So you want to fix the economy? Here are my suggestions...

[Aamer Khan]

1. Add any missing comps to the game and increase the drop rate on hard to get ones like Zombie Ogre Toes.
2. Remove the Vielo including Nadia. Move all forms and techs to the trainers.
3. Have all weapons, tools, and armor eventually need repair, without affecting it's teching.
4. Make it impossible to farm the PB for unlimited cash. Simply put a cap on what you can make per day on the PB, regardless of what you sell or your level.

Number 1. takes care of the worries about a vibrant comp market. And give the adventures the opportunity to be a part of the economy, supplying comps to crafters.

Number 2. takes us back the the exact same way we worked Beginner and Journeyman.

Number 3. would be better than the blighted stuff that most won't use. But it also lets the crafters have repeat business. If the weapon/tool/armor is teched, the wear does not affect the tech, just the usefulness of the item. So, as an example, after a months use in game time, the 42-85 slash sword drops back a tier and is now 32-65. One quick trip to the weapon smith and its good as new. And all the weapon smith needs is bars and orbs and the skills to "repair" the weapon.

Number 4. is the important one. This way we can still use them to offload junk we don't want, and lower level players can get needed cash to continue to take care of their needs. When we started playing the game, the idea was that the PB was to help us have funds for porting and to help those starting out. I fully believe the Devs never had in mind what we see today. As an example I can make 1 gold every 5 hours gathering geostone clay and making cooking sheets, and selling to the T5 PB in our guild community.

Now, lets suppose that I was limited to making only 100s off a PB per 24 hour period? Now this take me 10 days to make a gold off the PB. If the economy turns around, and we can make cash in other ways, It might just be faster to make funds actually crafting for others.

[Altair]

You forgot one aamer

5) Burn down aug and sing campfire songs

Alt
EoI

This post of sarcasm was brought to you by DIC
(Disgruntled Istarians of Chaos)

[imported_Lycaunoss]

1, 2 and 3 would probably be a bit drastic and would have people crying if they were implemented.

4 on the other hand should have been done a long time ago. I'd only make one small change and that is so make it so that it wouldn't be a hard cap. Once you have sold a certain ammount everything else you try and sell has the value dropped to 1c. That way at least you could still offload junk and not feel like the game is forcing you to delete it.

[IndyMan]

1. Add any missing comps to the game and increase the drop rate on hard to get ones like Zombie Ogre Toes.

Sounds like a good plan.

2. Remove the Vielo including Nadia. Move all forms and techs to the trainers.

I dont like this one


3. Have all weapons, tools, and armor eventually need repair, without affecting it's teching.

As long as there is an NPC that will repair them for a fee, this is ok. That way if I cannot find a crafter I can get my items repaired

4. Make it impossible to farm the PB for unlimited cash. Simply put a cap on what you can make per day on the PB, regardless of what you sell or your level.

I dont like this one. New players want to get a plot, usually, and this is a way to help them reach that goal. Stopping it would only drag out the time to get a plot and increase the chance that they wouild quit before. My UO account is near 95 months and the only reason I keep paying for it is my house. If I logged in and had no house one day, the account would be gone. I like housing and filling it with neat things.

Trying to make it harder on new players is, in my opinion, not a good idea.

[gusi]

1, 2 and 3 I can more or less agree with.

4 I do not agree with. I agree with the idea, but not limited to 100s/day. That is FAR to little income, compared to that of an adventurer that hunts the right mobs. What's it take, about 1 min to kill your average mob one on one? That's only 1 hour and 40 mins if you're hunting mobs that drop coin, going on at least 1s per mob, which it is usually more. Factor in down time, and you'll come to around 2 hours total. 2 hours vs. 24 hours.

I'm not saying everyone hunts mobs that drop coin. Nor am I saying that everyone does PB runs. I'm just comparing the equivalents of the adv income to the crafter income - consider adv'ers that hunt mobs that drop coin to be equivalent to the crafters that do PB runs and consider adv'ers that hunt mobs that don't drop coin to be equivalent to the crafters that don't do PB runs.

