Preserving Economic Viability of New Trade Skills

Jules

I'm really hoping that when the new trade skills are rolled out, they include some mechanism to protect them as actual, viable *trade* skills for the portion of the player base that needs to get an actual return from such skills.  If I'm a financially well-off player with an eye to make friends, and move up in my orgs, and there are no serious downsides to providing my trade skill free to others, it's a no-brainer.  Doing *just* that isn't going to mean advancement, but it makes absolute sense as part of an overall approach, and that is always going to be harmful to the actual market (because in Achaea enough of us are artificially "rich" to matter).  I'm not trying to push admin to run Achaea as some sort of charity, but Achaea does have sort of a unique game economy, and having more people who are trying (and succeeding) at making some actual gold tends to make for better and more consistent service availability than my fellow credit whore who is doing it "to be nice".  If this is something enough people care about, the next question is, what's the best way to make it actually work?  How do you make it unattractive for us credit whores to curry "good will" by providing free or nearly free services?  

Trevize

While I don't agree with the end goal for the reason I stated in the other thread (it's a result of player decisions), looking at it from a perspective of 'how would this be done?' the implementation would be difficult. It's impossible to make it to where someone 'has' to keep gold, so the goal would have to be to discourage it through some method or another.

I don't have many ideas, and I see flaws in all of these ideas, but this is all I could come up with on short notice:

A simplified selling/buying system, more readily available than shops. Major problems here: people paid a ton for shops and if this devalues them, all that is lost.

With or without the above: ways to store services so they can be bought. 'Runestones' for runes, for example. Also, some sort of system where someone can purchase a tailor/jeweller's services, but they are the ones billed (with an extra fee for not being a tailor/jeweller but requesting a design, a fee that goes to the artisan who created the design). Things like that.

Xith

Frankly I think cheap or free services do screw up the people that are trying to make money on their skills. I have a poo-ton of credit investment that I could never make back in-game. But I still charge 1500+ per waterwalking despite it costing me 800, because that's how business works. I do generous things sometimes, but when people seek me out for something I specifically can offer, I make it clear that I'm not an errand boy and the cost includes both goods and services.

If they want a custom tailoring design for only the cost of the design and the comms, they're welcome to buy their own tailoring license.

I don't think conc/trans/forging/enchantment/venoms(?) should cost the full 200cr that tailoring/jewellery/cooking do, since the latter offer a greater creative impact on the game environment as well as requiring volunteer/admin time to approve designs.

The class tradeskills should probably go for more like 50cr for a license.

Jules

I do think separating the skills out in the first place will help somewhat in and of itself, whether that was one of admin's considerations or not.  But yes, we're still stuck with things like runes and totems, and equivalent useful things other classes have that aren't technically trade skills.  I can sort of make peace with those, as runes need to be applied quickly (and probably for free) to large groups in raid situations, and totems... well, maybe someday something something.  

Anyway, back to some sort of attempt to preserve the new skills that *will* be considered trade skills.  Part of the answer might lie in creating artificial costs (in this case not monetary) that would be palatable enough to someone trying to drum up some gold, but unpalatable to most "independently wealthy" Achaeans.  There needs to be a downside to providing the services that is sufficiently annoying to someone who just wants to "make nice" (I'm not trying to be mean, I think nearly all of us do it) and that quite frankly helps makes it seem rather bold to ask for free services.  Unfortunately, I already know that probably wouldn't be enough on its own.  Enough people would be quite content to still provide the free services, and forgo hunting, exploring, or whatever else, because they already do.  

Another option that could be used with or without the above is to limit the number of "services" a person can provide to others in a given time period.  At least the people giving free services will run out of "charges" and users will be forced to look elsewhere, and hopefully end up reinforcing the idea of services as a thing that is paid for.  This obviously has some cons, but might end up as a lesser evil.  

Whatever the answer is probably does involve some mechanics, but its ultimate goal is to change what is and isn't socially acceptable when it comes to "freebies".  I totally agree that the second part can't be ignored.  

Blujixapug

For tradeskills to be economically viable they need to balance supply and demand.

Supply can't be infinite, or it will outweigh demand, and the price of goods will fall.

