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boomervoncannon

Player shop rent disconnected from reality

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In what reality do you really think 1400 gold per day in rent makes player shops viable for anyone?

I don’t mean everyone. I mean anyone.  This seems like more evidence of developers disconnected from their own game. There is no conceivable economic model under which this is viable with a player base even 5 to 10 times what you currently have testing the game for you, and at the current rate at which gold is earnable in game as a practical reality. The most disappointing thing is this should not be required feedback. One gold per minute is so insanely over the top as a maintenance cost that it should have been immediately shot down internally as too high the moment someone suggested it, not actually put into the game, leaving the players to tell you the sky is blue, water is wet, and women have secrets.

Please tell me this is a coding error. I have owned a small retail business irl and when comparing options to rent retail space my partner and I used a simplified model of seeking to rent space for between a penny and a nickel per expected person in foot traffic. This was a realistic model that gave us a fair chance to make a profit and saw us paying a fair rent to our landlord for the space. By contrast, one gold per minute would require two thirds of the entire current playerbase to visit a given shop every single day.

If you want player testing of shops, reduce the rent cost by a factor of 90%, minimum. If you want them to be ignored and players to continue to wonder what you could possibly be thinking, leave them where they are. For a development studio that started out claiming it wanted to pattern Arlas after Eve, your apparent grasp of economics is abysmal.

Jat et al, I hope that by now you are familiar enough with my posting history as a member of this community since day one to know that I do not engage in hyperbole or overblown emotional reactions. This is straight talk from someone who has played MMO’s since 2004, whose favorite aspect of MMO’s is economy, and who has a real world background in business.

Edited by boomervoncannon
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57 minutes ago, boomervoncannon said:

In what reality do you really think 1400 gold per day in rent makes player shops viable for anyone?

I don’t mean everyone. I mean anyone.  This seems like more evidence of developers disconnected from their own game. There is no conceivable economic model under which this is viable with a player base even 5 to 10 times what you currently have testing the game for you, and at the current rate at which gold is earnable in game as a practical reality. The most disappointing thing is this should not be required feedback. One gold per minute is so insanely over the top as a maintenance cost that it should have been immediately shot down internally as too high the moment someone suggested it, not actually put into the game, leaving the players to tell you the sky is blue, water is wet, and women have secrets.

Please tell me this is a coding error. I have owned a small retail business irl and when comparing options to rent retail space my partner and I used a simplified model of seeking to rent space for between a penny and a nickel per expected person in foot traffic. This was a realistic model that gave us a fair chance to make a profit and saw us paying a fair rent to our landlord for the space. By contrast, one gold per minute would require two thirds of the entire current playerbase to visit a given shop every single day.

If you want player testing of shops, reduce the rent cost by a factor of 90%, minimum. If you want them to be ignored and players to continue to wonder what you could possibly be thinking, leave them where they are. For a development studio that started out claiming it wanted to pattern Arlas after Eve, your apparent grasp of economics is abysmal.

Jat et al, I hope that by now you are familiar enough with my posting history as a member of this community since day one to know that I do not engage in hyperbole or overblown emotional reactions. This is straight talk from someone who has played MMO’s since 2004, whose favorite aspect of MMO’s is economy, and who has a real world background in business.

Are you kidding me? 1400? The fact that there is any is stupid to begin with but that is ridiculous. Screw the rent entirely. There doesn’t need to be any rent whatsoever. Yeah, hearing that definitely pissed me off.

with numbers as low as they are they don’t need to be having any rent on the damn player shops. That is just a purely stupid idea. You might be doing real talk but I’ll go a head and handle overreacting.

@Jatheish come on man. You guys really are kidding right? Don’t bother lowering the rent because if it isn’t gone completely just leave it how it is to see what a bad idea that was. This is by far the most disappointing thing you guys have done. Actually had high hopes for player shops but man....

I am already telling the people I will be playing with IF it ever comes to console that I don’t do upkeep and I don’t do taxes. If they want to do it that fine but I am a builder and a grinder so that is what I will be doing.

you are pretty disappointing right now. Smh 

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I was looking forward to the player shops. WTF are you guys thinking Jat? That's ridiculous and stupid. No way could I maintain that. Now your making it so the solo/small group player, on the small group server, cannot have a vender. EVER. It is obvious you do not want a player economy, or real trading/vendors. 1400 gold a day for a vendor is insane. Please look into this immediately, it wouldn't ever be worth it to have one if it is that much. As per the OP, please tell me this is a mistake. 

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Don't you guys loved the testing? All these valuable info getting into the devteam. I loved the fact they did ablsolute nada with it. Even EVERY old bug pre wipe still exists. 

