How to fix the balance and economy..?

Kitch

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This is definately the most serious and thought about thread I have done and the thing I feel strongest about in EU.

SO my thinking is this, that as the game is RCE its essential that atleast for the main three professions the economy functions in a full 360 degree work flow. That is, Hunter > Crafter > Hunter or.. Miner > Crafter > Miner..

You dont have to know much about the game to realise that this just isnt the case, at least for 2/3 of the professions.

So an example would be that hunters do not require crafters to get (L) gear in order to continue to hunt, therefore crafting, one of the main professions is redundant (Broken)

In my ideal you would have hunters supplying the materials for crafters to craft armour/weapons/amps/faps and these (L) commonly used items would not drop in loot at all. There would still be high MU rare items dropping from mobs suchs as UL gear and esi etc... But for 90% of hunters (Low-Mid level) there gear would have come from a crafter, and they would have supplied the materials. Unless the want to splash out on a luxury item.

But wait? doesnt that give the crafters free reign to charge whatever they want and rip off hunters?? Ermm nope.. The living proof of this would be enhancers, which clearly prove that the MU of end item is dictated by the miners or supplier of materials, and the item MU will typically only be enough to break even. Thats because the crafters compete on AH to sell their stuff which drives the price down to a point where it covers the MU of ingredients. Obviously this is only true of (L) or consumable product.

But would Low-Mid level hunters be poorer? Ofcourse not because their loot would actually be needed by another major profession which supplies them, full 360.

Obviously for this to work you would need to totally rebalance the BP's and loots and do away with ridiculous issues like useless BPs with rare ingredients for example. And awful hunting loot with tiny amounts of dozens of useless little stackables..

The thing is, crafting as it is, is mainly only useful for the gambling, and people just wont keep going in a profession if they are just looting TT food which is how hunting is going... Cause you loosing 10% or so each run it becomes futile. And as the game is a RCE this basically means that its broken. And as an MMO.. well dont even go there.. its totally broken because of the fact that as a profession.. Most of them are redundant. The little professions like scanner for example, should have a place in a hunting party but thats getting off topic.

Basically I call for a full re-balance and.. yeah I think you get where i'm going... Obvioulsy I won't fully understand the concerns of the top 5-10% of hunters as I am not one, nor am I a huge depositer/cycler but at least for the overall picure its pretty easy to sit there with a calculator and work out the MU of ingredients, compare that to the MU of item/residue etc and see it just doesnt work. Look how much residue has crashed with the recent nerfs.

I dont beleive it is possible for everyone to profit all the time, thats silly. But there is a time to spend and a time to profit, and when your spending, to get to where you want, then someone is profitng, and then it switches and you are profiting..

Anyway... :computer:
 
This is definately the most serious and thought about thread I have done and the thing I feel strongest about in EU.

SO my thinking is this, that as the game is RCE its essential that atleast for the main three professions the economy functions in a full 360 degree work flow. That is, Hunter > Crafter > Hunter or.. Miner > Crafter > Miner..

You dont have to know much about the game to realise that this just isnt the case, at least for 2/3 of the professions.

So an example would be that hunters do not require crafters to get (L) gear in order to continue to hunt, therefore crafting, one of the main professions is redundant (Broken)

In my ideal you would have hunters supplying the materials for crafters to craft armour/weapons/amps/faps and these (L) commonly used items would not drop in loot at all. There would still be high MU rare items dropping from mobs suchs as UL gear and esi etc... But for 90% of hunters (Low-Mid level) there gear would have come from a crafter, and they would have supplied the materials. Unless the want to splash out on a luxury item.

But wait? doesnt that give the crafters free reign to charge whatever they want and rip off hunters?? Ermm nope.. The living proof of this would be enhancers, which clearly prove that the MU of end item is dictated by the miners or supplier of materials, and the item MU will typically only be enough to break even. Thats because the crafters compete on AH to sell their stuff which drives the price down to a point where it covers the MU of ingredients. Obviously this is only true of (L) or consumable product.

But would Low-Mid level hunters be poorer? Ofcourse not because their loot would actually be needed by another major profession which supplies them, full 360.

Obviously for this to work you would need to totally rebalance the BP's and loots and do away with ridiculous issues like useless BPs with rare ingredients for example. And awful hunting loot with tiny amounts of dozens of useless little stackables..

The thing is, crafting as it is, is mainly only useful for the gambling, and people just wont keep going in a profession if they are just looting TT food which is how hunting is going... Cause you loosing 10% or so each run it becomes futile. And as the game is a RCE this basically means that its broken. And as an MMO.. well dont even go there.. its totally broken because of the fact that as a profession.. Most of them are redundant. The little professions like scanner for example, should have a place in a hunting party but thats getting off topic.

