NPC Bidding Auctions to Counter Inevitable Gold Inflation

[lord_yoshi]

A huge MO1 problem was the lack of real gold sinks, AKA ways to remove gold coins from the world economy. Trading gold between players just shuffles the coins around while more coins continue to collect. One potential solution is to have the server generate Auction House item listings for players to buy. If the server posted these items in small enough quantities over time (Potentially tied to player activity), gold coins could be siphoned from the game without disrupting the player economy.

"But wait..." I hear you ask. "How would the server manage the prices for every listing in every region while accounting for a constantly fluctuating economy?" That is where the bidding part comes in. All the listing needs is a minimum starting value (Such as double the item vendor value), a few days of listing duration, and the players will decide the item value. Add in a minimum expiration period between bids to prevent last second sniping, and you have all the management you need.

To summarize:

• Add the ability to have bidding listings on the Auction House
• Add NPC-generated item bid listings as a gold sink

 

[Tzone]

Banks could also charge per bag you have in them. Something like a silver per week of space inside of a bag. You can take items out but you cant put anything back into the bag untill you pay. Its a small cost that adds up with the amount of people that will use it to remove money from the game.

 

[KermyWormy]

I'd like to see them do something on the wealth creation end of the equation, changing all easy no risk high reward farms that came into the game more and more over time in MO1. The inflation in the old game was mostly tied to these things imo.

The fact you could just print gold selling stacks of mats that were garbage and unused for crafting but any vendor would buy infinite stacks of them, overtime helped inflate gold in the economy as well.

It's been suggested before that dynamic pricing with vendors sell prices or a limited daily/weekly/monthly stack of funds in a town that all their vendors use to buy our goods, once depleted they drop offered price or just can't afford to buy our trash goods would help.

Maybe this fund could be replenished based on the take the auction house collects from us via sales and therefore would kind of reflect upon the current economy in that region as well. This would make thriving trade centers, or even fluctuating locations one might go to buy/sell based on how the economy is doing or something .

 

[Kovah Temsik]

I think the stables are a pretty decent place to start if you're looking for gold sinks. Remove the stable limit, charge some silver per day/week for each pet kept in the stables.

 

[lord_yoshi]

Adding small upkeep costs to everything just pisses off players, and the costs themselves are insignificant compared to how much gold a player can make in a day.

 

[Kaemik]

Not a big fan of auctions and not a big fan of upkeep on banks/stables.

One thing I WOULD like to see on banks/stables is the ability to increase storage capacity up to infinity with upgrades being localized and doubling in price each time a specific location is upgraded. Yes, that means a potentially infinite gold dump on an exponential curve for every bank and stable on the map. A very good way to remove some change from the economy when people have entirely too much.

I'm also a big fan of significant gold sinks and upkeep related to territorial control. Though as I understand some of that was already in. But if it isn't sufficient it could be expanded.

 

[Tzone]

Yeah I change my mind. The upkeep system with food/reserves I am really not enjoying right now. Which would be similar.

 

[Kaemik]

Yeah I change my mind. The upkeep system with food/reserves I am really not enjoying right now. Which would be similar.

I love food systems but I feel like most of them are a bit micromanagment intense and this one is by far the worst. What a good food system would look like to me is a food slot in a character inventory that makes your character automatically eat when hungry. Likewise, a good weight system would see them add a "Calorie density" rating of say 0 to 200 with 0 to 200 also corresponding to the fatness percent you will stabilize at if you eat it continually. Then I'd create the ability to make a "ration" by combining multiple food items to get the desired nourishment and calorie density.

Essentially what that means, is as a cook you experimenting intensely to create perfectly balanced rations with the ingredients available to you and customize it to the needs of the people requesting food. And as a player, you get food from a cook, bank a bunch, put some in the food slot in your inventory. And then forget about it until the next time you bank and pull out more rations.

Complex and interesting for the crafter. Simple for the average player. The way it should be with any craft.

Also, I have to throw out there. Does this game seriously have you lose weight by eating bread and gain it by eating meat? That is prettymuch precisely the opposite of how it should work. XD

Relating that back to the topic at hand:

If there are upkeeps, don't make them a headache. Dealing with upkeep shouldn't require I do a cartwheel through a tunnel of flaming hula hoops and then backflip into a handstand. Dealing with upkeep should be as simple as making sure we have enough gold in the fund it's pulled from.

 

[Tzone]

@Kaemik I would mind and would welcome a food system. I like the survival aspect it could bring to the game. I just hate how I have to eat hourly. Reserves drain to fast in my mind. I get on to play and the first thing I have to do is rest and find food. A bout a hour into the game just lightly playing I need to rest again and start thinking about food.

Food should be a once a day thing maybe twice if you are dying a lot. I think the reserve system takes too much time away from playing the game.

 

[Neftan]

I can't say I am totally on board with the OP idea, but more gold sinks = a BIG yes. I am a really big fan of dynamic pricing, but only if it isn't too short term. If a player rolls into town (assuming a clean economic state) and sells a stack of an item, it shouldnt make a huge difference. It should take some time for the changes to set in. This way, traders and other players can see the change happening, in order to decide what to sell, and where to sell. This would promote roaming for proactive people, and for the lazy people it burns gold.

Something like that in line with other features similar to the OP, would be ideal, IMO. The game should be an oiled machine, right? A looping cycle. The economy needs to be set up in a way that the game can take care of itself.

EDIT: Adding in a flat tax that is influenced by your standing with the merchants faction should also apply. Even at max standing there should be a small tax, something that is clearly a tax and not built in to the behind the scenes transation. So that players are able to identify it as a tax, know that it is tied to their standing, and so they know just how much money they are losing.