You can limit supply by having goods take time to gather or generate. The problem you then encounter is sellers who don't value their time or effort. If people aren't attempting to maximise their profits, it undermines the economic premise.

You can circumvent this by mechanically limiting supply. A seller can undervalue their goods if they want, but if supply is mechanically limited they will soon run out of stock to sell, and be physically unable to replenish it at a level that meets demand. Depending on the resource and whether it is essential to gameplay (eg. curatives, not luxury goods), this may require admin monitoring to ensure a 'fair' level of scarcity, to prevent demand from dramatically outweighing supply.

Achaea's mercantile setup creates some issues in terms of bringing goods to market. Tailoring and Jewelery are tough to make work as tradeskills, because to recoup design costs and eventually profit, you need to sell goods in significant quantities. That's not plausible unless you own or have access to a shop. You can try to get around this by selling designs, operating on commission, but that is a very high-effort, labour-intensive way to operate. These are great skills for creativity, but they don't work very well as tradeskills IMO.

Gold, inflation, and goldsinks are a related but separate issue. There must be ways for gold to permanently leave the economy - not just be transferred between players - that correspond with gold entering the economy, or else gold in circulation builds up, currency is devalued, and credits cost more. Inkmilling removed the goldsink of buying ink from NPCs. It will be interesting to see if they add or remove any goldsinks to/from existing tradeskills when they shift them over.

Xith

I think self-restraint is pretty much all you need. If you like being a doormat or encouraging newbies to expect doormats, then I guess give free services.

Mithridates

I've always wondered how the economy of Achaea hasn't completely capsized with the unlimited commodity supply that's currently in place, and the unlimited amount of gold that can be obtained. 

Mazoth

Mithridates said:

I've always wondered how the economy of Achaea hasn't completely capsized with the unlimited commodity supply that's currently in place, and the unlimited amount of gold that can be obtained. 

Effort vs. reward I'd say, though that is merely speculation on my part.  Nobody (that I know) REALLY wants to stand there watching text forging go by for like 10 hours. So I think what keeps things in check is there's just barely enough people not making stuff, in my example forging, to keep costs somewhat within reason rather than dirt level low.  I'd never expect comm cost for any item from that skillset EVER...now I don't really know anything about tailoring/enchanting/etc. etc.

Is the upcoming model going to a similar system for tailoring where you buy licenses for your crafting skills though?

Antonius

Best answer so far based on what Tecton said last year: No, you won't need licences for most of them. Likely only the ones where you submit designs (so tailoring, cooking, jewellery) will require licences, much as they are now, I assume because there's also admin time involved in reviewing and approving them. There will be a limit to how many crafting skills you can pick up, though exactly what that number will be hasn't been stated.

Kyrra

Antonius said:

Best answer so far based on what Tecton said last year: No, you won't need licences for most of them. Likely only the ones where you submit designs (so tailoring, cooking, jewellery) will require licences, much as they are now, I assume because there's also admin time involved in reviewing and approving them. There will be a limit to how many crafting skills you can pick up, though exactly what that number will be hasn't been stated.

That's kind of lame with the tailoring/jewellery/cooking abilities. Part of why I picked those up is to make my own things, and be able to submit my own designs. If they cut down how many licences you're allowed to own, I've expect a full refund of the credit licence cost plus lessons invested. I never liked that aspect of Lusternia where the tradeskills are so limited, and are restricted further by class.

Antonius

As far as I know the intention is to just stop people from having literally every trade skill possible and not needing to interact with anybody else for anything at all ever. I imagine you'd still be able to pick up cooking/tailoring/jewellery (or just keep them if you already have them, depending on how they do the refunds) as well as one or two of the newly-divorced-from-classes trade skills. The licensed skills may not even apply to the limit, there's really no way to know at this point because there haven't been any concrete details yet, only statements from Tecton on how he thought it would work at that moment in time.

Sena

I think the problem of people working for potential favour instead of immediate profit has minimal impact, there are much bigger problems that prevent tradeskills from being viable sources of income.