Basically I call for a full re-balance and.. yeah I think you get where i'm going... Obvioulsy I won't fully understand the concerns of the top 5-10% of hunters as I am not one, nor am I a huge depositer/cycler but at least for the overall picure its pretty easy to sit there with a calculator and work out the MU of ingredients, compare that to the MU of item/residue etc and see it just doesnt work. Look how much residue has crashed with the recent nerfs.

I dont beleive it is possible for everyone to profit all the time, thats silly. But there is a time to spend and a time to profit, and when your spending, to get to where you want, then someone is profitng, and then it switches and you are profiting..

Anyway... :computer:
I disagree with pretty much everything you wrote, but I better not make a long post about it. That rarely accomplices anything good.

Anyway, hope it leads to a nice discussion thread at least. :laugh:
 
I disagree with pretty much everything you wrote, but I better not make a long post about it. That rarely accomplices anything good.

Anyway, hope it leads to a nice discussion thread at least. :laugh:

how can a nice discussion thread develop, if people wont make long posts about it :scratch2:
 
Oh ya, well I agree with pretty much everything he wrote :laugh:

The hunting profession has steadily become more and more detached from the other two professions. Anyone currently using a crafted weapon has a screw loose in their head. All crafted weapons have to sell for below tt value if they want to get anywhere near the eco of their looted counterpart.

The only things hunters look to crafters for anymore are faps, some L armors and maybe an odd weapon amp or two.

Honestly at this point I don't know how to fix it. The root cause seems to be the huge oversupply of unL items. If everyone was using L items, the current drop rate would be just right. The high eco and low decay/damage ration looted weapons would have a high MU giving the higher decay/damage and lower eco crafted weapons some space for MU and the chance for a crafter to profit. Since MA decided to turn on the rain of unL items, a high % of the turnover is now cycled through unL items.
 
I hear ya. I think MA have put themselves in deep shit with all UL gear dropping and L as well.
Im looting more weapons now than im able to use, so atleast i am oversupplied :)
They need to reset the whole game and start from zero, just drop a big freakin nuke and start over.
 
In my opinion a nice balanced economy is against the present MA business model.

A balanced economy do not means all parties profit (would be impossible), but that more players will be able to play more time with a certain amount of ped - meaning less deposits. If a new player can go out for a hunt with 200 ped and will not return with 32 different crap stackables in small amounts, but with something he can sell for MU or even craft with and get his next gun, that would mean he will not be pressured to deposit another 200 ped next week. I'm not speaking about the loot return (which for sure have a lot to be improved regarding the amount of PED cycling needed to get a nice % back), but about loot quality/usability.

I do not think MA wants that. The business model I see they have now is aggressively chipping away peds.

If the financial reports will show an improvement (after they got rid of SEE payments, liquidated assets and consolidate the servers), it means MA knows much better with what kind of players it has to deal and all our musings here are irrelevant.

If on the contrary, MA continue to bleeds money, nobody can help them. Doing the same thing all over again and expecting a different result is the definition of insanity, some famous physicist said.
 
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I kinda agree with the OP that as of now the economy is kinda broken. However, I really think its too complex at the moment to solve the situation and probably what the balancing manager is doing is more of a "plug the holes" sorta thing, which is ironically how real life economy is working as well. In that way i guess, EU is more inline with real life and perhaps should be part of curriculum in college for everyone :laugh:
 
I get your idea.. but the post was way too long (could have written same thing with 3 sentences).

About the idea i mostly agree, but the problem isnt weak link between profession, but small playerbase.

If we had higher playerbase, then all those old time UL weapons wouldnt play that big part in the economy (it is fixed amount of them ingame, and we cant reduce them) Me myself i use crafter services fairly often (weapons specially)
What has mindark done already ? They introduced weapon amplifier modifying which removes quite nice amount of UL amps from game. They also tried to remove some UL weapons with the Tier upgrade system (in the first days you could lose UL item when tiering another same name item).

IMHO : Mindark has to find way to reduce the amount of those UL items by way that is fair both to owners of those items and for the other players (about the same way they did with amps). THen mindark should introduce more Limited items (not some crappy ones, but really ones that could compete with adjusted mk.v or some other high end UL items). UL items should only drop in right ratio with the players active (like 1 mod merc per 1k players). As you cant expect crafting to be strongly linked with hunting if the hunter profession is already overflooded with UL items).