 

[Evelyn]

Stealing ideas here but how about stuff that is expensive and degrades with use or degrades and is expensive to have an NPC repair?

For instance, maybe you could put in a jewelry enchanter that can put an enchant on rings or a necklace that makes mining yields double and another that makes processing time for materials at crafting stations take 25% or 50% of the normal time? Everybody will want that. Make the enchant degrade and depending on quality of gem you can pay more for the enchant to last longer for convenience?

You know, stuff like that. Put in really neat convenience stuff that takes some of the dull grind out of the game while also removing gold coins and its almost like a sleight of hand trick.

 

[Konrad]

we still don't know how much its going to cost to build anything, and how much the upkeep for keeps and palisades is going to be... lets not go straight into cancer grinding before we even have most of the content required for persistance, most of the guilds will be consantly broke due to wars etc so I doubt there will be crazy inflation straight away

 

[Jackdstripper]

we still don't know how much its going to cost to build anything, and how much the upkeep for keeps and palisades is going to be... lets not go straight into cancer grinding before we even have most of the content required for persistance, most of the guilds will be consantly broke due to wars etc so I doubt there will be crazy inflation straight away

This.

i was going to say “no gold sinks? I guess you’ve never owned a keep. Or been directly invested in a war.”

once buildings are added there will be plenty of gold sinks. Not to mention that making gold will not be as easy as it is now. In the end inflation is inevitable. The longer people play, the more gold they accumulate, the more things will cost.

The important part is that people aren’t allowed to dupe or cheese boss farm (use exploits to farm lucrative mobs). That was the biggest problem in MO1.

 

[Konrad]

This.

i was going to say “no gold sinks? I guess you’ve never owned a keep. Or been directly invested in a war.”

once buildings are added there will be plenty of gold sinks. Not to mention that making gold will not be as easy as it is now. In the end inflation is inevitable. The longer people play, the more gold they accumulate, the more things will cost.

The important part is that people aren’t allowed to dupe or cheese boss farm (use exploits to farm lucrative mobs). That was the biggest problem in MO1.

the dupe problem wasnt just a problem... SHIT TON of people left the game when they learned that people had stacks of mats and gold from that crap, it was one of the things that killed the game

 

[Konrad]

I mean we had a number of crap that was sinking gold, like auction house fees and tax, veredari fees, stable horse -> horse lvling at the stable guy, building keeps, palisades and housing, all the infrastructure, NPCs, Guards, wars in general, siege engines, 'equipment' for horses, torches campfires, reagents, certain catalysts for crafting, potion making etc, for lot of us many of those things are 'non existant' when it comes to how much they cost but they tho indeed 'sink' a certain level of gold from the economy.

As I mentioned already in one of the posts above, the game isnt even out yet, we don't know how much fucking grinding we are gonna go through just to get basic shit. Let's not compare 'now' when we have very little content and all lvling is x100 times the speed and 10 year old mmo to 'persistance' thats not even close to being out yet. Don't give suggestions to make the game even more grindy than it already is. Just because some of us played for 10 years straight and made a bank doesn't mean every fucking player is going to be happy to grind 24/7 just so they have basic shit and minimal advantage.

 

[barcode]

the game isnt even out yet, we don't know how much fucking grinding we are gonna go through just to get basic shit. Let's not compare 'now' when we have very little content and all lvling is x100 times the speed and 10 year old mmo to 'persistance' thats not even close to being out yet.

because complaining after-the-fact will get sv to change things.... its actually critically important that they get the economy 'right' and honestly i have extremely low confidence that they will. mo1's economy was ruined from day 1 with dupes, to the point that i dont think using any information from mo1 is valid at all, so they're starting blind once again.

having some idea where sinks will be added to the game and how they will work *before* they implement them would be good because we can at least weigh in on it and give our opinions before its 'set in stone' because after they're in, the game will have a half-assed economy and gives little incentive for SV to change it with the enormous backlog of features waiting to be implemented. SV may choose to completely ignore our uninformed opinions but i dont see any problem with theorycrafting what a 'fair' system would be.

-barcode

 

[Konrad]

because complaining after-the-fact will get sv to change things.... its actually critically important that they get the economy 'right' and honestly i have extremely low confidence that they will. mo1's economy was ruined from day 1 with dupes, to the point that i dont think using any information from mo1 is valid at all, so they're starting blind once again.

having some idea where sinks will be added to the game and how they will work *before* they implement them would be good because we can at least weigh in on it and give our opinions before its 'set in stone' because after they're in, the game will have a half-assed economy and gives little incentive for SV to change it with the enormous backlog of features waiting to be implemented. SV may choose to completely ignore our uninformed opinions but i dont see any problem with theorycrafting what a 'fair' system would be.

-barcode

fair enough really, problem is if people will find out that there are ways to dupe and other people were duping shit there will be a mass 'unsubscribe' rage, but yeah as much as I hate to say it all the problems we are going through right now are the exact same problems we had to go through in MO1 so fair enough to you to look at these problems, I just think there will be a lot crap we will be spending gold on, simply just based on all the stuff Henrik has promised to us, like ships, wagons and crap like that, considering the map is freaking massive (x6 the size and all that) I bet everyone will want to have their own house or even holiday home in the place they like to grind or whatever, plus many other features that will sink the gold to a major degree. In fairness I would first like to have a look at how much it will cost to build and maintain infrastructure and basic buildings, than the cost of NPCs and NPC guards. As those will be 'the main gold sink' it all depends on 'how much'.