[imported_Nalo]

There are two things that I think are the main base for the economy for IN, UO, and even in real life. It is very important to know and keep in mind that these two aspects of income.
Hunting and Resource Gathering are the only sources of pure income that is generally 100% profit. In primitive times and ways of life, you only have those two base sources as well that are so purely income. Hunting provided for mainly food and clothing, and resource gathering provided for shelter, warmth, and tools.

In the world of UO and even in modern times, it's the same basic way, but more complicated and/or it's a different scenario. In UO you have hunting [for gold] and resource gathering [for armor, weapons, etc.].
Hunting is the only way to get straight gold other than selling your items from resource gathering.

So what does this mean? It means that when an economy has a big flaw or flaws, it typically resides in these two categories [if the entire economy is flawed, or a large portion, and not just certain aspects, which I don't think IN's is].

So then where and/or how is it flawed?
Well I think that there are very simple things that can be added that can "fix" or help it out. People have been way too dramatic about the whole thing IMO, and these OMGhuge changes are just going to make it too complicated, and maybe damage the economy, and if not that, then the server, whether it's through the population or something else.

A few suggestions I will cover include (among other things):

--Small tweaks to PvP which relates to items (weapons and armor).
--A lot of what I cover correlates to and effects that of Crafting Skills including, among other things, the need and usage of various skills.
--AFK Macroing and what impact it makes.
--A way to make armor much more useful in PvP and PvM
--A way to make tailoring much more useful
--Methods of making crafting and decoration much more useful and effective in the economy and how these methods add a lot to the server in general
--What not to increase or decrease when it comes to skill gain, among other things
--How to make Fishing more useful
--What can make hunting more useful
--General things on combat skills

Another important thing to keep in mind, like where the base of income starts, is that there are various levels of building income within an economy:
The first level would be a brand-spanking *spanks* new player that is brining in very little, if any, money or items for a few weeks - how much of whatever is needed being taken in; and is it a good ratio to whatever is needed? Meaning, if you need gold to survive, and you aren't getting enough at stage one, you have a huge problem because it's stage one that you can't conquer effectively, or it's stage one that you can't haven't made conquerable, therefore you have people leaving or not wanting to join.
The final [not the second] level of income would be a high and steady income, but what would you use it on?
PvP and decoration of course!

The final aspect that I think everyone should keep in mind [and this applies to real life as well as the game], is that [SIZE="4"]People_Love_Crap[/SIZE].
People love it! They love to crap out their crap [pimp their crap], and buy more and more crap. If you have crap for the rich to buy, that the rich like, you have the rich stimulating the less wealthy [the ones who make all the crap]. So you have the rich throwing money at the 'less wealthly', who, in time, will become the rich, and everyone that specializes in different things can make crap that relates to that specialty for other people that in turn make crap for them, so people aren't bored, and the economy is stimulated.
I cover one of the main crap-related-economy-stimulating aspects of shards further down, which is not PvP, and PvP is a big one, because you have Steeds [which are lost often, and thus bought often, and thus money and items are circulated for them], and you have weapons and armor, potions, scrolls, ammo, etc. which are lost and thus created and bought often and etc. etc.

Anyway, I'll stop blabbing and let you get to the main part:

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. IN1 did NOT have afk macroing, and thus the market stayed continuously fresh and stable.

By comparing yourself running a company with constantly running robots to that of endless AFK macroing [a good analogy on the surface], you would then be saying that everyone has robots working endlessly, not just you, because in the world of a game, if you can have it, everyone else can have it pretty easily, especially when it's something as simple as AFK resource gathering. I AFK macroed all the time on IN1, but not when it came to resource gathering [simply because I didn't know how to then because I was 12].
If everyone was bringing in more resources because of AFK Resource Gathering, you would have people creating, selling and owning more and more weapons and armor [funny how the only thing that resource gathering actually provides on the surface is simply armor and weapons, because the only types of resource gathering there are are mining, lumberjacking, fishing, and wool/cotton gathering, and fishing and wool/cotton gathering aren't effective at all because fishing doesn't give anything [as far as i know], and cotton/wool gathering is too slow to be a huge source of income], which only stimulates the use of weapons and armor because it is more available, and thus more PvP and hunting which causes a greater demand for scrolls, potions, reagents, bandages, etc.

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.

