Economics and scarcity in Ryzom

[seawe]

Well looking at the current state of the markets EVERYTHING is scarce

User made craft/dig missions would help. But the economy in Ryzom needs a big shakeup! Loads of suggesstions have been made (by many including by myself) and its all known, but little has been done. In&Out Guild barter is good but needs to be built into the game mechanics somehow and leaves alot of non guild players out. Make use of the merchants!

Perhaps the new proffessions will help.

<rant on>
Main Points are: more storage space combined with exhorbitant prices on storage of large quantities of mats in market. Market should be for Market not storage.

Longer resale times with maybe replacement in a local inventory (if room) when time is up.

More access to highscale markets in the cities.
</rant off/>

[gcaldani]

My opinion is that the most scarce and needed is the storage as pointed by Seawe.

I think around storage we could add a lot of micro-management stuff, from:

1. small containers (in example, jewels box to sell a full set in one shot)
2. trunks, boxes, wardrobes into the apartments
3. warehouses spread all over Atys, accessible with a scenery object interaction (similar to the ring terminal) with rentable spaces, with price and accessibility based on your fame and/or rites/quests. This kind of storage, if placed also at tribes, could add more meanings to work for a specific tribe. Wooden cars rentable at one warehouse to move a big chunk of stuff to another warehouse. Wooden cars should be shared and do a trip at specific intervals. Warehouses could be personal or guild.
4. a second building into Outposts.

All this stuff should have reasonable costs, expecially the guild related storage.

Said that, other suggestions i've read sounds all good in some way or another.

[browserice]

How about creating a new profession : storage clerk/manager/owner ?

Someone who has access to a storage room in which people can pay a reasonable price to use his/her services ?

The price payed would be related to how much storage space to use.

Worst case scenario, storage clerk could be an NPC if a profession cannot be created.

If a profession can be created, then economic rules would have to be created so that storage prices are fare. Maybe include price fluctuation according to somekind of mainland market info ???

[seawe]

Well bartering may be active, but most markets I look at these days are empty, bare shelves, dust gathering. Most mats don't sell, most items don't sell, so yea scarcity on all sides of the market. I think it makes the game look bad if guilds only produce for inguild or barter use, markets should be used and thats where new players look first.

Lower population == less homins on to bother about obtaining things.

Longer resell times and player-made market orders should be the first bugs to fix to help kickstart some activity. I don't like the ingame forum enough to want to have to use that.

The tradeoff of time-and-effort for skill-tree-progression seems to be functioning fairly well;

I also liked this post from Arfindel on MMORPG design decisions that I find relevant to the economic view.
http://forums.ryzom.com/showthread.php?p=432167&postcount=8

Theres that new Monster Hunting game that makes you use all parts of what you kill or grow, and gives you bonuses, and home upgrades. Hunting and maybe digging could have more results or item requirements. Don't know, it seems alot of players burn through a game/skill and don't give the attention/output it should get/generate. Final takeaway for me is that results of actions are better if they keep you playing rather than attaining a lvl, and a market should contribute to that.