A simple solution to a tough problem.

[Helcat]

come on...

a disk full of obsidian takes you an HOUR...?

I've gathered a disk full in the Dralk field and processed it
in about10 mins...

[Joolara]

I almost never pawn items that I can deconstruct - I just don't want to swap the exp for the cash. However, there are many stackable items that I just can't deconstruct, so I pawn them. I guess that if pawnbrokers wont pay for these items I'll just be grinding for the reduced exp that non-deconstructable items give, plus getting no cash. Very motivating.

[LaughingOtter]

I've gathered a disk full in the Dralk field and processed it
in about10 mins...

You didn't read his post correctly. He said 'bricks'. A Tarbash obsidian disk full of bricks (in my case) can take a fairly long time.

A single load of slabs, yes, about 10 minutes. But that's a different issue.

Here's another question for you, Aamer:Explain to us how removing the pawnbroker improves interactions with other players - other than by increasing killstealing and mass camping of the few remaning creatures that drop coin?

[gusi]

I'll start off by giving you a set of figures.

I entered Order with just over 2g and around 100 craft lvls (highest lvl 65 Fitter or so).

I have now about 6.4g and close to 1200 craft lvls.

During these two times I have PB'd upwards of 40g to buy techs and forms, and I'm still missing about 6 V techs (excluding spell techs) and at the very least 20 forms.

How did I achieve such an accomplishment (in my eyes)? PB.

I know of people who entered Order with 30 - 40g+, just from Expanse. There is NO WAY I could've EVER competed with them. Hell, I even had to sell my plot to keep up with the market.


I'd have to say Smeglor, that is/will be a highlight of the new year for hz. That is, the universal connie viewing idea only.

PB's paying less for items they have stocked would be detrimental for players such as myself (connecting from different parts of the world).

And Aamer, improving player communications through removing the PB will not work for all, if anybody. Majority of the NA players have logged out and gone to sleep at about 2-4pm here and then start to trickle back in around 12pm onwards. Yes, prime gaming time formost Aussies (and neighbouring contries).

Btw, as stated above, I have spent upwards of 40g on techs and forms. Through player sales I would've gotten back about 800s-1g. I've now decided to work for free, since the player sales business is not really booming. Even though I do get a few more customers by crafting for free, charging my previous rates wouldhave gotten me around 1.5g more, if that (and that's considering if the customers even came to me).

Ohh, I'm missing about 80% of the IV techs aswell. What can I do to prepare myself for those techs to come? PB runs. Already Str IV went for ~2.4g to another player, where I bought my Str V for 2g. All I can say is that I'm going to be packing the gold for weeks to come, even if it does mean mindless PB runs.

[evilkarl]

All I can say is that I'm going to be packing the gold for weeks to come, even if it does mean mindless PB runs.

Wouldn't you rather enjoy your play time?

[imported_Leannae]

Remove or limit what a pawnbroker buys and I'm out of business.

With 40s left to my name after spending nearly everything I've made since merge by pawning resources to buy what few expert forms I have, I'll never be able to get all the forms I need for my crafting. I rely on pawnbrokers for money because I can't sell my armor without new techs, new dyes or the new forms.

[Tantalyr]

Helcat, my Tarbash's obsidian disk hold 10,500 bulk, so yes, it takes me right at an hour to fill it plus my inventory (another 4450) full of obsidian bricks (around 1800 bricks total), then turn them all into rods, then drag my arse back to Dralk to sell them.

For a whopping 50 silver . . . .

[gopher65]

Very awesome Smeglor! Exactly what I want!!

Leannae, once there is less money in the economy Deflation will occur. This means that your 40s will be worth much more than it is right now.

[Pharcellus]

It is my primary source of income.

As a Dragon, my market is saturated. There are about a dozen other L100 crafters other than myself with quite a collection of forms and techs. Quite a number of them will craft for free.

I can't make much coin hunting, unless I hunt in a PL group on the Satyr Islands, and even then, I get a very small shot at any forms/techs that drop, usually for my own use, that I have nothing really to sell.

Thus, I grind gems and make the gold pieces that I end up paying to some biped adventurers anyway because they have the forms/techs that I need. Or I pay some biped crafter for hoard, or I spend multiple gold buying comps off the Vielo because I can't hunt the stupid mobs to get the comps to make scales so I can't hunt the stupid mobs a little better than before.

