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Author Topic: Inflation suggestion  (Read 2536 times)

stefan pall

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Inflation suggestion
« on: May 11, 2022, 08:34:23 AM »
Everybody is saying economy is kinda broken due to endless amount of coin, imbalance low-high levels, gold flowing up, not enough sinks.

Here a an idea:

Decrease gold rewards/selling prices/bank deposits by a factor of 10.

Increase cost of living by:
1.  making foods/drinks necessary and more expensive - not an RP commodity.

2.  Rentals to rest expensive, not 10-20 coins.
  Increase hours necessary between 2 rests to like 8-12 hours IG.

If we want inflation down,  a character should
strive  to make money to cover  the cost of resting / getting food from one adventure to the next.

Not going once out and banking like 3 - 5 k when a rental is 10 coins and food is free if you hunt deer.

That s a long term solution for keeping wealth going up and up and up,  and it s not dependent on player base.

Shift the focus from making easy money to pay exorbitant amounts on gear
To making money to be able to rest properly/get necessities.

I imagine it would work better than artificial sinks like renting a mansion - which some chars would never do anyway.

And it would be a choice.

Make it necessary to spend coin.
Not a choice.

Day Old Bread

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Re: Inflation suggestion
« Reply #1 on: May 11, 2022, 08:40:06 AM »
Everybody is saying economy is kinda broken due to endless amount of coin, imbalance low-high levels, gold flowing up, not enough sinks.

Here a an idea:

Decrease gold rewards/selling prices/bank deposits by a factor of 10.

Increase cost of living by:
1.  making foods/drinks necessary and more expensive - not an RP commodity.

2.  Rentals to rest expensive, not 10-20 coins.
  Increase hours necessary between 2 rests to like 8-12 hours IG.

If we want inflation down,  a character should
strive  to make money to cover  the cost of resting / getting food from one adventure to the next.

Not going once out and banking like 3 - 5 k when a rental is 10 coins and food is free if you hunt deer.

That s a long term solution for keeping wealth going up and up and up,  and it s not dependent on player base.

Shift the focus from making easy money to pay exorbitant amounts on gear
To making money to be able to rest properly/get necessities.

I imagine it would work better than artificial sinks like renting a mansion - which some chars would never do anyway.

And it would be a choice.

Make it necessary to spend coin.
Not a choice.

Making money is not easy for everyone. Just as in the real world, we all have different ideas of what wealth is. Some only ever accumulate modest sums of coin and this sort of thing would be prohibitive and frankly taxing. The economy is fine as it is IMO. Players can easily effect the economy in positive or negative ways. I had a merchant a while back that was quite popular in spite of the fact that she charged significantly higher prices than others. I know of other tradesmen and merchants who do the same. In that they are able to bleed out some coins from their fellow adventurers and often times you'll see that money goes to other places, not back into player hands.

Madame Trousers Son

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Re: Inflation suggestion
« Reply #2 on: May 11, 2022, 08:44:52 AM »
Gold sinks should hit deep pockets; I don't think there's a problem with the low level economy. Also carrots are probably better than sticks.

If anyone can think of fun, setting authentic ways to encourage players to spend big amounts of gold, though, that'd be cool to hear.
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William Roberts

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Re: Inflation suggestion
« Reply #3 on: May 11, 2022, 08:55:48 AM »
Quote
Increase cost of living by:
1.  making foods/drinks necessary and more expensive - not an RP commodity.

2.  Rentals to rest expensive, not 10-20 coins.
  Increase hours necessary between 2 rests to like 8-12 hours IG.

If we want inflation down,  a character should
strive  to make money to cover  the cost of resting / getting food from one adventure to the next.

Not going once out and banking like 3 - 5 k when a rental is 10 coins and food is free if you hunt deer.

That s a long term solution for keeping wealth going up and up and up,  and it s not dependent on player base.

Shift the focus from making easy money to pay exorbitant amounts on gear
To making money to be able to rest properly/get necessities.

Increasing the cost of living *is* inflation, so that's not really a cure for inflation.


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Day Old Bread

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Re: Inflation suggestion
« Reply #4 on: May 11, 2022, 08:58:02 AM »
Gold sinks should hit deep pockets; I don't think there's a problem with the low level economy. Also carrots are probably better than sticks.

