PlaneShift
Gameplay => Wish list => Topic started by: Zalya on March 21, 2013, 01:55:29 am
-
Alright, so we all know the tria still exists. Its a real thing in game. But currently it is next to worthless. The value of a tria is close to nothing. As of right now, people are handing out circles as if they where petty change. It is far from uncommon to have a couple million tria. The current in game economy not only allows that, it supports it. The original concept for the tria was to have it be a reasonable standard of coinage. Where it would only cost two for a mug of beer. As of right now it costs upwards of forty. That's a little ridiculous but bearable. The part that really irks me is the amount that it is being thrown around. Circles are not supposed to be the dollar coin for every day purchases. They are that big bill you are supposed to carry around for something special. It costs tens of thousands of tria to gain one level of training. That is nuts. What is also nuts is that pie sells for more than a circle now a days. I propose that we bring back the value of the tria, by lowering prices on everything, from training to food and beyond, and in turn lower the amount of money received.
This will allow for thieves and beggars not to get rich quick off of one person. Money should be harder to find. Its much more interesting when tria has a worth. Poor characters have motivation, rich characters want to stay rich, and middle class characters should try and do what ever they can to get a leg up on the next person. It is starting to become legitimately hard to play a character who is just scraping by. When every other person in the dome is a muti-millionaire, how are you supposed to get anything done? Money becomes worthless and RP around said money becomes stagnant. What I am asking is rather simple, and easy to put into play.
This idea also can apply to players. Haggle more, get a bang for your buck. Try and be a little more greedy, after all money is the root of all evil. And a little bit of evil in an other wise good person can be very interesting. Try getting your self into debt, or something close to it, and for Talad's sake don't tip so well! It sounds crazy, and a little mean, but that's what life is like. And those problems make for wonderful RP.
-
I both know you what you mean and fully agree but I think training is really the core of the problem. Until training gets scaled back, I don't think scaling back anywhere else will work. Maybe if a dev who knows what it would take to redo prices for training could comment, it would give a better idea of what could be done to scale back the inflation.
-
Well said, we need more mean larcenous scoundrels! :thumbup:
I believe there is already a plan on the gsoc projects of this year to create a dynamic economy that will dictate prices of every thing based on offer and demand. If someone appears for this task we might see a better economy soon. :)
-
Making a real economy is tricky. Even in today's heavily regulated real-world economies, exploitation occurs. I'm skeptical about an actual market driven economy working in PS without the need for hired people to sit there and regulate/police it, but who knows - maybe some one will figure out a way.
Regarding the discrepancy in tria, I get your point, Zalya. In the real world, when people have ample money, opportunities and resources, they can grow and thrive rapidly. When there are no free resources, we stagnate. This is just my opinion, but I think that if they scaled back the tria in such a way that it was earned very slowly, you would have people quibbling over small amounts like we do in the real world, but at the cost of stagnation. Personally, I would rather play a game in which I can thrive and make great progress. ( I want to be successful in-game so I can feel better about being a complete failure in real life o.o )
As for the role playing angle, you can always /tell the other person that giving you 1mm tria for a beer is out of character. When I played Sillamon ( a blind, poor beggar ), I used to just give all the money and stuff that people gave him to noobs. I needed him to remain poor and needy.
-
I see your point but I really don't see any solution to it. Decreasing prices and rewards across the board doesn't actually change anything. Sure everyone might have 100,000 tria instead of a million, but if everything is 10 times cheaper then you can still buy the same amount of stuff with it. The actual value of your money, in terms of purchasing power, hasn't changed.
The root of the problem is that there are no limited resources in PlaneShift. Economics is "the study of choices," or "how people choose to allocate finite resources." In PlaneShift there are no finite resources. Ores can be mined endlessly from the ground. Plants and animal parts can be gathered continuously. NPCs never run out of money to buy your items. The only finite resource is the player's time. As long as this is true there will always be people who just spend more time in the game, and get more money.
