Well Ornies aren't 5 mil anymore...they've gone up but the cost is based varies a great deal by shard. A little looking around tells me that on Atlantic for example you can get one for as little as 9mil while on Lake Superior they are going as high as 45mil.
Thank you for this post, because it proves just how subjective a thing a "ruined economy" can be. Most people see 45m ornis, and decide it's evidence of a "ruined economy" because no one should have that much, let alone sell an item for that much, and this means inflation has ruined the economy.
That may be true, but it's very possible for a crafter to sell his wares in today's UO.
Ah, see, you were working when you should have been playing. That'll kill the fun every time.
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how many games have ornies? Not everything in a game is relevant to its economy. If your sole purpose in UO was to make profit, then yes this game would still be crap for you. There is still much PvP action in game altho it is as bad as Gothom city is corrupt. Everything else in the game is as is or as was.
But the process that a "crafter" has to go through to be able to produce an uber piece either equals buying a runic tool, or heartwood quest grinding, or bod buying selling grinding.
If this were a real-world economy, with no hand-of-god changing things dramatically over the last eleven years, I would agree with you. Capitalism doesn't mean everyone wins. Companies failing prove the market is working. No intervention. No bailouts. I'm with that. No problem.
Galen, the original poster's problem isn't deflation. He's claiming - with much hyperbole and undisguised elitism - that certain items aren't worth what they used to be worth, but deflation isn't the only possible cause of that. Especially when inflation is staring us in the face.
Of course. (Although I don't agree RL economies SHOULD have such interventions.) This is just a difference of degree. There's a big difference between meddling in a RL economy (eg: adjusting interest rates), and having complete control over the entire MMO economy (eg: controlling all of the faucets and sinks). Until the fed is actually paying us all to work, directly, like EA pays us to kill monsters, then they're not quite on the same playing field. And if our government were printing money nonstop without deleting old money and inflating our currency while not punishing counterfeiters, we'd be griping at them too.
I just can't agree with this. This is like saying, only rich people are capitalists, or only poor people are socialists. Fails the obvious tests of reality. My arguments have absolutely nothing to do with my own personal buying and selling, but rather with my twisted obsession with studying MMO economies. "Broken" in this case refers to the intent of the design utterly failing. UO's economy was designed to maintain a balance of inflow and outflow of gold, with crafting, decay/item loss, and so forth. Whether it was designed adequately is up for debate. But regardless of who's to blame, the economy envisioned by DD himself (and implemented in two MMOs), is utterly broken.
And when does it go down? Insurance?
This is not only a bad idea (price caps hurt markets, and cause supply to decrease artificially) but it won't work the way you're hoping, either. A working example: in Guild Wars, the most money a character can trade in one transaction is 100 platinum - the devs wanted a hard price cap on all items traded between players. You'd think that nothing would cost over 100 plat wouldn't you? But you'd be wrong. Instead, people look for other valuable items (ectos, rubies) and use those as additional currency to trades, so the devs' little trick didn't work at all.
Oh aren't you sweet! A quote comes to mind. A few weeks ago I was reading a biology blog, where they'd tangented off to economics (which is easily as silly as gamers discussing economics). An economist posted the following: "My whole life is a like physicist touring a Star Trek convention. I keep hearing conversations in which people seem to be talking about economics, but it bears no resemblance to the market as economists actually understand it." I feel this way quite a bit when UO spills over into my small niches of real-world expertise, and I do a lot of /facepalm.
That is a valid point. Here are some other ideas/adjustments that I'd like your opinion on.
When there was no insurance loss of items and loot was a curb to inflation. It needs to go if the game economy is ever to fully recover and become stable and reasonable again.
How about this they toss LRC out the window so Reagents become a serious commodity again and not something just a few carry. How about tripling the tithing cost of Pally spells.... Those are couple of things that would go much more far and be simpler to do if you wanted to help the economy.
Insurance can go or stay. It should be functioning on in lands that have law. But I would agree it should be scaled.
The free unregulated economy has had a technical rebound and has since corrected itself. We are proud to say that no one has ever needed to morgage their houses in our utopian world.
I thought about that as well.. However, the problem is, that punishes new players learning the game more than it punishes the vets. The vets can afford to die many times by that method, but for new players, it'd quickly drain their coffers.
Gold is endless, but that doesn't mean it needs to maintain it's influx.
yes, sir.
). So the important managing part is not to keep veterans, but to pull newcomers and make them stay long enough. Too long uo had its focus on veteran demands - look at the last expansion (Mondains Legacy), what was a complete and solely veteran orientated expansion.See thats were the game gets screwed up.
I thought of this idea which I though was cool.
