Commodities Acquisition

Rispok

I did get 508 steel for 149.0511811024g per in the past 24 hours. Not sure if the restock rate changed or I got lucky. Very rare to get that much for that low.

Sarapis

Aelios said:

I can personally attest to Steel being next to impossible to come by regularly, as well as Leather.

Between Peak, Trey, and I - we're burning through a TON of materials in short order, paying around 1000 gold per rapier created. 

I really hope this isn't a war of attrition, as I'm broke. 

I don't think you're looking very hard! I check at least once a day at various times, and so far every time I've checked there's hundreds for sale in villages. Right now, over 350 for instance.

Trey

Sarapis said:

Aelios said:

I can personally attest to Steel being next to impossible to come by regularly, as well as Leather.

Between Peak, Trey, and I - we're burning through a TON of materials in short order, paying around 1000 gold per rapier created. 

I really hope this isn't a war of attrition, as I'm broke. 

I don't think you're looking very hard! I check at least once a day at various times, and so far every time I've checked there's hundreds for sale in villages. Right now, over 350 for instance.

Again, it's the price, not the supply.

Sarapis

I think you guys had just gotten used to a broken system of oversupply and demand. If you only want to pay the bare minimum price for something, sure, supply should be hard to come by. 

Kinilan

Sarapis said:

I think you guys had just gotten used to a broken system of oversupply and demand. If you only want to pay the bare minimum price for something, sure, supply should be hard to come by. 

A broken system that feeds forging, another broken system, that was screwed hard by the change to city improvements requiring steel, wood and leather. If you have to spend hours forging a mountain of weapons for a small chance to get one with the stats you need to pull off finishing moves just to win a fight you shouldn't be expected to pay through the nose with gold on top of your time investment. And Prospero help the poor knight that wants to use their trans forging skill to make fullplate that has lower base stats than fieldplate.

Sarapis

Forging is indeed pretty boring, and it'll get reworked in time, but it's still going to have costs that vary based on the cost of the comms, and those costs are going to actually fluctuate based on player behavior, as they do now, though once we get the comm production rework I mentioned it, it'll vary with different mechanics than now. 

In the meantime, steel is actually still hovering somewhere below what was originally supposed to be its 'average' price, though just like the minimum price, that average price was fairly arbitrary. Once player production goes in, the price will simply be whatever players sell it for.

Cooper

Saying "There is xxx,xxx of y comm in the game, supply is fine", and "there are always x amount when I check" are 1. not accurate due to dormancy and the satisfaction some people get from just having a full rift of something regardless of it's usefulness to them, and 2. being anecdotal.

More anecdotal evidence to contradict this:

It took my alt two weeks to find enough steel to forge a reasonable amount of fullplates (15 or 20) with logging in every day, checking all the on main continent shops every few hours, and spamming market and house channel asking to buy steel.

You've brought up a few times that people got too used to "cheap" steel - if that is really the case, why don't you just increase the base price if you think it's too low all the time?

The main use of steel is forging, and there is already massive, massive, massive time investments involved to get the quality of equipment necessary to fight at a decent level. Do you feel the current quality of weapons/armor is too high as well, then?

Sarapis

Dormancy's not relevant, as I specifically pointed out that I'm looking at the supply in rifts of active players only.

Currently 634 steel for sale in villages. Like I said, there's almost always plenty. Actually, I have yet to check and find anything but a lot out there. I'm sure there are times when the villages are empty, but those appear to be quite rare. If it starts to look like supply is actually not keeping up, I'll up production, but doesn't appear to be the case.

As for base price, I did bring it up, just without setting it manually. The goal isn't a system where the price of comms stays constant, but where the price is at least partially determined by player actions, which it wasn't before due to oversupply.

There's also only a time investment to produce the equipment necessary to fight at a decent level if you don't want to pay someone else to do it. Forging is a tradeskill after all!

Trey

Out of curiosity, could you give an example of what you think is equipment necessary to fight at a decent level? Let's do something fairly relevant to the topic at hand and say 'knights'. I'm assuming Runewardens are the most common, so let's go with that.

Kinilan

Sarapis said:

As for base price, I did bring it up, just without setting it manually. The goal isn't a system where the price of comms stays constant, but where the price is at least partially determined by player actions, which it wasn't before due to oversupply.

Because the prices only go up when the comms are bought out below a given point, and which point the price skyrockets. It was common courtesy to not buy comms below that point. The actions of the players were setting the price. Conversly the price doesn't drop nearly as fast as it rises even after a shop has reached the stock cap but now with the demand added by cities their needs and the massive bank accounts of each city, are pitted against individuals.

