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 Posted: Sun Sep 08, 2013 12:21 pm |  |
I woke up again 5 minutes ago and for whatever reason this is when I can think the clearest. I'd like to make a big post about the Economy in game and what can be done to fix it. The economy of a game, specifically an RPI mud is so important to many aspects of the game. Muds like armageddon and Shadows of Isildur had/have terrible economys. I'll explain why and how to compares to Parallel.
These points boil down to Currency, Sources of Resources, Uses of Resources, Sinks.
Currency:
Money in Rust comes from a small allowance given to new pcs, 50 chips. The rest of the money comes from turf quest which families can perform to earn 5-40 chips a day. That is the source of said money. The use of the money and therefore the money 'sinks' come from NPC sellers. Rent takes money out of the economy so does buying gold blocks for bullets and finally buying patterns and blueprints. The rate at which money comes and leaves the economy is very important. Inflation can and will reach a point were everyone has more money than they can logically spend. Patterns/Blueprints can not wear out. Grandpa last night mentioned that patterns should have a certain number of units before having to purchase new ones. This creates a constant demand rather than a slow build up of infinitely lasting things. Rent is the only other sink that is always in demand. However since the indie population is so small and the families earn most of the money from turf quest, the amount of money that disappears from the economy is too small compared to the amount that enters the economy.
I wont touch on market script but in the same situation, the sink is too small. Repair kits are the only continued source of taking script/chips out of the economy.
Resources:
Scavenging is the source of all resources in game, any piece of scavenge has to come from a PC's hard labor at some point. That is the source and its a big one since the game mechanics are designed around the constant procurement of scav.
Scav is used in everything..Construction, weapons, armor, furniture, containers, medicine, etc. This obviously makes scav very important to the economy. However the internal economy of rust does not have any flow of resources from one family to another. Each family gathers there own resources based on activity.
Sinks: There simply isn't enough of them. Weapons eventually wear out but to fast at all. Armor from hides can last many months if upgraded from leather>hardened>plated each time it gets permanently damaged. Furniture once made last forever, containers too.
The only good sinks for materials are medicines which get used quickly however the source of herbs is extremely abundant. Construction is by far the best sink of resources capable of taking out vast stockpiles of resources and turning it into a structure that isn't game breaking.
How does the economy matter to having fun and keeping players interested:
This boils down to Professions. How many people have gone to make a character and could not think of a concept that works, hunter, armorcrafter, weapon maker, clothier, etc. The economy is flooded with hides making it so a lagato hide is worth less than a bullet. There is as many leather suits as there is combat pc's plus some so armor is covered. Weapons hardly wear out, having more g-quality is a possibility but families will take care of that themselves. Clothes never wear out, the only draw to buy more clothes from a clothier pc is the many combinations of styles available.
Suggestions:
-A market vendor that will buy lagato hides for 5-10 chips. This is a simple fix that provides a draw and sink for hides. I would even say, bring back bundling rat/squick hides and sell them to the same vendor for 1-2 chips per bundle. Food is also extremely over abundant. Allow us to sell tubs of paste to said vendor for 3-5 chips.
-Fix the situation where upgrading a set of armor repairs permanent damage.
-Make weapons break down faster and occur permanent damage easier.
-Remove turf quest, they were an early game answer to chips. The hide market can take over as a money source while doubling as a resource sink.
-Lower the skill checks on larger constructions.
-Patterns/blueprints etc should wear out.
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Posted: Sun Sep 08, 2013 1:25 pm | |
Building checks are fine. Loss of materials and lack of real progression is still what hurts projects. I'd be far more interested in seeing that further modified than the checks themselves.
Admin word has been pretty consistent that haggle/selling hides for chips will not return. I personally have no issue with this. Pasting hides works fine by me. If they're overabundant, I would prefer to see that addressed with additional crafts. Replacing an inconsistent source of chips with a consistent source of chips when there aren't enough sinks as is seems backward.
I also don't feel the paste problem is really a problem. There are sinks for it (solid plastic, booze) though maybe the rate of use could be improved somehow. A 24 hour cd is pretty rough.
Adding decay to things that do not have them already seems fine by me, though.
A sink I'd want? Refrigerators. Halves the food decay rate, requires a buyable part, limited space by weight, or something like that.
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grandpa
Registered
Entrenched Oldbie
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Posted: Sun Sep 08, 2013 2:08 pm | |
| Quote: |
How does the economy matter to having fun and keeping players interested:
This boils down to Professions. How many people have gone to make a character and could not think of a concept that works, hunter, armorcrafter, weapon maker, clothier, etc. The economy is flooded with hides making it so a lagato hide is worth less than a bullet. There is as many leather suits as there is combat pc's plus some so armor is covered. Weapons hardly wear out, having more g-quality is a possibility but families will take care of that themselves. Clothes never wear out, the only draw to buy more clothes from a clothier pc is the many combinations of styles available.