Yes there are always small groups of people who benefit from chaos. I am sure there were people who made money during the great depression too. That does not mean that the general economy was not in shambles.
The major problem with insurance in a game like this, is that it exists. They basically replaced a functioning item sink with a weak gold sink, and destroyed several other game systems (PvP looting, etc) at the same time, which is what happens when devs meddle without a fundamental understanding of the economy they're meddling in (sound familiar? hehe.
) I think the problem here lies in the fact that there's no reason to assume that noobs can't have decent items. You can find some amazing things left on corpses or in New Haven. This discourages noobs from accepting or wearing nice items given to them by older veterans, lest they lose them. More reasons in the next two paragraphs...I like this better than scaling insurance based on item properties, but not much more. For starters, it wouldn't work. Noobs and the 'middle class' would just log out when it gets too expensive. Secondly, 2k per item is peanuts to the wealthy - it won't put a dent in the inflation. Third, the people with the best items are more likely to take more risk, but also to die less - so basically what you've done is added an incompetence tax to the people who are likely to be incompetent: noobies. Congratulations, you died, now lose a ton of money as well as a bunch of time. That strays over into game theory a bit, and how death should be handled, true. I would be more inclined to remove insurance altogether, or make it so dramatically expensive (100k per item? more?) that almost no one uses it and it's no longer thought of as automatic, but optional. Either way, tweaks to insurance alone are no longer enough to battle this problem.
As you note, this will hurt new players who buy old accounts, returning players, and new characters on veteran accounts. It also isn't very good game design to *punish* success or longevity. The idea with gold sinks is to make it a voluntary expenditure and reward the successful player with optional non-gameplay vanity items like titles, mounts, extra housing - gold sinks can be highly effective without pissing off the playerbase.
If this were the real economy, I might get on board with this. In the real economy, we'd yell at the government for printing tons of money and inflating the currency artificially, because the expectation is that the government will merely create the pool of money, and that it will be traded between players in the market after that. To recreate that scenario in UO, we'd have to turn off the gold faucet. Period. No more gold coming in. Since monster hunting is a very large part of the gameplay, and many would cease to engage in it if there were no more incentives to doing so, the game would literally fall apart, so we must conclude that the real world doesn't have faucets in the same way. Now you're merely suggesting a decrease in the money coming in, not a total turn-off of the faucet, and you're suggesting that it be based on skill points. I say to you that this has already been done - money drops are already scaled based on the difficulty of the monster, and in fact, lower end monsters drop a lot more gold than they used to, while higher monsters drop a lot less. Lowbie monsters also drop a lot more relative to their difficulty. Moreover, this is just another way of punishing success. I'm not sure the canceled accounts over further reducing veteran players' money faucet, is worth it - not when there are easier ways of simply getting that money out of the economy after it's already in. We want to make sure we don't acidentally de-incentivize hunting, after all!
This is the same point you made earlier, but I had a different thought about it when you phrased it this way. The real problem is that these possible controls each has its own cost to implement, and those costs are not equal. Increasing voluntary gold sinks has very little cost - an intern slapping together some new code. But decreasing gold faucets has a very high cost - players will become outraged and quit. Those things need to be balanced as well.. nothing is as simple as just pushing a button, and when they treat it that way, that is when the economy balance starts to fall apart.
It's not all relative. I noted several posts ago that some of the costs are variable (trades between players), and some of the costs are absolute (money-per-time coming in from monsters/NPC merchants, and money going out in the form of insurance costs, housing, etc.) As you yourself have said several times, this part of the UO economy has few parallels in the real world economy, unless economies are engaged in price fixing/caps/floors (for example, when a government uses force to insist on a minimum wage, or a maximum on gas prices). But that is exactly why it matters how much money is "worth" in this particular system, and why we can't say it's all relative. When currency is deflated, the variable costs are trivial and the fixed costs are a challenge. When currency is inflated, the fixed costs are trivial, and the variable costs - trade! - get out of control. Think of it this way - when you trade items between players, you're asking for a percentage of the entire sum of gold on the shard - that part is variable. But the NPCs, the gold sinks, are always going to ask for exactly the same amount of gold no matter how inflated the economy is - that part is absolute. The ideal here is to keep a healthy balance of faucets and sinks so that both the fixed and variable costs remain roughly the same over time.
