Year 2020

Eril

2020 Hopes:

- I'd love to see an overhaul to the village feelings system, where positive and negative feelings with orgs actually has a purpose and delivers measurable benefits.  Alliances of some form would be extremely positive in my personal opinion, with trade and protectorate options existing.  Would also be cool for cities to be able too train and outfit the denizens of their alliances to improve their skills.  (Also may add relevance to the High Clans, least the racial ones, just sayin!)

- This ties into the above, but I agree with previous statements about war and conquest systems and would love to see them tome to be.  I'd say that it needs to be a mixture of tactics, strategy, and pk though.  New system that would reward both pk contributions, and strategy/tactic contributions to npc troops and defenses.

- Updating to Forging!  Would love to see benefits outside of a cosmetic benefit to a blacksmiths increased skill.  Perhaps adding in special metals that add extra effects to weapons and armor forged with such.  The blacksmith may need to have advanced their skill and experience in forging to be able to use such!


2020 Goals:

- Keep working on Order stuff!  Loving seeing it grow and some increased interest! @Phaestus Love ya boss!  Glad you're still around!

- Be involved in Cyrene's Post-Tsol'teth recovery and changes that will and should inevitably come from Cyrenian culture.

- Maybe, finally learn combat...anyone have unending patience and time?

Synbios

Advanced Happy New Year everyone!

Zackery

And an intermediate happy new year for those of us who aren't quite ready for that one yet.

Naoko

2020 hopes:

- I wanna see some conflict that creates weird alliances or at least ceasefires. Probably unlikely but I'm a sucker for stories where the good guy and the "bad guy" team up to fight the big bad.

- Cyrenian factional alternate skillset. I have no idea how to encourage this to happen but I dream of a Cyrene where we have a combat feature that's exclusive to us. Runewarden, magi, or bard make the most sense, but shaman would be so cool, given how haunted Cyrene is.

- Fire Lord to have a bigger raid/teamfight identity.

2020 goals:

- Learn how to compensate for my combat leadership shortcomings. I want to be dependable as a raid lead.

- Embrace Naoko's RP even though some people apparently really dislike the whole airhead meets hothead thing. Lost sleep over people chewing me out for Naoko's intentional social ineptitude.

- Take Fire Lord as far as it can go, combat and roleplay wise. I know it's the least picked elemental and that some people really don't believe in it, but I love it.

- Get more involved in city RP.

Ygia

2020 hopes:

Deuc to return to play & not forget the story beats the last active Deuc put into play.
An Aurora present too?
Targossas to not be the city of long-standing suffering anymore like holy heck.
A Divine snuggle.

2020 goals:

Finish 1 book, 20 recipes, 5 clothing items.
Get a shop (again).
Join a house (again) and rise through the ranks (again).
Get to a position where I'm comfortable & able to help people a lot without becoming too obsessive in play.

Torrent

Naoko said:

2020 hopes:

- Cyrenian factional alternate skillset. I have no idea how to encourage this to happen but I dream of a Cyrene where we have a combat feature that's exclusive to us. Runewarden, magi, or bard make the most sense, but shaman would be so cool, given how haunted Cyrene is.

The admins touched on this, Cyrene just needs to be more in the combat scene with other cities. This is what Hashan did.  Good luck! Hope it helps

Asmodron

As part of Year 2020, I look back at the years I've played Achaea and developed my characters throughout. I started playing roughly in 2004 and at times cringe and laugh as I recall the things I got into.

With a new decade dawning and my game time slowing down, I'd like to thank those that have influenced my time here and apologize to those where issues manifested.

Happy new year

Achilles

For mom and dad to come home from the store.  We've been good, everything that was bad was @Farrah's fault.

Telinus

With regards to wood and its high price, is this not considered one of the goldsinks that people wanted?

So just thought about this - probably not a goldsink if its being bought from people as opposed to a denizen. I have no idea how any of this works.

Lenn

It sounds like wood is actually even cheaper to produce, and just not able to keep up with demand.

