Game Guides Archive
Thread: Friday Feature Economy Stats April 30th
BabyRancor wrote:
I think the most unsatisfying part of the economy (to me at least) is that all the drains are fundamentally about either avoiding a bad consequence or required by the game.
By this I mean the following: All types of maintenance are paid to prevent the relevant structure/ vendor from going poof, ditto vehicle repairs. Insurance is about avoiding greater decay and cloning fees are about avoiding wounds and downtime. The travel and skill system are respectively totally required and mostly required (I've bought most of my skills as I don't like standing around and spamming for a trainer).
About the only "perk" sinksare: 1)bank tip surcharge - saving you a trip to the bank and 2) buying faction - saving you the time required to run the missions.
The game could really use more sinks that result in a tangible gain for the player. I realise that this is a player-driven economy but IMO there is still a place for NPC vendors.
One really neat idea that cropped up in a thread I started about the economy was to have an NPC "phat lewt" vendor.
Once a week this vendor (a Jawa caravan outside of Bestine perhaps) would stock a few (less than a dozen) different high-end loot items (such as Krayt tissue sets, armour layers, AV-21 powerplants, etc) for auction. High-rolling players could then bid on the items in-game, with the funds leaving the economy permanently and the winning player getting their hands on a nice item. This neither devalues the efforts of the combat classes (as they would have the lions-share of loot sales) nor floods the game with high-end items (a handful a week). However it does present the opportunity to drain millions from the game economy every week from the people that hold the majority of liquid funds - the non-combat types.
That has to be one of the best ideas for "high end loot" NPC's I've heard so far.Niceone BabyRancor!
/thinks Sarcastically about Junk Dealers:
On the other hand, the "Junk Dealers" are an amazing idea created by developers getting PAID for doing development like this!
Sounds like too much EverCrack standard fare creeped into the hurried late development of SWGwhen SOE cracked the whip!
3164 -5524 Outside of Moenia Naboo
Installations and Architectural Supplies
Doctor's Healing Tools By Ekki
Master Artisan Componants
Crafting Tools and Stations
Quality Resources
The Highest Rated Vehicles!
NasEscobar wrote:
Personally, I think the economy is pretty bad in this game. I always remember this one quote from A New Hope said by Luke,
"10 thousand? We can get our own ship for that."
When the price of a gun cost 3 mil, and in the movies, the price of a SPACESHIP costs 10k, I think that is a problem.
They should make resources like Genosian loot and krayt tissue common. That will decrease the economy down a lot. From that I am reading from this new combat balance, then it seems like the damge on your gun is not going to be so important as it used to be. So I think it can be done.
No.
If they really wanted to increase the value of credit, the only way that's not going to bork the game (oh yes, let's all play with NS sliced compo, ultimate krayt guns and so on. Very fun, very immersive, very rewarding to end game hunters) would be to strongly reduce the influx of money from mission. If those destroys gave 1K instead of10K, then NPC loot would be more valuable (right now, it's often a paltry sum compared to destroy benefits), and make this 10K more of a sum.
but is it really worth doing it ?
I agree. 10k for a ship, hell, the bounty on Chewbacca was 25k - and that because Jabba was REALLY ticked and set a price so high every bounty hunter in the galaxy was looking for him.
But, a bigger sign of the crudfest the devs have given us for the economy is the crystal and krayt pearl trade.
Here are items that VERY few people in this game can use, yet the prices are extremely and artificially high. Why? Because they look pretty to those of us without a Jedi slot, sure, but because we have accepted them as prices.
These items are the Tulip Bulbs of SWG. They are ruining the economy through artificially inflated prices and people seemingly oblivious to their uselessness.
The way to correct this?
Well, when was the last time you paid somebody $1.5k to come to your house and remove a nest of bunnies?
So, I agree. An EXTREME lowering of mission payouts would help. But it won't FIX.
When it comes down to it, the only way to fix this economy is for us to realize that the devs of this game realize that there IS no real content to it, and have artificially created content by sending us on these wild goose chases for "rare loot."
They have distracted us to the point where we've forgotten what we used to find FUN.
When was the last time you were in Bestine or Theed and saw a HUGE pvp raid like you used to see last summer?
You don't, because they don't happen anymore.
Everybody is on this huge loot quest, even if they don't realize it. I'm a holosmith, and I've spent so much time grinding these past few months that I've forgotten about what counts.
How about you?
