118090-economic-depression-death-to-crafters

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Economic Depression
 Since the game first started out i have given players an exit strategy it’s just sad that you went and broke the only real economy that we had going for us in Wildstar, being able to give maxim coin for their materials. Personally this is a mistake, every one that had the free time could have been doing what many of the buyers if Wood and Metal. With the changes that you implemented we now have our hands tied and have to let all the people supporting our crafting needs that we can no longer purchase the materials that we could 2  days ago. This is a prominent problem in the game is no stable economy, when players have to vender their harvests for 26s for [Primal Hardwood]  and 17s72c [Augmented Hardwood] and [Galactium Chunk]  13s25cNew prices just to make a 3% margin would have to be  [Primal Hardwood] 27s ea [Augmented Hardwood] 18s ea a
Not sure about the Glactium but that is what seems reasonable for the amount of procs it was getting.So White picket fences, Jungle Pines thing of the past.It takes great time investment to return a profit . a huge money investment to start,  now it is pointless to use crafting for money because in the time it takes to craft 20 gold you could harvest far more then 20g in materials   This is just insane, because neither the buyer nor seller can get a decent price from the goods. On Monday these were the current prices [Primal Hardwood] 30s each,  [Augmented Hardwood]  20s each and  [Galactium Chunk]  22 s each. This brought many people into the housing and harvesting department of this game. Half the players in my harvest thicket they were hoping this did not come to pass as it removed their way to make money without the CXs Charges. Currently after running tests i have found it is faster to just harvest the extra time then to craft any items for the small amount or return. So the Economics of it, every one that buys and sells material is stimulating the Wildstar Economy. Why is this you say?  Look at the current model for the United States, when the United States needs money it goes to the Federal Reserve that is not owned by the Government, that print little pieces of paper that in turn is equal to the 100 Billion that they just borrowed.  The money in Wildstar is created out of thin air just as the money from the Federal Reserve. Wildstar players are paid for their work in the game from doing quests and vendering materials that the economy currently does not need.  This is fine system but it leaves crafters completely out of the loop, me and wife have 3 accounts between the 2 of us one is just a crafter, but since the changes came into play we are going to let the account lapse as it is not worth the 10-11p per month to keep it running if it cannot generate any revenue. Now for the taxing portion of the little economic briefing, I know you “ Carbine” tries to remove money from the economy in the form of repair bills  taxes paid to the auction house and commodities  exchange , other little things like postage. That sums up the basics of the real world economy and Wildstars economy overlap, without a way to get ahead aka crafting people will always be stressing on just harvesting to make enough money to rune their gear or level a crafting profession. We all know that farming items for a rune set would take far longer than to just buy the components off the CX. I don’t understand why you don’t want players to have any amount of money at any given time, inflation happens to every MMO and you should not stop players from earning money and recirculating it into the current population. C.R.E.E.D. has done well in the market .  C.R.E.E.D. has gone up slightly over the last 5 months. It has  almost doubled in price sitting around 10p for one C.R.E.E.D. and I believe the average user can obtain the money to purchase the C.R.E.E.D.  C.R.E.E.D. in this game is the equivalent of paying your truck payment or your mortgage payment when people are allowed to sell to crafters they make more money than vendering it.They can free up more time to enjoy the game, giving the crafters the ablity to buy materials at a markup over vendering the materials gives them coin in their pocket and  crafters can provide a service to the harvesting community.	
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Citing a one day market fluctuation as the primary support for your thesis does not make for a good argument.  Not saying you are necessarily wrong, but really... try to come up with something more substantial.
 
Even just (for the sake of argument) advancing the notion that WS's economy is healthy, market adjustments happen all the time.	
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Hello my friend, we meet again
It's been a while, where should we begin?	
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I take it they reduced the vendor value of the "go to" craftable items?
 
It really was one of the few ways (in my opinion) gold was making it back into the economy.  Not enough folks do dailies/dungeons/adventures anymore which is the only other major source that created gold.
 
I do understand the need to fight inflation tho.  There are a LOT of folks out there who stuggle to keep up with weekly repair/consumable costs and inflation only makes their lives even more miserable.  Bad news for us rich folks - but honestly it's probably better for the game as a whole.
 
If more gold was coming in than out but most was going to the 1% that's not good.  I realize the "middle class' will be affected as well... those who harvest and farm.  They won't earn as much by vendoring wood/ore.  But the economy may become healthier over all if prices go down because of the changes and wealth is more evenly distributed.
 