Thaisen

Yeah it could be considered a gold sink...but it is kind of a shitty thing to do...instead of having something new and exciting be a gold sink...it just made old gold sinks more expensive. 

Also doesn't help that cities need a ton of it every day for upkeep of stuff, like why the hell do guards keep smashing the walls of a barracks? Why do I need to keep shipping wood over there...

Iaxus

Buying from the comms market is not a sink, foraging is a gold sink. Pretty much, if the gold goes to a denizen or effectively leaves the hands of players, it's a sink. If it's player-to-player, it's not a sink. 

Namino

That's a bit debatable. You can't call the money you spend sending the foragers out a sink when they come back 24 hours and return your investment 20x. I spend 10k sending my guys out and they bring me back like 400-500 wood in a cycle. Selling at 200, way below market, I'd make around 80k, so come out way ahead.

tl;dr foragers are gold generators, they just generate their value in comms.

Lenn

Gold sink refers to the game as a whole, not to the individual experience. It's not generating gold, you're just passing the costs off to other players, and taking a hefty profit.

People are basically paying you to let them rent your ability to turn gold into wood.

Namino

Yea verily, but EVERYONE is using foragers (or I would assume they are, because it's so ridiculously easy). Which means, individually, EVERYONE is producing an increase of wealth, either for personal use, or selling. Even if you factor in hypothetical people who are buying wood but have no interest in defraying their costs with their own foragers (seek professional help), if the 'average' player is gaining the gold value in wood in excess of the gold value they spend, I'd argue it's not a sink, as wood is readily converted into gold. A gold sink needs to produce a product that is not readily convertible to gold, such as an artefact, bound credits, so forth.

Edit: So in this case, the actual SINK step is when all that wood gets turned into housing credits. That is the step when the liquid asset (gold/wood) becomes fixed. The high price of wood in a roundabout way does contribute to a sink, because it increases the amount of liquid asset disappearing into the fixed asset, but perhaps the issue is now that the proportion of the population participating in the sink step (building houses, or fitting things to their ships to a lesser extent) is much much smaller than the population participating in wood trading. So the consequences of a high commodity value is benefiting many but disproportionately hurting those who bite on the fixed asset.

Iaxus

Namino said:

A gold sink needs to produce a product that is not readily convertible to gold, such as an artefact, bound credits, so forth.

I know I'm pulling this line out of context, but I feel it's worth clarifying that this sentence, in and of itself, is not accurate.
If I give 10,000 gold to a humgii, it is "sunk", but produced no product.

Antonius

Foraging is a gold sink no matter what happens to the wood. If I spend 10k to send out foragers, then sell the resulting wood for 200k that another player already possessed, the game's economy has 10k less gold in it than it did before that took place. That's your sink.

It would only not be a gold sink if you could turn wood into more than 10k gold that doesn't already exist, such as having a denizen that buys wood 

Jiraishin

Iaxus said:

Namino said:

A gold sink needs to produce a product that is not readily convertible to gold, such as an artefact, bound credits, so forth.

I know I'm pulling this line out of context, but I feel it's worth clarifying that this sentence, in and of itself, is not accurate.
If I give 10,000 gold to a humgii, it is "sunk", but produced no product.

Don't humgii your gold. Give it to me. I promise I will make it disappear just as permanently... as far as you're concerned, anyway.

Namino

Antonius said:

Foraging is a gold sink no matter what happens to the wood. If I spend 10k to send out foragers, then sell the resulting wood for 200k that another player already possessed, the game's economy has 10k less gold in it than it did before that took place. That's your sink.

