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Neville

The Wurm Online Market Overall

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3 minutes ago, KillerSpike said:

I disagree that it is a net loss all around.

I always sell my in game silver and buy Premium with RL money. The reason I do that is to ensure that CC get some RL money out of my subs.

You're aware silver's bought in the shop right? CC already got real money out of it even if you use ingame silver to prem, hell they've gotten more that way since 10 silver is 16 euro in the shop compared to 8 euro for a month of premium.

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2 minutes ago, Oblivionnreaver said:

You're aware silver's bought in the shop right? CC already got real money out of it even if you use ingame silver to prem, hell they've gotten more that way since 10 silver is 16 euro in the shop compared to 8 euro for a month of premium.

I think you miss understand. I know that in game silver was bought at some point from CC.'s shop. But if you do it my way they still get real money for my subs. so more cash flow to CC. So what if they indirectly make more money out of silver.

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Well, technically people, who pay prem for silver, bring in more money for Code Club, than those, who buy it directly via shop. It is 16 euros per month for silver, while you get 1 month prem for 10 euros from shop(the longer periods, the less you pay per month).

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WO ingame economy is borked and will only get worse over time. Especially for selling anything that isn't consumable resources.

 

There is constant inflow of new items created, and a good portion of those items will stay in circulation forever... If you build a ship or make a sword there's good chance it will still be around 10 years later and someone will resell it (competing with all crafters that would be making new swords and ships in 2028). The plate you made yesterday and are trying to sell is competing with a bunch of plate made since 2007. Yes some items are lost to decay, shattering and people logging off with them and never coming back, but the left overs are enough to be a problem.

 

On the other hand money circulation is extremely limited because it's bound to RMT and the only way for new money to enter circulation is for someone to pay RL cash for it. Worse, money is being removed from the circulation via upkeep, trader purchases, etc. (not all that money ends up in kingdom coffers, some just goes *poof*)

 

As time goes the supply of items increases while the demand is staying stable at best (or decreasing with the population). At some point in the future WO will reach a point when the market is completely saturated and any profit from crafting will approach 0.

 

Consumable resources (planks, bricks, nails, etc.) are the kinda an exception because they are actively removed from the world by being used, so they will stay afloat for a while longer, at least as long as there are still people around to build things from them.

 

 

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As bdew posted, there is no real consumption, how can there be a real economy once a market is saturated? I have the same rare 2h sword since I started playing again. Along with the same drake armor and many of the same tools.

 

Since there are a limited amount of consumables and those are saturated markets with people competing and price slashing to a point it is not worth getting into. You end up having no market for anything. 

 

The game needs a way to remove items from the game to allow for a larger market. This would lower initial prices but allow for a larger market and would, in the end, a better economy. Would I be pissed that a critical failure based on fighting skill, weapon ql and/or armor ql, breakage would occur? You bet! But I would be in the market for a new weapon or armor piece.

 

The same applies to tools and other items in the game. I would love a more robust market and economy. I have not pursued any specialized skill because the markets I am most interested in are mostly saturated. Since there is no real consumption, pvp replacement of lost gear being the only exception and even then there is not any real consumption just gear moving from one person to another.

 

This would have many effects on the economy, some of it not so good but in the end, it would help everyone from old players to new players. Giving them a larger market to play in and boost the economy as more items would be in demand.

 

Anyway my 2 coppers worth. Though I have to be honest and say that my knowledge of economy with basic supply and demand is from a 101 university class and that was like back in the dark ages.

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You could only have real consumption of tools, weapons and armor if you could improve tools like now after creation but if you could only use them once you finalise the improvement via game mechanics and if you could then never repair them...

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3 minutes ago, Eltaran said:

You could only have real consumption of tools, weapons and armor if you could improve tools like now after creation but if you could only use them once you finalise the improvement via game mechanics and if you could then never repair them...

 

Or they broke when in use or damaged to a point of not being repairable. Base these things on skill, ql and use. You could also place a finite lifespan on the tool or weapon. Repaired only x amount of times for x amount ql before they are no longer repairable or imp-able. There are quite a few avenues available and I can say without reservation that I do not know most of them.

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1 hour ago, Saicotic said:

The game needs a way to remove items from the game to allow for a larger market. This would lower initial prices but allow for a larger market and would, in the end, a better economy. Would I be pissed that a critical failure based on fighting skill, weapon ql and/or armor ql, breakage would occur? You bet! But I would be in the market for a new weapon or armor piece.

 

If Wurm were ever so optimized for the "economy", I would be done.

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5 minutes ago, Roccandil said:

 

If Wurm were ever so optimized for the "economy", I would be done.

