Nobles eating the "good food" doesn't affect me one bit. If my PC has to eat tough meat and dream of pies their whole life, Nobles eating flaming cheese tembos every day doesn't really affect me or the 10k coins in my bank. Salarr and Kadius DO have House-Only crafts, but as time goes on, staff and players alike don't know what these are, and that 5000 coin sword you like is sold to the Noble for 3000 but you both can have the same sword.

Slaves. Building. Protection. Its basically virtual protections that I have to enforce in my own mind, because I don't get to see it. There's a disparity in game between "This guy has 20,000 in the bank" and "In order to do the crew of slaves or get your own wagon you need 1,000,000 coins minimum".

It'd be cool if there were some mechanism we're merchant house people (Crafters/merchants) could stock their houses shops with their own wares and, if those items sold, receive a commission.

Agreed. Don't know how it'd work, but totally agreed.

[Armaddict]

Give noble food the values required to 'eat' it once and it will fill you instead of having to spam eat and I'd care about noble food.  XD

[WithSprinkles]

Protection can end up meaning something, but I suppose it's circumstantial. If you mostly depend on yourself to keep your hide intact, it's not really something you think about, but if you have minions to protect or if you can't really keep yourself or your business safe, it really comes into play.

Building projects don't often need sid so much as resources and connections, but you sometimes do need to pay base costs, in my experience. Then you just sometimes need sid to grease palms, especially when you get slammed with fines or unexpected expenses.

Slaves are just hugely expensive and the recent gladiators aside, who seem to have good staying power (unless they die in the arena), they seem to store too often to be a good investment.

I often wondered if I was doing well or poorly on my first merchant. I was in a house and after reading these boards, I always figured that I had less sid than any idie. At one point I had almost 100,000 sid in the bank and it wasn't through any special knowledge of the economy or from spam crafting. It was just through selling to the player base and doing the job over time. Then I got promoted to leadership and it was like there was a hole in my freakin' pocket. I funneled a lot back into the clan.

[Riev]

Oh, don't get me wrong. Aside from always having a "go" bag on my Byn Sergeants (maybe thats true, maybe its not come fite me), I usually funnel a lot back into the clan. Buying casks of booze, trying to convince a PC to do a sultry/sexy/stripper dance, paying to have an elf from the 'rinth brought in so we can throw rocks at it.... you know. BONDING.

[Cind]

It'd be cool if there were some mechanism where merchant house people (Crafters/merchants) could stock their houses shops with their own wares and, if those items sold, receive a commission.

Oh my god, I love this. I enjoy house crafters from time to time and this would be pretty good, especially since sometimes I just can't do human hours.

[Grapes]

I think the most interesting thing about this conversation is people claiming that somehow crafting things is like, OMG, WAY too much money, simulataneously there's anther thread about craft fails that mentions the actual IC logistics much better than I've seen them described here.

[Riev]

There are certain crafts that, depending on your location, will always be worthwhile. Even if you fail 3/4 times you make it, that one time will get you enough coin to cover the resources and half your month's rent.

Its not "OMG WAY" too much money, but being a 'full crafter' does come with a lot of ability to make coin off different items.

[Cind]

I don't think staff are going to do anything about the economy until they see the effects of the new guilds. Multicrafters that can greb without dying, and all that. People that want to buy the 'full package' of poisons, saps and picks all at once. That depends on when they are coming, though.

[AdamBlue]

Buff crafting in general. Have the 'skill level' of the maker determine the overall quality of the finished product, but put caps on the roll one makes based on their skill level, allowing even a novice crafter to make something very nice, if they're lucky.

Novice: the shoddy pair of leather gloves
Apprentice: the simple pair of leather gloves
Journeyman: The pair of leather gloves
Advanced: The polished pair of leather gloves
Master: The immaculate pair of leather gloves

Quality would add little bonuses that give people an edge. Weapons a bit sharper, armor a bit tougher, food a bit more filling, works a bit more refined. And on the other hand, someone who makes poorer quality stuff would sell for less as it would be less good, but perhaps it would be easier to sell or pass off to someone that would greedily take it.

A shoddy pair of leather gloves may not exactly sell for tons, but now someone in the 'rinth is happy to have a new pair of gloves without someone trying to fucking murder him for it that is almost as good as something he could pick up southside from salaar.

Meanwhile, you've got merchants trying to make the highest quality goods but need differentials and classes of armor so they can try and provide cheap, shitty armor to commoners and shiny, well-made armor to people who are willing to shill out a few more sids for higher quality stuff.

When crafting, by default, one would never be able to fuck up below their skill level, but as stated before, can make something above it.
So if a journeyman armorcrafter wanted to make some gloves, unless he failed and bungled the craft, he would get either regular gloves, or maybe he had a great day and rolled advanced and got some polished gloves, or maybe he was in the zone and they're absolutely immaculate.  There comes the money, and all of a sudden you've got some leather gloves that look good, feel good, hell, they probably smell good too, even for tanned leather.
But what if this journeyman crafter has some 'rinthi friends he wants to make some shitty gloves for? Then he could 'craft [novice] leather, 2.leather into gloves' to have an easier time making said gloves, and ensuring they come out shitty.

Of course, this would mean literally every single craftable item in the game would have to be changed, and current items that exist would never be better than 'journeyman' level unless they're super rare items that you'd probably ask staff to give a touch up.
It's just a pipe dream, really, I'm rambling.

[Synthesis]

I wonder if "minor advantages" are possible from a code perspective.

If all the dice rolling is done with straight integers on a typical D&D scale, probably not.

That is, if leather armor has a range of like 1-4 damage reduction, and it can only be set to an integer, going from 3 to 4 isn't a minor increase in quality...it's a 33% upgrade.

At any rate, I don't think anything over journeyman is necessary to achieve maximum functionality.  Advanced and master should be the realm of frippery, in terms of the final product.

[Synthesis]

RE: clans and vendors

I had a subclass weaponcrafter in Salarr a while back, and I was allowed to sell the weapons to the Salarr shop, as long as I delivered the coins to my family member boss, and then I'd get like a 30% commission or something.  I suppose the docs might've been made stricter since then, but I didn't see a problem with it.  The coins are staying in the family, and they're selling merchandise that they "bought" for 8% of the final sell price (as opposed to the stock 25% they offer any indie who shows up with a loot knife).

E.g. if I sold a 100 'sid knife to the shop, the shop would pay me 25 'sid, I'd turn that 25 over back to a different Salarri, and I'd get 8 'sid back.  1,250% markup isn't bad business at all for the House.  I didn't get rich off of it, but it was a fair supplement to the clan pay and my side gig.

[Cind]

I would like to see boot, glove and belt crafts for chalton hide in the more craft-heavy new guilds, a more common resource like that would have more people crafting it to make some money. It wouldn't make much, it would be one of those small jobs where people could both feed themselves and stay poor. This considering you could turn a few in somewhere every day for off-peakers, like in Storm. Fixing chalton goods would be more visible than fixing other things.