The Economy isn't Broken

[Encyros]

Among the flurry of usual gripes is often the offhanded comment that the economy of this game is 'broken'.

No it isn't.

The fact that a pound in Victorian Britain had the purchasing power of 70-80 GBP today has no bearing on the purchasing power of the average person.

To give some specific in-game examples:

There is a blitzer over in the Market Forums who is successfully taking commissions to roll items at 20m a piece.

Lcory offers a service to roll nano crystals at 10m a piece, which is popular and widely used.

Tradeskillers, even for comparatively easy combinations, are often generously tipped, and in a position to require it.

I sympathise with the argument that there are crooks out there who exploited to gain vast sums and manages to squirrel away their winnings from FC. The permeation of those misbegotten funds are why we are all so rich today.

The fact that we have a large sum of credits is no reason to expect to be able to buy what we could some years ago with it. Because some years ago, the same efforts would not have yielded that many credits to us.

Yes, the bunch of zeroes can be oppressive for a new player. But then all unguided new players will find AO pretty oppressive to get into at the very start compared to most games, and I don't feel it was any better half a decade ago.

At least as it is now, the new player is very quickly freed from the burden of having to consider the cost of store-bought items.

It is a big deal for a newbie to have a yalm. And they'll be able to afford one very quickly now. And perhaps that's a good thing.

There is nothing inherently wrong with GA IV costing two billion credits, as long as people are able to earn that sort of money within a similar timeframe to being able to obtain GA IV some years ago. And we are. So nothing need fixing. Exploiters just need banning.

[McKnuckleSamwich]

You're right.

The economy isn't broken. Just the credit flux is.

[MachSchau]

Anyone got any credits I can have please?

[nat3s]

Yes you can charge more for providing a service now than you could when the game launched but the amount you earn from quest rewards and vendoring items hasn't scaled up as the economy has grown. You need credit generation methods and credit sinks in equal measure to keep credits flowing. The measure of an economy is by throughput.

Notice how you can grow your wealth completing quests or simply vendoring items in games such as WoW, this gives new players ample opportunity to compete and do so playing the game the way they want to. The reason being, there are lots of ways to spend that gold such that the playingfield is kept quite level. Not every new player wants to run 200 mission blitzes @ 10m per nano for 1 piece of combined (or 1400 missions for a full set!). I don't think that makes for compelling gameplay - do you think a lot of new players will continue to subscribe if this is what they are faced with? Won't they just return to WoW which doesn't require players to do such onerous tasks to enjoy the economy? Simply completing daily quests or selling items from instances/trash mobs will allow you to compete just fine in WoW.

The economy is out of control because of Funcom's poor coding (the 5 separate credit exploits over the years) and a lack of creativity/resource to create credit generation methods and credit sinks in equal measure (or a determination to introduce the latter without the former - a misconception that many people fall into when trying to understand how to solve the problem, economics 101).

[Unkfix]

The fact that a pound in Victorian Britain had the purchasing power of 70-80 GBP today has no bearing on the purchasing power of the average person.

Let me explain a few things about the real world for you that you seem to have missed but which are also key differences between the real world economy and AO's economy:
The real world does not have vendors which accept you found on the ground and turn it into gold, I'm sorry to ruin your fantasy here but that just doesn't happen in the real world like it does in AO.
The real world does not have vendors who stand in one place for months on end without resting while they take money from people and mysteriously cause it to vanish while, at the same time, changing that person's skill set to better suit their current needs.
In the real world, the value of any currency depreciates as more of that currency is produced while the physical commodities that are used to back said currency have remained constant for thousands of years and will continue to do so in the foreseeable future. Again, we don't have gold-making machines which generate gold from dirt here in the real world. Sorry to ruin your fantasy, yet again.
In AO's economy there are systems which are designed to prevent the depreciation of currency by both using the backing commodity(credits) directly and by constantly changing the amount of that commodity which is available(through those magic dirt-to-gold machines which we call "shops" or "vendors" in AO). Therefore, if the value of a single credit has changed so drastically that a returning player has less than 1/3 of the purchasing power that their credits had when they left the game 2 years ago then the economy of AO is indeed broken from its original design which was intended to prevent just that.

