Tree of Savior Forum

Economy - The most important thing

Caption Obvious:
It doesn’t really matter how much currency you can gain in any given period of time. As long as the appropriate currency sinks are in place to consume it.

Inflation happens when more currency is generated than is consumed.

Big number syndrome and inflation are slowed by good currency sinks that players enjoy dumping their currency consistently into. Often these are common crafting materials that can be purchased from an NPC, or consumables also purchased from an NPC, or repair costs paid to an NPC.

Note that for a currency sink to actually be a sink, it needs to remove currency from the system, not transfer it to another player.

You really think i am just some random douche, don’t you? Fair enough…

You are getting more aggressive on each answer, what means you are running out of patients, what means you are getting brain tired. This topic is about an opinion i happen to have, why are you driving yourself tired with my opinion?

After all, i am just a random douche, isn’t that right? Clever people don’t care about random douches’ opinions. You have 8 texts here discussing my opinion, that clearly show that you care about my opinion.

So since you care so much about my opinion, here is another one: I think you are a Joe six pack trying to look smart.

Well, there is no such thing as “for you”. My intentions is to help improving the game for everyone, making it better in order for it to become “unforgettable experience” material just like ragnarok was.

First of all, the math required for that doesn’t take an Einstein. And YES, i have experience with that, it would be an honor for me to be there helping them improve this game, or even helping them make a new one. I would do it gladly.

  • HEY IMC! TAKE ME AS YOUR SLAVE, I WILL WORK IMPROVING THE GAME FOR YOU AS LONG AS YOU GIVE ME A BED AND FOOD JUST SO I CAN SURVIVE (NOT KIDDING, DEAD SERIOUS!)

I never said that it isn’t balanced, all i want is to make money look more valuable. Excessive digits make money look cheap.

And yes Mr. Joe six pack, IT IS COMPLETELY P-O-S-S-I-B-L-E to make it happen.

You can’t reduce things too far or it removes the sense of satisfaction. Face it, normal people like large numbers. If you ask 100 people whether they want $1 or ¥125, I guarantee the majority will take the yen because its a bigger number so you feel better because you have “more” even though in reality they are the same amount of money. Of course TOO much is bad as well, for example post WWI Germany where people needed truckloads of money to buy bread. There needs to be a balance, because if its too low people feel like its wasting their time spending an hour farming for 10 gold but if its too high most common items will be seen as worthless because of how easy it is to get lots of money.

That’s exactly what i meant,

THIS DUDE GETS IT!

Except that most people don’t think that way. The vast majority prefer quantity. The human mind isn’t a simple thing.

There was a study where they tested people on eBay. The same exact item, one cost $10 with free shipping. One cost $5+$5 shipping. Around 90% of the people chose the $10 with free shipping. Does that make sense? No. They’re both exactly the same price. But that one said free on it, so the brain automatically assumes it is better.

So sure, maybe this idea of taking an hour to get 10 coins makes sense to you, but most people will hate that idea and never agree to it because of the way the human mind works, from a young age we are trained to view small numbers as bad and large numbers as good.

Excessive numbers make money look cheap, and that is just a fact. It’s simple to understand.

Haven’t really played the game to see the high numbers in action, but here are my thoughts:

  • I agree that there is a sweet spot for currency - we don’t want really big numbers, and we don’t want numbers so small that they greatly impact our ability to differentiate between the value of items.
  • You’re (zeno_t) focused on the psychological effects of seeing big numbers. Although I agree the phenomenon exists (otherwise people would stop charging $99.99 on RL items), I can’t agree that it is the be-all-end-all for a good economy.
    - Though, I do hope we don’t all end up with 4,121,453,123,012 amount of any currency. An extra “0” in a trade would be catastrophic.

I would put more importance on functions that allow for money to be removed from circulation - purchasing keys for a dungeon, consumables, trade tax, etc.

Seems like its all the same thing, from one side it feel like its just a power fantasy. “I’m rich from defeating monsters”. purely from the mechanical standpoint you’re working towards the exact same thing, 1hour = 1 sword.

Kind of using all caps to call them wrong way and right way when they’re entirely subjective makes me feel like you feel very passionate about it and if that’s the case than by all means go right ahead and feel that way, you’ve a right to your opinion. I just think its unnecessary argument over a perceived difference rather than an actual one.

RO’s still there when we talk about $$$ haha :smile:

True, but still depends on the server you’re playing. Actual RO’s economy is a disaster.
Ntl, the economy was great at first (during the first years). Once upon a time, you were the king of the world with 100k zeny. Now with 1b zeny, you’re a hobo.
Sh*t first happened when Gravity changed its business model. Other factors played their role too, like the merge of some servers, the cash flow exploded…

Let’s hope ToS won’t meet the same problems. #crossyourfingers

Continuing the discussion from Economy - The most important thing:

you talking about inflation right? (its happen in real world too)
basically, inflation happen when there is too much money on hand and the gap between rich/poor is huge, the value of money get depreciated.

example of inflation is when price goes up, a rare weapon from boss drop, people sold/bought for only $1000 at the beginning, because that $1000 is good amount of money, after awhile, people getting richer and richer, $1000 is nothing, just like you said having 1b zeny but still a hobo, just enough to buy that sword.
the gap between rich and poor is bigger, a newbie hardly had enough money to buy potion from NPC. but hobo with 1b zeny, NPC potion had no value.

inflation is unavoidable, but it can be reduce,… how?
we need money sinking, a feature that remove money from the server permanently, so there is no too much money on the server and people appreciate the money more.
example of money sinking, is buying potion from NPC, its different from buying it from other player, buying from NPC, the money is gone forever, but buying from people, the money just change hand.
so we need more useful item from NPC shop,
something like rent a costume, rent a weapon and armor, rent a mount, donate money at the goddess for buff, etc etc

Doesn’t look like ToS is lacking in the money sink department - potions, anvils, item repairs, attributes and all.

