Economy Ups and Downs

Dont get caught in the weeds here about keeping money in your inventory lol. Im sure there are no plans for that and if it was, inventory would likely be expanded anyway. Besides, i can imagine the number of reports devs would get saying “accidently destroyed/dropped my money from inventory. Can i please have it back”

I like coin :slight_smile: I feel it’s easier than bartering, just got to find the good deals in the streets.

But if this is more than a sandbox game we do need some resources to be more scarce. Or else everything with cost 2c in a year. From gems to leaves, okay maybe 10c for a forged hammer, but that’s the lowest it should go.

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That’s never going to work in this economy though. This economy will rise and dive based solely off of the demands players have for an item/material at any given time. EVE conquered this buy selling PLEX/30days of gamer service in game. It gave a static item with a real world currency attached to it. People by and large used that as their medium to know how low or high to price something at. Effectively people were paying 2-5 cents for virtual goods or in some cases hundreds of dollars.

If people want currency to have a steadfast value, something is going to have to be created to create that value. As it stands now coins are just another resource like gems except more finite. The only way to get it is via footfall in worthwhile values, or via feats/leveling up which is not much at all honestly.

If Boundless doesn’t already have someone with an economics background, it could certainly benefit from one.

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Hmmm, I see your point. But I don’t think this game should have a real world backed monetary economy. Not everyone has = income or expendable money to do this, I feel like it would have to stay within the confines of the game.

I agree but that leaves needing a fixed item of value so that currency then has a value, otherwise coins are just another material and not a currency. It’s why I continue to say this is not a currency based system even though we have an attempt at currency implementation.

For example the US currency system was based off the gold standard. Now the US currency system is backed by a federal reserve note, which is just a piece of paper that the US backs.

So are you saying we could farm a certain material in game to trade for say coin? And then it would be backed and have value in game?

From my own personal experience and from the poll I did for forgers, I think bartering is a hugely underated aspect of this game. I have no real data to back this up but I think most players really don’t know how to leverage bartering at all.

It solves alot of issues:

  • Bypass the grind of trying to acquire XYZ item by simply trading for it (gems, cough)
  • Allows you to focus on what you enjoy doing. You can focus on say, hunting for spitter eyes and then trade the spitter eyes for something else.
  • Frees up time from doing stuff you don’t enjoy doing or have difficulty gathering. And time is money.
  • Saves you from using coins especially if you don’t have deep pockets yet
  • Allows you to leverage arbitrage

I’m well off in terms of coins and can buy anything I need. However, I enjoy bartering due to the above.

Current limitation of bartering is that the ingame communication mechanics are limited and you need to rely on 3rd party tools such as forum or Discord.

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This goes back to my thread about low level players needing something to farm.

High end players have the money but nothing they want to buy.

Low end players have lots of need but no money to spend.

90% of the money I get is by leveling up and now that all my alts are over lvl 20, that’s no longer an effective revenue stream.

This all comes back to the core problem of course. How do you balance someone like me who primarily wants to solo with people who do massive hunts and projects.

I’ve been trying to figure out how you make unique crafting goods in this game. Like maybe you could “lock” signs with ASCII art or 4x4 blocks of…erm…blocks that you could sell as statues.

@deenw sometimes I feel like we share the same sexy brain :brain:

@molav that is a really interesting approach to it. That’s a reliable currency faucet, like killing mobs in a standard mmo where currency is dropped along with the mobs, but I think the devs have stated they don’t want to do that. Maybe I miss understood.

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The only way bartering becomes realistic is if you could figure out “barter baskets”. Otherwise, it’s too much of a pain.

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Bartering would be awesome if it worked like mass-crafting and provided a slight bonus to the trade in a somehow unexploitable manner.

What if a “minting” machine was created and used ores to create different worth coins. Then ore would be the backing value? Much like old world USA?

Like 100 copper coin = 1 iron coin = .01 silver coin?

@james
Could still have world tax and portal costs as sinks.

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That’s because the majority of the money in this game is generated via footfall. A very select population of the game generates a large majority of the footfall. It’d be very interesting if @james would be willing to give us this data or ask the dev who has this data to respond with said data. If the majority of currency is being generated via football by said population, and their supposed main expenditure is buying oortstones to keep hubs running, then that is what people would have to farm. oort stones to spend at those footfall generating facilities (hubs). Sale oort stones to them to get the money they put in baskets. You then get to use that money they generated to buy things.

The core system here is broken. I’ve suggested as much since I started but I quit posting thigns that should be addressed and started posting about fluff suggestions instead since that seems to be one the team wants to hear about and not looking at the core system. Or maybe they are looking at it, but just not communicating on it well enough :man_shrugging: I dunno. It doesnt bother me though since I rarely use coins outside of buying oortstones myself, which I tend to pay a premium for compared to the hubs.

I would like to see minting become a thing… players make your own $*&% coins :joy:

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100% agreed

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I buy all ores, beans, coal, and several other things (fill baskets according to need). My shop is Coal, fuel, and metals shop. I have portals in biitula hub, beckon aqua hub, and ultima.

Used to have my baskets refilled literally daily but aince the sales dropped drastically, i now fill them according to need or every other day.

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I love your shop! I frequent it for building supplies!

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and this right here says it all

I think it might be interesting. Would give purpose to all the extra copper and iron too. Make them a bigger farming commodity for lower level player to get started.

Then money gain would be partially based on effort. @james

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If we switched to a barter system, that would just make the economy more complex. That’s something I don’t personally care if it happens. Though I don’t like barter systems but I’d adapt.

I think a small coin cost for going through a portal might work out well to decreasing the money supply. It’s very difficult to say what potential solution is going to work over another since all the players of this game have really known is a coin based economy.

I do think if the game has more content for players to enjoy that the player population would increase and that might be something that could really spark a fire under whatever economy the game has. The thing that needs to happen is the exchanging of coin from one player to another as much as possible and through shop stands and request baskets so the taxing of that coin happens.

This kind of problem happened in Alpha and Beta. One solution was to forcefully lower your shop’s prices and to stop trying to suck out as much margin from each sale as possible.

Kind of like that whole… he who controls the spice controls the universe mantra… :thinking: