On the Economy and other musings of a new player

[iwojimmy]

Playing as an Independent (not part of a Guild), and presumably for the smaller guilds as well, I had to make do with what I could purchase either from the NPC vendors, or from player crafters I had established relations with, and to get decent gear, i had to save and budget. 500K dappers would do for a set of jewelry, back when i was around level 100. Large guilds with their own crafters may make money irrelevant to their members, but is the problem there the economy, or the guild ?
NPC vendors need to buy player crafted items - because no player would.. the crap that is produced as people grind craft is unfit for Homin consumption, and we really dont need the shops clogged up with hundreds of q34 daggers of lightness etc, etc, etc..

I agree with Richky s comment about not assuming the players are the entirity of the economy, it would reduce world immersion to have the player item sales totally divorced from the NPC side of Atys.

So, I am not an economics student and I am satisfied with how the economic side of the game works. In fact, to me it isnt an issue.

and totally offtopic/derail..
Should Guilds have a membership cap ? Are a few large guilds going to overrun Atys and exclude smaller players from game content ??

[desertt]

and totally offtopic/derail..
Should Guilds have a membership cap ? Are a few large guilds going to overrun Atys and exclude smaller players from game content ??

how many people would be a big guild?

[turjake]

In Horizons the only way a player could get money from crafting is/was selling stuff to the other players, vendors just kept the stuff but didn't give the player any money from it. Brilliant idea realismwise, but in practice it meant that lower level players were unable to sell anything as higher level crafters could always do the same stuff cheaper. That's why IMNSHO the present idea implemented - part of dappers from vendor and the rest from buying player is quite ok. The actual amount of daps from the vendors might and should be tweaked, but I'd keep the basic system as it is.

The problem in a game like this is that if we want strict realism a shard can support only "top" N crafters. That makes any profession practically a hobby and one that doesn't in every case give the player money at all, unless you're at or near shard top thus limiting the options a player has. As for myself, I craft things because I have those crafts thought out as a part of my "character concept". I stopped subbing Horizons after a month being a non-profitable cripple funded by my then guild (and I was the second or third best in my craft at the shard...). If I couldn't from monetary etc. reasons follow a craft I wanted in Ryzom I probably would end my sub here as well.

[kgrieve]

Solution: When you go to a vendor the information should be stored on your local drive as an XML file.

I see the biggest problem as being a lack of financial information. If we could have some figures, such number of items for sale, average price, maximum price and minimum price then we could make pricing decisions. Those prices would be for the items currently shown in the materials window. They could be calculated locally.

The biggest help would be the ability to save the market information in an XML file on your computer. That information could be displayed through your browser, using XSL.
I am sure that there are enough programmers that could write a separate program to extract the information and display all the market conditions, trends, averages and so on. I think that would kick-start the whole market.

[ncrijns]

1.) There is nothing for sale in the market
2.) Nothing is for sale because we are afraid the enemy will purchase said goods
3.) The population is too low to sustain an economy
4.) The user interface is bulky when it comes to trade
5.) Dappers have no value
6.) The game only allows for buying and not ordering. Or the trade mechanism is only one way and not both ways.
7.) People give away high value items to newbies and they never learn the “true value” of items.
8.) People give away high value items in general, thus negating the need for trade.

Going to provide some comment, point by point, if you don't mind.
1.) This is not entirely correct. A better description would be, there is nothing for sale at lower then Q100. And not as much for between Q 100 and Q150.
The why to this is quite easy, the lower levels go quite quick and selling lower level items.. Q 50 against Q150, or even Q100.. just is far less profitable. Second the levelling rate at lower levels is fast so the average guy buys lower then Q50 sets, once, maybe twice, same for Q50 - Q100, and then is on Q150. From the crafters point of view it's plainly much more profitable to grind to Q150 and then start selling.

2.) Erm, Well, if you say so.... There are some people that stop selling over the market I suppose, but this generally goesfor the top gear. The stuff that goes for more then 10 million anyway. Choice gear goes over market channels normally. Sometimes excellent. Finding Supreme gear is rare and are normally amps or degraded Supremes.

