by
Solon64
» 02 Nov 2014, 07:01
Obviously as things are still in alpha, there are MANY more things being worked on than an economy balance, but I do hope that the devs have a solid plan, going forward, as to how the economy of the game will work. This might end up being a long post, so bear with me. I'll throw a TL;DR at the end for you ADD folks.
A little basic economy 101 for people here, demand creates supply, and following from that, scarcity creates demand. Wood is going to be pretty darn valuable in a desert, for example, and good amounts of quality rock should be fairly difficult to obtain on a beach or in a forest, for example.
Quality is the key word here. Currently in the game, quality of products produced is based almost entirely on the skill level of the player collecting it: A tree gives you q100 saplings if you max out your forestry, for example, which then plants into a q100 tree, which can be cut down by a grandmaster lumberjack for q100 logs, which can be burned to make q100 charcoal, etc. Grandmaster farmers produce q100 crops, and so on.
This, unfortunately, means that the upper bar is maxed at q100, and when a player hits grandmaster in their chosen skill, they're just pumping out non-stop q100 stuff. Yes, the MMO version will have a skillgain rate of 1.0, not the fairly common 10.0 we see on most servers, but in the end, there's no reasonable limit; players will max out on q100 woodcutting and slam out nothing but q100 wood. Anything less than q100 wood will not only be less valuable, it will be precisely zero value. Absolutely no value at all. Why would I buy wood at q99 when I can find someone extremely easily and quickly that will give me q100, apart from simple time commitment.
The player base will very quickly max their skills, even at the slow skill rate, and from there the curve will turn into a cliff. Everything will be q100, the whole quality system will cease to be important from an economic standpoint. Everyone will have q100 tools, buildings, forges, weapons, armor, you name it, simply because it's easily and quickly available anywhere.
As for how this affects the economy, we have to ask the question: what is the main source of conflict in the human race, apart from humans being brutal, violent, power-hungry creatures? Resources. My neighbor has something that I don't, and I want it. If we want this game to be an entertaining, interactive, PVP-focused sort of medieval life simulator, we need to look at the resources, the base starting point of the whole system.
With q100 resources available everywhere with no challenge whatsoever, the game will trend towards small, isolated, COMPLETELY self-sufficient communities. Every village will have a few farmers providing endless q100 food to feed their smiths producing (nearly) endless q100 equipment. Any equipment less than q100 will be worthless junk not worth looking at other than perhaps melting it down to get some crap iron to train your skills up higher to produce more q100 stuff. The quality system does nothing to promote conquest, trade, PvP, nothing. It's just a number, it's either 100 or nothing.
Here then is my... I hesitate to call it simple, fix to what will quickly be a tremendous issue and leave the world, in the end, dead and uninteresting other than people who like to do nothing but run around and gank people: make quality of goods in a particular area vary.
Here is what I mean: one country/kingdom/village settles in a really nice, peaceful, secluded river valley. This river valley is lush, fertile, perfect for farming. However, this hypothetical river valley has two major issues: the fish there are not as plentiful nor as high quality, the trees don't grow as large or as vibrant, and there are few to no quality ore deposits. In game terms, crops grown in the area would be a base quality level of, say, 60, but trees will never be higher than 30 quality, ore deposits will never be higher than 20, fish will never be higher than 30 or 40 quality, etc. This valley is perfect for farming but little else.
Farmers would flock to this valley. Why wouldn't they? Wonderful crops with high yields. However, you wouldn't see too many woodcutters or miners, it's just not worth their time when there could be better pickings in the next valley over. Why would anyone settle there in the first place then, apart from the farming?
Because other regions have way, WAY crappier farming opportunities. The crops grown in other places would be crap quality because they'd never be higher than a certain limit. The food in this river valley is the entire reason it is important. This right here would be, in my opinion, a perfect reason to claim this valley. Various kingdoms/countries compete with each other in order to claim these wonderful crops. They use metal they get from other, more mineral-rich regions to make the arms and armor they need to hold this valley's food supplies. They bring in stone and wood from yet other regions to fortify the area, build a town, castle, what have you.
