The ECONOMICS of the tp fee + jobs proposal

So, let me get this right, we still have no idea what these 'Jobs' are?


So we will be getting charged for something they will not/ cannot tell us about.


Sounds like the stupiest most ludicrous idea yet. Not only that, wasn't ND's position meant to be a place for us to get things in the universe that we want? No one asked for this.


Once again, we are given nonesensical idea's with no thought out process.

I can see the conversation went like this.

'We need money.'
'Lets charge people to tp.'
'Excellent, what shall we use this new tax money for?'
'Who cares!'


Christ, no one seems to care where this money is going.


Rgds

Ace

Great discussion so far - no time to answer fully right now, though.

..all true investments involve an initial outlay for the intention of some kind of gain later.

If the marketing starts to focus on this idea of 'jobs' in VR as part of its economy, it may indeed bring people in to have a look - as in DoA's 'dont spend 15 dollars with a subscription; earn 15 dollars instead'.
Once inside the game, if these jobs are indeed free to carry out (no def costs or whatever), then I expect new players to spend those peds again. If there is cross-platform movement there may be the question of where?, but I expect them to be spending more time in game than just the average 30 mins per day by those who like it.
This will then indeed boost retention rates a lot, to a point where hopefully a reasonable percentage will start to depot to do more fun stuff, but can always fall back on 'boring?' jobs. It's a kind of buffer....

Yes, at least initially either depositors or deed investors will have to be 'paying' for the economic 'fund/liquidity' required by MA, but having massively more people staying and playing would hopefully improve economies of scale for the cost of running everything and siphoning off a profit.

Yes, the crunch point IS: the money has to come from somewhere initially and longer-term if there are more free-to-play (but work a little) participants slowly getting hooked on the game.

I'd like to look at this when I have more time. Another concern is the wild forecasts of participation, money raised from deeds compared to planned payout percentages, but also that more deeds will be issued if/when the original ones run out, which I think would be a watering down as I currently understand it.

DoA said:

Immediately after your image, you could see there will be four kinds of jobs at a guaranteed wage, depending on skills level, including a no skills one.

Click to expand...

Aren't these'jobs' really a rebate system? If u hunt a X level for Y minutes we will rebate you Z PEDs to help defer costs.

If this is right, then this is a classic example of a regressive tax. Any teleport fee is a greater liability to poor player but the tax goes most to high level players via the rebate.

Of course I'm reading this on mobile and may have missed a few things.

This will kill the game period. If not by itself, then it will due to the direction this thought process is leading.

Deeds would probably be the mechanism to assign the returns, and buying deeds counter the costs of TP's that existed since the beginning is a bit silly.



Heres the idea:

Instead of losing ped on the fees, you would need x amount of deeds to cover your normal TP use.

In the end people will play the same by using tp's, and getting a "rebate" on the use thru deeds, only now MA has sold x amount of deeds for (a ton of) cash....to leverage the ability to do what we did in the first place, TP.


This is having us prepay for a service we already use, and get paid back over time ...after MA walks with a large cash payment.




This idea already has resulted in the loss of over 20k cycled. I have no real motivation to play anymore. These ideas are flat out demoralizing when you realize what they will eventually lead to.


The last 4 announcements I have a feeling that I should leave....they just keep pushing it further.

DoA said:

Immediately after your image, you could see there will be four kinds of jobs at a guaranteed wage, depending on skills level, including a no skills one.

Click to expand...

LOL jobs ?

Go hunt Troopers for an hour, and tell me you made money when you get 2.5 free PED or even 10 PED when the run drops average loot (no global).

Trooper Gen 10 = 1600 HP
With eco 3 DMG/pec its 5.33 PED to kill
1 kills a min full hour is = ~300 PED spent
Average return is 90% = 270 PED - lost 30 PED
I am very happy about the 10 PED for full skilled job that hour, as I only lost 20 PED (still lost!)
Trooper has artifically no MU in it, thats why I rarly hunt them, the ultra rar drops 1 in 10k kills is good loot, but damn ultra rar. So that doesn´t cover anything on that hunt.
If you kill faster it gets even worse.

This idea is bad bad bad !

