Ryzom

From what I've gathered from many of the posts on these forums, and in-game experience, the game's economy is most certainly less than stable. While I grant that this might in part be a problem that is due to game balance issues between the advancement of different classes, there are certainly things that we as a community can do to aid this problem ourselves. The main problem that everyone seems to harp on is the inability of crafters to keep up with demands for gear, while harvesters surge ahead to better and better materials that the crafters can't utilize. Secondly, there is a definite price variance between regions, as, for example, q80 heavy armor goes for roughly 300k in Matis territory, while q100 heavy armor in Fyros land can be found for 200k on average.

The latter discovery (price variance between region) would be justified if resources were more scarce or harder to reach in the regions where prices were higher. Yet, in Matis territory, 3/4 of the q100 materials needed to craft the aforementioned armor can be found in close proximity at one location and generally far from mobs that aggro. The fourth is also abundant and can be located far from anything hostile. In essence, crafting q100 and below armor is neither complicated, overly time consuming, or dangerous. Between myself (a harvester) and a crafter partner, we can churn out 3-4 full sets of heavy armor in an hour or less. What takes time, is selling it.

At the time I am writing this we have six sets between us. That six sets includes the two sets that belong to ourselves-- we'd be willing to sell them if the first four sold and the we had a potential customer who didn't care about buying 268/271 hit point armor. But that's not ever really a problem. We can't get people to buy the first four. And yet there is constant talk about crafters being unable to keep up with the demands of melee characters.

I believe I have discovered the problem. That is not to say that the problem was difficult to find and that I should get a cookie for find it, but simply that I believe it is an issue that everyone knows in the back of their mind and should be brought to the general forum for discussion. The problem is thus: Guilds are unwilling to purchase items outside of their own crafters. I realize that this is a generalization prone to exception, but I know that most guilds look down on buying items out-of-guild when guild crafters could as readily make such items for the guild members without spending any dapper.

And yet- what gain is there in this? Consider the hypothetical: I broadcast that I am selling q80 Modi Heavy Armor, +240 Hit Points, Max Dodge, in Yrkanis (Matis capital). Generally, I expect to get a few tells from people whose Constitution scores are probably too low for the armor anyway, since when I tell them the price they seem surprised and tell me they can't afford that much. I'd like to think (maybe I'm wrong) that if you're high enough melee level to equip the given armor, then you ought to have quartered (or had the chance to quarter) enough resources to bring yourself close to being able to afford the armor-- or at least be able to go fight mobs long enough to quarter the resources to be able to afford it.

The inability of lower-level characters to afford the armor is not the problem. Rather, I know there are two or three characters out there that most certainly could use some new armor. They told their guild, and their guild crafters (being busy churning out higher level armors, like 100, 130, 150 etc) and guild harvesters (similarly concentrating on higher grade materials) haven't gotten around to concerning themselves with making this person's armor. I'm not saying they don't care about lower level characters, or that the character in question should not be responsible perhaps for learning to harvest his or herself and going out and doing some of the work instead of placing this burden on crafters and harvesters alone. I'm simply saying that the common solution to this problem in MMORPGs is that "Guild Gear" gets passed down from one tier of characters to the next, and the lower level characters are usually fine with hand-me-downs since they are free and better than what they would otherwise be using. In this game, due to the apparently rapid degradation of items, it is hard to pass one's armor to a lower level character after extended use since generally that armor will be rather worn out. And it almost certainly won't live long enough to be passed on a second time.

What I would suggest as a solution to this problem is that guilds not close their doors to buying from crafters out-of-guild, if such is currently their practice. If you are having problems supplying your guild members with armor, for what reason other than spite or greed would you shun the aid of outside crafters to alleviate the pressure of keeping up with your guilds melee characters?

Trade agreements between large guilds (regardless of race) need to be arranged if they are not already in place, open license to buy wares from out-of-guild crafters needs to be granted if the guilds crafters and harvesters cannot keep up with the guild's demand, and price universality between guilds, independent crafters, and races, needs to be addressed.

I don't know what exactly I'm expecting in response to this post. I suppose what would be helpful would be reactions from guild members about their individual economic situation and how well their guild keeps them supplied, from guild crafters and harvesters about how swamped or not they are, from guild leaders about their own guild's economic policies, and lastly, suggestions of general prices from crafters for items you sell, and how well you sell them (i.e. how much of a demand is there outside of guild?).

