Hubs period are footfall traps. It has nothing to do with Ultima. I think you keep taking it as an affront when this gets mentioned. It had nothing to do with you or your group. It’s the way the economy functions as footfall is the really only true coin generator.
hubs are the primary travel function in the game now. As a result all the coin goes in to those hands. If it isn’t constantly being streamed out to the general populace, something will serve as a value stabilizer and that’s now looking to be oort stones.
There are a limited amount of oort stones in this current player population. The way this gets solves is if more players hunt oort stones. More players hunting more stones means more being sold which means the demand goes down and as a result prices on them go back down.
Until coin generation is addressed and hubs stay the way they are, oortstones are going to be what the economy begins to base coin value off of. It will likely get worse before it gets better.
I really don’t understand you folks. I don’t care about coin. I barter the majority of my goods. That was pretty obvious by the fact I gave you guys half of whatever gems I pulled in for each hammer you gave me. That was much for bartered wealth then anyone else I have dealt with, but you are right, greed is amazing I guess.
All I have done is address economic problems and how these factors impact things like hubs.
I think maybe @wolfpack2012 might be referring to the design compared to portal seekers. You go through more portals and more beacons using portal seekers so in general they probably get more footfall per traveler than a more centralized system like the ultima hub.
I do agree that large hubs do generate more footfall than a typical build.
What Helios means is the difference be set up.
Aquarius Network makes the traveler go true 3 places max if i am right. At Portal Seekers you need to follow the road to the planet. That makes you travel true more portal hubs what generate more money then.
I don’t think Ultima folks overreact. It’s just the way in which you express your statements make it sound offensive even for just an observer like me.
However I must totally agree with you that the footfall is (was?) the only real source of money in this game. There are only 2 sources of money in the game: footfall and feats. Now the first one is broken, and the other is as crappy as it was.
As for “Hubs period are footfall traps” part - you’re completely off. Hey you can say the same about shops! And roads! Oh, hey… any plotted area is a footfall trap…
There are networks that are designed to force players to go through a number of other plots in order to reach the destination. Those, my kind Sir, truly are footfall traps, although they provide you a service taking nothing from you, except that little bit of time.
Now, regarding the Ultima portal network - it’s just one big blob with all portals available at hand. That makes it very convenient for travellers, and is the main reason I prefer to use this one over others.
Unfortunately that layout doesn’t generate much income, as each player is registered only once (or twice if the destination is out of reach for a single portal).
Perhaps. It certainly isn’t the intent. Maybe I come across too blunt.
Regardless, if coin generation was addressed the footfall trap argument wouldn’t even exist. Only the devs know where the majority of footfall/coin generation is made. Until they release that set of data, anything we do is speculation.
edit: as per the comments about how other hubs have you walk a bit more, perhaps they realized this problem and planned for it as such? I don’t know, maybe they really wanted more forced coin generation. Again speculation.
There is no shop that generates more income than any hub, I’m pretty certain of that. If there were numbers that proved otherwise, I’d certainly happily eat crow.
I just used his words and said all hubs are predatory footfall traps by nature, by design or otherwise. Hubs force you to centralize your path. That’s just the fact.
edit: gonna stay out of the thread then since it seems Im ruffling feathers unintentionally. The economy will work itself out. What hubs do going forward is their prerogative. It’ll be an interesting dynamic to watch as far as coin generation and the oort stone farm rate, and other smaller things impact the future.
our footfall has gone down drastically too, but we still get oort from members/supporters doing semi-donations at 100c per stone. PS isn’t designed to be a footfall trap. it’s split into travel nodes to consume less oort.
I think both PS and Ultima need to continue working hard to get the oort they need.
To be clear the arrangement for PS is based on 3 main things:
Oort cost - having two hops that cost less than a single hop
Atmosphere safety - Spending more oort to ensure people can reach all the safe planets without having to go through a T4
World Full - Putting popular planets at dead-ends so they don’t block travel to other planets
We’re also considering taking EU planets off the main road as lots of people have problems with the EU server.
None of these reasons have anything to do with maximizing footfall, although I agree we do generate more foot fall because we have more nodes.
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Not trying to hijack this thread, it’s just that there’s talk comparing Ultima to PS and I don’t want anyone to think PS is in some super safe place either. We work hard to keep going and I think if you use Ultima you should help out with their Oort too, because it’s no different than paying for your own portals if they go down.
