Life is Feudal Official Forum

[Stormsblade]

Food is going to be consumed regularly.
People will always need more food, especially high quality food.

But right now, the only way leather, iron, etc "leave the economy" is via a very slow process of decay.

If we want there to be trade caravans as a regular occurrence, there is going to be a constant demand for those trade caravans. There will only be a constant demand for trade caravans, if there is a constant demand for valuable goods.

How do the devs hope to address creating demand in an economy? How will the devs ensure that items leave the economy quick enough (drain from the economy/are consumed) that people will still need new ones?

[Tymefor]

cant really see big drops in demand for anything that's used in construction. PVE players are always going to be building something. Leather may see a drop in demand once a server has ALOT of armour floating around and the changes to coop breeding will perhaps mean more available leather. But even then I doubt that would ever really drop-off due to player attrition.

so not really sure what your asking about???

[Tonto]

He's talking about item decay. It's an economic principle that consumption drives production (half the economists lol). I tend to agree with this subject. The other being if you build it they will come.

I believe the DEV team already controls the faucet of content. Therefore, they are controlling any innovation. Thus, with PVE players constantly building (constant supply), the Demand side of the equation needs to be addressed.

To increase demand, you could have things fall apart faster so that you need to consume more goods. I don't think it is absolutely necessary at this point in the game to teeter with this. I think we need to play the game out as an MMO to truly appreciate the impact of decay.

HOWEVER

To hold things constant, this is a game economy. That means the most valuable currency is time. How much time spent on making a good? How long will they value that good? There is some value out there that intersects at the most optimal level.

I think decay of a good should take as much time as the production of the good. That way, there will never be a major surplus or shortage because it meets market equilibrium. It'll take an analysis utilizing statistics such as averages, p and r values of resources, and time regression analysis of every good to properly figure this out.

I think it is entirely possible for the DEV team to create this formula. Or hey, utilize this great community.

[Tymefor]

good god lol. I SERIOUSLY hope that's not the way decay will work lol. Especially Not repair/maintaince taking anything even close to the time it takes to build lol. Or it even taking items....

Imagine a week by a clan spent building a fort.....guess what guys youll have to keep up this amount of effort FOREVER!!! forget trying to level swords or actually raiding. nope is an endless grind of repair

Repair/maintainance should probably just be an action performed on a building or item. The building/item could have a percentage broken/damaged that slowly "decays" unless repaired by relevant skill.

the economic principle of item decay applies due to the fact items CONSUMED in building cannot be re-used. Demand for those item continues because a PVE player base is ALWAYS going to be planning the next big project lol.

I doubt a surplus is ever realistic, unless through a broken mechanic (moose heads lol and infinite tile mine), or an over-tuned production change (breeding in coops).

[Stormsblade]

A surplus shouldn't be viewed as just something that will be realistic.

I think that it is almost so assured it will be inevitable.
Why?
People are going to produce items to increase their skills.
Lots of them.

Therefore, item value will be less than the base materials used to make them.

There will be a large surplus of the finished items, then, and no real demand for them.

[Tymefor]

A surplus shouldn't be viewed as just something that will be realistic.

I think that it is almost so assured it will be inevitable.
Why?
People are going to produce items to increase their skills.
Lots of them.

"weapon and other items durability will be balanced later"

but you knew this already.

[Stormsblade]

A surplus shouldn't be viewed as just something that will be realistic.

I think that it is almost so assured it will be inevitable.
Why?
People are going to produce items to increase their skills.
Lots of them.

"weapon and other items durability will be balanced later"

but you knew this already.

Of course.

But they would need to break very, very, quickly if durability loss is going to be the only form of item drain.

Without demand, there is no economy.

I think its proper to be thinking about maintaining a sustainable demand base, this early on, when they will be writing the core mechanics for the game.

[Centric]

What you're not accounting for is a large population and kingdom level warfare. We're not seeing a huge drain on the economy because we're limited to small scale servers that rarely reach peak capacity. Warfare and the associated training of warriors will drain equipment at an acceptable rate, and will create demand.