3.) No? What people just don't know is who crafts what.

4.) YES! Give the option to sell multiple different things at once. Or buy multiple different things at once. That be nice, thank you!

5.) Indeed. But, the players decide if something is worth the price. For example a choice sword going at 300% noone will buy, an excellent when someone want to spend the cash and a supreme is gone as soon as someone discovers it.

6.) Ordering goes directly to players. However, some sort of order board at the market would be great for people to asses what is wanted and what will sell. There is no point is putting things up for sale when you know it's not going to sell. Right now, whenever you put things up for sale it's always a gamble if it actually is sold to a player.

7.) I like giving away things, so there. This again goes to the 'nothing for sale at low levels'. When there is nothing for sale, a newbie asks for it. The normal responds would be then 'Search the market' or 'Sure, so much dapper' or 'Sure, I can make that for you'.

8.) Only goes up for friends and guilds. The items of high value that get sold go for loads. See the bazaar.

I'd like to add one thing to the thoughts and comments.
At the moment as I see it there are 2 different currencies in Ryzom. These are obviously the dappers, but also mats. For crafters the latter have a far greater value any amount of dappers.
1 Q250 mat can go for around 7000 dappers. Again the why is simple, demand. Mats crafters can turn into items and thus experience. Then sell the items for.. dapper. A forager never needs any dappers because he/she can supply a crafter directly with mats in exchange for items.
The only guys that need dappers to pay for things are the fighters/mages. They can kill mobs for mats, but this is a far less efficient way, and the mats are always basic or fine (a few exceptions there are, true). So anyone who wants items, goes foraging. Once foraging, they go crafting. Once crafting, they can make things themselves. Soooo no need to buy certain stuff.

[andypur1]

I think this statement is mistaken. There is a competitive market place for Raw Materials. It just so happens that the demand is much much much higher than the supply. The fact that you would choose to sell to a proxy(the vendor) and have your profits cut is a decision you make. People will pay 5,000 6,000 even 9,000 or 10,000 per material.

Noin.

The biggest problem I find when shopping for grind mats is the homins who use the vendors for long term storage. Maybe oneday, when Zok has accumulated many dappers, I'll buy some supreme q250 amber and ransom it back to the 'owner'.

I think that to be more realistic, there ought to be a buy back fee that is more than the NPC merchant paid you for the items in the first place. Maybe 50% of the player mark-up Call it a storage fee.

At the moment (q160 jewels but most branches lvl 104) I'm quite willing to pay upto about 2.5k per mat (up to q200) and maybe a bit more, but I rarely see bulk quantities in the shops. (Of course, last night was an exception, with 250+ q150 choice desert amber which I snapped straight up )

[totnkopf]

1.) There is nothing for sale in the market
2.) Nothing is for sale because we are afraid the enemy will purchase said goods
3.) The population is too low to sustain an economy
4.) The user interface is bulky when it comes to trade
5.) Dappers have no value
6.) The game only allows for buying and not ordering. Or the trade mechanism is only one way and not both ways.
7.) People give away high value items to newbies and they never learn the “true value” of items.
8.) People give away high value items in general, thus negating the need for trade.

1. Not true at all. There is quite the market for all goods. Take the Dyron market for example. There is LA of all Qs on there, weapons of all qualities and grades. I, myself, have sets of Heavy Armor for sale there.

2. I don't care if enemy, friend or neutral buys my goods. In the end, I make the profit and the items sold will only last for so long before they will need to be replaced.

3. This one is sort of in the middle. There is a growing population so there will be an increased market in the future. However, there are some things that are hard to find even now and there is a great market for. Amps for example.

4. Agreed. I'd love to see it overhauled to include what continent items are in and be able to filter my sale items. Also a sell all button or allowing drag/drop would help a ton too.

