Topic

The Game Economy

Since I see no recent posts specifically on this, I'm going to put my ideas here and hope a discussion happens.

What do people think should be the basis of the game economy?

I know what I do at the moment - I harvest things, I mine things, I get random drops, I buy things from vendors; I make things; then I donate things and sell things to the vendors.

It's all very solitary and very lonely, and not a system that allows an economy to, well, work.

***My ideal world of Glitch would look like this***
Every single item in the game, apart from those sold by vendors, can be either made from raw resources or found randomly.
Vendors would ONLY sell very basic things to get new players started, i.e. limited use and unfixable tools.
EITHER no vendors would buy _anything_ from the players OR there are some vendors (ideally in starting streets only) who would buy some things (ideally things that new players need) based on market prices and the amount already in stock, and the sold items go straight into the selling stock of the vendors.
Shrines would calculate favour based on current market price of any item.
Auctions would work a lot better (with both a putting items up for bid system and pre-bidding system). The frog system (fixed time delay) should go alongside a "go to a place and collect" system (instantaneous), for people who want to trade.

What I'd like to see happen is that it would no longer be necessary for the developers to buff or nerf any aspect of the game, and supply vs demand would work everything out. Underpowered? If people need the resource then it becomes profitable. Overpowered? If too many people do it, it becomes unprofitable.

What do my fellow Glitchiens think?

Posted 16 months ago by Saro Subscriber! | Permalink

Replies

Previous 1 2
  • I don't see how the economy is not working at present, could you please explain how it's not working? 
    Thank you :)

    Personally I love the harvesting and selling on auctions part of the game. It's not at all solitary. I walk around Ix, Goddle, Jeth. Alakol... numerous places. I have chat open, so am talking to friends, and I am walking past people, so I'm meeting potential new friends. Not solitary at all, unless you make it so.  That's what I like about it. If I'm feeling chatty, I'll stop and chat, if I'm in the sort of mood where people are making me frowny, I'll just walk on by, politely say Hi, if I'm Hi-ed at, or just go about my business otherwise :)  Seems ideal to me.   
    Posted 16 months ago by Ebil Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Yeah I think the economy is in good shape so far (no doubt it will change with launch and an influx of many new players). Maybe fewer things should be got from vendors; as I've focused on farming this go maybe veggies, for instance, should be taken away from produce vendors. That way gardeners could have room to make more money (you don't see raw ore at vendors, you know?). 

    But as a whole I think things are good and there is a lot of room for players to step up and take more charge, not unlike EVE. The tools are there, I just don't think anyone's stepped up to try and control the market.
    Posted 16 months ago by shipwreck Subscriber! | Permalink
  • In non-gameplay aspects of the game, I'm very chatty too :) But I'm of the opinion that having interactions within the economy would just put so much more life into it.

    A market-based economy is supposed to respond to supply and demand. Having vendors offer things for a fixed price doesn't do that. You can't profit from auctioning vegetables, or food, the same way as you can profit from auctioning rocks, because there is a cap on how much you can charge for them - the produce vendor, and the food vendor in the deeps. Similarly, there's a lower cap on the price of an item - the price the vendors buy it for. With these in place, if the true value of that item is outside this range, then market interaction just wouldn't happen for that item. If the system truly worked, being part of the market wouldn't be something you had to decide to do - it would just happen.

    Our auction system has lots of overpriced things at the moment, because it's not a true reflection of supply and demand in the market. You get people complaining about areas in the game being too over-powered and other things being too under-powered, but in a market-based economy they would be self-regulating.

    I know that personally I would feel good if I could make a decision to do something different every day not just arbitrarily, but based on what other players have decided to do that day, so that I can meet their needs. For example, if lots of people decided to do very energy consuming mining today, then more of them want to buy food. Food prices would go up, so I would know to dig out my beans and some lovely chillis. :) At the moment there's just no mechanism for the game to do that. The price of a chilli is basically fixed.
    Posted 16 months ago by Saro Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Perhaps stoot's response here would be of interest to you?
    Posted 16 months ago by Melody Pond Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Yes, that certainly solves one end of the problem. :) Thanks

    The other end of the problem is NPCs buying things for fixed prices. That might be more controversial to get rid of...
    Posted 16 months ago by Saro Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Oh! Another stoot response of interest here, talking about how vendors shouldn't buy infinite amounts of something at an unchanging price. 
    Posted 16 months ago by Melody Pond Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Thank you! :) I'm awful at finding these things.

