No complaint I would literally milk that cow for all it’s worth.
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The problem with coin dropping from things you do such as a “profession” is that all of those activities yield very different results. Hunters don’t make as much as miners. Nor do lumberjacks or diggers. Builders certainly don’t either.
So while a miner with even a halfway decent AOE hammer can get hundreds of resources and thousands of rock, it forces players to be funneled into a particular activity in order to earn coin to then buy things in shops or to fill request baskets. All compared to other gathering activities and even if miners get 1 or 2 coins per item collected. They don’t have to move around as much as a lumberjack or hunter or explorer to earn that coin passively. Diggers would be the only comparable thing. This is of course considering the coin dropping per block is roughly the same across the board.
One of the issues I think is centered around the Centraforge. We have a blanket application of Boons, Quirks, and Defeats that can go on any forgeable tool. Axes should have their own set of forging effects, same for shovels, chisels, and hammers. There might be item specific stuff, like world regeneration on bombs, but it leaves much to be desired.
The reason for lumberjacks being so lackluster for income generation is the fact that a AOE Axe is a complete waste when an alternative AOE effect could be axe tool specific. Such as the 9 blocks being hit isn’t a 3x3 but rather a chain of blocks connected to one another in a line and for ever swing it applies that to the same 9 blocks of the same type. Could mean ripping through a tree faster in a more effective way than blast hacking 3x3 walls of foliage and trunk.
There’s also another side to blocks dropping coin. It makes it harder to implement other pieces of content or develop existing features further to be more robust and deep. A small tweak to another feature or piece of content can dramatically affect large portions of players in negative or positive ways (probably negative). Like if lumberjacks are getting 7-10 coins per trunk or foliage because it takes longer for them to get the materials compared to a miner, then miners will complain about it. They’ll ask for their block coin to be buffed from 1 or 2 to be more in line with lumberjacks. It’s just an unnecessary balancing nightmare that the developers don’t need to deal with.
Even if coin dropped from blocks is an amount based on prestige, it will not balance out very well. This means hunters get shafted while miners continue to be the most profitable gathering activity in the game. Lumberjacks get screwed too with ancient corruption being a lot more rare to find than any resource a miner can get. Diggers have nothing special they can gather that has high prestige so they’re rock bottom still. Even if hunters get coin from the cashe box after completing a meteor, it will 100% fail in being comparable to any other gathering profession in terms of coin dropped from blocks.
This is sort of why we need a more traditional questing system that gives players daily and weekly quests to complete that reward coins for the particular activity and if you don’t want to do one of them you can abandon it for a randomly generated new quest. And if you finish a daily quest that day it just gives you a new one. So you can grind out daily quests for coin if you wanted but could only replace them every 12 or 24 hours. Something that isn’t too restrictive but prevents exploiting it from happening.
Someone in another thread suggested having a coin minter or money printer and that’s also another issue. Dropping items into a machine that does that to have it spit out coins is more in favor of the people who primarily mine for their income. Most of that has to do with how many resources a miner gathers compared to other gathering activities. Even if it was tied to Prestige, it wouldn’t matter cause it would also include those who beacon gleam and ancient corruption locations to farm.
Right now the only real viable fix to this game’s economy is fixing how often Footfall rewards coin. Until that change is made, suggesting a bunch of other stuff is kind of a waste of time. It’s funny that everyone’s thinking up these ideas when a game feature is broken but not when it was functioning perfectly fine.
When you start suggesting ideas to game developers that force players to funnel into a single activity, you end up ruining the game. This is a sandbox MMORPG voxel game. Let’s try and keep that in mind when making feature and content suggestions to the developers.
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So long story short you agree their should be a real questing system in the game. As so many other people also agree upon but instead of just getting coin from quests need to have an option of coin, item, or experience.
Coin, oortshards, and EXP. Yes.
It’s a simple system that works. I can see people grinding out oortshards that way in between community meteor hunts to supplement their portals along with just doing something different than mining for ore and gems for several hours at a time.
The point is: more things to do is a good thing.
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I support this message
If the coin is based on the xp gained through the activity versus prestige does that not offer more of a balance? It is no different than the way players gain xp now. If the way to gain coin is through quests then the game becomes more structured along the lines of you need to do this today to get your coin, versus allowing players to be more free to earn coin through normal activities.
That’s the problem though. You mine blocks faster than you chop a tree down. Digging gives garbage XP. Hunting is lackluster XP. Right now the ways to level are mining rocks, coal, ore, and gems to then throw all your rocks into crafting stations and refineries to make large waves of mass crafted stuff. But we aren’t talking about getting coin from crafting stuff cause that would just be idiotic.