Take a look through the trade forums when they started, around early december. Look at what Holocrons were selling for.
8-10 million.
What do they go for now?
A few are on the Ahazi board for 75k right now, with no bids.
HUGE inflation, HUGE deflation. A sign of a REAL healthy economy.
And, as in RL, a flawed economy is symptomatic and precursor to major upheaval.
Look at Germany in the 1920's.
Let's just hope that this problem can be addressed and fixed, rather than swept under the Sean Tredwell election rug that my buddy bought for 3.5 million the other day.
I believe that in order to get the economy to flow better, you need double the payout of all Combat type missions from terminals. That way, combat only players have a chance to become rich and not have to waste Lots on harvestors to just get by.
Just my 2 cents (no pun intended)
This is an awesome Friday Feature. I think many of us who have been playing for awhile find the economy and other aspects of our population behaviour very interesting.
Thanks
Message Edited by Nononsense on 05-01-2004 01:06 PM
As an earlier respondent mentioned: I run missions, I pay fees, at the end of the day I have a profit. This is the basic engine that runs the game's economy. Anyone who does what I do makes a profit. For all such players, the economy is inflationary. Don't you think we'd notice if we were going broke? The only time my bank balance takes real hits is when I'm buying things from other players, and that money's not leaving the system. Put simply, it does not matter to me, or to anyone who can run missions, if the economy is "running at a loss" in some big-picture sense, because we can just print what we need. If I want something that costs a million credits, I can go run missions for a million credits.
This is not a good thing.
Assuming the analysis isn't flawed (and it's entirely possible that it is), the only people for whom the economy could be deflationary are people who don't run missions but have high costs -- pure crafters maintaining structures, basically. Of course, these people are the ones with the huge bank accounts too. So we have a hard-working class of adventurers that adds value to the economy which is sucked away by bloated elites to support their decadent lifestyle...POWER TO THE PEOPLE! VIVA LA REVOLUTION!......whoops, channeled Che Guevara there for a moment.
Which brings me to my last point, the following quote in relation to the concentration of wealth in the hands of the few:
This isn't necessarily something to be discouraged by - rather, we take it as a sign that the game economy is replicating characteristics of the real world economy. Since one of our goals was to have a game economy that can provide ongoing interesting strategy gameplay, seeing real world patterns manifest is something we were looking forward to.
This quote is pure Koster. Game balance isn't important. Whether or not the system is entertaining isn't important. What matters is using the paying customers as lab rats.
As I've said before: Sim City isn't fun for the Sims.
Haha, I love that kind of honesty from devs
Holocron wrote:
Not all that slowly--we went in and zapped the cash out of accounts that seemed to be totally ridiculous. But a lot of the duped cash is spread out at this point, since it was used in transactions. So probably everyone has SOME counterfeit credits in their possession at this point. That's why going the route of running at a deficit is a better way to go for now. The best way to track this, much as I hate to say it, is to watch the value of SWG credits on eBay. Since we closed the duping loophole, the price has more than tripled.
And we miss you Holocron, you should come back and visit more often, hold server wide events in the name of the devs, etc.Just a couple of quickie comments. Glad to see so many folks enjoyed the article...
Expecting a game with largely player-driven pricing to adhere to the prices cited in the movie is unrealistic. There are VERY few numbers that the devs set directly in terms of values. If a given item is developing artificially inflated prices and is becoming the tulip bulb of SWG, that's largely thanks to player speculation in that market. For that matter, a centrally planned economy that could actually achieve hitting that number would be quite the opposite of a player-driven economy--it'd have to be very tightly centrally controlled...
Secondly, DFH, the power law distribution isn't about game balance. There isn't a single economy in the entire world that is "fair" in the way you propose. I'll say upfront that I am at a total loss as to how make sure that the game economy is "fair" in the way you suggest;I'd also note that fairness in the way you seem to asking for it would also mean that skill could not result in making more money than someone unskilled. And that seems antithetical to "fun game" in a lot of ways. It's certainly true that currently some professions tend to accumulate cash and others do not--it's a worthwhile exercise to build a graph showing where money enters (via which broad profession groups) and where it exits and accumulates.
This particular article focused on only a fairly small subset of the possible metrics, since it is largely about currency creation and destruction. Yes, there's tons more that can be done with commodities prices, per capita incomes, and so on. Some of you may have read the articles by Ted Castronova calculating the GDP of EverQuest--he'd love to get detailed stats on SWG, I'm sure. 