A lot of people would be, especially the older players who like the status quo. It is a balancing act for sure. As it stands, I am pretty much done as it is. I do not play but to mess around on my deeds. Everyone I know (friends in rl) are off to other games. Those that I know in game seldom play if at all.

 

I do not think the older, forgive the term but elite players can prop the current market indefinitely. Something has to eventually be done.

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1 hour ago, Saicotic said:

A lot of people would be, especially the older players who like the status quo. It is a balancing act for sure. As it stands, I am pretty much done as it is. I do not play but to mess around on my deeds. Everyone I know (friends in rl) are off to other games. Those that I know in game seldom play if at all.

 

I do not think the older, forgive the term but elite players can prop the current market indefinitely. Something has to eventually be done.

 

It's not the market, it's people. Wurm needs -new- people. Do you really think tweaking the market will do that?

 

One real problem is that Wurm Online no longer presents a true new player experience. By that, I mean starting new on a new island with everyone else new too. That's a huge missing piece to this puzzle. For Wurm to attract new players, it needs to provide that again, somehow.

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6 minutes ago, Roccandil said:

 

It's not the market, it's people. Wurm needs -new- people. Do you really think tweaking the market will do that?

 

One real problem is that Wurm Online no longer presents a true new player experience. By that, I mean starting new on a new island with everyone else new too. That's a huge missing piece to this puzzle. For Wurm to attract new players, it needs to provide that again, somehow.

Been there done that with Release and Pristine, maybe you weren't around during that time, but even with a higher population it didn't achieve the results your looking for.

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3 minutes ago, Roccandil said:

 

It's not the market, it's people. Wurm needs -new- people. Do you really think tweaking the market will do that?

 

One real problem is that Wurm Online no longer presents a true new player experience. By that, I mean starting new on a new island with everyone else new too. That's a huge missing piece to this puzzle. For Wurm to attract new players, it needs to provide that again, somehow.

That is only one piece of the puzzle the new wears off and without a sublayer (economy) to support continued play you only have a band-aid for the current issue. Number one complaint from my friends was there was no market for things they wanted to do in the game. Shipbuilding, Blacksmithing, Weapons and Armorsmithing, Animal Breeding, Farmer. Those things exist and can be done but the market is shallow and hard to compete unless you can undercut already very low prices. 

 

And as I stated previously, once you buy what you want / need why do you need to buy any more of them? I bought or crafted all the gear I wanted 3 to 4 years ago and have not bought any since. I just imp them back up and keep going. 

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The issue isn't the perpetuity of items; Wurm's retention rate is pretty low; its players leave often and, generally, their most valuable items go with them.  This does produce a natural outflow of items, surprisingly.

 

In most game economies, new players buy items from more experienced players; but new players in wurm are among the demographic least likely to invest real cash into the game, and thus have the least amount of disposable income (most sink it into their deeds or save up for premium (tm)).

 

This creates a situation where:

 

1.  Your mid level players are competing for a VERY limited pool of buyers, this is what creates competition and forces prices down.

2.  Your low level players are more interested in sinking silver into their toons/deeds than in buying high QL tools (do remember, most alliances give them away these days)

3.  Your magic market (and thus priest population) was killed off by broken player gods, alt pets and general poor treatment, so the only viable pool of mid/high level buyers that aren't also solid crafters have vanished (had to get that one in)

4.  You have a healhy bulk market, but bulk crafting does contribute heavily to player attrition rates (1k bricks for 1s is something most folks do once, and then go "*palm* this, I'll just pay real cash/quit")


In essence, the situation is that players have less incentive to pass their money to other players, and more to spend it on their own toons.  The only source of "trickle down" wealth is a leading cause of attrition.  Money doesn't move.

 

The only way to get things flowing again is to give lower level players the ability to produce items useful to mid/high level players.  But, to be quite frank, how this could be done on wurm is a mystery to me.

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 A small round silver coin. This is a very rare and interesting version of the item. 

 

Perhaps this is the fix to the economy they envisioned.

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If you added more incentive to imping items vrs spam creation, be it swapping the chance for rares from imping instead of creation you could make existing items more attractive than continually adding more and more items to the game.

 

On the other hand you could also have it make sense to smelt down the bloat of items in the game as well, I'm sure a lot of details would need battled out in the forums, but things to make less items in the game matter more would be a decent first step, instead of mass spamming for rare chances etc, even working out a better incentive to sac items may be a thought.

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The market is set by the seller. As people sell things more and more on the cheap, downward pressure to other sellers occur, and you get the market we're at now. The Wallmartization of wurm!

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1 hour ago, Kadore said:

Been there done that with Release and Pristine, maybe you weren't around during that time, but even with a higher population it didn't achieve the results your looking for.