The thing is though even if you compare the XP gain from hunters and miners, it will nearly at every point, favor the miner. They get more blocks and have next to no risk in getting death penalty which results in zero XP gain lost per hour from a debuff. If I am not mistaken, just plain normal rock blocks reward 4 XP per. Even if the going rate of XP conversion to coin is 4:1, a miner is still going to get way more coin than a hunter, a lumberjack, a digger, a builder, etc. from the actual activity.
At least with a questing system the player can choose to go about doing an activity that they wouldn’t normally do to get their coin or even ones they do already. Break 100 trunk to get some coin, rough oort, and XP. Simple. It works. Heck, even if the questing system allowed you to filter out certain things that get presented to you would be nice. So if you want to focus on mining quests, go for it. Focus on digging, sure. Building perhaps? Why not.
The real problem is it’s hard to balance any sort of coin generation from an activity such as gathering stuff because there are certain items that are just way easier to get. People will naturally gravitate towards what is going to yield the best results. It’s what players do in MMOs. It’s why miners are so common and why entire worlds have been hollowed out for resources (speaking of course before the new ones were released).
It’s also why I like footfall so much and think it’s the most fair way to reward a player for doing something in the game. You’re rewarded for creating value. The entire building aspect of this game functions off that concept of value creation. Gathering items feeds into building which feeds right into the value creation concept. So that coin you get from the footfall gets spent on things that other players have created, such as stuff being sold in a shop or possibly commissioning someone to build a structure for you.
It just flows nicely through the gameplay loop of Boundless.
Bringing in the idea of printing your own money or having coin drop from blocks you break are very interesting ideas but at the same time it opens up a whole laundry list of issues. It’s not necessarily a balancing issue but more or less of does the game really need those forms of currency generation to begin with? Is it more of a hassle than its worth to balance? What are the alternative ideas? Why not just add barter functionality to current shop stands and request baskets? Is that even mechanically possible?
We can have a robust economy without currency generation favoring only one path that provides the least amount of resistance towards making the most coin per hour without a shop stand.
There’s already plenty of funneling player activities into a small fixed list of things. Mining being one of them. But this problem also has another side of it too. This game lacks a large amount of replayable content (dungeons, titans, pvp, actual good settlement management tools, world management and ownership, etc.) to break up what players are doing day in and out.
We very well just don’t have enough stuff in the game to do to merit another viable avenue for currency generation outside of footfall. Dungeons and titans both would be excellent places to bring that into the game. Meteor loot boxes too. Have the tax system on settlements and worlds work for the owner of the city or the viceroy of a world.
The more stuff we have to do in game the better conversation we, as a community, could probably have focused around the topic of the economy and current coin generation methods.
Sorry for the essay length response. 
This is where I think we disagree. I will agree that a portal network creates value. But a road does not create value and a single plot near a portal hub does not create value. Giving footfall in these instances rewards location and does nothing to offer value for the casual player that crosses them. This is purely passive income that does not give each player the same chance to be able to achieve. Everyone cannot have a plot adjacent to a hub. I also do not think a store creates value. An empty or overpriced store might get traffic but in my opinion does not deserve income merely because a player made the effort to visit it. The store should get its income from selling things and not from players merely crossing the threshold.
Building does not automatically equal footfall. If I build away from hubs or a city then I do not get footfall so I am not in a position as a builder to engage in the economy. I can build a 10k prestige plot adjacent to a hub and a 2 million prestige build away from settlements and hubs and which one will get more footfall income? If you want builds to generate coin then everyone’s builds should generate coin no matter where they are located.
I think the entire concept of footfall needs to be re-evaluated which is hopefully what the developers are doing now. All I can say is that I have built where I wanted to and not necessarily where it would generate footfall. As a result, I got very little footfall even when it was working better. So what are my options as someone that wants to focus on building? I can spend 90% of my time mining and crafting and then try to find a store that will buy what I made at a price I think is fair, or I can just play with a group of friends that will support each other and we will make our own stuff, hand trading resources and crafted items and ignore the economy entirely. The second choice is what I (and a few friends) have been doing until now. If there is not some way for me to generate sufficient coin engaging in my current activities to actively participate in the economy then I will continue to work with friends and ignore the economy. That pulls multiple players and what coin they do generate out of the active economy.
While this is not something I personally am interested in, I certainly do not have a problem with this generating coin for the participants. The main reason why is it requires active participation on the part of a player. That is where I think the game needs to focus. You need to actively do something to earn coin. You need to build, mine, gather, hunt, or explore to earn coin and not be the lucky one that has plots surrounding a portal hub. If the developers did switch from footfall, I would generate coin for a portal getting used by a player other than the owner. Running a portal does require the active acquisition of Oort shards to run so by my definition it is not passive but active.
