I actually don’t have a horse in this race, but I do see a lot of people wanting more than less specialization/less ability to do everything on your own. I’m one of those “do everything on my own” types, really. But you’re right, with machines easy to make, as a brewer you can pretty easily say “Well, I’ve already got the Food+Brew feat, if I just put 3 skill points into food crafting I can now make loaves.” and now you are a great cook, too. I think it’s human nature to look at something and say “Well, if I just do this one little thing more then I can do all these other things, too!” And that’s fine, but if the game takes that tack (which is has been, and which I personally like) then we can’t also expect a booming economy.
Making coin isn’t a role in the economy. Its a result. In this economy most have to be both suppliers and consumers. Unlike other games, we aren’t generating coin when we trade. Just moving money around. Since others are not going to just give them coin, they either need to supply or sell to earn it. Obviously this is a vast oversimplification, but it gets the gist without typing a book on my phone.
I think you touched on the core of the issue here more than you did in the original post I responded too. I don’t believe that the issue is lack of specialization in the crafts themselves, like I said brewer only needs 23 ingredients so there is plenty of other stuff I can sell if I wanted to focus on that and make a bit off coin from the excess, but it’s so easy to simply do everything yourself that you just end up taking every single skill anyway so all of those ingredients that you would sell in another game do all become important to you in this one.
Sadly with the prominence of alts and skill sets, I don’t think that’s going to change and the economy will suffer for it
If creatures would drop a few coin, as they do in OSRS(along with the other loot), players of every level could have/generate some coin. How much you receive would be tied to how much you play/hunt/etc. For builders, maybe certain blocks could also generate coin when harvested or something. Maybe plants or certain timber could also drop a couple of coin.
The more I read, the more I am thinking it may be an imbalance of casual and hardcore players. Its a difference in the value of our playtimes. I see the 100 iron they brought as 4-5c each, while they see that as an hour of work and want 20c each.
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I think a centralized General Exchange/bank like OSRS has or a built-in market like Trove has could be helpful. Also, being able to toss unwanted items into a loot collector to get coin would be nice.
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With new players/characters you get an influx of coin into the economy as objectives & feats are completed. When money was tight at one point in EA I considered deleting & re-rolling an alt as a way to get some coin.
People use & play MMORPGs/sandboxes for different reasons. Some just want to mine & build, some like to hunt, some (heaven forbid) want PVP. Therefore, I don’t think everything can be truly “balanced” without forcing people into roles or play styles that turn them off. Boundless won’t be able to make everyone happy…no game ever can. There will always be someone that doesn’t like something…be it original content or updates.
They are one of the only ways to increase the pool of currency.
I think another issue is while you see the iron as 4-5 cents, the economy as a whole seems to value iron at 6-7 cents (for buy baskets). While your prices aren’t bad, per-se, if there was an auction house structure where players didn’t have to go to 1000 stores to find a buyer, you would never get sellers at that price. So that hour of work for the person now possibly becomes 2 (or more) hours trying to unload their mats at the market price, making the game that much less fun because they have to “waste their time.”
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Or if I know via the auction house what people are buying and for how much, I can focus my efforts on something I am capable of gathering that has what I consider a decent price and pretty much know I can sell it thus avoiding wasting my time.
Edit took out extra word
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6-7c of 0c baskets or 5c with 5m coin in them. There is a lot more iron ore for sale then there are buyers.
This is off topic, but I have no problem selling smart stacks of iron at 6 or 7 cents, and I play very late at night, giving other people plenty of time to empty those baskets out before me.
Edit: The main takeaway from my post was that being a part of the economy, as someone that sells to buy baskets, is not a ton of fun. In a system with this much inefficiency, it will always be a smart business move to try to take advantage of that. But that process is also anti-consumer, and where it’s as easy as it is here to just opt-out of the economy, this is bad for everyone.
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Which low level individuals are having trouble selling iron ore for 6c? And where is their shop?
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An auction house would solve well over half of the problems with the economy but everybody grabs their pitchforks and torches when you say AH.
Is anybody actually having fun running around for two hours visiting empty request baskets?
Or if you’re already at the top of the food chain you probably scoff request baskets anyway.
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Don’t know, I only shop local. I only go out into the world to price check.
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Other than my 5 favorite shops, trips out into the wild tend to be disappointing.
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I run around a lot to find good deals. Some stores are hard to find, but have great deals.
Thrill of the secret find for me.
Sometimes ill hit 50-100 shops it feels like for deals, nightly.
I have found quite a few good shops, some new ones every day. That is part of the exploration feel to the game in my opinion
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Love your shop =D got a ton of gleam from you for our gleam displays =D
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This is getting into “reasonable people may disagree” territory, so I just want to preface that I respect where you are coming from.
I also love walking into a store and finding a great deal on something they are selling, or seeing them buying stuff at higher than usual prices. But I hate the process of going store to store, half of them (mostly) empty, and large chunks of the other half being out of coin in baskets/not having what I want/their prices are WAY out of line with the economy. I don’t have a ton of time to play during the week, so to me it just feels like I’m playing the most boring game of roulette imaginable, which means more and more I go to exactly 1 shop, and only if I know I need what he is selling or is buying what I am selling.
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