The fact that we have a large sum of credits is no reason to expect to be able to buy what we could some years ago with it. Because some years ago, the same efforts would not have yielded that many credits to us.

Yes, the bunch of zeroes can be oppressive for a new player. But then all unguided new players will find AO pretty oppressive to get into at the very start compared to most games, and I don't feel it was any better half a decade ago.

At least as it is now, the new player is very quickly freed from the burden of having to consider the cost of store-bought items.

It is a big deal for a newbie to have a yalm. And they'll be able to afford one very quickly now. And perhaps that's a good thing.

New players often rely solely on the income generated from shop vendors to provide for their characters until they reach a level where they can offer desirable services to higher level players in order to gain credits faster. 8 years ago it was entirely reasonable to expect that a level 1 to 150 player could reasonably gear their character, even for competitive PvP, using only the credits that they gained from selling loot to shops. At that time QL300 Combined Sharpshooter's armor sold for roughly 650 million credits, and though it may have taken a few weeks a new player could easily acquire this amount of wealth with even a level 150 character. Now that same armor costs up to 3 times as much and would take as long as a month of farming for even an average player with a single account and only one high level character to be able to gain this single piece of armor.

Before anyone makes any assumptions about me or my reasons for taking the views that i have in regards to the subject of the economy that I claim is broken, understand that I have no need for credits because all of my characters are fully geared and there is nothing that I want for them that I don't already have. I am a part of the group of people who have the least reason to desire a change in AO's economy because said change would likely do more harm to me and most of my friends than it would do us good. Regardless of these facts, I still believe that the economy is indeed broken and needs to be fixed if it is to survive.

-Unk

[Encyros]

Snip

The scaling of quest rewards should be in line with the scaling of vendor items, as indeed they are, in both AO and WoW. In WoW, the acquisition of significant wealth is necessary to buy necessary vendor items. In AO, the acquisition of vendor items is trivial even to the casual player. Hence the fairness, and the gap.

Opining that by increasing quest rewards and shopfood prices will increase purchasing power is economically unhelpful. There is little reason except philanthropy not to demand of players what they can afford to pay. If we are rewarded 40% more for missioning, service providers are well in their rights to charge 40% more for their services.

The supply of combined armour is a service. It is not an avenue closed to anyone. To gain Dustbrigade and OFAB armour, make some friends with similar poor fellows, and pay 300m for a raiding city is not difficult or prohibitive to do in any way.

When we buy CC/CSS, we declare ourselves too lazy to do the farming ourselves, and wish to rely on the services of more dedicated people.

The newbie who needs to be leet can opt for one of the financially cheaper professions, such as Doctors or Nano-technicians which are needed, popular, dependent on skill, and inexpensive to equip completely in endgame gear.

Ending up in a mix of OFAB, Dust-Brigade, and Enhanced Molybdenum Armour as a result of engaging content makes any normally useful profession useful to PVM team members.

Combined is required for many professions to be their best in PVP, and yes, there is an issue there. And it's a bare-faced issue. AO is not a game which enables players to PVP competitively without doing the rest of the content. But that's a good thing for most of us because PVPers help keep the game alive.

[Encyros]

-Unk

"The fact that a pound in Victorian Britain had the purchasing power of 70-80 GBP today has no bearing on the purchasing power of the average person."

This is the point I wished to make, and I believe it to be a valid one.

I'm not going to engage in a defense of any comprehensive analogy of reality with AO as that would be a derailing and not my intent. I'm sorry if it appeared that way. It was simply an explanation that inflation does not necessarily decrease purchasing power, which I tried to illustrate.

New players can very quickly offer services which are deemed valuable to others, to provide for their basic maintenance; their levelling gear, nanos, implants, weapons, into PVM endgame gear. I'm not denying that newbies will find 300 CC/CSS and a whole host of other items unaffordable, at the outset, just that there is no bar to them making their way, in a fairly natural manner, to a position where they can chase this if they want to. We shouldn't discount that Alien Armour is generated by farming.

