[Galens]

[B]ELCID: THIS THREAD IS GOING TO BE WATCHED CLOSELY! AS IT IS THE ONLY CONSTRUCTIVE ONE SO FAR. BE WARNED ALL FLAMING POSTS AND NOCONSTRUCTIVE POSTS WILL REMOVED[/B]


A resolution to INX Economy
By Galens

When introducing players to a new shard, it is bet to start an economy at ground level. No hand outs, no transfers, no freebies, no edge’s, etc. This eliminates any beginning imbalance of the shard’s economic structure. Failure to do so will only cause an extremely wide gap between newcomers and veterans.

There are several types of players bases in this shard currently.

A. Veterans who started with nothing but the default created character
1A. Veterans who had previous accounts transferred
2A. Veterans who had Statics and/or Guild Stones transferred
B. Newcomers who have no idea how to play or are novices to the game and are searching for a decent shard structure to play on(This contains all newcomer scenarios)



Now with that stated above, take several scenarios into account that have already been implemented so far. 1A and 2A have both been implemented. This was the first mistake the shard could have made economically. This produces a huge economic boost, but without the growth. Lets say I aquired 5 million dollars out of nowhere. Well, the economy has to compensate for my economic wealth, but cannot, because it was not aquired through the proper means of obtaining wealth. This in turn prevents economic growth from lower players OR it makes everything extremely expensive OR cheap, depending on the active scenarios occuring during those events. This in turn destroys more than half your economic stability. Transferring goodies is therefore a BAD idea.

Now you may classify A and B base scenarios can be classified closely at the same level, but I will separate them into two different scenarios just for examples.

Scenario A was able to obtain a substantial amount of wealth due to knowledge of the game beforehand, there fore there must be a balance to limit the advantage of veterans vs newcomers. I will elaborate on this further in my statements.
Scenario B consists of newcomers who have no guide to follow except what is provided on the forums, which is still shabby because of the inconsistancy of placement of questions and answers. To help out newcomers to the game and the shard’s background, there should at least be an instruction guide informing the newcomer on the basics of gameplay for UO itsself, and/or shortcuts with programs or UO macro systems. These things may be found on the forums, but honestly, how many know how to use a forum correctly? We have already had this question answered just by watching the forums ourselves.

Now Onto the Economy part. This is going to be…. fun, to say the least (insert sarcasm)


Economy Structure
Skills

Skills should be roughly described as extremely difficult to gain. But before I go into more detail, I cannot stress enough that AFK macroing should be completely illegal, this is a serious economic killer. Think of it like this. I own a business. I run my business using robots. I can go home knowing I don’t have to to a damn thing, and I can rake in the money as I please, but this also puts others out of business/employment and also reduces my cost and increases my profit. This is a very smart business move yes, BUT, it also encourages laziness and lack of dedication, which in turn makes more business men feel they can do the same. This then makes even more people unemployed, which then destroys the economy because you have too many people unemployed and not enough jobs to fuel that economic imbalance. Thus economic imbalance and destruction. One thing sets off balance another which sets off balance another, and the chance of rebalancing gets further and further away. IN1 did NOT have afk macroing, and thus the market stayed continuously fresh and stable.
Crafting Skills
Blacksmithing
Crafting skills should be extremely hard to gain, as of yet, I do not see an imbalance with the crafting aspect of blacksmith. Except for fail rates on platemail. Crafting platemail should pertain to the crafter’s blacksmith real % level.

