The Economy --> The Crusade

Most players can agree that it has become an issue. The prices in the market are sky-high. Resources consistantly post at max value, and frags are so expensive that even a top-page player such as myself cringes at the thought of buying any.

I would personally love to see this game expand and succeed through to a Battle Conquest 2. To do that, it needs to attract/keep new players. As a new player, I would have been thoroughly disheartened to learn that the market prices are so expensive it would be better for me to not even look.

A large part of keeping players is keeping the feeling of growth/progression within the gamer. The market is one of those tools we have to provide flexibility to the gamer. It enables them to find what they need to complete the task they have in mind - be it levelling a building, researching a technology, or buying/crafting items for your armies.

Not all guilds have the ability to stuff their vault with goods so that members can get what they need, most members of smaller guilds (or guildless players) have only the market as an option to quickly acquire exactly what you need.

I post about this for 2 reasons....

1. To brainstorm for ideas to solve this problem

- Increase frag drop rates? i.e. 2 frags/battle
- Improve resources from quests/battles?
- Have the names of sellers on market items displayed with their postings?
- Have the names of buyers provided to sellers upon completion of sale?
- Set market caps for frags? (would inadvertantly offer some control on gear prices)
- Any other ideas/suggestions welcome

2. To gain support from the community in lowering our prices for the greater good.

- I personally am making the attempt to lower market prices myself. I am continually posting resources at lower prices to hopefully influence others to likewise drop their prices. Granted, I am only able to work with 12 posts at a time, so my ability to effect the system on a grand-scale is minimized.

- Would love the assistance of like-minded end-game players like myself in lowering prices.

- What i'm doing is starting with resources since they're the easiest to effect, and are self-regenerating

My personal targets for the economy are
- 1.5 resource/1 gold ratio
- get frag prices down to 1/2 of current standard (current non-artifact frag standard buyout is approx.: 150-500 common, 800-2500 uncommon, 5000-10000 rare, 50000-60000 epic, 100000-120000 godlike)

The aim is to make the market a more feasible place for newer players to shop. Any assistance/ideas/input is much appreciated, as I feel this is critical to the anchoring of the new players.

I agree with Dobraine. Prices are crazy, the inability of most players to purchase decent gear makes pvp a ghost town as well. I'd be very much ok if drop rates increased and some sort of cap system was introduced on frags. Its not like the gold is all that important...but having to pay for things by the truck full is a bit non-sensical as well.

Supply and demand....

The prices are high because someone or some people are buying at such high prices. If people were not buying them at such prices, then the sellers would actually lower the prices...

YOU regulate the prices...not us or the system...

Rune, I think you and I both know that prices are also driven up by high-level players/gem-users. Currently, I think it clearly shows in the market. Somebody just bidding everything (of 1 resource or multiple at the same time) to a high price. Last week I saw all stone (without buyout) within 19 hrs. and 1-4 days on 2500 gold. I don't think that this was an incident, nor a guild just looking to acquire resources for walls. I know that in the past this price-driving happened deliberately (before you changed prices for gem-users re. resource buying), so I got the feeling this is now happening again.

Rune, you can't blame the people playing for this. The game system does not have enough ways to get resources other than gold. If it did, than people would be getting resources and cashing in their high price, thus lowering the price over time. Since people aren't (can't), it's clear that resources are actually scarce. We're not trying to rip people off, resources just really are that hard to come by.

Source->Seller->Buyer. If the source isn't adequate than there is no chance a savvy seller is going to sell resources for lower prices. Resources cost so much gold right now not because people refuse to buy from evil people, but simply because every resource but gold is scarce. By battling, you make multiple times more gold than any other resource.  The only reasonable way to get resources other than gold right now is to buy them from the market for very high, wait for your buildings to make it, or to buy with real gems. There is no other way to get them reasonably, as battles give resources other than gold very poorly.

I agree with people who have mentioned that gold can be dropped more, while resource drops should be increased more. The previous gold patch did almost nothing to help the issue as gold is still several times easier to get compared to every other resource. Except I think maybe the changes need to be a little more extreme where on average the resource drops of a battle are around 70-75% of how much gold you make in the battle (not 100% as healing/repairing needs to be considered). Think about the SOURCE of resources!

