Ouch. Yeah, coin gets really rough like that 
I think the expected approach to surviving the coin game at the moment is to sell some of your gathered goods at the shops that are buying at reasonable prices. And the game doesnât really push new players to experiment with this
Finding said shops, howeverâŚ
And people like you make it sound like itâs the hardest thing on the planet as you rake in 5-6 figure footfall daily and can feed the network for a month with 1 dayâs worth of meteor grinding by your collective. Iâm not saying you donât provide a service, you do, but your service isnât the only thing that matters in the game.
Further, just so we are absolutely clear, Iâm not complaining about anyoneâs hard work, nor am I saying âWahhh, people are further than me, thatâs not fair.â Can we be done with this straw man now and actually talk about things that matter?
The economy is not long term healthy or sustainable with the model it currently has. 15 minutes of research about real world economics will show you that. If we just âfix footfallâ then things should snap back some, and may even be healthy for a while. Thatâs why I said we are in 1926 and not 1929. But so long as money generated largely goes to the top (large portal hubs), they dictate the entire economy (for the most part). This means, as someone pointed out above, that everything in the economy is based on the the 3x3 max efficiency price, which due to general supply is plummeting. This combined with relatively inflexible prices for those 3x3 tools due to their difficulty to make means that the people you âpay to farmâ (those that sell to your buy baskets), canât readily afford your services (assuming you are selling those 3x3 tools) or arenât going to buy from you anyways unless you are selling very specific goods as most lower tier stuff can be farmed and it wouldnât make sense for them to be buying what they just sold to you.
This game needs inflation, desperately, which can be done with a large expansion of the money supply, (edit)prefferably in the hands of players that are going to immediately spend it(end edit). The devs are smart, they can figure out the best way to do that, though a few have been posted across the forums.
You have a good day, too, Peyago. Aside, I just realized your name wasnât âPayGoâ and have been reading it wrong for weeks.
I suspect the game would also benefit from some more coin sinks, ideally aimed at higher level players.
Otherwise we get into situations where the drip is so low itâs a rounding error (like today) to players that are active in the economy âŚand a huge barrier for those that donât yet understand the economy
Iâm betting that coin sinks right now outpace coin creation.
I know I personally killed about 150,000 coin this weekend just from the sales / request baskets (via tax) that I stood up. Itâs quite possible that we have the opposite problems, that so little coin is being created that it is being taken out of the economy faster than it is introduced.
It would be interesting to see the amount of coin in the game for players âactiveâ in the last week.
At this point, it doesnât matter if they do or not, but so long as people have the perception that this is happening, it may as well be happening.
Haha or boundlessâs gini coefficient. If the money isnât sinking out of the economy faster than itâs coming in⌠where is it hiding? Do ppl who transact in 50k hammers each day even understand the position of new players who must grok an entire game economy before they can participate without being exploited? I see otherwise very kind and reputable sellers with hopper core request baskets set to 300c. Thatâs a tenth of their hand trade value.
I still stand by my belief that money isnât going out the sinks. Itâs simply being horded right now.
Until we have numbers that state otherwise thatâs going to be my continued belief. Luckily for me and everyone else in this game, you only need coin to buy and sale from baskets and stands. Everything else can be hand traded and bartered.
The only thing coin is needed for at that point is warping. I guess the question there becomes were we ever intended to move around the universe as freely as we do or did the devs intend for us to be locked to a certain planet area and then global trading to be a specialized profession. Thatâs just hypothetical any more given weâve already been introduced to his universal portal system. Who knows how the game would have formed organically had we not been introduced to those systems immediately.
Since the portal systems existed in the EA universe and the developers did not take steps to prevent them in the Launch universe, it may be impossible to know what the developers wanted, but it was hardly unexpected that the portal networks formed.
Could be. Hording is a form of a sink though.
The problem is we are all used to living in inflation based economies⌠unless you live in Japan. Players may expect their net worth always has to increase to keep pace with inflation so some are probably spending less than their earnings.
Now that we have severe deflation, this tactic only makes matters worse.
Iâm not typically that critical of developers. I have experience in launching and supporting products. Itâs always rougher than we typically anticipate. I can sympathize.
This being said, successfully launching a game is only half the battle. I have to be honest and say that the prolonged silence on topics like the economy really irks me. This is an MMO, a living sandbox universe. Spontaneous player-driven situations that defy the original game design will always arise, sometimes really quickly. Right now you have a lot of players flagging a situation with the economy in the game. We donât agree on whatâs causing it, sure, but we certainly agree that something is messed up. This warrants a statement from the development team. If you think thatâs entitled, I would 100% agree with you were this not presented as a living sandbox MMO. You donât treat that like a single-player game; there needs to be an open communication channel. I love the public roadmap that was published, but it does nothing for the state of the live universe.
Note that my beef is mostly with the silence, not with anything that would be made on the subject. Make a statement! Not saying anything only leads to people attributing that silence to incompetence. This team is very competent, so itâs really unfair, but part of it is your own doing.