A much bigger problem is that, even when people are seeking profit as their primary goal, they're still willing to work for practically nothing. For example, potash isn't selling for 6 gold/piece because of people giving away minerals for free, it's because of people being perfectly content working for 4000 gold per hour (or, more likely, not even considering the time cost at all). Time is the biggest cost in a lot of tradeskills, and for some reason a lot of people find it difficult to assign a value to that time. Limiting the supply as Blujixapug suggested will help a lot with this. But that won't be enough, because of the next problem.

It only takes a small number of players to provide goods for the entire game, and there are a lot more than a few players providing those goods. If you limit supply, then the tradeskills become more profitable (ideally), but fewer players will be able to use the tradeskill. If you want tradeskills to be a widespread option (which seems likely, given that they're being made more accessible), you also have to force the supply to be spread more evenly between users of the tradeskill.

The design tradeskills (cooking, tailoring, jewellery) have their own problems. Cooking has almost no demand, since a lot of players have no need for food at all, and the ones who do need food usually only care about sustenance and so they go for the near-infinite supply of cheap, filling food sold by denizens. For tailoring and jewellery, nearly all players wear a single outfit constantly until it decays instead of changing frequently like in real life, and clothing/jewellery lasts a long time, so again there's not enough demand. Then there's the problem Blujixapug mentioned of them generally requiring a shop in order to be practical.

Probably the biggest problem though is that all tradeskills are far inferior to bashing and questing. So after the initial investment of learning the tradeskill and maybe buying a license, you're able to do something that won't ever be as profitable as an easier option with no initial cost. This affects inflation as well, since the best sources of gold are the ones that generate new gold, while things that just transfer gold between players are a lot less profitable.

Xith

And never mind shops. Purely luxury item. The closest you'll get to making the money back is by renting them out, ironically.

Kyrra

Xith said:

And never mind shops. Purely luxury item. The closest you'll get to making the money back is by renting them out, ironically.

I think shops are more profitable if you're able to stock items with no expense to yourself. And by expense, I don't mean time factored into doing things, but having to pay for things that are otherwise not attainable yourself.

Things like tuns set people back a lot as well. I think it's a million or two million gold for a set of twelve to cover just one set of curatives.

Siduri

@Xith : You don't understand why we do it for free...

Xith

Kyrra said:

Xith said:

And never mind shops. Purely luxury item. The closest you'll get to making the money back is by renting them out, ironically.

I think shops are more profitable if you're able to stock items with no expense to yourself. And by expense, I don't mean time factored into doing things, but having to pay for things that are otherwise not attainable yourself.

Things like tuns set people back a lot as well. I think it's a million or two million gold for a set of twelve to cover just one set of curatives.

Yeah it doesn't help that those tun shops all price their elixirs at 200 per as well. I priced the single health tun I had at 450 and it still sold like candy for quite a while. It only stopped selling because I'm not a forestal and at one point I ran out of stock.

People will always return to your shop if you have everything they need. So two health/mana tuns and one of everything else, price up to wherever you want (cause remember, it's a shop) and you will still get every customer you ever had.

The reason nobody can make their shop investment back is because people make their prices far too low and nobody can compete with someone who values their shop at nothing.

That being said, I hope there isn't a limit to your number of tradeskills. People who are all-out merchants with shops and services to run shouldn't be limited and have to still buy from others.

EDIT: Yes, Siduri, it does make the world burn.

Sarapis

Xith said:

That being said, I hope there isn't a limit to your number of tradeskills. People who are all-out merchants with shops and services to run shouldn't be limited and have to still buy from others.

The very definition of being a merchant is buying things from one source and selling them to another. 

Renoir

From what I can see of 'trade skills' to be divorced from classes we have:

Concoctions,

Transmutation,

Forging, and

Enchantment

If those end up the only skills that get divorced from classes, I could see them limiting it to two of the four, and not allowing both Concoctions and Transmutation, for lore reasons..

Ren, personally, would quickly pick up Transmutation and Enchantment. She'd consider Forging, if the limit ended up being three of the four, which I sincerely doubt.

Sena

Venoms is also being split off, unless the plan has changed in the last few months. There will probably also be a couple new tradeskills added.

Mithridates

Yeah, serps should totally have necklace of purity AND shrugging. 

Renoir

Ah, forgot about venoms. With Five divorced trade skills, and two that I could not imagine allowing you to have both, I could see the limit going two or three. More if they do in fact create new tradeskills.