Take away the Pawn Brokers, and I don't have any source of income, while others pack away hundreds to thousands of gold pieces.

[imported_Leannae]

Very awesome Smeglor! Exactly what I want!!

Leannae, once there is less money in the economy Deflation will occur. This means that your 40s will be worth much more than it is right now.

So, you're telling me that the vielo are going to lower thier prices so I can actually afford to buy items? I highly doubt that.

[Bori Grimbattle]

Very awesome Smeglor! Exactly what I want!!

Leannae, once there is less money in the economy Deflation will occur. This means that your 40s will be worth much more than it is right now.

You are basing that on the real world. Deflation in a game world will depend mainly on the Adventurers as you are proposing taking away the crafters main source of income. How many in the Adventure class will sell Strength or Focus V for 50 silver?

[gusi]

[img]/Web/Themes/Generic/images/icon-quote.gif[/img]gusi wrote: All I can say is that I'm going to be packing the gold for weeks to come, even if it does mean mindless PB runs.
Wouldn't you rather enjoy your play time?

My idea of fun is watching a satisfied customer walk away with what they want. And sometimes (but less importantly) the rush of being overwhelmed by mobs and barely running away with your life.

Knowing how much crafting you have done whilst playing hz, we clearly have very different ideas of fun and enjoyment.

[evilkarl]

Quite true I find crafting rather boring. Even with my alt which had an assortment of crafts below 50 it was boring. Something about the endless solo grind with no challenge other than patience doesn't do it for me. I only did 100 miner because sometimes I need a short break from adv and it was a good personal challenge :)

I was glad when they put mobs in the craft fields it broke up the monotony of mining

[Dobro]

The reason things are so expensive, isnt because there is so much money in the economy, it is because the Vielo are charging up to 2.75g for one form! This sets the price of any farmed forms obsurdly high from the onset.

If the Vielo charged 2.75s, the auctions for those forms would not soar to many hundreds of silver.

Closing the PB's and/or limiting the sale items to T1-T3, would be disasterous for an already ailing economy.

I think we should take a lesson fro RL. Greenspan does not see a spike in the economy comming and suddenly raise the interest rates to 9% to head it off. He small changes, and monitors the effect. Lets make small changes: Lower the prices at the Vielo.. Add T4 and T5 techs to the Quartermasters. Offer multiple avenues for revenue and acquisition.

[imported_Leannae]

The reason things are so expensive, isnt because there is so much money in the economy, it is because the Vielo are charging up to 2.75g for one form! This sets the price of any farmed forms obsurdly high from the onset.

If the Vielo charged 2.75s, the auctions for those forms would not soar to many hundreds of silver.

Closing the PB's and/or limiting the sale items to T1-T3, would be disasterous for an already ailing economy.

I think we should take a lesson fro RL. Greenspan does not see a spike in the economy comming and suddenly raise the interest rates to 9% to head it off. He small changes, and monitors the effect. Lets make small changes: Lower the prices at the Vielo.. Add T4 and T5 techs to the Quartermasters. Offer multiple avenues for revenue and acquisition.

Bingo! The vielo have set the prices for the adventurers to use when they DO find a form. Price gouging occurs and will continue to occur. I've seen tier II techs with price tags of 30s simply because they can and if a person is desperate enough they will pay that amount... However, limit or remove the pawnbrokers, the primary source of income for crafters I might add, and all those lovely forms adventurers find now will end up being returned to the vault week after week because THEY won't even be able to pawn them [:^)]

[LaughingOtter]

Lower the prices at the Vielo.. Add T4 and T5 techs to the Quartermasters. Offer multiple avenues for revenue and acquisition.

That sounds like a much more reasonable & realistic way to improve the game economy and "promote interaction" - by making it possible for players to get the tools & resources they need to do what they want, be that crafting or hunting, and to promote crafter-adventurer interdependance, as each group would have products needed by the other group and ready cash to buy those products with.

[evilkarl]

On order most expert forms go for 10-50s. The techs are the ones that get the higher prices but they are not available via other means. Crafters are the ones that decide the price of a tech at an auction not the adventurers they just find the techs and sell it.