 

Starting new servers and then letting them linger won't solve the problem, for sure. The model I see is more like Challenge, relatively short-term islands that everyone knows up front will be replaced.

 

One difference from Challenge would be that any skills gained during the scenario would be translated back to the source cluster, so players wouldn't be thinking they could be grinding on Epic/Freedom instead of playing the scenario. (I'd really only do these scenarios on Epic, though.)

 

The key, though, is that these islands can't simply be rehashes of existing islands. Each time they need to explore something new: whether mechanics, weapons, items, biomes, etc.

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I seem to keep just as busy as I want to be and make what I want to make without much issue.  Devs have definitely changed things around a lot though and you got to adapt and carry on.  I believe the OP intent is to discuss changes that have been made and if good or bad for the game and what changes could be made in the future. A good case study would be favor.

 

For those not familiar with priests and how they work favor is what you need to cast on stuff to get enchants.  Favor used to be fairly hard to get fast with things like cordage or locks being the main source of quick favor through sacrificing at an alter.  If you didn't want to invest either the time or money to obtain the materials to sacrifice, you had to wait a long time for natural favor regen.  This severely limited the number of casts that could be done.  Ropemaking skill was very valuable and some people literally "paid the rent" selling favor through cordage or another form.  Enchants cost a lot and if you wanted top line enchants on your stuff, it was time to take out a second mortgage on the house.  So the "winners" were priests and favor makers, both did very very well.  Of course, if you tended to the black arts, you could do beyond really well if that was what you were looking for, but that had its own set of separate issues that limited market participation.

 

Then player made gods started to fall from the sky like rain and certain casts got buffed up big time since they could now be cast on Freedom using farm products directly for favor.  No longer a need to turn wemp into cordage, just sacrifice the wemp straight.  This resulted in a lot more casts being done and prices starting to fall.  Interestingly enough, the price of farm products didn't change, the increase in demand was met without a ripple in the veggie market.  (This may have been since at about the same time we all figured out that soul depth didn't do anything for priests and so a lot less veggies were used for cooking.  Anyone got thoughts on why the veggie market didn't move?) But the prices on enchants started to fall for sure. 

 

This led to the very predictable result that if you didn't have the correct priest type you were out of luck somewhat market wise.  This was not a good thing for play balance and the worst of it was mitigated by introducing chopped vegetables.  They are easy to get high quality and oh so blindingly fast to make that now every priest can have almost unlimited amounts of favor to cast with.  The fact that certain priest types can still use garlic direct, is not that important now since you can chop up that same garlic so fast and any priest can then use it for the same favor.  The result is very cheap favor for all, favor price is now only 20% of what it was a few years ago

 

So, what was better, a small and limited segment of the Wurm population doing very very well or cheap enchants for all?  For myself, I vote the cheap enchants.  Do I really like the way the process was handled that got us here?  Not really, but nothing wrong with the end result as I think it is a lot better for new players now. 

 

Overall, I think we need things that help squeeze the skill gap between high end and new accounts and Devs seems to agree with that as many things have been brought in to help accomplish that in a reasonable manner and I suspect we will see more in the future as well.  Doing things like this give new players a reason to feel they can be relevant in a reasonable amount of time.  Continuing to work on things like the UI and overall new player experience are simply baseline items that need to be done.  With those in place, the table should be set such that new players should have a higher retention rate and the market overall should be more active.  That won't necessarily lead to higher prices, but at least overall volume should increase.

 

 

 

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20 hours ago, GoldFever said:

....

 

So, what was better, a small and limited segment of the Wurm population doing very very well or cheap enchants for all?  For myself, I vote the cheap enchants.  Do I really like the way the process was handled that got us here?  Not really, but nothing wrong with the end result as I think it is a lot better for new players now. 

...

 

I think this is the biggest mistake being done.. The assumption, that driving prices down is good for new players. It is based on assumption, that new players are consumers only. But they want to get into the game and start selling stuff also as fast as they want. And there the problem starts, when they realize, that everyone and their dog is selling stuff for peanuts. Basically making things harder for longtime players on the market does not make things easier on new players, they are affected probably even harder.

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1 hour ago, rixk said:

I think this is the biggest mistake being done.. The assumption, that driving prices down is good for new players. It is based on assumption, that new players are consumers only. But they want to get into the game and start selling stuff also as fast as they want. And there the problem starts, when they realize, that everyone and their dog is selling stuff for peanuts. Basically making things harder for longtime players on the market does not make things easier on new players, they are affected probably even harder.

