It is not unrealisstic. Lots of items are not even selling at 1c each. That is a problem.
Runescape had this problem. Only reason why items stayed at somewhat ok prices was because you could high alch them for a certain coin amount. Oh, and nearly all items were at the high alc prices, unless they were used for a specific method or best in slot gear. The real fix came with the implementation of Invention skill, which allowed players to gizmos and spare parts from dismantling old items. Depending on the item, they give different spare parts. Long story short, this gave the game a huge item sink, prices rose according to supply vs demand and the economy is better than ever. If prices rise too high, nobody dismantles those items, until people farm the items again and prices again. I mean, items used to cost like 10m, only to over time drop to a measly 100k, cause of oversupply.
This is why when you say it’s unrealistic, you are wrong. This solution would even give rocks and stones a higher price, cause it would be useful for other than masscraft.
However, in accordance to this, the game needs to get more coins into the game, but at a steady rate not to cause insane inflation.
I feel that prices can continue to drop, as i have said before it makes your daily activity bonus worth more.
If someone sells an item for the cheapest in-game, it takes a lot of work to keep up supply at self-gather prices. I will just chill, build, have fun, and keep my stuff at sustainable prices. This way when mr.cheapest runs out of stock and/or gets burn-out from the self inflicted non stop grind, I’ll still have stock and peeps willing to sell me mats
I’m playing the long game, and whatever makes me feel overwhelmed gets put on the back burner because, well, its not rl and nobody is gonna die from taking a break to just run around a bit and get some boundless love back.
Literally the purpose of my shop. I price at like 70pct of market. Market price goes down? Drop another few thousand. Move product first, make profit, help people, it feels good. That’s why when people.said hey, in closing my shop, good luck… That’s a bummer, it’s counterproductive.
Just read this Crete guy’s post and it’s total NONSENSE! He’s completely misdiagnosed the problem by a large margin. If anything he’s just virtue signaling about how everyone else but him is at fault. The fact is the economy “is” broken. Something everyone has known since the start was that the economy couldn’t possibly last if everyone could do everything. At this point most of the players who are left are at max level with multiple characters and have the ability to do and craft anything. Even if you have the coin to spend why would you if you can just go out and farm it yourself? After all there isn’t enough CONTENT to keep you occupied doing anything else. Compound that with low population, the fact that footfall was the primary lubricant to the economy at the beginning (before the nerf) and everyone saw the perfect storm was coming. Well here it is. Prices aren’t and have never been the problem. If prices were high at the beginning you always had the option to go find a better deal and still do. Trying to justify the collape of the economy with the “lower your prices” argument is just plain ignorant. Those who wanted to make coin did that long ago. And those who want to give things away virtually free can.
I agree with those who say the game needs item sinks. Some cool end game items everyone wants but takes a buttload of gems and such would help. Right now if you’re a millionaire with all the forged tools and coils you want, there’s nothing to do with that coin. So, taxes have dried up much of the liquid capital remaining in play for new players, and the rich have nothing to buy. How to fix it? The game needs something that costs 100k, and 500k, and 1 million, and 5 million to consume items and move coins around that are stagnating. Gem thrones maybe, requiring 100 metal and 100 refined gems each? Gem doors with the same requirements? Gem crowns you wear for effects and get consumed over time?
Also, massively increasing mushroom and plant spawn rates hurt the economy badly.
Many top players took a break two months ago due to footfall. It doesn’t seem fixed yet. When there was more coin supply people bought more.
I think taxes hurt a lot too. A real business doesn’t have to deal with wild price fluctuations, and can subtract losses from gains. Shops sell for double their buy prices due to risk and tax. This was perhaps abusive before the gathering collapse and the subsequent footfall collapse but now seems justified.
How to fix it? I don’t know. Other than item sinks, I have previously suggested that taxes on transactions cripple the economy; some other solution is needed. Maybe taxes should come from a crafting fee; once created there should be no tax on an item no matter how often (or whether on a stand or hand trade) it is bought or sold. Or some other tax. People in the game aren’t mathematicians, and there is huge risk in buying anything right now.
Not enough new players buying items of lower ranks, and now that everyone is max level with their coils, everyone can make their own stuff for cheap. I have lots of friends I think would love this game, but it’s too expensive. It needs free weekends and a $19.99 price point to get the player base moving. Unless they are indeed soft launching.
World resets are a huge problem. The resources on a world needs to remain relatively constant regardless of server resets; the shockwaves sent through the economy by resets cripples the economy.
I hope the BL devs do something… I want this game to succeed.
the way you should treath money is that you can buy stuff you dont like to gather or do.
I had this great time when the meteor hunts wherent a thing yet and i gained alot of money be doing them.
Then i started to do request baskets to buy items i dont want to do Collecting coal, making bricks and so on.
some people like to make food, some people like to mine and go on.
Ofcourse you have those maniacs that just do all. and that is the part what hurts in my opinion the economy.
Those shop holders dont feel like spending money. They just collect it and whent hey need something they mine it.
On the other hand, i think i agree with @SePras , we few who actually specialise still have a rather good time doing what we like and buying the rest.
(everyone goes deaf when i mention this it seems) absolute coin value means very little, apart from making activity bonus coin stretch a bit further. One of the larger harms to the economy is indeed the ability to do everything yourself, and on top of that it’s quite easy to get to that point thanks to the endless ‘bring down the grind’ petitions. Thankfully the economy is totally arbitrary and 100% opt in like most things in boundless, i guess it will just take a much larger population willing to buy and sell than we currently have; if we get to the point where trade volumes are high enough that the DIY guys get burn-out from 24/7 farming we might get bigger involvement in the economy. Item sinks ftw
This is actually a good point. The economy, like guilds and so much of the game is not something every player has to engage in. I would agree it will take a larger population interested in engaging actively in the economy for it to function well. I think a lot of things would function differently if the number of active players was higher. If as has been said, the developers are expecting a slow growth, we might jus have to wait a while for the number of players to grow to a point where we actually see how the existing economy mechanics work.