If anyone can think of fun, setting authentic ways to encourage players to spend big amounts of gold, though, that'd be cool to hear.

High level crafted items. Oh wait, that's already a thing!

Madame Trousers Son

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Re: Inflation suggestion
« Reply #5 on: May 11, 2022, 08:59:40 AM »
High level crafted items. Oh wait, that's already a thing!

Not quite... craft markets don't take money out of the system. They just transfer the money around between players.
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William Roberts

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Re: Inflation suggestion
« Reply #6 on: May 11, 2022, 09:06:40 AM »
Inflation is too much money chasing too few goods, so the cure for it is either decrease the money supply or increase the supply of goods.

An easy way to decrease the supply of money is to get rid of NPCs who buy stuff from PCs or to reduce the amount they pay for such goods. That is probably a horrible idea, however, because those who already have a lot of money would be unchallenged in their wealth. New PCs could never hope to obtain such princely sums, perhaps making it even harder for players to closure grandfathered PCs.

So inflation is kind of good in that it devalues the huge stockpiles already accumulated and gives incentive to keep on keeping on.

If inflation does have bad game effects that need correcting, then the carrot (increasing the supply of sought-after goods) is indeed probably better. That creates a different form of inflation, however: power creep.


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Re: Inflation suggestion
« Reply #7 on: May 11, 2022, 09:14:00 AM »
This would alienate a lot of people from the server, and would simply add another layer onto why so many people already consider PoTM extremely unfriendly to new players. No thanks.

MAB77

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Re: Inflation suggestion
« Reply #8 on: May 11, 2022, 09:21:40 AM »
Yeah it's a difficult thing to balance.

Decreasing gold reward isn't really possible because of the way the loot works in NWN. It's tied to the gold value of items, decreasing this means decreasing the chance of high value loot to drop. We could however decrease the amount of gold given back by NPCs for items they buy. Whether or not that's a good idea remains to be evaluated. As was stated, the issue is more at higher levels and that may hurt lower level players.

Adding gold sinks never quite had the impact we wanted. They mostly invite players to grind further for their gold and we don't seek to encourage this behavior.

Good use of your gold that I can think of:
- Invest in lower level players. Equipping them and financing their crafting operations.
- Give millions in gold/rare items to NPCs in exchange for future favors.

I had this idea once of a monthly upkeep scaled according to one's level, and of monthly interest rates at banks. But that would cause more grief than anything, and the system was easy to exploit to avoid paying it.
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HirtZirk

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Re: Inflation suggestion
« Reply #9 on: May 11, 2022, 09:22:16 AM »
Since I started playing I thougth about this.
Its seems that at some point old player have infinite money and start giving random new players gold for no proportionate reason.
I liked it a lot and helped me start very nicely but it made me question it.

Shouldnt the bank just start taking money from the account proportionatly to the ammount deposited  per periode (ingame year for example)(stradh tax or whatever) ?

This could really empower faction to act as banks and so on...
just brainstorming here.

--- PS : I posted at same time MAB posted so excuse me if I raised a point that was also adressed in hes message ---
« Last Edit: May 11, 2022, 09:29:29 AM by HirtZirk »

MAB77

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Re: Inflation suggestion
« Reply #10 on: May 11, 2022, 09:26:27 AM »
They already take an amount based on the sums deposited.
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Day Old Bread

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Re: Inflation suggestion
« Reply #11 on: May 11, 2022, 09:26:52 AM »
Yeah it's a difficult thing to balance.

Decreasing gold reward isn't really possible because of the way the loot works in NWN. It's tied to the gold value of items, decreasing this means decreasing the chance of high value loot to drop. We could however decrease the amount of gold given back by NPCs for items they buy. Whether or not that's a good idea remains to be evaluated. As was stated, the issue is more at higher levels and that may hurt lower level players.

Adding gold sinks never quite had the impact we wanted. They mostly invite players to grind further for their gold and we don't seek to encourage this behavior.

Good use of your gold that I can think of:
- Invest in lower level players. Equipping them and financing their crafting operations.
- Give millions in gold/rare items to NPCs in exchange for future favors.