That's it. That's all I've got. Oh, and I'm sure if you want to reach me in-game ("Ashen") my crafter and I will still have a number of those q80 modi heavy armor sets with 240hp and max dodge if you're interested. Or if your guild wants to buy some off of us. I'm sure we could reach a deal if you want to buy them in bulk .

Yogurt.

Speaking from the Tryker perspective:
We cannot keep up with anything. The harvesters are decently high level and have the skills to harvest, but very few can survive the aggro mobs and get to the areas with mats of 50Q+. We have level 100+ fighters in Q50 gear. It isn't necessarily that our capacity is so low, it is that we cannot make the quality that is needed.

The few people who can make good high qual items, or forage for the mats have cornered the market and the extortion is amazing. We have to rely almost entirely on quartered mats to get higher than Q50 mats.

Our guild has been stuggling to supply it's crafters with high enough quality mats to get to a decent level in anything. I know some people in our guild who have made it to 70-100 in certain craft skills on 50Q mats alone (do you have any idea how much grinding that is?).

You said a lot of what i've been thinking and trying to put into words. Thanx!

A note on prices... we really do have a supply/demand/price model going in this game at the moment. Outside of the guilds, there are only a few crafters in Fyros that make heavy armor. They charge whatever they want, because the non-guilded fighters need the armor and will pay whatever it takes. I don't know how it goes in the other lands, but this is what I've observed in Fyros.

Very nice post. Well thought out. I myself am level 50 in melee and I have a set of 50 heavy armor and a set of 50 light armor. Last week I purchased a set of Q70 heavy armor I can't quite wear yet.
I advance fairly slowly, so I have no idea when I met hit level 70. It could take another month. You see, I like to try different things out. Play with magic, craft, harvest, etc. Unless I tear up my armor, I won't be needing a set of armor for quite awhile. (Hopefully)

I like to craft. I make pikes and mage amps. I don't really want to buy other people's weapons. I make my own for myself. I think there is quite a lot of this going on in game. Crafters like to make their own stuff. Because of this, there is a race to powercraft to get a "competative" advantage. However, people making their own stuff, aren't gonna buy stuff no matter how high other people make it, until they toss in the towell and give up crafting.

You also bring up guilds. I know of serveral large guilds who are very much homophobic. All mats go to the guild crafters who provide to all guild members. Two I know of, are filled with hard core power players. They make armor as good as, or better, than you make. These guilds don't need to go outside their ranks to fill equipment needs.
Thankfully, there are a lot of smaller and more relaxed guilds out there. They let their members buy stuff from whomever. There are a few trends I've noticed in my guild. Lots of mages who wear light armor. More fighters going to medium armor because of the penalties of heavy. I'm one of only a couple people who actually wear heavy armor. I also see naked people too. (With blind and stun who needs armor. It won't save you anyway, and there are uber healers that can heal your damage faster than you take it.)
You are correct however, in that I know a couple other crafters who make armor, and they probably don't have the skill you do, but because I know them I'll wait for them to get the skill, than buy from you. This is where the craft "grind" comes into play. Crafting and grinding become such tedious chores (like they did in DaoC) that most crafters just toss up their hands and quit. This leaves the market open to a few early crafters for a fair bit of time. However, once characters get rich and mats become readily available, you may see players in various guilds once again try to powercraft up to high ranks.

With high decay rates, the devs I think are trying to create more demand so that crafters will be able to make more goods rather than power craft like they do in other games. Right now that doesn't seem to be working. Crafters powercraft and only make a few items for sale because their still isn't enough player demand despite the cries otherwise. The higher level the crafter the more items that have to be made before they can advance to the next step of "in demand" items.

vanderpm wrote:Speaking from the Tryker perspective:
We cannot keep up with anything. The harvesters are decently high level and have the skills to harvest, but very few can survive the aggro mobs and get to the areas with mats of 50Q+. We have level 100+ fighters in Q50 gear. It isn't necessarily that our capacity is so low, it is that we cannot make the quality that is needed.

The few people who can make good high qual items, or forage for the mats have cornered the market and the extortion is amazing. We have to rely almost entirely on quartered mats to get higher than Q50 mats.

Our guild has been stuggling to supply it's crafters with high enough quality mats to get to a decent level in anything. I know some people in our guild who have made it to 70-100 in certain craft skills on 50Q mats alone (do you have any idea how much grinding that is?).