Now I show you how hunting jobs work, that I have done in the past:

Crafter hires a hunter, where the crafter provides at least ammo and pays full decay for FAP, Armor, Gun and Attachments.
You team up with the crafter, so he can see what you loot, while he stands at the mashine crafting.
When you finished the hunt, you trade all loot to the crafter.
Hunter gets the money for decay and worked for free skills, while the crafter gets the resources from the hunt he needs for his own crafting.

Since there is artifically no MU left on the resources and auction is flooded with nearly everything a crafter needs, such hunting jobs became very rar. Easyer and mostly cheaper just buying things from auction.
Not to speak of non existing MU for crafted items, because everything looted is way better than crafted things.

Thats a real hunting job, what ND offers here is not a job. It can´t earn you money on the long run, as your average loss exceeds the money paid for the hunt.

To get back hunting jobs in EU as we have had it in the past, there has to be a economy driven by crafting mainly. That needs balancing, not additional fees.

Maybe is just me, but how I imagine these "jobs" is putting only time in, not also money.

Something like you take a turret seat and have to defend the teleporter of incoming mobs waves or something; you're using house ammo and you don't loot anything (probably no skills either).

Wouldn't the current highly skilled players represent a massive drain on resources as they'd be right at the top on the payment chart.

Or is this a new skill where everyone starts at zero. Even so it's still weighted heavily in favour of the those who've been around a while.

tbh it feels more like a new version of the oil rig where you have to shoot something instead of picking up the oil. What represents 15 hours of game play - if it's just being logged in it could lead to massive influx of alt's who just stand around doing nothing.

If people are willing to create alt's to get 10 ped of items to tt then this would be nirvana for them.

DoA said:

Maybe is just me, but how I imagine these "jobs" is putting only time in, not also money.

Something like you take a turret seat and have to defend the teleporter of incoming mobs waves or something; you're using house ammo and you don't loot anything (probably no skills either).

Click to expand...

Me too. At least my expectation is of zero cost, or very little.
I thus expected the work to be of no actual value, but it will fit into whatever storyline of defending the tp. My main questions are: is 1 hour simply exactly that: 1 hour at some terminal or tp repair, whatever? Or is it an 'averaged hour' of new mat collection, resource gathering maybe, with a hand-in value to some 'factory'?

This links to my main concern about alts/bots. If the dreamt-up job is of an auto-tool nature, then you may as well be afk, so the 30 mins a day serves no purpose. I thus expect the task to be maybe running up and down a bank of tp terminal units, like at the forts, where they can be destroyed and repaired. In this case the 'enemy' would damage stuff in a similar way that mobs damage spacecraft, except to individual points to keep repairers running around. But as yet I've seen nothing by ND on this element, but I can imagine lots of easily implementable stuff.

It does bring me to where the jobs will be, though... could it be a link to the land plots in some way serving as the 'factories', and will all planets and external partners in the ped worlds get opportunities, or is the idea to get everyone to tp (at cost) into EU and away again (or not) when done?

On another thread someone has started a brief look into the absurd teleporting forecasts. We've not had it here yet, but I expect inter-planetary tps and out-of-world tps (e.g. compet) to count too, so even if I reduce current tp use, I'll be tp-ing via the further types in the future.

I already have a job. I use part of the money from it to play this game. I'm not going to pay to work a second job at wages that make the lowest paid worker in Cambodia look like Fortune 500 CEO pay. Nor am I going to pay to teleport.
Neither am I going to fly to Hunt Mob X for muscle oil and then fly from there to Mob Y to get eye oil so I can get fucked crafting conductors or springs.

I am not going to be "Conscripted" to do anything. It is my free time and no one dictates to me how I will spend it.

Now listen carefully... MindArk provides the game I want to play or I move on to greener pastures. I am not unique in this. I AM VERY COMMON IN THIS REGARD.

If any of this gets added, what will happen is a rush to chip out, sell everything (TT if need be) and withdraw. The very last update to this game will be something like this...

V ###.###.##

- Added Soup Kitchens for the remaining players.

People will not get their withdrawals because quite frankly, MA doesn't have it. People will sue. MA will be finished.

People will post loot theories that "In the long run you get 5% returns so all is well".

Calling this a bad idea is an understatement.

The bottom line is: I AM NOT PAYING IT.

There is already a system of guaranteed income in effect. It is called sweating and gathering. People can sweat mobs and pick up fruit, dung and stones.

So the idea of introducing some new thing to bring jobs to players? Seems silly we already have a system in place that does just that.

