I proposed a daily quest system or something similar some time ago because of exactly your point there. Footfall goes in to the hands of a specific group, and the economy is dependent on them to circulate those coins. That’s just the foundation for a failed economy if you want coins to be a thing.
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Yup. I don’t care how they fix coin generation. I rather enjoyed selling iron, gold, copper, sweet beans to the rich. I do not enjoy selling dirt @1c or beans @2c in hopes of saving up for 45,000c items.
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This is slightly off topic, but this is referred to as “The Paradox of Thrift.” I don’t want to bring politics into this as this isn’t time or place, but this would be a perfect testing ground for Keynesian economic theory with no real stakes. And if the devs screw up terribly they have the ability to remove the coin, too.
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Forgive my “noob”, but how did footfall break?
I have seen a suggestion changing it from the “visited” beakons earning coin to the “visitor” earning it. Sounds legit.
A sandbox game literally lets you build the entire thing.
The US exited the Great Depression, in part, by the 2nd World War. It jump-started the economy by creating jobs. Is there a way to artificially create this demand on Boundless?
Assuming WS has no intentions of doing anything, shouldn’t the community solve this problem? It’s sort of a great economic experiment. This should be easy to figure out. We have all the pieces, they just need to be assembled. Take a look at the past of our own histories and maybe a solution can be made?
My socialistic 2 cents.
I’ve seen the concept of employment cited but I haven’t seen any companies in game
The only loop hole is that in real life people can’t specialize in everything and do not have the ability to bake, and mine, and become a blacksmith, and be a herbalist gathering plants, and craft chairs all at the same time and then make a shop to sell all their wares and manage it.
So in game there is no – you do this and I do this – to create demand and supply. No real reason to cycle coin, because no one specializes.
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Ironicly, because the servers got better. There is apparently a bug that makes footfall actually trigger every 24 days instead of 24 hours but it doesn’t persist through server resets. When the servers were going down more frequently footfall kept getting reset, but now that they are stable it is not.
The community doesn’t have all the answers, though. We have no idea where the money is, or where it is coming from. And goods are still taxed meaning that there is a perception of money leaving the economy because the only way we know how to generate the money isn’t working right. So we end up in paradox of thrift because of the uncertainty. In theory, yes, everyone could agree to spend all their money every day, or something, but that doesn’t seem sustainable.
Also, this is a game. Even if it’s a sandbox, I expect the devs to actually put the sand in it. The players need a working foundation in order to grow the world, and it shouldn’t be their job to create it.
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Another aspect of it is that every time you buy something from a shop poof, there goes 10% of that coin. Every time I sell something poof there it goes. (7% with skills)
You buy a Powercoil for 7k? there goes 700 coins. that will only regenerate after 25 more people come to the property. If you bought 2 power coils… now it takes 50 people plus 2 months… ect ect.
Another way money vanishes is when high level players with millions of coin just stop playing. I know at least a handful that quit with many millions of credits. Now that coin is (probably) never coming back either.
So coin can just disappear vs goods most of which are pretty much permanent. In real life, we pay tax, but that tax is used to pay government workers, illicit activity, bribes, and what have you.
The money doesn’t disappear. It’s still in the economy.
In boundless when money disappears, it contributes to deflation.
There are other complex behaviors too. People usually only spend money if they feel like they can make it back somehow. Since footfall dried up, many people I talk to feel like if they spend coin, they won’t get it back.
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I collect coin daily from my beacons. (?) I need to look up how this all works. I’m guessing foofall requires unique citizens entering the settlement/24 days?
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Correct. The way it should work is if I walk through your beacon then you should get your money from me. If I come back tomorrow, you should get your money again. What is actually happening is that you wont get the 2nd “payment” for me until the 24th day instead of the 2nd day.
