Economy Ups and Downs

Did some exploring today and out of 20 portals and countless beacons/shops the only thing consistently selling and selling for a decent price (in request baskets) is Oort Stones. 100-175c in virtually every non-abandoned shop or hub. Hopper Thermal Cores are a runner up, selling for a couple thousand here and there assuming the basket isn’t buying 0.

I don’t count the shops buying bark at 10c each, gems for 75c or sweet beans for 5c because forget those guys… I’m using nice words even though I don’t want to.

This has become the state of the game since footfall broke, which hopefully will get a fix tomorrow and balancing later… there is literally no way to make money in the game right now without having buyers with realistic offers for your stuff. I sincerely hope footfall breaking was the cause for all of this because if not we have much bigger problems than footfall - a game where the only way to make money is selling Oort stones and Hopper Cores.

Shout out below if you know or own a shop that buys low end items such as iron, silver, gold, beans etc. at decent prices in decent quantities via request basket.

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I’m running out of cash to put in my baskets. I used to get around 10-20k sales a day, but now I’m down to 0. I might have to quit this game for awhile because I can’t afford to keep my portals open and my baskets filled.

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So sad to hear man! I found 3 closed portals today that I had regularly used every day.

I do buy exclusively low end items. I’m trying to bring prices down a bit.

Buy/Sell prices
Bone 2c/4c
Tallow 2c/4c
Raw Meat 2c/4c
Flint 2c/4c
earthyams 2c/4c
grass seeds 2c
Sap 6c
Trunks 2c
Sand 1c
Mud 2c
Gravel 1c
Silty Soil 1c
Peaty Soil 2c
Clay soil 2c

Baskets refilled at least once a day… if not more often. @ Infiniplexx

Also, I just recently put out Forging compounds, at what I think is a reasonable price and they are selling great! Same with shop stands. Earthyam soup… always a hit. So things are selling, but it is hit or miss and random daily

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Good to hear! Anybody buying iron@10-11c or gold/silver@100c?

This isn’t one of my usual posts about I hate this or don’t nerf that… things are truly worrisome.

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Honestly I think there are two causes. Player count is less than 50 percent what it was a week after launch and there doesn’t seem to be anything being done about this

2… going to be unpopular but the economy in this game fails because of alts… everyone has 6 alts that means any player can do anything. Farm, mine, forge , craft hunt etc etc. no one is being forced to trade buy or sell for things they really need. Hey I’m low on gems switch to alt go mine. Time to mke those forged hammers with the gems switch to forge alt… dang Need to farm some mats switch to that alt.

Alts make the game possible for players to not have to rely on others however this kills the demand for a balanced economy. Trade off.

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Agree. But the reason I have alts to do everything is partially because I’m poor because I can’t find a place to sell my stuff. We’re in a vicious cycle.

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Honestly, the new spawn rate of things makes me sick. Why would you buy Exotic Earthyams @ over 150ea when you can head to Besevrona and gather 100 in 15 minutes… 15 minutes to save 15k? Deal!!

Why would you buy Diamonds when you can go to Serp and mine for 30mins (A persistance Pie) and easily come away with 200 on a bad day.

No one is buying certain items… cause they are too easy to get now…

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True, also a possible factor…

Prices are dropping on everything. Some players are foregoing coin alltogether and doing direct bartering trades instead. Everything is just so easy to farm and coin is so abundant. The only thing I shop for is Advanced Power Coils because it is cheaper to buy them already made than making them yourself.

On the brightside, I do not expect this to last. We have no idea how the real economy will look until the real endgame is finally released. The game we are playing now is midgame stuff.

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You think they are easy to get now? Watch what happens tomorrow. The atlas changes are going to exacerbate this problem.

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I buy a lot at Yeomra’s Workshop including gold/silver ore at 100c, gold/silver alloy at 125c, titanium ore 175c, titanium alloy 300c, hopper cores at 3.5k, and various eyes, etc. I’ve been really busy with a new job and my sales have also decreased so my coin flow is down but I try to refill at least once a day. I also have some request baskets for hopper cores, titanium, eyes at the Temple of Commerce in Grindstone.

I did notice my portal to one of the portal seekers hubs had closed, I thought I had it fueled but must’ve overlooked it. It’s open again now.

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Nice, you have an Ultima hub portal from your shop?

no, I should get one. but if you use the Ultima west coast hub portal the portal for the Temple of Commerce is directly across on the left side and from there is a portal to Yeomra’s Workshop. Or I have a portal to the workshop from the Grovidias Te hub.

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Speaking purely for myself here, but…
I find I don’t want to sell goods to people because I would have to ask a lot for it to seem worth not just keeping for myself. Same for baskets; I’d just rather keep my mats rather than pawn them for such low amounts.

It’s a tough economy, for sure. But, it’s also early in the game’s life. Things may need a lot of time to settle.

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Interesting to see how many people thought demand was going to always outweigh supply/knowledge on how to gather/craft efficiently,

Simplest way to explain what’s going on is learning curve of the overall player.

Nothing is rare in the game that’s why we need limited supply items , the demand will follow.

Weekly/monthly events where rare items are introduced to the economy, money from the rich players will trickle down to everyone, even to the lowest tier, then they will start/keep the economy going in a cycle by buying items and moving the money up back to the rich, then new event, and cycle repeats, devs should consider introducing rare hue items/deco/crafting ingredients if an objective is completed, like a world boss and anyone that does hit damage gets the reward, the players that couldn’t play or were offline will buy the items up from the ones that have the items, just have to create incentives to keep money moving from one hand to another.

