That’s smart
Yup, thanks for all the feedback! It looks like the economy is in a rough patch because:
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The coin simply isn’t there. A thriving economy requires coin AND momentum. Bins full of non-moving coin are as useless as a few scattered coins blowing in the breeze.
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The Gem Rush is over. Yes, regen is fixed but that is not causing any problems. People have finally crafted their power coils, and now that grind is over. Power coils were in high demand because you can’t craft much without them.
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DIY mentality. If you can do something yourself, why not? And that’s OK!!
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End of the line. Some players have already experienced everything the game currently has to offer. They feel no need to add a few thousand more gems to their pile of ten thousand gems. They’re out getting fresh air and spearfishing or whatever it is that Boundless players do. They may come back for T7.
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Population dip. Not everyone playing in week 1 will still be playing in week 5. Less players, less coin.
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Recession/Depression. People tend to hoard their money when the economy isn’t doing well. It’s like the economy isn’t doing well because the economy isn’t doing well.
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Price drop. Few things are in demand right now. Maybe 5 things tops not counting the random guy building a temple out of compressed coal or whatever.
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Forging. The things people want most right now are very expensive. And they can’t get but so cheap because there is an entire crafting process involved.
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Flooded market. Every shop sells everything… in a universe with no buyers.
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Lack of alternative routes. Coin comes from footfall. One does not simply “make money” in Boundless; one can only make money for others.
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Nice summation.
Exactly, dead on, was a bit confused actually when I realised how alts worked and were being used in this game as opposed to how the game is “sold”, proposed to you to be like. Yes, alts do just that!
I’m watching daily 
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I price my request baskets by how easy it is for me to gather those resources. If I don’t want to gather them, or I’m having a hard time getting them then I increase the price I am willing to pay for them so I don’t have to go out and get them.
Now in order to FUND those requests I need to make sales so I need to price my goods for sale based on what I am buying the materials for, adding in a bit for profit cause I am not a charity. So higher request basket prices means higher sales prices.
But if no-one is buying my goods, which I think are set at reasonable prices, then I am not making sales and I still have no coins for request baskets.
Now on the flip side, if something is selling well then I am making coins that I can put on the request baskets to buy more materials to keep the process rolling and expanding into new areas.
So saying that the sell prices are too high is really difficult. If I need to put up the request basket prices to a higher amount to encourage people to sell to me (assuming I have the coin) then I also need to increase the sales prices of the goods I produce accordingly. It has to have some profit to make it worthwhile…
People want high request basket prices but low sales prices on goods produced and refusing to buy anything cause the sales prices are too high, or the request baskets are not deep enough, just exacerbates the issues.
When I started after release turnover was high. Now it is pretty much stagnant and it is either people have progressed past the goods that I have for sale or they have less coins to purchase with due to footfall being broken.
Why buy Fibrous leaves @10c when I can go out and farm heaps of them for free?
If I do decide I don’t want to do it myself then lets say I put up a request basket for 10c each, then I need to raise the prices on what I make from those leaves. But they don’t sell cause everyone complains that the price on the goods is too high. Then I am out of pocket for buying those leaves and no income from selling the goods.
If you want lower prices on the goods then I need to pay less for the leaves accordingly.
But now the request baskets are at “insultingly low prices” so I might as well just go farm them myself since noone will sell them to me at the lower prices…
You can’t win either way…
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I don’t get your logic and why you’re hammering on this thread. You were/are one of the most vocal people when as it relates to the bomb mining nerf. We all know if that was kept in game then we’d be right where we are right now but maybe at a faster rate or worst off (assuming you believe the economy is bad right now). It’s like you want your cake and to eat it too. You just can’t have it both ways.
I really hate it when everyone use noobs as a proxy for their argument. Everyone seems to do this. Why not just come out and say that it’s you that this is affecting rather than noobs.
Noobs are fine. We were all noobs at some point and managed to get past it. It’s not like new players are invalids and incapable of surviving this game. This isn’t the most complex game in the world…
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My baskets are never empty. I wish I could increase the budget in my baskets but there is only so much that I need
I rarely have more than 10k on hand at any given day. I log in, collect profit from my sales and spend it all on ingredients to make more stuff or some power coils, tools or materials for my build. My profit margins are pretty slim and I price everything based purely on the ingredients that go into it via a spreadsheet of ingredient make up for every item I sell.
I never have money in my request baskets because I do all my buying on Discord or from a few shops I know sell stuff for decent prices, I hate the thought of my money just sitting in a basket on the off chance that some random seller happens to enter my portal out of the hundreds of portals and has exactly what I need and is willing to part with it at the price I can afford to offer.
Sadly my store is either not competitive enough or there’s just not enough people buying as sales volumes are pretty low, thus my buying volume is also low
Different set of players.
Those of us in the economy are now suffering, and so you see different players complaining about it.
I’m still doing okay because some shops are doing okay that I sell too, but a lot of shopkeepers are not.
I bought one of your last slingbows out of nostalgia 
I don’t play multiplayer games, especially MMO’s to do absolutely everything myself that sounds like a hell of a chore. I get that some people like doing that, that’s great.
What you need to do, is understand people like different things to yourself.
The meta of the game has been changed, toward more of a solo mindset, thus the economy is hurting and the players that use or rely on it are unhappy. Its as simple as that.
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Agree with you there, but imagine if money did take inventory space… huge opportunity to run player built banks / vaults and teller machines ingame 
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Not even calling for buffs or nerfs in this thread. Bomb mining was just plain cool! Shame it was also effective. Your shop is currently one of the top 1% of shops that actually works, you are winning right now! And it’s not because of profit, but because you can actually get this to work.
If the option to buy isn’t there for some because the option to sell isn’t there the economy has failed. I have a few ideas I’m gonna try in the not too distant future.
I am not so sure about this. My experience is that groups of players are forming and they are taking care of each other. Between them, they mine, gather, and craft what they need. They build common workshops so everyone does not have to have power coils. Now is this sort of a grey area between true solo and true MMO? Maybe. I know of three different groups I interact with that are essentially doing this. They all do have some shopkeepers also that sell to other players, but within the group they tend to barter or just give the other players what they need. Very cooperative environment.
Now does this affect the other players running stores or looking to sell to stores? Maybe. It does reduce the number of players selling and buying from stores.
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I’d say you are right on point. I’d rather give my extra stuff to my fellow guildies in PSI or the Cuttlepunks (shameless plug for awesome people!) then sell it in a shopstand to the masses. Communities are important.
You also have cities developing their own economies. You can get nearly everything in blacklight, and the citizens want to keep their coins in the city as much as the can. So other than heading to @deenw s for pies and brews, most of us buy local.
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Where is the data do you have that shows the player base has increased? Everything I’ve seen shows a steady decline over the last 4 weeks. Just curious cause if that’s true then a lot of what I feel is totally wrong
The total number of people who have purchased the game can only go up. Hard to say the number of true players but there does seem to be a decent number of people playing right now.
I believe we have seen a normalish drop in playerbase, but we have seen a larger drop in player daily activity the past couple weeks. Probably due to RDR2 and other AAA games being dropped in the past few weeks. I’m even splitting my time between BO4 and this now to play with my long time buddies. Hopefully most will come back fulltime in the future. 
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