Guild members do not generate footfall

[james]

@LyndaFromHR

It just a matter of time before a community footfall system is constructed just for coin where everyone runs over plots in 5 minutes and collects their cash each day. Don’t fight the mechanic. Enable the behavior.

Totally disagree here. This path just leads to some players doing all the cheesy things to maximise their gain, and everyone else getting annoyed that playing the game straight doesn’t return the same value.

@LyndaFromHR

The issue is the economy is contracting and there is insufficient coin coming in the drive economic activity. Removal of bomb-mining was a huge hit to the supply-side of things. For example: I was too low level to take advantage of it before that balance pass went through and lost out. So you had folks sitting on Scrooge McDuck piles of coin and resources and anyone afterwards is playing the game as intended. That is totally fine, but the economy isn’t.

I spend upwards of 3 hours a week pricing and scanning shops and find abandoned shops with huge amounts of inventory that are utterly priced out of the market. Their owners nowhere to be found. I also find shops that have tons of resources to sell, but little in the way of buying.

We need massive economic stimulus. The game is in a recession and looking just at footfall isn’t a sufficient enough calculus to assess whether players have more coin or less. It would be better to assess if players feel like its better to grind for resources rather than engaging the economy. At the moment, I think the overwhelming opinion is it is easier to grind than pay money. It should never, ever be that way.

My evaluation is that for the majority of resources there is a huge over supply in the economy. Supply > Demand.

For a few resources there is parity and a really healthy economy: Rough Oort Stone and Shards. Supply = Demand. In this market we can see that the number of resources entering the economy is equal to the number leaving. The market is fluid and is working well. Players can always sell these resources. Players can always buy them. The net result is that there are very few stockpiled resource.

For some resources there is under supply: some of the rarer creature drops. Supply < Demand. The price is high and the resource is in demand.

So my focus is on the majority of items where there is over supply:

1. It’s simply too easy to find and gather almost all resources.
2. Players can gather these easily, quickly, and in volume.
3. Shop owners have spent all their coin, they’re now coin poor, but resource rich.
4. They have more stock than demand wants.
5. Hence you end up with request baskets without any coin. “I don’t need any more bones!!”

How do you solve over supply:

1. You need to slow supply by making resources slower to gather. (But obviously everyone would freak out and screen NEEEERF at me.) Alternatively,
2. You need to take the over supply out of the economy. The way you do this is by introducing a guaranteed mechanism for converting resources into coin. Thematically there are a few ways of doing this:
   • a game run shop but this has been rejected because we don’t want to make any parts of the world special,
   • allow the elder to buy items from players, also rejected for various technical, security and thematic reasons,
   • allow players to craft an coin / economy machine that converts items into coin.

An coin / economy machine would act as a guaranteed purchaser of some resources and would establish a base price for the item in the game. This would allow players to always generate a coin income if they’re willing to gather resources. I do consider this a hack on a pure economy - but there are real world examples.

This machine would:

1. Take resources out of the economy and hence reduce supply.
2. Establish a minimum price that the items can be sold for.
3. Allow the player-player economy to sit above these prices.
4. Allow an arbitrage for players who upgrade their economy machine.
5. Allow players to always generate coin in exchange for collecting resources.
6. Shift shops to focus more on crafted items.
7. Give us a dial per item to reduce supply based on price.

So an economy machine will reduce over supply without nerfing gathering.

Another solution is to increase demand to match supply. IMO this is much harder, and I’m open to ideas to do this. There are a few options here:

1. New Boundless players will increase demand. (But also increase supply!)
2. Allow coin poor players a mechanism to generate coin to allow them to purchase more item - see the coin / economy machine.
3. Create a reason for coin rich players to purchase items. (Any ideas?)

We have been thinking about this issue for a while and it is planned for release after the Exoworlds.