The in-game economy is wrong

Suggestions
1

The problem with this game is that the supply of money is more than consumption.
This leads to inflation, and I think inflation in the game is more serious than deflation.
This is a disadvantage to new users.

The real decline in money is only the portal fee and the tax on goods.
However, due to the use of portal seekers, many people do not exceed 100 coins.
The tax on the product is 10%, but when we think about the supply and demand of goods, the impact on the whole economy is insignificant.

If maintain the current state, the value of the currency is very low and can be changed into barter

My point is in the game Money must disappear.
But this needs a lot of help. Indeed, the economy needs a lot of insight.

Let me tell you what I think.

1.Replace beacon fuel with money.(It provides the factors that make the game more engaged)(Indirect tax)
ex)
1week free
2week 1000coin
3week 2200coin
4week 3800coin

2 tax the prestige (This can be a huge controversy)(+direct tax)(This is close to the example. I know it is a bad way.)
(But even if you do not do it this way, people who make a lot of money need incentives to spend a lot of money.)
ex)
settlement 1 level free (it is for Small builder not hard)
20 coin per 10000 presitge

  1. Purchase skill points through money (This is also very immediate and efficient. But it will show many side effects. But there is no disagreement about how to decrease a lot of money.)

ex) first skill point 5000 coin
second skill point 10000 coin
third skill point 20000 coin

Using a multiple structure can reduce the gap between hardcore gamers and light gamers and stimulate the hardcore user’s ambition.

I do not think my proposal is the best way. However, it is true that this method is definitely needed.

I hope others have a lot of opinions.

Thanks for reading.
I am not an English speaking country, so I may have the wrong English.

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2

You are not an English speaking country, but you have the RIGHT English.

This is very well thought out and I must agree with the point you made in the quote. Although, I am not very excited about your solution. I think that money can remain and become important. I think that you have to add a layer of unique decorative and character model/skin/armor customizations at a premium of in game currency. That way the ultimate purpose to great wealth is to greatly stand out and be unique and rare. This or an alternative is that wealth could be shared among a settlement which could be donated at will back to the server which could affect prestige and/or trigger a reward (or raid defense???) scenario.

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3

You propose some very interesting solutions which seem significantly different from what the devs intended originally, but are still worth noting.

In regards to portals, it does seem like the prefered method of travel since the beginning was through warps. There has been talk of tolls for portals, but I am unsure what is confirmed. We will hopefully see some more info on this when they expand the universe and or balance the portal fuel costs even further.

One of the more significant issues that you are not considering is player retention. Many shopowners leave only to keep millions of coin from feats and footfall from other players from being reinjected into the economy.

Rapid and sporadic growth and decline are what hinder the economy the most and to make matters worse I do not think that the volume of players is a good enough control group to estimate 1.0 metrics.

Unfortunately, we don’t have the data on the coin in the game and how fast it grows and/or how slow it is consumed. Thankfully, the devs do and it seems that there are ways in which they intend to further regulate this in the future.

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5

I think most of your thoughts are right. but I have to think about it somewhat differently.
I also think that the price has stabilized because many rich people are not using the money.
But if you think about why they have money, they already have everything they can buy with money, or just because they are a hobby to collect money.
if something they desperately need comes up, the balance will be broken and the price will go up sharply.

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6

Right now there isn’t an everyday essential use for coin. We are considering other ways to encourage players to spend their money rather than hording it.

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“Fluff” items. Things that are purely cosmetic. That usually seems to do the trick :wink:

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8

One can only speculate, but you and I both know that this does not make for a good economy as well.

It is true that people who have been playing for a while and people with large cities accumulate large amounts of money. It seems that the aim of shops is is to displace some of this wealth among shop owners. Now what happens when a big player enters the shop business. If they price high and there are other alternatives then not many people will buy and if they price lower than breakeven then their cash dimishes over time albeit slowly. Micro economies form in a game because of the lack of centralization and the ones to price effectively are the ones who in theory come out “victorious”.

A good way to gauge new players spending power is to keep and eye on the current feat system. This is the fastest way to accumulate wealth in the game (aside from P2P jobs) and there are definitely issues with it in itself. While bigger spenders have the ability to wipe out a supply of goods in one visit it is not enough to say that the price of the these goods will dramatically go up. If you use iron hammers as an example, a mass buyout does not mean that prices should double or triple. There are still many many shops offering this around the same price that the big spender hasn’t been to. Not only this, but as long as the seller can match the rate at which the buyer buys and can still manage a significant profit then things remain stagnant.

I don’t disagree that inflation is an issue, because it is, but unless we have numbers we cannot adjust for it.

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9

I think it would be better to add more options for players to spend their money rather than giving them less of it or making things that we NEED more expensive like warp costs.
I am one of the players that spent all their money trying to prepare for the update and most of that simply got deleted in the server update. Still no word on that btw :cry:
Now that I practically have no money its gonna be pretty hard to be part of the community again with 3 broke lv50 chars and my infrequent play times…

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10

The issue is that when you spend money on oort shards you’re displacing that coin to another player. Only about 1 coin in that entire trade is being sunk, but you both are right still and it seems like Luke and the team have some things in mind.

11

Well i think they should put tax on Player to player trades aswell, since poeple are trying to get around the requestbasket tax.

