Business And Economy Archive
Thread: I SAY FOR A QUICK FIX FOR THE ECONOMY IS TO
CorenLanra wrote:
Col_Osiris wrote:
wildwalker wrote:
I say a quick fix for the economy would be to consolidate some of the servers, at the very least double the popolation on remaining servers. Delete all accounts that are over 60 days inactive (thats houses and all) and do away with lot swaps to stop the fake cities and harvester farms. Put player owned Hotels in the big cities, let the owner lease out places to live. Create a group to control shuttles across planets, and another for garages. Let the Doc's own and run big city hospitals, where a visit would be "a have to" to get wounds healed...oh well..was just getting carried away...
All I really know is that my sales went from an average of 2 mil a day down to less than 200k a day.....and get this, I stood at MO sunday and tried to give away "free samples" of post CU pu's that I had made with "near perfect" resources....and in 3 hrs I had given out less than one crate...and these were for max dmg and max speed in ranged and melee, where are peeps at? What has happened to our game?
Theyre not going to delete inactive characters. They cant do that. When you buy the box the game comes in, you buy the account and CD Key. Its yours, forever. Thats why you cant trade these games in like you can other games.
They have already announced a purge for this coming october sometime.
Hmmmm bummer. If they were going to do that, they should just make a complete wipe of the servers. I mean totally get rid of everything and start anew. Its happened before in online games. I cant see how doing so would make things any worse for the community right now. I mean, not saying that to bash the CU. I like it. But they wont do that because it would really mean the end of the game. Anyone who had a Jedi would quit... and thats probably more than half of the population hehe.
XStarbracer wrote:
the best way to fix the economy to is take skill points away from crafting professions, and put npc vendors and more loot drops into the game.
erm how about no
oh yeah....so if every major MMO decided to jump off a bridge while rubbing green jelly all over themselves, does that mean this one should too?
Just because every other game wants to cater to the lowest-common denominator doesn't mean this one NEEDs to follow suit. It's been doing just dandy without being just like every other system, so no need to make it into Diablo 2 with blasters just yet.
And if you want to play Diablo 2 with blasters, I'm sure there's a mod somewhere....hey...why do we need any of this advanced stuff anyhow? Where's my atari...I wanna play tank.
XStarbracer wrote:
How about yes, every major MMO realizes people cant run an economy, even SOE hence EQ2 not having one. This is reallly fix the game.
If you look at EQ2 or wow their echonomy is in no way better than the one in swg, in both of those loot sells for tons, in swg the difference is that it caters to 2 different playstyle, crafter and combatant, and promotes interdepence that way. By making this "fix" what you do is basically make every single crafter quit the game due to them not having a role anymore, if anything this will kill the game. The reason swg is doing as well as it currently is that people can chose what path to take whether its entertainer, crafter or combatant.
If they were to remove crafters, well i know 1 of my accounts would be gone, most likely 2, since i wouldnt need my crafter or one of my support toons. If you want an echonomy like EQ2i think you should go play EQ2, just as much of an echonomic mess as SWG can be just loot based..
XStarbracer wrote:
We dont need crafters, and SOE is realizing this, so i dont need to go anywhere, its only a matter of time, and thank god.
What I can't understand is: How can you have been playing so long to make such an asinine comment as this? Have you never played with the Crafter professions in the almost 2 years that you have been registered? If not, then you have really no valid opinion about the Crafting profession. If so, then you must understand the amazing uniqueness of the crafting professions. I have played many online games from text-based to first-player graphic. There are so few, if any other, systems that allows the players so much opportunity to craft nearly EVERYTHING you see in the game.
XStarbracer wrote:We dont need crafters, and SOE is realizing this, so i dont need to go anywhere, its only a matter of time, and thank god.
If the MMORPG genre was at it's best someday down the road, for you, would anyone even know if they switched games?
I have just recently taken on merchant skills with one of my characters, he is purely set up to make and sell.
Something I think that could help the economy is a publication thru the game of Need and Demand.
I produce good quality equipment but cant sell it at all because obviously there is no need for it! But how do I know that .... in real life you would research your market. Look as the stock exchange ...see what rescources are shifting. There is something in this and it could open a new character line (in merchant) - resources dealer/broker.
Also - the system should NOT let you under sell an item. It should set a minimum based on cost per unit of recource and quality/complexity of the produced item.
Under cutting the price should levy a Galactic Tax on your bank to cover the difference.
MercHalton wrote:
I have just recently taken on merchant skills with one of my characters, he is purely set up to make and sell.
Something I think that could help the economy is a publication thru the game of Need and Demand.
I produce good quality equipment but cant sell it at all because obviously there is no need for it! But how do I know that .... in real life you would research your market. Look as the stock exchange ...see what rescources are shifting. There is something in this and it could open a new character line (in merchant) - resources dealer/broker.
You can do market research in game too...it's called playing. If you're playing and you think, "wow, I could really use one of these" you have your market. If you're playing for a while, and there stuff in your inventory you never use, there's an item that probably won't sell. You can also ask other players, etc.. That you didn't doesn't mean that you can't.
