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Original post by Beyond_Repair I was about to post a reply like "is EVE too complicated for the average EVE player?", but held my tongue. :D That said, I don't think that such games are too complex, some people don't have enough time to figure out the specifics of deeper games. I notice this in myself, when I was 14 I played extremely complex strategy war games; now in my twenties I don't have time to learn any new ones, so I stick to old ones and learn very few new ones (and play the more 'accessible' games of their respective genres, particularly in the FPS category).

I think that has a lot to do with it. The other big thing is that a lot of people play games to escape the mental complications in the real world. They want something relatively simple to do when they are not working, and EVE is just not an escape from mental complication. Personally, I like in depth, complicated games. I find them fun, but some don't and thus a complicated MMO limits the player base.

I think there's a happy medium though that would satisfy both types of players. If one can succeed without getting into complication, but will find even more to do and understand if they delve further in, then it satisfies both players. That is something I tried to do with this game idea. If a player wants to just play and not think, then they can certainly just fight to take over territories, kill monsters attacking their country, and go on other quests. If they want to get more in depth, they might end up part of a guild that rules a nation and has to figure out the right taxation rate (keeping in mind that it affects not only the balance of resources to money, but also inflation), conduct diplomacy with other nations, make trade agreements (whether it be trading resources or just free trade and tariffs), when to buy mercenaries, when to buy assassins to nip a coup at the bud or weaken a rival nation, protect the king from assassins, and decide what improvements to buy for territories or, (given the vassal idea proposed in this thread) decide how much money to give to each vassal lord.

The weakness is that this type of in depth play is only open to the ruling guilds at any time. First off, though, the idea is that the King and his guild would get overthrown a fair bit of the time, so everyone in the best guilds would be part of the ruling party a fair bit of the time. Secondly, this is why I like the idea of vassals for each territory as that gives a lot of players access to the broad strategic questions in the game.

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What is so complicated about EVE's economy for the average player? Maybe I'm somewhat elitist, but anyone who isn't smart enough to figure out the basics of the economy that is needed to play the game,... likely shouldn't be allowed out of their house as they're clearly not smart enough to function well in society. (Unless of course things have radically changed in the few years since I last played.)

Google search "eve online too complicated" There are 278,000 results and from what I can see, most of them are people complaining about the game being too complicated rather than just links where those two words appear out of context.

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Google search "eve online too complicated" There are 278,000 results and from what I can see, most of them are people complaining about the game being too complicated rather than just links where those two words appear out of context.

Oh, I'm not going to deny that most people think EVE is too complicated. It often gets compared to a graphical spreadsheet. But the economy itself is modeled after real life economies in such a way that it is a lot more stable and easier to manage than other MMO economies.

*Buy orders make the market more stable than just auctions. They allow people to express demand. This is important.

*EVE style minimal base resources means minimal places the devs have to adjust sources and sinks, player transmutes let the market adjust on its own to a steady state. WoW style crafting resources results in 400 input sources crafting into 800 items, resulting in 400 things you have to adjust and hope the interplay works out. EVE's devs still have to manage the same 10,000+ item drop rates just like WoW, but the fact that players can transmute item->resource->othertiem very freely means that imperfect drop rates don't affect the economy of EVE as badly as they do the economy in WoW.

Then there is all the stuff that probably makes it too complicated for people who just want to play, and could be left out or changed to make things easier for the average player to manage:
*Items having a location. This results in purchases having ranges. People having to move around to collect stuff they bought or want to sell. etc.
*Contracts. Especially in relation to items that you can't put on the regular market.
*Items having specific drop locations, and the ability to claim territory that may be the prime hunting ground for those drops (excluding people from getting easy access to all items).
*Crafting trees. EVE really is complicated on trees of items construction, where you need to make parts for a part for the item you want to make. The recipies go too deep.

So, I can totally understand you not wanting to take too much from the EVE universe. I'm just putting out there what I see are the key points that make EVE's economy more stable than other MMOs out there.