I had this idea once of a monthly upkeep scaled according to one's level, and of monthly interest rates at banks. But that would cause more grief than anything, and the system was easy to exploit to avoid paying it.

My noble has donated more money than she has earned to various charities. It keeps her humble and modest.

HirtZirk

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Re: Inflation suggestion
« Reply #12 on: May 11, 2022, 09:30:51 AM »
They already take an amount based on the sums deposited.

Sorry yes, meant originaly per period (example in game year or just IRL)

Merry Munchkin

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Re: Inflation suggestion
« Reply #13 on: May 11, 2022, 10:02:33 AM »
I don't know what kind of server metrics the developers have access to, but a relatively simple metric to track is total gold available on the server at any given moment.  If this is consistently increasing you have inflation, if it is consistently decreasing you have deflation, and if it is more or less at a steady state, you have a balanced in-game economy (all the gold that is being won by players is being absorbed by the available gold sinks).  Moderate up-down fluctuations are normal, but what you don't want to see is the money supply growing or decreasing steadily in one direction.

The server cannot, and should not, police the earning or spending behaviors of the general populace unless there is a steady move towards inflation or deflation.  The goal is a reasonable steady state, since that maintains the relative value of coin for player-to-player transactions.


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tylernwn

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Re: Inflation suggestion
« Reply #14 on: May 11, 2022, 10:06:08 AM »
Based on my own observations, the highest volume of money that enters the market comes from professional-merchant characters selling items (unwanted items from adventures) to NPC vendors.

FinalHeaven

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Re: Inflation suggestion
« Reply #15 on: May 11, 2022, 10:07:59 AM »
I'll preface this by saying I almost universally play characters capable of Ninja Looting, but I also don't really maximize it as much as I could because I am lazy.

There's definitely some exorbitant price tags out there.  I'm not sure I'd agree that the player economy as a whole is terrible.  Especially lately, things don't seem too bad at the lower levels in regards to purchasing potions and alchemy supplies, or even basic tier equipment.  It's when you start aiming for a few specific items that things get more noticeable.

I think the only real way to force a change on item prices is a concerted effort to simply stop paying those prices.  This is obviously a hard choice, because most people crave the best gear for their builds.

That being said, more interesting gold sinks are always a good thing.  The problem there is that the suggestions often don't seem to ever fit in with the developer vision of POTM.



Dumas

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Re: Inflation suggestion
« Reply #16 on: May 11, 2022, 10:13:47 AM »
I feel like so called legacy gear causes huge fluctuations in the player economy that just leave a lot of players scrambling to catch up. Something for example like Druid gear that gives bonus mid-high level bonus spells will suddenly turn up after sitting in an old characters inventory for years, get auctioned for 100,000, and then drive up other items in a sort of trickle down affect. These sort of things are disruptive for the perceived player value of items, for better or worse.

Merry Munchkin

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Re: Inflation suggestion
« Reply #17 on: May 11, 2022, 10:24:06 AM »
Based on my own observations, the highest volume of money that enters the market comes from professional-merchant characters selling items (unwanted items from adventures) to NPC vendors.

This can't be true.  By definition, all of the coin in the game comes originally from loot drops.  The player to player economy is simply trading that same stockpile of gold back and forth.  The only actual increase in money flow comes from loot drops, and the only outflow of money from the economy comes from gold sinks and selling to NPC merchants.  This is why the only concern should be:  is the inflow equal to the outflow?  This ought to be a relatively simple metric to track system wide on the server.


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Maragrouf

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Re: Inflation suggestion
« Reply #18 on: May 11, 2022, 10:25:14 AM »
2.  Rentals to rest expensive, not 10-20 coins.
  Increase hours necessary between 2 rests to like 8-12 hours IG.

That would impact Dungeonning more than Economy. I mean, sure, you can make Inn's rooms more expensive. But changing the Rest Cooldown period would just mean screwing up the current "Dungeon Balancing", with spells lasting about as long as it takes for a rest to be possible.

