Magnus Ryme, and rest of balancing team, I present to you a wall of text
I can definitely see a use for AI in streamlining the process of sorting data, manage loot tables and run simulations of implications of the economy before new implementations. To run checks such as; how many weapons are there of similar eff/dps/dpp already? How much turnover is generated with each (indication of how much gear is sitting idle in storages and could give a hint of market saturation)? Streamlining such processes, that would be excellent use of AI as an assisting tool. I sincerely hope this is what you mean and have in your mind as well, Magnus. But your statement indicates that it is not "humanly possible" to solve your current problems without the help of AI. With all due respect, this is bullshit. Hopefully you have been misinterpreted and you actually understand you have greater problems than what you indicate and decided to highlight in that statement.
Your problem is not that you need to balance and weave 20 year old items into the economy again, it is that you have serious meta imbalances and flaws and seemingly no long-term plan. Your past year has been a complete shit-show of short-term actions and knee-jerk reactions. No AI can alone magically solve this for you, it's on yourselves.
I was not going to spend time to compile my views on the situation since I thought you already did get a lot of good feedback these past months, but reading your statement made me rather concerned. Entropia has an incredible potential in it's unique real-money concept and we love it and care for it. Again, hopefully we misinterpreted your statement. But I also realized you might not actually have the slightest clue of which suggestions you should actually pick out, to be honest a lot of the ideas have been incredibly shortsighted and/or 100% only favoring the one who suggested them.
I will be biased too of course, impossible not to be. But here are some of my thoughts on markup, economy and psychology from a player perspective, as a 18 year veteran player. A lot of it is so basic that you might think is an insult to your intelligence, but I just try to keep it as clear and simple as possible;
DRIVERS & END PRODUCTS
First: without markup, this game is dead.
Mayhem vendor pulls have been THE number one driver of this economy. With a straight-forward and visibly clear end goal of being able to pull something really valuable (and/or useful to yourself) after a few years of grinding Mayhems, it made huge sense to heavily invest in your avatar - upgrade dps and gear all around. This creates markup all over the chain. At the top you have those who go hardcore, who pays high markup for the upgrades and also a premium for doing it fast. This allows for opportunities all along the chain for hunters, crafters and miners who can target the resources involved (tier components, gemstones, tiering minerals etc) in their daily activity.
Take that away - with nothing valuable and sellable stocked in vendor (and no, your newly added blades is a complete joke at set price) along with tanking trust and huge uncertainties regarding Mindark's competence to actually turn this around - and here we are. Motivation and trust to zero, everything implodes because the end carrot is gone which in result make the whole chain below it useless as well.
You need to understand what actually drives markup on different levels, what attracts the playerbase and stimulates cycling, and be a lot more efficient in attaching resources/loot to each step along the chain of these "drivers" of the economy. Throwing any good markup resource you can find into space mining may seem like a good driver to you, but it's incredibly short term, 100% manufactured and you destroyed both regular planetside mining, and RDI/crafting carrots of gemstones in the process. The only "real" and sustainable driver is the end product - teleportation tokens. Which actually is not a bad idea in itself, people value convenience and time-saving and will be ready to pay some (some.) markup for it.
I realize now that you might have close to no idea of different branches of the economy, like which resources actually drive mining activity, so you know to be careful with it, as an example. I always took for granted you had coded simulations where you could theoretically run different activities and see what the net output is for the player with current droprates, over time. If this is not the case, hopefully this is one of your future uses you have in mind for CelestAI. Bottomline, if something is not even close to being monetarily sustainable over time, it will be abandoned by the players. Even if someone just plays casually and/or for entertainment, they can't keep doing it when the money is gone. You have players in here who number crunch EVERYTHING. As I touched on above, you need to start thinking more like us. But this is done through COMMUNICATION with us, not just by turning inwards and train an AI model to read your 20 years of data. Some planet partners do a lot better job with this in how they develop their planets, learn from them. Long quests with clear and desirable end goals, good mob spawns, proper hunting-mining-crafting resource sinks and interconnectivity, just to name a few examples.
- Carrots
I am not ready to say (like some do) that the mayhem vendor system is a doomed system, but I would argue you need a lot more strategic thought and long-term plan behind it, and in what you add to the vendor. Power creep is inevitable, but you can do a whole lot more to prolong the process by many years. Don't just keep adding same type of weapons, you received a lot of good ideas from the community last few months of things to add instead of weapons, weapons and more weapons. Get creative and listen. Same things with the seasonal rings you introduce - the last few years of seasonals are very weak drivers of markup to say the least. In summary, desirable carrots are essential.