As for the spelling that just comes down to being British I'm afraid. I hope my OP wasn't littered with typos.

PS: Just as an aside, AO's vendors give you hardly anything for shopfooding stuff to them. In the same way, pawning junk one finds is not a sustainable way of life. Really don't want to go off on that tangent though.

[Animalz]

Let me make a copy-paste machine and make a few kilo's of Anti-Matter. Will not ruin the economy.

[Encyros]

Let me make a copy-paste machine and make a few kilo's of Anti-Matter. Will not ruin the economy.

Well I'm not in the market for instant annihilation explosives...I don't know if that's the sector of the economy you operate in...

[Animalz]

Well I'm not in the market for instant annihilation explosives...I don't know if that's the sector of the economy you operate in...

You get the point.

[nat3s]

Opining that by increasing quest rewards and shopfood prices will increase purchasing power is economically unhelpful.

Not quite what I was advocating. Increasing credit acquisition through means which are not too onerous i.e. enjoyable content for new players whilst, at the same time, introducing credit sinks in equal measure to help reduce the purchasing power people possess, would help rebalance things. Take WoW, notice how a variety of mounts costing as much as 20,000g are available (just one of literally hundreds of credit sinks).

In WoW, the acquisition of significant wealth is necessary to buy necessary vendor items

I was referring to the ability to compete in the player auction house for BoE drops (epics earned by guilds in raid content or crafted - rare items akin to Combined armour). Prices are kept reasonably low and within reach of casuals who complete their daily quests each day due to the sinks. There is no catch up mechanism in AO to work alongside the few sinks, just a stalled economy.

WoW has had much greater scaling of gold generation compared to AO (you can generate gold extremely quickly - generate rather than recirculate) yet there has been no hyperinflation. Gold rewarded from quests has increased 1000% over the years yet prices are still low.

In AO there was a massive influx of creds due to exploits (tends of thousands of trillions of creds) with no sinks to offset this. Scaling this back would be another way to fix it (something I suggested here: http://forums.anarchy-online.com/sho...2&postcount=26).

[Cratertina]

Economy is not broken, it's adjusted to sploited credits.

If anything it makes services pay way more than commodities.

Commodities inflated like 100%, but tradeskill tips I get today are about 500% of what they used to be.

Personaly I like it this way, I provide many services and farm my own gear. As a result of new economy ... credits just pour in to my accounts.


This does lead to a problem, how do you buy piece of CSS when toon limit is 1 billion? All credits can easily be divided by 1000, as can all the prices. Or whatever.

I hear some guy made 2000$ selling AO credits, influxes like that kinda influence economy. But for regular nonexploiting player everything is the same. You make credits two times easier and buy stuff two times harder. A bit sad if you had 50 bil somewhere and now realise they are worth half what they used to be.

Devs should just plug credit exploits and bannhammer cred sellers. Or maybe do some credit selling of their own. Imagine if funcom sold credits for 10€/$ per bil. That'd totaly destroy credit sellers.

[McKnuckleSamwich]

10000$/week. not $2000.

Edit, ya, I agree with your last point George: If FC had a policy to buy/sell credits at a continual discounted service (ie. Sell credits back to FC, buy credits back from FC) then maybe it could work.

I like EVE tho with the Plex service, I think the Plex system eliminates a LOT of the problems. But Eve also doesn't have a still functional that keeps ISK flooding the market anytime there's a hint of deflation.

[Encyros]

Snip

I'd really welcome the appearance of more attractive credit sinks. As a roleplayer who trades I know that several of my friends and I took up the 989m offer to buy an Orbital Apartment/Charon for credits.

VIP Membership to The Grind is nifty too, though perhaps that should be more expensive than the ~10m I remember it costing.

We have a medium option of The Stiletto for about 200m, but that has too high VA requirements. I had to take my toon out of it when I wanted to progress.

