Gold Generation

Sarapis

Khaibit said:

Sarapis said:

Somewhat related on a comedic note, my wife and I were watching a screen while eating dinner tonight, and Hudson Hawk was on. It’s a terrible, early ‘90s movie starring Bruce Willis as a cat burglar. It’s pretty bad. 

But this quote made me chuckle because of this discussion about the value of gold. It’s from one of the main villains, who are working on a way to turn iron into gold.

“After a couple years of steady production, we’ll flood the market with so much gold that gold itself – the foundation of all finance – will lose its meaning. Brokers, economists, fellow entrepreneurs will drown in the saliva of their own nervous breakdowns! Markets will crash crash financial empires will crumble crumble.”

You do have to imagine it being said by Sandra Bernhardt though, in a super campy villainess role.

Don't you mock Hudson Hawk! 
That film is amazing! 
And now i am going to have to go watch it again

If the Mario brothers weren't New Jersey's third-largest crime family, I'd say, "Kiss my ass." But considering your status, I will say, "Slurp my butt."

Szanthax

Sarapis said:

Khaibit said:

Sarapis said:

Somewhat related on a comedic note, my wife and I were watching a screen while eating dinner tonight, and Hudson Hawk was on. It’s a terrible, early ‘90s movie starring Bruce Willis as a cat burglar. It’s pretty bad. 

But this quote made me chuckle because of this discussion about the value of gold. It’s from one of the main villains, who are working on a way to turn iron into gold.

“After a couple years of steady production, we’ll flood the market with so much gold that gold itself – the foundation of all finance – will lose its meaning. Brokers, economists, fellow entrepreneurs will drown in the saliva of their own nervous breakdowns! Markets will crash crash financial empires will crumble crumble.”

You do have to imagine it being said by Sandra Bernhardt though, in a super campy villainess role.

Don't you mock Hudson Hawk! 
That film is amazing! 
And now i am going to have to go watch it again

If the Mario brothers weren't New Jersey's third-largest crime family, I'd say, "Kiss my ass." But considering your status, I will say, "Slurp my butt."

Wtf... Again not sure if offended or aroused

Sarapis

It's a quote from the movie.

Szanthax

Sarapis said:

It's a quote from the movie.

Ah... Ok lol. I'm easily cornfused

Khaibit

Sarapis said:

Khaibit said:

Sarapis said:

Somewhat related on a comedic note, my wife and I were watching a screen while eating dinner tonight, and Hudson Hawk was on. It’s a terrible, early ‘90s movie starring Bruce Willis as a cat burglar. It’s pretty bad. 

But this quote made me chuckle because of this discussion about the value of gold. It’s from one of the main villains, who are working on a way to turn iron into gold.

“After a couple years of steady production, we’ll flood the market with so much gold that gold itself – the foundation of all finance – will lose its meaning. Brokers, economists, fellow entrepreneurs will drown in the saliva of their own nervous breakdowns! Markets will crash crash financial empires will crumble crumble.”

You do have to imagine it being said by Sandra Bernhardt though, in a super campy villainess role.

Don't you mock Hudson Hawk! 
That film is amazing! 
And now i am going to have to go watch it again

If the Mario brothers weren't New Jersey's third-largest crime family, I'd say, "Kiss my ass." But considering your status, I will say, "Slurp my butt."

Oh, no! You love me! It's your job! You probably love Butterfinger over there. -points at @Szanthax -

Kiet

Ahmet said:

Not to mention you have people like me who have way more than 500 hours bashing and aren't even 90 yet u.u.

what how, even dragon is only like 300-400 hours

Ahmet

Kiet said:

Ahmet said:

Not to mention you have people like me who have way more than 500 hours bashing and aren't even 90 yet u.u.

what how, even dragon is only like 300-400 hours

Because until recently I was a fully unartied serpent, I like multitasking, and I die more often than I should. 

Kresslack

Not everyone has that exact science of how to reach dragon down, or even really the time to invest in it. After six or so years I'm still not dragon, but that's for a few reasons. I don't like hunting; it's boring and I don't really like the repetition/grind of it. I figure every once in a while when I've the time to get on I'll go kill some things and then one of these days I'll get there.

