Note entirely sure if this is the correct place to ask but it seemed the best bet.

A player and I got into a debate about the common folk of Elanthia. When I role play I try to remember the fact that Elanthia is thriving with life other than actual PC players. People such as teamsters, porters, cobblers, carpenters, hunters, farmers, and so on and so forth.

This player and I began talking about the wealth of so man and he mentioned how a hundred platinum is not worth much these days. I made the off remark that there are most certainly thousands of people who never see a hundred platinum in their lifetime.
(insert long debate)

So I was wondering if there were any recorded documents or such that would give an idea of how much these people common folk make. In my mind I had imagine between 5 to 20 silver a week depending on whatever job one might hold and imagine it highly unlike they would make anything like even 50 silver a week.

Anywho, I was just curious and was hoping someone might have the answer.

Have the crafting societies mechanics and the hunting slowdown from 3.0 had an effect on the pricing for player-produced goods yet, or is 'this is the pricing we've always used' still dominating the day in terms of price-setting?

--Wryhk

"If you want total security, go to prison. There you're fed, clothed, given medical care and so on. The only thing lacking... is freedom." ~Dwight D. Eisenhower

The economy has not changed that much because of 3.0, so neither have prices. People still have way too much, so prices not that bad. On top of that, the availability of rare metals has not changed with 3.0. So those prices have not changed.

Abison/Rystien

I find that interesting, as the supply side should be sky-rocketting while the rate of inflation (Delta [delta value of plats / delta time] / delta time) should be decreasing (unless workorder payout is creating more plats than the hunting slowdown removed... or inflation was so rampant that we never even came close to hitting a stable equilibrium... both of which are entirely possible).

--Wryhk

"If you want total security, go to prison. There you're fed, clothed, given medical care and so on. The only thing lacking... is freedom." ~Dwight D. Eisenhower

>>or inflation was so rampant that we never even came close to hitting a stable equilibrium

This. 3.0 may have slowed the serious plat farmers down a little bit, but it has in no way halted the economy as people acted like it would. I don't keep track of what I make but I know I can still fill 2 gem pouches up in 8-10 hours of hunting resuscitants and they sell for ~80 plat lirum on average. That is at level for me also, not killing quickly to farm.

>>inflation was so rampant that we never even came close to hitting a stable equilibrium..

As mentioned above, it is this.

You can slow down plat generation all you want, but there is nothing to buy in this game that drains plats from the game. You can buy items from Simu for $$ (either in the microtrans shop or for payquest prizes), or you can buy expensive items from other players and pass plats around. There is nothing that takes significant amounts of platinum out of the game, so inflation will always continue

Apu
_
Respect. Integrity. World Domination.
https://sites.google.com/site/apucorpdr/

>>Nothing... except the gem box!

The gem box is awesome don't get me wrong, but it does not drain a significant # of plats when it only exists a couple weeks out of the year

Apu
_
Respect. Integrity. World Domination.
https://sites.google.com/site/apucorpdr/

My estimates based on studying the history of over a decade of auctions and the DRSales plat-dollar exchange rate was that I assumed a yearly 50% inflation rate.

That is a tremendous inflation rate.

>Nothing... except the gem box!

The gem box does not count because it is entirely voluntary and the winner of the prize gets more out of it than was put into it in terms of marketable value items. Last year's prize was absurd and easily worth the hundreds of thousands of plats invested.

The same with auctions.

There is nothing to stop "Hrm, I need X amount of money to "be competitive" in the next auction." X will continue to get bigger and bigger until either it's so high only one person can reach it, there's no one left playing the game, or the game crashes from the stupidly high value of X.

Alright, I'll come out and say it. Yearly wealth removal, percentage-based.

Kaeta Airtag

>>Actually an opinion cannot be changed or corrected. Nice try back of line.-VERATHOR
>>But it can be wrong.-Starlear

>>The coolest stuff is largely reserved for people with many alts and lots of money.

Alts have almost nothing to do with it. You can make much more by running one character than you can running alts.

Abison/Rystien

The REAL driving issue on auction prices also isn't purely the amount of money one can obtain IG. There is the marketing of plats for RL currency that allows the most-driven PLAYERS (not characters) to obtain the vast quantities of plats needed to enjoy high-end auctions and less driven players to pick up some extra pocket cash. This is something I do not personally like, though it certainly has it's merits. I think it is detrimental to the game, but I'm in no position to do anything about it, nor would it necessarily be proper even if I were. I guess at the end of the day, my trader did drop some pieces into the cleric's donation box which my nec decided to abscond with, so I imagine my rights to even complain about it are quite limited.

At the end of the day, you are either able to produce insane amounts of plats, you are willing and able to BUY insane amounts of plats from other players for dollars, or you aren't going to take part in the auctions. I, like you, have always been in the third category.