[kengar]

O.K., let's take Kengar for example. I'd say that as a lvl 100/100 dragon, 95% of his income comes from the pawn broker. Oh, such a horrible exploiter. He's made a whole 200s so far this year that way. Kengar grinds to feed the pb to cover expenses, not to get rich. As is, he probably won't be able to afford a decent lair when they come out, and he still hasn't upgraded his combat or crafting scales to teched T5 scales (except for the scales he needed to reach 2:1 on gem cutting). He's also never turned down a crafting request on any basis other than inability to craft the desired object or lack of time to craft the desired object. I think we can agree that Kengar isn't the issue here. However, I'd like to think that any proposed solution would take Kengar and crafters like him into account.

Now, with Aamer's original proposal, Kengar would have to grind 8 times as much for the same amount of money, he'd have to raise his crafting prices, and/or he'd have to be an eternal presense in marketplace looking for crafting jobs to pick up. Frankly, I like charging reasonable prices for my crafting and leaving marketplace chat open for more than 15 minutes at a time causes the game to freeze for long periods of time when I return to that chat tab.

Smeglor's change sounds more interesting, but there's one thing that seriously worries me about it. It's going to make it impossible for the casual pb stuffers to sell anything if the people who are currently seen as the problem continue operating, since the pb will always have all he wants of everything. Forcing the casual grinders to compete with the hardcore grinders for a limited (fixed?) resource is going to have a much greater impact on the casual grinders overall than the hardcore grinders, and I'd rather see a solution more accurately aimed at the problem.

Also, I think this is much less an issue now that the blacksmith exploit has been fixed (again). Prices in marketplace dropped like a rock when that fix went live. I don't think all the money from that exploit is out of the system yet either. In my opinion, AE handled that exploit totally wrong, from taking too long to address it to not directly removing the money from the economy, but that's water under the bridge at this point.

I'm not sure how well Smeglor's change will impact the economy, especially of people that are casual grinders, but I do know this. Any change to the pawnbroker is pointless if the next money exploit is treated as much of a non-issue as the last one.

On the other hand, I don't have a better suggestion (except possibly for limiting how much can be pawned on a per-character basis), so as long as my concerns are listened to, I'm willing to find out how it does affect the economy.

[Sajid]

Smeglor's consigner post was nice. We have all been waiting and wishing for that one. Can't say thank you enough for that.

About the PB - Changing the PB now would allow the folks at the top pull the ladder up, and make coin dropping mobs easily mass slaughtered CAMPED like pre-merge T3 golems.[+o(]

There are things that need work. The economy is lllloooooooooooooowwww on that list.

I still have yet to see a standard metric for economy health that does not invlove opinion, personal vision, etc. Now the indeces thatGreenspan uses can be setup via surveys and posted. That would be the first step in economics.

Define, Measure, Analyze, Plan, Act, Validate

Some folks rather skip to "Act" - bad idea.

[Fireclaw]

Without pawnbrokers there really isn't a good way for me (dragon) to make cash.

If I hunt without hoard abilities, it takes a LONG time to kill even one mob resulting in very little cash gained.

If I hunt using hoard abilities I can hunt reasonably quickly, BUT the lost hoard effectively eats up any gain in cash. As a dragon, hunting using hoard abilities makes me weaker - not stronger as all it does is deplete hoard.

Without pawnbrokers the game would lack an important source of fresh currency into the economy. The only source of income would be trophy tokens and mobs - this is great if you exploit by mass-killing the mobs on Elnath, but sucks if you are a pure crafter or unable to abuse the mobs on Elnath. Pure crafters would have NO source of income at all independent of other players, making it VERY difficult for them to generate cash. This could easily kill the game for a lot of crafters who would find that they cannot afford anything.

Prices of teched items won't drop that much because the prices are controlled by the Vielo and many comps are not readily available anywhere else. Of course, nobody sells premium teched items on the connies - the cost of the tech comps fare exceeds the profit from selling it on the connie. Nowadays when people want manufactured teched goods they custom order it from a crafter.

With little influx of new currency into the economy the economy will stagnate, most of the cash will inevitably become concentrated into the hands of a few super-rich players. Those players will be happy while many of the rest will leave the game.

Conclusion: Leave the pawnbroker system as is. They aren't broken and don't need fixing. I do like the idea of a universal connie browsing system, but don't think it will help much as most players use just a few select connies anyway.