Oh, I know it has due to the recently found bug with footfall, but I imagine if that is resolved your footfall is simply going to skyrocket once again.
I’m not trying to claim your design is specifically made to generate coin, but it does. And that coin needs to come back into the economy, not through giant competitions where the money goes into 3-4 peoples pockets, but with a constant and spread out feed. The only way you can do this is through oort purchases, which isn’t going to happen when you’re trying to hold the price at rock bottom.
I mean it’s not going to happen anyways. lets say we raise our asking price for oort to 2000c each. Other people still need oortstone, so other people need to be willing to buy for more than 2k to get it, because why would you sell to some shop when you can help your local network and get more money? So shops will buy at higher than 2k so they can sell at even higher, and people will buy higher than 2k because otherwise they’d have to get it themselves. So eventually the economy stabilizes above 2k, and we’re in the same problem. Yes we’ll get a short term boost of oort, but it doesn’t fix anything. So there’s no real reason to increase the price. Raising the floor hurts portal networks, and hurts people who buy their Oort instead of hunting for it. Yes it gives more money to people hunting but that’s only one side of the situation.
I think there’s also an issue of scale you need to take into account when looking at minimum pricing as well though. Right now you price at 100, I find a shop selling for 200. That’s a 100% increase on my sales, i’d be throwing half my income away if I wanted to help you. In your 2k example, I highly doubt shop owners are going to try and buy oort for 4k, so I’d be losing maybe 10-20% of my income if I sell to you. In that case I’m much more likely to just drop it in your basket than run around trying to get that extra bit of coin.
And while you may not like this next part, since I know you worry about other players, people who have stupid amount of portals open in their dead stores wont be able to afford to raise their basket prices above yours. Meaning less competition for the oort, so more can be dropped in your baskets as demand decreases.
But that is how fully free-market economies work, right? You set the price so that you get the volume of sales you want, others compete, and the best win while the rest founder and go out of business. If a hub dies because it can’t get enough stone/sales/footfall/whatever, that’s the market. I’m sorry it didn’t work out, maybe your next venture will be better.
This is a good point. but yeah making other people’s lives harder isn’t really ideal :S.
Yes. What I’m saying is that I don’t think PS or Ultima will die because if they do, then someone else will make portals. The only difference being someone else is working for the oort. Why not just skip a step and work for the oort now. I think if you’re benefiting from the portals, it’s hard not to help support them. Communicating the oort reserve levels to your community helps facilitate that. It doesn’t mean that drastic change is required, just some periodic raising of awareness =D. There’s plenty of people who can help.
And on that note, look at how many people rushed to help Hash when he asked, which is awesome. Would love to see more of that in his help request thread than people dissecting hub networks/speculating economics.
One problem with your 2000c example is that the portal hubs should generally (if footfall is working right) have more money than the average day shop owner. So at some point the majority of shop owners will not be able to match whatever new price you were to set it at due to not having the funds to fill the baskets. So the portal hubs end up, for the most part, being the highest price basket for players to drop off their oort. Shops will end up having to to offer less but they will still get some sales here and there from the people wanting to support them. Its the same thing that is happening currently except the hubs would have plenty of oort and the shops would have a harder time getting oort, instead of it being the opposite currently.
When you look at the size difference from how much fuel a shop needs compared to a hub it becomes clear that a shop, even with lower prices, could still stay afloat. Even if that means they would have to go hunt a tiny bit to make up for the small amount they could possible be short. What they would have in their favor though is that there would be working portal systems in place to make that small amount of hunting much easier to do.
I wouldn’t really say that’s always the case. Their only income is from footfall and the money is going back out into oort baskets. I can potentially make hundreds of thousands of coin on a good day of sales, I don’t even want to know what kind of coin a popular forger makes.
Their income will of course be a lot more consistent, but if I really needed oort I could just hunt for it because the amount I need will be tiny in comparison to a hub
Edit: Hah, you kinda addressed that at the end of your post already I’m a bad reader
The money may or may not make it back out to the players though if no one uses their baskets due to the low price. And yes a forge shop could make much more money than a portal hub but the difference there is passive income vs active. Plus a forge shop is not an average everyday player kind shop to own. You have to be further along to be able to forge compared to random guy wanting to sell the things he has gathered or gotten as drops.
I’m a bad reader