I get the reasoning, I understand why. Hell I still remember reading on the old web site all those years ago about trading comms being a thing to do in Achaea and then being all kids of disappointed in the system when i saw what it was. Change here is good. But you've put the horse before the cart here. Forging isn't an option. Knights need crazy high speed stats just to fight and fullplate is a massive investment in time and gold and while those items only represent a small section of things that require comms they have a much larger impact on how three classes play within the game.

Sarapis

Depends on your definition of decent, but the equipment required hasn't changed since the comm supply was changed! Seems like a good opportunity to me for enterprising forgers and/or comm hoarders to make some gold. 

Cooper

As has been proven in the past repeatedly with forging/enchanting/venom/herb/crystal/clothing/jewelry/cooking/reagents/ingredients/etc agreements/bans/minimum pricing, this never works. There is always someone who is willing to sell lower in order to sell their goods, or give good prices to friends and allies.

Kinilan

Sarapis said:

Depends on your definition of decent, but the equipment required hasn't changed since the comm supply was changed! Seems like a good opportunity to me for enterprising forgers and/or comm hoarders to make some gold. 

But the cost has. It's not a matter of buy 10 steel, forge two rapiers and off you go. It's buy 500 steel, forge for a minimum of 4 hours if you have a hammer and the master forger trait and hope you get lucky enough to wind up with two rapiers you can use to get below the 2 second dsl balance point needed to pull off disembowl or vivisect...or whatever the hell paladins do. But let's be honest nobody cares about paladins.

There is no enterprise to be made here, this isn't an opportunity. It's a bad situation involving something that is fundamental to the playability of three classes that has been made that much worse for the sake of a gold sink.

Trey

Sarapis said:

Depends on your definition of decent, but the equipment required hasn't changed since the comm supply was changed! Seems like a good opportunity to me for enterprising forgers and/or comm hoarders to make some gold. 

This is an example of an answer that leads me to believe that you really don't have an idea of what forging is like

Nellaundra

Gods have all skills. Magic up about 1200 steel, a hammer of forging, and a forge and just go at it for a while. Try for the following stats on a rapier:

60+ attack, 150+ tohit, 230+ speed. Now try for two of them. You will see why this is an issue. These are pretty much the bare minimum for fighting as well.

Sarapis

Cooper said:

 There is always someone who is willing to sell lower in order to sell their goods, or give good prices to friends and allies.

So then what's the issue? Buy steel from those people if that's true. 

I think it's not actually true though. There are a lot of people who bought and have a lot of steel acquired from before the changes went in. If what you're telling me is true - that there's always someone willing to sell lower in order to sell their goods - why not go to those people to get steel?

I think what you're suggesting is that there's always someone who is willing to value their time at approximately zero, which may be true, but is not at all the same thing as saying that you can't buy something at one price and sell it at a higher price. I'm very sure you can (as witnessed regularly on the credit market, for instance, or with particularly excellent forged weapons).  

That actually brings up an interesting point: Maybe we need comm<-> gold commodities market in the game, to better connect comm sellers with comm buyers. I'm generally a bit reluctant to put in trade systems that obviate the need for personal interaction, but commodities, like credits, might be one of those things that would work well that way, and would makee it both more easily possible to try to run a comm-trading business and also to acquire comms at whatever the going market price is amongst players. 

Cooper

I wouldn't touch a 60/150/230 rapier, lol.

72/150/239+

Sarapis

Nellaundra said:

Gods have all skills. Magic up about 1200 steel, a hammer of forging, and a forge and just go at it for a while. Try for the following stats on a rapier:

60+ attack, 150+ tohit, 230+ speed. Now try for two of them. You will see why this is an issue. These are pretty much the bare minimum for fighting as well.

230+ speed? Did you typo? That's faster than a level 3 artie rapier...

(P.S. Currently 745 steel for sale in villages, ranging from 66 gold, though that's in Umbrin, to 142 in one of the mainland villages, to 190 at the high end on the mainland villages).

Trey

I've got a decent amount of steel built up again (not nearly as much as I'd like) because I wanted to do a big run of fullplate and have some in reserve for orders/'emergencies'. I'm kind of thinking of just not doing any forging that isn't specifically ordered and comms provided until we get a) Knight changes, or b) the new commodity production skill. My profit out of a group of 1000 steel for rapiers used to run on average of 20-50k for about 8 hours labor (with the rare goldmine hit where I'd snag a 30-50cr rapier out of the bunch). With steel costing a premium these days. I usually don't get it for less than 140 per, and at that point on average I'm losing gold.

Nellaundra

No, I did not. With curing systems as they are now, 230+ is the minimum required for combat.  Also, pretty much every time someone asks if they should get an artie weapon, we say, "No, you can forge something better because the stat spread is bad."

Trey

Sarapis said:

Nellaundra said:

Gods have all skills. Magic up about 1200 steel, a hammer of forging, and a forge and just go at it for a while. Try for the following stats on a rapier:

60+ attack, 150+ tohit, 230+ speed. Now try for two of them. You will see why this is an issue. These are pretty much the bare minimum for fighting as well.