Iron armor should be based on direct %

Example: 50% Blacksmithing should yield 50% success rate for making Iron platemail.
Example: 100% should yield 100% seccess rate for making iron platemail.
Example: 100% should yield around 40-65% success rate to make sapphire platemail (random each attempt mind you)

(Insert any in between chance rates you feel you are comfortable with, but try to balance them out, this is a very delicate matter of course. And I will not write your whole economic structure for you. I am merely giving my own ideas.)
Now, you have seen that as a basic example, not only does this keep the price of ingots high, but it also keeps the profit rates of crafters in a balance. They cannot get uber rich from this, but they can make a substantial living from it.
Keep in mind, the GM Reward for smithing should always give that extra 20% bonus, which should have a big use when crafting, thus bringing up the fail rate percent for lets say sapphire from 40-65% to 50-75% thus giving the added profit they deserve for such hard work.
Blacksmithing should take at minimum 1 month to grandmaster if you do it straight. This prevents economic instability, and prevents hacks and lazy people from getting easy uber gold. The gold obtained is well worth the wait, trust me, 480-500k for a sapph suit for one month of training is WELL worth the wait if you can make them constantly. Skill gain should be hard-even harder than extremely hard But the player should gain small profit from training to prevent them from quitting their craft.
Bowflecthing
Bowflecthing is a very controversial subject, one I am not that familiar with, but I can give some more opinions on this. Making arrows is a big hunting expense reducer. Arrows should usually sell for 5 gp each, giving the player room to sell his goods for a smaller price of say 3-4 gp each. Thus making ingredients for them only obtainable from monster loots or from resource gathering. I will elaborate more on vendor stock quotes further in my statement so don’t be deterred by my previous statement, trust me, you will like my ideas. Gm Bowflecting is the only thing that should yield the ability to make Elven bows, BUT it should have a serious fail rate of 40-70% success rate(random for each attempt) This keeps the price of the bow high, and creates a competition to gain more gold to buy a successfully made bow. Now resources are free to obtain, so the profit made from them is fairly substantial for the work done on that skill. Feel free to balance however you please but keep in mind, sale to the vendors should only grant .5 to 1gp per arrow when sold to the vendor, this reduces vendor trading and increases player run economy. This is one thing we really want is player run economy. Skill gain for BowFlecthing should be medium-hard. Bowflecthing is a direct form of hunting resources, therefor should be player run and vendor run.
Scribing
Scribing is probably the most profitable skill as of yet. This is insanely unbalanced right now, it especially ruins the full capabilities of PVP in our shard as of today. Anyone with 5 fs scrolls and 5 lightning scrolls can go out and just blast anyone to death. They don’t even have to have anything but the scrolls. Sure it can become more complicated if the individual has potions and such, but I will get to that later. Making scrolls is fairly simple, it seems that anyone with 50% scribing and magery and/or alchemy can become extremely rich extremely fast. This is NOT a great idea. This only fuels PVP costs and the PVP aspect of the economy, not the entire shard. Blank scrolls should never be available in mass stock from a vendor, blank scrolls should only be craftable with a good fail rate to them to prevent over abundance, or should 95% of the time be only accessable from monster loots. This reduces flooding of scrolls and keeps a nice high price on the scrolls and a steady flow of competition with the attempt to obtain them before someone else does, thus increasing their cost even more with competition, and thus motivating the crafter to become richer through his efforts. Magic should not be the main aspect of PVP as it is on our shard. This ruins our economy as it makes PVP one sided and crafting one sided. This diminishes the economic balance. Skill gain should be hard-extremely hard
Alchemy
I cannot make statements on alchemy. I do not have knowledge of this aspect at all. Skill gain should be medium hard-extremely hard depending on the economic structure.

[Galens]

Tailoring
Tailoring should be a little bit harder than it currently is, with a small profit during the skillgain with vendors. This rewards the tailorer further than just a dye tub. A dye tub is nice, but tailoring does not fuel the economy hardly at all, so the tailorer should receive some profit other than his once in a while gm tub sale. Since this is not a direct boost of the economy, it should be vendor run and not player run. Anyone can get a dress, so no one is going to buy 10k from a person.

Carpentry and Tinkering Should both be equally hard as they go hand in hand. Carpentry and tinker should be a little bit easier than blacksmithing though, as they are not economic neccessities, they are however a big part of UO decoration.

Resource Gathering skills
Resource gathering from any skill should take at least 1hour to 1.5 hours to gain at most 1000-1100 units per, it should also have a decent amount of weight so that it creates more time spent with the craft then just gathering resources really fast. Polymorph should play a roll with resource gathering aswell, increasing strenght increases weight capacity. All resource gathering skills should be at most 1/3 easier to gain than crafting skills. This limits the flood of rare materials.