    It's good to know that they're thinking about it. However, the main thing about a market-based economy that's awesome is it forms a unspoken communication between the buyers and the sellers - the pricing of commodities tells everyone exactly what people want. It'll take a LOT of tweaking of the vendors to get that to work, while having only player-on-player trading makes the system a lot easier.

    It'll be interesting to see what they come up with, and how well it works!
    Posted 16 months ago by Saro Subscriber! | Permalink
  • My comments on no vendors might be more appropriate here...but in this other thread Saro, you proposed no vendors - seems like here, you are less extreme WRT vendors. But thought I'd link to my comment from the other thread to here since it really is more related to the game economy.
    Posted 16 months ago by b3achy Subscriber! | Permalink
  • I've replied to your comment in that thread, and I'll restate it here - it doesn't matter if fewer new currants are being generated, as long as fewer currants are being eaten by the system. Making currants change hands between players only should make things work fine.
    Posted 16 months ago by Saro Subscriber! | Permalink
  • My point is there is currently only very limited ways to obtain currants outside of vendors.  Vendors help us to get currants to put into the economy.  Since we don't have printing presses...there needs to be a way to create an influx of currants in the system because there really isn't going to be enough currants to have a meaningful exchange in a closed economy without vendors - I do think fewer currants will greatly hinder your proposed system.  Maybe you are proposing more of a barter system...and that would be fine for some things, but challenging for others.
    Posted 16 months ago by b3achy Subscriber! | Permalink
  • For starters, I'm not sure about wanting a market-based economy. I don't see why it has to be like that in Glitch or any game with some sort of economy. I like the current situation in wich the results of what I make are mainly predictable. I also like the gift economy that many players happily endorse.

    Apart from that, I suggested in another thread to have less vendors, and have agreed to the idea of them selling fewer things. I want the auctions to be more lively, and I prefer items made by players. On the other hand, I wouldn't mind having prices fixed not only by vendors but even in auctions. Your market-based economy may be the only way to go IRL, but I don't like it in-game. (Maybe because I'm not good at it, never was, and don't want Glitch to become profit-oriented and competitive.)

    You see, it's a choice thing.

    ETA: I've had a lot of experience with World of Warcraft's economy, which is hugely more market-based than Glitch's economy. It's not that I globally reject the concept. I even enjoyed it, and played with auctions, and so on. It's just that I prefer Glitch to be different.
    Posted 16 months ago by Ximenez Subscriber! | Permalink
  • @b3achy

    Well at the moment we put currants into the system for, as you said, levelling up, quest completion, and selling things to vendors. Each new player brings in a set amount of currants, which is good. We lose currants from the system for houses and street projects and buying things from vendors. (I propose to get rid of houses as a money sink anyway)

    What you're saying now is we're gaining more currants than we spend from vendors. At the moment, this pumps currants into the economy to be spent on houses, and to allow inflation (except it doesn't because of the price caps, so it just sits there in high-level accounts doing nothing).

    It would seem that if the system is implemented, the prices of everything should naturally settle to a comfortable state relative to the amount of currants in the system, since currants are no less subject to supply-and-demand than anything else. It would be self-regulating - prices move to what is fair. Then the total amount of currants in the system doesn't matter, as long as it's relatively constant, because all the prices should scale to it.

    And even better, we'd be able to track the total amount of currants in the system simply by monitoring commodity prices. Then if inflation happens, we make some street projects cost more currants, and if deflation (what is the opposite of inflation?) happens, as you suggest it might, we add a source of currants to the system that can be carefully monitored and adjusted (which the vendors can't - they sell too many things and adjusting the price of each individually would be a pain). I suggest quoins, because I like them, but this can be a lot of things as long as they're easier to tweak than vendors!

    It's still a lot less hassle than constantly buffing and nerfing each of the skills individually!