Well, in RO’s case, it’s not “natural inflation” (like in real world). It was too fast, too hard for a classic inflation. I exposed one of the main causes, the change of business model.

There are already 2 good money sinks: pricey companions and attributes.
It will take quite some time/money to max attributes. It seems we have some time before to really worry about economy problems.
The IG cash flow will also depend on what will be sold in the cash shop… another big concern…
More money sinks may come later, i.e. when we’ll know more about the housing system.

Yup, that’s important. Maybe we should buy services from other players too (we already have skill shops, buff shopts, etc…) and this must be improved on the future.

And i think the Auction House should be more player involve.

Give me the dollar please.

Also on this note i don’t need extra digits my country recently phased out penny’s to minimize our decimal digits.

[quote=“Masamune, post:53, topic:39742”]
The same exact item, one cost $10 with free shipping. One cost $5+$5 shipping. [/quote]

I would take the 10$ one not because it looks better. not because its bigger. But because you said ebay and shitty sellers on ebay always try to ■■■■ you on shipping so most experienced ebay buyers will take a higher base with no shipping.

1 Like

Increased trading tax from 10% to 20%, reduce vendor prices at higher levels (prices at which NPCs buy your items).

Btw, is it still possible to feed equipment to gems?

^ As long as the game has appropriate sinks, inflation will be slowed. Good sinks are those that players enjoy spending their currency on.

Potions are an obvious example, because we happily throw our money into them because they help us do whatever we wanted to do faster or more effectively. We justify the cost and are happy to spend it for improved efficiency.

Other somewhat clever examples from RO were Mammonite and similar skills which literally consumed currency. After a while the amount felt insignificant to the user, but we just spammed away happily watching the coins scatter, not just from our own pockets, but from the system.

Maybe the OP went about explaining his ideas and thoughts in a weird and intricate way that may not be well written either. So instead i’ll try to see if he means something about keeping the economy deflated and i’ll try to explain it in my own words as thorough as i can:

In order to prevent inflation in MMOs one must tackle the main source of the problem in an MMO economy. This is the fact that money is created out of nowhere. Some examples of this are:

1)Killing mobs gives money.
2) Items are permanently acquired ONCE with no need for extras.
3)Selling junk to NPCs.
4)Rewards for quests,raids or even events.

In essence money is bound to inflate in MMOs and as it inflates so do prices in the Auction House and trades between players. The only solution to this every growing problem of ample amount of silver coins is “money sinks”. Money sinks are a way the world can take back its silver coins in an economic way that is healthy to keep prices low without making it too unbearable for newly created characters to earn the bare minimum silver coins to stay classy( no one likes running around in broken equipment D:). Some of these commonly used money sinks are:

  1. Equipment repair due to durability damage( keeps on giving a money sink for both low and high lvl players alike).
    2)Taxes( Auction House tax, Quest accepting fees, trading fees)
    3)Making multiple equipment viable on the same character (weapon changing due to different elements in combat).
    4)Production costs( costs to produce an item, costs to refine an item, costs to socket and unsocket items)
    5)Chances of failure( items disappear when you fail at refining,socketing,unsocketing,producing,etc)

In order for the economy to not suffer from both inflation and deflation, the MMO must have both money sinks and money creation mechanisms. The thing is most mechanisms are driven by a force, can you guess what this force is? PLAYERS. That’s right players drive the economy, from making money to sinking money. A player driven economy gives depth to the game as much as a real world economy since after all it follow the same principle; “decisions based on finite resources”(money,materials,time).

What the OP is hoping for or at least suggesting is for the game to have a balanced player driven economy which most of us are in agreement. Now what i do like which most MMOs don’t implement is a PVP driven trading system, at least to some extent being able to make money off trading packs between towns in the game. Something like you purchase the packs from an npc and need to deliver the pack on another town, this way your character will be displayed with a backpack while traveling with said packs. Then players can have the choice to attack you or leave you alone ( or preferably the roads between these towns are open PVP areas) and if you die you would drop the packs on the floor for anyone to pick up. But if you make it to the town you can make quite a profit for putting your pack(and life) in danger. This promotes believe it or not alot of social play, from relying on your guild or party to protect you to having designated trading days in guild to having guilds fully made to trade packs. It also serves as practice for those pvp inclined in case of GvG events. And since trading packs is made as an optional way to make money, those who don’t want to participate don’t have to.

Er… No. The OP has pretty much already said exactly what he wants, all he cares about is the money having less digits.

All i want is to make this game better, by improving strategic points on it.

I think your example is a little bit too low, although I understand your sentiment.

if it takes you 1 hour to make 10 coins, that sounds like a lot of RNG is involved in getting those coins to drop, since they are rarer.

if it takes you 1 hours to make 10000 coins it means that you can be given 50, 100 coins, or even 500 or more coins when you kill something/achieve something, meaning it feels like you are constantly making progress or being rewarded rather than waiting for RNG to drop you 1 of the 10 coins you need.

Although like someone else said before, you can easily break up the currency into gold/silver/copper as a way to be giving currency regularly in smaller amounts