Lol, I won't touch theorycrafting until I can fuck around with a builder. I'm too lazy otherwise.
Crowfall
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Vitality
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Todd on ingame currency (Gold/Gold Coins in inventory space):
by JToddColeman 2 hours ago in forum General Discussion in What Do You Think Of A Consolidated Currency?
yeah, we are trying to find a way to make the in-game currency more "real", and impactful in a Campaign. It takes up space, you have to cart it around (which exposes it to risk), etc.
There is a scene in the HBO series "ROME" where all of the gold (meaning ALL the gold of the city) was piled into a massive cart with a tarp over it. A cart that could be lost, stolen, re-appropriated.... I remember thinking "wow, the implications of having currency as an actual, tangible item are really cool."
That said, pure barter requires a high level of interaction between buyers and sellers for every transaction... which is why coins exist, in the first place.
We're still noodling over this system. I think we've got a good high-level vision for where we want to go, it will just take some work to get there.
Todd
ACE
by JToddColeman 2 hours ago in forum General Discussion in What Do You Think Of A Consolidated Currency?
yeah, we are trying to find a way to make the in-game currency more "real", and impactful in a Campaign. It takes up space, you have to cart it around (which exposes it to risk), etc.
There is a scene in the HBO series "ROME" where all of the gold (meaning ALL the gold of the city) was piled into a massive cart with a tarp over it. A cart that could be lost, stolen, re-appropriated.... I remember thinking "wow, the implications of having currency as an actual, tangible item are really cool."
That said, pure barter requires a high level of interaction between buyers and sellers for every transaction... which is why coins exist, in the first place.
We're still noodling over this system. I think we've got a good high-level vision for where we want to go, it will just take some work to get there.
Todd
ACE
No need to build an entire game when a custom campaign could implement this with a custom ruleset (i.e. "same rules as campaign X but all currency is mined from ore and minted"). One of the things I'm curious to see with Crowfall if they use this idea of short-lived, one-off campaigns to quickly iterate through new ideas and innovate like we haven't seen in games/mmos previously.
Vitality
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Path of Exile already does it, With new 1-3month leagues they implement a new and sometimes extremely overpowered mechanic(or set of mechanics) into the game. They scrap the parts that don't work out and add the parts that do into the core permanent leagues.
It's one of the main attributing factors to their success.
Tuco
I got Tuco'd!
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Metalurgist Arthritis Perk:
Have to click all your abilities because can't bind keys to your hotbars
10% more coins from smelting gold/silver.
Byr
Ahn'Qiraj Raider
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Grim1
Ahn'Qiraj Raider
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EQ1's early bosses were basically loot pinata's for end game guilds. Easy kills, if you took them out first. The fun was racing to them when they popped and taking out other guilds with trains etc.. Had quite a few run in's with GM's before they changed the rules and ruined the fun.
Scouting for bosses, spys in other guilds (and ours), getting the call and racing to the prize. Training whole zones on to a enemy guild's raid. Defeating said hated enemy as they wipe. And oh, by the way, that mob Itchybum was tanking died while we were preoccupied, and it dropped some killer loot.
It's a fun mechanic. Adding PvP makes it better. Doesn't need to be complicated to be fun. For CF, it would be an interesting change of pace if occasionally there were a race to a loot pinata somewhere. Don't want to see the game centered on that mechanic though.
A completely fleshed out economy from scratch would be, well, awesome. Everything from bartering to markets with currency fluctuations. Icing on the cake of a great core game, and something for which various apps would be helpful and allow for another level of gaming away from the game.
Also, crafting (even simple aspects) when you're mobile and guild/group chat on the go, please.
Ukerric
Bearded Ape
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Developper-created currencies always suffer from a massive problem: they model their currencies from real-world money, then find out that real money does not work well in a small-scale economic simulations. Too simplistic, and stuff doesn't work, too realistic, and the best way to get rich would be to strike rich, then invest and relax (instead of playing).
The interesting part when you explicitely do NOT create a player currency is that you start with barter, and the player economy quickly settles on using a "main good" as a currency proxy. The main good is whatever is simultaneously difficult (but not too much) to get, and useful for almost everyone: i.e. one that has a good balance of faucets and sinks. You don't have to painfully balance your sinks and faucets: the player economy will find out which one works.
You still need to be careful about your goods balance, but you don't need to balance that ONE good. The players will find out which one you balanced well.
I'm going to take The Settlers Online as an example. In TSO, you have a barter market: you can sell anything and ask for anything in exchange. Which means your market sees a lot of barter offers (my marble for your bronze swords). There's a gold coin, and it has a good popularity because people expect it to be "the currency", but the real currency in-game is the Granite bloc. Granite is required in quantities to upgrade to high levels your buildings. Low-level players can get small quantities of it, but have little immediate need for it because they haven't upgraded their economy enough to start needing it, high level players get more, but have lots of buildings that can be improved.
For a time, a new resource looked like it might upset the market (the magic bean), but while it has traction, it lacks the standing power of Granite because only the high level players can get it (you need level 48 to enter hard adventures that reward it), and the uses for it are relatively few. It works due to rarity, but fails as a main currency: most trades are granite-oriented.
Note that you need to design your game to work for that. Your goods must be heavily divisible, or barter does not work well. If you have large blocks (something Crowfall seems to be leaning toward), you have difficulty using it as barter, plus it's very difficult to tax. However, if it's heavily divisible, you lose the caravan aspect: people can stuff their pockets and make multiple low-risk/low-reward trips instead of putting all their baskets into a high-risk/high-reward caravan escort, and most people are risk averse.
