Dear devs,
You've made it clear, through word and deed, that part of your goals for Glitch are that players interact in groups, and that repetitive behaviors, not being fun, should be avoided. These are goals I laud! I want to see varied play, and group activities in Glitch.
Specifically, nerfing cheese making on no-no by adding a delay to the production of dairy products (rightly) made a very rewarding repetitive behavior much less rewarding. Speaking as a former cheesemonger, I'm glad you did this.
Rook attacks and street projects are built as group activities. Recently, Party Packs seem to be designed to encourage group activity. I'll admit, I haven't participated in a Party (that was paid for), so I can't speak to the success, but I also can't say I'm drawn to them.
What I'm concerned by is this: the way that the skill tree, and the auction house interact produce the following effect reliably. Players become economic islands unto themselves.
It's *almost* too demanding to accumulate enough skills to fulfill some game-economic goal on your own - but not quite. It's still very feasible to mine your way into large houses and much favor, and the mining tree is (relatively) short: a week covers the whole thing.
The auction house, as it functions today, is a race into the arms of arbitrage. Players who can collect a resource easily drop it on the market for 80% of it's base cost where it is reliably purchased almost immediately by the literal crowd in Cebarkul and resold to a vendor. Prices above that are quickly undercut - listing fees mean that it's a loss even to try to sell above minimums, so sellers ensure that their items will at least stay on the front page.
There are also structures in the skill tree that weakly incentivize economic independence. For example, the fact that Refining II is required to craft a Grand Ol' Grinder means that a player needs to be on the Refining path anyway in order to make the best tools for the job. Toolmaking as a specialty is weakened as a result.
So at present there are incentives and counter-incentives to find a cycle of harvest and crafting and do the whole thing yourself. Mine, sell chunks and donate gems. Keep herd, sell meat and milk, donate eggs. That kind of thing. These are solitary, repetitive pursuits. But they're rewarding, and both variation and interdependence are not.
If I were the only one to feel this way, I'd have kept this to myself, but daily there's a new forum post that touches on the auction house, or the skill tree, and I believe these complaints all touch on these issues.
I put it to you that the best way to encourage variation and interdependence would be to change the Auction house. I personally think the best change would be to add buy orders and a last-sold price for items. Likely, the auction house would need to be more prominent in the world - at least be added to the main site navigation.
I would predict the the result would be that players would check the market prices of things they can produce, and decide what to do on a game-daily basis. It's possible side deals would spring up, but regardless, a miner who needs earthshakers would drive up the price, and other players would have a reason to break out of routine to fulfill the demand. If the price of earthshakers goes to high, miners can buy food or consider other activities.
Altering the skill tree - the addition of new skills and activities with their own feeds into the economies of the game - would also help. It might also be beneficial to throttle daily energy refreshes, or to ramp up glitch attacks and street projects (possibly even: the one requires the re-do of the other. But, their help would be magnified by a change in the auction house.
It's distressing, having come to these conclusions, and seeing other players frustrated by what I see as effects of this core issue, not to at least hear a developer comment about this, since "macro-economic changes are coming..." which have yet to have had an effect.
Sincerely,
Yarrow