Raven, again you've ignored that this economy has major barriers to entry for noobs, you've jumped right past the crux of the problem. Don't hunt for money, you say - set up a vendor and make money from other players! And sell what, exactly? Noobies have nothing worth buying, they rarely have a house, and can't afford vendor charges in Luna. It's not like a noobie can get to doom, get some drops, and come back and sell them - if they had the gear to go to doom they wouldn't be noobies. I'll answer the question for you: there are two ways to break into this game - farm lowbie mobs forever, or farm hide/wood/ingots for resale to other players. Here's the problem with those - they SUCK. I'm an old-school 1997 veteran who's switched shards enough, and played enough other MMOs (pretty much.. all of them) who will be honest and say that UO is the nastiest game to break into, that I've ever played. And that's not just whining - it very much matters that it sucks. This game needs new players to survive. New UO players at this point have played other games, games with much friendlier learning curves and costs that scale to the player. Why the hell would they play an 11-year-old mostly-unsupported game that looks like crap and requires them to farm resources on a mule for months just to afford the basics, when they can play something that doesn't suck? They won't. They just won't. And we all lose.
Simpler, and functional, but not necessarily good game design anymore. I think the original idea behind LRC was to remove some of the penalty of choosing magery. Initially, it made more sense before UO started to shift to be more 'class' based, when everyone had magery in his template - reags were their way of reducing magery's popularity. With the addition/rehab of the 'full template' skills (anatomy, eval, meditation, etc) they incentivized not-being-a-mage - instead of nearly every character having a reagent gold-sink, only mages had such a sink, while most other templates had none. LRC got rid of the (at that point) undue penalization of magery, as well as eliminated some of the tedium of buying and using items like that, but unfortunately, as you note, it also removed yet another gold sink. I have to say, I wouldn't delete LRC now, and not just because the players would revolt, but because reagents make it very tough for noobs to use/raise casting skills, and that's bad news for retention. If they're adding a new casting skill with SA, however, I would make sure LRC doesn't apply to it, so that it is seen as an "elite" skill, just as magery was prior to meditation et al.
This is the same idea Coldren posted yesterday, and it won't work for the same reasons I posted yesterday: "I don't agree that changing the amount of money coming in, would help, however. Rather, it would help reduce the overall gold total, but primarily at the expense of the wrong people in the sandbox - it hurts the noob, that money was far more dear to him than it is to elite players. It's too late to change the rules now. Hence: smarter sinks."
You and Raven have both claimed that the economy isn't broken, and then gone on to state several reasons that it is broken.
The economy isn't merely the gold floating around, it includes the crafting systems you mention too. Also, hyperinflation isn't "regulation", it's a state of health, and a symptom of someone pushing the wrong buttons.I think it is relative in this sense.Long post incoming, rather than replying to each post in kind. It's worth it I promise.
The major problem with insurance in a game like this, is that it exists. They basically replaced a functioning item sink with a weak gold sink, and destroyed several other game systems (PvP looting, etc) at the same time, which is what happens when devs meddle without a fundamental understanding of the economy they're meddling in (sound familiar? hehe.
I like this better than scaling insurance based on item properties, but not much more. For starters, it wouldn't work. Noobs and the 'middle class' would just log out when it gets too expensive. Secondly, 2k per item is peanuts to the wealthy - it won't put a dent in the inflation. Third, the people with the best items are more likely to take more risk, but also to die less - so basically what you've done is added an incompetence tax to the people who are likely to be incompetent: noobies. Congratulations, you died, now lose a ton of money as well as a bunch of time. That strays over into game theory a bit, and how death should be handled, true. I would be more inclined to remove insurance altogether, or make it so dramatically expensive (100k per item? more?) that almost no one uses it and it's no longer thought of as automatic, but optional. Either way, tweaks to insurance alone are no longer enough to battle this problem.
As you note, this will hurt new players who buy old accounts, returning players, and new characters on veteran accounts. It also isn't very good game design to *punish* success or longevity. The idea with gold sinks is to make it a voluntary expenditure and reward the successful player with optional non-gameplay vanity items like titles, mounts, extra housing - gold sinks can be highly effective without pissing off the playerbase.
If this were the real economy, I might get on board with this. In the real economy, we'd yell at the government for printing tons of money and inflating the currency artificially, because the expectation is that the government will merely create the pool of money, and that it will be traded between players in the market after that. To recreate that scenario in UO, we'd have to turn off the gold faucet. Period. No more gold coming in. Since monster hunting is a very large part of the gameplay, and many would cease to engage in it if there were no more incentives to doing so, the game would literally fall apart, so we must conclude that the real world doesn't have faucets in the same way. Now you're merely suggesting a decrease in the money coming in, not a total turn-off of the faucet, and you're suggesting that it be based on skill points. I say to you that this has already been done - money drops are already scaled based on the difficulty of the monster, and in fact, lower end monsters drop a lot more gold than they used to, while higher monsters drop a lot less. Lowbie monsters also drop a lot more relative to their difficulty. Moreover, this is just another way of punishing success. I'm not sure the canceled accounts over further reducing veteran players' money faucet, is worth it - not when there are easier ways of simply getting that money out of the economy after it's already in. We want to make sure we don't acidentally de-incentivize hunting, after all!
