Life is Feudal Official Forum

[MirakulixAndechs]

First of All, dear Developers: Thank you for you hard work, I believe, that we all are currently experiencing the birth of one of the greatest Games in History!

As I have read in several threads now, it seems that an In-game-currency system will be a thing sometime.

Hence I have some proposals for currency and general economics.

Please, dear admin, move this topic at your pleasure, if there already is one, which i have overlooked when searching.

Number 1, Prerequisites:
Only the great nations should be able to have their own currency. So i would suggest, that only the respective head of state may allow, that a mint is created on his claimed soil. This may happen only after his kingdom reaches a certain population, say, 150 players.

Number 2, Alloying and bad metals, fake gold etc.
In the middle ages, it was very common amongst the sovereigns of europe to mint their respective coins out of steadily worsening alloys of gold and silver, thus funding their deficit spending at the expense of inflation. Therefore, i propose that a Smelter of lvl. 90 or something should be able to to alloy metals in addition to vostascuss steel. Similarly should he be able to inspect ingots, bars and lumps of alloys for their qualitiy, which is, how much of the respective precious metal they contain.

Not precisely currency, but important: A Smelter of sufficient skill should be able to purify metal, thus improving its quality every time he does so.

Number 3, The Mint:
From these alloys, a Jeweller of lvl 100 should be able to mint coins, using high-end machinery, ideally a dedicated building, similar to the Blacksmith's shop, but much more expensive.

Number 4, Security and Design:
The respective Master of the Mint should be able to change the design of his coins. Concerning this, I recommend to your consideration that he may upload some vector graphics, .svg or .odg or something like that, which then render into the coins' design. Alternatively, you could provide some sort of ingame tool to design coins by combining pre-rendered symbols. Also, their should be different sizes, at least two, which require different amounts of metal, for example 4 lumps of alloy for the smaller one and a bar for the larger.

By the combination of these four, currency politics would become a very important part of politics, just like it was in the real dark ages and is up to the day.

Number 5: White-collar crime?:
Fuelling inflation and defrauding the public by worsening the money should lead to allignment losses. Additionally, i could imagine some serious riots, even a civil war. Should the King's (or whatever he will be called) allignment drop below, say, -59, his people should be able to have a revolution of some kind, leading to the loss of the throne.

I think, this might be enough for today, i would be pleased by feedback from all of you.

Sincerely, Mirakulix von Andechs

[Azzerhoden]

While all of this may be fun from a player to player trade perspective, it would be a pain to implement on the programming side, with very little benefit. Cold, Silver, and Copper coins are already in the game. They can be GM'd. They sit in your inventory like any other item (at least currently). Any other type of coin would have to be added to the game, and pushed out to every player's client. (Side note - this is what makes me wonder about the use of heraldry. In EvE new corp and alliance imagery was pushed to clients via periodic updates).

Secondly, how will this work with a Trading Post? It would only add even more complex programming.

Too much work without enough reward.

I have never been a fan of scamming or any other type of deceit in a game. If I want your stuff I am going to try to take it, up front and personal like. Well, personal to you, not to me.

[Tymefor]

what has currently been proposed and hinted at sounds fine to me so far. Im happy to wait and just test that first before making suggestions.

there is a lot of talk of minters and merchants and such. But really from a gameplay perspective we all need to be able to generate currency. we cant just lock currency generation into 1 class as its something we all need to be able to do, so as encourage a vibrant trade market.

keeping the currency uniform and its generation at tradeposts seems like a happy middle ground to me. I think you will be able to RP most of the ideas you have with riots and whatnot. I even think the idea they have of locking currency generation per sq km tile will be the cause of a lot of wars really. Some country building another rival tradepost on your countries tile and sapping the available currency pool would be a MAJOR cause for war.

You have to remember that there will be a lot of players that don't want to engage at the level you are thinking about. But the level they do engage at will contribute to the overall "realm" feeling the MMO could have. we cant make it to hard to them to engage in the trade and currency market.

[Falcion]

When I think about currency I think "named coins".
Meaning there might be simple gold, silver, copper coins. That we use to trade with the NPC if such a feature will be implemented in the final version.

But players with kingdoms might be able to make their own name for these coins and whenever any jeweler/blacksmith is making coins in the kingdom he makes them as such.

This would complicate economy little. A great alliance of kingdoms might make a similarly named currency witch would have a better value then a same metal coin from NPC or smaller kingdom.

Trade posts - you could just place the value in multiple currencies. Maybe make all the prices in your own kingdom currency only. Making it so that those who would come to buy from you would need to exchange their coins for the local currency.