That, however, really doesn't take a great deal away from the game itself. A great many of the things in those auctions end up collecting virtual dust in someone's vault and only see the light of day when they are exchanged for even-more exorbitant sums. They end up being more like someone's private collection of Picasso than real combat advantages. Case in point - ever seen any of the Katanas (I believe a few were added in more recent auctions)? How about the Masamunes (I think 2 exist.. I could be wrong)? They are probably under a mountain of textdust. No one actually fights with them.

--Wryhk

"If you want total security, go to prison. There you're fed, clothed, given medical care and so on. The only thing lacking... is freedom." ~Dwight D. Eisenhower

I almost almost almost almost had enough for the multi-language crown last year (of course it was Grey Haven Scrip not Platinum Dokora) I really hope they have multi-currency stuff for the auction this year, and start doing that for the Guild Festival too.

And as far as the multi-language stuff goes, I would have used it, I make regular use of other language assisting things on my characters and I wish I had more.

---
"I think anything that forces you to do something no sane adventurer would do just in order to train is ridiculous."
DR-SOCHARIS

---
Victory Over Lyras, on the 397th year and 156 days since the Victory of Lanival the Redeemer.

>> And as far as the multi-language stuff goes, I would have used it

>Just out of curiosities sake, what is a multi-language crown and what does it do

Probably talking about something like this :

http://elanthipedia.org/w/index.php/Item:Delicate_platinum_diadem_set_with_glittering_black_opals

"Allows you to understand (and speak) all languages. Can use it for 3 minutes every 48 hours.
Use LANGUAGE command to change the spoken language."

---

Salute a drowned sailor? You ought to brush up on your protocol, Kasto.

Yes something like the Diadem

http://elanthipedia.org/w/index.php/Item:Simple_crystalline_crown_set_with_sapphires_surrounding_a_ruby

---
"I think anything that forces you to do something no sane adventurer would do just in order to train is ridiculous."
DR-SOCHARIS

---
Victory Over Lyras, on the 397th year and 156 days since the Victory of Lanival the Redeemer.

>>Well, you can make the most money by running a bunch of HLC alts. That's what the top DR farmers do at least.

That's no so much "alts" as just having a bunch of accounts. Generally an "alt" is a lower level character on the same account. But yeah, tomayto tomahto, and the point is there are people out there who control multiple bought 150+ level characters and can farm insane amounts of plats if they want to.

Apu
_
Respect. Integrity. World Domination.
https://sites.google.com/site/apucorpdr/

>feel free to rip it up

Ok.

>where are out faucets?

OUR faucets. (that's probably about as critical of this as I'll be)

>List 'o sinks.

You forgot non-POS shopping. Voluntary, true, but buying stuff at fests and 24/7 shops does sink money. (Although truthfully, I don't buy ANYTHING from 24/7 shops these days. There's nothing I buy in 24/7 shops that I can't steal for free. Although some things I need in such quantities that I probably SHOULD buy because I'm hampered in how fast I can steal how many I need. Need dozens of gweth chains. Keyblanks can only steal like 7 at a time.

>-i don't even remember the last time I even THOUGHT about the coin cost to train an attribute.

Remember it's 2xTDP cost. and I'm SURE you think about TDP costs, A LOT.

>attribute training-
>-scale by attribute, modified by characters TOTAL bank accounts (costs a little more if you're rich)

This should probably be done. A linear sink is no sink at all when character power/wealth/TDP is on exponential gain.

I've got a 150th MM with 10k TDP, that's only 2 plat or about 15 skins.


>-repair of rare material items should require a small amount of the primary rare material

Now this I'll disagree with on the principle of how are you going to GET tyrium, or diamondhide leather? Keep in mind that there's nothing smaller than 1vol. You need 1 volume of tyrium to fix a 4 volume stabbing sword?

I think the bigger problem is that they set repair prices too low. At the time they were tweaking and retweaking NPC shop repair costs/times, we were desperate for ANYTHING better than the old system of "it got a bit of acid, get it repaired in 60 seconds or it's GONE" and "It'll take 4 hours and 90 kronar to repair that". I think the TIME is ok, (10 minutes is a bit of a wait, but you can do something to amuse yourself that long without getting frustrated) but the price is too cheap by a factor of 2-3.

I wore a full set of moonsilver cloth to the damage cap (which for those who don't know is WAY beyond "battered and practically destroyed", that's probably only about 40% the way there) to see how bad the repair bill was on such expensive gear. The repair time/cost was to be, well:

Randal says, "It will cost 196486 Kronars and take 10 roisaen to repair some quilted Elven silk gloves decorated with blued moonsilver, a target shield, a quilted Elven silk hood crisscrossed with blued moonsilver and a quilted Elven silk hauberk shimmering with blued moonsilver.

I took the time to train up tailoring to get repair techs, and it wound up being about 85 seconds per item and practically free to repair that myself with needle and thread and slickstone.