230+ speed? Did you typo? That's faster than a level 3 artie rapier...

This is another example, just fyi.

Melodie

Sarapis said:

Nellaundra said:

Gods have all skills. Magic up about 1200 steel, a hammer of forging, and a forge and just go at it for a while. Try for the following stats on a rapier:

60+ attack, 150+ tohit, 230+ speed. Now try for two of them. You will see why this is an issue. These are pretty much the bare minimum for fighting as well.

230+ speed? Did you typo? That's faster than a level 3 artie rapier...

(P.S. Currently 745 steel for sale in villages, ranging from 66 gold, though that's in Umbrin, to 142 in one of the mainland villages, to 190 at the high end on the mainland villages).

I'm afraid that's not a typo. Most "excellent" rapiers needed these days are 230+ speed, and 227 is considered the general minimum to really dig hard into combat. A lot of people want 235 (that's a popular speed for bards, especially if the rapier has high damage, like 80+), and many more will want to dig higher than that.

Sarapis

Nellaundra said:

No, I did not. With curing systems as they are now, 230+ is the minimum required for combat.  Also, pretty much every time someone asks if they should get an artie weapon, we say, "No, you can forge something better because the stat spread is bad

So, what you're saying then, is that you don't like the fact that it's expensive and time-consuming to forge a rapier that's faster than one that costs 1600 credits? And your solution sounds like it is to make it easier to forge weapons that good? I think your expectations may be a bit out of line.... Regardless, that's got nothing to do with the price of steel in the game. I'm far from a PK expert these days, but that's a problem with Knights as a class, not with the price of steel. It should certainly not require a weapon that's faster than a level 3 artie. Forging something with stats like that should be a once in a blue moon thing. Also a topic for another (very valid) thread.

Nellaundra

And now you see why we've been begging for weaponry/knight changes forever

Melodie

Sarapis said:

Nellaundra said:

No, I did not. With curing systems as they are now, 230+ is the minimum required for combat.  Also, pretty much every time someone asks if they should get an artie weapon, we say, "No, you can forge something better because the stat spread is bad

So, what you're saying then, is that you don't like the fact that it's expensive and time-consuming to forge a rapier that's faster than one that costs 1600 credits? And your solution sounds like it is to make it easier to forge weapons that good? I think your expectations may be a bit out of line.... Regardless, that's got nothing to do with the price of steel in the game. I'm far from a PK expert these days, but that's a problem with Knights as a class, not with the price of steel. It should certainly not require a weapon that's faster than a level 3 artie. Forging something with stats like that should be a once in a blue moon thing.

The bolded I think is what everyone is trying to say. That might not have anything directly to do with the price of steel, but the pricing of steel does actually feed into the problem and make it worse, which is why people are so off from these changes (especially with the city improvements change).

Sarapis

Yeah, I agree that's pretty ridiculous, and going to going to check with our dev team combat experts. If you guys are only talking about the very high end combatants, well, such is life- got no problem with the very high end people needing rare kick ass equipment to compete with other high-end combatants with rare kick ass equipment.

If you're talking about your average midbie actually needing that to compete against another average midbie though, or to hunt effectively, that's a different story. 

Melodie

It's not nearly so huge a problem with hunting - hunting you can go with the lower end of "excellent" and be fine, or use some other weapons (I hear axes aren't too bad). But to actually get into real combat (not low tier, but mid, upper, and top tier), yes, you would need those kinds of weapons to beat out the curing times of your opponents to achieve things like disembowels, damnation, and so on effectively.

Edit: Basically if you fight anyone with SVO, or hell even server-side curing, you will need 227 speed/150 to hit at least, whether you get them from a runewarden runing a slightly sub-par weapon, or just able to use the weapon as-is as a paladin or infernal.

Nim

Sarapis said:

Forging something with stats like that should be a once in a blue moon thing.

No, see, it already is. What you think should be the case is the case, and that is also the problem, because Achaeans are crazy and will get that once in a blue moon thing, and then enough of them get it that you need to balance things around there being a lot of people with these really cool things.

Nellaundra

If you want to PvP against anyone with a system as a Knight, you need the bare minimum of 227 speed and 150 tohit. That is for any knight. A runewarden midbie can swing a bit lower thanks to runes, but those are the numbers you need to look at.

e: typos

Sarapis

Nim said:

Sarapis said:

Forging something with stats like that should be a once in a blue moon thing.

No, see, it already is. What you think should be the case is the case, and that is also the problem, because Achaeans are crazy and will get that once in a blue moon thing, and then enough of them get it that you need to balance things around there being a lot of people with these really cool things.

Well, it just means that those people are going to be better, which isn't different than having arties generally. We'll certainly be adjusting in any case during this process of working on knight changes.