Bobba wrote:

The only reasonable way to get resources other than gold right now is to buy them from the market for very high, wait for your buildings to make it, or to buy with real gems. There is no other way to get them reasonably, as battles give resources other than gold very poorly.

I agree with people who have mentioned that gold can be dropped more, while resource drops should be increased more.

I agree with Bobba, resources are too hard to come by, maybe even harder for the newest players who are drawn into coops with high-level-players. They may actually have a hard time getting enough gold to buy something useful on the market. Also, the frag drops are still nerfed for solo missions. The need for good equipment was clear when the AI got gear. But at the same time the way to get that gear, was restricted. I have stated before, the devs need to re-think the balance of the game. Especially for starting players. The vet-players who already have excellent equipment will not be dissatisfied when newer players will get the chance to gear up more easily. This also includes a drastic improvement of crafting something useful. It is really discouraging to see how many items I crafted and how much were utter crap or 3rd-rank spares at best.

I'd like to give an example. I just did a coop with a very new player. With boost he had lvl. 7 units. My cav. were dealing in the North with a lot of enemies, so the two of us had a go on about 40-50% of the total AI-army. I went in first, he immediately after me. But facing enemies up to lvl. 13, he couldn't possibly do much damage. Surprised he lost so few, actually. But the fight was short, probably why.

The statistics: The new player had killed 26 enemies, had 19 casualties. His rewards : 291 gold, 54 iron and a common banner frag. His actual healing cost was 103 gold.

I got 113 kills and 14 casualties. Had 2378 gold, 462 stone and a common banner frag.

I think this illustrates something: he got 54 iron and barely any gold out of a fight. If I recall correctly he had no equipment, which isn't strange for lvl 1-2 players. When I was a smaller player, at least the resource rewards were better than this....

Obviously, as a starter step, WE as high-end players have to step up and make a difference in the market.

Granted, i'm of the opinion that some minor tweaks to the loot system would aid us greatly in improving the game for newcomers but it is not the sole source of the problem.

As has been discussed, balance is an issue. They can't tweak too much and have such an overflow of frags/resources that noone wants to invest in the store anymore...though right now, it is certainly a great struggle for new players to afford the market prices.

I'm not sure what the answer will be in the end, but I believe we should start by trying to influence the market ourselves...if we gather support from our peers it should certainly be doable.

Should our efforts fail, then is the time to really push for change, and not simply discuss the possibility.

Cheers

- Dobraine

I'll post later some thoughts on the economy, from observing it for four months.

Just noticed this when Malodor mentioned in trade chat:



Zero stone for buyout & only two pages of stone for sale  

A lot of trading of resources has obviously moved to the guilds using their vaults, so that changes the market.

Since yesterday, I've also stopped all buying & selling of iron/stone, for one week; as an experiment to observe the market.

Before, for last few weeks, I was buying iron/stone at 2.5 & either giving it away; or giving to friends at 1.0; or reselling at ~2.85 to make a profit.

Was also selling at ~2.85 iron/stone from gems (and yes, it sold quite briskly at that price).  I was selling about ~300k per day of iron/stone from gems last few weeks.  And spending a lot of it on buying wood at ~1.2 price.

RuneSlayer wrote:

Supply and demand....

The prices are high because someone or some people are buying at such high prices. If people were not buying them at such prices, then the sellers would actually lower the prices...

YOU regulate the prices...not us or the system...

This is true to a degree. We are lucky you put a capped price on resources to stop that price from going up. If you had not made a cap of 3:1 ratio, then who knows where the prices would end up being. All I know is for the prices to go down, there would have to be a huge supply, which in turn would require another noob swarm or a rich player selling stuff for really cheap prices.

venumuse wrote:

RuneSlayer wrote:

Supply and demand....

The prices are high because someone or some people are buying at such high prices. If people were not buying them at such prices, then the sellers would actually lower the prices...

YOU regulate the prices...not us or the system...