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Oh, I'm not going to deny that most people think EVE is too complicated. It often gets compared to a graphical spreadsheet. But the economy itself is modeled after real life economies in such a way that it is a lot more stable and easier to manage than other MMO economies.

No argument here on that. It's just that a lot of people don't want to be playing a game that is like a real life economy. They play to escape that. With that said, though, I absolutely value complex economic ideas in a game; I just think they need to be implemented such that you dont HAVE to understand them or deal with them in order to play the game. My idea attempts to do that by giving mechanisms for players to greatly affect the economy on a macro level, but not have the average player need any knowledge or understanding of that to play.

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*Buy orders make the market more stable than just auctions. The allow people to express demand. This is important.

I like this idea when it comes to selling items. I had been thinking that when someone goes to buy/sell an item, they would be told info like the average price paid for the item over the last day/month/year, the lowest paid for it, the highest paid for it, etc etc. I would also like something where the average price of the item is charted over time and a player is shown a graph, although I think that starts to be too complicated for people. This sort of thing would ensure market stability as asymmetric information would be much less of a problem. Buy orders would have a similar effect, simply educating players about what they should be paying for an item.

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*EVE style minimal base resources means minimal places the devs have to adjust sources and sinks, player transmutes let the market adjust on its own to a steady state. WoW style crafting resources results in 400 input sources crafting into 800 items, resulting in 400 things you have to adjust and hope the interplay works out.

I agree with this and had been envisioning a much smaller number of base resources than WoW has. There would NEED to be a smaller number of resource types in this game because each nation is not going to control THAT many territories, and it should be reasonable for a nation doing pretty well to have access to everything they need. If there were 400 resources, that would mean that each territory would need to be producing an absurd number of resource types (25-40) for that to be possible, and that seems silly and cumbersome.

I also have no problem with player transmutation as a means of creating economic stability. Hypothetically, that should make items worth more actually, though (not in an inflationary sense, but in a level increase sense). This is because one is essentially buying the item itself OR any other item that can be made with those transmuted resources. Choice increases value. Let me give an example. Let's say a dagger that took iron to make is being sold. In a normal system, it might be auctioned off to a player who values it at 20 gold. Add transmutation into the mix. I might already have a dagger, so I don't value it very highly. But I might really really need an iron bow. If I buy the dagger, I can melt down the dagger and create a bow with the iron, and I value that bow at 25 gold. Thus I would bid 25 gold. Essentially, then, the price of an item would be based on demand for daggers AND anything else that can be created with that iron, rather than just demand for daggers. Higher demand = higher prices. This is a good thing IMO because it makes crafting more profitable.

Maybe you had already been trying to explain this to me, but I suppose transmutation would negate the need for NPC quotas on goods bought. My fear was that people would farm a ton of lame items to NPCs who would never be able to sell them. The big problem with this is that the NPC shop then becomes another source of inflation; they'd be paying for way more items then they'd sell. If you can transmute daggers back into iron, there remains demand for them because they'd be a source of extra resources (which people would really value since there's a cap on how many new resources you can buy per day).

With a sensible crafting system and functioning market, there's no real reason to have the NPC shops at all.

The Npc shop keepers provide a way to balance item dispersal and economy balance, they provide a control point for how rare, resources can be and the cost of said items

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Original post by Storyyeller With a sensible crafting system and functioning market, there's no real reason to have the NPC shops at all.

You should be right, except there's one particular problem.

The problem is the fact that there are less people desiring low level goods than there are people wanting to produce them. If a low level crafter can only produce daggers, he will want to produce a bunch of them, but there aren't a lots of people demanding daggers for every low level crafter around. Thus, demand for the good is very low, while supply is high. This leads to a really low price. Thus, it is very possible that if everyone who wanted to craft did, the equilibrium price for the dagger would be less than the cost of the resources to make it. Realistically, it would never get to that point, though because people wouldn't craft if it were unprofitable. Supply would simply decrease to the point where economic profit equals zero (because the market for low level goods is essentially a free market, implying zero economic profit at equilibrium).

