Getting players into the economy

¿Porque no los dos? Currently there isn’t an incentive to explore. It’s a one way benefit to the person building. Both should get footfall, the split would have to be looked at.

We also need some sort of searchable auction house, even if it just gives you price, stock, and coordinates.

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As we already spoke in discord, my only real concern for an auction house would be the sheer amount of data that would need to be parsed with an “everyone in the same persistent online universe” scenario. At the moment, with the game population we have, I can see it being manageable, but what happens when we get more players, more worlds, more people wanting to set sell things… more data.

Honestly, I’m not 100% against an auction house… I’m just trying to think in terms of scaleability, which is why I think if anything like that were to be introduced, it should be at a planetary level and not a universal one.

My take on it would be for players to have to craft a shop search console and whatever planet it is placed on is where it will search planet-wide for any shop stands. When you find the item you need you then pay a small fee (which goes to the console owner - possible source of income for portal hubs), and are given a waypoint on your compass to go and purchase the item.

I agree that footfall would be better split between both beacon owners and visitors… maybe a 70/30 split in favour of the beacon owners.

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I struggle as well. Ultimately it comes down to this for me - there is no reason to pay me as a builder unless the game requires me to use coin to do stuff to support my building. Not the best way to explain but kind of where I am at.

Pretend: I don’t want a shop and just want to build. I have to go acquire my goods and run around getting stuff. But some things like Exo require coin and well as warping (if I don’t want to use a portal network). So if I want to be a self-sufficient builder and no coin is needed then to do my job then I could lose my builder FF.

If we remove the few key things around coin for anything not directly related to “buy/sell” then I could easily see us shifting a lot of the coin stuff more towards those playing the economy or wanting to “earn money” by offering a portal.

Hope that makes sense…

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Only reason I ever participated in the economy is to fund the guild buffs which are ridiculously expensive if you’re not in a huge guild. I struggled, but I found a way, and now I currently have a lot of coin. But the purse strings are tight for fear that the source of revenue will dry up and guild buff donations will erode the coin in a few months. So for that I’m pulling coin from the economy and not truly participating in the economy… which is not a healthy economy. I honestly would love to relax and buy items instead of trying to gather, craft, forge, and farm everything. Adding more guaranteed revenue sources, or changing the way guild buffs are paid for are going to get me more active in the economy, and circulate the coin I have. Actually if the guild buffs were paid with the amount of endeavour you have or it was scaled based as a cost per player in the guild… I could easily be more active in the player economy. But either way, as in life the more disposable income I have, the more I’m going to spend. Then as I get more use to paying for goods and services, I will be more inclined to find comfortable ways to keep paying for these goods and services. So I’m fully for adding more sources of revenue in the game. And just incase I’m asked; Reducing the amount of coin available to me or making it difficult for me to get coin is not encouraging me to participate in the economy, it’s going to do the opposite. I will give up on fuelling buffs and using coin altogether again.

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I agree, the player who fuels the portal should get a bump. The other side of the portal still gets footfall. As for exploration, maybe if there were some kind of checkpoints for exploring a build and you could only place one per chunk. The explorer and builder would each be rewarded for each checkpoint. Maybe certain prestige requirements could slow down potential abuse. Just gonna leave this here.

I really had tried to push the idea for guild buffs to use gathered goods and player based actions instead of coin. I think it should be a more flat rate and activity type thing. That way both small and large guilds would get the benefits and not have huge coin requirements.

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I’ll just say this - the devs have some really good ideas up their sleeves in regards to shop stands and people’s ability to locate items. A hybrid of ideas. If they do what they are thinking, everyone will be happy. I’m not kidding. :shopping_cart::shopping_cart::shopping_cart:

It will be great for markets as well as a little shop connected to someone’s hidden mountain hut.

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Maybe trying to make “building” a viable say to earn coin was just a bad idea.

If all someone wants is to build might as well wait for private worlds.

More players also means more money, which means the devs should be able to invest some of that money to make the game able to handle such things.

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An auction house or other index will ultimately be needed. The amount of participation in the economy is artificially limited by the lack of any infrastructure. This has created those that run goto shops that a number of people visit, and many less known shops, and a sea of derelict shops.