To fix the economy there are two ways : Fix the amount of players or Fix the amount of UL items. (or why not both?)
 
Hunters soon don't need to buy shit from crafters to continue hunting as MA is still drinking booze... It's raining UL guns so everyone should have one by now.
 
I agree, there always has been very few BPs actually worth clicking. 90% of weapons, armors etc BPs aren't competitive and even if by some miracle, you can sell them at breaking even point or close enough - the demand is maybe 10 guns for the whole week from all the crafters. Material change in rarity but BPs doesn't, so we have some guns that needs 1000% markup materials in abundant quantities, therefor aren't worth clicking because you find a looted alternative for half the markup.

Look at last few years - p5a, apis, x1 were the 3 main crafted weapons. Than we had XT boom - but that wasn't for very long and there were very few BPs. Can't remember - maybe manis was decent amounts as well? There is/was small market for felis, maybe some more with small markets.
Armor? The whole profession is half-dead, most people use UL armor, L looted armor costs close to tt.
Tools? Very limited demand for these things, ofc there are competition, but still 1 good crafter could probably cover all of EU needs for tools.
Attachments - ok, a quite big market ped wise, but than again - its just few BPs and 90% dead BPs.
Clothes - very limited demand, not worth talking about.
Enhancers - similar to others - very few high volume types that are worth clicking.
Furniture - same as clothes I assume.

Etc. etc.


Arkadia made some hybrid version where the same item can be crafted and looted. Not sure if that isn't even worse or the same.


But the question is - how doable is it. Its a massive overhaul of all the main systems. Its probably even bigger than switching to CryEngine...
 
I think MA is milking the cow, i have à feeling that they Will keep going until they go bankrupt. I really dont see the point of what theyve done, screwing with crafters etc. I bet 80% of the players Hunt, so they are doing their best to milk them as long as they can.
 
To fix the economy there are two ways : Fix the amount of players or Fix the amount of UL items. (or why not both?)



Nice idea....maybe something like this : "Put 2x Mod Faps into refiner to get 1x Realy uber kick ass fap"
 
I think MA is milking the cow, i have à feeling that they Will keep going until they go bankrupt. I really dont see the point of what theyve done, screwing with crafters etc. I bet 80% of the players Hunt, so they are doing their best to milk them as long as they can.

They not screwed crafters, just crafting was flaved from begining.

Crfating is to fast !!! Making one set of armor shal last at least 24h for example. Also such long crafting process shall be alowed to continue after loging off ( time consuming same ). That would solve most problems with craft
 
Before we ask for changes, we need to look at what is needed for EU/MA to survive,
also understand how the whole process to decrease and increase the ingame value
so the RL-money flow is at a decent level, that is essential, otherwise no bigger changes
will come.

Every little feature ingame have to decrease the ingame value with a theoretic set
value vs what we gain from it, if it doesn't MA adjust this in a ongoing process, in one
way or another.

We also have to understand that people are different, some are ok with only using
L-items, I'm not that kind of person, I want my basic gear to be UL.
No matter how good my loot are over time, it will never be a profit or a break even,
if I then have to pay too much MU for L-items, my interest to play will be even lower.
Atm it already feels like way to much goes to MU when using L-items, but on the other
hand, I want to use them, and pay for them, as long MU is decently low.

I don't mind depositing, and I don't mind losing it either, as long as I get decent
amount of time playing.
So maybe it will be better with your ideas, since the flow could be faster between
each profession, and that way less values are stucked in one way or another.

One thing they could do is to split auction in two, or maybe should say create a
subsidiary system to auction, that is about direct trading.
That way issue with not being able to use PEC in auctions is solved since you can
use a system that goes down to lowest value equal to that ammo and so on have in TT.
With this a LOT of stuff that is stored in storage now due to a too low value/amount,
will be sold, if they only use fee based on per cent.
To solve the problem that to much crap probably comes up for sale, they could set
a limit on amount of slots for each avatar.
Fees on playerowned shops and similar should have the lowest (if any) fee ingame thou'.
This idea might not work due to what I wrote in beginning of the post, but maybe
something similar could. :)
 
There are already way too many unL items in circulation, growing by the day (unlike the playerbase, which is probably shrinking). So, why not just implement new professions that require items that can ONLY be attained from crafting?
 
What the OP is stating is basically calling for complete co-dependence of the trinity (hunting,mining,crafting). Which in theory is a great idea. In the current system of hunters being able to loot (L) weapons/armor/faps/etc.. It gives them a sort of independence from the realm of crafting.