As for prices of commodities... Let's keep in mind that those are also supposed to make sense from an IC point of view. Not Barovian Farmer would be able to afford food if it cost like a hundred fangs for a bowl of soup. Of course, as some said when we discussed the subject over on Discord : you can just suspend your disbelief and assume prices displayed are what ADVENTURERS (or Outlanders) would have to pay. After all, if they can spend Hundreds of Thousands of gold for some trinket, they could spare a few hundred for warm food and comfy beds.

Now as for Player-Based Economy... Can't say anything nice about it, so I'll just keep quiet.

Madame Trousers Son

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Re: Inflation suggestion
« Reply #19 on: May 11, 2022, 10:30:56 AM »
I feel like so called legacy gear causes huge fluctuations in the player economy that just leave a lot of players scrambling to catch up.

It's not just legacy gear, though. There's still some ultra-rare items that drop. Frankly, most of that stuff doesn't even see auction. They're traded for things far more valuable than mere gold.
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Anarcoplayba

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Re: Inflation suggestion
« Reply #20 on: May 11, 2022, 11:01:48 AM »
I strongly believe that "money sinks" would only serve to make hugh levels grinding mire for gold (further worsening the high level soloing low kevel areas problem).

I, personally, don't think the "inflation" is true a problem for it touches mostly items truly legendary and hard to drop. I've seen greater amulets of thoth coming from 15.000 to 8.000 due to its flooding in the market. The problem are the items that ONLY drop in ridicously hard dungeons.

The easy answer would be "make drops great again!", But that would be against the server ideology.

I'm all for equiping everyone with top tier gear, but that is not true to the setting. I remember when a masterwork rapier (+1) was the prize of a fencing tournment in dementlieu and the winner was deemed lucky because we did not have the amount of mercykillers and rapiers of the high road around.

There is only so much gold can buy. Truly epic gear will still be object of auctions.
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Re: Inflation suggestion
« Reply #21 on: May 11, 2022, 11:31:59 AM »
Based on my own observations, the highest volume of money that enters the market comes from professional-merchant characters selling items (unwanted items from adventures) to NPC vendors.

This can't be true.  By definition, all of the coin in the game comes originally from loot drops.  The player to player economy is simply trading that same stockpile of gold back and forth.  The only actual increase in money flow comes from loot drops, and the only outflow of money from the economy comes from gold sinks and selling to NPC merchants.  This is why the only concern should be:  is the inflow equal to the outflow?  This ought to be a relatively simple metric to track system wide on the server.

To be honest my ninjalooting character has been reaching a point he has more money than he knows what to do with from selling to players and NPCs.

He would buy expensive stuff from other players if it is actually worth the coin, but so far hasn't met anyone selling the things he needs.

For now I really only have varnishes and potions to spend on, everything else is apparently too rare!

Merry Munchkin

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Re: Inflation suggestion
« Reply #22 on: May 11, 2022, 01:29:19 PM »
I was probably imprecise in my language earlier, referring to money and coin, when I should have described it as "value".  There are actually two concepts that are related but different, "value" and "liquidity".  Value is like GDP for a country -- the total value (as determined by the loot tables) of all the drops in the server.  The second is liquidity -- most of the loot has to be liquidated in order to have a useful economy (a pure barter economy would be grossly inefficient), and NPC merchants allow you to exchange value for liquidity at a pennies-on-the-dollar exchange rate.  Liquidity is effectively the cash money supply available at any given moment.  Since the overall cash money supply is dependent entirely on the value (GDP) that the server is generating, but constantly tracking the money supply is not easy, efficient or necessarily effective, tracking the value generated by the server (all inputs) and all the value being taken out of the server permanently via gold sinks (all outputs) ought to be an easier task.

