Well it seems like a good amount of people agreed with my other thread about the economy being in danger here on Arkadia. I know if this were my planet and my hunters/miners were losing by having to sell most of their stuff to the trade terminal, I would try and fix the issues. Happy miners/hunters will lead to a happy Arkadia. Now, let's figure out ways to fix it. Basically we are in the mess we're in right now is because of a lack of two things: crafters and resellers. We need to come up with ideas to bring these people to the planet and get them fluctuating the economy. I have come up with two ideas so far that aren't really much and probably need to be worked out more. Let's toss some more ideas out onto the air and see if we can come up with something good. Idea #1 : let's get a an actual crafting event going on the planet. Maybe give out some nice special blueprints or real life items for the winners. The thing is the event will have to be with just Arkadia blueprints so that we will be fluctuating Arkadia resources. I thought about this and I would hate to see just the uber crafters from Calypso come in and take over the event. We need to come up with ways that even the beginner crafters stand a chance at winning something. Otherwise, why would a beginner even try? Let's maybe come up with categories that crafters are put in according to skill level or the blueprint they use. Perhaps we can just have them submit global screenshots and have winners chosen at random from a number generator. Idea #2 : A competition for resellers. Let's get some resellers on the planet and make a competition between them by how many good trades and happy players they can make. let's offer a real life reward for the winners, I cannot really think of anything to draw in a reseller except PEDs or a real life reward. Maybe instigate some kind of voting system by the players to choose who they think is the #1 reseller on the planet. Give 1 player 1 vote and have it decided here on the forums so it is easy to moderate and diminish cheating. Or perhaps we can just do a competition for how many PEDs a reseller can cycle out of the hunters/miners per day. I know this will probably never truly work because it can be manipulated and cheated. I really really hope we can come up with something to improve this issue. I love Arkadia so much, but it is making it really difficult for me to stay around when I am losing so much PED. -Edit: had some spacing issues in the paragraphs, made it seem like less of a wall of text.
Personally I don't think Arkadia's economy is in danger or flawed at all... in fact I prefer it alot more then the stale economy on Calypso. My hunting loot sells faster on Ark and fro significantly more mu. There are exceptions to this however L armor pieces are really hard to sell except for the mid-high level L armor, but they fetch higher mu on calypso. Textures and paints are more worthwhile for me to export to calypso and the esi market is non existent. That being said it will be hard to play on arkadia if you don't have a big enough float to enable you to stack your loots to decent size piles, the upside to this is that I can get 3-5% more mu on just about anything. Regarding crafters, the recent weapon nerf crippled the Ark series weapon market... more crafters aren't the solution rather improve the quality of item they are able to craft. Another thing that will help immensely is to get the arkcoin brokers working... this will mean keys will need to be made... this means treasure needs to be mined and will be able to be sold at worthwhile mu.
I personally think that you need to follow one simple rule. For every mineral, and stackable, that you either get from mining, hunting, and crafting, should have a usefull bp for it. There also needs to be different levels of bps that use all the types of minerals and stackables from level 1 to level 8. Level 9 and above should still use these materials, but include some rare ones that lead to some nice crafted items that you only want limited supply of. Also have some special bp's that drop every now and then that alow you to have one chance at crafting an unlimited version of some weapon, vehicle, armor, etc.... If you want to add flavour to the mix, have sooto finds that enhance any crafted items. These finds can come from mining, hunting, and crafting. For example, say I found an anceint hardend metal that was used along time ago, but was lost through the ages, that when used in the mix of a crafted weapon, or other crafted items, will enhance, modify, and or increase it's effectiveness. This to me will bring in the sellers, buyers, miners, hunters, crafters, and even resellers. All things you need for an effective economy. If this is done across all levels, you will increase the odds of new players wanting to stay and even deposit. Again a win for the economy. This may have been said on other posts. If so, thank you for saying it earlier.
Yep it's taking a while for us (crafters) to recover from the changes to weapon stats. We'll get there. And yep, getting those brokers online at the end of february should boost demand for keys, weapons and associated ingrediants. But I'm always up for a competition. I thought Ark devs did a pretty good job with the last crafting comp. A global got u a prize off a randomised list, with each avatar limited to a maximum number of prizes. Not really seeing the benefit in encouraging resellers (not that I have anything against them) as it doesn't increase demand.