Maybe the Clinique Plastique should offer unique faces/tattoos that are not otherwise available, with a correspondingly higher price option; this doesn't seem impossible since new faces were designed for the new engine.

Returning to the broken/combined discussion though I'm not sure it's completely comparable. Ask far as I know, those epics are not the unquestioned 'best in slot' in the same way that CC/CSS and CS is for some slots and some professions in AO.

Without altering the dynamic of how Combined/GA IV/300 HD/AAD is obtained, farmers will want, rightly in my view, to be generously rewarded for doing boring content for profit.

I feel that obtaining 1.5b now is easier than obtaining 650m was back when Combined was that price.

People speak of introducing new armour sets which outclass Combined, but I have no doubt it would make plenty of people angry. FC was careful not to outclass especially valuable yesdrops with the introduction of the Bastion armour - Bastion Shoulder is categorically better than Icy Shoulder, but competes with iGoC for the other endgame slot; the Back offers unique benefits, but items such as Modified Notucomm and SoDN are still best for their respective tasks.

So I don't see, and it probably wouldn't make sense after such a long hiatus, for Combined to be completely replaced. As such, the system is working and relatively fair for the non exploiting majority, even if we all know we are likely playing with some sometime exploited credits.

[Anonimofied]

Only way to fix inflation is by deflations.

[Technorabbit]

Okay, I have a suggestion.

Compress all the credits currently ingame by 90%.


So, 1000m becomes 100m.



Job done. Now everything's 10x cheaper and there's a lot less zeros.

[Encyros]

Compress all the credits currently ingame by 90%.

How would anything be cheaper in real terms as a result?

The real terms cost of NPC services increases by 10x

[Animalz]

How would anything be cheaper in real terms as a result?

The real terms cost of NPC services increases by 10x

You have to think about it in several ways.
Sure.. services and mission rolling might have increased by 200%.
But what about Monster parts>Blood Plasma? the profit which for example froobs rely a little bit on, have decreased by maybe 200% instead.
Sure, you can roll nanos, but what if everyone rolled nanos and did services?
Price would drop, cause people would prefer a cheaper price, from there you are stuck on the same problem again.. not enough profit. The rich will still be rich, while the poor give them what they need.

[Encyros]

You have to think about it in several ways.
Sure.. services and mission rolling might have increased by 200%.
But what about Monster parts>Blood Plasma? the profit which for example froobs rely a little bit on, have decreased by maybe 200% instead.
Sure, you can roll nanos, but what if everyone rolled nanos and did services?
Price would drop, cause people would preffer a cheaper price, from there you are stuck on teh same problem again.. not enough profit. The rich will still be rich, while the poor give them what they need.

Yes the rich will still be rich. As they deserve to be. I've been a fr00b for many years. The idea that serving the rich doesn't enable you to get all the gear you need is a mistaken one. Lcory is trading in Combined.

One serves the rich until one gets the funds needed to merchant. That's how it works in every MMO. At least, in the sector of the economy that is by choice.

I don't believe in knocking down successful traders a few pegs just because they've been cunning. Are you a clanner or something?

I'm only really addressing complaints about the service economy here, not what players need to be well-equipped and able to do content. There's no need to amass any vast sum to be in excellent PVM gear

[Artyomis]

As I've mentioned multiple times - the only way to fix current economy state is to implement periodic tax that will hit every character and GMI bank account and decrease current amount of creds by some %.
For example - it may be 10%.
And theres nothing bad about it. 10% tax monthly is a reasonable amount (100% monthly obtained creds is 3% daily average).

That way players will hold phats for longer to try to "save" creds, while others will try to buy phats faster due to incoming credits loss.

That way players will either be interested to spend creds to gear their toons up as soon as possible, while others will still hold phats.

For a moment of time we'll have a shortage on specific goods, but after that economy will fix itself, as far as overall farming/raiding interest will increase due to shortage on specific items.

Other economy fix method could be making every item nodrop, but that'll ruin tradeskill system, so can't be implemented.