Simple ideas to encourage a player driven economy

[hitancrias]

I?ve got two simple ideas to encourage a more player driven economy.

1) Don?t let NPC merchants buy back your old weapons.

I think it would support a more player driven economy if NPCs didn?t buy back weapons, armors and mining tools. That way people who like to sell those items are forced to find a player who wants to buy it. Normally this won?t be much of a problem since there are always new people who are in need of a cheap weapon. It would also encourage interaction between new and more experienced players.

NPC merchants should still buy your ores, rat hides and Tefusang teeth, as they have little or no use for other players.

An other option would be to lower the offered price by NPCs from 80% of the selling price, like it?s now, to something like 40%. That way traders would have a better margin.

2) Monthly changing shop supply of special items.

The fact that shops used to sell special rock picks and mugs, but don?t do that anymore gave me this idea. Why not make it policy that certain special items are not always on stock, but rotate periodical, like every month? It might have the effect that, once this is known among players, people might buy extra of those items to sell them later to other people who are in need them but can?t buy them because they aren?t in stock anymore. This idea may become obsolete once crafting is implemented, but I can imagine that not all of the special items can be created by players anyway.

[Kiva]

1) Another way to make this work, would be by having certain NPCs run a kind of \"antique shop\", kind of thing. Or simply by having the weapon/armor dealers have the lowprice corner, where people dump their broken weapons for a few coins, and if someone wishes to buy them, they won\'t need to pay more than a few coins. That also keeps the server from getting used as a giant trashbin, because there will never be as many new people, as there will be broken and damaged weapons.


2) Here, however, it is nice that we, for now, just let merchants buy up the worthless goodies that some monsters drop, however, eventually as more jobs are created, merchants could stop buying teeth and hides and the like, so players would have to sell those kind of things to jewellers and fur trappers. Who wouldn\'t want a tefusang-tooth necklace, or a rat hide skirt?

[Black_rose]

why not make it so shops can raise prices and lower them??? and also have a stock of like twenty thousand of every thing that gets replenished every two weeks?

[Merak]

When crafting will be available to make swords, shields and other first-aid (!) stuff, it would be interesting to create a penury for all NPC merchants: no more items to sell in all shops... During a month or two, to see what\'s happening...
In this situation, the prices will be automatically adapted to the offer and the demand: players won\'t sell any home-made item too cheap, and if they are too expensive, more players will try to be craftsmen...

For the previous mentionned ideas, I agree that it would be nice if NPC were buying only worthless objects, to enforce inter-players exchanges.

At last, it would be nice if craftsmanship could be learned only if we are an apprentice of a regular craftsman (like Harnquist for example), and these masters would accept only a limited number of apprentice (20, for ex.). It would prevent that everyone is level 1 in Mining, Forging, Swordmanship, Crystal Way and Fire Way !

If the apprentice is not regular enough, his boss and master will expel him and wait another apprentice to come.

[Aravi]

Limiting the number of apprentices will bite for players who want to pursue that career but miss it.

Really, Lvl 1 in a skill shouldn\'t make you sufficiently competent to make much out of it (this is already true of mining, it takes forever to mine gold with mining of only 1-2) - pushing your skills up from there requires an investment of time.

Arguably the way things are now, progression points/money will become easier to come by for higher level players who will likely proceed to level up other skills, but instead of artificially limiting who can ger access to some skills, it\'d make more sense to address it within the skill system: eg. slow down the gaining of progression points as players grow (The slowing shouldn\'t be that significant, just enough to ensure they have to be careful where they decide to spend those precious progression points) or maybe increase the pp costs for new skills based on the number of skills already learned.

Regarding inter-player exchange, You\'d need to not only prevent Player->NPC selling but NPC->Player buying to make it work (Far more convenient if you don\'t have to go looking for a merchant). I\'d also recommend having the skill of the craftsman affect the quality of the item (to encourage craftsmen to continue to develop their abilities beyond what they need). Really, this sort of economy stuff shouldn\'t be messed with until the game has a bit more content in it - there\'s not enough to support it yet.

[darkerdreams]

I definitely like the idea of supply and demand based pricing.  as a merchant gets flooded with items the price they\'re willing to pay (and that they charge for them) slides down.  the things they specialize in they\'re willing to pay more for and charge less for than he random items that someone has in their inventory.

[Zan]

I don\'t think we should prevent NPC\'s from buying back items just yet. If we do even money will start leaking out of the player pool and back into the NPC pool. However lowering the current 80% price NPC\'s give to used items to say 60% would encourage players to try and sell their items to other players a bit better.

[Merak]

Originally posted by Aravi
Limiting the number of apprentices will bite for players who want to pursue that career but miss it.

But this would be more realist, and can be done when there will more towns and NPC-craftsmen.

When you want to learn something, to improve in a specific field, you have to be a little perseverant and to go regularly to your master. It is unrealistic than someone, kill tefusang all the day, and once a month go to a mining or smithing evening class...