- Progression
Building your avatar and gear is for some a good enough driver in itself. However in general it is highly watered-down by lack of usefulness in the end, like being able to grind efficiently for a valuable item/carrot, or allowing you to hunt potentially high markup, high level mobs. To really take advantage of and empower Progression as a driver of markup, you need to introduce an even more clear ladder of profitability. High end mobs should naturally drop really good markup in general, this has trickle-down effect on the whole economy. In general, high end mobs should be better than mid level mobs, which should be better than low level mobs.
A well designed progression like this encourages people to actually grind for HP and Evader/Dodger and upgrade armor and healing tools as well, and not only DPS (along with designing a proper macro or bot) as has been the case with the Mayhem format as the 100% undisputed money maker. If done right, it can have a greater positive effect on the economy than what the Mayhem format ever had, even with a lot less total turnover vs the 24/7 Mayhem grind. Just because it creates so many extra economical side-effects and trickle-downs from every aspect of your avatar that you want to improve. Especially if you want to do it quickly.
- Luxury items
Arguably the ultimate end products are the "luxury items", the ones that does not actually affect the economy (like better and better weapons) after they are created. You can be a whole lot more creative here, or actually start to acknowledge them for a start. Haven't you seen how much people pay for skins in other games? Potentially huge market if done properly. For example, you have already put in some effort in developing new clothing the past couple years (and UE5 will allow further branching I am sure), keep up that work. Could also keep throwing in some minor buffs to them. You might think the interest in luxury items is miniscule at best among the players, but I would argue this is because it is not being developed. At all. HOWEVER, don't be lazy and add new stuff as finished products to a vendor like you have done recently, make sure to release them through for example (L) blueprints, or in some other way take advantage of the opportunity of it being a proper resource sink. More on resource sinks below.
Another good example of a driver of markup along the lines of luxury and/or bragging rights, is actually the society terminal. Imagine if we could have society skill toplists that actually showed each exact soc average numbers (and/or more lists, TT value of skills for example). You have NO IDEA the psychological effect and how much competitiveness and extra skilling this would bring out, just to beat out the bastards just ahead of you. All for free without expecting anything back in terms of returns - pure luxury driver of markup. Prime opportunity to make something smart out of society terminal with UE5, Mindark.
There are a lot more examples, once again be creative, and actually listen to your customers. Identify the different player types, ask them what drives them. I mainly speak from a profit-minded, cost-reducing playing style, so I am likely missing a whole lot of angles.
RESOURCE SINKS
The high dps we can have nowadays, along with the use of macro and botting, simply can generate so much more resources than what can be consumed. Clearly, Mindark is not ready to take a definite stance on macroing and botting (it boosts the total cycle and your short-term income, I get that), but then it is hugely important to actually do more on the other end, and really attach the resources a lot better along the chains of the economy. You got a perfect example how powerful this is during Resource Mayhem (although insanely boosted by the highly desirable end product of Mayhem Tokens, at the time); here you did a good job of incorporating resources from all three main professions - hunting, mining and crafting. This model needs to be applied to a far greater extent also in the "normal" economy outside of events. Hand-ins of resources or new (L) blueprints for different useful and powerful (L) items, is one example. Which brings us to the next important point - (L) and spending markup.
SPENDING MARKUP
Imo it's essential to have spending of markup as a natural part of efficient play on all levels, also for endgame. The (L) alternatives like ArMatrix need to be A LOT better than what they are today. Either pump up the ArMatrix series or introduce a new series with say 95% efficiency, amazing dpp with low enough decay so that even a healthy markup of like 150% have them comparable to an UL weapon with 85% efficiency. Having (L) alternatives a lot more competitive, along with proper resource sinks to craft them, would stimulate the economy greatly. Also once again, be a lot more creative, come up with really useful (L) support stuff that is worth to use in everyday activities. A lot of creative ideas have been mentioned already on both forum and Discord, I hope you took notes.
Of course making (L) highly competitive comparably lowers the value of UL alternatives a bit, but UL still would provide the benefit of convenience and possibility of constant tier levels. You could argue that it would result in the economy "carrots" of for example UL vendor pulls not being as powerful drivers as previously, but on the other hand this meta balance got us to the sorry state we are in today. And like previously mentioned, I would argue that some creative managing and actual thought behind what you add to the vendor will go a long way in maintaining proper end carrots good enough to have people desire them and go after them.