It would only not be a gold sink if you could turn wood into more than 10k gold that doesn't already exist, such as having a denizen that buys wood 

 Maybe this is a better way to explain it. Wood is so liquid in Achaea that it is effectively simply another form of currency. If I hand you ten USD and you give me back fifty GBP (~65USD worth), that isn't a gold sink of ten USD. It's just a generation of 55 USD because the GBP is effectively the same as the USD I gave you. You will never struggle to convert wood to gold in the same way that you can always convert GBP to USD. If the goblins went into the woods and came back out with 60k sovereigns for me, it'd clearly not be a sink. Now we're doing the same thing, just with a bimodal currency system of wood and gold. The only way this could be a sink would be if there is a hypothetical situation in which wood cannot be INSTANTLY converted to gold, which due to current demand is hard to even imagine. The fact that the wood is being bought by another player is immaterial, because like me, they can instantly convert it back into its gold worth again, presuming they didn't buy from me at an inflated price. So they lost no actual wealth. What's actually happening is a bidirectional exchange of two different currencies in which no one loses any wealth, just the proportion of their assets being held in a particular currency.

What **IS** sinking wood is the housing credits, not foraging costs.

However, the fact that I can hand foragers 10 wood worth of gold and get back 400 wood worth of gold is clearly playing silly buggers with the economy.

Edit: Continuing in this theoretical line of bimodal currency design, there's some hypothetical future extrapolation that makes me smile. There's a number of 'put gold in get gold out' systems, hunting, seamonsters, so forth. The 'put gold in get wood out' of foragers could be considered the same as hunting. Instead of spending money on curatives, sips, and other things to generate gold, you spend it on foragers. Hunting isn't a gold sink because the generation of magical ether gold from NPCs outpaces the investment. Same for wood. Just a second currency. If the rate of return for ether-wood outpaces the best rate of return for ether-gold, then with enough time you'd actually end up with a wood-dominated economy where the majority of all generated wealth is in wood form. I don't think that will happen though.

Accipiter

Humgii's don't eat gold anyway.

And yes foraging is a gold sink, whether it is a larger gold sink than commshops were is up for debate but even the ferry to Poly is technically a gold sink.

Keorin

@Namino

Your basic point (that wood is valuable, and can make the people who trade in it more money than they put in) isn't wrong, but you're thinking too much about the -individual-, and not enough about the entire economy. Basic macroeconomic stuff is what's most applicable.

Atalkez

Keorin said:

@Namino

Your basic point (that wood is valuable, and can make the people who trade in it more money than they put in) isn't wrong, but you're thinking too much about the -individual-, and not enough about the entire economy. Basic macroeconomic stuff is what's most applicable.

Actually his point factors the entire economy gold sphere, while people that call it a sink consider it independent of the total economy.

Cooper

His base point is wrong. Foraging is a gold sink. The gold goes to denizens and is removed from players hands and our economy.

Namino

@Keorin The reason I'm making this argument is BECAUSE I'm thinking about the whole economy. To reiterate what was just discussed on discord using hunting instead of foraging:

I buy 10k of curatives from Seasone, an NPC. Then, I go up to Nur, slaughter the entire place, and walk away with 60k of gold drops. Is this a sink? It depends on how systems-oriented your thinking is.

Initially, it looks like a sink. 10k goes into Seasone's pockets. That's money being remove from the game! That's a sink!

However, that 10k facilitates a generation of 60k that would otherwise not have been possible (for this argument, assuming hunting is impossible without curatives, slightly fudgy but you get the idea). When you take an economy, system-scale approach to the gold flow there, you realize this is a generation of 50k, not a sink of 10k. The only reason you can see a front ended gold sink there is if you divorce ROI from that NPC expended gold from NPC gained funds later on.

Foragers are doing the same thing.

On a massive scale, just with two currencies instead of one.

Edit: Maybe the use of 'gold sink' is what's throwing this off? I propose instead 'currency sink'. Foragers do result in less GOLD strictly speaking. But not less currency, as wood is in effect, a currency.

Jiraishin

Namino said:

@Keorin The reason I'm making this argument is BECAUSE I'm thinking about the whole economy. To reiterate what was just discussed on discord using hunting instead of foraging:

I buy 10k of curatives from Seasone, an NPC. Then, I go up to Nur, slaughter the entire place, and walk away with 60k of gold drops. Is this a sink? It depends on how systems-oriented your thinking is.

