Business And Economy Archive
Thread: Money Sinks bad, just lower (@&%$ing inflation and set prices.
BlackJango
Thu Mar 03, 2005 9:34 pm
#14
Want a realistic economy? A weaponsmith set up a shop and gets stocked for several million, 10-20. Think Remmington is owned by 1 guy, who owns a few factories, and sell weapons out of his house outside of LA?
MeciniaLua
Fri Mar 04, 2005 6:25 am
#15
sciguyCO wrote:
Why not let the "market speculators" or merchant players have their game? It's just as interesting (to some people) as the combat game, and AFAIK is pretty unique to SWG.
Crafters usually get most of the complaints about this, because they're the ones the majority of the players deal with. But (IMO) few crafters are actually deliberately gouging their customers. They have costs they have to cover. Most of those costs are for resources (although there's overhead for vendors, factories, and the value of their own in-game time). So Starsider armorsmiths may have to charge higher prices because they're paying more for hide / polymer / reinforced panels / whatever.
On the other side of things, prices wouldn't stay high if people weren't buying them at those prices. If a vendor stocked with suits of composite priced at 250k sells out in a day (after requiring a week or morefor the armorsmith to manufacture), the crafter is completely justified raising prices to reflect that demand.
Also, it's pretty difficult to actually determine the value of any particular item. A crafter has his base costs, which isn't too difficult to put a credit price on. A customer should judge an item by it's benefit to him: how much more income could he get with this item compared to without it over the lifetime of the item? The market value of the item should be somewhere in between those two. If the market value is lower than the crafter's cost, the crafter is losing money. If the market value is higher than the benefit to the customer, the customer would be better off without it (although not all customers realize this).
Fixed prices wouldn't really be able to deal with individual variations in those crafter/customer value judgements. One crafter may be very self-reliant, gathering all resources himself, allowing him to sell for a lower price due to his greater efficiency (but requiring more in-game time commitment). Another may put a higher value on his play time and purchase all his resources, which means he'd have to charge a higher price to get the same profit. A third crafter may charge a premium on her items due to a very convenient store location which saves hercustomers' traveltime.
There are also out-of-game factors that effect the in-game economy. Despite attempts by SOE to crack down, there are still sites that sell credits for real cash. So a person with extra real life money can compensate for lack of skill in-game. From the game's point of view, one player got something for nothing (because the other side of the transaction was outside of the game).
One thing that I would like to see (and was brought up in passing during the whole "galaxy wide vendor search" fun) is some sort of "commodities price tracking" where a player can get information on average prices across the galaxy. Variations in item and resource stats would make this tricky, though. Plus, a resource that a chef may pay 50 cpu for might only be worth 20-30cpu to a doctor or combat medic due to different stat requirements between the different crafting professions. I'm somewhat opposed to global price searches for individual, since there isn't that much variation between game items, and I fear that would lead to price wars with large "megacorporations" as the only winners.A player should have some information on whether a given item's price is a good deal or decide if it has some other benefit (location, service, etc) to justify a higher-than-average price. I think that would reduce at least some of the economic frustration that crops up so often.
Inflation isn't some variable in the game code that the devs can just adjust up or down. Item prices are set by players for reasons of their own. The devs can attempt to tweak things either on the money supply side (reducing mission payouts) or on the money sinks. And sinks are only things like shuttle fees, structure maintenance, vehicle repair, 5% charge on bank tips, etc. A true sink removes credits from the game completely. Paying 300k for a suit of composite armor is not a sink, since those credits are still in the game (just belonging to another player). The non-l337 players don't have to pay any money to system sinks they don't want to. With JTL for inter-planetary travel, no house / harvesters / factories, never bank tipping, and either walking or using a creature mount for travel around a planet, a player doesn't pay out any credits to a sink.
I personally disagree with your statement that "no one player should have over 15 million". If a player puts in time and effort to gain credits and manages their costs, there's no limit to what they should be able to accrue. At some point, the value of those banked credits start to lose their meaning, just because eventually there's nothing worth buying with those credits. It's that lack of "stuff to buy" that leads to players accumulating a lot of cash (since gaining money isn't really that hard), leading to players who throw multi-millions at things like skill tapes, which may or may not actually be worth that much.
