Coin Holdings/Earning Breakdown

[Tathar]

Because there is a lot of talk about economy and coin sinks in this game I think it is very important to put into perspective who has what amount of coin and what earning potential vs. their need for coin. Very often the coin cost of things is weighted toward the old vets in an attempt to get their cash but this is very unfair to everyone else as I will illustrate.

Note: Biped Crafters in all Tiers will require many times the amount of Coin to stay viable compared to Dragons due to the immense number of forms they must buy in comparison.

Tier VI Players|

This group has every Form and Tech in Triplicate. They have hundreds of Gold and besides buying an occasional Comp from someone else and funding some work on their Plot they have NOTHING to do with their Coin. They are desperate for entertaining little things to blow coin on. Fun perks that make them look more unique or can be fun props for RP. They want to get fluff that requires vast Coinage to make their hoard of money worthwhile. They do not need any more coin and it has next to no value to them whatsoever. Copper? What is that? Silver? I use it for Toilet Paper. Gold? I have coated everything in my Lair in Gold. I Gold Plated the walls, floors, ceiling, furniture, work benches, shrubberies outside, and even some of my food in Gold. My whole world glitters in golden splendor. I am even considering some substantial Platinum in the near future.


Tier V Players|

These are slowly reaching the end game. They are within a hair's breadth of getting everything they need and want and have the ability to earn coin in the range of 100 Silver an Hour if they work hard at it. They need lots of Coin still because they have the last and most expensive Forms to buy which are utterly bank breaking and may need to finish the last and most brutal of Vault Upgrades. Coin still has value for these players but it is slowly starting to wane and become less useful. Silver is starting to lose its charm and Gold is becoming increasingly required but making any great amount of it still seems like quite a task that is not for the faint of heart.


Tier IV Players|

These players are still in the thick of things. They are looking to the future and dreading the horrible amount of Coin they will need to purchase the Tier V content of the game. They are missing many Tier IV techs as they are next to impossible to get their hands on and are scraping by with Tier III Teched Gear and Spells. They can now make around 30 Silver an Hour if they hunt Tier III monsters in massive groups. Coin is of moderate value to them because they cannot buy much of what they want but they still know they need to save up for their future. Silver is now in decent supply and the idea of having 'A' Gold Coin is starting to sound plausible if they really drop everything else they are doing and work for just that goal.


Tier III Players|

These players are hurting still hurting for Coin. They need to buy all thew new and very expensive journeyman formulas and techs. They are swamped with expenses and are lucky to be able to eak out 15~20 Silver an Hour if they grind hard. They never seem to have enough Coin and always have many more things to buy. As such they do not part with Coin unless absolutely mandatory and find themselves grinding Junk Loot just to stay afloat. Silver Coins seem to come in a bit more regularly and are the currency of choice but Gold still seems like a pipe dream.


Tier II Players|

These players are desperate for Coinage. They are getting some quests which offer little shots in the arm to their bank account but they are not enough. They are growing fast in their ability to craft and are in dire need of all the forms and techs for their level. Now that they can scribe more forms they cannot keep up with the new demands on their cash supply. These players are doing very well to pull in 10 Silver an Hour in their grinding and most Forms will eat that up in one or two shots. They really have nothing left over to spend. Gold at this point seems like a Coin type they will NEVER have.


Tier I Players|

Of course being starting characters these Players have nothing at all. A few quests go by and they get just enough to begin their careers but trying to find the funds for anything that is not absolutely essential is beyond their ability. They are struggling to get the coin to buy Refurbished gear so they can go hunt. They are doing good to make 1~5 Silver an Hour in their Grinding and each Silver seems like a Million Bucks to them.

I think it's also important to put in perspective that bipeds have a MUCH easier time getting coin than dragons. I actually created a biped solely for this reason.

Without any significant help, my biped managed to earn over 3g before getting *any* school to level 30, and 1g before any school to 20. The vast majority of this coin was from paid T1 plot work at standard rates, usually masonry, fitting, and carpentry. Contrast my main adult dragon, which was at mid-T4 through all of this and was only able to get 600s on his own and had to take out a loan from a guildie to bid on a lair when lairshaping first came out. My biped ended up paying back the loan. Ever since, I've been putting coin for construction work on my lair and paying for it with money from paid plot work.