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*points to all the good players that had their sandbox, built it up, then said "What now?" and looked around in confusion*
Agree, agree, agree. Except for g-quality stuff, fuk that noise we need to balance the base game.
Suggestions:
| Quote: |
| -A market vendor that will buy lagato hides for 5-10 chips. This is a simple fix that provides a draw and sink for hides. I would even say, bring back bundling rat/squick hides and sell them to the same vendor for 1-2 chips per bundle. Food is also extremely over abundant. Allow us to sell tubs of paste to said vendor for 3-5 chips. |
Reducing the output of hides on all levels/replacing lagatos with larger, grouped populations of something moderately dangerous would be better, probably. I do have an alternative solution, though.
| Quote: |
| -Fix the situation where upgrading a set of armor repairs permanent damage. |
This isn't the problem you think it is, mostly because PCs just upgrade to metal-plated fast as they can, and massive/permanent damages are rare enough as-is.
| Quote: |
| Make weapons break down faster and occur permanent damage easier. |
I'm not so much in agreement on this, purely because it's a hardcode change so suggested it is null. See my end suggestions for things that can be implemented.
| Quote: |
| -Remove turf quest, they were an early game answer to chips. The hide market can take over as a money source while doubling as a resource sink. |
Making turfquests so that they require two people in a group(is this possible?), put out 1-5 chips instead of 1-10, and increasing the timer on them reappearing are all changes I'd love to see.
| Quote: |
Building checks are fine. Loss of materials and lack of real progression is still what hurts projects. I'd be far more interested in seeing that further modified than the checks themselves.
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Yeah, building things is the best part of the game thus far.
| Quote: |
| Admin word has been pretty consistent that haggle/selling hides for chips will not return. I personally have no issue with this. Pasting hides works fine by me. If they're overabundant, I would prefer to see that addressed with additional crafts. Replacing an inconsistent source of chips with a consistent source of chips when there aren't enough sinks as is seems backward. |
The only issue is that that doesn't solve the problem at the front-end: too many hides causes armorcrafting to be too easy. It solves it at the back end: what do I do with all these hides?
| Quote: |
I also don't feel the paste problem is really a problem. There are sinks for it (solid plastic, booze) though maybe the rate of use could be improved somehow. A 24 hour cd is pretty rough.
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Less a problem and more a challenge. At least one Family has met it in a way that forced them to interact/roleplay more.
| Quote: |
| Adding decay to things that do not have them already seems fine by me, though. |
I don't know about -blueprints-. I didn't say those. I did say -molds-, though. I could agree on wear/tear for everything, though, but molds seem the most reasonably likely to wear down.
| Quote: |
| A sink I'd want? Refrigerators. Halves the food decay rate, requires a buyable part, limited space by weight, or something like that. |
Like scavenging robots, this is an anti-sink: a permanent investment that then increases the rate you earn something or decreases the rate you lose something.
Solutions:
We can't increase timers, so let's increase material costs for things.
"We have too much paste!" Require crafts to use more paste.
"We have too many hides!" Make armor take double the hides.
"We have too much metal and plastic!" Ditto.
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| It is a poor craftsman who blames his tools. | |
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Posted: Sun Sep 08, 2013 2:29 pm | |
Re: refrigerators
It would be a chip sink as a trade-off for food. Maybe something requiring maintenance, like it requiring buy-only parts every once in awhile. Though really, it's not about stockpiling food.
I honestly think cooked food is annoying. The decay rate, the fact that you can't tell which meat is going bad, the smell, the fly attraction. It's in enough abundance that it just sits around and decays, meaning then you have to go load up on another round of squicks and rats and whatever.
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Posted: Mon Sep 09, 2013 4:04 pm | |
I don't think we should have anything take more then it already does, for materials. An indie armorcrafter who just managed to get a lagato hide doesn't want it to all of a sudden cost two of them to make a piece of armor. That isn't the solution. However, I am all for a way for other PC's to create money, to create jobs for people to do. If we want more money flowing, allow things to be sold to NPCs. Lizard fillets, properly cooked? That's worth a chip. A rack of ribs? That's worth a definite five chips. A tub of paste? A couple of chips. These would, of course, be rebuyable by other players to have more money coming in and out. Repeat with plastic. Repeat with metal. Repeat with cloth. Buying and selling of goods in the market, of all sorts, types and ways, should be allowed. Hell, a general pawn shop/general store would also be great- Sell whatever the hell you want for very, very low amounts of money compared to the specialist stores, but you're for certain gonna make something. Got an extra shirt? Sell it off your own damn back to make enough chip or scrip to pay the rent. See a nice shirt for sell that some muck just sold? Buy it for a little above market price, because it's kinda nice and there's only one of 'em. Some sucker decides, 'holy shit, I need cash, gonna sell my g-quality gun so this family dude doesn't fuck me in the ass figuratively?' Suddenly, there's a g-quality gun on the market that isn't 'on auction', that can't be bid for. Everyone has the chance to make money off of this, and lots of people can start losing stuff real quick. The only problem I can forsee are hoarders, and I think maybe you can only sell so much of something at a time to reduce the chance of inflation. You can't sell 100 lizard fillets at a time to the general store to make a fuckload of dosh. You can sell maybe ten at a time, though.