Connecting buyers with sellers is the cornerstone of a functional economy. Boundless’ economy won’t be healthy or functional until this is addressed. I encourage everyone to keep asking, and outright demanding, this common sense functionality. There is not an in game, ethos, or out of game reason that has been presented that demonstrates that it cannot be done.

To the point, they could make the AH tool only work on shop stands and baskets within beacons in excess of X amount of prestige, to reduce unnecessary polling of data.

If we are concerned about footfall, make the AH open a portal to the beacon or shop stand.

Plenty of solutions are available beyond “nothing”.

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As long as it addresses the pain it is for the poor buyers to find someone selling what they are looking for without it taking as long as it does now, I am interested. If I still have to trek across multiple planets and settlements generating hundreds in coin for other players just because they have a plot between me and a store then not so much.

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It does. :grin::wink:
It won’t harm markets or malls either.

Edit to add:

Come on now…this is part of the game :wink: I don’t know the future of footfall, but since it doesn’t harm or take anything away from people, I don’t think it’s bad. And this feature could actually spread the footfall coin love a bit more to people that aren’t in cities or malls.

Edit, edit: The main focus does seem to help people find things better though. The footfall, I dunno about. :woman_shrugging:

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I have to say, I haven’t seen anyone touch on one of the two main issues with the economy. The first, which everyone knows, is that in order for money to make its way up the ladder, you need more people at the bottom. New players. Just like real life.

The other issue preventing sellers from selling is availability, which was blown out of proportion by regen bombs and aoe gathering. I’m sure these message boards used to get lit up by people who wanted to be able to gather more and more. People go out and gather tens of thousands of mats so they never have to spend another coin, then get mad that everyone else is doing the same thing. Sorry to say it but the only way to get people to pay for stuff is to not make it so common. Lower drop frequency of everything so that people want to specialize.

In all my time playing, I’ve only identified drops from surface plants as a vacuum in supply, so I focused gathering on leaves and beans which I sold to request baskets for pretty much all of my non-ff revenue. Then farming was released and obliterated the value of those mats.

Personally, I’m not complaining about the economy and am not here to suggest we lower drop rates. I just don’t want to see one economic stimulus after another ruining the integrity of the player-run economy. Capitalism requires specialization to be successful. Apple is the biggest company in the world but you don’t see them out there mining and producing every single material on planet earth. They need to spend money on common mats in mass quantities in order to sell their rare items. Common mats that they simply don’t have time to gather themselves.

Bottom line, and I apologize to anyone offended by this, is that veteran players aren’t looking for a way to fix the economy. They’re looking for a way to make it easier on themselves.

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It is part of the game, I agree but the few times I was willing to try and find something that I needed, that is all that happened. I did not find what I wanted, wasted game playing time looking for it and added coin for players that had empty stores or happened to have a plot in my way. A lot of effort on my part with zero reward. Probably why I do not shop any more. If I need something and cannot get it through my guild then I prefer to pm a few players I know or just make it myself. At least then I get xp for the time spent versus nothing.

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Ah. I see what you mean. Yes, this will definitely help with that. There are even times I can’t find stuff that I am looking for lol. I look in the malls, go to diff planets…no bueno. I get what you are saying :+1:

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Not trying to be difficult. But how many players find the shopping experience boring or a waste of time. One reason I was thinking incenting a player to look might generate sales for stores. If a player got something for making the effort maybe more players would make the effort. Maybe not, but I figured it was worth getting feedback on a proposal that tried to do that.

I am interested in what the developers may be thinking about and what affect that might have.

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Why don’t players do more to advertise their items or prices? Sellers should be making more of an effort to grab my attention.

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What about a hybrid system, where we could have an auction house ONLY for raw materials (blocks, drops, etc) but keep the shop stands for crafted items and specific colors? Sort of a wholesale+retail system.

I suggest this because I find it really annoying to go searching for baskets just to sell things like tallow or meat, but I don’t mind shopping around for hours for special forged tools. I’d like a more casual way to sell and buy basic stuff.

An interesting proposal but as most of what I need at this point is crafted, I would not find it useful at all. I have the tools to get plenty of the basics at my level.

I wonder if most basic resources trade through stores go through request baskets versus sales stands?

Last time you said this that idea didn’t pan out as they hoped :pleading_face:

But if they’re gonna let use a shop stand in the atlas to track down places that have shop stands placed then that will stimulate some exploring for best deals for sure.