-
I would say that it is not just a matter of time and that you can work to limit the unlimited. Way back, when plat ore was 700 unsmelted, it really unbalanced the economy. It didn't take much time to get "way too much money" since a few ores could set you well past RP limits. However the devs did effectively limit the effect of platinum.
Now you don't see people crowding the plat mine like they used to and you don't even see people smelting platinum as much either. By scaling back on the price and putting the mine further out they were effectively able to curb that imbalance even though platinum is still available and relatively easy to get. Surely there are some such measures that can be applied to other places.
I really think that cutting the price of training and lowering the caps would do the most good, then you wouldn't need to have so much extra to be constantly pumped into the system. Although, a non necessary tria well might help. Not like training which is technically optional but still greatly affects gameplay and thus drives players to have to seek more rather than dump excess.
Maybe if the GMs and Dev(or maybe creative players) can offer community events that require donations and after players put their money into it. Things could be released. Maybe temporary winch access, or a merchant selling a new kind of item, special event connected items, or something a player could provide.
-
I agree with tman. The unlimited amount of resources do create an issue. The only way to decrease the amount of tria would be to make resources more scarce. I thought of an idea like with moving the Platinum mine as Illysia pointed out. The idea is to make it so you can't pick things up from the ground (gems, plants, fruits, roots, etc). The things on the ground would only show that you can harvest them there but you can't pick them up. Also, limit drops from NPCs and selling values for those drops. That would be a start. Just my two tria.
Modified: I was thinking of other ideas and a big one would be to either move the iron ore mines to more remote locations or make it harder to mine. This would have an immediate impact on the economy because a crafter wouldn't be able get resources as quickly. Although it would make mining (and harvesting from the first idea) even more of a grind which I don't think would make people happy.
My opinion about this idea is 2 posts below
-
Mhm, just read through this page and I have to agree with some points (e.g. Rigwyn, Illysia), while other suggestions really sound dangerous to me. Sure, the "economy" we have in game has always been far off the settings, but I think some of the rules adjustments that were done over the last years improved balance at least. Platinum mining was mentioned before, and it really was an issue that different ways to earn tria were greatly unbalanced, which makes a game very dull and boring seing everyone rush to do the same thing. So as earning tria is more balanced, it may be easier to find a way to make some fortune, which is okay. Whatever you suggest to lower player incomes or get tria back to setting, please think about resulting imbalance and boredom. Limiting player activity and fields of interest is not the best way to attract new players. For these reasons, the only suggestion that sounds somewhat reasonable to me is the softest one: To scale back all tria by a factor ten, i.e. have 3 tria per PP training cost, reduce all item prices and quest rewards by a factor of ten and wipe 90% of all player owned tria. But I do not really think the effort for doing that is worth it.
That is all, thanks for reading.
-
After reading Bonifarzia's post I realized I should have put my opinion instead of just how to reduce the tria in the economy. I do think that making items in the game more scarce is a hard thing to do at this point. Really all I could come up with is making it harder on a player which makes the game more of a grind which is not a good thing. I don't think there is really a perfect or even close to perfect solution to this. Definitely dealing with very large imbalances is needed but anything else seems to create more grinding.
-
I think the economy suffers from having no sink. We need an unlimited well (input) of ores, herbs, ..., and certainly need this to make an economic circle possible. What is not here, is a removal of goods at the top. We do not have unlimited growth, therefore, a perl-encrusted broadsword of Talads force has to break after a while, and a q300 chain armor must do the same, like everything else. Otherwise we have an incredible pileup of goods and tria. Making goods vanish (by ageing or making them by far less durable) maybe is not enough. Tria build up also, creating a natural inflation. So, we have to have a tax of some kind, which reduces the amount of tria we have, automatically.
Just my 2 cents. I'm not an economically highly educated person, but, to me, this seems to be the root of the problem.
Have fun!
-- And don't try to discuss this with Pakerl. She is absolutely ignorant about money and politics :)
-
The only bigger "money sink" is the hope for a guildhouse, which is ruined by guilds which were able to gather a magnitude of more money than your own, mysteriously...
-
I think the economy suffers from having no sink.