My response was also probably too long. but oh well
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I won’t quote your entire response. It wasn’t too long, I just didn’t have the time when I saw you replied to read it before I went to work. That’s all. My job > Boundless.
I do think that your post does reflect well on that we need to have every source of currency generation fixed and working as intended to allow players a diverse way to create their income. I think if we have multiple sources then it means that potentially the removal of one over another might be healthy for the game.
We could very well not need the concept of footfall if we have other viable sources of coin generation. We don’t. We need what we have fixed first before we can proceed to the next step.
I can agree that value creation in this game is rather hard of a concept to wrap your head around. The reason roads are garbage value is because there’s absolutely nothing that they bring to a traveler compared to roads we see all over the real world. They are a way to navigate yourself to a destination. The problem with these roads in cities of this game is there’s zero navigation and that suggests zero organization even if there is some. It’s the fault of the person who designed that location.
I can agree and disagree with shops. I agree they can provide zero value when the person running it is simply throwing in items that are over priced, not bothering to even try and sell stuff, and just wasting people’s time when they visit. I do disagree with it though when a shop is regularly updating pricing, competiting with other actual active and real shop owners, and try to work their shop like a mini-business instead of passively listing stuff for 5000% what it’s worth. If they’re able to keep their inventory stocked and prices constantly updated then the value comes from knowing the shop has reliability through its management and shop strategy. Location literately means nothing when all it takes is awareness of how to get to the place. After all, that’s what portal networks do for shop owners. There’s nothing that says any portal network can’t expand certain hubs to incorporate more portals that are financed by the person who wants a portal connected to it.
But all of this stuff really boils down to having more than one way to generate coin out of nothing. We don’t have that. I just don’t want to see a money printer in this game. I would quit and probably a lot of other people would too. A percentage chance of a range of coin dropping from a block? I could see that working along side other coin generating methods. Just no coin printing.
Perhaps a good starting point is making it so that if coin drops from a block, it will reward at least 1 coin. From there it would fluctuate depending on the block or resource being smashed. If it’s a normalized value, it won’t really stop people from funneling into certain activities. If it varies from block to block, then I can see that working well in giving players a reason to go gather stuff other than the normal items they do get.
Or maybe it won’t since I could care less about wood related things. 
I don’t think the economy of this game will ever have all the functionality that we think we want in it and probably not in the form we think we want it to be either. I do know that with footfall broken, I’ve been looking at other games to devote my time towards playing and looking more and more away from Boundless as I am on my hiatus from it.
I would agree with you that a money printer is a bad idea. Coin drops from activity like mining or gathering, I could see that. I understand you feel they need to fix the footfall issue and then decide if other changes are needed. My concern is right now, footfall is broken (the code is definitely not working as intended) if they fix this do they create too much of an uproar among uses if they then take it away and try something else? I believe they might be better off trying something new even if it is in test before they reinstate footfall. I know this will continue to drag the economy as we only get a footfall reset now when they launch a release, but I wonder for the long term good of the game if this might not be the right time to make a change.
In the end, I think we both want people to be able to be a part of an in game economy if they choose to. I think we also agree that the current situation with coin generation is the major reason the economy is in such bad shape. I do think the developers have some time to find a solution to the problem, but that time is limited to maybe a month or two.
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I dont agree with this. But if ppl are concerned that to much coin is generated there is a solution by adding a daily cap on the money printer(Minter). Or maybe make amount resources required to make a coin high. Like 20 gold alloy a coin.
Player’s shouldn’t be capped at how much coin they can make. It’s like telling businesses in real life they can’t make more than 500k in sales a year when they can easily push 10 times that.
Whenever you limit how much money someone can make it just stifles economic activity of that person. There’s plenty of historical references in economies across the world that prove that. We don’t need regulation in a video game.
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Agreed but its an option for those who dont want it to think upon.
Except in no real economy since the advent of central banking have people been printing their own money (legally). Unless WS is going to set up “The Central Bank of Boundless” and start distributing money to player run Banks that then lend to players, there needs to be some way to generate coin from nothing. If that service is distributed to the entire player base through quests/crafting printing press/craftable NPCs/any other idea that has been put forward, then it makes some amount of sense to cap what that can generate so we don’t have Hyperinflation (some regular inflation is needed, though), as real Treasuries cap the amount of money they “print.”
What you are worried about won’t happen, as no one is going to be telling a store owner that they can only sell 3 hammers a day when they know they could sell 10 (for example), because that money isn’t being generated from nothing, but coming from another player (aka “The Economy”).
There are plenty of people who will stop playing this game if they introduce money printing.
Nobody, in a video game or in real life, should be told how much real or fake money they can make. It’s just an idiotic idea to cap their income.