I'm with you onthe resource broker/miner proffession. I thought it'd be nice if it was attached to the surveying and engineering lines in artisan, and with the extra skill cost would be the ability to use more lots for mines. Keep hope alive, but I doubt we'll see it come around.
Also - the system should NOT let you under sell an item. It should set a minimum based on cost per unit of recource and quality/complexity of the produced item.
I completely disagree withyou. If you want to get technical, only a couple of planets are actually under Imperial control...the rest are contested and/or rebel and/or independent. No merchant on Tatooine should ever fall under the auspices of the Galactic Empire's taxation board (shudder), as the Hutt's control that planet.
And your second point of a minimum cost of an item. I've been from Droid Engineer to Weaponsmith to Chef to Bio-Engineer to Architect to Merchant to Armorsmith, and I can say with some certainty that while there is a base cost for items, it has nothing to do with any equation that could possibly be derived. It's based on costs of maintenence, what you consider to be your business expenses, travelling to prospect, etc....
But that only masks the underlying issue. If I have a vendor, I should be able to tell him what price to set. WHat if I want to run a sale? Do I have to get in-game permission from a taxation board full of bugged NPC's? Makes no sense.... this calll for galactic pricing guides is just not necessary. There's a simple process. Will you pay that much for the item? Will you pay more? Those are the only 2 questions that need to be answered for your market research. If you think undercutters are making you business go south, maybe you should switch locations....
But about the undercutters - You can guarantee that they're making a profit, which means they're meeting the minimum cost requirements, and charging a bit more on top. Maybe you should take a closer look at their business model. If your crafts are really quality then someone's bound to realize it, unless you're abismally overpriced.
Under cutting the price should levy a Galactic Tax on your bank to cover the difference.
Like wrote above, all this kind of thing would really do is raise the minimum cost, which even undercutters sell far far above, so it'd be a waste of time and space to fix a system that isn't broken, and that's just pure and simple innefficiency.
cl0kwerq wrote:
And to the crafter hater:
To protest crafters you should:
-Take off any armor
-Only Use Looted weapons and clothes - no custom jobs, so you gotta start with a widdle knife and work your way up to a crappy NS Lance.
-Got a droid? Nope! crafted only
-Want a mount? Gotta go master creature handler
-Walking kinda slow? NO SWOOP FOR YOU! Cept for that X-10 that you start with
-Tired of geting blown out of space with your Tier 1 ship? Sucks...
well okay you get my point.
BUt I believe what you're trying to say is that you'd rather this be a completely loot based game, with different level NPC vendor's offering different goods at set prices by the developers so that when you look at a price and say "HOLY HANNAH!" you'll know who's really behind it. Exceptional items using rare components, or that are just plain better than any other items out there, or seeing one vendior in a pricing war upsets you, because then you can't go around to people and call them "noobs" becuase they don't know a WF is worth 20 soj.......oh, wrong game sorry.
Loot based economy is fine....but it's been done. This game is unique and very well liked because of the huge crafted item base. The success of the business depends on how good the crafter is. So there has to be some degree of quality, otherwise the crafter is reduced to a pointless role, and you're playing just another DandD type RPG. Nothing wrong with those, but that's not the game I want to play. I want to run my business....get loot too when i feel like it, but mostly I just want to co-exist with the community and interact in this virtual star wars environment. I see no way in which constant loot hunting would improve that.
Hopefully your next response will be a bit better thought out.
Nice post.
Personally I really don't like combat. Okay, i'll hold my hands up, it's because I am not particularly good at it. But I love crafting, buying and selling, making deals etc etc. I AM good at that. That's why SWG holds me. It gives me the opportunity to play my game alongside people who prefer the combat game. They can supply me in the form of looted items, I can supply them in the form of equipment.
It gives me the chance to craft something different to the factory run weapons that go on my vendors. And, just as importantly, it gives the consumer the opportunity to own something different to the mass-produced factory weapons. How can this be a bad thing? Sadly, I fear for the future of the crafters in SWG. And only when they're gone, when all the combat players run to an NPC to get their identical weapons, will alot realise what they're missing. They won't even have the choice of different NPCs to get slightly different weapons as they can do with factory run player made weapons now.
Don't get me wrong, I am not having a pop at all combat types, just the ones who use their player crafted equipment without giving a second thought as to the time and effortthat went into creating it. You know thatbuzz you get when that mob a fewlevels higher than you finally drops dead and you loot something nice from it?? I get it as well, when someone mails me or tells me that they think my products are great.
SWG is really the only choice for players who like to craft and play the economy side of a game. But there seems to be a glacialcrawl in this game towards pure combat. If ever a purely crafting/economy MMORPG came onto the market based on aCapitalist ideal of growth, investment, research and developmenti'd be there like a shot.
Until then, or until SWG finally makes it blatantly clear that crafting really isn't what they want players to do in this game i'm stuck here.