[...]
we have an incredible pileup of goods and tria.
The only bigger "money sink" is the hope for a guildhouse
Yeah, I have the impression that the only reason for nonsensically high auction prices is the idea of a tria sink. But actually, there is another obvious sink that may easily go unnoticed: Players simply leaving the game. Not every single item ever created or looted is passed on forever.
-
Yes, people leave, gh-s are bought. But still, the people who stay and already got a gh amass incredible amounts of circles, because there is no way to get rid of the tria. Like with the super-rich in real life :)
You can collect thingies, feed the poor, whatever you like. But nothing makes you loose whatever you got in a reasonable rate. E.g. if you would have to eat, consistently have to buy new stuff for your weapons and armor, some money would have to go out for that. If people starve,you will have to have a social system, or whatever you like.
As it is, once you are over the saddle point, rich guildies bought your guildhouse, you just collect tria. No way to loose them. This makes an economic cycle (or flow) basically impossible.
Just my 2 cents, but I am only a dumb little drifter :)
-
/me tries hard not to suggest a property tax...
:whistling:
Fortunately, there is no highspeed trading among NPC bankers yet in Yliakum. :devil:
-
Yeah I don't think limiting the amount of goods the players can collect is good. This just makes players spend more time "working" to get the same amount of goods back. I have enough work in real life, I don't want to spend more time mining/harvesting in game to pay for training or whatever.
I definitely agree with the money sink problem. Realistically a blacksmith wouldn't be able to just work endlessly amassing millions of tria. Why? Because in real life people have expenses. You have to buy food for yourself and your family. You have to pay taxes. You have to pay for a place to live. You have to purchase (or rent) and maintain your equipment. In PlaneShift, you don't have to pay for anything. You don't even have to eat.
I kind of like the idea of introducing new expenses or "money sinks." A while ago I talked about introducing hunger/starvation. I don't think dying of starvation will ever be a thing, but it would be cool if there was a "food meter" that would give you some little bonuses for being well-fed and some significant stat penalties or "hunger sickness" for not eating for a long time. And things like mining, smithing, fighting, etc. would cause the bar to decrease faster. Another possible expense is giving players the option to rent a bed from a tavern or inn before logging off, which would give them some "well rested" bonus when they log back in (could be a function of the amount of time they're offline to prevent people from signing out and in to get the bonus). Smiths/cooks/etc. could charge a small fee to let you use their equipment, but the fee could be avoided by doing a quick task or favor for them.
-
Personally, I really like that tria is not a huge worry in this game. Worrying over it is one less element to distract from RP which is far more enjoyable. The only time tria is a worry is when you start out playing, but then it's relatively common to get help from established players because again, tria is no worry to them, and being helped like that feels good and being made to feel good and seeing players willing to help out when you start makes you more likely to stay.
That's not to say that I don't feel there are imbalances that should be addressed in time, but I don't think making tria harder to get and adding potential for what could become a huge element of frustration is good either.
I really don't think PS should adopt the same sort of mentality as a lot of other games when it comes to this, but that's just my thought.
-
Especially newcomers get easily "sponsored". When a certain redhaired Ylian girl appeared in Hydlaa, one person offered her some free leather armor, freshly looted ... another crafter overheard that and immediately overtrumped this offer with a set of selfmade armor. ;D
-
Like I said earlier, the well needs to be less essential than training and gathering. Training caps increased, became a tria sink, and this just pushed people to spend more time making money to afford it which later means that skills and mobs had to produce more money so that the player can spend more time actually playing the game. That really made the overall problem worse in the long run.
However, I really like tman's idea of a sleep and being fed providing buffs but ignoring them isn't life threatening. stuff like that which introduces a new angle but can be ignored sounds much better. Not to mention it would give more use to items like beds and cooks.
After thought:
Oh, I also remembered. This function is kinda useless since it doesn't accrue interest but I've always used it to keep tria from burning a hole in my pocket. If you use [/bank personal] when you have a storage NPC selected, you can bring up a window for storing tria as well. I tend to put the excess there.