This solution might work better if implemented on a clean server or game. I would still argue against it in favor of better sinks, however.
This is the same point you made earlier, but I had a different thought about it when you phrased it this way. The real problem is that these possible controls each has its own cost to implement, and those costs are not equal. Increasing voluntary gold sinks has very little cost - an intern slapping together some new code. But decreasing gold faucets has a very high cost - players will become outraged and quit. Those things need to be balanced as well.. nothing is as simple as just pushing a button, and when they treat it that way, that is when the economy balance starts to fall apart.
It's not all relative. I noted several posts ago that some of the costs are variable (trades between players), and some of the costs are absolute (money-per-time coming in from monsters/NPC merchants, and money going out in the form of insurance costs, housing, etc.) As you yourself have said several times, this part of the UO economy has few parallels in the real world economy, unless economies are engaged in price fixing/caps/floors (for example, when a government uses force to insist on a minimum wage, or a maximum on gas prices). But that is exactly why it matters how much money is "worth" in this particular system, and why we can't say it's all relative. When currency is deflated, the variable costs are trivial and the fixed costs are a challenge. When currency is inflated, the fixed costs are trivial, and the variable costs - trade! - get out of control. Think of it this way - when you trade items between players, you're asking for a percentage of the entire sum of gold on the shard - that part is variable. But the NPCs, the gold sinks, are always going to ask for exactly the same amount of gold no matter how inflated the economy is - that part is absolute. The ideal here is to keep a healthy balance of faucets and sinks so that both the fixed and variable costs remain roughly the same over time.
Raven, again you've ignored that this economy has major barriers to entry for noobs, you've jumped right past the crux of the problem. Don't hunt for money, you say - set up a vendor and make money from other players! And sell what, exactly? Noobies have nothing worth buying, they rarely have a house, and can't afford vendor charges in Luna. It's not like a noobie can get to doom, get some drops, and come back and sell them - if they had the gear to go to doom they wouldn't be noobies. I'll answer the question for you: there are two ways to break into this game - farm lowbie mobs forever, or farm hide/wood/ingots for resale to other players. Here's the problem with those - they SUCK. I'm an old-school 1997 veteran who's switched shards enough, and played enough other MMOs (pretty much.. all of them) who will be honest and say that UO is the nastiest game to break into, that I've ever played. And that's not just whining - it very much matters that it sucks. This game needs new players to survive. New UO players at this point have played other games, games with much friendlier learning curves and costs that scale to the player. Why the hell would they play an 11-year-old mostly-unsupported game that looks like crap and requires them to farm resources on a mule for months just to afford the basics, when they can play something that doesn't suck? They won't. They just won't. And we all lose.
Simpler, and functional, but not necessarily good game design anymore. I think the original idea behind LRC was to remove some of the penalty of choosing magery. Initially, it made more sense before UO started to shift to be more 'class' based, when everyone had magery in his template - reags were their way of reducing magery's popularity. With the addition/rehab of the 'full template' skills (anatomy, eval, meditation, etc) they incentivized not-being-a-mage - instead of nearly every character having a reagent gold-sink, only mages had such a sink, while most other templates had none. LRC got rid of the (at that point) undue penalization of magery, as well as eliminated some of the tedium of buying and using items like that, but unfortunately, as you note, it also removed yet another gold sink. I have to say, I wouldn't delete LRC now, and not just because the players would revolt, but because reagents make it very tough for noobs to use/raise casting skills, and that's bad news for retention. If they're adding a new casting skill with SA, however, I would make sure LRC doesn't apply to it, so that it is seen as an "elite" skill, just as magery was prior to meditation et al.
This is the same idea Coldren posted yesterday, and it won't work for the same reasons I posted yesterday: "I don't agree that changing the amount of money coming in, would help, however. Rather, it would help reduce the overall gold total, but primarily at the expense of the wrong people in the sandbox - it hurts the noob, that money was far more dear to him than it is to elite players. It's too late to change the rules now. Hence: smarter sinks."
You and Raven have both claimed that the economy isn't broken, and then gone on to state several reasons that it is broken.
I agree. Reducing gold by a percentage equally or adding in new types of currency does nothing.
Actually, it is a very well-known fact that inflation increases poverty and affects poor people more severely than the rich. This is true both in real life and Ultima Online. Your examples make little sense.
Thomas,