Mining should be a little bit harder than other skills as it is more economically direct than fishing. Ingots fuel hunting, PVP and include decoration advantages aswell. Mining any ore should seriously be revamped. At gm you should still get about 65-70% of the time iron or even higher. Sapphire should take about 3-4 hours to get just two ores, and that’s even if you manage to smelt it(make that about 90% success rate on sapphire. And go from there on the rest)

I am going to skip fishing. Ill leave that up to someone else.

Lumberjacking should be just as hard as mining.

Loot

All monster loot should be catagorized by the monster. It is much easier to just classify a monster by level of difficulty.

Example: A moongbat is level 1 Where as a level 1 would probably drop anywhere from 1-50 gold.
Example: Guardian Of Wrong is Level 10 Where as a level10 would drop anywhere from 10-15k just in gold. But the difficulty of the monster is so hard it takes a party to kill it. Keeping especially rare items only towards this level type of monsters decreases flooding of items and increases profits made from sale of items to players.

Now based on that example, you classify monsters by their levels according to their stats. Then you distribute loot based on their stats. But keep in mind the balance of Weapon damage vs Monster Stats. A Katana of ruin isnt going to hurt a dragon, so you would think that with that weapon, perhaps it has a chance of critical hit of maybe 2-5% on a random counter each swing, thus giving that katana anywhere from 2x-5x the normal damage it would do (also base the x scale on a random interval aswell per critical hit. This is just an idea, not an exact proposition.
Combat skills
Combat skills should always be hard to obtain no matter what. You don’t want everyone ganking everyone because they got zomfgkkthxbyehaxorzmyboxorz skills within the first week. This makes hunting way more unbalanced against craftables, UNLESS you make hunting loot decreased more than it currently is at the moment. (currently I could make 100k in one day if I hunted from dusk till dawn, though its hard because I like to play other parts of the game such as roleplaying) I would spend probably 10k total in that day for resources, most of which I could get from archer monsters. This needs to be checked out seriously. Either make combat skills harder to gain and more loot for monsters, or keep it as it is and make loot smaller.
Fencing
Fencing is completely ridiculous, I won’t say anymore.
Mace Fighting
Is useless
Swordsmanship
Is The only melee skill currently popular (BAD idea, this brings less diversity to someone’s personal favorite class and reduces role play factors aswell)
Archery.
Need I say anymore other than its uber strong?
Tactics
Tactics should be about as hard as mining currently is to Grandmaster
Parrying
Parrying is ridiculous aswell, this should be redone at an even higher difficulty than it currently is, maybe twice as hard.

Special craftables

Now this is a discussion that could take me freakin forever to tell. So I will try to shorten it as MUCH as possible.

Special Weapons
Weapons are a serious issue as of late, you have several levels of items that are currently worthless in damage against monsters that are tougher than an ettin (Ruin) The Power, force, might weapons seem to not do much more damage either. This seriously needs to be revamped. Vanq weapons(Only a few) are worth the time to use, some like kryss and mace items are completely worthless. Attacking faster is nice, but when you yield maybe 1-25 damage with any fencing weapon on a person or high level monster, come on now, that’s bad! A dragon has at least over 300 hps I am guessing. Probably a lot more.

We need class specific weapons to be equal with the speed vs damage ratio.
We need more special craftables with extremely hard to find ingredients, rather than making an uber weapon within 5 seconds.
Vendors
Vendors do NOT need to stock hardly any crafting supplies, all crafting supplies should be found from either monster loot, or be player made only. The most a vendor should carry of any crafting supply is 10 with a random restock rate of 1-1.5 hours. This is only for crafting supplies. Any monster can drop certain supplies, hell, dragons could supply blank scrolls, or high level mages could drop them maybe 5-8 at a time. This makes selling the blanks use more of the economy’s money while giving more competition to strive for that scroll for their scribing skill(Of course any input you place in your quotions should be balanced with the skillgain. Don’t use scribing as hard at is is now and have monsters drop only 5-8 blanks at a time, now that would be ridiculous. Vendors should only carry ringmail at most. All other items should be crafted. This makes relying on other players more effective than going and buying iron platemail for a 70 day hunt. Vendors should never carry ingredients for special items, even when sold to them. This makes it less work for a vendor camp who has a macro set to buy certain items.