-
Another possible tria sink:
A Pterosaur station in the Eagle fortress.
-
Another possible tria sink:
A Pterosaur station in the Eagle fortress.
Please please please please please this.
-
If you want a sink, raise the cost of all merchandise and increase the payout for all jobs and loot on a regular basis. Do this enough and the 30million tria that your inactive players are hoarding will be barely enough to buy a beer. To get around the problem of astronomical prices, you just phase out the lower denominations of currency and stamp new denominations - ie. Square=2500t, Trapezoid=10,000t, Star=50,000t , Bling=100,000t, Blingbling=1,000,000t
-
This seems like the exact opposite of what the OP suggests. From what I can tell Zayla's post was about trying to put a stop to the inflation that makes current money denominations worthless. Plus it wouldn't stop people from storing money in the form of items and just selling them later at the inflated price.
-
Well, that's the thing about inflation, physical goods keep their value while money looses it. A chunk of gold is with a chunk of gold - regardless of what that translates to in tria. Yes, you can hold goods and sell them back later at inflated prices, but guess what? The prices aren't really inflated, money has simply lost its value. Replace the current coinage and you're back to paying a few physical coins for a drink :)
Seriously though, how many real life millionaires/billionaires do you think go around overpaying for things just because they can? I've worked for many millionaires and have found that most of them would do just the opposite. In fact, someone who is not wealthy or who has suddenly come into money( ie celebs, Mc hammer) is more likely to toss it around like its cursed. ( and eventually go broke). It's this poor man's mentality that keeps the poor where they are.
-
The prices aren't really inflated, money has simply lost its value.
This is exactly what "inflated prices" means.
-
True, I worded that very badly. They're inflated, because the currency is worth less than previously.
-
To get around the problem of astronomical prices, you just phase out the lower denominations of currency and stamp new denominations - ie. Square=2500t, Trapezoid=10,000t, Star=50,000t , Bling=100,000t, Blingbling=1,000,000t
That reminds me of galactic currencies for hitchhikers (http://hitchhikers.wikia.com/wiki/Universe#Monetary_units):
... and the Triganic Pu has its own very special problems. Its exchange rate of eight Ningis to one Pu is simple enough, but since a Ningi is a triangular rubber coin six thousand eight hundred miles along each side, no one has ever collected enough to own one Pu. Ningis are not negotiable currency, because the Galactibanks refuse to deal in fiddling small change.
Funny side note: The german translation is overly specific; its autor possibly misunderstood this sentence so that "no one has ever collected enough Ningis to own one Pu"; but I believe instead that Douglas Adams meant "no one has ever collected enough rubber to own one Pu".
-
I both know you what you mean and fully agree but I think training is really the core of the problem. Until training gets scaled back, I don't think scaling back anywhere else will work. Maybe if a dev who knows what it would take to redo prices for training could comment, it would give a better idea of what could be done to scale back the inflation.
Most of the PS rules formulas are relative regarding the base price, basically it means that scaling all the prices by a factor of 10 won't unbalance the formula's factor. Regarding trainig a constant should probably be scaled to mantain the proportion.
A problem could be prices lower than 10 which cannot go below 1 tria, those could become unbalance if compared to other prices.
I can see the point of Zalya, it seems to me a task like that requires a lot of effort with not so many benefit, but it's only my personal point of view.
Regarding inflation and tria sink an option could be to ask for a "fee" to mantain the guildhouses acquired, but I'm not sure if that will be well received by many. (no need to say for RP-awarded GH will required to mantain RP not the trias).