This is true to a degree. We are lucky you put a capped price on resources to stop that price from going up. If you had not made a cap of 3:1 ratio, then who knows where the prices would end up being. All I know is for the prices to go down, there would have to be a huge supply, which in turn would require another noob swarm or a rich player selling stuff for really cheap prices.

A REALLY rich player maybe, throwing thousands of dollars into the game for a temporary fix doesn't sound good. As for a noob swarm, I don't think that would effect the prices very much or for very long, as resources are hard to come by even for newer players.

Bobba wrote:

As for a noob swarm, I don't think that would effect the prices very much or for very long, as resources are hard to come by even for newer players.

The price of wood will drop down to 334 again, like last time with the newbie swarm. Remember the 100+ pages of wood for sale ...

(It would have gone lower than 334, but that was minimum they could sell at)

Bobba wrote:

A REALLY rich player maybe, throwing thousands of dollars into the game for a temporary fix doesn't sound good.

Such a player would be more likely to become an investor, I imagine. Were I that player, i'd be all over it.

What I was proposing was for a team of not-so-rich, but well progressed individuals to make the attempt to sell their spare resources (preferably in bulk - i.e. 10k+ amounts) at a more affordable price to apply pressure to the rest of the market to drop their prices.

No great personal sacrifice needs to be made, not if it becomes a group effort. I alone began pressure on the wood market by selling 20k stacks at just under a 1.5 ratio buyout. At the time I started, the average ratio was around 2.5 -3. I'm sure we can all agree, that's a terrible price. The day after I started doing this, I noticed that smaller ratios started popping up in the 1k-5k amounts. There were (and still are) those that stubbornly sell at a 2.5 -3 ratio. However, I maintained my auctions, and the market started to fill with cheaper wood... due to the fact that the higher ones simply stopped selling because a better option was available.

Now granted, no noobies are going to be investing in 20k wood...but when someone goes to check the market for going prices before they sell - "WHOA! Someone undercut the market by 50%! If I want my auctions to sell, I should probably drop it down a bit..."

And so it trickled down...now there are people beating my prices - which is fantastic!


If we could find a group of players at the end-game level who were committed to this idea, it would not be difficult to regulate the market. I did undertake the easiest resource, true...but I also did it alone without spending money to buy any wood to sell. That's simply what I had built up.

Now if I were to get some help, I could move on to stone or iron - whatever is convenient to the team, really. Several people, making a coordinated market push would likely yield fantastic results.

Agree upon a ratio to sell at, assign several people to each resource, and MAINTAIN. The key is making sure those prices are present ALWAYS. While you won't influence everyone to drop their prices, you will convince enough people to begin the trickle effect...which will eventually force those that want unreasonable  amounts to reduce their prices.

All I need is some willing participants, which is the hardest part.

Granted, I admit I'm about about to buy 1 bunch of wood from the store ;)i've been donating EVERYTHING to the guild in the last few days hehe

Don't feel like becoming a liar in addition to a jackass ;)One is enough!

See? Told you it was the hardest part

*crickets*

Well, I don't even worry about the market unless I can buy cheap gear and frags for later or donate to clan, I've been focusing on just clan stuff.

I keep losing interest in the game myself and I am a mid level player, it'd take literally hundreds of battles just for a few 10k worth of resource, so I am stuck waiting 4 hours, log in, collect resource since building and research cost is sooo high with the lower than before resources from battle xD you barely see me bugging you in here because I've just been losing interest that much.

Then don't even get me started on this stalemate -.- are you kidding me? Put up walls and no one really moves anywhere. This is getting past boring for a war game. There's not even strategy which you'd like to see, because it's just a war on walls.

Then again with only darks ever getting bonuses to new players if there ever is a winner it will not be lights because we have many players with many being inactive. So the light is slowly finding its self active at all, to find a coop now is crazy... Wait for like 5-10+ mins just for a game now.

Perhaps since you have hardly been playing you're missing it...

Much of the strategy (map-effecting strategy, anyways) comes from players and guilds working together and formulating plans.

The individual player strategy is in the form of how you build/gear your army, how you set yourself up/play/react on the battlefield.