The benefit of traders ("accumulators") is that they allow people with smaller ped cards to hunt and mine more (especially since we have more ores in any given patch of ground than Caly or RT). This is, of course, at the expense of some markup. Auction zombie resellers, at the end of the day they don't add anything to the economy since they take away at least as much as they give. We also have not yet had all bps introduced in game, especially amps, and that will make a difference.
Well there are a few things arkadia could do: drop the blueprints for arkadian mining amps (just check the markup for alternative ingots from RT) Balance the loot of instances Introduce uses for the arkoins Have blueprints for useless materials that have no markup (for example lysterium power container from Cyrene) (and thus not having to add 3+ ingredients to craft). There are a few things people on arkadia can do: Use Arkadian gear, if you want arkadian ores/enmatters to go up in price, make sure crafters can sell their stuff, that way they will buy more and markups go up. Don't tt stuff! Sure it's hard to sell low amount of stackables but search for a reseller. Who cares if they rip you off? You get a few pec markup, crafters get more supplies, and market will increase. Crafters should be patiënt, craft a few things a day, and wait for them to sell. And start to do other stuff as well (full time crafting on ark is impossible if you play daily due to supply) Search for crafters/hunters/miners. I have a few miners/hunters on FL that i buy specific stuff from when i am on ark. That way i can craft more and people have to tt less. With a lower amount of players the social aspects get a lot more important.
All good ideas, but speaking of native Arkadian amps - they won't happen before a FOMA style mining zone gets released.
The economy on Arkadia is not that bad, some stuff sell here for better prices than on Calypso. However, Calypso is still the economic capital of this universe and will it will remain that way for the foreseeable future. As a miner who spends almost all my time on Arkadia, I know I must travel back and forth to Calypso several times a month in order to play like I am used (i.e. cycle a lot of peds). This is just the evolution of this game and I do not think it is bad. Players who don't want or can't afford to travel have to pay someone else to do so, by selling for less or buying for more. Again, this is not a bad thing in a RCE. I think Arkadia are doing a decent job with content. Of course, like everyone else I am waiting for more blueprints, more use for treasure, functional Arkoin brokers and many other features which will make Arkadia even better. The problem of useless resources is true for the whole of EU, there were too many resources even before the new planets were developed, and so each new one should have had no more than 5 new ores and 5 new en-matters just for the uniqueness. For now, we must be smart and picky about our activities like always
the real problem is MA's fault they economy in then Project Entropia worked so much better and they need to go back to that way of loot balance. The key was that there was a balance for how many items to how many participants. We've had way way way to many different items added. This has screwed up basic supply and demand. Back then we used to hunt ONE creature to get a ceratain material and when we hunted a creature we usually only had a stack of about 3-5 items. Now we have sometimes 18 to 30 different things from one creature. Arkadia has actually done it a bit better with some mobs i've found but there is still room for improvment i think. Also we need to get rid of the different types of things like Extractors i think we have like 26 or something like that. if we only had like 4-5 tops there would be more demand for them and a better MU. MA has this wrong idea that adding more items will mean you get less of something and it will increase it's MU as it will be harder to get a lot of and more rare. But they are wrong and that is obvious by how much stuff is just TT food. Back 10 years ago almost everything was easy to sell for some MU we NEVER would have thought about TT'ing stuff like we do now.
Uhh dude, did you even play 10 years ago? Cause I got to say this statement is terribly false. So many useful things used to be TT food because they dropped way to often and no longer drop at all. I personally used to feed Omegaton gun amps to the TT like candy, same with Gremlin armor.
Well 10 years ago 70% of the loot was tt stuff (pec or ped), so that doesn't really count now, does it?
Great, practical ideas, Harmony. I also agree that MA is making the mistake of allowing way too many resources and items into the universe for the size of the playerbase (I'm mainly talking about Calypso). I also don't like that they allow so many unbalanced items into the game.
your talking items not materials which was fixed with L items the matterials where a whole different story this is exactly what i was talking about back then you where like damit another paladin mask when you woiuld have rathered the TT in soft hides now its totally reversed we are just dying to get an item and dont really care about the materials. Ammo being in loot is really no different then PED/PEC in loot was back then. And you are only proving my point that back then we got less materials back in loot which meant we had way more demand. We simply get way to much supply of way to many different things to create any sort of demand. More Ammo in loot less materials, less types of matterial per creature to be looted, and for it to be more balanced and everyone would be a lot better off. Thats how it worked before and it worked a lot better.