-
This is my idiosyncratic, personal, five year view of tria... just one elf's opinion. :innocent:
Early days: Roled was broke, down and out. :( All his tria went for training step by step, inch by inch, in strength, endurance, intelligence, and rudimentary sword. One time Roled invited three lovely ladies to lunch at Kada Els :-* and didn't have the tria to buy even a beer for all three. So he left then and went running around delivering lunches to guards, like 4 times, each time running back into Kada Els with some excuse that Allelia was busy, or Jomed burned the pie, or something :-[ . Finally one of the women figured out I was broke (thaks Monala) and bought the table the round of beer. Except not RR 'cause he was running around. So after all that, RR had no drink, and maybe 50 tria to show for it. From this and other experiences of poverty, RR made his first real IG friends and RR's character, his ethics, his character backstory, and his view of the world deepened.. in other words, one of the first times RR ever role played. \\o//
Middle years 2 to 3.5 ish . RR found benefactors, or they found him (thanks Barike, thanks Dragonis). He joined a Guild, and was supported in training and had new clothes. He became friends, by association with his Guild leaders, with others who taught him alot. He got better at quests, better at running, (no mounts in game then) and only had to stop onece or twice on the hill up to the BD. Guild house auction were few and far between, so hardly anyone had a 'house'. The first guild house he had friends in was the DoX. Questing brought tria, tria brought slow slow slow advancement. Then a GM event with storytelling at Kada Els', RR told a story (part of an ongoing rped plot line, thanks Xaava, thanks Dragonis, thanks Barike) and Jayose awarded him 6,000 pp (yes!!!) and 20K tria (yes!!!) afterward for participating. OOC I still don't know what GM impersonated Jayose :love: but RR suddenly could train up his stats to max, and with that hunting became possible. Result: deeper rps, deeper friendships IG and more character depth of backstory as RR's generousity was kindled...
Now: year 4 -5 IG: RR hunts for tria and loot, and sells much of it. He is generous sometimes to a fault (especially with unsuspecting newer players who rp with him) giving away lots of tria and loot. He overpays crafters deliberately since he admires their perseverance :-X. He buys presents for people ;). He always brings a lot of food to events, weddings, and parties. He seldom carries a lot of tria on him, (robbers beware :devil: ) and as you know, his magick skills :sorcerer: are where he spends his dough. In other words, ig, even with inflation, he can now keep up with the Joneses.
I don't have an opinion of the absolute, comparative, or inflationary value of tria ig- but my opinion of having tria be perceived both as valuable AND as attainable with hard work, good luck, and the generosity of others, has been critical to RR's character ::| development. So its all relative, and its relatively important... methinks. X-/
-
/me blames this thread for a now reduced loot rate.
-
Wait really? Did they at least reduce prices to compensate?
-
No offence intended, but I would like to remind you guys/girls of something: PS is a game, not a RL simulation. We are here to have fun, not grind. We already do grind in our real lives. We should first look at the things that may unsettle the game balance IMO.
And I'd like to say that I don't agree with some of the ideas that if implemented, would cause people spend more time to achieve same amount of in-game-reward. Not that I'm saying those ideas are not realistic, or bad, but they are not appealing either. A person who sleeps 8 hours a day, and works 8 hours a day only has a mere 8 hours left to himself/herself. When we include the daily-activities such as dining, bathing etc. not much free time is left. Time may be the only limited source in Hydlaa, but it is also the most sensitive topic to be tampered with, IMO.
-
I don't think anyone's advocating making it harder to get money. Unless I misunderstood, the OP wants money cuts across the board (prices, quest rewards, and training). So it would take the same amount of time to level up and stuff, only the actual amount of money changing hands would be different.
But I do think the root of the inflation that caused the problem in the first place is the lack of money sinks. Money is added by NPCs constantly via quests and purchases, but money really only leaves the economy through training (which is why it's so expensive in the first place). If there were more optional money sinks like the pterosaur, then the inflation wouldn't be so bad and you wouldn't as likely run into the situation of GM auctions selling unique by ICly mundane items for millions of tria.
-
I was actually talking about "making resources more scarce", "reducing drop rates", "moving harvest zones to more remote locations", "prevent people harvesting stuff by just picking them from ground", "Add a hunger system, and raise hunger level faster if character is doing physical labour and also a hunger sickness"
These ideas, while providing some sort of remedy to the problem that Zalya had addressed, are also adding to the difficulty level of the game. They are all good ideas which add up to the realism of the game, but in the end, there are many players who dislike the "Hard" difficulty setting.