Sometimes I really feel like the MMO angle that was taken was a mistake. This game is truly a masterpiece IMO when looked through the lens of a voxel builder sandbox. Conversely, it is in itâs current state an abysmal sandbox MMO. Sadly these two game aspects are intertwined leaving a lot people with a strong love/hate relationship with Boundless. (To be clear, I appreciate the MMO features, but the live universe is not being run like a good sandbox MMO at all.)
All in all, iâm going to be waiting for a statement to be made on the economy. Iâm playing a LOT right now (I have 4 months off until March) and every day the struggle for coin is increasing. I spend an absolute zero on convenience and luxury too, every coin I make goes straight back into tools so I can gather resource myself to do things in this game. I wish I could shower peopleâs shop stands with coin, but Iâm barely getting by even as a power player. A sad state of affairs.
When I refer to a sink, itâs something that takes an asset out of the economy forever. Actually as I type this I suppose you are correct to a degree. If Richie rich folk no longer participate in the economy via quitting the game then that has effectively taken tha coin permanently out of circulation. So I guess the counter I was going to make no longer exists since I can see the avenue you are describing.
I used to think like that in EA but this time Iâve learned my lesson. Coin in my pocket doesnât help me or shopowners. Buying coils and other bits early on helped them and me. Sure I could still have the coin I spent but Iâdâve had to do a lot of things that I dislike/would prefer to skip. Sure it may get more purchasing power but by that point Iâd have less use for it.
The devs do play a role though. Itâs not like they designed the system then hands off from there. Every change they make impacts the economy in some way. Again, an overabundance of resources is the most obvious.
Iâm not speaking from authority, just my opinion here but I honestly preferred it when effort (or time) =value. Nothing is worth anything if everyone can collect it all for the same time youâd spend shopping around.
Iâm holding onto every coin from here on. Thereâs nothing worth buying(except maybe rr feathers but if rumours are true and therâll be rr in future meteors too, that market will also collapse). Only time spent collecting ingredients made me buy those instead, actually crafting them into consumables is easy as you can do other things at that time.
There have been several instances where people have taken their words out of context when they do say something.
The plight of being a dev of a released game in an unreleased state. Other than their laughable statement about the forging changing being âa bug fix,â though, I canât think of times the community jumped on them out of context (if Iâm missing any, please remind me).
Conversely, a few times now itâs taken me so long to find a shop selling at reasonable prices that Iâve correctly deduced itâd be quicker to just go get some (this before economic depression and new planets/regen).
I agree with this. Unfortunately as people progress the difference in collection/time skews heavily for most items (again surface resources being a relative exception, but high tier planets = ripe pickings still). My main observations are that
2 ignores their own time value, or at least greatly reduces the value of their time to grind (and maybe complain about the grind) to gather & make something for an hour to save 100c⌠a knock on effect of this is that they devalue the time of players not aiming for this - raw drops worth 1000s in processed items are now bought for a minor price because resale is speculative at best - penalising gatherers because of increased alt use and general diy.
I think there is a 3rd alternative also.
I do think you raise a good point in looking at how people value their time. This is an area that cuts both ways. It seems that there are players that think the request baskets do not value their time and effort needed to gather the items and the come back seems to be âit is easy to get those I can get 1000 in an hour on this planet so those are worth 1c perâ. So the player that spent his/her time and effort is told their time and effort are not worth much, so why should they think the time and effort the shopkeeper spent to gather and craft is worth as much as they are asking? They keep seeing posting were players are getting hundreds of gems in an hour, so why should gems, power coils or gem tools be so expensive? Its a tough spot for both sides to be in. Since the developers seem committed to allowing solo and collaborative play, players will always be able to make/gather anything if they are willing to spend the time. The people running shops need to understand this and make it attractive to the players to get them to spend coin. fixing footfall is not going to change this fact and now that more players have found they can exist without coin it makes it even more challenging for the players running stores.
only time i can think of is when they devs released the microtransaction store. people where reading the first line or 2 of the dev post then started screaming P2W without reading the part where the cubits could be earned and that plots where the only gameplay item that would ever be buy-able in the store
Just my two cents, Im no economics major and I play mostly solo so dont jump on me too hardâŚ
School of thought sees a few problems hurting the boundless economy, but Im just going to look at two.
So we have less money and more materials, leads to an obvious suggestion as I see it.
I know its been suggested elsewhere but what about having say an NPC vendor that buys stuff like rocks, dirt etc (heck maybe anything) in unlimited quantity but at a low price? Do the boundless servers keep track of any of the sale data of items from stands, i dont know perhaps a dev @james could let us know? If so could the NPC prices be adjusted daily to represent say half or 2 thirds of the average shop stand sale price?
If this was possible perhaps it could provide a purpose for that poor sole who waits endlessly at the sanctum only for me to drop by without even acknowledging him every day. (sometimes I wave to him though). This would answer the question of (where do we put these NPCs?), and would also provide another advantage/disadvantage depending on your viewpoint. If i was on a mining trip and full of that yellow stone from T5 planets (again) I could just zip to the sanctum, sell it all, and get back to it, with no duration taken from my pies and potions. This could also mean less frame rate drop (I think I noticed this yesterday PS4) from countless amounts of unwanted mined stone just floating around on the ground.