My main's 85/75/55 right now, and my biped's still not level 30 in any school, but does have all craft classes. I'm currently having my main hunt trophies to cash in to the trophy hunter and sell a bunch of spells and flying disks, and that's giving me a fair sum of cash, but it's not even close to as fast as my (largely T1) biped earns coin. I absolutely understand the greater need for forms and techs bipeds have, but bipeds have a huge advantage in just about every way of making money, as I'll demonstrate:

Bipeds have no need for hoard items but end up receiving them as loot anyway. Selling these on connies, even for a tenth of the hoard value, results in good cash.

Bipeds can still make use of trophies they've outgrown in their highest adventure school by switching to a lower level one. Good exp gains and decent cash each time, even if just selling the trophies to players gives more. Same goes for town marshall quests, which give even better coin in exchange for requiring you to go back each time you reach the required number of kills.

Bipeds can craft consumables. I have no idea how much Korth has made off of this, but it has to be a lot.

With the exception of consumables, bipeds don't have to deal with as much complexity in their crafting formulas as dragons do. This may be an attempt to offset the fact that dragons have fewer schools to level, but, using construction as an example, a dragon's high T1 construction resources (at max eff., 20 of one processed type, plus the product of 40 processed and 40 unprocessed or the product of 3 types of 20 unprocessed, and making the use of single-stack disks less desirable and requiring more running around) take more than three times the effort (and raw bulk) per unit of finished resource than a biped's high T1 construction resources (at max eff., 20 of a single processed type). As a result, it's much easier for a biped to earn coin for paid plot work than it is for a dragon to earn coin for paid lair work. Factor in that dragons can purchase plots but bipeds can't purchase lairs, and it becomes a very one-sided flow of coin.

Dragons are very unspecialized. While this reduces the number of levels that must be gained and allows dragons to be mostly combat-ready while gathering resources, it also comes with the disadvantages of being unable to craft or gather several important resource types and being capped at a much lower level in both attributes and craft skills. This is most apparent when comparing a craft-only dragon to a craft-only biped, both fully classed. The biped ends up with almost double the attributes that the dragons ends up with -- 10 str/10 dex/8 pow/9 foc to 5/5/5/5 per level. These factors make high-requirement spells (more or less the only common crafting product type) much harder for dragons to craft than bipeds, and dragons are unable to make or sell the raw resources only bipeds need, with the exception of certain confectioner resources, and even then dragons can't gather the bonus-only resources. While flight does put dragons at a moderate production and logistics advantage for low-tier spells and resources like those sold on NT, this is much less lucrative than the high-tier resources that bipeds have an advantage in gathering for sale, and the flight advantage is further diminished due to the time it takes the NT connie to sell off all of the resources a dragon is selling.

Speaking of flight, this logistical advantage lacks a market. To my knowledge, there is no biped who pays a dragon in coin (hoard perhaps) to fly the biped's resources somewhere. UPS would go bankrupt in Istaria.

I'm probably missing a few things, but in its current form, the game economy has a very unilateral cash flow from dragons to bipeds, with a slightly more balanced economy in the T1 range. Unfortunately, since T1 players of either type typically have very little coin to spend, it's not the sort of thing that a T6 dragon should be using as their main source of income. While the changes to formulas and techs did accomplish the objective of making coin important, they do little to nothing to make coin important for those who already hold most of it while making it extremely difficult for the less wealthy to earn the coin they need to purchase formulas and techs that are much too expensive for them.

I must say though, I do see some value in giving adventurers a cash spring via Rhahool and crafters a cash sink via formulas and techs. It'll take a while, but it might actually get crafters to charge adventurers for their goods, even if made on demand. It's too bad that T1 players don't have access to Rhahool right away, since they need the extra coin the most.

I'm probably missing something that someone else would be able to bring up, so I'll end here.

[velveeta]

i would consider myself a t4/t5 player (vel is rated 150, mw is 100/70) and i can tell you that at least the coin thing is def not true.....
the most coin i ever had was 100 gold, and i split that up between 3 alts (both mine and snake's sslik) -
at the current moment, vel has less than 30 gold and mw has about 50, i think, because i transfer the money vel gets working on the industrial complex so that mw can put more coin on the construction in the hopes peeps will come build on it......
i can't imagine what i would have to do to get the crapload of money i apparently should have.....

all this might be a prob on the live shards, but on blight, we just don't have that much to spend money on, so most of us don't feel the need to get a lot of it....