-
One little problem is that the system is balanced pretty well now. It would be a shame to see it all get scrapped because someone didn't want to be paid 20,000 circles by a player for a beer. It used to be a real bitch to make enough tria and progression points to make any progress in leveling a skill. If you wanted to be a competent healer or baker for example, you had to first go into the woods and slaughter the shit out of everything that moves, gut them, and sell their horns and innards in order to fund your training - which is kind of contradictory. At least now, you can train a skill and make enough revenue from your work to fund more training.
-
At least hunger and sickness can be prevented from being a burden by simply making it so that not taking care of the issue provides a low debuff and a reasonable buff for keeping it done. That should make it a part of the gameplay without being cumbersome. After all, you can get debuffed for being sick already and it's not too bad.
However, it is not so much balanced now as comparable off the scale which helps but at this point training needs to scale back. Either the amount of training you need to do needs to be cut back or the cost needs to be cut back. Then the tria getting pumped into the system can be cut back as well. It's not like the other buyable items are so high priced that a slight cutting back will hurt you. One hour of PLing a skill can set you up pretty good for non training and and weapon/armor repair/replacing related stuff.
-
I want to point out that - as I think I said in my previous post on the topic - shortening income cannot solve the problem.There is only one possibility to sink money: guild houses. Which is not a permanent thing. Or quitting players. But players who stay and are in a guild with a house just accumulate wealth, maybe spread it a bit, but from game mechanics they have no other choice than to accumulate. Dumping the tria on a bank and let them rot there is a possibility, but not very ic-ly....
So, once more, shortening income will hit beginners, but does not solve the problem in the long run.
As always, just my 2 tria, ...
-
I was actually talking about "making resources more scarce", "reducing drop rates", "moving harvest zones to more remote locations", "prevent people harvesting stuff by just picking them from ground", "Add a hunger system, and raise hunger level faster if character is doing physical labour and also a hunger sickness"
I would like to point out a few decisions the devs team has already discussed about:
- "making resources more scarce", "reducing drop rates", "moving harvest zones to more remote locations": we have no plans for that and mineable and harvestable zones are present in every map, should we move some harvestable zones it will be done to better fit settings needs or to fix bugs not to make peoples life harder
- "prevent people harvesting stuff by just picking them from ground": some respawn rates for plants are admittedly too fast, should we tweak it a bit is only to better balance the system (remember, an out of balance factor may bring in issues that otherwise would not exist)
- "Add a hunger system, and raise hunger level faster if character is doing physical labour and also a hunger sickness": we already discussed this point and we don't want to introduce a hunger system that would penalize RPers and could be a potential trouble for everyone; we instead think food should give beneficial effects and we recently introduced a new system of buffs/debuffs for food. We also added the indigestion capabilities to add a gameplay element and balance the food buffs in the process. Physical work (crafting system) already drains the character stamina and food helps to restore it (as long as some potion and some spell) so there is already a synergy between work-food.
-
I would like to point out a few decisions the devs team has already discussed about:
- "making resources more scarce", "reducing drop rates", "moving harvest zones to more remote locations": we have no plans for that and mineable and harvestable zones are present in every map, should we move some harvestable zones it will be done to better fit settings needs or to fix bugs not to make peoples life harder
- "prevent people harvesting stuff by just picking them from ground": some respawn rates for plants are admittedly too fast, should we tweak it a bit is only to better balance the system (remember, an out of balance factor may bring in issues that otherwise would not exist)
- "Add a hunger system, and raise hunger level faster if character is doing physical labour and also a hunger sickness": we already discussed this point and we don't want to introduce a hunger system that would penalize RPers and could be a potential trouble for everyone; we instead think food should give beneficial effects and we recently introduced a new system of buffs/debuffs for food. We also added the indigestion capabilities to add a gameplay element and balance the food buffs in the process. Physical work (crafting system) already drains the character stamina and food helps to restore it (as long as some potion and some spell) so there is already a synergy between work-food.
The tweaks you've mentioned are indeed good and certainly does not impede players' fun at all. ^_^