Now take the current hunting system and put it to use in mining where a miner would be able to find (L) finders,excavators, and even amps... yes amps... in their regular loot. This is no different than the current hunting system is it not? Doing such a thing, however, would absolutely destroy crafting as the amp market is the bread and butter of most crafters.

To make things even the (L) items in hunting loot would have to be removed, or put (L) loot in mining, which destroys crafting altogether.

OP does make some good points here, it is unbalanced.
 
The total net paid MU in the game is ALWAYS 0. :wise:

Consider the implications for minute, before wanting to redesign the entire game economy, just to "optimize" the MU.
 
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The total net paid MU in the game is ALWAYS 0. :wise

While "technically" might be correct, I do think is a little like this:

- money were deposited 2-3-more years ago by players to buy nice uber items xxk USD in value.

- MA spent those money on regular expenses, issuing some nice end-of-month-hofs, covering withdrawals (including said hofs maybe), over an extended period of time. They do foresaw regular, similar depos.

- lets assume the flow of money is getting down now (less deposits). Do I assume right, at this moment?

- today said players who bought the nice items gets fed up, gets scared or wants to do something else with the money. They want to sell the items.

Well... MA at this point, faced with many actions of this type, were forced to take action. So this is why the UL bonanza I hear about - they try to lower MU in order to make sure that whats leaving the game will be much lower of what entered it (already spent money).

I do think MA is taking a shot in the dark to devalue things, at the risk of making big crafting obsolete. And IF the big crafters were having a nice life before (aka assured profit), that is hitting 2 birds with a stone now: lowering MU and reducing profit of the regulars. Future will tell if discouraging the big grinders is wise, but the focus now seems to be counteracting against big withdrawals.

As a side note, Dreadnought is for sale. Oh happy times, stealing is not so lucrative as before.
 
Personally, I think the main problem with crafting is getting to the good multiplier.
Compare it to 'normal' hunting/mining..
Most ppl do kills/drops of 3-7 ped?
how much ped/click do you need to do in crafting? 15-20?
Also keeping in mind that it's way harder in crafting b/c you need to have the big stack of residue (I'm not taking the condition gamblers in the equation).
Then, even with a 20% success rate.. I look at the free auction slots..
30 or 40? not sure
1k kills a day isn't really a problem for me 3k-7k ped) & i have enough slots but for a crafter, 1k clicks(15-20k ped) at 20% means 200 items, see the problem?

First 3 steps I would take to reive crafting is make shorter lootcycles & smaller 'ATH' multipliers
Let crafted items count for 0.5 auction slots
Make the diffrence between crafting on Q & C 50 % smaller

Das
 
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It almost seems that the best thing to do, is just find a way to play and have fun. Now, im not saying don't have a business mentality, but every business needs to be funded. No business or not many, can be started up and maintained with out a cost. Plus! How can we talk about balance in the economy when as players we will spend a lot of money for some of these new toys they "Surprise" us with. What ever happened with all that cash ya dig! So I say and not in a mean way. Play, Find you a way to play, and don't miss out on the Items that count!! Such as, the Caly Land deeds.. even though they accumulate very little, at least they accumulate!!

ILLz-z Out!!

(About to upgrade my game and log on)
 
I think that a way to revive crafting is HOW We repair items. Let's say that to repair a gun, you would need to consume the same type of gun to repair it. This way, the demand for UL guns would go up, since you would need to buy more of them. Crafters would be able to buy materials for higher MU, to craft more items. Same with mining. All items should decay slightly less, so you won't have to buy expensive items again. However, so we don't bankrupt MA, is to overall have smaller and less globals, Hofs, etc. though mainly for crafting. MA should also slightly increase the loot for hunting and mining, so we won't break the crafters. as for miners and hunters, I already stated they should get slightly less decay.:wise: Is this a good idea?
 
1. Hunting, remove all items from hunting except stackables and ESI's.
2. Mining, lower the required cycled peds to hit that avg 90% return.
3. Crafting, use current hunting/mining resources in all new BP's. That means all tools/weapons/armors etc. ONLY craftable.

Reasons:
1. Having items lootable means MA controls the drop rate completely and thus it becomes a lot harder to profit. However, making it all done by crafters with current hunting stackables, it would increase the demand of most stackables so higher MU!
2. Self explanatory.
3. Having all current stackables useable in crafting it would mean stackables have plenty of quantity so the majority of tools/weapons/armors etc. Would go down in MU. Thus reducing the cost to play and increasing demand for crafting, since only way to get weapons etc is to either craft it yourself or buy it from crafter.
 