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Posted: Mon Sep 09, 2013 4:05 pm | |
I don't think we should have anything take more then it already does, for materials. An indie armorcrafter who just managed to get a lagato hide doesn't want it to all of a sudden cost two of them to make a piece of armor. That isn't the solution. However, I am all for a way for other PC's to create money, to create jobs for people to do. If we want more money flowing, allow things to be sold to NPCs. Lizard fillets, properly cooked? That's worth a chip. A rack of ribs? That's worth a definite five chips. A tub of paste? A couple of chips. These would, of course, be rebuyable by other players to have more money coming in and out. Repeat with plastic. Repeat with metal. Repeat with cloth. Buying and selling of goods in the market, of all sorts, types and ways, should be allowed. Hell, a general pawn shop/general store would also be great- Sell whatever the hell you want for very, very low amounts of money compared to the specialist stores, but you're for certain gonna make something. Got an extra shirt? Sell it off your own damn back to make enough chip or scrip to pay the rent. See a nice shirt for sell that some muck just sold? Buy it for a little above market price, because it's kinda nice and there's only one of 'em. Some sucker decides, 'holy shit, I need cash, gonna sell my g-quality gun so this family dude doesn't fuck me in the ass figuratively?' Suddenly, there's a g-quality gun on the market that isn't 'on auction', that can't be bid for. Everyone has the chance to make money off of this, and lots of people can start losing stuff real quick. The only problem I can forsee are hoarders, and I think maybe you can only sell so much of something at a time to reduce the chance of inflation. You can't sell 100 lizard fillets at a time to the general store to make a fuckload of dosh. You can sell maybe ten at a time, though.
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Posted: Mon Sep 09, 2013 4:10 pm | |
| AdamBlue9000 wrote: |
| I don't think we should have anything take more then it already does, for materials. An indie armorcrafter who just managed to get a lagato hide doesn't want it to all of a sudden cost two of them to make a piece of armor. That isn't the solution. However, I am all for a way for other PC's to create money, to create jobs for people to do. If we want more money flowing, allow things to be sold to NPCs. Lizard fillets, properly cooked? That's worth a chip. A rack of ribs? That's worth a definite five chips. A tub of paste? A couple of chips. These would, of course, be rebuyable by other players to have more money coming in and out. Repeat with plastic. Repeat with metal. Repeat with cloth. Buying and selling of goods in the market, of all sorts, types and ways, should be allowed. Hell, a general pawn shop/general store would also be great- Sell whatever the hell you want for very, very low amounts of money compared to the specialist stores, but you're for certain gonna make something. Got an extra shirt? Sell it off your own damn back to make enough chip or scrip to pay the rent. See a nice shirt for sell that some muck just sold? Buy it for a little above market price, because it's kinda nice and there's only one of 'em. Some sucker decides, 'holy shit, I need cash, gonna sell my g-quality gun so this family dude doesn't fuck me in the ass figuratively?' Suddenly, there's a g-quality gun on the market that isn't 'on auction', that can't be bid for. Everyone has the chance to make money off of this, and lots of people can start losing stuff real quick. The only problem I can forsee are hoarders, and I think maybe you can only sell so much of something at a time to reduce the chance of inflation. You can't sell 100 lizard fillets at a time to the general store to make a fuckload of dosh. You can sell maybe ten at a time, though. |
This doesn't really work, it eliminates all need to sell things to PC's and it tends to cause a massive inflation in chips. Selling a hide or some food for a couple chips makes sense, selling stacks of metal and plastic bars are not so good.
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Posted: Mon Sep 09, 2013 6:40 pm | |
Selling hides for chips just makes everyone suddenly have mountains of chips. It re-creates the unrealistic situation of super-rich indies. I don't think there is any problem with the economy and this is just being overthought. Yes, there are lots of hides. So what? I don't see how it is a problem, at all. People talk about chip sinks and hide sinks and such, and I really don't see how it matters.