Initially, it looks like a sink. 10k goes into Seasone's pockets. That's money being remove from the game! That's a sink!

However, that 10k facilitates a generation of 60k that would otherwise not have been possible (for this argument, assuming hunting is impossible without curatives, slightly fudgy but you get the idea). When you take an economy, system-scale approach to the gold flow there, you realize this is a generation of 50k, not a sink of 10k. The only reason you can see a front ended gold sink there is if you divorce ROI from that NPC expended gold from NPC gained funds later on.

Foragers are doing the same thing.

On a massive scale, just with two currencies instead of one.

Edit: Maybe the use of 'gold sink' is what's throwing this off? I propose instead 'currency sink'. Foragers do result in less GOLD strictly speaking. But not less currency, as wood is in effect, a currency.

Your foragers don't necessarily make you money. Mine keep dying before they can return, which means the gold I spent to hire them and send them out are sunk costs. So even if it's *possible* to make money off of its end results, it is a gold sink.

It's just not a very good one, because while successful foragers may be using the gold to generate commodities as an end product it's more likely that they're planning, like you, to exchange the commodities for gold.

Namino

Okay, yes. I did not account for the scenario where your foragers are getting religiously wiped out.

...What's going on over there?

Zenui

Back on the topic:

I've already accomplished one of the goals I had for 2020, which was to finish grinding to the Dragon threshold before my spring teaching commitments landed. (Though I still haven't actually picked a color yet...) And I guess it's good I did: my laptop has had a mechanical failure, which I guess is as good a sign as any that I should step away from Achaea for a bit. I'll be back eventually, though, and when I do I plan to keep pushing for level 100. Maybe work on funding a ship so I can do some proper exploration.

As far as hopes go, Zenui's current status is built around his Order membership and so I can't help but hold out hope for a certain Someone to return to an active role... (On that note: If that seems to be happening, send me a PM on forums and I'll make sure to be here.)

Antonius

Gold sinks aren't about the total amount of wealth. They're about the amount of actual gold. If you remove gold, and replace it with something that isn't gold - even if that thing has a higher gold value than the actual gold removed - then it is a gold sink.

This is why foraging is not the same as hunting. When you kill a denizen, gold is created from nothing and added to the economy. When you sell wood, the gold is being moved from one player to another, and no new gold exists.

Jiraishin

Namino said:

Okay, yes. I did not account for the scenario where your foragers are getting religiously wiped out.

...What's going on over there?

I really need to train my foragers in isolated places during fibre season and -then- release them into the Darwinian world of wood foraging. Best I can figure, I got into foraging really late when I suddenly needed wood comms, and by then everyone else was high level. Add that to the high-level people who set their foragers to aggressive, and my poor little Therans were doomed. I once got them to live several hours by basically hiring a new forager or two nearly every hour, i.e. when they took casualties, but eventually I had to qq and sleep. They were eradicated overnight.

Alternately, my foragers figured out that the wood comms were worth more than they were getting paid, faked their own deaths, and ran off with the proceeds. The bastards.

Cobault

The fact foragers can even go out and assault each other on aggressive mode is such a forced conflict that I feel it's pretty unnecessary. Mining is already pretty cutthroat for the majority of other sought after comms. At this point, I'd rather just see everyone have passive wood/fibre gathering and the market get saturated with a ridiculous abundance of cloth, rope and wood and see the prices collectively bomb to mineral/herb prices. Foraging just altogether feels like it was added solely to chokehold the shit out of wood. I basically dropped roundabouts 750k worth of commodities earlier today making an onager for a seastrider. Probably more than 750k, but it was roughly 561k worth of wood since I received 25 shipwood from the ballista that I dismantled.. I'd hate to see what fitting out a brand new galley would cost now.

To make sure I am considered still on topic here - what I'm saying is foraging needs some tweaking.

As a personal goal, I'm getting Dragon in 2020. I'm doing it, god damn it. I've been playing this game entirely too long to have still never made it to Dragon on Tribal or Cobault.