Amen to that. It took me 2 weeks of begging for armor and I finally got some. It cost me 500k and guess what? It is still below my level. I had to take it because my last armor set (which was half my level) fell off from decay. So at least this was better than nothing. My weapon is below my level and although I have a probable sourvce for that-they are probably leaving in disgust. They dont even log much anymore, they just wait for EQ2. Someone asked me about the stats on the best shield I could make and I had no idea because I can only grind ql 50 mats.

I am a tryker, I was fed up with the mats situation so I moved on to matis to join my guild. I have since then travelled to fyros and yes both races have it easy. I am able to make ql 80 tryker armor now, however the mats for the armor is still very difficult to get. The trek through lagoons is no easy task, the trek through winds of muse is difficult also. Some of the required armor mats are near or underneith really tough mobs and you have to wait to harvest them. Some are just not accessable at all. This makes it hard to even make a set of armor for myself much less other people and I've been struggling just to get by. For a while I even wore matis armor. I hope they even out the situation between the races so we all have a even field. You should not have to fight level 144+ monsters to get to q100 sources.

I still see other races in trykerland selling q90 armor for anywhere between 400-600k

septic01 wrote:I believe I have discovered the problem. That is not to say that the problem was difficult to find and that I should get a cookie for find it, but simply that I believe it is an issue that everyone knows in the back of their mind and should be brought to the general forum for discussion. The problem is thus: Guilds are unwilling to purchase items outside of their own crafters. I realize that this is a generalization prone to exception, but I know that most guilds look down on buying items out-of-guild when guild crafters could as readily make such items for the guild members without spending any dapper.

Telling a Fyros, a Tryker, or a Zoraï about the situation within the Verdant Heights as if that's an answer to the problems within those other areas doesn't work. The reason being that the challenges in each region are very different. How does the ease of Matis harvesting help the Trykers deal with the difficulty of harvesting their higher level mats? How does it help the Zoraï with levels that far outpace their crafters even when those crafters are fed all the high level mats to help boost their crafting?

The problem is not the demand for quantity as you assume (not for the Zoraï nor for the Trykers nor for the Fyros) but for level. The Trykers can churn out all the lvl50 items you want but gathering the mats for lvl50+ items is a DP fest let alone the time required. The Zoraï can craft mid-level items (lvl100+) but the crafters are fast being left behind by the lvl of the fighters and mages (lvl120+) and by the time the crafters can craft lvl150 items (full armor and weapons) the combat players will be pushing lvl200+.

The concept of the hunters and the harvesters supplying the crafters is one that I love but that concept in practice is not keeping up with the needs of the crafters' customers. Some have said that the answer is more hunting to increase the supply of mats to the crafters but, of course, more hunting increases the level of the hunters even faster which widens the gap between crafter and customer even further.

Possible solutions?

You say buy outside of the guild but when no crafter outside of the guild can even come close to the level I need and the guild crafter is only 20 levels behind what I need, why buy outside the guild?

More realistic solutions have to actually address the combat player/crafter/harvester dynamic.

Viable solutions in no particular order:

• Restore the full range of mat lvls to the raw mat vendors.
• Increase the number of mats a harvester can pull on each dig.
• Increase and/or balance the carnivore/herbivore drops.
• Drop the XP cap for combat players to 1k
• Possibly others

Restore the full range of mat lvls to the raw mat vendors.
The ONLY economic model ever tested during any beta phase included level 10 - 250 wondermats at NPC vendors. Nerf the stats on the mats to basic or worse levels. No one will want vendor mat gear (just like now) which keeps the demand on harvesters but doesn't require them to churn literally hundreds of thousands of mats as fast as possible leaving them no time for anything but harvesting. This also restores value to dapper because they can continue to be used for leveling crafting. For players above lvl100 or so dapper has no real value. Don't believe it? Just ask anyone with 3 packers, an apartment and 2 million dapper in his bag. If you know ANYONE that can craft lvl100+ items, you know someone that can do this without much effort. Dapper are so worthless above lvl100 that mats have become the currency of trade within guild Comitatus Praetorian.

Not entirely a complete solution as it does not address the Tryker difficulties which need to be improved regardless of how/if the combat/craft/harvest dynamic is ever reviewed.

Increase the number of mats a harvester can pull on each dig.
A good idea for those against bringing value back to dapper and/or NPC mats. Keeps the demand on harvesters very high but allows them to better be able to meet that demand. Really only a bandage unless done in conjunction with at least one of the changes below.