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Ultima Hub. They had to post a thread asking us all for help because footfall could no longer sustain the portals in its broken state. Never would have had that problem if footfall never stopped working correctly. They were pumping money into the economy, buying spooky seeds at high prices then got the rug yanked out from under them a few days later.
Not really a socialist thing.
The market is such that, the supply of some goods is so damn high, that they are worthless.
Look at Diamonds. Once you can AOE mine, your product, diamonds, are easy to get en masse, and they create a byproduct, which is stone. There is a huge demand for stone, don’t get me wrong. But 3 mining trips in, and I have all the stone I could physically, possibly use. Literally hours per night of doing building, for several nights in a row.
Hunting is the same way. You get shards, bones, hide, tallow, creature mantle. All of these, you get literally stacks and stacks. And they have a sink, which is vital essence. But that sink isn’t as high as the supply, and so there’s really nothing you can do with all of that extra stuff. The supply vastly outstrips the demand.
Then there are things like sap, beans, exotic earthyams, inky leaves. These are not really “mass farmable.” I would go as far as to say they are the most balanced crafting ingredient. As a newbie, you need
Then there’s oort. As a hunter you get something like 150-200 oort per hour and a half hunt. A 30 person hunt would gen 6000 rough oort in that time. Oort is still going to be pretty expensive, 200c per, specifically because there are huge sinks for it. That’s an example of something where there is a pretty huge supply, but also a huge huge sink.
And so we are getting to the bottom line. Anyone can participate in the economy by finding something to farm, and farming it. The #1 thing that we need right now, is oort, and so pretty much by definition, anyone can get a character to level 11 or so, put points in the protection of the day and grapple mastery, and go follow a hunt around and contribute. That’s it. Short of that, you can do the same thing, and go farm trees for wood and sap,
But for the things that there are just too much of in the market… there need to be additional sinks for those. Additional crafting recipes, which make use of those items, and which people thing is super-valuable. Or a gambling mechanic where you can use something like vital essence to get random properties on an item, like forging but for food or brews or augments or something, which would create demand for the item that exceeds the supply, because any extra, people will want to use to try and roll good stuff.
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Maybe socialist wasn’t the right word. Idealistic.
Bottom line. We need more consumables. Stuff we create that we, then, use up.
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Footfall was probably never meant to become as big a part of the economy as it did. And the devs are in no hurry to fix it, so it’s not going to work like it used to when they do…
Footfall is a lousy primary coin generator because it can be so easily scaled. It’s an uncapped source which is extremely dangerous for a game economy. I could build a single stretch of road with prestige vaults that generates me and my alts thousands per day out of thin air, in the span of a few seconds of someone sprinting.
Don’t reinvent the wheel. Coin sources should be linked to finite daily drips per account (if they want us to stop using alts) or per character. They incentivize showing up and performing tasks devs consider healthy for the game.
It should be impossible to transfer coins across alts via the request basket exploit. Close it. Coins that transfer from alt to alt are equivalent to coins horded.
Footfall should probably never be fixed. And before you get angry at me for saying that, remember that you should be getting your coin from another game system. One that has the properties I describe above.
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Population population population, devs cannit do anything about the number of people playing the game. If there are only 250 players for example who play regularly thats not much of anything when it comes to economy.
I dont think it would be an issue if the player count reached 1k or over. Enough traffic to increase demand on a daily basis.
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I agree it would be less painful or less of an issue. Population is vital.
While this would no doubt help some, it doesn’t change the fact that an economy where a vast majority of the money generated goes to the top is going to be unstable and eventually collapse. On top of more players, there needs to be ways for those players to generate coin on their own so their participation in the economy isn’t directly tied to the participation of the 1%.
Agreed, events, rare drops and such would help, even a very in depth guild system could help, with specialities what not. Even if a viceroy or guild leader could control certain aspects with a voting system would be ingeresting to see.
For example setting what can and cannot be sold and at what minimum or maximum price. All with a vote of course. I dunno just spit balling.
I think incentivization of roles will help too
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