    (Ideally, of course, players can run their own banks and trade in their own currency, and other players can choose which currency to use, but somehow I think that's a tad too ambitious for Glitch ;) )
    Posted 16 months ago by Saro Subscriber! | Permalink
  • @Ximenez - the main problem with the fix-price system is that you need to constantly nerf and buff things to make the skills "balanced" and "fair".

    For example, right now, crops feel very "underpowered" compared to rocks, precisely because there's a price dictated to crops. Then everyone starts to gravitate towards mining, and the developers have to either sit there and accept that ok, mining is going to get more and more popular forever, or actively tweak things to avoid this. Unfortunately, when they tweak things, they might accidentally make cooking more profitable. And then everyone start to gravitate towards cooking...

    A supply-and-demand based system would be self-regulating, because the communication happens with commodity prices. In the long term, it could save the devs a lot of trouble, because it's a fix that will always work, no matter what else you change: sure, if you implement a big change and release a new skill to make making something easier, people will change what they're doing. But because they're getting feedback from prices, eventually the shift will stop and there will be a new equilibrium.

    ETA: People will still gift things; a change to the economy will not change Glitch's culture, which is fundamentally kind and unselfish - and I love that. In fact, in such a system which gives the players more feedback about what other players want, those players who do care about competitiveness and currants can make themselves useful, rather than blindly making the same things and then selling them to vendors, for the things never to be seen again.
    Posted 16 months ago by Saro Subscriber! | Permalink
  • The imbalance between mining and gardening comes from the fact that vendors sell veggies. Veggies are needed for food (without which you simply don't survive) and street projects (which are very popular). If the only resource for veggies was gardening, then it wouldn't be underpowered any more.

    You always need to balance things in a complex game, lots of things. A market-based economy would change Glitch a lot without guaranteeing less work for the devs.

    ETA: Your addition to your last post is very thoughtful, and I agree with you. If there is a place in Glitch for competition- and profit- oriented style of play, I'm ok with it. I just don't want it to change my own style.
    Posted 16 months ago by Ximenez Subscriber! | Permalink
  • I've just been reading the first thread which Melody Pond posted above, and that raises many interesting points.

    And yes, you always need to balance things in a complex game. But surely you want to spend time doing bigger, better things than deciding how much a vendor should pay for a Pungent Sunrise every few weeks?
    Posted 16 months ago by Saro Subscriber! | Permalink
  • No sure why the economy has to be a market economy, there are other alternatives. Maybe we can have a rook economy when the rook attacks prices plummet!
    Posted 16 months ago by Phochai Subscriber! | Permalink
  • @Phochai Certainly any sort of mobile economy would be better than fixed prices forever, but in terms of the work the devs have to put in to maintaining it, a market-based economy is the kind of thing they can just think up and implement, and the prices will change themselves in sensible ways without them having to do anything extra. In terms of the longer-term development of the game, it's more feasible than manually changing everything, and self-regulating will mean fewer people complaining and asking the devs to "please do something about *insert badly priced thing here*"
    Posted 16 months ago by Saro Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Saro

    Your theory relies on complete and uniform access to information by every player in the game. For various reason, that is almost impossible for either new or long-time players to obtain.  Newbies aren't likely to know when they're being gouged, and long-time players aren't likely to spend time looking through the auction prices of every single item in Glitch to see if there's a way they can undercut price-gouging. 

    So far I haven't seen any complaints about "badly priced things".  Could you link to some of those forum posts, please. 
    Posted 16 months ago by WindBorn Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Of course, this system will not work if implemented into the game right now, since there aren't enough players doing enough things.

    One of these days, though, the game is going to get BIG. BIG to the point of every day, everything that can be done in the game will be done by lots of different players. Almost everything that can be bought or sold will be bought and sold by lots of different players daily. Then even without complete information, if some of those players do some shopping around and some of those players do some looking at prices for what they're doing that day, the system should run itself to a nice place.

    If frying pans are actually selling for 50k each, people will notice pretty quickly. And then flood the market with frying pans. Smaller fluctuations, if people think they're worth less than the time taken to check for them - well, they aren't worth enough to care about.