Increase and/or balance the carnivore/herbivore drops (both in quantity and quality).
Helps balance the load the harvesters are shouldering. Again, the only economic model tested included quality increases on quartered mats (lvl50+ was fine if I remember right, lvl100+ excellent and so forth). Named critters were not the only ones with good quality mats on them which made camping them a needless effort. Again, only a bandage if not done without either a harvest or combat XP change.

Drop the XP cap for combat players to 1k
Combat players are the driving force so slow them down. Just imagining the outrage over even just suggesting this as a possibility (I'm not recommending it!) is deafening. Doing this would help the slow craft grind keep up with the combat players but would still require non-stop harvesting and hunting to keep the crafters up to level.

Restore the full range of mat lvls to the raw mat vendors.
The ONLY economic model ever tested during any beta phase included level 10 - 250 wondermats at NPC vendors. Nerf the stats on the mats to basic or worse levels. No one will want vendor mat gear (just like now) which keeps the demand on harvesters but doesn't require them to churn literally hundreds of thousands of mats as fast as possible leaving them no time for anything but harvesting. This also restores value to dapper because they can continue to be used for leveling crafting. For players above lvl100 or so dapper has no real value. Don't believe it? Just ask anyone with 3 packers, an apartment and 2 million dapper in his bag. If you know ANYONE that can craft lvl100+ items, you know someone that can do this without much effort. Dapper are so worthless above lvl100 that mats have become the currency of trade within guild Comitatus Praetorian.

Not entirely a complete solution as it does not address the Tryker difficulties which need to be improved regardless of how/if the combat/craft/harvest dynamic is ever reviewed.


Just wanted to comment on this in particular, I hope this never happens. I was suprised they boosted the store bought mats even up to 50. For one thing, this really doesnt solve any problems. What it will do is produce level 250 crafters almost overnight (trust me, it will) because money, just like you said, is meaningless. And if you can buy up to 250 mats, you can easily powerlevel crafting up in a few days just buying store bought mats. Takes all the effort and challenge of getting crafting up high out of the game and instead turns it into a money farming fest which is incredibly easily to do.

Furthermore this doesnt make dapper useful, at least not long term. Dapper would still only be useful as long as they were not maxxed in their crafting. Once they were 250, they no longer have any need for it and you are back to square 1 with dappers being useless.

Additionaly the crafters will all outlevel their harvesters which wouldnt be good. I think the highest foragers are around 200ish and they most certainly took advantedge of the mat specs which no longer work so foraging is much slower experiance now. So whats the point of having a 250 crafter who powereleved overnight when everyone can only pull up q100-200.

The last thing I want to see is people sitting down in front of an NPC with 20 million dapper and becoming 250 overnight. This can already be done to 100 or near 100 as it is. Getting crafting above 100 is a challenge and should remain that way.

I agree with everything you said up until the last sentence. Everyone has been complaining about the grind for crafting. However after level 100+ its a grind to level fight as well. Its not just about lack of equipment, levels are just as hard to get for a fighter as it is for crafters. All those people you see who are much much further along in magic or fight have used various exploits to get there. I see people killing mobs with little or no risk using the loopholes in the system. Those handful of people are the ones that crafters can't keep up with atm. The rest of the NORMAL fighters are only about 10-20 levels ahead of the crafters and if they help out and pitch in on the harvesting, the crafters CAN catch up. Sure for armor it branches out to 6 skills at level 100+. However if you assign 6 fighter/harvesters to that crafter, he can easily get the mats he needs to grind. After that its just click... click.... click... click.....

korin77 wrote:I agree with everything you said up until the last sentence. Everyone has been complaining about the grind for crafting. However after level 100+ its a grind to level fight as well. Its not just about lack of equipment, levels are just as hard to get for a fighter as it is for crafters. All those people you see who are much much further along in magic or fight have used various exploits to get there. I see people killing mobs with little or no risk using the loopholes in the system. Those handful of people are the ones that crafters can't keep up with atm. The rest of the NORMAL fighters are only about 10-20 levels ahead of the crafters and if they help out and pitch in on the harvesting, the crafters CAN catch up. Sure for armor it branches out to 6 skills at level 100+. However if you assign 6 fighter/harvesters to that crafter, he can easily get the mats he needs to grind. After that its just click... click.... click... click.....

Honestly, I hope you are right. I don't believe you are but I sure hope you are.