Okay, A new direction for everyone to ponder. Scratch my entire original idea for the moment. It only addresses one piece of one problem and cannot in effect define a bigger problem. I was wrong. A single problem can be identified without debate however. Sales are really low universally wide in Boundless. There are many other problems many can think of. I am trying to analyze the economy only in this thread. There is also many ideas tied to lower sales like lower player base. But for the existing ones at least , lets break it down a little.
1st Lets try this.
Known Base facts:
1.Everyone can eventually make anything they need or want.
2.Everyone can sell if they desire.
3.Everyone can gather, and accumulate stuff, and coin.
4.Coins are not exactly 100% needed to gain 1-3. Proven by thousands like myself who have everything just by playing the game. Though you can go into debt by excessive warping.
5.If a player wants to build portals, he may need to join hunts, in order to make enough oort to maintain a portal. It may be hard to make enough oort by solo hunting alone for some destinations. Thus killing the solo hermit play style for just this portion of the game. Or joining hunts to gather higher numbers of animal resources more quickly as a convenience.
6.Everyone can partake in footfall if they desire allowing other players to come onto their plots. After all, hermits who live in the wilderness often don’t claim taxes anyway. So some do not ever see footfall.
7.The economy exist in this style or business model, for those who do not want or desire or have the time for doing either 1 or 2 or 3. Thus making coins something used, to avoid having to do either 1 or 2 or 3. The need to use coin to open a warp and jumping home seems to be the constant no way around the permanent need for coin. Everything else is conveniences.
The main re-occurring solutions I’ve heard:
A) “Increasing footfall coin will fix the economy.” or “Players need more coins.” - I feel with number 3 and 4, it may not. (lets ignore footfall ideas for the moment) I will say I do go broke all the time and it makes me not go out and buy other crafters items, and does force me to go make it myself. However, in ALL mmos it’s always cheaper to make it yourself as opposed to buying it. So deeper thought may need to be put here as opposed to why it may not be working in Boundless as well. I do remember chancing an account ban in my old WoW days and buying gold. All because of number 7 here. I didn’t want to grind.
In fact, lets think more a sec here. If we had more coin available, yes we would be buying tons of stuff. (I would be) But it’s a lack of coin to obtain what we desire that makes us go out and work to make the that coin, in economics 101. So is there possibly a balance issue here? There is most definitely a huge decline of crafters buying materials. Most request baskets are empty, period. I use to go out and make a 100k easily selling stuff. But know it takes 4 hours and 15 planets to find the baskets to sell that much. So what came first here, the lack of coin or the lack of crafters?
B) “Giving us more stuff to craft might fix the economy.” It seems the more stuff we have the more stuff simply sits in shops. With number 1-3 in play, all your items in a shop is only there for those who don’t want to do one of the 1-3. Thus creating number 7.
My personal thought is that number 7 would need to be accepted. If it is, then there is no economic problem, and everyone has to accept that Boundless is not a economic simulator. This is not what the majority wants however. I think the bigger issue is involving parts of A) above.
A different idea: Maybe in this games evolution increasing players coin through higher coin rewards for the harder objectives/feats. After all when we pay 20k+ for just one hammer that will wear out. Why not have the rewards increased? I think in other mmo’s this is the big difference. They have huge rewards for completing instances and super higher end loot worth 100k’s or millions sometimes. This is where Boundless kinda of stops. We get pretty low rewards considering the cost of tools and buffs to reach those bigger objectives/feats. We are in the hole sometimes by the time we reach a feat. This would change the coin balance, and the added coin would not come from the debated earned footfall.
Also I might add that just merely adding more creatures and more loots doesn’t change the desire of sales, but would increase number of players. I feel that it’s a larger drop of players who all came and saw and moved one within just 5 weeks, once they did everything and saw everything. So a combination of added content of things to do (like most all mmo’s) like boss’s, and more group things and even the evil idea of dailies to increase some coin, could add an increase of players as well. More players with more coin is more people buying. If more people are enable to buy more frivolously, there would be a demand for more crafters again. just personal idea.
