This most likely isn’t going to be the easiest to read because I’m more of a numbers guy and not a language guy and forgive me for working up the thread here. Also I’d like to note as a crafter I typically focus most market data from this perspective and I’m typically blindsided by market developments outside the realm or have little knowledge there of. An example of which was my initial ignorance that, any player has the ability to play the servers book keeper if they so wished as they have access to the books.
Correct. Typically people gather around something in order to form a community, for example fledgling civilizations in ancient times typically start near rivers or fresh water sources. There’s access to fresh drinkable water and the land is more fertile. In other words consumable resources. Trade and traffic between such places usually results in a common meeting ground to act as a neutral trade station. If we take a look at our game world we see this.
Now among all the iron veins the only place you can actually read on the map is, Windsward. Now this is from the crafter viewpoint, but I typically consider the most valuable place on the map to be 1. Centralized and more less equidistant from everywhere else. 2. Surrounded or abundant in the most commonly used materials. If we also add hemp to the list of resources we are tracking the map looks like this:
Now as you can see, the space within the center which there was no iron has been filled in with hemp. Trees grow all around the world and typically surround every settlement so just about anywhere has raw wood. Rawhide comes from any animal you can skin that is level 1-40, which is just about anywhere for those level ranges, but I should note those plains in Windsward also just so happen to have Bison which net 60-80 rawhide a head. The core materials required to make virtually every piece of equipment we require to function within this world, Iron/Hemp/Green Wood/Rawhide, are at their highest density in EF/WW which is also, conveniently, dead center of the game world. This checks my 1 and 2 as “The most valuable place.” from my crafter’s viewpoint. Due to a vast majority of my required resources being within this area, I have no incentive to venture out and interact with other lands outside the occasional visit for a lesser needed resource or for “Adventure” and quests. Quests dry up, and (personal opinion here in terms of budgeting) lesser resources are not a sufficient enough reason for me to own land in these regions. With trade linked I would be able to purchase these lesser resources without traveling myself thus resulting in these outer regions seeing sales. However that would require those resources to be gathered and sold there. If I have little incentive to do so being a primary consumer with clear access to do so, why would anyone else? It would remove distance part of the equation, yet I can still simply retrieve these materials myself when I required them anyway due to ease of access. While this maybe more opinion than fact, as a crafter it’s often far more beneficial budget wise to gather the resources yourself when training the craft when the end product costs less than the base materials or the time it would take to sell the resulting product is far from ideal. Lastly I agree, population is a key root of the problem.
Everything you say on these threads regarding the situation has been on point and I just find myself going “Ya what he said.” whenever I read it.
Ehhhh, while in most economies I’d agree with competition lowering prices, not in this one. Focusing on raw resources again, the price may dip a bit at launch but it’ll just go back up. The only materials with much worth are in fact the most abundant, Iron/Hemp/Green Wood/Rawhide. The higher end materials you can gather are already virtually worthless due to the supply and demand. The lower tier materials are constantly used so if the trades posts are linked they’ll just sell much faster resulting in the price returning after an initial drop. What will lower the prices of these primary resources would be a lack in demand and that would be due to lower population resulting in less crafters demanding it. Personally. my worry with that initial drop due to the implementation of linked trade posts is:
^ It’s the market window for this.
A keyword here is Start. Now personally I’ve stated I could go either way with the link, but I don’t see it effectively strengthening the economies of the outer regions. Which, is the reason they mentioned implementing the change. If it was introduced to be a QoL feature I would’ve just nodded and went “Yup, it would be QoL.”. Now, long term yes it will introduce more tax revenue to all settlements, however this tax revenue isn’t enough. Referring to my first post in this thread:
The current overhead, on my server anyway, is simply too high. Now I haven’t organized all the data to a pie graph like OP, but just eye balling it I can say “Ya that’s about right for my server as well.” The only solutions to this over head I can think of would be:
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Reduce the upkeep costs for settlements and settlement upgrades. This is tricky because this very system is to fight against inflation within the game by deleting gold. I don’t believe a static upkeep cost would solve the issue if they were simply lowered, as higher population servers would eventually see inflation. It would have to be a dynamic system that responses to player density.
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An increase to player population that generates enough tax revenue to cover the overhead. This is, not an easy fix and there are so many different variables to a server merge for this particular game I feel like it would be a logistic nightmare.
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Each settlement specializes it’s crafting stations to a streamlined model in order to keep upkeep costs to a minimal while maximizing the territories economic worth. This would result in bareboned crafting stations overall and would more or less require linked trading posts to work, conveniently anyway, to allow a steady flow of imports and exports among settlements. Even then the bulk of crafting/refining tax would be seen from the process of training a skill. At 5% trade tax, 1.00 Crafting/Refining tax the process of 1-200 Weaponsmith in a streamlined fashion equates to roughly 10k in total taxes received if all base materials were purchased at .2 each. This isn’t factoring any possible discounts or salvaging finished products for materials either, this is if it was the most wasteful. So the settlement would still be required to be attractive enough in resources and location for crafters to do this.
None of these solutions are easy or convenient and a misstep could potentially make things worse. But honestly I can’t think of other solutions others haven’t mentioned. If you’ve made it this far you’re a trooper and I warned you I’m not a language guy.