The Economy is Going to Fail if Left as is

[Vallok]

I have no idea how so many people aren’t understanding how there is a real issue with the long term economy at this point. There is a small injection of gold into this game, but also an abundant amount of gold sinks.

I realize many players will have tons of money by the time you hit 60, that’s because you get 100+ gold from every quest you do, but you eventually hit 60, and run out of quests to run.

Then you rely on:

Wars: Which only pays out 500g to 100 people who take part. Wars also don’t happen everyday.

Mobs: Yeah that 10g on every 5th elite is nice but it’s not a good amount of consistent money.

Town Boards: Right, I’ll hand in 40 Starmetal ingots and get 4g for my trouble makes sense.

Corrupted Portals: As the tier 4 and 5 corrupted portals only got fixed 2 days ago I’m not sure how much you get per, I doubt it’s significant though.

These are almost all the ways that you get injected gold into the game. 4g here, 10g there, 500g from wars when they happen and when you get in.

Also all these people who are saying “Economy is fine, I’m making bank off of the market.” Your just getting gold from another player, not the game. Eventually the gold will run low for everyone and this will tank the prices for everything.

Now let’s look at gold dumps in the game:

Houses: 20k for a tier 4, then taxes every 5 days. So if you have multiple houses there goes most of your gold you made getting to 60.

Towns: Owning a town initially costed companies 100k to claim. After that to declare war is 15k every time just to get a chance to be the attacking company (not a ton but still). Then you obtain a town. Every upgrade after tier 2 costs 5k to upgrade, 2.5k to give a town buff, and every bit of upgrading you do causes your upkeep to skyrocket. Many towns on my server hemorrhage money, they make so little from them, they basically need to dump money in to keep it up. The only town that’s successful is Everfall, which is currently making 159,215g a week and pays 130,000 a week. That’s the only town that doesn’t lose you money.

Repair Bills: Start out small, but grow exponentially larger the higher you get. Repair Bill rn at 60 would cost 300g. That’s not counting all the gear you hope to sell that takes dmg in your inventory.

Market: If you still have enough money after everything else then you can spend it on materials to level up your trade skills or buy some shiny gear.

The fact is that just because your looking at something that looks fine right now, doesn’t mean you should not consider how it may become broken in the long run. Out of all the issues I’ve seen brought up, this scares me the most, because if AGS sit too long on figuring out how to resolve this, the economy will begin to tank and you’ll just see towns being claimed but not being paid for since no one has the money to bother caring about it.

[Koz]

a lot of people are realizing the issue with the economy.

too much coin sink, not enough coin gain. in a couple of weeks once all the lvl 60’s buy all their houses and finish all their quests there’s going to be no coin flowing into the economy.

only real way to get coin at 60 is to do the faction quests with daily bonus for like 600 coin. not a lot if you have 3 tier 4 houses costing you 3k+ a week.

not to mention town upkeep and gear repairs.

they need to bring back coins for fishing chests. that was a great way to inject coin into the game. removing it was such a poor way to deal with bots.

weekly and daily quests or more events need to be a thing. world bosses that appear every so often like corruption would be a great way for this. or add small amounts of coin to breach caches.

[Anachron101]

What fascinates me most about this issue is that this is not new. We have had games like this for more than two decades and plenty of academic work about their economies.

WoW is a prime example of where inflation leads and how important it is to have proper controls in the game, and yet even after all this time AGS seems to pretend that they just started a new genre. This is the main problem with the game: instead of learning from the experiences of the past, they paid as much attention to it as they paid attention to the fact that you cannot sort anything properly in this game (by age, numbers or letters - does not work).

[Koz]

honestly I wouldn’t be surprised if the dev team is forbidden from looking at other games as examples. It’s happened before, I think it was with Anthem (rip) where the devs were actually told they weren’t allowed to use other games as reference points for content, mechanics, or issues and fixes. (I could be wrong with it being Anthem, it just sounds familiar to the context)

you’d assume the dev team would have some form of experience with other games in their own time, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they were hushed or chastised for suggesting something similar to another game.

Still though, economics like that isn’t hard to predict and should be easy to address.

[Anachron101]

While that would be a problem, you do not actually need to look at another game (though it would help immeasurably). There is a lot of knowledge out there about how to build these games, a lot of theory crafting based on meta analysis of various games.

But again, since they did not even bother to allow us to sort anything properly, I do not feel that the attention for detail that is necessary, exists here

[asteldian]

Also doesn’t help that Outpost Rush is broken since that is one of the biggest money earners in game an would have been a primary source of income. Not much help to PvErs though I guess

[Sommer_ray]

More clarity, communication from AGS would be kind of nice