Yes and no. The Gem Wall makes it so effectively there are 2 different games being played at the same time; those pre-wall and those post-wall. The game needs to be balanced for both of those somehow, but they are such different experiences that I’m not sure how that gets done. If the devs make it so that there is “more grind” based on the post-wall play rate, then pre-wall players should just pack it in and go home as they are never going to advance in that world. The flip side to that is by making things common enough that anyone can farm them (which I think is a good goal for a game, that if not strictly a voxel builder, is more so that than anything else) then we end up where we are, where lower level players can get the items they need, but post-wall players can 3x3 through whole worlds or race across surfaces gathering up huge amounts of stuff.
This, of course, has an impact on the economy. If we really care about a good economy in the game, 3x3 tools and Regen Bombs would likely need to be looked at to make sure they aren’t distorting it too much (I suspect they are) along with something to stabilize the deflationary spiral. If we don’t care about the economy at all then honestly I think the whole system should just be scrapped. Vestigial, half formed systems in a game don’t really serve a purpose other than to frustrate players.
At some point, that slow growth needs to kick in. I don’t know what it is going to take from WS to make it happen, but the game is going to be a total ghost town before next Summer at the rate things are going. But you are right, it is hard to diagnose exactly what is wrong with so little system input. Maybe with 1000 concurrent players instead of 2-400 some of this would work itself out or show other weaknesses that we can’t currently see, but it’s impossible to tell.
I don’t think they ever did nerf it. What happened was they fixed the server crashes. So footfall at first was more or less working as intended since the servers were crashing all the time and resetting the timer on footfall. It wasn’t till those were fixed that we finally realized the mishap of footfall being on 24days instead of 24hrs. So some may look at that as a nerf when in fact it wasn’t. I don’t know how much fury looks at the forums to this game being as he pretty much just fills his beacons nowadays. Same with all the big players that lived in anvil.
I’ve run a shop since sept, it once boomed daily.
I’ve always had reasonable prices, and consistent prices in buying and selling.
I haven’t really been greedy and offered fair prices in baskets and selling… i farm some stuff and buy lots also.
But it’s getting to the point that people will sell stuff to your baskets at 25-30 a leaf but won’t buy your products you make.
People are selling end game foods at a loss now, i’ve seen it all over. <500 for a xp or persistant pie is just pure loss because there is no way they are spending all this time making them, farming coal, using spark, collecting and processing various ingredients and power coils for 500c.
Hopefully some kind of injection happens soon because that’s broken AF
I’m about 500 hours in to this game. Up until about 450 hours in, I was scared to go try to mine gems because I kept reading about people saying how impossible it was to cross this gem wall. One day, I said “I’m just gonna try.”
I made 5 iron hammers and forged them with extra damage & criticals. No AOE. This was also one of my first forging experiences.
I made a single trip to Galan, stayed there until I had over 360 Topaz, and didn’t even use all of my forged iron hammers. I came home and mass crafted my first batch of Topaz and made my first set of Topaz hammers.
From there, I have gone out mining for all of the other gems and now have plenty of each (except Ruby, that one is a jerk).
That was literally all it took. A half stack of forged iron hammers and a little bit of courage. There are so many gems on Galan it’s ridiculous. If you can’t get Topaz there, then no one can help you.
You could also turn those compact topaz to compact sapphire with a gem change chisel (sapphire is balanced and will be a bit slower but do more damage than the swift topaz hammers). But yea galan is loaded with topaz and forging the iron with dmg and crit was a good idea to speed up the mining process
I don’t even think about the fuel it takes to make something but that is probably because my main is a miner so I’m generally floating in coal. And getting the exotic yams for persisting is super easy with the farms that are out there.
I used to farm at those floating pancakes on high tier sovereign planets or on top of the giant trees. I’m not sure if that’s 200 orbs in 15 minutes tho.
The 200 orbs in 15 minutes might be from regen farming growth but by farming mushrooms you’ll end up with other ingredients needed by forgers as well.
Island trees on a T6, make sure to have the plant skill that drops extra. I have had the best numbers on a chill world but someone else might have a better spot.
Reminds me of a recent conversation where a person said, I can trade shadow orbs against some forge ingredients. It was hard to gather, I died 30 times!
offers 5 shadow orbs and asks for various items…
Good fun!
But for real, one can’t go out from how hard it is for oneself to gather items. In that scenario every little new player of lvl 20 would price everything they hunt down with copper slingbows, every little mushroom loot from besevrona, every ore high prices! If a newbie for example stays on their one planet, and don’t know about hopper cores, of course they would price it like a lucent deco block They did not yet arrive in the real economy since they’re not level 50 yet, and have not yet made it to the higher class tools. It’s a problem in a way. Without sales they can’t improve either. The good thing is, that everyone advertises boundless universal trade tracker nicely. But still a lot people forget about it or are too lazy to do their research. Or simply say, I have no clue about prices.
Collecting coal, making bricks and so on.
They did not yet arrive in the real economy since they’re not level 50 yet, and have not yet made it to the higher class tools. It’s a problem in a way. Without sales they can’t improve either. The good thing is, that everyone advertises boundless universal trade tracker nicely. But still a lot people forget about it or are too lazy to do their research. Or simply say, I have no clue about prices.