Slaariel
*The Only Real Life Girl Dev*
I really dislike the state of the player economy as it sits right now!
I do not like the list system for selling (i do like it for sending stuff between people though) and I do not like the whole change that went in about 5 years ago that introduced BoE and Unbinders and Huge Vendor Price Floors to the economy.
Here are my issues with this:
-If the vendor price floor for an item is too high, no one will ever sell it to a player. There are plenty of examples for this where an item is pretty good but sells to vendor for 2k so you can't sell it for under 2k or you are literally losing money so you just vendor it. No player economy.
-BoE is good! It lowers effective supply of either plat or items. HOWEVER, a fresh loot is always better and over time the number of times an item will drop tends toward infinity. There is rarely a great reason to use unbinders these days outside of just being a little lazy. And again, since the cost to unbind is the same artificially high vendor price this is not good for the economy.
-The entire BoE / High Price Floor / Unbinders scheme was concocted to combat a perceive loot surplus where item prices were bottoming out. The CORRECT solution to this was to ONLY implement BoE like every other game. What we got instead was trading a loot surplus for a previously unimaginable platinum surplus. Oh, also very small player economy.
Those 3 points can I guess be summed up with if you want to control the economy like this, you can't fire and forget. It takes constant supervision and adjustment and tools/tech/attention that we just don't have. Whatever the problem with player economy was before, we have equalled or surpassed it.
More issues: We have to make a rule right now that says you CAN'T store and manually search our vendor lists because it defeats the idea of 'shopping around'. And we are told that a searchable item selling system would encourage and reward 'undercutting'. I feel like these are both invented problems. If an item sells to the vendor for 1 copper you can sell it to someone for more than that and make a profit or you can destroy it. With STRAIGHT BoE and no unbinding the item surplus is shored up. The plat surplus shores up from un-inflating the high vendor prices (AND THEY ARE, RIGHT NOW, SEVERELY AND ARTIFICIALLY INFLATED).
To that end, I propose three things and this is what we are discussing here:
1- Remove artificial price floors on items
2- Re-institute the classic Bazaar-style shopping mall
3- Remove or re-do unbinding as a whole
Unbinding was implemented as a way to 'soften the blow' incurred during the shift from non-BoE to BoE economy. That blow has certainly been softened by now and the whole enterprise is just causing problems. Okay, take it away!
I do not like the list system for selling (i do like it for sending stuff between people though) and I do not like the whole change that went in about 5 years ago that introduced BoE and Unbinders and Huge Vendor Price Floors to the economy.
Here are my issues with this:
-If the vendor price floor for an item is too high, no one will ever sell it to a player. There are plenty of examples for this where an item is pretty good but sells to vendor for 2k so you can't sell it for under 2k or you are literally losing money so you just vendor it. No player economy.
-BoE is good! It lowers effective supply of either plat or items. HOWEVER, a fresh loot is always better and over time the number of times an item will drop tends toward infinity. There is rarely a great reason to use unbinders these days outside of just being a little lazy. And again, since the cost to unbind is the same artificially high vendor price this is not good for the economy.
-The entire BoE / High Price Floor / Unbinders scheme was concocted to combat a perceive loot surplus where item prices were bottoming out. The CORRECT solution to this was to ONLY implement BoE like every other game. What we got instead was trading a loot surplus for a previously unimaginable platinum surplus. Oh, also very small player economy.
Those 3 points can I guess be summed up with if you want to control the economy like this, you can't fire and forget. It takes constant supervision and adjustment and tools/tech/attention that we just don't have. Whatever the problem with player economy was before, we have equalled or surpassed it.
More issues: We have to make a rule right now that says you CAN'T store and manually search our vendor lists because it defeats the idea of 'shopping around'. And we are told that a searchable item selling system would encourage and reward 'undercutting'. I feel like these are both invented problems. If an item sells to the vendor for 1 copper you can sell it to someone for more than that and make a profit or you can destroy it. With STRAIGHT BoE and no unbinding the item surplus is shored up. The plat surplus shores up from un-inflating the high vendor prices (AND THEY ARE, RIGHT NOW, SEVERELY AND ARTIFICIALLY INFLATED).
To that end, I propose three things and this is what we are discussing here:
1- Remove artificial price floors on items
2- Re-institute the classic Bazaar-style shopping mall
3- Remove or re-do unbinding as a whole
Unbinding was implemented as a way to 'soften the blow' incurred during the shift from non-BoE to BoE economy. That blow has certainly been softened by now and the whole enterprise is just causing problems. Okay, take it away!