Nizaris

I just came back, and admittedly, my overall knowledge of Achaea seems to be outdated. But, a few ideas to throw into the mix to see what may be of assistance. Additionally, good work on the diminishing returns on the supply end of the problem.

1. One of the particular problems mentioned here is the amount of credits purchased by the top few percent of top-tier bashers. Warcraft, for example, uses as a partial solution to the gold sink problem an "auction house cut" system. Currently, our credit market simply allows for the exchange of credits, without removing gold from the economic system. What about instating a gold sink in the form of a fee for each transaction on the credit market? Perhaps a flat 5% taken from the cost of the credit transaction, that is then dumped out of the system? Or more aggressively, a floating percent based off the net worth of the character?
2. The gold auctions for artie armour right now are a well timed initiative. But, only the winner of the auction pays, and this is inefficient for gold destruction. Websites like Beezid and QuiBids use an interesting "pay per bid" scheme. I'm not sure if the concept is copyrighted, but I submit it as a possible idea: pay for the right to place a  bid (in gold) on all auctions.
3. Eve Online has a full-time economist on staff. While Achaea may not need one full time, having an economist on retainer for consults from time to time may be helpful to adjust factors and get ahead of changes as they crop up.
4. Another neat gold sink from Warcraft would also target high-end hunters more specifically: equipment damage. The idea is simple: weapons and armour take equipment damage with both use and upon death, this damage must be repaired using gold.
5. An idea that I thought of some time ago may be of use, and is completely original to my knowledge. It will take some explaining. The idea is to impose a dynamic equilibrium of sorts; see below for my explanation.

• Pick a target amount of gold that you would like for the game system to have in active circulation, ie. in the hands of adventurers.
• Double this target amount of gold. The new portion of the gold, we call "gold yet to be claimed". This gold is to be the one supply of gold all gold is generated from. It is in the background, and not yet in the hands of a single adventurer.
• On an ongoing basis, measure the amount of gold in "active circulation", versus the amount of "gold yet to be claimed". When they are equal, set a system multiplier of x1.
• When there is 5% more gold in "active circulation", decrease global gold production by 5% (ie. system multiplier becomes 0.95). Also, increase the cost of gold sinks by 5%.
• When there is 5% less gold in active circulation, increase gold production, and decrease gold sink costs.

The idea with this last suggestion is that gold is never created nor destroyed. It simply changes state between "active circulation" and "yet to be claimed", with an automatically computed multiplier to encourage the system back toward equilibrium when it's out of whack with an appropriate amount of force.

Cynlael

Holy shit Nizaris is alive.

Tesha

For future cases, would it be possible for houses/cities to just get an equivalent percentage of sales from the gambling promotions, @Sarapis @Makarios @Nicola? Credit prices went from 6500 to 9000 over the last few months and it seems like people generally bought more gambling things than credits. This is great for IRE's revenue but are there any reasons to exclude house/city credit generation from gambling promotions? I'd love to be more generous with creditsales to help out newbies.

Ahmet

@Nizaris you'd have to tune your point 5 to the number of active achaeans, and the way each of them is using or abusing their bank accounts. It's all fine and dandy to say you want 10mil in active circulation as long as thirty or forty people are actively earning and spending that, but what about when one person is hoarding all the gold they can get their hands on for credits, or because there's just nothing that interests them? Does everyone else lose out because of the one? Or when only one person is buying credits to inject into the economy? What about someone who doesn't participate in activities that have gold sinks attached? What about when ten players go dormant and the scales shift? Or when you get twenty new regulars coming in? And if you don't count gold that's been sitting in bank accounts or packs for decades like this, what about when someone drops 40mil into the economy on a whim? What about when the gold sinks don't account for enough, and you empty the "gold yet to be claimed"? Are the people whose primary sources of revenue come down to system-generated gold (aka not-merchants) just completely screwed? Seems like a sound theory when taken at face value, but it just doesn't seem like it would work as well as you make it sound in an economy like Achaea's, where gold sinks are by and large completely optional.