Now, this isn't to say that the farmers in the area do nothing but farm. There is still metal and wood and fish and such, but it isn't high enough quality for anything but the basics, nails, locks, simple low-quality tools, etc. The metal-rich region still has farms and fish, but only just enough for sustainability.
What happens is there is STRONG incentive for trade between the regions, if not outright conquest and exploitation. Players construct a road between the regions to facilitate this trade, merchants travel to and from both regions, collecting high-quality metal in the one region to sell in the farming river valley, where they purchase great amounts of high quality grain, vegetables, flax/cotton, etc. to take back to the metal region to sell there. Bandits realize this is a prosperous trade route and start haunting the roadway. The local leaders want to protect their supplies of metal/food and hire/equip soldiers and/or mercenaries to protect the caravans. A nearby kingdom wants to claim the river valley for its own, kick all the farmers out and install their own farmers. The kingdom that currently rules it wants to protect it and they form an army. A war starts, all over this one river valley, and solely because it provides a huge amount of quality food.
Where the game is at now, this war never starts. There is no trade, because why bother taking q80/90/100 metal to a region that can already get it on its own? Bandits probably show up anyway mostly because there will always be players who just want to screw other people over, but that's hardly what you'd call a war. The valley is left to its own devices, the players there make what they'd consider a good-looking village, and then.... what? They just stockpile amounts of grain that aren't needed anywhere else because everywhere else already has its own stockpiles of grain.
Scarcity. Scarcity is what promoted all this conflict and interactivity between areas, what made the game so engrossing. And this is just one river valley. On the other side of the map, a fishing village is constantly under siege from a neighboring kingdom. A mining boom town where gold has been discovered in quality and quantity is defended to the last from raiders looking to steal its wealth. A trading city is founded in a centralized area between several different regions where coin flows freely and people from all walks of life and many different countries/kingdoms intermingle. The capital city imports wheat to feed/breed the warhorses for which they quickly grow famous and use to control their lands, and they gather high quality iron and steel from the distant mountain town to outfit their army in the finest gear.
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TL;DR version
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So for those of you who skipped the wall of text (Wall of Text Crits for over 9000 damage! It's super effective!), here's your synopsis: the game's economy needs SCARCITY in order to last through the ages and promote conflict. Every region CANNOT produce high quality goods of every kind, as then there's no conflict other than just "coating the map in your color" which still means nothing in the end.
If the developers want an engrossing, intriguing economy from which to promote trade, player interaction, and combat, they MUST have different areas specialize in different types of resources. This is how it works in real life, and a point where I find that most MMOs miss out entirely. Look at EVE online: tritanium is everywhere, who cares what happens to tritanium, but look at Arklon, found only in nullsec, and where much of the competition used to happen, simply because it could only be found in that particular region. Quality adds even more depth to the matter, since EVE doesn't even have "quality" of goods.
From a programming standpoint, this shouldn't be all that complex. They can manually "paint" the gameworld with these different resource specializations, or simply write a quick algorithm to have the computer do it for them. Such an algorithm could even simulate some overlap between the regions, particularly because then it would feel a bit more natural than just "oh, this tile has high quality crops, but one tile over and my crops suck."
Now, obviously we don't know exactly where the devs plan to take things from here. It could be that in the future they have something similar to this planned already. But I do feel that this is something that a PvP game should consider very seriously. It gives a very very good reason to do that PvP, other than just running around like madmen butchering someone else merely because they're from "that other guild." Now, it's "that other guild has an extremely valuable region where the best horses in the world are found, let's take it so we can have their horses for ourselves. Sure, we used to buy their horses from them, but they gouged us so hard on the prices, it'd be easier to just take it from them."
*pauses to rest fingers and take a breath* Alright. Does anyone here have any opinions on this? Any pros I might have missed? Any glaring negatives? This is something that ought to be discussed with the hope that the devs see it and make a note or two.