Current system is:
\"
Quite exhausted by a Tefusang-hunting afternoon and the evening spent in the tavern with his hunter pals, Bob staggers along Hyplaa graveyard when he sees a familiar shadow bowed over a hole...
..Bob: Howdy buddy ! Digging again for weird and mighty ingredients ol\' man ? I\'m happy to see ya there \'cause I wanted to learn a little bit more about Dark Crystal way (in order to kill Tefusang quicker)
..Levrus, in petto: Oh no ! Why such dilletantes are always dropping in on me like that... He\'s the hundredth since the sunset. I wish I could teatch them all in two lessons of 2 hours per day to get rid of them the rest of the time...
..Levrus, aloud: I do am so happy to see that young fellows are still eager to learn more about the ancestral magical techniques ! [he grabs a bit of chalk and start to scribble on a tomb...] First of all there\'s the Dark Crystal, and blablabla blabla...
\"

What it should be :
\"
..Levrus: Bob, useless rrat slayerr, you are not interested in ancestrral knowledge ! You\'ve spent more days in the taverrn than in my Magic Classes, and subscribed to them only to be able to thrrow firreballs and to amaze girrrls. Magic is deeperr than these frrivolous activities. Now I have several interested and harrd-worrking pupils, more regular than you could everrr be, especially the one keeping the shop since a month. So leave at once or I turn you into a schrrrimp !
\"

And so Bob leaves, and will try to subscribe again after a while, when the gramps will have forgotten about him...



The ideas of player driven economy and of training/learning are linked. Especially, as a part of their training, the master (NPC) could let his pupils (in limited number) to keep the shop, and the pupil could keep 10% of what he sells. The stock would be limited. And the pupil, while he waits for another customer, could do some crafting in the back of the shop to increase the stock...

[darkerdreams]

if you\'re going to limit training from NPCs then you need to allow PCs to train other PCs first- otherwise a lot of people are going to get frustrated that there\'s no redaly available training.
Personally, I think it\'s a Bad Idea(tm) to require PP, money, \"practical experience after training,\" and some other time requirement.
In real terms; if I\'m doing these lessons when it\'s convenient for this joe that has nothing better to do then spend all day standing in one place, what am I paying him for?  If he wants money why isn\'t he risking his neck killing rats and running errands?  further, if I wanted to play a character\'s every waking moment of life I\'d play Sims, or some other non-RPG non-adventure based game.
In playabilty terms; it\'s just a bad idea because it penalizes players for having the audacity to treat the game as a pastime instead of real life.

I\'m all for player based economies.  I think that there should be some solid and real economy limits on the amount of money and loot circulating (meaning NPCs not \"spontaneously generating\" and destroying cash and items that they get).  However, making it more difficult to learn skills seems like a bad way to approach that.

[Merak]

I agree that NPC-teatchers limitation and PC-teatching authorization should be implemented at the same time, because this will give a boost to teaching-based economy, and meanwhile PC-teatchers will be seeked by other players during periods where no NPC-teatcher will be available. But this wish list is to express wishes that (if they are interesting) devs can keep in mind not to be in a implementation dead-end afterwards. So even if this interests them, I doubt it will be available before 2006.

Originally posted by darkerdreams
Personally, I think it\'s a Bad Idea(tm) to require PP, money, \"practical experience after training,\" and some other time requirement.
In real terms; if I\'m doing these lessons when it\'s convenient for this joe that has nothing better to do then spend all day standing in one place, what am I paying him for?  If he wants money why isn\'t he risking his neck killing rats and running errands?

You are paying for theoretical knowledge you cannot learn by yourself (as to recognize raw iron ore from other rocks), and your teacher wants money because he isn\'t strong enough to get rat hides and tefusang\'s dentures, or he\'s pacifist, or all-day slaughtering is boring for him... Whatever may be, being a teatcher is his job.

But besides he has a life, and cannot give all-day long lessons to any asking wanderer. So a NPC-teatcher should  give lessons in three sessions (of two hours for example).
As PS\'s players are worldwide, the sessions should be placed in order to cover regularly real world\'s 24 hours, and other teacher for the same topic should be settled in other towns, with other timetables.

As PS wants to be a fun and realistic roleplay game, you cannot just level up by gaining experience points. It is possible in grandpa\'s Zelda because Link has no skill, but most paper or computer RPG allow the player upgrade skills separately, according to his own interests. Also this is unrealistic to upgrade quickly a skill by itself, or just with  money, or with only theoretical knowledge. (else you are in a Matrix/Shadowrun world where you just have to buy knowledge chips, then plug \'n play). Besides you don\'t really enjoy what you gained without sweating, so you will really enjoy being a duellist when you will have spent several weeks to train... So the purpose is not to make learning more difficult to artificially create tertiary sector economy, but to have a realistic and coherent skill system. Neither it is to recreate a realistic real world, else one PS-second would be 1-realWorld second, and you\'d be dead before the game over...

Originally posted by darkerdreams
In playabilty terms; it\'s just a bad idea because it penalizes players for having the audacity to treat the game as a pastime instead of real life.

PS is a past-time, and its realism won\'t penalize players: this will be its greatest quality. If I have only 15 minutes of spare time, I play Pac Man instead...