The current system is a result of adaptation to the real situation.

Initially the crafters were supposed to be the only source for something, let's say a certain gun -> now the law of entropy kicks in: 2 big crafters are going to a vacation away from the internet -> there's not enough suppliers for 2 weeks -> hunters are left without guns and simply can't hunt, so they stop cycling -> no more depositing -> BIG red light starts flashing in the MA office and the guy responsible for balancing gets fired.

What's the 1st thing a new balancing guy will do? Alternative source of the same weapon... and he's right, this is actually the only reliable solution.

What's the alternative? Make high end gun BP's drop more -> too many crafters competing for a too small market niche -> short bursts of oversupply > MU drops to zero -> some crafters go broke, others avoid crafting to let the MU to go up again -> hunters left without constant stable supply -> the BIG red light... balancing guy fired... back to square one.

The keyword here is "stable". This is why MA has to tolerate traders. They take money out of the game without bringing anything in, thus effectively increasing the cost to play for everyone but at least they help to provide little more stability for some market areas.


______________
TL;DR: With bigger markets the laws of self-regulation would start functioning. Currently the random fluctuations have too much impact.
Think about an economy that's as much bigger than Caly as Caly is bigger than Ark.
 
I'd get rid of the high end stuff and the ultra HP mobs. Reduce the max tt value of L so that a crafter doesn't need huge amounts of materials to craft stuff and add alternative stackables to craft things. Get rid of the ultra high loots as theirs no longer a need for them as the excuse for them in the first place was to drop high tt L items. Then stop dropping L items in loot completely.

Make L items stackable or that after the first one is used it automatically switches to the next of the same sort.

This might make crafting more sustainable and rather than having a hundred people making mining amps you have a range of players making various items that can be sold to players rather than the tt. We need more players to take up crafting but there isn't a good way to start in this other than afk MS repairing. Reducing the loses from those starting out by providing a market for the low end gives a broader skill base.

For tailoring I'd reduce the tt cost of items and adjust it so that they have the full 100% condition look at only 50% tt value.

The only way to get balanced and back to an economy is to increase the number of active players and that only comes when cost to play is reduced. If that means driving MU down then so be it as most of us have taken hits on old equipment any way but artificially keeping things high to cater for a small minority of old players isn't sustainable.
 
All these suggestions about balancing the 3 main professions... That's not Mindark's style. Look at what they did with taming. Just remove one of the the 3 main professions at the next vu for another 5 years or so with promises each of those years that it'll be back next year to create a little hope. That'll fix the economy up right nice I suspect.
 
All these suggestions about balancing the 3 main professions... That's not Mindark's style. Look at what they did with taming. Just remove one of the the 3 main professions at the next vu for another 5 years or so with promises each of those years that it'll be back next year to create a little hope. That'll fix the economy up right nice I suspect.

and to many rk-5 tools and to much welding wire were being consumed so ms repair was nerfed.
 
Fixing economy by necessity entails making more of materials and markup cycle in the economy. Part of how I would see it done would be:

  • Fix L weapons - the L weapons that drop from hunting should be higher decay, lower eco at markup and crafted ones should be low decay, being able to absorb more of residue and materials markup. This is reversed atm, so crafted guns are very unpopular.
  • Fix L armors - presently using many L armors is uneconomical, both availability and cost wise. And looted armor dominates. This cannot be fixed only via component markups, UL bps should drop, as otherwise any BPs available are only via endless grinding and the consumer will need to pay for that grinding. Make and drop a bunch of UL BP sets for Predator(L), Sema(L), Luna(L), Serum(L), eMine(L), Orca(L) and Solir(L).
  • Which brings me to - the only new armor crafter thing in over past 4 years has been the Necromancer(L) bps? How come?
  • Make some melee new weapon BPs. Seriously, the situation is horrible here. Melee amps will hopefully make more of limited melee weapons being used, but the crafting professions are almost dead.
  • Make new, overcharged, faps. Balance higher hps at same level with lower eco, say around 5hp/pec like Ek-2600. Give people the chance to have higher healing without having to get impossile levels. Help them get to those levels by being able to use bigger faps.

Longer term, crafting should be reworked to be more interesting and flexible.
 
Look at last few years - p5a, apis, x1 were the 3 main crafted weapons. Than we had XT boom - but that wasn't for very long and there were very few BPs. Can't remember - maybe manis was decent amounts as well? There is/was small market for felis, maybe some more with small markets.

Manis sold too. So did Scrof. Most of Geotrek was not well balanced for crafting and use.
 
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