Yeah i agree, personalized nodes would be ideal. Thing is supply and demand work. If its worthless to gather the masses will stop and just buy as needed which will lower supply and increase value naturally.
Also personalized nodes also make spotting bots easier. It removes randomness from their patterns no outside forces to disturb a rigid pattern. That is FAR easier to find and flag with AI.
I would agree with you if this was a working true economy with checks and balances. Like you said, the basics of supply and demand would dictate that the more “bots” you have farming the cheaper materials should be, yet oddly that is not what has happened. I agree that the biggest issue was people trying for smelting gear, but the bot’s selling the ore realized they could get A LOT more gold so they charged more. So it IS the bot’s that are raising the prices, along with players that are normally gathering and selling materials. Basically, greed. 
Again, if they just made nodes personalized then it wouldn’t be an issue. Don’t want to farm materials? Go buy em. If you want to save money then go and farm them. With more people now farming the prices should drop significantly. Less people will need the stuff since they can farm it, and more people will be farming it. Win/Win
None of this should be seen as endorsing bots just a discussion on their impacts in the economy.
This literally is supply and demand.
Bots only sell for more for the simple reason a market supports a higher sell price. Bot or player they arent going to list something people will pay 10g for for .01. Both bots and players are there to generate gold if selling, they arent there to provide welfare.
Its selling for more because demand far out stripes supply. Bots farm as fast as possible and price to sell. If it wasnt selling the price would be lower
If bots werent there the supply would be lower and prices would be higher. Just like how undocumented workers are underpaid keeping prices and costs down. Take that out you pay a prevailing wage and the delivered good is more expensive or less supplied.
Again not supporting these issues just explaining.
Goods in an mmo typical balance on a gold per hour opportunity cost based pricing. Except where bots drive prices lower.
The lower the price the less morivation players have to farm. I doubt you will see a huge drop in price however those who farm their own materials would benefit greatly.
Bots can work forever require no rest and dont eat or sleep or complain. So they dont care if they are making 10g an hour or 1kg an hour they just do what they can script.
And again id support personalized nodes. My wife and i adventure alot. Getting nodes more frequently. 2x for us would be huge!
The supply and demand equation is a little skewed on some of the higher population servers because of the massive wealth imbalance between the companies that own EF and WW and everyone else. On Camelot, the last time I checked, the company that owned EF and WW was pulling in around 6-7 million gold per week. Meanwhile, the owners of a smaller territory had to purposely lose an invasion so that their facilities would get downgraded, which would get their upkeep costs in line with their revenue.
There’s only so many things that rich people are going to spend gold on repeatedly in this game. BiS items, asmo, runic leather, phoenixweave, ori ingots, ori ore, cinnabar, tolvium, starmetal and certain craft mods. Items like trophies, crafting gear and houses are one-time purchases and lower tier mats don’t seem to be affected because once you’ve leveled to 200 in all of your refining, why would you continue to craft if you have an inexhaustible supply of gold?
So the resources that are in demand get hoarded by non-bot players. The bots don’t, and can’t get 100% of the ori ore, even if they are getting a lot of it. I hoarded a lot of mats leading up to the last patch because I wanted to level my weaponsmithing. Had about 6000+ units of cinnabar, tolvium and ori ingots, and I had stopped crafting asmodeum. Ended up only taking me a little over 2k mats to get to 200 since I was able to do it all through expedition replicas for the extra XP, and the salvage gave me back around 500 ori ingots. I sold about 3k of the remaining cinnabar and tolvium to another crafter the day of the patch, and I’ve just been sitting on the rest, doing my daily asmo ever since. I grab ori nodes when I see them, which is rare, but with prices the way they are, I’ve pretty much just been sitting on whatever I have. I’m definitely collecting enough for my daily asmo every day, so my stockpile of ingots is dropping. But with ore prices where they are, I’m not participating in the market anymore, because as long as the price keeps going up, I’m going to keep the option to sell available. I’m sure there are other people who have the same idea.
So the market right now is basically just the rich people buying ore and the bots and some farmers selling. Ori has become a luxury good, and the pricing has become relatively inelastic because of buy orders that maintain a floor that can’t be breached because there isn’t enough ore making its way to market to satisfy them all, so they just get filled and renewed every few days, and the competition keeps the price up.
Giving us personalized nodes would bring more low and middle income people back into the market. If I were able to freely mine the available nodes in Shattered Mountain once a day, I would probably smelt the ore until I get the full smelting set, then I would sell either the ore or ingots at whatever the market price was.
Personalized nodes would also be a good way to increase the supply, at least on mid and high pop servers. There are currently ~216 ori nodes across the entire map, according to Aeternum Map. With a respawn time of between 12-16 minutes each, that means each node respawns and can be mined ~90-120 times a day. If the nodes were personal, and on daily single reset, you would have the potential for each node to be mined 2000 times a day. If it was shorter reset, it would obviously be more. Or maybe it could be like the juniper berry bags- you could mine each node a certain number of times each day. Lots of different ways they could do this.
Thanks so much!
Supply and demand is a great introductory theory to begin working with but economies are far more complex functions than this simple formula. If they weren’t there wouldn’t need to be checks and balances.
So while your first premise is a correct starting place it can’t be counted on as a fully developed explanatory theory.
As for how to work one out for an ingame or real world economy I haven’t a clue. These statements shouldn’t be taken as even claiming to be an armchair economist.
I agree with everything you said except that people dont recognize the other side of personalized nodes. Now each bot multiplies supply along with each player. That does drive prices down. Without a very agressive GM bot response team the bots will push these materials back down far below pre demand prices. There is a finite amount of ori we can consume each day and the ori would become the exvrssive resource. Timeless shards and crafting mods would skyrocket in price as crafter burn more of them rolling lottery tickets.
Not saying its a bad idea. I like personal nodes but it can potentially swith the pendilum to far the otherway. They may have to personalize nodes and cut back on spawn times to keep end game crafted items reasonably valuable.
That’s why I said the daily single reset for each node if they make them personal. That way the server cap will function as a limit on how many bots can affect the market. And with orichalcum ore being personalized, I don’t think there will be as many people camping Shattered Mountain, which means that bots won’t be able to get most of the veins each day, as getting through Myrkgard, Scorched Mine and the Illurmin Rift is likely too tall of an order for a bot, and that takes ~90 nodes out of the equation there.
Personalized nodes wouldn’t make a difference in bot behavior on Camelot, because the server is locked anyway. On low pop servers, maybe it would lead to an increase in bots, but the farming would be much less lucrative, so maybe (hopefully) not worth the effort.
I dislike the idea of the daily cooldown. If we’re going to personal spawns thats fine but lets not do it and introduce some other arbitrary restriction. I’m okay with material markets crashing allowing supply and demand to totally dictate value is the reasonable thing to do. Some will chose to buy rather than sell it will balance at some point.
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