 

Maybe they need to sell things because everything on freedom is so overpriced???  "yeah hunting is easy as a noob just buy an LT weapon since you won't prem 2 priests to do it and no one on pve wants to cast for free"  "btw you gotta spend 5-10s on one crappy weapon if you want LT with some other enchants or even just LT alone welcome to wurm don't die wandering or you'll have to buy more haha :   )"

 

Odds are they don't need a business making 50s a month when they likely already can afford premium if they are already playing wurm in a way that attempts to sell items and new players aren't going to have 201x201 deeds to pay for so they can just laugh and botanize for upkeep.  Also oddly enough, if items are cheaper, then new players are more likely to buy them what a shock.  If they can buy a fancy weapon for 1s, they can easily say "ok that's 1e, no big deal I can also buy some good skilling tools for 50c a piece too... but I can even just use my botanizing money to pay for it!!!"

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On 2/16/2018 at 3:15 AM, Roccandil said:

 

Now that would suck, and it wouldn't even make sense. :P

 

Quite frankly, I want the economy of Freedom to stay on Freedom. The more I hear of it, the less I like it.


no not really, and upon deaths it should be partial loot with the rest of it disappearing. 

Albion uses this system, works great.
many other games use the no repair system - works great.

How do you keep the supply for 90ql weapons up? make them dissapear after extended use. The buyer has to come back to purchase the new item.

Too late for it now, sadly.
 

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46 minutes ago, MrGARY said:

 

Maybe they need to sell things because everything on freedom is so overpriced???  "yeah hunting is easy as a noob just buy an LT weapon since you won't prem 2 priests to do it and no one on pve wants to cast for free"  "btw you gotta spend 5-10s on one crappy weapon if you want LT with some other enchants or even just LT alone welcome to wurm don't die wandering or you'll have to buy more haha :   )"

 

Odds are they don't need a business making 50s a month when they likely already can afford premium if they are already playing wurm in a way that attempts to sell items and new players aren't going to have 201x201 deeds to pay for so they can just laugh and botanize for upkeep.  Also oddly enough, if items are cheaper, then new players are more likely to buy them what a shock.  If they can buy a fancy weapon for 1s, they can easily say "ok that's 1e, no big deal I can also buy some good skilling tools for 50c a piece too... but I can even just use my botanizing money to pay for it!!!"

Of course, buy cheap tools, get your skills up, prepare to start doing business (I am not talking here about 50s per month business).. and all you can do for getting money is to botanize in back yard. Brilliant plan. :D

In plain english.. market is a vital part of the game, but all the changes to "make lives easier of newbies" have excluded those newbies actually from that part of the game. Yes! They can buy cheap tools, but WHY?! They have no real use for those skills. They will be become just the part of the horde, who will wait for the next single newbie to join the game and start undercutting each other to get attention of that newbie.

Wurm is first game, where prices have plummeted and playes/staff thinks that it is actually a good thing. :D 

 

EDIT: And your post confirmed 100% what I was trying to say. Another vet thinking, that all a newbie can think of, is how to get cheap tools. I say it is BS, those newbies I have met, their first question was, how to earn some coins in the game(at least those, who had gotten past of "what should I do next" question.

Edited by rixk

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As was pointed out already: Where you make things once and then can keep them infintely unless you are very, very careless there will never be a real market.

 

Craft, imp up, finalize and then you can use but not repair it. Stuff needs to be replaced, you have an economy. Otherwise it's down to consumables (aka planks and bricks...), which is where WO is now.

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Trying to reinvent the wheel to fix the economy won't happen anymore than sun setting servers to get all the community closer together, I've seen loads of suggestions over the years but the only thing that happens is new things being added to the game vrs attempts to shrink the game to fit the population.

 

Honestly I can't see any major changes to how items are created / sold / repaired anymore than other changes that would be too drastic at this point, Wurm has been showing it's age for quite sometime and anything that wouldn't upset some portion of the player base wouldn't be a risk the game would take imo.

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3 hours ago, Mclavin said:

How do you keep the supply for 90ql weapons up?

 

Why do we need to prop up prices of 90QL weapons? If buying and selling is the be-all, end-all of Wurm, then there's a much more fundamental problem: every resource can be found nearly everywhere, and thus deeds don't have to specialize function based on location the way nations have had to in RL.

 

That's why hard-to-make items are what the current economy revolves around. To fix that:

 

- Make certain raw materials only available on specific islands, and no one island gets everything;

- Remove mailboxes*.

 

*As a bonus, force Freedom trade routes through Chaos. :P As an added bonus, make ship combat more interesting. (I wanna see ships aflame and foundering in the water! :P )

 

Presto, we have a much more realistic foundation for an economy.

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