Fungibility, Farming, and Degenerate Economic Efficiency

We have not received permission from beaushinkle to share the quoted post.

Even so, it's another reminder of how different our priors are. I expect you'll answer maouw separately so I'll focus in on aligning a specific one.

I don't see the caravan system as implying a high liquidity.

Players always max out their inventory in MMOs. They put a pile of stuff in storage. Then they want to move it, and fill their own inventory to move it. If a player does this solo, and die, they lose a lot from any instance of dying.

If they instead gather their friend group of 8 and put 8x their inventory on a mule and the mule is durable compared to players, then any individual death in battle loses nothing for the travelers, and they can focus on 'protecting the payload'.

I have lots of issues with the way Corruption works, the Caravan system, and so on, but I can easily imagine 'making this sort of system and brainstorming the specifics later' so the fact that we don't know only bothers me a little.

I'll leave the discussion of other priors between you and @maouw but add something to that side for discussion if you don't mind. My expectation is that the thing most likely to be stockpiled, etc, is something that most people might find frustrating. Repair mats for gear. You need a lot of these, but not so many that it's likely to require a meaningfully higher than FFXI liquidity.

Because it's one of the few economic factors that has a clear and known impact when it's depressed, and a timesink cost incentive to function. You have to repair your gear, someone has to supply the materials for this, it would be good to have large amounts on hand. If it takes 1h of gathering to repair 3h of dungeoneering, then I think the numbers approximately work (I'll 'show my working' if you want, but the numbers are long, and I do still hope to maybe make an MMO one day if Ashes goes in another direction, so take it on faith if you are willing).

So we have a huge and constant sink for materials with a high fluctuation in requirement (i.e. market tanks when no one needs to repair or decides not to care for some reason, and automatically tanks if everyone starts to gather the same items because that reduces dungeoneering time and therefore demand).

Alpha-1 had some implications, Alpha-2 will probably give us numbers that I can plug into the equations, which I don't think Intrepid will hide, since it will be about system testing, not 'letting people like me figure out the current niches'. I would really hope that they would let us at least see the real economic system during Alpha-2, that is, 'know how much Silver Ore it takes to make a Silver Ingot to repair a Silver Helm'.

However, you're missing some data from the Alpha-1 experience, I believe. I don't remember seeing much 'gatherer path optimization' YouTube content, is all I'm saying, but we did it, and it's... currently pretty easy, so your feelings from the art style are valid, but the system is built around 'concentrating resources in places so that when you have an efficient run, there will be conflict'.

I think of this as... 'naive', let's say, given human psychology, but there certainly isn't a better way to do it. In short, I feel that the Corruption system implementation is wrong, not the worldbuild. I'm keeping my alternative one as my own 'trade secret' though, mostly because I'm bitter and want the option to 'I told you so' all the people who kept going 'it'll be fine, it worked in L2' and similar.

I exist in the quantum state of 'wanting it to succeed so everyone is happy' and 'expecting it to fail just enough to make people who overconfidently assert it is good as is, shut up'. Sadly the third outcome is 'some set of people going 'working as intended, this is great!' while the game bleeds subs and becomes a ghost world. I don't want that one.

We have not received permission from beaushinkle to share the quoted post.

I see what you need now! But unfortunately I have no idea if Ashes will offer it.

MMOs with an extremely wide range of different materials and a lot of intermixing of those materials in products. This is the other thing that FFXI does so 'right' that might have been missed.

It might be a little hard to get all of it without going overboard, so just push back on whichever part of this I'm leaving out. I am likely to 'forget to mention' parts, it's like trying to describe to someone every thing in your apartment, some things are so 'obvious' you forget that they are there, but the layout won't make sense to others.

It's a tier thing. You don't go mining for Darksteel. You go mining for Iron and Darksteel is the rare drop from mining. Therefore you're guaranteed Iron, but not guaranteed Darksteel. But Iron isn't hugely profitable. So if you don't like mining, you don't mine, because if you only got Iron, it would feel like a waste.

If you like mining, that feels like 'a bad day' but not 'a waste of your time' any more than 'farming in BDO and not getting the big money drop for the area'.

The next layer is the fact that with 8 different ingredients for one 'synthesis', and a massive amount of different materials, there's always a chance that one of those will be in low supply, then you have to compete for it. When it's in low supply the price goes up above the efficiency point if you have any related skills.

So if 'there's very little Darksteel because no one got lucky', you can try to make money with something 'more efficient' but 'efficient' is almost always 'the lucky drop from doing some equivalent', whether that be fighting mobs for stuff or gathering.

So if you aim to make 5x of some armor piece and your profit margin is 40k on the piece, and you go to buy the last component and there are only 2x because no one 'got lucky', then you can't make them, right? Then you 'wait for someone to get one'.

Anyways all this depends on one more data point that is implied, not sure how aware you are of it, but, more numbers!