[C`gan]

1. Add any missing comps to the game and increase the drop rate on hard to get ones like Zombie Ogre Toes.
2. Remove the Vielo including Nadia. Move all forms and techs to the trainers.
3. Have all weapons, tools, and armor eventually need repair, without affecting it's teching.

Works for me.

4. Make it impossible to farm the PB for unlimited cash. Simply put a cap on what you can make per day on the PB, regardless of what you sell or your level.

This one doesn't.

I'm a builder. My priorities have been the World Projects Team (which gets paid absolutely ZERO for it's work) and making money for our guild by selling things at the pawnbroker (gems, tools, weapons, construction units). People are not paying much for construction (Iheard someone offeredcoin for a recent masonry job: 15c per unit sandstone (both) and 25c per unit slate (both) and I'm hoping that was due to inexperience in the market) and I'm way too busy with construction to attempt to become an adventurer (warrior 19 and ONLY warrior 19). So limiting the pawnbroker trades to any amount suddenly makes my ability to make any money extremely unlikely. I do not have the vault space to hoard a bunch of things I was going to sell, but because of a cap I couldn't. Since now hauling excess items around means lower capability for construction, buildings would take longer. Since I couldn't sell off the excess construction units or materials when I switch classes, I'm ending up with a full regular disk somewhere that I can't teleport with or a full inventory with a Tarbash's disk I can teleport around (at a fee). Someone was talking about money being made 70% by crafter, 30% by adventurer. This would seriously curtail crafters making much at all, as well as killing adventurer money by selling off extra stuff they'd picked up from the kills. After so many things being sold, they'd be up to their ears in excess stuff that they'd have to wait until the next day to pawn out. In the end, a lot of people would end up really hurt by this one.

[Bori Grimbattle]

1. Add any missing comps to the game and increase the drop rate on hard to get ones like Zombie Ogre Toes.
2. Remove the Vielo including Nadia. Move all forms and techs to the trainers.
3. Have all weapons, tools, and armor eventually need repair, without affecting it's teching.
4. Make it impossible to farm the PB for unlimited cash. Simply put a cap on what you can make per day on the PB, regardless of what you sell or your level.

1. I agree here. Once the comps are in game and drop in a ratio that reflects their demand then Nadia can go. (by demand mith frags should drop at a higher rate). All techs/forms perhaps to Tier IV on Trainers. Upwards drop only.

2/3. Agree. We need something to start a cycle of Adventure -- Crafter interaction. With most people having been here long enough to have fully tec'd Tier V equipment there is little market for what a crafter can create now. As I suggested before even the formulas would require replacement once every so many items made.

4. Do not agree. Simply put there is not enough demand to keep the crafters in any coin whatsoever. However, if you take the suggestion I mentioned above and limit the useage of any formula to many 200 uses then crafters will not be able to do the mass PB runs without having to find another copy of the formula. Have it set so an immediate create/decon (when the auto decon switch is on) does not count against the total. That way levelling can still be done the same way. This is also the reason for not placing Tier V forms on the Trianers. Tier V is where you make your big coin on PB runs and the lower levels that require the coin can still get it. Once populations have built up high enough so one or two crafters cannot supply everything the server needs this may be looked at again.

[Aamer Khan]

As a high level crafter and high level adventurer, I must reply and say that experience does not match the picture you paint.

If you indeed are an accomplished construction crafter, I find it very difficult to believe you have 100s worth of excess building units per day. And I know that adventurers don't typically waste there time on looting craft resources. But even so, lets say they did collect all those logs, ore, and uncut gems. How much would it take to reach 100s? Well, off a T5 PB it would take roughly 5556 to do it. All T5 base resources sell for 18c. Now since your not a high level adventurer, I'll tell you that I have never gotten more than 2 or 3 hundred of these resources a day. But let's say someone was able to collect 1500 in a single day of fighting.... Not close to reaching the limit.