We also aren't seeing mineral wealth being depleted geographically. Once an established towns' mine runs dry, they will either have to a) starting trading with neighboring towns for minerals, or b) go to war with their neighbors for control of their minerals (see first point). Both of these will drive local economics, and potentially global economics, once clay-cuts and major mineral veins begin to deplete.

I think prematurely adjusting the decay rate (which is already noticeable and reasonable in any metal objects that see use), will ultimately cause issues.

We need to wait and see about collecting hard data, instead of pushing for changes based on speculation.

[Stormsblade]

It's better to overcompensate with decay and item drain than it is to undercompensate - You can always ease the drain later down the line.

As you said we really don't know at this point. But it is better to be safe than sorry.

[Thylbanus]

Without an outlet currently (i.e. PvE enemies or dangerous animals), the demand does fall off after a time due to lack of use. The PvP crowd is pretty much driving loss after all the structures are built. Since there is no siege warfare, the loss of buildings and structures is not a factor. There is SO much more than what we have now, it's too early to say one way or another what direction things are going. Considering what we have, I'm not concerned.

[First0f0ne]

At this point there are too many faucets and not enough drains on the economy.

In the future when Lif is an MMO, I think there needs to be a few systems to remove items from the game. You have to take items out of the world somehow and decay would have to be cranked pretty high to be able to keep up. I would recommend 3 things working togehter.

1. decay, as described

2. a 25% Item destruction on death. Number subject to balance, but the idea is that when killed by players or NPCs, your loot bag has 25% of the items destroyed. Or this idea could be tweaked to 50% worn items and 10% of backpack items destroyed to place more demand on weapon and armorsmiths.

3. building maintenance. Put decay timer on buildings and allow the most common ingredient required to build the structure to refresh the decay timer a small amount. This way costs of buildings are not a one and done, last forever sort of proposition. I wouldn't make this cost very high, but it should require some effort and a neglected ghost town village would disappear after some amount of time.

[Stormsblade]

At this point there are too many faucets and not enough drains on the economy.

In the future when Lif is an MMO, I think there needs to be a few systems to remove items from the game. You have to take items out of the world somehow and decay would have to be cranked pretty high to be able to keep up. I would recommend 3 things working togehter.

1. decay, as described

2. a 25% Item destruction on death. Number subject to balance, but the idea is that when killed by players or NPCs, your loot bag has 25% of the items destroyed. Or this idea could be tweaked to 50% worn items and 10% of backpack items destroyed to place more demand on weapon and armorsmiths.

3. building maintenance. Put decay timer on buildings and allow the most common ingredient required to build the structure to refresh the decay timer a small amount. This way costs of buildings are not a one and done, last forever sort of proposition. I wouldn't make this cost very high, but it should require some effort and a neglected ghost town village would disappear after some amount of time.

Something along these lines, I agree with, even if not exactly this. Building decay would have to be very minimal, but definitely a destruction on death mechanic.

Its possible that buildings would need to be maintained to keep them above 25% durability, but would not otherwise go under that unless someone bashed them down.

[Centric]

1. Decay through use as it is already implemented, not decay over time. There are still functional examples of period pieces in museums that you could use today. It's all about how much care was taken in maintenance.

2. Having any percentage of your items magically poof out of existence would be a major pain in the ass. This would be annoying to both owner and victor in a fight. Imagine going through the trouble of killing a worthy opponent only to have that nice looking sword vanish. Dying early on to a random beast encounter would also be frustrating. Bad idea all around.

3. No. It's enough of a time sink to put up and manage a village without having to go around and rub mud or nails on the walls to stop them from eroding. Property maintenance and upkeep is necessary in real life but is something you do a few times a year. Also, your home usually isn't in danger of falling down if you don't clean the gutters.

[Ajaxx84]

I think a lot of people seem to forget this is an alpha still. This isn't "we are playing the game and it isn't balanced" it is "we are testing the game to allow the devs to make it more stable and balanced over the next year for the mmo".

I feel not enough people are in the mindset that LIF:Yo is, in all reality, a bug finding platform and a "buy-in" to the alpha/beta of LIF:MMO.