I agree with this, my suggestion it to make armor magic resistant, and make it parallel armor rating. Your armor rating should be a percentage of reduced spell damage, for example:

If you have 1-4 AR, none is reduced.
5-14 AR should take away 1 point of damage
15-24 should take two
etc.

Basically you just round to the 10s [5-9 rounds up, 11-14 rounds down, etc.] and make that proportional to 1 point of damage reduction for every 10 armor. So if you have full sapphire with a heater of invul [gives about 13 AR I think, I know a kite gives 12], you get 7 points damage reduced from damaging spells because sapphire is 53, plus the heater [66].

This example would hardly effect PVP [not many people would be willing to wear armor still], so I suggest making it in 2s [every 10 points gives two damage reduced, therefore sapph w/heater would give 14 reduced].
OR possibly even 3s, but we should test both of course in actualy battle to see how they effect PvP at every angle [with healing and weapon usage, and of course spells].

This type of armor protection would greatly increase the need for armor and weapons.

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.

My suggestion for tailoring isn't to make it harder or to jack vendor buy prices up so that people will but from people. Like some people [including myself] have said before, implement higher sell prices at higher skill [maybe 1 or 2 GP above the no gain/no loss line for GM people, meaning, the "no gain/no loss" line is where everyone sits right now: if you buy something, you can re-sell it or craft something and re-sell it for exactly the same amount, so there is no gain/no loss, and GM skilled people should gain maybe 1 or 2 GP over so that they can get some money from it, but should somehow not be able to farm from vendors and then re-sell it right there for profit] so that people with the GM skill can get some type of useful income from that skill.
My second suggestion for tailoring is, like others have said, items with recipes, only mine are a little different. I say add clothing items [and leather armor of course, but others have said this [elven and daemon-skin armors]] that add a small amount of combat skills to your current skill amount, like accurate weapons and the elven bow. Make this effective on maybe robes, cloaks, hats, and shoes or something where you can craft a certain piece of clothing [with the right recipe, whatever that may be] that adds maybe 2-5 to a certain combatant. However, I say do NOT add clothing that adds to other skills, unless its MResist or Meditation because I have played on servers where you can get clothing that adds to crafting skills, and that just gets way too complicated. Just a simple add that would make tailoring more useful. A good recipe might be Cloth, a certain amount of jewels, and the cloak from a dread lord captain to make a cloak that adds like 5 to swords and tactics or something. And maybe the bow from an Eithka Ulesra, some Arrows, Jewels, and Cloth of course to make some article that gives an add to archery. The same could be applied to leather armor.

(Continued down)

[imported_Nalo]

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.

Also a big part of decoration, the economy, showing off, and for some, pure fun, is Custom Housing! Many RUO servers have it, and it's huge on basically all of them. For the final stage for some people in their income [where they have a shit-ton of money and income and nothing to spend on], this is a huge way to stimulate the economy. As far as I can remember, on one of the INs [or maybe it was another server], you had to have GM carpentry to make housing pieces. So I say make it to where GM Carpenters on here can make these pieces, but have to have certain items of course, like Ores, Logs, etc. This way, Miners, Lumberjacks, and Carpenters alike would benefit. When a Carpenter makes a "piece" for the house, its like a Non-newbied certificate that enables a person to add a piece to their house of whatever kind of tile or wall or whatever, and if you mess up, you can remove the piece for the certificate/s, just like selling a house too. Vendors would not be able to buy or sell these, so it would be player-stimulated only. So basically you have these rich people stimulating the income of the carpenters, miners, and lumberjacks; You have diversity in server decoration, you have less boredom later in the shards life, and economic stimulation.

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.

I think it's safe to say that all this would do is become an annoyance. The only thing that is changing is that everything is going UP, meaning that when weight goes up, you have to make strength go up by using polymorph every minutes, which makes you lose regs, which makes you lose money because you can only buy regs from vendors, or kill ice elves for a few hours, which causes a fault in income and thus the economy. Of course, you don't HAVE to cast polymorph, and you just have to bank more often, which takes up a little time, which is simply another annoyance that really doesn't stimulate or hurt the economy in a huge way, it just annoys people. I hope you don't think I'm trying to flame or anything :o , I'm just bringing up the faults.

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)

By your calculations, it would take 12.5 days of straight mining to get one set of sapphire armor. And for any normal person, it would take around 10 months. What's wrong with this? Keep it as is I say
I see your point, but making rare ores more rare would only slow down the income of miners and make them bored.

