The Shard Economy

[Abraxus]

First off, I'm pretty new to the shard. I'm loving it so far and much kudos to the development team (Konstantine & Co.).

I'm starting to become attached to the shard and naturally, the well-being of the shard is becoming a concern for me. The world economy of UO is one of the things that keeps me coming back to this game - an economy that is vibrant and balanced will do the shard well in attracting and retaining a large player base. This brings me to my points.

The inflation of the value of gold.
I'm not sure how it came to be that items on auction and vendors came to such high numerical values. All I know is that if left unchecked, the economy will spiral out of control to a point where it will be very hard to perform market correction. How is the gold-currently-being-circulated being generated? Is there a check on the inflow of this gold? How about sinks? Are there sufficient channels of outflow for the gold, especially at the level of the established players?

A runaway gold economy would be bad for the economic stability of the shard, which detracts from the player experience for all. Especially painful for the shard is that it hurts the new players the most, since they cannot keep up with the large costs of items sold in vendors. If we endeavour to make the economy stable for new and medium players, we ensure that the shard will keep growing with new blood.

The player-vendor economy.
A key aspect of the world economy is the player-vendor system. If the Player Mall under the Pandora category of moongate is meant to be the main Player Mall, then it's a sad story indeed. The vendors hardly ever update and there are too many empty vendors left standing around. This makes shopping a tedious affair.

I understand that Luna is the place to be for well-stocked player vendors and is the current go-to location for shopping. If the location designed to be The Player Mall is not functioning as the go-to place for player-vendor shopping, then how about we clean it out and pack it up?

I shall leave this post to just these two points for now. I hope for some quality discussion by players who enjoy the finer aspects of the game.

[Cerone]

Well said. I agree with this completely.

[Abraxus]

Since I don't like to just highlight problems without suggesting solutions, here are some solutions addressing the player-vendor situation.

Inactive Vendors
The current player-vendor environment will receive an immediate boost in user-friendliness if the system clamped down hard on inactive vendors. Simply removing these inactive vendors will tremendously improve the shopping experience.

On top of charging players a fee for maintaining a vendor, we can make vendors auto-expire if they satisfy some criteria e.g. not making a sale in 72 hours. The maintenance fee alone doesn't hurt the player with a huge pile of money in the bank. An auto-expire criterion will force players to make their vendor an active one.

Indexing Vendors
Currently, player-vendors are located inside the houses of players. Since houses can be placed everywhere in Trammel and Felucca that's out of guarded areas, it can easily be that player-vendors are located all over the world. While this can create a nightmare for the bargain-hunter shopper, being able to erect a house anywhere in the game world is a charming effect of the game that should be preserved.

To circumvent this problem, I have an idea. Each player vendor comes with a recall rune. This recall rune is added to a billboard that is accessible via a billboard object available at all major banks. When a player sets up a vendor, the rune is updated with the vendor's location. When the player submits the rune to the billboard system, he can add a small caption of not more than 20 characters describing the theme of the vendor.

Shoppers need only to access this billboard and recall to the location to check out that vendor's wares. And when the vendor auto-expires, so too will its rune entry in the billboard system. This keeps the billboard clean of inactive vendors.

If providing a recall rune to simply recall to is making it too easy for the player, perhaps we can make it so that the shopper clicks the button on the billboard corresponding to that vendor and an in-game map pops up showing the general locale of the part of the world the vendor is located. The player then has to hoof it there on his own. What this achieves is that the more accessible places (via the already too-accessible moongate system) will have a naturally more desirable location for business since through-traffic is higher, creating a market for selling business hotspots. Imagine that! A bustling real-estate trading environment in the game.

[Abraxus]

Thanks for the support, Cerone.  

Note that most of my ideas come from my experience from playing a free shard about 9-10 years ago. That shard had a very vibrant economy which I always assumed to be the case for all UO shards (since it was the only one I ever really played). I was a little dismayed that this great shard I found on my return to UO had an unkempt economy balance system. This is my effort at being part of the solution rather than sitting back and letting it be.