Subjects like this really shouldn't even be being discussed for another 6-8 months after the devs have had time to fix server/client stability, implement all intended game mechanics, have time to spend doing balancing on said mechanics, then once they come back and say "LIF:Yo is where we want it" then we can start addressing concerns about balancing, how the economy will work, etc and they can take the last 4-6 months prior to their projected 3rd quarter 2015 release of the mmo to address our concerns and spend time fine tuning stuff in prep for the mmo.

With the complete lack of 50% (or more) of the gameplay mechanics implemented currently, and 50% of the ones implemented not functioning properly (come on now you going to tell me over 50% of the people on LIF:Yo servers didn't actively make use of the infinimoose bug?) it is way to early for us to try and make assessments of how the mmo will be in 1+ years time.

Give the devs time to handle issues that are pressing and lets worry about fine tuning later.

[Stormsblade]

I think a lot of people seem to forget this is an alpha still. This isn't "we are playing the game and it isn't balanced" it is "we are testing the game to allow the devs to make it more stable and balanced over the next year for the mmo".

And a lot of people forget that in the alpha, you are working on slowly implementing the games core mechanics, which makes it the best time to talk about those mechanics.

[Ajaxx84]

I think a lot of people seem to forget this is an alpha still. This isn't "we are playing the game and it isn't balanced" it is "we are testing the game to allow the devs to make it more stable and balanced over the next year for the mmo".

And a lot of people forget that in the alpha, you are working on slowly implementing the games core mechanics, which makes it the best time to talk about those mechanics.

Discussing changes to mechanics when we don't even have all the mechanics makes it moot. We don't have building decay, we don't have large scale battles, We don't have terrain/map differentials in resources, We don't have a ton of things. Hell simply the change made today with specialty buildings going from 100% quality increase to 20% is a huge deal. Once we actually have everything the way they ant things to be I feel we will be able to properly assess them.

All I am saying is we are trying to theorize and speculate with only a small portion of the details.

X + y + z = 84
x = 12

what is z?

you can't possibly answer that question cause you don't have enough information and that is what this thread is trying to do.

Once we have all the information (what y equals)

Trying to figure out z becomes way easier.

[Tymefor]

I think a lot of people seem to forget this is an alpha still. This isn't "we are playing the game and it isn't balanced" it is "we are testing the game to allow the devs to make it more stable and balanced over the next year for the mmo".

I feel not enough people are in the mindset that LIF:Yo is, in all reality, a bug finding platform and a "buy-in" to the alpha/beta of LIF:MMO.

Subjects like this really shouldn't even be being discussed for another 6-8 months after the devs have had time to fix server/client stability, implement all intended game mechanics, have time to spend doing balancing on said mechanics, then once they come back and say "LIF:Yo is where we want it" then we can start addressing concerns about balancing, how the economy will work, etc and they can take the last 4-6 months prior to their projected 3rd quarter 2015 release of the mmo to address our concerns and spend time fine tuning stuff in prep for the mmo.

With the complete lack of 50% (or more) of the gameplay mechanics implemented currently, and 50% of the ones implemented not functioning properly (come on now you going to tell me over 50% of the people on LIF:Yo servers didn't actively make use of the infinimoose bug?) it is way to early for us to try and make assessments of how the mmo will be in 1+ years time.

Give the devs time to handle issues that are pressing and lets worry about fine tuning later.

your never going to stop forum junkies from discussing content lol. These sort of discussions are ALSO a part of an alpha. the earlier they are discussed the better. As it could change the direction devs take when first balancing, making the whole process faster.

or it gets ignored, which is feedback in a way aswell.

so don't hate, or get annoyed with people discussing things that i'm sure they realise aren't even important yet.

Just like you've said we may be forgetting its alpha. I think you are forgetting that lively forum debate is FUN

[Stormsblade]

Discussing changes to mechanics when we don't even have all the mechanics makes it moot.

Really?

If you don't have a car yet, there is no point in discussing the new car you will be buying?

Through discussion, we can learn things from the developers, and perhaps they will read something they had not yet thought of.

People like you are very annoying, "Because I don't think its important means that you shouldn't talk about it."