    (badly priced things are taken from the other thread, e.g. drinks being priced for 1 currant per cherry, not 10 currants per cherry as it stands)
    Posted 16 months ago by Saro Subscriber! | Permalink
  • for a step closer to complete information see 
    http://feedyourglutt.com/landing.php
    I normally go to stats then overall auction stats to get an idea of historic prices
    it points out how the fixed going rate value is different from the observed auction value
    Posted 16 months ago by Artilect Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Personally, I don't want to be forced to use auctions. I have purchased auction items, but selling in auctions is not my "cup of tea" and my enjoyment of the game would be diminished if that were the only way to make currants.
    Posted 16 months ago by Audaria Subscriber! | Permalink
  • @Audaria

    I don't like the current auction interface either. However, if the auctions were more in-game, more friendly and generally easier to use, I don't think they need be any more annoying than the vendors!
    Posted 16 months ago by Saro Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Good point Saro, and I think you have a better grasp on economics than I do. However the game is a game of imagination and market economy doesn't sound very imaginative to me.  The auctions aren't auctions anyway, where is the bidding? It's a buy out economy as I see it.
    Posted 16 months ago by Phochai Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Market economy, in my opinion, is much more interesting than fixed prices: I'd find the game a lot more interesting if vegetables changed prices every day, and I could choose to do different things based on how much they cost. I'd also enjoy the game more if I knew that the things I make, other people are using, rather than just disappearing into a vendor!

    And yeah, auction is a bad term for what we have now. It's more a marketplace, and I'd like to see them more like that :)
    Posted 16 months ago by Saro Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Based on Stoot's response in the thread linked above:

    In the long run[1], NPCs won't sell any[2] crafted products, unless they bought it from a player and are trying to sell it for a profit.

    [1] Not very soon!
    [2] There will probably be some exceptions to this.


    It's probably safe to say that the only reason we're having so much trouble auctioning things this time around is because there really aren't enough players atm to have a stable economy, and to alleviate the pain there are street vendors who sell us the things we need. I imagine that once the game goes live commodities will be gone from vendors, and the auction house will be the only place to get them unless you want to collect them yourself. I imagine that food stuffs will be quite profitable once the game goes live.
    Posted 16 months ago by Skwid Subscriber! | Permalink
  • I apparently wasn't clear. I don't want to be forced to sell items to other players in order to make currants. It isn't about the auction interface or the fact that there is no bidding. I just do not like to have to sell to other players. I socialize with other players, so it is also not that I want to play an entirely solo game. I have no problem with there being an option for auctioning/selling between players as long as that is not the ONLY way to make an income, even later in the game.

    I don't want my game of leisure to stress me out by requiring me to do something that I dread in order to play. One thing I like about this game, is that it allows different people to play according to their own likes and dislikes. As it currently stands, those who enjoy participating in auctions can do so and are rewarded with more currants. Those of us who do not enjoy it can still make currants, but have to find another way to do so. Actually, this is closer to RL than would an all auction economy be. Some people sell commodities to make a living, and others simply go to their jobs.
    Posted 16 months ago by Audaria Subscriber! | Permalink
  • To restate a point made in the "underpowered" thread, a market-based economy doesn't have to centre around the auctions. We can keep the vendors, but make it so that it doesn't generate any stock of its own, and never destroys anything you sell it - it goes straight into the shop stock. The higher the stock, the less they pay. It doesn't entirely solve the pricing problem, but it does give us useful supply-and-demand knowledge.
    Posted 16 months ago by Saro Subscriber! | Permalink
  • I don't like that idea either. First, I don't believe Glitch needs to have a market-based economy. It is a game so there can be differences between it and the real world. Second, even if you do want it to reflect the real world, there is no need to reduce the vendors to being effectively trade markets. If I want to buy, say, a can of refried beans at the store, I don't have to wait until someone else has a surplus of beans and sells them to the store. I know I can walk in the store any day and buy that can. And the price will be fairly consistent. I'm going to pay the same price whether I'm the first one buying, or if someone else walks in before me and buys 50 cans of beans for their fiesta.
    Posted 16 months ago by Audaria Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Well the ideal is for there to be enough players for the pricing to only subtly change, especially on a global scale.