But, beside teacher\'s level and student\'s XP, the only realistic requirement to teach and learn is time. Money is a consequence.

[derwoodly]

I like the idea of training taking real world time, and costing in game money.  

But I don\'t want to be forced to stand in front of my computer the whole time.  I should be able to either log another character, or log off all together.  I have WoW has a feature that allows for some offline down time.

[Merak]

Originally posted by derwoodly
I like the idea of training taking real world time [...] but I don\'t want to be forced to stand in front of my computer the whole time.

In my view, training would be gaining theroretical knowledge by some actions in the game, perhaps (if someone has ideas) with some kind of mini-games. When theoretical knowledge is gathered, practical experience is still required to reach the next level. Reaching a level means that you are more skilled than before, and you have understood at the same time that you were missing some other knowledge to perfect your talent.

By mini-games, I have in the back of my head Yoda teatching the Force by telling to an upside-down Luke to make little stones levitate even if he does not understand the reason why.

In planeshift, this could be try to cook an omelette in limited time, after the cook has explained the recipe and without mistaking between the available ingredients and proportions. Or for swordmanship Lvl1, the master explains how to hold a sword, and the corresponding mini-game is to hold a sword correctly, when its weight is making it fall right or left, and makes you stumble... For level 2, the master explains how to hit a target and how to avoid a blow; for the mini-game, student-players with wooden excercice swords and grouped by two have to each one another 5 times, and to avoid 5 blows to succeed. If you fear some cheating, then replace the \'PC vs PC\' by a \'PC vs NPC\'... For level 3, it would be to use correctly a new learned technique against a NPC (so to hit 5 times the NPC with this technique), etc.

Of course, programming mini-games for theoretical lessons would be long, but the major difficulty is to have good and implementable ideas for these mini-games.

[Zan]

The way I see it training already takes real time ... for the skills that is.

Currently there are two things you need to do to level up a skill. Get theoretical knowledge from an NPC, which I suggest will not take up real time ... because ask yourselves, who thought school was fun? The second thing you need to do is get some practical experience by using the skill. This already takes up time.

Now I think that the problem lies in how those two things are balanced. I \'d rather see the second thing become more important than the first. So instead of paying several hundred trias and a bunch of PP\'s to get theoretical knowledge, why not decrease that ammount and instead make it take longer to actually level up through the practical experience.
Also use the same system for leveling up stats. At the moment you can only raise your strength by paying and using PP\'s. I think it would be better that we would only spend a few PP\'s at preparing a stat and then use that stat to level it up. For example to increase your charm you need to talk to NPC\'s and to increase your agility you need to run or jump. Endurance: carry heavy loads = mining, strength: fighting, ... and using the magic ways of course increases that stat the specific way is based on.

[Merak]

Originally posted by Zan
Get theoretical knowledge from an NPC, which I suggest will not take up real time ... because ask yourselves, who thought school was fun? [...]
So instead of paying several hundred trias and a bunch of PP\'s to get theoretical knowledge, why not decrease that ammount and instead make it take longer to actually level up through the practical experience.
Also use the same system for leveling up stats. At the moment you can only raise your strength by paying and using PP\'s. I think it would be better that we would only spend a few PP\'s at preparing a stat and then use that stat to level it up.[...]

To get theretical knowledge with fun, there could be some kind of theoretical speech of the (NPC) master, then some kind of verbal indications for the trial, and then the trial: for example, archery L1 theoretical knowledge could be to learn to stay calm and to aim a target, the associated trial being to shot a target 50 feet ahead. When this theoretical knowledge is learnt, practical experience should be to use the same interface until L1 is reached. Then this kind of thing would be automatically handled by the computer, as your character has assimilated it.

For Stats, I agree that the system should be different to be more realist, and the way you describe it (automatic progression when you use a corresponding skill) seems realistic. However, this should be done with a potential system as the one explained in http://planeshift.oodlz.com/wbboard/thread.php?threadid=15599&boardid=11&sid=507e3100b5469218c62b131dc2880671#1 (see also http://planeshift.oodlz.com/wbboard/thread.php?threadid=15599&boardid=11&sid=507e3100b5469218c62b131dc2880671#5)
in order to compensate the progression when using the skil, by a regression when it is not used. That should be fair.
Also, you should be able to increase faster these Stats with an adapted teacher: better strengh if a body-builder teatches you how to develop yourself, more charism from an actor, more endurance from a beggar, etc.

Ultimately, PC should also be able to teach one another (if they are very skilled in a field, and have also a good pedagogical skill), but one of the problem raised is that the implemented system must avoid to let a PC train his friends for nothing (see http://planeshift.oodlz.com/wbboard/thread.php?threadid=13701&boardid=11&sid=507e3100b5469218c62b131dc2880671).
For the moment, any NPC trains you for 42 trias, because NPCs do not need anything, are not passionated by what they are doing and are available 100% of the day. As human players play only several hours per day or per week, their time is precious. And in Real Life, teatching only needs time, money is a consequence. So if teatching would take a little more time and application from the master, PC-teatcher would be possible.