Well, my contribution to a better economy is I'm back at buying and selling ores. So miners, gather up your small stacks and sell them to me. Crafters, let me know what ores you want and I'll gather them for you. If you need something rare-ish, I most likely have some of it.
Arkadia lacks four things that could greatly improve the amount of crafters here: 1) "Clean" mining regions where two ores make up 60% of all ores found 2) Areas with commonly used Calypso ores 3) Craftable UL tools 4) Big craftable amplifiers that use common ore I don't want to mine since I end up with every ore known to man, so I have no control over what I get. Once my amp runs out I can't get hold of a new one, other than Calypso exports. Should I want to go to a new finder (I prefer UL, like many) it's once again Calypso export. Should I sit on the bp for a finder I want (or a friend), guess what, it's once again Calypso export to get the necessary ores.
To expand on the subject, about more powerful Ark mining amps: theres one painfully obvious reason - RT has HELL, and higher amps weren't really available on the market, before Hell got launched. Now for some theorycrafting - I think there are 2 reasons behind this. First is not fast enough local TT drain opportunity, and second is concern of dramatic market and balance shifts by MA balance team. 1. In my opinion there needs to be a local "drain" to deplete that created TT value equally rapidly. In planet mining you really can't deplete that much amplifier TT value as you can on a "FOMA" style spot, so it could create a huge overproduction, that would eventually result in driving the price down on both - the godzillion of Arkadian ores, found in planetmining and the price of amps themselves. 2. Continuing on from point 1 - Overproduction would result in amps being exported elsewhere in the universe, and anyone in a VTOL could carry them around totally risk free. And then there's another very "fine" point - if the new arkadian amps turn out to be even by 1% cheaper than their Calypso/RT counterparts, miners WILL gob them up, causing quite a bit of global market shift. That would eventually bring down the markup on equally powered Calypso/RT amps. And Mindark doesn't really like powerful amps being cheap, (as demonstrated in the "Niksarium crisis" of 2012 ) It could ofc turn out completely opposite - the new Arkadian mining amps could be more expensive than LevelX/X-Class, due to some market conditions (crafted entirely from L prints or some expensive components/ores) In this case, the next question - why bother crafting them at all? So to sum up - Fast creation needs fast depletion, otherwise balance gets screwed.
Most of your suggestions would turn Arkadia into "Calypso Lite" Arkadia has a different mining system, that separates it from the rest of the planets, and I'm even not touching the subject of treasurehunting here. You either adapt to it, and do pretty well, or don't mine on Ark. There are spots here where you can hit limited variety of ores per quadrant. There are also spots where you can hit very high-demand, and high MU calypso stuff. I'm guessing that you probably moved to Ark because you don't like the "lysterification" of Caly. Asking for a spot that has 2 ores with MU, will bring tons of lysterium to the table. Finally - No Foma:Arkadia - no big local mining amps. I touched this subject in my previous post in this thread. Arkadia eco will fix itself, when more higher level players are attracted to it, and as the demand for home-grown stuff improves.
No, I moved to Arkadia because I enjoy the hunting. Mining on Arkadia is arguably the worst place to do so in the entire universe.
Ark amps should be: composed of enmats, ores, and animal oils so that crafters can use whichever residue is cheapest. Actually, here's an idea... add 1 generic leather to the ingredient list so we can use tailoring remnants too Bingo. We have more ores in the ground, therefore we avoid the lystfest of caly and RT, and mining is not brainless. Mining RT is fun for the first run, after that it's boring IMO. That said, though, I would like to see a few more areas (new ones) like the windy isles... where you can mine and only get 3 or so ores and enmatters in each zone. It would make it easier for players of all skill levels who don't have a big ped card but also don't want to keep losing several percent by selling it all to traders. Let's be honest... to mine without the use of traders here, you either need to mine windy isles or you need to have 3k ped free for mining. Treasure hunting is better... in general there are only two or three resources at a depth in a given area. Speaking of treasure hunting... is it just me or does treasure hunting tend to give less loot TT return than ores or enmatters? Lol, different strokes for different folks, I guess. I prefer it to mining on Caly or RT. Though I would like to see a foma/hell style mining area. Maybe these could be in the form of mining instances. (Though obviously a 70% loot return there isn't a good idea).