    What I envisage happening with this system, once the game is large enough, is that local prices would fluctuate based on things like tree-poisoning, but auction prices would stay almost constant, with a constant flow of items, until there is a change to the game, and then all the prices would change to reflect the new situation.

    Maybe I'm being too much of an idealist?
    Posted 16 months ago by Saro Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Perhaps, Saro. I guess I just don't like the idea of this becoming a game where economics plays such an integral role. I want to be able to go to the store and know what I can find and how much it will cost, regardless of what other players are doing. Maybe they can figure out a way to make us both happy? As I've said, I don't mind if there are aspects of the game that incorporate some of these ideas, as long as I am able to work around them. I really do not want to play an economics game. I understand that it appeals to some, but it does not appeal to me in the least.

    (I realize that some economics are already involved, since there is a currency. I just don't want that to be what the game is centered upon.)
    Posted 16 months ago by Audaria Subscriber! | Permalink
  • there is going to be a system where NPCs buy things from players at fixed prices and sell them to other players at higher fixed prices. that's good and i look forward to it. the most useful items should be plentiful and in stock under such a system, always available for purchase pretty much everywhere.

    while Audaria might not care about the economy, the economy matters none-the-less. the ability to buy vast quantities of cheap produce might be great her, but creates an economic black hole for farmers in which they simply can't compete. it's even worse for tinker tool crafters .. even if they could undercut the vendors a player looking for their first hoe isn't going to look at the auctions first, and that first hoe may end up broken and repaired and never needing to be replaced.

    so it a tradeoff. Audaria's ability to trot down to the store and buy whatever she likes right now, while great for her, is horrible from anyone trying to start up  a business in selling produce, since it is *impossible* to keep up with the super powered vendors with their unlimited supply and fixed prices.

    which is to say that if you want to "play it your way" with an air of obliviousness toward what other people are trying to do, there are going to be outcomes beyond yourself that might come back to snap at you. maybe you're happy to mine for currants and buy everything at the store, but demanding an economy that allows that scenario to persist mean you might as well take every skill other than mining off the skill tree.

    "As I've said, I don't mind if there are aspects of the game that incorporate some of these ideas, as long as I am able to work around them."

    get a garden, grow crops yourself. get tinkertooling 5, make your own tools. harvest stuff off trees.

    that's your 'work around'. most everything in this game you can make all by yourself without those messy currants getting in the way at all.

    if your goal is to avoid economic interaction with your fellow players, you don't need a vendor to sell you stuff, you make it yourself from scratch.
    Posted 16 months ago by striatic Subscriber! | Permalink
  • The thing I must disagree in stratic's post with is the "fixed prices". With fixed prices, any imbalance is going to stay. If people find that, say, potatoes are vastly unprofitable to sell to vendors, and they can get a much higher price at auctions, then vendors would be perpetually out of potatoes. The thing that would make the system self-regulate would be flexible prices.

    Would a sensible compromise between the two concepts (a self-regulating economy vs. stability of prices) be that vendors would change their prices weekly, based on auction activity? This way, short term changes such as mass tree-poisonings would have little impact on the day-to-day running a glitch's life, but they'd still find vendors well-stocked with most things.
    Posted 16 months ago by Saro Subscriber! | Permalink
  • When this game becomes a "business" is when I will no longer play.  I spent 25 years playing that game in the Real World, and it isn't any fun.

    In any closed system no matter what style of play or of "monetary policy,"  receiving a constant influx of new capital (assets or cash) will inevitably break the system.  When you have 20, 20,000, or 2 million players all making money from mining regenerating pixels, you will never be able to control it. 

    I've seen these arguments on the forums of every MMO from M59 and the Realm to LotRO beta and beyond.  It is never solved no matter how much passion or vituperation is spewed forth on either side.

    There will never be enough money sinks to remove sufficient cash from the game and not seem onerous to the players. 

    At this point I am willing to wait and see how the devs tackle the "problem" that honestly I don't see at this time in this game.  I've used the AH and vendors - usually when the AH prices are usurious or when I am too lazy to go hunt a vendor - but the "free" market doesn't work well in any world where human beings feel the need for greed. 