I just set up a basket buying 100 silver at 100c.

Serp Gate on Lamblis, access through PS Lamblis, Ultima Mall 2nd floor, Chisel Knights Lamblis or Aftashop Arie.

If anyone gets here have a look around and give me an idea of whether my prices need adjusting (buy and sell) as I seem to be getting visitors (some, not many), but don’t sell anything!

I also buy Oortstones at 200c, both at Serp Gate and through my portal to Serpensarindi.

:slightly_smiling_face:

The biggest leak I see in the economy right now is the amount of premium currency handed out for leveling up. It’s net positive to buy another character, level them up quickly, and fund yet another character. You can earn the first 7 levels (and all their cubits) probably without going more than a few plots from your main base, and get a stable of 10 characters in an afternoon.

I’m sure nothing in the game was balanced for players having 10 characters. You can be entirely self sufficient, since it takes only a couple of days on a character to get their respective tenth of the skill pool. So the skill pool concept is moot; everyone has all the skills. But can they easily share them? Yes! Portal hubs mean all your characters are never more than five minutes apart from each other. And as a consequence of the genre it’s trivial to transfer items from one character to another, safely and asynchronously. The objectives that are like “Get a earthyam! Hold a hammer!” are basically auto-completed on characters 2-10 because everyone has some laying around in storage.

This completely collapses the leveling curve. It’s a magnitude easier to do the first 15 levels 10 times than to earn 150 levels once. Not just because the XP requirements are so much lower, but because objectives don’t always consume the items so you can keep “turning them in” on each character.

The longer this sits the more irreparable the economy will become. A power chasm will grow between those who were around to exploit the system and those who weren’t. Everything must then be designed for these player patterns at opposite ends of a spectrum.

IMO devs should patch the game to make the level-up crate contain 3 plots directly, instead of cubits which can be turned into more characters. This is the fastest way to stop the bleeding. From there I would honestly disable the ability to have alt characters and try to buy back these extra character slots from the players. Incentivize them to delete their alts by transferring the cubits, plots, XP, etc onto their main character. This is an attractive deal for the player to consolidate their power yet end up back on the leveling curve; so it is win-win, given the situation. I’ve never tried a buyback idea like this before but I have been stuck balancing a game with players on opposite ends of a power chasm (due to an early economy exploit) and it sucked enough that I would actively try to not be in that situation again.

My advice if they want to drip premium currency into the economy, is to only do it from sources they 100% control. Only thing I’ve seen like that in this game is the daily/weekly rewards. Put the cubits in those boxes and keep alts disabled until they can predict the drip rate well enough to price alt characters without creating an exploit. Giving out alts in a f2p game is like making a deal with the balance devil. If you’re going to offer them, at least get paid Real Money since it will take Real Work Hours to balance the game with them around.

Sorry this turned into a rant, but I am actually a bit worried about this exploit and I think your post hit the nail on the head that we may be seeing a downstream effect of an alt-plosion stressing the game balance in a way no one predicted. Devs can easily investigate this claim to see how bad the problem is and if it’s worth patching.

Only other quick hit I can think of is for the devs to run community events regularly. Something like November is Build With Black Stone Month; with prizes, to create a temporary rush of demand for black stone (e.g.). They don’t need to add new drops and recipes to the game to have an event. They just need to figure out how to temporarily incentivize everyone to want 1 of the existing items, and make sure the demand is great enough to drain everyone’s stockpiles. The player economy will handle the rest.

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It’s funny since I just made some silly calculations and wanted to post about it.

I moved my market, blabla, and made a booboo on the pricing of my Teaching Loafs, was selling them for 279c, hehe, until someone pointed out I was way, way cheaper than any of the others.

We talked, he opened a stall in my market as well, and he was talking about selling diamonds, if I was interested in them for 533c each.

That got me thinking, that is cheap compared to a few weeks ago when they were 1000c but how long does it take to mine a single rough diamond? Not very long at all. Is it really worth around 500c then?

How about my Teaching Loaf? For 1 Loaf (with a mass craft that yields 50), I need:
5,76 Sweet Beans
3,11 Fibrous Herbs
4,15 Barbed Grass
4,15 Rock Salt
4,15 Sap

Which is faster to farm? That little list or 2 rough diamonds? Right, two rough diamonds!

Why are they then sold for the same price (most teaching loafs sell for around the 1000c)?

I made a small calculation what it would cost me if I bought all my ingredients, just used one shop, not the cheapest in everything, but not the most expensive one either. 1 Loaf would cost me 677,22 coins to buy the ingredients! But then it still needs to be made as well, different recipes, different machines, which take time and don’t get me started with pies, making purified butter alone costs 75 minutes!

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Me too. But this is exactly what everyone wanted. The community rejoiced when surface regen got fixed. Every other day was a drama post about how mining on serp was horrible. And then devs fixed the regenerate issue.

How do people not understand that this wasnt coming? And imagine if bomb mining didn’t get nerfed. People want their cake and to eat it too.

The game is just too easy. With alts, there is no need to collaborate with others as there are in other games. I’m someone who wants to join a guild and work with others but I just don’t see the need to given I can do everything I need with a couple alts

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