Armor

Armor should always play a big part in hunting AND PVP. I hardly see anyone going outside in anything higher than gold armor. What kind of nonsense is that? I don’t even hunt with more than 25 ar, and I go hunting dragons, daemons, dread lords, etc.

To reduce the non use of armor, you could give certain armors certain magic resistance capabilities and then script certain spells for certain elements and go from there on the damage table. Or you could make scrolls do less damage, thus implementing more magic book usage and more use of physical melee and range attacks, thus giving armor more use. Those two ideas work, it just takes time to implement.

Misc Skills lore etc.
Lore skills should play a HUGE part in the game.

Example: Summoning a creature. The creature will disobey your commands more often if you do not have high enough animal lore.
Example: Taste Identification helps with making cooking play a big part in the game. Cooking food gives you a smaller increase when using heal potions. OR the taste skill gives an even higher boost in gaining health with potions.

Example: Arms Lore increases usage time of weapons, thus allowing for less breaks and repairs, but it would have to be a hard skill to master since it would also take away more from crafter’s repairing profits.
Peacemaking could be changed so that even if you are gm peacemaking, the monster has a greater chance to become angered again and fight you more often. (I make easy money EASY money using peacemaking, its ridiculous)
Provoking should NOT allow monsters to fight to the death, even when Gmed, is should just have a longer last effect than normal.
Discordance should play a big role in hunting aswell. Currently is takes 20% of str from monsters when Gmed. This is STILL useless as most players use magic and/or ranged attacks when hunting. And on top of that, most high level monsters use magic anyways. It should be extremely hard to gm and give a stat decrement of 20% in all stats, thus giving it a better use, since it would cut down on mana use from a monster(if implemented that way)

This is all I have for now. I will write more if I feel there is a need. This is ONLY a guide, and merely MY opinions. I do not state this is how the shard SHOULD be, but it is a good guide to follow.

Galens

[imported_Mephisto]

I Understand your reasoning behind Feeling that Not having everyone start with the same thing as a blow to the economy but you have to also understand this point...

Without these transfers there would be no population to have a economy. I know I myself would not be here if it wasn't for my transfers and I know, Modestly, alot of others who would not either. This world was a "Merge" and the population (Who for the most part was waiting quiet patiently) was promised certain things to have them here.

I personally Don't feel that the transfer of skills is affecting the unbalanced economy we're experienceing right now however. More or less its just that like any new UO shard, it takes some time for the admins to balance things out... and every new "Bug" that is found and exploited knocks the economy away that much more to becoming balanced.

Also, If this was 7-10 years ago, i would be right beside you saying how hard the skill raises SHOULD be... However... Come on... who HASN'T GM'ed all these skills at least once, on whatever shard in thier life. The few friends that I play with on this server IRL.. we don't call this IN:X, we call it "Retirement UO"... because we came here saying "Alright.... Its a Step from Imagine Nation. (where we're from personally) We'll give it a try.. But we've played so long.. so much.... We just wana kick back, hang out with old friends, and enjoy the game. XUO Got their PvP, hey, thats cool, we were always crafters and RPer anyway. We're Greatful to be playing with them and have them here for the PlayerBase Boost. But to make everything so Difficult to gain isn't going to help our server or cause out one bit, but in contrast will detur newer players from even trying....

[imported_Duke]

No one transfered with huge amounts of gold. The biggest thing was a static house, which in the end is just a house. It does not effect the economy.

[imported_Messiah]

Now that im back the economy will be nothing more than a nice little memory

[imported_Aghast]

Now that im back the economy will be nothing more than a nice little memory

Hail sir! you sure look like someone in need of logs!