ARK logic.

ALL

THE

WAY

...sigh...

Come on devs.

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Actually im on work and cant try to test it. But when 1400G is true, it makes no sense for me to sell tames (when possible) there.

Can someone proof it with screenshot?

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 I'm flabbergasted at this decision.  Until you find out how the flow of gold affects inflation in this game......at this time it has none since we do not purchase goods with player set prices so how can you setup an Eve'esque ISK black-hole to remove gold from the game.....how can you decide on how much to remove?  Enough gold is already lost in raids, sunk ships, etc so I cannot fathom how this decision came to be.

I will not be using or testing a player shop until this is removed. 

 

Want to properly test player shops in a EA?  NO CHARGE!  Let everyone build one.  Lets flood the market with goods and see how it goes.  Make adjustments from there to fine tune it. 

 

OR

 

Build a regional market vendor kinda like in Eve.  This vendor in a Freeport handles all transactions in that grid.  Each Freeport island in that grid gets one.  They take a small cut of each sale.  I like the idea of isolating all goods put up for sale in a grid are only purchasable in that grid.  Provides more content in that people will either have to make trips to other areas for the resources they want or merchants will need to travel to other areas to put their regionally rare resources up for sale to increase profits. 

Edited by DocHolliday
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If there is an upkeep for the shop it doesn't make a lot of sense, it's better to go arround offering your products port to port and get paid there with no tax. 

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Sure that can work, but a vendor is 24/7/365.  Who wants to hang out in a Freeport spamming global/local chat all day?   This is how many did it in Shadowbane for years.  Sea Dogs Rest was a hotspot for player to player sales.  It can work, but that game had 1 location that was easily reachable via its own version of Fast Travel and you could do so with your gear and inventory intact.  It also had a banker which allowed you to access your storage from any banker in the server.  Unless they allowed us to FT with gear to a port we all agreed on as being "the spot" it could be rough going. 

The current upkeep is insane however.  If the devs want to keep solo/small companies in a good spot they need to be able to participate and flourish with this system.  Sure the large companies can farm more, sell more, etc but thats natural.  What you do not want to do is to put this game feature out of reach for them. 

Also with this Freeports are going to need banks to organize and safeguard the gold.  Allow players to transfer gold to other players or the company.  Gold should be tied to a Freeports grid however.  Want to bring it home?  Load it on a ship and sail it there.  Want to spend money at another Freeport to buy that Mythic BP?  Sail it there!  Lets make it so people routinely move large sums of gold around. 

Edited by DocHolliday
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I'm starting to learn about the new changes (decided today I'm coming back) but holy cow.

 

Every game I've played has some sort of tax on trade so I totally get that but it shouldn't be remotely close to that. A simple solution would be to make it very affordable for now, later make tax on the type of item being traded and the amount.. Warframe does an excellent job of this and has safe trading. 

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agreed as is the [layer shops are pointless at that upkeep rate you will spend more money paying for the shop than you will ever make. We are already paying rent for islands the shops should be free and have some kind of global advertisement.  I was looking forward to placing a shop to help me pay the rent but was disappointed when I found out the shop will cost more than the island. 

Edited by Shawshanker

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What kills me is they know this is a problem, all they have to do is move a few decimals in the tax rate to get people to start using and testing them.  When we put our shop up our server crashed for about 2 minutes.  Maybe they are unstable and the only way to keep them in game but keep people from using while they work on a fix is to make it too expensive.  Then they dont have to say" sorry guys the shops mess up the servers, were not sure how to fix it yet"

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You know I do not even mind upkeep. The whole game is upkeep. so that makes sense to me. 

I do mind the upkeep not being even close to reasonable or sane. These costs and prices and upkeep just do not make sense. Make it like the crewmen. A gold every 2-3 hours, maybe have a skill that makes it go down, all that would be in line with the game and its design (whether you like that design or not, its what the game is based on). 

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As i read on i was expecting an update eventually that someone would be like .....”Finally they fixed this”. But to no avail this is still an issue I’m assuming, another problem that I’m finding is the lack of information on how they work. I been scouring for some documentation but nada. There are some definite issues with this economic model, but it almost seems like they need to redo it from the ground up.

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I think they need to remove it from the game and add a regional NPC vendor on each freeport island.  Items moved to these vendors and put up for sale can be purchased at any freeport island in that grid only.  Each freeport grid is independent from the other to promote traveling for goods whether its a seller trying to offer regionally rare resources at a hefty markup or someone traveling to another area to purchase goods that are rare by them and transporting them back to save some gold.  This promotes large amounts of gold in transit due to this along with the rare resources.  Pirates can pirate. 

Edited by DocHolliday

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