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

Fishing is a tough subject because it's hard to make it useful. I say add certain types of scales you can fish up that are relevant to the recipes I was talking about earlier with tailoring, and other recipes. For example, you could fish up serpent scales, fish scales, mermaid scales, or more [I can't really think of more myself]. You could also add in jewel loot in fishes, like you cut a fish and you might get jewels or something. And, like on most RUO shards, you could add damaged or "shipwrecked" items, like furniture, pictures, boxes with some items, etc. You could also add the ability to fish out some treasure chests with good loot at GM or something.

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.

I really like this idea and I think that it would help newbies income out a lot if you had more than just 50 gold on "level 2-3" monsters that newbies would typically kill after they get past the mongbats and headlesses.

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.

This would hugely damage the economy. Hunting is the only source of purely profitable income other than resource gathering. If you made the loot smaller, people would just be less and less willing to spend/sell. There isn't much wrong with the higher level monsters loot, but the lower levels drop too little IMO. Also, you just stated that "level 10" monsters should 10-15k no?
Not everyone can hunt dusk til dawn [10 or so hours for me] and make 90-100k a day; I can only hunt about 1-2 hours a day [10k usually], so I think it should actually be raised according to level or stats like your first suggestion.

Mace Fighting
Is useless

Macing is just as useful as swords, and just as damaging. I have tested quite a few Forces/Powers versus Swords weapons, and they are basically parallel in damage. People just think that the skill/weapons are not useful because people always do Swordsmanship first, and therefore only need swords to use swords, and they don't have to use macing weapons, therefore they don't train Mace Fighting because it's simply a waste of time, but it does come in handy when you are out of bladed weapons. I think the reason people always stick to swords in the first place it because it's the "coolest" or the most common skill in movies and in other games that people always seem to like, so people just instinctively start off on it straight away.

Archery.
Need I say anymore other than its uber strong?

I think that if anyone got shot with an arrow in the chest going 150 MPH it would phark them up too Which is why I have my next suggestion:
Make naked people a bit more vulnerable that ones with armor, like if a naked person just runs out and gets shot with an arrow, it should do twice as much as when you have armor, this would stimulate armor usage and thus armor/ingot trading and selling.
The same goes for other weapons, not just bows.

Tactics
Tactics should be about as hard as mining currently is to Grandmaster

I actually think that it is, because I fight with weapons [whether it's hunting or pvp] all the time and I've only gained about 3.0 total from 80 since starting.

I agree with most of his section on special weapons. We should have a good bit of them that are pretty hard to craft, but are not OMFG extremely hard to craft. And there should be different levels of weapons for lower level players, like the Silver Bane or w/e that silver longsword was; it didn't do great damage [about as much as a force], and it was medium in difficulty to craft [only required GM smithy I believe].

Vendors should ALWAYS sell their items for more than you can sell them back, this way players can sell their items [like arrows] for the same amount or 1 gp less per than that of a vendor so that they can make money.

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.

Another reason I said add the magic-resisting abilities in armor (though you said something about MRing armor too)

Provoking should NOT allow monsters to fight to the death, even when Gmed, it should just have a longer lasting effect than normal.

I agree that Provoking is strong, but I can't kill monsters effectively otherwise. Without provocation, I would use Peacemaking, and when I had to use that [I GMd it first], it would take me forever just to kill a few guys because weapons are pretty crappy. Speaking of weapons, I think that two-hand weapons should be a bit faster. I can't get one hit off in PvP without being FS'd five times, and definitely not before having to heal. Even during PvM, I usually have to heal before getting a hit off, which it why I use Peacing/Provoking, and also why I stick to bows.

[Galens]

Nalo, I have absolutely no problem with your posts. It is almost way to much for me to bear at this moment. I will post on your quotes in a couple days maybe HAHA. Good work, its makes me want to explode knowing that someone intelligent other than tabion exists to discuss such complicated situations. Kudos to you dude.


My reply will come soon.

Thanks.

[social_fuzz]

Anything being considered or taken on board GM's? Interested to see what the GM's think and like/do not like in these suggestions.

[imported_Taran]

We already want to implement some changes (some that have been posted here), but at the moment we don't have someone that knows enough scripting to do that.
When maka gets back he might be able to do something about it though.
And I'm also speaking to someone that might be able to help out as well.