Bring back the Tria

[Zalya]

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.

[Illysia]

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.

[Chessire]

Well said, we need more mean larcenous scoundrels! 
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.

[Rigwyn]

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.

[tman]

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.

[Illysia]

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.

[Eatuck]

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

[Bonifarzia]

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.

[Eatuck]

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.

[Pakarro]

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
 

[LigH]

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...

[Bonifarzia]

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.

[Pakarro]

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

[LigH]

* LigH tries hard not to suggest a property tax...

 

Fortunately, there is no highspeed trading among NPC bankers yet in Yliakum. 

[tman]

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.