And people are holding their stuff, because they want to do everything themself :smile it would be nice to have a job where you arent able to everything. And i suppose this is going to happen sooner or later. The crafter craft stuffs to sell to the hunter and miner. the miner and hunter gather things for the crafter to make stuff

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12

I don’t like the idea of taxing on hand trades. Hand trades encourage player engagement. By taxing hand trades it will reduce player interactions, player travel, etc. That’s not good.

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13

It was good to be able to see each other’s point of view.
I think this is why economists are not united.
The economy is so interesting.

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14

You can still do deals with players. But i see the player2player trade as a work around for the taxes XD Maybe the tax can be less. But the Player to Player trade is a way around the coin sink of the game.

15

No. This would bankrupt even the wealthiest of players. When you make these things coin sinks, it just crushes the economy. It’s like raising taxes and fees on citizens in real life. Less purchasing power someone has, the less they can stimulate the economy but too much purchasing power does just as much damage to the economy.

The thing that people need to do is not make the stuff they’re selling at some stupid high price. What the economy needs is people buying and selling stuff and the passing of coin from player to player to increase. The actual money supply doesn’t necessarily need to be increased. It’s players changing their mind set on what price to sell their stuff.

With atlas maps, and meteors on certain worlds dropping tech components and devices, it makes very little sense for people to sell them at prices well into the hundreds of coins or even sell em at all (as an example).

The more you kill a person’s purchasing power in a video game or in real life the weaker the economy you will see.

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16

yep its broken :slight_smile:
hire sung to fix it :smile:

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17

The only way to fix it is people understanding how an actual economy works. Most people don’t.

Selling a gem tool for 6k pre tax (as an example) doesn’t help when the actual fair market price is 2-3k less than that… Selling Refined Rocks for 45c doesn’t help either when they’re really only worth at most 12c. If people want to be greedy and just make a ton of coin in their shops then they need to understand how price elasticity works.

18

This is not a problem, happens in the real world as well, what evens out the economy is the fact there is competition so the greed for higher profits ends up by those offering taking less of a margin that will attract people that way. With that, those who go pricy end up having a hard time selling, the more players there are the more competition there will be in pricing.

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19

Yup @TheBacon is on point with this one! While competition is low profits are above normal and when competition exists profits are regular. On top of this, just look at Tom’s. They make a shoe that takes them less than a buck to make and retail it for $50, and further claim that they are doing the world good by shipping shoes to kids who don’t need them… People still buy these shoes, but the crazy pricing is not detrimental to the overall economy. What Sung was saying was that coin is generated faster than it is being taken away. You guys have stopped talking about this and started talking about the way that things are priced. People simply do not value their coin enough to care how to spend it wisely. This is just how it is when you have many players who care little about coin and more about just having fun. You can’t stop things being priced unfairly. All you can do is compete or wait until a competitor arrives.

Going back to Sung’s original concern, coin needs to be sunk! It is also extremely important to remember that this is an early access game. There have been many exploits and bugs that have already killed the supply of coin. We just have to keep on hanging on and playing to prepare for 1.0.

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20

It’s just like putting a free capitalism vs capitalism (that’s being ruled and controlled).

A free capitalism will divulge in people pricing things as they see fit, and people buying what they consider fair prices, me a new player will believe that 5c might be a good price for refined sedimentary rocks, but a veteran player believes it might not be. Here it’s not only a matter of pricing, but on available information. Everyday we make assumptions on prices being fair or not, based on the information we have on hand.

Take for instance a game, you might be buying a game from Amazon, getting it a really good deal, you’ve checked sites like camel to check it’s historically lowest price and confirmed that it was a good deal. But a small shop down the road, with no website or social media, might be selling that same game for far less. Your information pointed on Amazon being the right option, the truth was, it was not a bad deal, it was good, but it was not the better one. There in comes, information, availability of the product and ease of purchase or access. That’s why it’s an ever expanding market and there’s technically a “place” for everyone in the economy.

Now there in comes the activity of the devs, with the reduction of coin available in the market with sinks, so the money doesn’t overflow.

In the economy, we can have deflation or inflation. Both of them happen constantly, with inflation happening more often. Inflation means that prices go up, and deflation that prices go down, but eventually economy starts shutting down, as people start hoarding money, as the expected value of it, is supposed to go upwards.

The current case for Boundless will be leading into an inflation, where there’s too much coin circulating, thus making things be “worth” more coin, while in truth money is losing it’s value as with the same amount of before, you can buy less than before.

Most economies handle themselves by controlling their levels of inflation to percentages lower than 5. I don’t think the best strategy to go about it is to have devs control coin sinks all the time, namely tax and warp costs.

I think the better policy is to give tools to players to play with. Considering establishing base tax levels on settlements or even the planet by itself. Establishing taxes and import and export fees when travelling with goods from outside the planet and commercializing them. That opens up to trade alliances. But also brings the competition for warden of the capital of said planet, making some players consider this too much of a hassle and bring too much complexity into the game, or where a group of dedicated players, can hold too much power in the game.

That’s where devs come in, to prevent the invisible hand from monopolizing the market, etc, etc.

I would love if people could bring in more ideas to how to make Boundless more expansive and complicated, without needing all it’s participants to dive deeply in it, unless they wanted to.

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21

Very much this.