I caution that drawing any parallels to "real" economies is going to break down at a certain point when you are dealing with artificial, virtual game economies, because they do not have the same market forces acting on them (except in the most rudimentary ways) and don't have the same market correction mechanisms that a real market has.  For example, in real life if a money supply is growing too large, the price of money (i.e. interest rates) falls and it spurs more borrowing and lending, and more consumption.  However, POTM has no mechanism for lending or interest rates to respond to increases in liquidity, nor does it have a federal reserve bank to tinker with interest rates.  As a consequence, we cannot simply act as if this is a "free market" and let things roll however wild the ride.  Nevertheless, I am not an advocate of blunt force trauma to correct perceived market disruptions -- I think the optimal way to control a game economy from rampant inflation or deflation is to simply balance inputs (loot drop value) to outputs (gold sinks).  There will need to be some margin in favor of gold sinks, simply because even though value is exchanged for liquidity at a discount by NPC merchants (i.e. they buy low and sell high), a lot of loot drops are not recycled back to the community at a higher price and therefore are not effective gold sinks (see my thoughts below for a more thorough explanation of this).  Thus, the outputs have to be larger than the inputs to account for this.  It will take some tinkering to sort out exactly where the balancing point would optimally be.

Another factor to consider is to avoid loot drops that are effectively "junk" (i.e. they get exchanged for liquidity, but will never be purchased by the player base).  Tarnished wedding bands and similar ilk are an example of loot that will only be sold and never purchased, thus increasing liquidity but not functioning as a gold sink in return.  Loot that has a purpose and value that would incline other players to want to purchase it (even at a higher price), thereby taking liquidity out of the system, is preferable to loot that is merely sold and has no life beyond that.  Consumables are usually a preferred option (especially if they were made stackable and thereby more easy to carry and quickslot), but I recognize there are a lot of "flavor" loot drops that people might play with for novelty before discarding.

I will note also that while some consumables (oil of conquering glory and similar) have a value and may be wanted by lower levels to augment their limited casting abilities, they are often simply disposed of with NPC merchants so that gold can be split by groups, and repurchasing can be expensive for the low levels that actually could use it (and the fact that many are one-shot or limited shot consumables that don't stack is an inconvenience).


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Re: Inflation suggestion
« Reply #23 on: May 11, 2022, 03:38:40 PM »
I think this is more a perception problem than anything else. Even at the highest levels of play, I don't believe most do not have endless hordes of money, and if they do? Why does that matter? Shouldn't it be ic for a long, thriving hero to be fabulously wealthy? I don't even say this as a wealthy high level, it's fairly reasonable some have assets in the millions, and others simply do not. While certainly, it can be frustrating to see extremely rare drops to go for obscene (not really that obscene most of the time tbh) prices, those items still do drop, and most often these items end up being sold far lower by merchant characters here and there.

I think generally /not/ having money sinks is better, because having a dragon's horde currently is something worthwhile only for ic reasons. There reasonably is an upper limit where the amount of gold you end up earning will give you practically no real reward anymore. That being said, providing an ic plot money sink for characters is never a bad thing in my opinion, as those tend to lean more at the moment, and do not encourage excessive grinding on the norm, only for that instance.

As a player of a merchant character for some time, I personally think the economy is fairly decent. The majority of decent equipment is reasonably cheap to gold income rates, while fantastic items simply take more time and luck to acquire, which is probably how it should be. It's not like some high level buys up all my wares of lower-tier equipment or something, so supply is only a factor to how much work merchants want to do. Besides this, crafted equipment is flat out dirt cheap bar like the super-rare metals, which often are just a luxury in of themselves, not critical by any stretch of the imagination.
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Anastian

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Re: Inflation suggestion
« Reply #24 on: May 11, 2022, 05:57:09 PM »
I strongly disagree with any further changes to the economy for the following reasons:

1) As stated above, only very few characters have several millions in gold. It's the same characters cited in several posts who actually have a TON of hours sinked into, with a LOT of personal investment, and that have been long running and long standing for a while. I myself never even reached a million on my characters, but I would feel really bad taking away the effort and achievement poured to reach several millions in GPs on one character

2) I'd argue it's a matter of false perception: there are a handful of extremely rare items that cost that much, but they give only a limited edge over enchanted second tier gear. Sure, these new players might have a hard time being able to purchase this handful of items but are they really necessary to enjoy the server?

3) Really. How badly has this affected your gameplay, in the end?

In general, fully against gold sinks (they simply do not serve the purpose), fully toward keeping things as it is. It is still time consuming to accumulate that amount of wealth! Like really, I have all the merchant feats and high appraise on one of my character and ok, I never focused on grinding for more gold, but I've RPed an active merchant and still I have never reached 1 million in cash!
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