Yay good post 
As a chef most of my money goes to Bio Engineers for tissues and resource gatherers. I
nefarious2
Fri Mar 04, 2005 11:21 am
#16
sciguyCO wrote:
One thing that I would like to see (and was brought up in passing during the whole "galaxy wide vendor search" fun) is some sort of "commodities price tracking" where a player can get information on average prices across the galaxy. Variations in item and resource stats would make this tricky, though. Plus, a resource that a chef may pay 50 cpu for might only be worth 20-30cpu to a doctor or combat medic due to different stat requirements between the different crafting professions. I'm somewhat opposed to global price searches for individual, since there isn't that much variation between game items, and I fear that would lead to price wars with large "megacorporations" as the only winners.A player should have some information on whether a given item's price is a good deal or decide if it has some other benefit (location, service, etc) to justify a higher-than-average price. I think that would reduce at least some of the economic frustration that crops up so often.
I wouldn't really like the average price for the galaxy, however what I would like to see, or be able to do, is look up items and see what they were sold for, and what the stats were. This would help "balance" out the economy so that if I'm a crafter I can see what people are selling what I have for and either lower or raise my price and still be competative.
As it is right now, If I wanted to do this I would have to travel to every vendor and see what they have it for sale at, not what it was sold for, and adjust my prices depending on how long they had theirs for sale. To keep this from getting over used, I would propose that the person looking up would need to have a skill Efficiency3 perhaps, this would make another advantage to going merchant.
I don't think that a new character has a tough time getting what they need. I started a new character and with space I was able to make a lot of money, as well as other players offering help. True I didn't go out and buy all of the highend armor, I don't need it yet, and it won't help yet as I'm still only pulling <1k missions. I didn't even buy a change of clothes yet, still have the newbie-ware. The ONLY thing I did from my main character is give the chasis blueprints that I needed for that tier. All of the parts as well as the money to have the chasis built came soley from that one character. True if they are going crafter they are going to have a tough time, but I do think that anyone can enter the game and still go on to be a really good crafter and have the same if not more of the money that the crafters now have.
CyrilNagal
Fri Mar 04, 2005 2:17 pm
#17
The economy will never be realistic.
Why? There is no scarcity of resources and they never run out. It's basic economics 101.
There are unlimited spawns of creatures. You can get unlimited jobs on terminals. Where in the real world can you find things like that? In the real word, if you could go out and kill elephants everyday, and get paid, and elephants would never become rare or extinct...well, you get the picture.
JTGAlpha
Fri Mar 04, 2005 5:21 pm
#18
The point is that this is a player run economy. We have money faucets where money is created in the form of missions and looted credits (pure money faucets). Then there have been several problems of duped credits in numbering in the trillions throughout the game. Not all of them can be accounted for. To counter these things there need to be inherent money sinks where money is "destroyed" just as it's created. These cover things like maintence fees, town fees, and, to a lesser extent, ship repairs and shuttle fees. None of these have any bearing on content.
The things YOU think of as sinks, armor prices and buffs are the only monetary gates to content and they are entirely player-oriented. Which means money is neither created or destroyed simply shuffled into the system and circulated until you lose it.
These things are necessary for a player driven economy. A player driven economy brought a lot of us here. It's a fun game for some of us to play. It has nothing to do with content. Sinks do not bar content. Fees from players for armor and buffs gate content. Skill level gates content. But if we are to have an absolutely free market these things are necessary. If you remove the free market then you kill the crafting game because the only way to regulate prices is to have NPC vendors (which would be a money sink) that offers goods as good as any crafter can make. Now, here's the ironic part. Player crafters will always be smarter. They will always make the higher end stuff (unless the devs REALLY manipulate the crafting game and kill it all together) so under this plan only the LOWER level crafters will be really hurt because they can't compete with the NPC's. Nes pa?
Ewach
Fri Mar 04, 2005 9:03 pm
#19
You want set prices? Here's the results you would see. All products would become average. No one would take the time to make high quality or exceptional products because there would be no way to distinguish them apart.
As crafters begin to realize there's no reason to make high end products, they'll just as quickly figure out they can sell products at the fixed prices with less and less effort to make them good.
The average quality will decline even further.