    It really doesn't even work in the Real World:

    "As of 2007, the top 1% of households (the upper class) owned 34.6% of all privately held wealth, and the next 19% (the managerial, professional, and small business stratum) had 50.5%, which means that just 20% of the people owned a remarkable 85%, leaving only 15% of the wealth for the bottom 80% (wage and salary workers). In terms of financial wealth (total net worth minus the value of one's home), the top 1% of households had an even greater share: 42.7%. Table 1 and Figure 1 present further details drawn from the careful work of economist Edward N. Wolff at New York University (2010)."  Stable URL:  http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/wealth.html

    I know we have Leaderboards so those who feel they need to flex can compete, but this isn't fun in the Real World, and frankly it isn't fun in any game no matter how good it may be.

    tl/dr? Read more - it is good for your education to stretch your brain.

    ~~TJ Fuzzybut
    Posted 16 months ago by Thaddeus J Fuzzybut Subscriber! | Permalink
  • "The thing I must disagree in stratic's post with is the "fixed prices". With fixed prices, any imbalance is going to stay. If people find that, say, potatoes are vastly unprofitable to sell to vendors, and they can get a much higher price at auctions, then vendors would be perpetually out of potatoes. The thing that would make the system self-regulate would be flexible prices."

    i agree with you .. i guess what i meant by "fixed prices" are prices that are fixed on a short term basis.

    i wouldn't want to see price swings just because a single bought out an entire store's inventory one day and caused a temporary spike in rarity. prices should be based on long term averages.

    so not "fixed" absolutely. "stable" would perhaps have been a better word.
    Posted 16 months ago by striatic Subscriber! | Permalink
  • +1 TJ Fuzzybut  ( love the name too)
    Posted 16 months ago by caley dunn Subscriber! | Permalink
  • +1 TJ Fuzzybut too

    Market-based economy in a game = no fun
    Posted 16 months ago by Piratice Subscriber! | Permalink
  • I think what striatic is referring to is the usage of an "averaged ceiling" price for commodities in game. By utilizing data from previous sales, the auction system sets a median low and high price tag on goods. As such, you cannot set prices to say 1c or 100,000c for the items you sell, but must adhere to the low max and high max.

    This is actually a good thing. Why? It prevents people from exploiting the auction houses through the process of "pushing". Pushing allows things like:

    > Resources to be sent from a lower ranked account to a higher ranked one without an appropriate trade-off. (Think of opening endless new accounts to send goods to your higher level one)

    >"Loans" that are not returned within a timely fashion. (Buy this Auction at X price and consider it my loan to you)

    >Trades/Sales in which the higher ranked player does not return the resources within a timely fashion.

    >Trades/Sales made with an exchange rate that differs greatly from the normal rate from which a higher ranked player can get an unfair advantage.

    Sure, this game has a lot of emphasis on random giving and sharing, but for those who like the economics of a game, such constructs as listed above are ripe for the picking if not safe guarded against. What striantic is proposing, or I am think he is proposing, exists in almost every MMO out there. When the game goes public, I will guarantee you will have people "pushing" in the market as it has happened even in games targeted for ages 3-16 (McWorld, Littlest Petshop Online, and WizKidz to name a few kids oriented games). So, why wouldn't it happen here too? Public is public.
    Posted 16 months ago by c0mad0r Subscriber! | Permalink
  • - 1 TJ Fuzzybut

    the current economic inequality in the united state is not an innate outcome of or market systems. i have no idea why you quote it as if it is an inevitability of all markets.

    yeah, the US economy is shitty and horribly unfair. we all know that. let's move on and talk about glitch.

    "I know we have Leaderboards so those who feel they need to flex can compete, but this isn't fun in the Real World, and frankly it isn't fun in any game no matter how good it may be."