What I want right now is the only coin generator to be fixed. Then we can look at other things. In fact, none of this matters since we have practically no actual content to replay through that’s even worth playing through to begin with. Can only gather stuff, run a shop, build, and do meteors for so long before everything is just bland and boring. Probably why a few people have stepped away from the game aside from balance issues.
Farming isn’t going to be enough. Titans won’t be enough. Dungeons probably would be. We have a very small player base with a small amount of worlds. This game’s universe is actually pretty tiny for how many things there are to do.
Those are different issues that are separate from the game’s economy.
I would much rather have a barter economy system than people printing their own coin. It would be a lot more irritating to figure out how to convert your iron ore into tech devices but at least it would be way more fair across the board for players than someone setting up their own massive factory shop to print all the money they want and just flip that coin to buy more items and continue to just accelerate their wealth. With how alts are a thing it will make zero sense to put a cap on stuff since they can set themselves up to max out their coin printing across 10 characters.
In addition to that, I don’t think we really need to be seeing item prices in the thousands for basic stuff like Iron Hammers cause everyone is rolling around with millions of coin.
The moment you allow players to directly increase the money supply exponentially with a money printing system is the time when the game currency literately means nothing and holds no value in its intended purpose. But I am sure you’ll say it has no value so I guess everything I am discussing with you is pointless anyways.
It is what it is man. Fix what’s broken now and hound the devs for more content. That’s what’s going to give players a reason to play. A reason to gather stuff, trade for things, buy stuff from others, and just play the game. All of those things will change the context of what is needed to improve the game’s economy through game features.
Is footfall (still) broken tho?
Or are ppl just not having many visitors?
I get 1-2k footfall a day. Dont think i get that many new visitors in 24d as ppl say it is setup up.
If coins arent working for people and they dont want coin generation in another form, maybe we should get barter baskets. To trade 1 item for another.
Footfall is relative though. Coin is tight, so prices are low. This makes the 100c you get for being active daily go much further, helping those out in the middle of nowhere who cant rely on footfall.
Increasing footfall increases coin in circulation (please note the 80/20 rule of thumb holds, so most of this coin will be with a minority regardless) and drives prices back up, reducing the value of your 100c for being active and choking the new / secluded player’s spending power again.
Prices change with money supply, so the only impact i can see from increasing the absolute value of footfall would be decreasing the relative value of activity bonuses. This means passive income >> active income, which is no incentive to be active, so lower populations running around, so less footfall generated.
Anyone else noticing this inter-dependency cycle?
Yes.
It won’t matter how that coin is made though. There will always be that dependency.
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Citation needed.
You keep bringing up this while at the same time saying “no caps ever.” There are ways to allow active play to generate a fixed amount of coin such that no more coin is being generated per day than is being generated via footfall (or more generally, a fixed amount that keeps inflation low). Better daily quests do this is a way that even feels organic instead of having a printing press that only works for 1000c per day
or having coins fall out of tree trunks.
Daily quests would be linear, a fixed amount printing press would be linear, the dude in the sanctum buying a limited amount of stuff from you per day is linear. You could even tie those to your account instead of per alt to make sure someone with 10 alts doesn’t over-generate.
While there is merit to this (as we see with LED blocks creating a real (though possibly temporary) demand for ATRs), there seem to be fundamental issues with the economy that simply creating more content won’t resolve. Footfall as the sole money printer simply doesn’t allow enough people to meaningfully participate. Until that changes there is always going to be weak economic participation as you either have to have a spot in a main portal hub or be on 3x3 Gem tools, things that newer/more casual players are not going to have access to.
If active play was rewarded with coin instead of just purely passive play, you could break it.
Content is king in these kinds of games. Meaning, MMOs. Without it there isn’t much point in discussing anything in the game. There just isn’t. Less stuff to do causes players to be bored and quitting or taking breaks from it. That’s less money being circulated. Not really hard to understand that since it’s pretty simple.
There seems to be this idea that there’s limited space at portal hubs when there isn’t. They can literately build above and blow the surface of where they’re built and add in additional spots for portals that players can finance. If there’s space extending out from the hub they have even more room on the x, y, and z axis. That’s on the people or person running the hub to do that though.
The whole argument of active play being rewarded with coin would break this inter-dependency is bs. It doesn’t when the game lacks the content to keep that person engaged in the gameplay loop. You really have to love gathering, crafting, building, and exploring (which there is an actual limited amount to do of) to break it.
I would wager a lot of money on the idea of having this game needing multiple coin generators to prevent future problems with just a single money generator from ever happening again. We need more than Footfall as a money generator. That I can agree on.
Anyways, this topic has been beaten to death for months. It’s old. I am also bored talking about this with people in this game. The devs know what they need to do and should be making it a priority to fix.