Your fear is not founded in reality.

What is really the problem, is that since there is market saturation, and since there are so many higher level crafters, your really worried that you won't be able to compete. So, you have chosen to us the PB as a primary source to make your money.

My next question to you would be how much can you make a day, and what do you need the money for? By your own words it would not be to pay for construction.

Part of the over all problem is that each shard is different, what works on Order, doesn't on Chaos and vice versa. So the solutions would need to take into account that fact. This suggestion comes from reading all the comments from everyone on all shards, and is My attempt to provide a single solution that could work for ALL shards.

[PJ]

The problem with a straight cash capon pawnbroker fundsis its an entirely artificial limit, and really 100s is just a random number. You could equally make convincing arguments for 200s or 50s or 432.5s.

What the purpose of pawnbrokers is to be needs to be defined.

Should they be the primary source of income for crafters?

Or should they existto take surplus/unwanted items out of the economy?

Personally, it should be the latter. Let crafters get income via: selling crafted goods, repairing damaged goods, construction, and new tasks that provide a reasonable income for services provided to the empire.

Pawnbrokers should buy crafted goods only, and in limited quantities. Paying modestly for plain gear, and more for teched goods. They should not buy resources, raw or processed, and should not buy umpteen million mining picks a day.

What about the resources that drop from mobs? Get rid of them. Sure they supliment the income of up and coming adventures, but replace that via other means. Take away the unprocessed resource drops and give them CASH only trophies.

[Aamer Khan]

Bori, for your idea to work, the form would have to be very costly to prevent anything.

Lets take the new pricing on porting with a disk load of ore. Fully loaded, I pay 600c per port, and have to make 2 ports to return to town. BUT, I sell that load after turning it into cooking sheets for 51.6s. So each trip I net 50s for 950 sheets, or about 475 batches. Now with your idea, I would have to have 3 forms to do this. So, on top of making it much more complex ( since this would have to be setup for all forms ) It would have to be expensive to prevent anyone from farming the PB. So, lets say you make the T5 form cost 10s, now I have a net profit of roughly 20 silver to show for 15 minutes work.

Was that too harsh? Lets make it 5s. Now, I can net 35s.

So for 5 hours work, You have shaved off 300s from the gold I can make currently, and have increased the complexity 1000 fold. And you still have NOT encouraged player interaction, since you don't need other players for this to work. As well as introducing MORE money into the system, with out providing a method for it to leave.

This is not supply and demand, this is a continuation of the very same problem we have now, just slightly slowed down.

Let's face the facts folks, the problems at hand will require sacrifice to get fixed.

[Bori Grimbattle]

As far as what a crafter needs coin for...techs and forms. Bori has yet to get most of the blighted weapon forms and still needs most of his Tier IV techs. So even if they are 20Silvers each that adds up to quite a bundle. This is keeping him as a weaponsmith/fletcher along with his carpentry. At present there is no feasible way to make that coin by consigning weapons as a crafter. The market is dead.

If I see consigned forms on a connie that I do not have I have two choices. Try and sell what I can make to raise the coin to buy them or do PB runs to buy them. The latter is quicker and assures me the forms will still be there and not bought by someone else.

As a crafter Bori has never had more then 4 or 5 gold on him. Although he has made a bundle doing PB runs he spent all of it buying forms/techs.Placing them on Trainers would only take that money away from the adventurers. The crafters would still have to earn it. Sinistre, although he does do essence is also a 100 mage/conjurer. He has more gold on him because his overhead is lower then Boris.

As to your concern Amer, the Tier 5 forms would be drop only. The lower availability of those forms would be the throttle on the PB runs.

[Aamer Khan]

Very good points PJ.

I was shooting for something easy to do, that causes less stress on the DB as a whole.

I'll even say my idea could just be an interim fix until your ideas could be put in.