    -1 -1 -1 -1 -1 -1 -1 -1 -1 -1 -1

    the purpose of markets isn't competition. the purpose of markets is to make stuff and trade that stuff. this may involve competition or it may not.

    i have no interest in competition, but i want to make things and sell them to other people in return for resources to help make more things.

    that's fun, but guess what? it requires a market.

    the return i get on my goods is information that helps me know that what i am doing is good for someone and helping them in some way and that i should probably do more of whatever it is i am doing.

    selling sacks full of rubies and diamonds to NPC vendors has no such effect.
    Posted 16 months ago by striatic Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Maybe to solve the above we could just have a barter system and do away with the market which some people think is the only way to run a mmo.
    Posted 16 months ago by Phochai Subscriber! | Permalink
  • "What striantic is proposing, or I am think he is proposing, exists in almost every MMO out there."

    sort of.

    i'm suggesting that there be a single price at the street vendors, based on long term averages of supply and demand for the various products. not a ceiling/floor based on long term median price - using the *actual median price*. because the price is based on long term trends, it would not be very flexible 

    the auction house would not operate in that way. maybe it wouldn't have a ceiling or floor, maybe it would. dunno. i think it probably wouldn't have any controls though, more that the listing fees and commissions would exceed the profit that the street vendor would take while buying slightly below and then selling at median price [based on historical demand].
    Posted 16 months ago by striatic Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Take a step back from what you might think is the ideal, efficient economy and approach this from Tiny Speckle's lens. I don't think they're intending to build a complex, self-regulating economy. I don't think they would ever want their average player to have to check the markets every time he/she logs in. I don't think they would want their average player to be stunned that a stack of cherries that sold to vendor for 200 currants last week now only earns 30 currants. 

    For the casual player, having to deal with a fluctuating market is stressful. Donating to shrines is already hard enough for beginners to understand. I get that you want an experience that's more suited to your level of play but in the long-term, I can't imagine TS imposing a system that would require players to maintain a spreadsheet or feel compelled to play daily. Remove crafted/high-level items and food from vendors? Sure. But impose market conditions on vendors? I doubt it.
    Posted 16 months ago by SleepyAce Subscriber! | Permalink
  • My biggest issue with the way things are now is that there is generally no need for there to be an AH in the first place. Sure, you can use it to get rarer items like music blocks, or street trophy pieces (and that simply negates the awesomeness of getting those achievements/trophies on your own), but everything else can be made by every person in the game given the appropriate skill levels, which every person can attain given enough time. My issue is that the vendors buy items for way too many currants, and it leaves little to no room in which a market can exist. It's faster and easier to simply farm a bunch of stuff, smash it into something more valuable, and then throw it at a vendor for pretty much the same price you could sell it for in the AH. What this does is it forces prices in the AH to be much higher than they need to be for common commodities (cherries/ore/etc…) and stops people from trading them because, why trade when you can just vendor them for exorbitant amounts of currants.
    Believe it or not this actually hurts the casual player since instead of being able to log on and do what they consider fun, they now have to run around and gather the materials to make food/powder/whatever instead of simply buying them off the AH for a reasonable cost because the items they need aren't available in the AH except at ridiculous prices.

    I'm one of the people who actually enjoys "playing the AH". I had over a million gold by the time I quit WoW 6 months ago, and I had a really good time doing it. There's something nice about not having to leave town to earn all of your cash, and figuring out the logistics and making spreadsheets was a lot of fun for me. Different strokes for different folks. While my friends all complained about not having enough gold I was buying 120,000g mounts and laughing at them. Good times.

    TL/DR
    There is definitely a compromise to be made here, my point is that if we're going to have an auction house we should at least have a good reason to use it.
    Posted 16 months ago by Skwid Subscriber! | Permalink
  • I love having the auctions so if I blow it and mining run out of food I can buy some and have it delivered before I die and go to hell. 
    Posted 16 months ago by xoxJulie Subscriber! | Permalink
  • The economy is not very flexible. Too controlled. I mean, who wants to buy Pungent Sunrises for 250 each if you can get them from Helga at 196 each? I demand Helga raise her prices according to demand so us drink makers can make a living.
    Posted 16 months ago by KitkatCat Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Also, another thought: In FS, our Fauna lay eggs. Those which have the eggs of new fauna will be able to sell them for fairly high prices. So, will it be the same here. Any new, cool, thing will be expensive to get initially?
    Posted 16 months ago by KitkatCat Subscriber! | Permalink
  • From what stoot has written it seems pretty clear that there will always be vendors but that their operations will become more market driven.  Also, instead of the currants they sell for and the goods they buy disappearing down a black hole, these will recirculate within the economy of the world.  For players who are into the game's economy this will be a big plus.  For newbies and players not interested in the economy I can't see that it will make any significant difference.  Some prices will initially adjust if their set values were unrealistic, and they will then vary somewhat with market forces but will almost certainly find a fairly stable equilibrium. 