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irkallia
Guide
f--- you that's my fish and i'm having sex with it
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Posted: Tue Sep 10, 2013 12:03 am | |
I agree on a superficial level, in that I do think we could have some more resource sinks, and that some things that don't wear out should. However, Flincher, I have to say that you seem to be coming at this from a very anti-RP perspective. You say "there's no reason to buy clothes from a clothier PC except for the range of styles available," as though the only valid reasons for wanting to do something are those that involve coded benefit. This is not, and should not, be the case. There's this little thing called roleplay which can and should drive decisions your character makes a lot more than any OOC considerations should.
That said. While, as I say, I agree superficially, I think this is sort of a superficial issue, and, well...
All of this seems very aimed at bringing back more "stuff-related" things to do, to me. Require -more- materials! -More- chips! -More- paste! Is that really the direction we want to be pushing? Because here's the thing: I believe in the end what is being asked for is more 'things to do,' and more options in gameplay. Everybody wants options. Nobody wants to log in and realize they've "beaten" the game by doing everything there is to be done codedly - if we were motivated solely by RP, and didn't want the game aspects, we'd probably play a MUSH instead of a MUD. Right? I count myself as one of this number, here - this isn't an insult in any way. We want a -game-, not just a story. We want both.
So.
I don't have a problem with the way things are working, especially. There are excesses, sure, and some of them sort of don't make sense/don't match up with the canon of scarcity for the game. But in my opinion, better solutions would be in the vein of providing more things to do and to explore and to learn and to craft that don't simply involve "go out and slaughter all the lagatos and scav out the hospital repeatedly to get mats to make things that allow us to get more mats to make more things." Essentially what I guess I'm trying to say is that, if you want to make things more realistic/in line with canon by reducing the amount of surplus materials, how about making some activities that aren't scav-dependent? Because requiring double the number of hides to make the same armor only motivates people to kill more lagatos and scav more metal. It's playing to the faulty system, rather than trying to circumvent the faulty system.
Random brainstorm ideas, off the top of my head:
- Make hides usable for art somehow. Heck if I know how. Papier-mache type hide-sculptures? Use them as canvas? Make them a component of a new paint type? I dunno, whatever.
- Heck, people've been asking for books. Why not make 'paper' out of them, in the same fashion that vellum was used in the middle ages?
- Make some system whereby Families can exchange paste for things they do need. I mean, c'mon. There are supposed to be umpteen squillion 'starving' poor people out on the turfs, right? And they don't have -anything- of value they could possibly want to trade for food? Psssht. They've got manpower, if nothing else... incorporate that somehow? Maybe you could 'speed up' new buildings by paying local residents in paste? (I don't actually know how buildings work, so maybe that doesn't work, but whatever - I still like the concept of incorporating 'peasant labor' somehow, somewhere.)
- Whatever. I'm out of ideas for now and I need to go clean my house. But it'd be nice to see solutions that don't simply reinforce the cycle of "get stuff to make stuff to get more stuff with."
Also, to note:
| Flincher14 wrote: |
| Armor from hides can last many months if upgraded from leather>hardened>plated each time it gets permanently damaged. |
THIS IS TWINKING.
This is an abuse of the code allowing players who do so to gain an advantage which should not be possible. You should not be able to take a ruined piece of leather armor, apply some chemicals/resins, and magically it's whole and new again. If anyone has done this or is doing this, it is cheating.
(ETA: I realize all my suggestions up there sorta -are- scav-dependent; I got off-track and started thinking of resource sinks rather than things to do that are independent of the scav system. I guess I'm still just waiting, waiting, waiting, and hoping for the promised scav reforms to fix what's broken there.)
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| 09:08:36 ‹Holmes› FUCKdgkljald
09:08:38 ‹Holmes› Irkallia
09:08:39 ‹Holmes› YOU GOD AMLDJALgkasdf
09:08:41 ‹Holmes› I WILL KILL YOU
09:08:43 ‹Holmes› WITH MY FACE
09:08:47 * Holmes quit | |
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Posted: Tue Sep 10, 2013 12:27 pm | |
| irkallia wrote: |
| I agree on a superficial level, in that I do think we could have some more resource sinks, and that some things that don't wear out should. However, Flincher, I have to say that you seem to be coming at this from a very anti-RP perspective. You say "there's no reason to buy clothes from a clothier PC except for the range of styles available," as though the only valid reasons for wanting to do something are those that involve coded benefit. This is not, and should not, be the case. There's this little thing called roleplay which can and should drive decisions your character makes a lot more than any OOC considerations should. |
Very true, and to that end, why not have different styles of armor that armorers can make. Require the armor use certain patterns and you'll have people wanting special looking armor. Maybe whole groups would go for the same type and what not. It just seems that between the colors of scales available from the hides themselves (not to mention dying dog leather and what not) and something like this you could have a fare number of different styles. Also, if you could color the metal plates so have things like, blackened plating or something even more could be added. This would add both a hide sink and a chip sink, of course, it would also require reworking all the armor crafts...
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