[PJ]

Now for any loot table adjustments, you have the take into account farming of certain mobs/types of mobs. Now the mechanics that make it possible etc etc no need to go into that here. But the fact is, it is possible.

Now "farming" is a vague term, and I'm sure we all have different opinions of what it is. So I'm going to make a definition that I'll be using throughout this post, although you're free to disagree with it.

You are "farming" if the amount of time it takes you to win an engagement either does not depend, or depends very slightly, on the number of mobs you're fighting.

i.e. If I have a level95 monk and i'm killing giant fire beetles. It'll probably take me twice as long to kill two beetles as it will to kill one beetle. However If I log my main character in, the number of beetles I'm killing has no influence on the length of time it'll take to kill them. I'd kill2, 5, 10 or 30 beetles all in the same amount of time it'd take to kill 1. That is farming.

Now I'm not passing a value judgement on it. But it does have economic implications. If your average level X is killing 1 mob in 1 minute, but I'm killing 20 mobs in 1 minute, I'm getting 20 times as much loot, be it cash, or comps or trophies, or forms, or techs, or any other drop. So if TG makessingle classed hunting rewarding with good drop rates, a farmer can come in and make 20 times that easily, that's bad for the economy. But if TG makes it so that farming like above is less rewarding, the single classed hunter suffer as he gets little reward for his time. That discourages his prescence in the game, its bad for the game in general.

Its a lose-lose situation. So what can you do to correct this? Aside from tinkering with multiclassing to reduce its benefits, or tinkering with the fundamental mechanics of combat so killing 20, 30, 40 mobs at once isn't possible by anybody (although I encourage the latter). You can alter the spawns.

When you're hunting, the number of mobs you can kill in an hour are dependent mostly on the mobs, your skills, level, etc. When you're farming, the number of mobs you can kill in an hour, is dependent on how many mobs spawn at once. The best farming areas are those that have 20-40 mobs spawning at once, and respawning fast. Flies/taranulas/fyakki on elnath, fire island, etc. Having that many mobs spawn at once in a small area does nothing for a player killing one mob at a time. In fact its contrary to his interests. Its hard for him to get to the fiery dire wolves on the fire island, when there are 40 giant fire beetles spawned between them. Makes it easy to get mobbed.

Up the rates so that killing 1 mob at a time is even semi-rewarding, especially for undead. But slash the spawns down a corresponding amount so that it doesn't grossly reward mob farming.

[Jayne]

I'd kill2, 5, 10 or 30 beetles all in the same amount of time it'd take to kill 1. That is farming.

I pretty much agree with all that youv'e said PJ, and I especially agree with the above.

But as you said here, if you can kill 2, 5 over my one at a time, you are still farming.

With that said surely we can't expect them not to spawn more the a couple in an area.

Next complaint there will be is that someone saw a bunch of folks camping.

And if the particular high level character can run and get all 30, then they can run and get all 5.

Not trying to put a damper on the suggestions by any means, just mentioning it because I don't think its an easy fix

Jayne

[Senkeleron Fell]

Cutting down the number of mobs in an area could lead to more camping, but I don't think you should ever be able to see more than about 15 mobs from one place at any one time. I think if the number of individual mobs in an area dropped, the people farming them would move on to higher mobs.

frex- You can round up and kill about 30 of Mob A in the same time you can round up and kill only 10 of higher level Mob B. So farming Mob A is more lucrative. Cut the spawn rate so that you can only round up 15 of Mob A at a time and moving on to Mob B may make more sense.

[Jayne]

Actually if they could make it drop zero loot if more then 5 mobs were killed in one shot, then that would level the playing field some. And prevent farming.

Now that sounds good in one breath, but is not fair for the folks that like to do that sort of thing.

Sadly there is no easy fix.

I have actually thought of being what you call a uber. I don't want to but the way the game is set up its almost like you have to be. I mean I am limited when it comes to lots of things, this being one of them, because I am not an over the top level player(multiclassed). I really just wanted to be me, my character and thats it.