Harfle
Lord Nagafen Raider
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Vitality
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Yeah if PoE had npc vendors in the hideout people could buy from. Trading in PoE currently requires quite a bit of setup to make small gains.
Tuco
I got Tuco'd!
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For those who haven't played it, PoE used a resource-barter type of system. There's a handful of materials which are used to randomly upgrade your gear/character as well as randomly create portal scrolls called 'maps' that spawn resource-rich and difficult areas that are the end-game.
The economy is an interesting and unique one, but I think it's an abomination and is the reason I quit the game as soon as I got to the end game. Because there's no way to trade goods (no auction house or NPC traders) you spend literally half your time either selling off your loot for resources and buying loot with resources. This isn't truly because the resource system is so confusing, but it does obfuscate it as the price of everything moves constantly.
If you want to get anywhere you either need to team up with someone who doesn't mind doing all the work creating maps, or you have to spend an immense amount of time accessing player-trading websites and meeting with people. I'm sure if you play a ton you start to get to know everyone in the community but once I got a taste of it and found out they had zero plans to improve it I gave away all my stuff and quit.
I think CF can make the economy just as integral to the game but focused more on the transfer of goods rather than the finding of it. I can imagine a city being co-located with a bunch of max-tier trees and have some kind of ownership of those trees. The players or hired NPCs chop the trees and move the trees in the city (under the threat of being PK'd). Once they're in the city they're converted into max-tier lumber by crafters. Then NPC merchants will sell the lumber. Players who want to build a max-tier lodge 5 miles away will have to buy the lumber, then form a huge caravan to march the lumber back to their build-site. This creates a system where resources have a huge impact in the game, players can control these resources, other players can trade for it, moving it across the world is difficult and the entire system involves PvP.
The economy is an interesting and unique one, but I think it's an abomination and is the reason I quit the game as soon as I got to the end game. Because there's no way to trade goods (no auction house or NPC traders) you spend literally half your time either selling off your loot for resources and buying loot with resources. This isn't truly because the resource system is so confusing, but it does obfuscate it as the price of everything moves constantly.
If you want to get anywhere you either need to team up with someone who doesn't mind doing all the work creating maps, or you have to spend an immense amount of time accessing player-trading websites and meeting with people. I'm sure if you play a ton you start to get to know everyone in the community but once I got a taste of it and found out they had zero plans to improve it I gave away all my stuff and quit.
I think CF can make the economy just as integral to the game but focused more on the transfer of goods rather than the finding of it. I can imagine a city being co-located with a bunch of max-tier trees and have some kind of ownership of those trees. The players or hired NPCs chop the trees and move the trees in the city (under the threat of being PK'd). Once they're in the city they're converted into max-tier lumber by crafters. Then NPC merchants will sell the lumber. Players who want to build a max-tier lodge 5 miles away will have to buy the lumber, then form a huge caravan to march the lumber back to their build-site. This creates a system where resources have a huge impact in the game, players can control these resources, other players can trade for it, moving it across the world is difficult and the entire system involves PvP.
Vitality
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Right Tuco, and the setup time I'm referring to is a third party stash scanner that posts items on the forum and subsequently gets datamined on poe.trade. Then you're supposed to refresh the post and wait for people to send you tells for trades.
Usually you can forget about bartering for anything after the first month of a new campaign in PoE. Just not enough people driving to the trade site looking for upgrades.
Vendors are going to go a long way for Crowfall in this category. Hopefully a vendor search function accompanies it.
I wonder what will be the go to "Chaos Orb" in CF..
Usually you can forget about bartering for anything after the first month of a new campaign in PoE. Just not enough people driving to the trade site looking for upgrades.
Vendors are going to go a long way for Crowfall in this category. Hopefully a vendor search function accompanies it.
I wonder what will be the go to "Chaos Orb" in CF..
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Vitality
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I'm thinking it will be something like Minecraft Diamonds. Probably a mix between the upper tier ores. (If they don't have gold coin crafting)
Now that I think about it. I think the ores and stuff are better than craftable coins in this model.
What's the point of converting an ingot into a coin if you could just trade the ingot?
Standardized Vendor acceptable currency? Might be awkward to go into a vendor hub and see that someone wants pelts for iron the other guy wants stone for pelts etc.
There's also the weight factor of ore too, perhaps coins are a way of converting it to a lighter version. Will be interesting to see how it plays out.
Now that I think about it. I think the ores and stuff are better than craftable coins in this model.
What's the point of converting an ingot into a coin if you could just trade the ingot?
Standardized Vendor acceptable currency? Might be awkward to go into a vendor hub and see that someone wants pelts for iron the other guy wants stone for pelts etc.
There's also the weight factor of ore too, perhaps coins are a way of converting it to a lighter version. Will be interesting to see how it plays out.
Harfle
Lord Nagafen Raider
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Ore will probably be the currency once players find out what is used in most everything that isnt so easy to find but isnt to rare they will designate that.
They will probably have some sort of ticket system where when you get the trade bazaar you have a ticket for 1 bronze bar or some shit and can barter with that with the dude with 1 bear ass.
Path of Exile has been developing their own sort of merchant system (to address tuco's comments on why he quit PoE).
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