The system the original author of this post desires would remove all incentives and everyone would suffer.
refleks
Fri Mar 04, 2005 9:54 pm
#20
Please, stop blaming the crafters, if a crafter has unreasonable high prices no-one is gonna buy his/her goods and he/she is going to go out of business. Only people you can blame are the people who pay the prices to keep overpricers fueled.
Puertoriqueno
Fri Mar 04, 2005 10:06 pm
#21
Pawlin wrote:
SWG is a player driven economy. It is by design a capitalist system where upply and demand determine prices. I don't see any game wide general inflation.
Money sinks are required. Money comes in... money must go out. If we didn't have money sinks then we would get inflation because of it.
Darth_Doofus wrote:
...No one player should have over 15 million, unless they own a monopoly on a server. ...
Why not? You can grind that much on missions within a few months fairly easily. Why 15M that too much?
There will always be rich people and there will always be poor people. The thing separating the 2 is time invested and ability.
....or camping Nyax. Look guys, I really dont think we have a place to say anything. We are the haves. I don't even remember the last time I had as little as 15 million. I think we need to give the have-nots the ability to speak their peace. We cant ignore them forever....there are more of them then there are of us, and they could pull the proverbial rug right out from underneath us if they band together. I for one would like to be able to keep my fortune thank you......lets let them talk.
BlackJango
Sat Mar 05, 2005 11:16 am
#22
Darth_Doofus wrote:
All money sinks do, is deprive the non-l337(elite) players of content. What we need is to fix prices, force merchants and weapons and such to set their prices for certain objects at a set price, or to at least send out a guide on what an item SHOULD be priced, and to avoid anyone who sells for more.
Inflation also causes massive problems. On the Naritus server, a set of composite armor goes for 100k. On Starsider, the same suit, with averagely slightly less stats. sells for 300-400k. People sell and buy items for over 10 million. No one player should have over 15 million, unless they own a monopoly on a server. I had a friend who went into the business of SELLING RIS ARMOR, he'd buy the pieces, have the armor made custom, then sell in BULK! We're talking losing and making 30+ million credits a DAY. How can this be intended by the Developers?
Call me a socialist, call me a commie, but the game's economy has gotten worse since the game came out and after a level off period for about 3 months it's now starting to get worse and worse.
MMORPG companies in South Korea (current leader in the MMORPG market), Like the makers of Lineage 2, Are Hiring REAL ECONOMISTS to set their prices and keep inflation in check. I'm glad there is finnaly a board like this, but it should NOT have taken over a year and a half to put it here.
Thanks for your time.
Hard working people that risk money tend to make money.
people that cry about not having money and wanting the rich guys money end up in the poor house
Tsujigiri
Sat Mar 05, 2005 11:40 am
#23
A spectre is haunting Starsider -- the spectre of communism. All the powers of Starsider have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: Devs and Players, BlackJango and sciguyCO, Vets and Newbs.
Where is the party in opposition that has not been decried as communistic by its opponents in power? Where is the opposition that has not hurled back the branding reproach of communism, against the more advanced opposition parties, as well as against its reactionary adversaries?
Two things result from this fact:
I. Communism is already acknowledged by all Starsider powers to be itself a power.
II. It is high time that Communists should openly, in the face of the whole world, publish their views, their aims, their tendencies, and meet this nursery tale of the spectre of communism with a manifesto of the party itself.
To this end, Communists of various nationalities have assembled on the forums and sketched the following manifesto, to be published in the English language.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I -- BOURGEOIS AND PROLETARIANS
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.
Crafter and non-crafter, Jedi and non-Jedi, stacker and Carbineer, AFKer and Entertainer, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.
In the earlier epochs of history, we find almost everywhere a complicated arrangement of society into various orders, a manifold gradation of social rank.
The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with class antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones.
Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinct feature: it has simplified class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other -- rich and poor.
From the ranks of the crafters sprang the Mayors of the earliest towns. From these crafters the first elements of the bourgeoisie were developed.
The discovery of Lord Nyax, the release of JtL, opened up fresh ground for the rising bourgeoisie. The rise of AFK looting, the colonisation of Dantooine, credit duping, the increase in the means of exchange and in commodities generally, gave to commerce, to navigation, to industry, an impulse never before known, and thereby, to the revolutionary element in the tottering feudal society, a rapid development.