In a normal economic market that's fine. And for the people who DO craft it is fine as well because they get their cost of production + opportunity cost back. But the problem is that it is a game, and you don't want to discourage low level crafters. It should be profitable for any number of people to craft from the beginning or you're taking away fun for a lot of gamers who want to craft.

NPC shops averts this problem. If they will always buy something for moderately above its resource cost, then crafting will always be profitable and you are adding to people's options and fun.

However, I'm beginning to think there are other solutions. I also think that making people able to craft a good amount of items from the beginning is a good way to deal with this problem. If low level items that aren't in high demand are not the only things that beginning crafters can and do make in order to grind their crafting level up, then they will naturally decide to make items that are profitable to sell. And those markets WILL exist because you won't have a high concentration of players who want to make items for which there is almost no demand. You will have a high concentration of players who want to make a large assortment of items that other players want.

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BAD examples of gold sinks are auction house fees, any kind of rent, and taxation on all trades of money or all trades of anything between two players.

Can you expand on this? Is it because you're suggesting that any obstacle between player-player interaction is bad?

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Original post by NateDog Quote: BAD examples of gold sinks are auction house fees, any kind of rent, and taxation on all trades of money or all trades of anything between two players. Can you expand on this? Is it because you're suggesting that any obstacle between player-player interaction is bad?

That wasn't my reason, although it may also be true. My reason is that these type of things are 1. difficult and irritating to keep track of (auctionhouse fees can easily turn a narrow crafting profit into a loss), and 2. feel unjust/insulting because they are taking away money without giving the player anything in return. There are so many things a game can sell to players, and the player will be happy to spend their money on them (and happy to have a choice whether to spend their money), that it's truly unnecessary to resort to gold sinks which extort money from players without asking and without giving anything in return.

For an economic system so heavily focused on crafting it does seem to really disadvantage crafters.

I think part of the problems there are essentially two different tasks you want to accomplish under the crafting banner. Manufacturing which is the bulk production of goods, and artisan work which production of high quality goods. Now these typically work themselves out by having different tiers of goods. But what about separating the activities in game? A player who goes down the manufacturing route could turn out 100 healing potions a day but someone who does the artisan route can turn only make 1 high quality sword.

The problem of course becomes how you are going to keep the player interested involved in the process? One thing you mentioned was a limited number of resources being available each day. Now if it takes a player a week to save up enough iron to make a sword of slaying where does the achievement and excitement come from? I player for a week and didn’t do any crafting isn’t exactly and achievement.

Basically all they are doing is waiting for time to elapse since the game artificially limits the amount of resource they can obtain at anyone time. They may do other stuff in game but if they want to focus on crafting they are at disadvantage, compared to adventurers. You wouldn’t have a kill limit in game would you? Sorry you’ve killed you 100 monsters today come back tomorrow if you want to kill more.

After all if they player needs 10,000 iron shouldn’t there be a way from them to get that other than waiting? They might have enough money to buy 1,000,000 units of iron and get frustrated as they want to craft a sword of slaying but the game limits them to a mere 1000 units a day.

Just some food for thought

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NPC shops averts this problem. If they will always buy something for moderately above its resource cost, then crafting will always be profitable and you are adding to people's options and fun.

The real solution to low level crafting is transmutation.

With transmutation, even the low level items can be transmuted (at a loss maybe) back into raw materials, and these raw materials can be use to make any of the itmes, including the high level itmes.

Thus all the new players making the low level items to level up their crafting skills can be transmuted back into raw materials that the high level crafters can gain access to.

You would expect the prices of the items to be transmuted will drop to that of the cost to extract the raw material (from mines or such) as if the price is higher than this, then the demand for transmutable items will drop and the supply will increase (the stockpile). If the cost of the transmutable items is lower then the raw material cost, then the demand for them will increase compared to the raw material and the supply (stockpile) will drop.

If the raw material gathering has a cost (either from tools needed, risk, etc), then this will create a minimum stable point (it could go higher, but it will not likely go lower) around which the prices of the raw material and transmutable items will gravitate to (but it will fluctuate depending on various other factors).