Personally, I understand not wanting one person able to milk venoms, forge armour, enchant items, and farm either herbs or minerals. Even though I would love to be able to do everything short of the venoms.

As @Sarapis said, the essence of being a Merchant, is making business connections with producers willing to sell for less than they would get selling to the public themselves while still making a profit themselves, a la wholesale, then doing the selling to the public yourself. If one person can simply make all of it, it takes out the realness of the economy.

In Example, Best Buy does not manufacture their Video Games, or Blu Rays, or Music CD's, they buy them in bulk from a Distributor, or from the manufacturer directly.

Vayne

Transmutation takes a ridiculous amount of time between extracting, synthesising, and transmutating. Prices for minerals have found a balance naturally between what people are willing to pay and what alchemists are willing to sell for I think, but I think supply far outweighs demand at this point, at least from my perspective. The change in extraction sites multiplied the amount of primes available at any given time times the number of alchemists so that there is now no competition for resources whatsoever.

Mithridates

I can't see any viable way to keep trade skills economically sound while allowing every class to have access to the skill.  This honestly just seems like a bit of a plot from IRE to get more credit sales. 

Trevize

Vayne said:

Transmutation takes a ridiculous amount of time between extracting, synthesising, and transmutating. Prices for minerals have found a balance naturally between what people are willing to pay and what alchemists are willing to sell for I think, but I think supply far outweighs demand at this point, at least from my perspective. The change in extraction sites multiplied the amount of primes available at any given time times the number of alchemists so that there is now no competition for resources whatsoever.

Clearly the solution is to recruit more alchemists. Vayne, hop to it!

Vayne

I recruit them left and right!

Antonius

Mithridates said:

I can't see any viable way to keep trade skills economically sound while allowing every class to have access to the skill.  This honestly just seems like a bit of a plot from IRE to get more credit sales. 

I think your problem might be thinking that's currently the case, to be honest.

Mithridates

How can this be good for anything, economically speaking? You'll be flooding the market, making prices drop on all trade skill items. Furthermore, you'll be removing people from the market altogether. Why buy herbs when I can just get concoctions and make my own? Plus my enchantments. I'll be set. I just won't make any money off my trade skills. And neither will anyone else.

Tecton

At the end of the day, there will always be people who want to help their friends and fellow org members by doing things for free/cheap. Is it necessarily a bad thing? I don't think so, helping new adventurers and returning people get set up is a great thing, and encourages people to stick around. 

Should people expect freebies? Certainly not! But the market on any player-produced item is completely driven by the players and not something we're really going to police.

To answer some of the other questions asked here:

• Yes, there will be a limit of how many trade/crafting skills each player will have access to.
• Yes, there will be some limitations, especially on things like concoctions and alchemy.
• Yes, there will be new trade skills to go along with the divorced ones (timeframe unknown).
• Yes, tradeskills that require design review will still require a license.
• Yes, tradeskills with a license will count towards the maximum.
• Yes, there will be some form of fair compensation for people who lose existing tradeskills in the changeover to the new system.

Hope this helps!

Mithridates

@Tecton how are you going to keep things from getting dirt cheap once everyone starts flooding the markets? 

Tecton

As I mentioned above, it's not something we're going to artificially control with price minimums. Anything on our end will be managing and balancing the availability of resources required for all of the new and split tradeskills.

I'm sure that there will be a lot of fluctuation in the market as soon as the new system comes in, but it will level itself out over time.

Skye

@Mithridates speaking from experience after autoclass caused a giant influx of rogue forestals harvesting all the ginseng in sight and everyone was doing health refills for practically nothing,* it eventually evens out. It will never be the same price as it used to be, but it sorts itself out after a while.

*Some idiot, can't remember his name but pretty sure he was one of the hundreds of freshly rogued forestals, had the gall to complain that he was being 'put out of business' after the fact (and celebrating with 'lol f u Oakstone prices!!111!!!'.) Those recommended prices had been put there for a reason even if they were in dire need of reviewing. But like I said, it eventually self regulated even without a price list.

I would have loved the idea of some kind of cartel RP, fixing prices and what not, but it's so hard to enforce in the game.