The feudal system of industry, in which industrial production was monopolized by closed guilds, now no longer suffices for the growing wants of the new markets. The manufacturing system took its place. The guild-masters were pushed aside by the manufacturing middle class; division of labor between the different corporate guilds vanished in the face of division of labor in each single workshop.
Meantime, the markets kept ever growing, the demand ever rising. Even manufacturers no longer sufficed. Thereupon, radioactives and factories revolutionized industrial production. The place of manufacture was taken by the giant, PA; the place of the industrial middle class by industrial millionaires, the leaders of the whole industrial armies, the modern bourgeois....
The Communists turn their attention chiefly to Starsider, because that server is on the eve of a bourgeois revolution that is bound to be carried out under more advanced conditions of SWG civilization and with a much more developed proletariat than that of Bloodfin was, and because the bourgeois revolution in Starsider will be but the prelude to an immediately following proletarian revolution.
In short, the Communists everywhere support every revolutionary movement against the existing social and political order of things.
In all these movements, they bring to the front, as the leading question in each, the property question, no matter what its degree of development at the time.
Finally, they labor everywhere for the union and agreement of the democratic parties of all countries.
The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a communist revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a server to win.
Proletarians of all servers, unite!
-- Groucho Marx, 1848
Jagged-F3l
Sat Mar 05, 2005 11:57 am
#24
Darth_Doofus wrote:
All money sinks do, is deprive the non-l337(elite) players of content. What we need is to fix prices, force merchants and weapons and such to set their prices for certain objects at a set price, or to at least send out a guide on what an item SHOULD be priced, and to avoid anyone who sells for more.
Inflation also causes massive problems. On the Naritus server, a set of composite armor goes for 100k. On Starsider, the same suit, with averagely slightly less stats. sells for 300-400k. People sell and buy items for over 10 million. No one player should have over 15 million, unless they own a monopoly on a server. I had a friend who went into the business of SELLING RIS ARMOR, he'd buy the pieces, have the armor made custom, then sell in BULK! We're talking losing and making 30+ million credits a DAY. How can this be intended by the Developers?
Call me a socialist, call me a commie, but the game's economy has gotten worse since the game came out and after a level off period for about 3 months it's now starting to get worse and worse.
MMORPG companies in South Korea (current leader in the MMORPG market), Like the makers of Lineage 2, Are Hiring REAL ECONOMISTS to set their prices and keep inflation in check. I'm glad there is finnaly a board like this, but it should NOT have taken over a year and a half to put it here.
First, regulating prices in this manner has a name--COMMUNISM. Do you want SWG to become a communist game? I don't think the majority agrees with you.
Second, you're obviously a noob that can't stand the fact that there is a percentage of the population that has already been playing the game for significant length of tiem. These people worked hard to become "elitist" (I believe this is how you referred to them).
Third, this is a game. Try to keep this in mind. If you're not having fun in SWG and having more fun playing communist games like Linneage 2, then go play that game and stop spreading your misery all over the boards.
Thanks for your time.
JTGAlpha
Sat Mar 05, 2005 11:59 am
#25
Let me also add....this is a video game. I'm allowed to be greedy here. I'm a relatively selfless guy in real life. I can be a greedy pig here. Know why? It's a game. If you're broke in this game like I am in real life, you're not going to starve. You're not going to freeze to death when you can't make your rent. You don't have kids to feed with those credits. No one's going to be evicted or killed or arrested. In fact, you can't even go into debt. The farthest you can fall is zero. And there is no real consequences to being poor. So pardon me if I sound like a heartless republican when I say, "Get a job, lazyboy."
Jagged-F3l
Sat Mar 05, 2005 12:01 pm
#26
CyrilNagal wrote:
The economy will never be realistic.
Why? There is no scarcity of resources and they never run out.
There are unlimited spawns of creatures. You can get unlimited jobs on terminals. Where in the real world can you find things like that? In the real word, if you could go out and kill elephants everyday, and get paid, and elephants would never become rare or extinct...well, you get the picture.
It is so obvious that you are not a crafter.
While resources do not run out, there is a scarcity of resources with varying stats. This allows crafters to create items with varying stats, and thus set prices according to supply-and-demand laws.
As for comment regarding the realism of the economy, I disagree. On a macro level, the economy in SWG follows some basic laws that one would expect a capitalistic economy to adhere to.