I dunno. I felt ranty. Sorry  

Aethele

I'm curious about how the July promotion will affect some of this. Artie discount will definitely increase purchases. Will houses/cities get a cut of credits as if people bought credits and then used those on arties? Having the sale go through the website should keep the sale from increasing credit prices. Or will artefacts bought in game also be discounted? 

Nizaris

Hi @Ahmet,

Thanks for reading the post. I agree with you. Any system would require tuning. Point #5 definitely belongs inside of a "constellation" of solutions, both on the generation and destruction sides. I thought about coding up a simulation and running it, but any such simulation would need hard data that no one would have save for the administration. My primary goal was to generate a few ideas in rough formats that could be tuned with this hard data.

A couple of points.

You mention that gold sinks as presently implemented are more or less optional. I agree with this. Gold sinks need to become more mandatory. Stated more aptly, the average character in the game needs to be made more and more likely to be subject to gold sinks in order to play the game.

• It was pointed out that one significant situation where inflation is readily noticeable is in the credit market, as wealthy players tend to buy more credits. So, I propose a tax upon the rich here: sink gold via a tax on the total value of credits purchased. You buy more credits, you pay more tax.
• It was pointed out that one of the impacts of top tier bashing is that those bashers have more arties. While the point that I made in #4 wouldn't work for regular arms and armour paid for in gold (in the long run, it's cheaper to replace worn out equipment than it is to repair it). Instead, I propose equipment damage to be in effect for artefacts alone. Artefacts wouldn't decrease in strength as they took damage, nor would they be destroyed; they would simply no longer be effective when at 0% health until they were repaired. You own more artefacts, you pay more in repairs.
• You mention bank accounts/packs and dormancy. This is a good point. Pick a gold threshold. Pick a threshold of dormancy duration. Slowly decrease the amount of gold in the account/pack and sink it until the total hits the threshold; thereafter cease sinking gold.
• Increase the amount of gold that organizations must pay to exist: guards cost more, city improvements more, etc. Cities pass this cost on to their shops in the form of taxes. Shops pass this on to consumers.
• For hoarders, actively sink their gold on hand, in packs, and within accounts over a specific threshold (higher than dormant characters).

These are just a few points. But to sum all of this up, the general idea is to identify negative behaviours, and then figure out a way to tax those specific behaviours in a mandatory way in order to return gold to the "yet to be claimed" pile with as much quantity and frequency as it is being generated. Don't just make gold sinks that are "in the system" and may be opted into at the discretion of the gold holder; make gold sinks more directly tied to the "abused" activity itself, and which scale on a character-by-character basis with the extent that the behaviour is abused.

I apologize if this post is too much on reiterating my previous post. Please file it in the "redirect" or "clarify" category.

Niz

Cynlael

Nizaris said:

• You mention bank accounts/packs and dormancy. This is a good point. Pick a gold threshold. Pick a threshold of dormancy duration. Slowly decrease the amount of gold in the account/pack and sink it until the total hits the threshold; thereafter cease sinking gold.

Unless the threshold is something like a million gold, this would be a great way to get people to not return to the game. Burnt out with 1.5 million gold in your pack, take a couple months break to do other things, then login again to see that's decreased down to 200k? 

Can you guess what someone's gonna say? I could safely say it won't be pleasant things.

I agree the game needs something to put gold into, besides credits, since combat-related (curatives, armour etc) isn't enough in modern Achaea.. But I can't say I agree with any of these proposed solutions, honestly. None of them would really be good for player retention, if you're forcing them to lose gold, rather than giving them actual things to sink their earned gold into.

Sarathai

Nizaris said:

Another neat gold sink from Warcraft would also target high-end hunters more specifically: equipment damage. The idea is simple: weapons and armour take equipment damage with both use and upon death, this damage must be repaired using gold.

That will result in more people bashing in dragonform, since it requires neither weapons (Gut or Incantation) nor armour (dragonarmour + native resistances, maybe a SoA at most).

Magenta

Sarathai said:

That will result in more people bashing in dragonform, since it requires neither weapons (Gut or Incantation) nor armour (dragonarmour + native resistances, maybe a SoA at most).

Put a time limit on dragonform in that case.

Xaden

Magenta said:

Sarathai said:

That will result in more people bashing in dragonform, since it requires neither weapons (Gut or Incantation) nor armour (dragonarmour + native resistances, maybe a SoA at most).