But 20 plat after hours and hours over a week of hunting in armor worth in excess of 3000 plat? In that time I've killed hundreds of plat worth of critters.

In contrast, more common sense appraisal value items like nightmare leather sets and such are only a few gold or maybe up to 2-3 plat.

>travel-could adjust based on the appraisal value of a persons worn items (walking up to a ferry wearing 30k plats worth of stuff should get you over charged by the ferryman
>-appraisal prices need to adjust to match what players will pay for items

The big problem I have with your proposal though, is that it hinges on checking appraisal value by item. Is that per ITEM, or per UNIQUE item? Like if 50 nightmare leathers get traded back and forth for 3k plat each by other people who I may not even know, does that jack up the value of the nightmare leathers I've owned for the last 2 years and never left my body?

Also, there would be a lot of system resources eaten up by these checks. And THEN you're going to have to change EVERY item that's now changing a value. That cannot be a trivial system change, given how RARELY they change appraisal values on items. Does it include altered items that are now no longer a generic "nightmare leathers" (just picking it as a commonly available item that sells for far more than its appraisal due to the non-IG reasons for its price).

Furthermore, an issue of scaling. There are (presumably) rather cash-strapped characters wearing rather valuable stuff that's "free" from questing, and there's characters wearing identical gear that would think nothing of dropping 10k plat in repairs. The latter are going to "crowd out" the former by being more willing to pay higher repair bills and other "maintenance" costs.

Further cons are that it is a disincentive to wear "common" gear. Although this is kind of offset by the desire to wear "uncommon" gear, like the immense pile of "not quite as good as the best, so no one takes it" stuff that infests so many of the quest loot lists on Elanthipedia. That would be probably be a plus, really, it'd get everyone to stop wearing the same damned armor because it's the best statistically.

Kaeta Airtag

>>Actually an opinion cannot be changed or corrected. Nice try back of line.-VERATHOR
>>But it can be wrong.-Starlear

only temporarily;

unless inflation is controlled in a dynamic way, inflation will ALWAYS eventually overcome any steps put in place. if the 'rules' to overcome inflation are static, they'll either not be sufficient, or they won't be used, because it'll be too expensive

yes, this would bring the total coin in game down... until someone complains that the only GOOD catalyst is WAY over priced, and QA forgets WHY it's so expensive, so it's changed, and inflation starts to rise again.

(option to let this idea still work - that uber-catalyst, let at least this one item to by dynamically priced based on the total coin in the realms ; devils advocate, someone will realize this, stockpile it while it's reasonably low, and then sell it while it's high, reducing it's effectiveness as an anti-inflation device)

>The shadowling exclaims, "Mana neeto!"

It could, of course, also be mitigated by making direct player-to-player trades... Good old rule of unintended consequences. Still, it would have an impact.

--Wryhk

"If you want total security, go to prison. There you're fed, clothed, given medical care and so on. The only thing lacking... is freedom." ~Dwight D. Eisenhower

Whole bunch of ideas going on in this thread that aren't necessarily bad, but would annoy lots of people and not even put a dent in inflation. You aren't going to fix anything with mandatory plat sinks or % based taxes on stuff that everyone uses, when the amount of money that various characters can earn per day varies by orders of magnitude.

This game has insane inflation for one simple reason - there is nothing worth buying for in-game coins. Every cool new item is either sold for RL$$ or is part of a lottery-style event where everyone gets equal opportunity (with the exception of two 1-hour auctions per calendar year). If you want to reduce inflation, sell cool items for massive amounts of plats. It's not complicated. I've been saying the same thing since 1998, and it's still the exact same problem, exact same solution that Simu has no interest in addressing.

Apu
_
Respect. Integrity. World Domination.
https://sites.google.com/site/apucorpdr/

>>They always seem worried about making stuff available for plats leading to uncontrolled inflation of 'cool stuff.'

Well I don't think it's so much this, but that it cuts into the profits they can make on payquests and microtransactions.

You don't need to release any more "cool stuff" than they already release into the game. If you took all the quest prizes and RL$$ bonding potions and sold them for plats, at the same limited quantity that they are already released at, inflation would be gone instantly. Simutronics' revenue and the game's viability might also be gone though, I don't really know. They don't even attempt to strike any semblance of balance though - nearly 100% of new items are sold for $$ except for two auctions per year

Apu
_
Respect. Integrity. World Domination.
https://sites.google.com/site/apucorpdr/

It would be nice if they had those material grab bags at HE fest (that were purchaseable for tickets) also available for plats. Even if they did something like 250 plat dokoras a bag, it'd suck an obscene amount of coin out of the system. I think one of those per major fest would do the trick. We had a fest in each currency this past year. Having a table with coin grab bags post auctions would do the trick, IMO.

"Brace yourselves, Squanto is going to bleh blah fart fart bleh.." -the player of the character formerly known as Pureblade