    Are you really going to care (or even notice) that the meat gumbo you bought from the meal vendor for  ₡ 93 last week costs ₡ 94 today?  Audaria writes about wanting shop prices to be constant like in the RW.  But the RW butter I bought for £1 last year sells today for anything from £1.40 to £1.60.  A market economy within the limits of the stable world of Ur will never produce swings of this sort.

    The one part I wonder about, and don't recall having seen discussed in this thread, is what will happen with mining.  It appears that by far the most mining is for dullite, sparkly and beryl which are then sold to vendors and disappear, and that this is quite probably the largest piece of the current economy.  So, for the greater part mining does not produce anything that the community uses.  If the market economy is going to emerge in the full sense, then there is going to have to be something significant to do with these rocks besides making a few esoteric powders!
    Posted 16 months ago by Hawkwell Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Thanks for all the comments everyone, it's great to hear everyone's points of view.

    The main thing for me about having a market-based economy is that people will be doing things based on what other people need. You will only be able to make money mining rocks if other people want rocks. You will make more money selling awesome stews if everyone wants to eat awesome stews. If you mine rocks and no-one bothers buying them, the what you were doing was probably not very useful to anyone, and you spend your time doing something else instead. But when Tiny Speck releases another use for rocks, then the price of rocks goes up, and you can happily go back to mining knowing that people want to use what you produce!

    And for those who worry that it would make Glitch too competitive, let me re-iterate that the behaviour of the markets and the players will still be based on the community. Having a market-based economy won't stop anyone from gifting things to strangers, or hosting parties with streets covered in food. 

    What's more, you have to be MORE co-operative in a market system, since it profits you to make things that other players actually want. You get feedback about whether what you're doing benefits the community, by how fast and for how much your goods sell for. It gets rid of the "mine, mine, mine, sell to vendor" system that is, forgive me for saying, a little bit antisocial! 

    And since Glitch is a game about community and co-operation, this is why I think it would really benefit the game.
    Posted 16 months ago by Saro Subscriber! | Permalink
  • If this is a game about community and co-operation, then why is it a capitalistic system?  How about basing the economy on an entirely different set of principles: 

    1755 Code of Nature "Sacred and Fundamental Laws that would tear out the roots of vice and of all the evils of a society" including
    I. Nothing in society will belong to anyone, either as a personal possession or as capital goods, except the things for which the person has immediate use, for either his needs, his pleasures, or his daily work.

    Or, perhaps people are more comfortable with the biblical version of that statement:  "And the multitude of them that believed were of one heart and of one soul: neither said any of them that ought of the things which he possessed was his own; but they had all things common."

    So, perhaps, the vendors would simply be places where you could acquire what you need for zero currants.  And the auction would become a giant warehouse where you could drop things off that you didn't need, and pick things up that you did.

    Wouldn't that be more cooperative than setting up a system that by its very rules disadvantaged certain players?  We're discussing setting limits and controls on that system, not the basis of the system itself.  If the system itself were "fair", there wouldn't need to be any limits or rules. 
    Posted 16 months ago by WindBorn Subscriber! | Permalink
  • "So, perhaps, the vendors would simply be places where you could acquire what you need for zero currants.  And the auction would become a giant warehouse where you could drop things off that you didn't need, and pick things up that you did. "

    Certainly nicely co-operative, but to be honest, it sounds a little on the dull side...
    Posted 16 months ago by dopiaza Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Ah, but dopiaza, it frees us from the tedium of collecting cherries and allows us all to become 'artistes' .
    Posted 16 months ago by WindBorn Subscriber! | Permalink
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