[imported_IceCube]

The skills you use as examples take huge amounts of resources. AFK macoing does not affect that in any way. Crafting scrolls doesn't affect that in any way. How are new players going to get anywhere in skill or money. If the means of how and what they can get are taken away? You are back to having an economy like it is now. Need to make a demand for craftables. Make gm weapons just as strong as say power, leather armor work like platemail , allow afk macroing. People need a start somewhere and well they can't get one on here. Galens your suggestion are just going to make it worst in my opinion! I did say in my opinion. Kinda like saying with all do respect.

[imported_Gris]

You can't sell statics? so that really doesnt effect the economy at all?
I really think some of you are going a little overboard thinking the worlds going to end, the skys going to fall on us shit. Most people that i have heard that have left are from lag issues not economy issues.

Like everyones already said over and over just make crafts useful and money easier to come by. Oh and better monster loot so everyones not just hunting dragons.

Oh and most importantly just have fun

[smoke]

Now that im back the economy will be nothing more than a nice little memory

economy means nothing to me you cant pvp you cant macro

[imported_dvlsmnd]

cyclops carry 200 gp :/

[Galens]

Well another perspective then. A lot of people have several complaints on an issue about UO becoming another life if certain things are nerfed and certain rules changed(afk macroing). This, like anyother game, no matter what the case, should not be taken advantage of.

Diablo 2, it is a poorly populated server, the game was good in its day, but they aren't going to give you things, you have to earn them still. They do however have a server for hackers, great idea. Okay, think of the other servers as a place for hackers to go, they get what they want. But when they play the real deal server, they don't get what they want, so they complain to get their way, threatening to leave and take their friends with them. Heh, bye *Waves*. Player Statistics and the economy are not gained by handouts, if that were the case, I could qualify for welfare, food stamps, tanif, etc. But I don't Any game built, must have a serious structure to it for it to succeed. Still don't believe me? Take a look at runescape. They had a massive amount of trouble with afk macroers and they ruined the economy. Well, they couldn't just reset things, but they did however implement tactics to falter afk macroers, which in time, led to a better economy. If you cannot prevent a situation, you take steps to set those "set backs" behind you. One step at a time.


As it currently stands, the major money makers are:

Mining
Blacksmithing
Scribing
Alchemy.

Two resolutions to balance this enough that we won't have continuous complaints from all sides.

Make hunting loot either easier to gain, or more loot dropped.

OR

raise chances of getting iron, making the economy price shoot down, reducing the financial whoring by the crafters.

Aswell as giving colored ingots a better meaning


Crafts must = Hunting Profit or vice versa.


I am sure everyone hates ideas that go against their habbits (afk macroing, transfers of skills and a lump sum of gold based on your item wealth) But I want you to ask yourself. How did every game become successful? Handouts? Or a minimum economy, building upon its own structure, rather than a structure that had no growth leading up to that handout.

Here is a lamens example:

I worked for 70 years of my life and retired.

You only worked 5 years of your life so far.

I ask you for money and pretty things.
You, with the common sense you should be born with, say no.

I ask why?

You say something like "because its mine, "I earned" it.

But I say "Yeah but "I earned" my whole life.

But then you say "Still, its something I earned and I won't just give it away unless you worked for it today, not 70 years ago.


Think.

[imported_Smurtle]

Ehhhhhhh. Everyone should have started with a newbie character. If you need to have your skills transfered to be coaxed to play apparently you've got better things to do.

Earning something on one shard shouldn't transfer over to another shard, but, as well all know, UO players are fickle crybabies and the only way to keep the is to give them something for nothing.

Not a bad craft and monster example Galens, however, I do think some things need some working.

I personally think mining should be harder, since I've already seen multiple suits of Sapphire. We shouldn't even see those suits until..months into the year. Honestly, sapphire ingots should be the reward for winning a tournament. It helps keep them rare and add value, since no one will wear them outside a tourney anyway.