Economics

[Dwonga]

What's the plan for the game's economies?

I see that currently all items have a set value, but is that going to change in the future to go to a supply/demand system or is the game going to stay at a "These Merchants have an unlimited supply of these items and will always sell them at these prices" system?

I read the post on vendors (http://www.eldergame.com/2013/02/vendors/), but I feel the system that has been landed on misses a lot of the fun in having true game economies. Not only are you missing out on a gameplay style by leaving the NPC economics shallow (I realize that any player run economies will still be varied), but you're missing out on a way to make the world feel alive.

 

[Luka Melehan]

one of the neatest things about playing the PK shard in UO is the player based economy. Any chance we're heading towards something like that?

 

[Citan]

Not in the short term. I mean there's like three vendors that can buy weapons at decent prices right now My feeling is that players don't generally want to have to trek around the world to sell their loot all the time. I definitely don't. That said I would like to get some mechanics that moderately reward people who like to travel between areas and buy/sell. The trick is getting that mechanic to be 1) optional, 2) rewarding for the effort, and 3) not TOO rewarding so that it's the only "right" way to make money. So .. short answer is I can't promise anything, longer answer is that when the world is more fleshed out it'll be easier to see what sorts of mechanics might fit into play and add more depth.

 

[Luka Melehan]

so what is the current plan for making money? I am assuming the money in our pockets now is for testing purposes.

 

[Luka Melehan]

Player run vendors?

 

[Citan]

In the short term, NPC vendors that you are friends with will sell your items on consignment in their shop. Eventually there'll be more systems for letting players sell stuff, probably vendor bot type things, yeah.

 

[Luka Melehan]

I had a buff bot for awhile in AC2. It would take donations and in taking donations it was walked into the water and drowned on a regular basis hehe. I was thinking of the player run vendors we have in UO but now that I think about it, it was AC that had vendor bots I think. so we have a couple different models to talk about when the time comes.

 

[Citan]

Oh, I meant NPC-driven vendor-bots, too, not like AC1-style where the players themselves become the bots. I'm not a big fan of that, because it's boring for the vendor (who can't play while their shop is open!) and it wastes server capacity, too, since those players will just sit idle online 24/7. So I want everything to be via NPCs or in-game automatons of some sort.

 

[Luka Melehan]

Awesome. In UO we purchase a contract which hires a vendor to sell our goods. We can put this vendor in our player house or a player can rent space for others to put up a vendor in thier house.

On the PvP server, the PKs cannot purchase stuff from NPCs in town so they have to use player run vendors and hope they will offer what they need. This means tinkers have buyers for things as simple as crafting tools and folks can become resellers of reagents. On this server NPCs do not buy crafted goods at as good a rate as on other servers so its a better idea for them to sell to players. When the shard had a decent population, we had an amazing player based economy.