Inscription
Back in that old shard I played, full Magery spellbooks actually had value. Runebooks were considered medium luxury items. "Medium luxury" is defined as an item that new players had to save up money for and yet not be so expensive as to cost as much as a house.

In this shard, both Magery spellbooks and Runebooks are given to each character upon starting. This hurts the market for these items. As a new player, why bother paying for any amount of money for a runebook when I can have 3 accounts worth of new characters to create just for their free runebook.

Just for a reference, it used to cost 5,000-7,000 for a full Magery spellbook and about 10,000-15,000 for a Runebook back in the old shard I played. Spells can only be found up till Circle 5 from the NPCs, at which point the player had to hunt for the rest or buy a full book from a player vendor.

Gold Inflow via Voting Stones
Each player (checks IP address) is allowed to claim 2,500 gold just by double-clicking a stone in Insula. This can be done every 12 hours for 3 stones and every 24 hours for 2 stones. That's 20,000 per 24 hours, just for double-clicking stones. In mitigation, this is to encourage players to vote for the shard in 5 shard-ranking websites - which, in turn, increases popularity of the shard and gets more new blood into the server. I see the value in this. But I also see no better way to encourage players to vote, so no ideas here...

Gold Inflow via Donation System
The donation system also has 1,000,000 gold for USD$15. I'm not sure of exactly how much hits this particular donation reward has gotten and how much it has affected current gold being circulated, but I feel there has to be a better way to raise funds for the server than simply selling gold. Shrouds, sure. Cool-looking mounts, whatever floats your boat mate. But being able to create in-game gold out of thin air unbalances the economy by cheapening the value of gold in circulation i.e. inflation.

I completely understand, even agree, that funds need to be generated for the running of the shard. But there is wisdom in abstaining from measures that ruin the balance of economy of the game.

Gold Inflow via AFK Macroing
I have a script that allows me to mine ore indefinitely. It's completely self-sustaining - it mines, it smelts, it stores the ores. It even makes the tinker's tools and shovels needed. Like I said, it can run indefinitely. When I first made it, I was so thoroughly thrilled. I thought wow, the world of untold riches await. That's when I got to thinking that combined with the shard's 3-account rule, I can have 3 exact same setups gathering me ingots at breakneck speed all round the clock, even as I sleep and go to work.

But seriously now, does this NOT strike anyone as being completely broken? I myself haven't done it yet to its full potential and I can already see that it's going to ruin all the fun for me.

The solution here is not to impose policing for AFK macroing of resources. That requires active effort by the GMs. Minimize (or negate) the amount of gold profit from selling to NPCs such that it becomes less desirable to AFK-macro gold-making processes. This forces players to sell their resources and/or craftables to the player economy rather than to NPCs. No longer will people be spamming platemail gorgets out of those hundreds of thousands of ingots to sell to NPCs to create gold.

[Nikodemsky]

Vendor economy in Luna - see classic idocs solution in:

Code Select Expand

http://www.pandorauo.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=1440
about player mall - it's hard case... from what i know having vendor there is kind expensive, so only few ppl have vendors them and not very much of that ppl updating gear for sell in em, anyway most of items there are for old prices and there are too overpriced so u can see PS's for x3 price etc.

for me? just set small week fee for vendors in player mall and make it semi-auto system so everyone will be welcome there as sellers

Inscription - Full spellbooks is rare addone for our shard and it's cool, Runebooks are still good selling for all kind of prices from what i know, u still can sell SW or Misticism spells :>

Gold from donate - playing hear for more than two months and didn't here that anyone ever take that 1m for so much money and im sure even now no one will spend real money for 1mio, it's only addone and it don't rly ruin economy here, remember that pandora have few months and ppl already have money here.