The walls are a fantastic mechanic...they aren't EASY for a guild to put up, let alone a high-level set. It actually requires political strategy in the working of guilds through planning/contracts to succesfully coordinate as a faction in taking and holding hexes.

If anything, the strategy of this game is becoming ever more complicated, as it deals with the reactions of real people...and is not solely determined by an a/b/c option NPC, or the click of a pre-determined option. It requires thinking, planning, discussion...the morale of players has an impact on all of these as well.

I think Joyce put it best...

Joyce wrote:

This game is fascinating becuase its *NOT* clear we can win.

I mean, mathematically, winning light .vs. dark is *easy*

The real key, is united the people; lol.

So its *really* a battle of wits, patience, forgiveness, grace, understanding, encouragement, manipulation, anger, joy, etc, etc.

Truely an amazing strategy game.

Can we win?  Maybe!

The 'Maybe' is what makes it *so* interesting & the only way to way to win; is by interacting, positivly with irritating, annoying people, lol.

Fascinating!

I believe the reason you see there being a lack in strategy...is because this game is unique in the way it has been implemented. Never have I seen a game where the players are so important to the outcome of the game.

And if this form of strategy isn't for you, take comfort in knowing that there are many things in the ToDo list that would bolster the kind you prefer. New units, for example. A counter-strategy mechanism for walls is currently under discussion as well. Go take a look at it and see what you think. While you're there, take note on how much has already been done on there so you realize that the devs mean business.

As always, if you have any ideas for improving the game for yourself and others, you could always suggest it.




Back to the topic, I suppose you don't feel like joining Operation Market Crusade?

Dobraine wrote:

The walls are a fantastic mechanic...they aren't EASY for a guild to put up, let alone a high-level set.

Hmm
*Looking suspiciously at Prism walls*

Btw this Operation market garden works only for the time you put up cheaper stuff. When you stop it, the effect will vanish soon.

wont the market also start to balance when the highest players run out of personal upgrades and eventually run out of guild upgrades, leaving them only with the AH to get rid of overstock resources?

Broodzero wrote:

wont the market also start to balance when the highest players run out of personal upgrades and eventually run out of guild upgrades, leaving them only with the AH to get rid of overstock resources?

I suppose that would be dependent on a number of factors, such as how many people reach this end game stage, how long they stick with the game, and what new upgrades/buildings/research is added down the line...to name just a few things.

Broodzero wrote:

wont the market also start to balance when the highest players run out of personal upgrades and eventually run out of guild upgrades, leaving them only with the AH to get rid of overstock resources?

Nope, a lot of them plan to use the resources to:

1. Help guild members;
   
2. Upgrade the guild;
   
3. Build walls  
   

Walls¹ in particular are a resource sink, and cause the price of resources to be way higher than before.

---

¹To be more precise, the building of supplies to support the walls is the real resource sink.  Or keeping walls up on the front lines as the opposite faction attack them.  For example the walls on #50 have been destroyed about 35 times (that is 350,000 of each resource withdrawn from the economy, causing prices to go up).  Add the supply to support the walls on #50, and we are easily talking 600,000 of each resource extra demand on the economy.  And that is only #50 ... look at all the other walls all over the map .... Hence prices go up.

Joyce wrote:

[*]Help guild members;

if wealthy players are giving away resources rather than just selling them, that causes the same effect as those in need are getting what they want.

I've seen a couple threads on the economy today. I'm a bit confused why it baffles people that our resources and fragments are such a high price compared to what they used to be (not that I know since I wasn't here then)... Did no one take economics in high school or college? It's all supply versus demand. If we want to change the market, we need to make a concentrated effort. Unfortunately, people are greedy and markets are extremely fragile and unstable.



Boom.

Nobody is baffled. I think everybody understands the basic mechanisms of price generation on free markets. The problem is that we are currently experiencing a severe inflation of market values triggered by the enormous supply of gold. But if i'm not mistaken market prices are sinking again and will soon be stable.

So prices are high because everyone and his mother has too much gold? I don't see the problem.