Tinker around with what needs sweat, fruit dung and how much if need be but to bring in a whole new system when we have still major stuff to be implemented and fixed is not making sense to me.











#space_flight connecting space service providers with travellers

Yoshii Lem said:

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Yes, but humans are strange creatures. Lots of people want to get in on action while it's new, not already around for years.

Give people a clear framework and they are more likely to do something, which is maybe why the very free (no structure) job of gathering is not so successful.

Sweating seems to be very well taken up, also in groups, but that economy is really low now in terms of peds per hour which can be translated into player turnover (good for MA) by those sweaters. I agree that that could be tinkered with much more easily, though. Maybe it's just not considered a marketable 'storyline' for the 'story-tellers'.

So from one standpoint I very much agree with you. But I could also accept a more inflated type of project if they ever did anything properly, and even halfway close to the time planned. It's called a follow-through MA!
(space transport missions, land plots, PROPER voting rights to things, harvesting with a purpose other than crafting mats to buy big plots of land which do nothing... etc etc)

...so, just on the 2020 estimations:
10 billion teleports a year with 316,000 virtual reality jobs.
Now, we have no idea how many active players overall, but IF it's 1 million, then everyone including workers will have to tp 27 times a day! (10k times a year each).

Ok, so let's turn down the volume to 100,000 players and 5 tps a day (as it might include even dieing tp to revive), makes about 1/60 of original estimation.
That's still 16 million dollars revenue and about 4 million suggested as 'profit' (25% of total).
That would still pay back an investment in the original share offering of 10 million dollars at 25% a year.

It would also be setting a 'base' of 5 peds cost a day to tp, which is.... voila... 15 dollars a month. Those workers under conscription would have to be tp-ing less, so anyone 'paying to play and not work' would be on 15 dollars and above without even doing other 'lossy' stuff.

If we lower the estimate of jobs down to 31.6 k jobs too, about 6 million dollars a year would be freebie costs, and we still have 6 mil of the 16 revenue for the platform and costs.

Ok, that was the homework I set myself........ it doesn't look impossible at that rate, but will there be even that playerbase if enough current players are determined not to be a part of it?

Or will it be considered a 'whole new ball game for new entrants to the game'?....

So you're telling players that are already ECO fanatics to spend 5 ped every day on something they used to do for free to pay someone else to do a job that isn't needed.

SpikeBlack said:

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I love how short and to the point you have made that
.... to pay someone else to do a job that isn't needed. - none of the 'jobs' in a VR world proposal are actually 'needed'. It is a created environment with artificial 'needs' which create (or add to) an economy, so in a way your argument is beside the point. I do get it though, yes.

ECO fanatics - they would tp less than average, as ECO is what they are concentrating on compared to others. I would expect ECO players to gravitate to the jobs side here themselves, as 10 peds an hour is a lot better than sweating.
Partly they are doing their own work here, yes, but mostly for others if they rarely tp.

There is a splinter group of the Basic Income supporters who want environmental taxation to go up as part of the new system, and it is then partly like a dog trying to bite its own tail. Everyone has higher costs as well as higher incomes, so many people ask what the point of it all is. The answer is in the new balance and the environmental incentives to reduce energy use in society as a whole.
The crazy VR version would be: stop tp-ing so much; don't you know how much energy it uses?!

jetsina said:

I love how short and to the point you have made that
.... to pay someone else to do a job that isn't needed. - none of the 'jobs' in a VR world proposal are actually 'needed'. It is a created environment with artificial 'needs' which create (or add to) an economy, so in a way your argument is beside the point. I do get it though, yes.

ECO fanatics - they would tp less than average, as ECO is what they are concentrating on compared to others. I would expect ECO players to gravitate to the jobs side here themselves, as 10 peds an hour is a lot better than sweating.
Partly they are doing their own work here, yes, but mostly for others if they rarely tp.

There is a splinter group of the Basic Income supporters who want environmental taxation to go up as part of the new system, and it is then partly like a dog trying to bite its own tail. Everyone has higher costs as well as higher incomes, so many people ask what the point of it all is. The answer is in the new balance and the environmental incentives to reduce energy use in society as a whole.
The crazy VR version would be: stop tp-ing so much; don't you know how much energy it uses?!

Click to expand...

Other than sweating and fruitystonepoo walking, there's not one activity in this game that costs less than 10 ped an hour to make that "job" profitable.