Put a time limit on dragonform in that case.

OI!! SHUT UP!!

Sarathai

Magenta said:

Sarathai said:

That will result in more people bashing in dragonform, since it requires neither weapons (Gut or Incantation) nor armour (dragonarmour + native resistances, maybe a SoA at most).

Put a time limit on dragonform in that case.

...I want my dislike button back.

Antonius

Nizaris said:

It was pointed out that one of the impacts of top tier bashing is that those bashers have more arties. While the point that I made in #4 wouldn't work for regular arms and armour paid for in gold (in the long run, it's cheaper to replace worn out equipment than it is to repair it). Instead, I propose equipment damage to be in effect for artefacts alone. Artefacts wouldn't decrease in strength as they took damage, nor would they be destroyed; they would simply no longer be effective when at 0% health until they were repaired. You own more artefacts, you pay more in repairs.

A considerable factor for me when buying artefacts is whether or not it reduces the tedious bullshit upkeep required to play Achaea, especially when I go sporadically dormant. I also buy most of my artefacts using real life money, so in my case (and likely others) you'd be actively disincentivizing giving IRE money.

Borran

Why are people flocking to defend the reason we have credits priced at 9k gold per?

Xaden

Borran said:

Why are people flocking to defend the reason we have credits priced at 9k gold per?

What's that now? The high yield dragon bashing that has been going on for years resulting in credits at 6500 gold up until December? Or the 6 months of non-credit based promo's that have driven supply down and raised prices to 9000+ ?

Sethra

Xaden said:

Borran said:

Why are people flocking to defend the reason we have credits priced at 9k gold per?

What's that now? The high yield dragon bashing that has been going on for years resulting in credits at 6500 gold up until December? Or the 6 months of non-credit based promo's that have driven supply down and raised prices to 9000+ ?

i think he means the 6+ months of gambling promos that discouraged the purchasing of credits (this promo does as well, funnily enough), as well as the introduction of relics/rare minerals that super-optimised bashing

Jarrod

People delusional if they think the gold rate hasn't changed drastically in the past 6 months in terms of amount brought in from bashing.

Xaden

Jarrod said:

People delusional if they think the gold rate hasn't changed drastically in the past 6 months in terms of amount brought in from bashing.

Forgive my ignorance but, what's changed in the past 6 months?

Bleak

Death cape, Death's call.

Sarapis

Xaden said:

 Or the 6 months of non-credit based promo's that have driven supply down and raised prices to 9000+ ?

This is why it's really difficult to have an actual discussion here sometimes. You're getting worked up over something that is blatantly just nonsense.  In the past 6 months, 2 of the months have been credit promos. April and January. 

Bleak

I really like the gambling promo's. Don't stop! Just let me win a veil as well some time. 

Xaden

Sarapis said:

Xaden said:

 Or the 6 months of non-credit based promo's that have driven supply down and raised prices to 9000+ ?

This is why it's really difficult to have an actual discussion here sometimes. You're getting worked up over something that is blatantly just nonsense.  In the past 6 months, 2 of the months have been credit promos. April and January. 

April also had the wheel of fortune and January also had the artefact cart. I'm not faulting IRE or you in particular @Sarapis , gotta put food on several tables, but fingers are being pointed at people who put 10 hours a day into the game as the sole problem and that is definitely not the case.

Sarapis

The people who wanted credits in a credit promo in April, for instance, bought them in April. You can't fault 'choice' as a reason people didn't buy credits during a credit promo, as whether there's no other promo, 1 other promo, or 10 other promos, there are still a bazillion other things they could spend their money on. 

It's also worth pointing out that even with the credit promo AND the wheel of fortune, April was still the worst month of the year for us. The fact is, people preferred to spend their money on something else other than credits or the wheel of fortune that month, compared to other months. It's not like having the wheel there makes people decide, "Well, I really want credits, but the Wheel is there too, and that's too confusing for me, so I'll go buy a new Lego set instead."

When we do straight-up credit promos with nothing else, it usually doesn't go particularly well. We'll still have them, but less often than before as they just aren't as popular, and rarely (though not never) just by themselves.