A server is expected to have 15,000 registered accounts at launch and upgrade over time to 50,000 (presumably as more people drop off). Given the standard MMO activity numbers, that gives us around 60,000 player-hours per day max.

103 nodes, despite the fact that they will be different in size, we can still average their functionality at 600 player-hours per node, per day. Assume that half of this is leveling up without much economic benefit, or hanging around in town, again, averaging between those who go hard all the time, and people like me who play multiple games, for 300 player hours left for actual economic 'work' per day.

You're a crypto guy so you know what happens now, right? If everyone agrees on value of a coin, it moves fast. If everyone spreads out over 60 coins, it flows differently. Same for stocks (on my side, that's what I do now, figured I would put all that data gathering, number crunching, predictive algorithm power into raw MONEY, mwahahaha).

Economic niches in high liquidity games are like playing stock markets, you just constantly move to whatever you think everyone else is going to assume has value, next. MMOs give you the option to corner markets and have real value instead.

So, high requirements across the board for making armor and certain things, interdependence of processors (let's say we get to around where FFXI is, with 20 types of ore/ingot, 15 Woods, 30 herbs, 10 miscellaneous for a total of 75). Now we've got 4 player-hours a day for each item, not even counting fisherfolk.

I expect that higher liquidity would exist in Metropolis nodes, but outskirts style village nodes would have less of these, and focus on gathering up rare items. But whereas I expect (using standard sigma variance) there to be 1500 player hours available in the Metropolis, I only expect 80-120 player hours available in the outskirt villages.

On the day that the village's main fisher doesn't log in, you hope the secondary can provide them all, wait for it, or go get your own fish because now it is explicitly more efficient to go get your own fish if your next shipment or plan or 'competitive edge against the village two nodes over' relies on you making those 30 Mordant Dye or whatever within 2 days.

tl;dr if you want variety, live in a smaller node? If Ashes fails to make 'living in any node other than a Metropolis node' meaningfully inefficient for economic growth, I feel their whole model will be painful anyway.

We have not received permission from beaushinkle to share the quoted post.

And all I can say to that is that I deeply, fervently, hope so too.

I believe it's possible, but I'd need a couple thousand players to make sure. Simulants are still only simulants. Whether I pull them from BDO or the Nasdaq, they're still just simulants, and YouTubers/streamers continue to mess with models worse than ever.

We should hope they have an economist on staff?

We have not received permission from maouw to share the quoted post.

You thought it was a simple forum poster, but it was I! DIO.

We have not received permission from beaushinkle to share the quoted post.

I'm more of the 'desperately try to help and support everyone while they tell me how wrong I am, then at the last moment when I know they're all about to lose or die for not listening, grab all their stuff and take the only escape pod' villain.

We have not received permission from beaushinkle to share the quoted post.

This methodology has some problems in MMOs that it doesn't have in real life, but you may not see them as problems, so I'll ask, (also point out something from the Vassal Node thing for those who might not have followed the link).

Basically 'can you say you are willing to pay more than you actually have?' and all the issues that come from either doing that, or the countermeasures.

And now, just random stuff from that page that affects a lot about this conversation.

Auction houses enable players to list items at the Economic node in which the auction house is located.[6]

A listing fee will be charged to list items in the auction house.[6]
Normal, discourages constant price hedging too.

Vassal nodes of the auction house node will be able to view items that are listed on that auction house, regardless of node type of the vassal node.[6]
Ok, knowing what's for sale is always nice.

This will be possible through an auctioneer emissary NPC in that node.[6]
Makes sense. But wait, why is it just 'view items'...?

Data relating to auction houses, such as price history, volumes, average prices, may be available to players via a mayor-constructed service building in their node.[8]
Ohhhh.

Items cannot be listed in non-economic vassal nodes.[6]
Uhmm...

Items listed are also visible in community boards (bulletin boards).[5]
Wait then why do we need the auctioneer emissary? Is that just for when the vassal node is economic too?

Integrated auction houses allow players to purchase items directly from remote auction houses.[5]
The Economic Metropolis thing. Got it. Sounds important.

Purchases of materials and gatherables will be automatically deposited within the listing node's local warehouse. Players will need to travel to that warehouse to retrieve them. Players wishing to move these items elsewhere will need to utilize the caravan system or other type of transportation.[7][6]
Listing node... so... non economic nodes don't receive gatherables or materials to their location when they buy them, period. Got it.

Purchases of anything other than materials and gatherables will be mailed to the purchaser.[7]
Mailed where? Do I have to be a citizen in this case?

Just figuring out what clarifications to ask for next month, so let me know if all that made the same sort of sense to everyone else.

We have not received permission from beaushinkle to share the quoted post.

My general design solution to these sorts of things is to 'twist' them, not 'fight' them, since obviously fighting raw economics is a losing battle in so many ways. "Twisting" allows for creativity on the part of the designer, and all sorts of things come up, so I think I just wanna watch and see what they do.

"Dragon attacks the bank because there's too much gold and they want to take it to sleep on."