Afk Macroing - AFK reasource gathering is illegal but still ppl mostly selling res. in bulks, not much of em doing that kind of tricks, so i see no problem here

anyway we still have much bugs in pandora and i think it's PRIORITY, but economy is important thing also

[Kontact]

i suppose i agree in that gold is a bit rediculous here, u think the voting stones are bad? naw i reckon they bring more benifit than good as the incentive keeps pandora up there on the rankings. i think the gold problem comes from the champs, i can solo a champ in 10 minutes or less and do about 6 or so in a hour for just under a mil and a couple 120s. if i have no IRL commitments i could do more than 30 champs in a day for about 5mil and a handful of 120s lol. there is a much larger gold source than probably any other on the shard. the afk mining can generate me a substantial amount of money also i got only two miners set up which can generate me a solid 3mil a night afk while i sleep. but i personally am at a point where the gold isnt worth the effort of me logging them in lol. so in that respect i agree that gold is something that should be looked at.

my proposed solutions would be to, drop the price at which npc's buy resources and/or reduce the amount of gold a champ drops.

as for the vendor based economy though, prices are a function of supply and demand, if you see something you like but dont want/cant pay the price, dont buy it. if it is rediculously priced the seller will be forced by economic pressure to drop it (in theory) lol or save more for it, or acquire the item yourself just as they did.

not to have an intentional rant,... but if i had a dollar for every 'poor me im new' thread ive ever read id be a rich man. new players to UO need to realize that they cant expect to be the rich vets they see around in a week, that sh!t takes alot of time and effort to build and develop a character.

the other thing is also, the rich vets who tend to dominate various servers typically do so for a few reasons, first they usually have 10x the game experience and knowledge than do the majority and so know the most effective and efficient ways to acquire wealth, second they probably spend 10x the amount of time actually playing it than do the majority also. I for one have logged in every day for 4 months. lol. so unless u do the same u cant expect to be on the same level.

[Domos]

I PMd Konstantine about the gold problem over a month ago when 4 people in a row didnt want gold for the items they were selling, they only wanted to trade and/or pcoins. At that point it was clear to me that they had gold stockpiled and nothing to buy with it. Now, most of the good high value items will be attained and sold by the vets, newer players are most likely to buy those items. Problem comes when the people getting the arties dont have a motivation to sell them because gold isnt worth much. To top that off, with imbuing system, many of those items are worth more as a relic fragment then gold. I proposed something like a gold donation room where you could spend your gold for arties/deco/whatever, hugely overpriced but cool and rare items. This would drain some of the gold stockpiles out of the economy and increase its overall value. Its the best I could come up with.

[Minogue]

2 things:

First..I was under the impression it was illegal to afk mine.  The rules state you can't afk macro to gain gold.  Well, although you are gaining metal, you are selling it..gaining gold.  I've never been part of a shard that afk resource gathering was allowed.  I think we need clarification on that.

2nd thing.  I think as far as a gold sink..I was part of another shard that in addition to the donation and coin room, there was other big things you could buy with gold to eat up some of the gold in the area...rares, decorations, etherals, statues, heck you could even buy specific bod's you were missing.

I think it could be a good idea to have a big mall where players with excess money could buy things and get rid of some of the excess gold.

[Sticky]

For the afk mining, konst has addressed this issue before, it is ok to afk macro

[Xeen]

Good insight, guys.  Will look into this for future updates.

Xeen [Developer]

[Abraxus]

Hello Xeen, thanks for dropping by.

About the vendor situation, have you considered implementing a sort of vendor directory system? I actually had the idea of the billboard thing (read above). But then I was browsing around for other popular shards and stumbled on ABC UO. They have a similar vendor directory system which pretty much is exactly what I was talking about. It makes shopping more to-the-point.

This can really pave the way towards stimulating the player-run economy. That is, of course, once the gold-drop from champion spawns is reduced. And all other major causes of gold inflation.

I really feel that once we fix this gold-inflation system, we can finally start to have an incredibly attractive shard. Players should be coming in droves once the word gets out that the shard takes an active approach towards balancing the economy.

[King Kong]

Yes wrote some notes down

[Outkast]

I say raise the cost of the vendor for the higher amount the item so that people are forced to put things cheaper.