But
1. I can'taqquire comps nearly as quick to sell as others

2. Ican't go out and solo high level named monsters much less SoG, so I lose out on certain drops in the game

3. And since this makes making money slow, I can't neccessarily buy things that I want that pop up on the MP

So how many classes do I need to gain to 100 to become one of these Uber's?

Jayne

[Bori Grimbattle]

Farming is a double edged sword. Many that "farm" a particular MoB do it for two reasons, experiance gain to level another class and the tech/comp/form drops. To fix the first is a simple matter that was used in a MuDD I played way back. That was to have a "buffer" so once you killed "x" number of Biggoogliethingies you had to go and kill something else before Biggoogliethingies" gave you any more experiance.

Farming for the latter,techs/comps/forms would be regulated by the demand there is for those items. Nobody will farm if they cannot sell the produce.


At any rate it is another idea to toss into the soup. Perhaps something may evolve out of all this yet.

[kengar]

1. Add any missing comps to the game and increase the drop rate on hard to get ones like Zombie Ogre Toes.

Agreed, with minor quibbles that in some cases, it's the spawns that need to be increased, not the drop rates, and some trophies are used in too many popular techs.

2. Remove the Vielo including Nadia. Move all forms and techs to the trainers.

Once we've got a comp market, I'm all for it, except for techs. Techs aren't on the Vielo that I'm aware of, so why should they be on the trainers? I know, you disagree with me on whether or not the Vielo are preventing a comp market from existing, and I think that without some hard data that only the devs could provide, we won't agree on this.

3. Have all weapons, tools, and armor eventually need repair, without affecting it's teching.

Two things. First, I'm not sure that this will have any real effect on the economy. Players in MMORPGs tend not to value their time the way real people do, so they tend to give away their work. I doubt we'd see much of a market for item repairs.

We've also disagreed on what reasonable decay rates were, but I'm sure that's just a matter of discussion and analysis.

4. Make it impossible to farm the PB for unlimited cash. Simply put a cap on what you can make per day on the PB, regardless of what you sell or your level.

Under the right conditions, this could work, though I still don't see this as the evil you do. I'm more likely to see lvl 100/rating 150+ farming kwellens for coin than run into someone making pb runs for any length of time.

[Narkano]

1) and 2)

I totally agree with.

Matter of factly no one in my guild really needsan adventurerany more ... and it's no small one. Almost no one is out hunting any longer.Most of the people are crafting the whole day long. Whatever they need for their craft, they simply buy from the Vielo. Prices are steep, butone can get enough money to buy double the amount of stuff from the Vielo in the same time as would be possible by hunting half the stuff out in the wilds.Removing Nadiais a step that was delayed much too long already.With her goneboth sides of the game will be needed again. Adventurers as well as crafters - of course implement the few trophies still missing ingame and increase drop-rates for those very rare ones like Blue Vexes and Zombie Ogre Toes. It'll surly enhance economy.

3)

I totally disagree with, as I already said with your last suggestion concering thatsame topic:

I personally would hate the idea of having all my equipment continually decay. Especially if it is for economy reasons and just to have something to do!My time for playing is precious enough and I don't continually wanna run and repair my gear just to keep me busy!!! I've more than enough to do and only small amounts of money!I wanna experience the game, the story and have a good time with my friends here. It often takes me weeks to gather all the stuff for my equipment (since I do not simply buy it) and now I should run about gathering even more stuff or spend more money for repairing that same equipment I just got finished??? Never! Would definitely make me immediately leave this game.

4)

You might explain this kind of game-mechanic with supply and demand ... a pawn broker simpy might not be willing to buy more stuff than he can reasonably resell. But I do not really see a problem with the current system.

- Narkano

[evilkarl]

I like 1,2,3 and the idea of 4.

However 100s is arbitrary and any cap would need to be considered long and hard as well as lore to back it up.