5. I'd say to some extent they do. If I said "I've got a supreme set of heavy armor, but it'll cost you 220 million dappers" what would you say? Probably something along the lines of "wow, thats expensive". If they had no value, then an amount like that wouldn't matter. Also, considering I probably spend between 1-2 million each day on buying grind mats off the merchant, dappers do have some value to me.

6. I'd suggest checking out the Bazaar section of the forum. Tends to be where people place their want ads. It would be nice to have something similar in game, but I wonder then how many would get answered as many crafters prefer to remain anonymous.

7. This was a lot worse once upon a time. There used to be no limit on the Q of LA and jewels a player could wear. In other words, a level 5 player could be weaing q250 light armor with q250 jewels. This has since been limited to +25 off the chars higest level (so the level 5 player is limited to q30 jewels/LA or lower). I would expect a guildie to help another, so if a new person turns up in guild, I don't expect them to have to go out and scrounge the markets for items to buy, especially when we've got a master jeweler in guild.

8. Such as? I make heavy armor and dabble in various other crafts. It has been a long time since I've given a set of HA away. Its taken me a long time to grind up that craft skill and I feel that its something that is of value to people. Therefore, I only trade sets for grind mats or dappers (and on a side note about grind mats. These are often assigned a dapper equivalent, giving value to both the mats and dappers). I may make the occaisonal sub q100 sword for some people because I'm bored or just in the right place at the right time. That doesn't mean that I go about raining them down on new players. There is also 4 different starter cities and we'd have to assume that in each one there were a couple people that were going out of their way to make the new players some of the best equiped.

[totnkopf]

The biggest problem I find when shopping for grind mats is the homins who use the vendors for long term storage. Maybe oneday, when Zok has accumulated many dappers, I'll buy some supreme q250 amber and ransom it back to the 'owner'.

Easiest way around this is using filiters. Set the amount of something like 6000 and you'll never even see the stored mats.

[kyesmith]

The real issue is that no wants average equipment, if there was a Q250 axe with 20 hits per min at vendors it wouldnt sell, and theres not enough supreme materials lying around just to whack on 20 different supreme weapons at different Qs incase someone wants it, ryzom is much more about who you know and you ask people for specifically what you want....
my thoughts on the empty vendors

[hans1976]

My thoughts:
On the no-dapper-from-npc is that I would like to know what another source of dappers could be? Dappers cannot be foraged and mobs dont drop dappers either. It maybe nice from a micro economic view, but macro economic it is taking away the only source of dappers one has. And dont start about missions, dont know about you but I never ever had a positive cashflow on missions.
A lot *less* dappers would be okee, but that will only make stuff less expensive in numbers, the relative price would stay the same.

Why not sell to the open merchant market? Because the population of Atys is spoiled. If it doesnt say "Excellent" or "Supreme" people dont buy it. So why bother? Crafting a good set of heavy armor is a lot of work, finding it doesnt sell because:
- ignorant consumers only want stuff with the Ex/Sup labels and dont look at stats.
- A very good set doesnt need to be replaced soon. I used a supreme ql140 set for ages (7 RL months) and is now in use by a guildie. Supreme mats give a very high durability, so no need for replacement anyway.
- Not everyone has access to the markets you sell at
- A good item can be passed on many times, every time it is passed on, it kills a possible selling opportunity.

So my thoughts to keep the dapper flowing around more is:
- Make items have either a lower durability or let them wear off much faster. (some people will flame me for this, they are obvious on the buying end of the deal) This will make the demand for items higher and thus the option for less expensive but good choice valid too.
- Make items Soulbound. I hate this one, but it makes a lot of sense from an economic point of view. It will greatly increase demand and by that will make people buy more of the normal stuff, thus making it more interesting to actually sell the normal stuff.
- Selling to merchant will give you about a fifth to an eighth of the dappers it gives you now.

Concluding: The economy has a low amount of items offered because of spoiled customers, little need to buy anyway and small monetairy difference between NPC or player selling. Change any two of these three and the sales through merchant will go up.

Now the next question is: Is the effort of implementing the changes worth the result of whining players?