But I'm neither an economist nor do I have access to the numbers Carbine can see.  So what do I know.	
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			Damn, CREED made 5 appearances during the Economic Depression. Was that an all time high? :P	
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			I am not pissed about all the changes, I just feel that people that dont want to run dungeons and adventures all day to get the Fantastic loot drops that are happening allowed the crafting class to have a niche to make some money. Currently there is less then a 3% profit margin for Architects that do wood Crafts, its no big secret that we take the wood and melt it down into items we vender. With out using the vender buff we would be going in the hole. With the vender buff we are only able to make 20g per hour crafting, when i can harvest more money then that just jumping from thicket to thicket of mining deposit circle All the buyers I have had for a pretty long amount of time I sent them out a Mail letting them know it was more profitable to just vender the stuff they harvest.  Just sucks because it was a nice 2 way street we had allowing them to make more for their time and allowing me to craft it on downtime. O well it all changed now we look for a new way to have some type of economical gain.	
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I'm lost.....
 
Can someone clue me in, because i don't see anything that changed. 
 
I"m going to PM you stridle	
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			Hey Stridle, do you know offhand how much you pick up doing an hour of thicket farming in a mining circle?	
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Start a desktop timer, run either hour or 4 hour sessions and find the average of the sessions on a 1 hour time basics .
 
No flasks used around 1300 is pretty average for mining nodes trees are a little more frequent till this patch where only tree stumps are spawning and  giving 1 wood each, this was pre drop 3 i did a test on mining and posted in in later forum.	
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			Haven't been able to run a full hour test since drop 3 because we are getting an infinate loading screen after 3-5 hops to neighbor	
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Hey Stridle, do you know offhand how much you pick up doing an hour of thicket farming in a mining circle?
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Hey Stridle, do you know offhand how much you pick up doing an hour of thicket farming in a mining circle?
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			WOOT 20 mins in loading screen in housing before i decided to restart client 	
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Hey Stridle, do you know offhand how much you pick up doing an hour of thicket farming in a mining circle?
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{| class="blockquote"
Hey Stridle, do you know offhand how much you pick up doing an hour of thicket farming in a mining circle?
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Nice post Stridle, As I am a miner/crafter that doesn't understand any of the economy on Nexus. I still hate it that every item I craft is useless and therefore not selling in wildstar. The armorsmith that I have doesn't have any use for crafting besides some costume parts :(
That means that I doesn't need any ores for my crafting because crafting is useless and I just need to sell all my ores.
 
Every crafter is selling their ores and no one needs them for any crafting profession. (maybe an architect, but they won't get any profit aswell) So there are to many ores in the market and no buyers for them. So the market value is extreme low.
 
If Carbine can make up a system when crafting make some use, the crafters will buy the ores (or use there own) the prices will get heigher and that will keep the economy running again. And not only that, I will have fun in crafting again. I think that is more worth than the money I can make with crafting.
 
I am an armorsmith and my expert tier is really a joke. The first expert armor (Epochos) is good gear for starting lvl 50 players. But after I got enough eldan data fragments and got further in the tier with the Adventus gear, the gear gets only worse then the Epochos set. So no use in the crafting daily / unlocking crafting scematics. And therefore no use in spending ores for making gear.
 
What is the reason that Carbine dont make the crafting gear as followed:
Epochos set: good starting gear for adventures
Adventus 1/2 set: good starting gear for dungeons
Adventus 3 set: best dungeon gear.
Adventus 4 set: best pre-raid gear.
 
I am not an economy freak and I am not an crafting expert, but I know that the crafting system that Carbine made in Wildstar isn't working.	
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Although I appreciate the idea of MMO player businesses, this really doesn't count. Something as primitive as this process shouldn't be worth people's time in the first place. I did it for a couple weeks, to see how well I could sustain a lot of crafting professions dailies on just my architect, and it worked pretty nicely, but as a regular core mechanic of the game? Heck no.
 
Think about it, why are we playing this game? Awesome dungeons, great humor, nice progression schemes, cool team coordination requirements. But instead of all that, what do people want to do? Go around to a bunch of houses, pick crap up off of peoples lawns, mail that crap to other players, who then take that crap + some automating lua script to stand in front of a crafting station for 2 hours while huluing, so that they can then go pick up MORE crap around Illium to launch a settler vendor buff, so that they can then right click their items in front of a vendor, and... profit.
 
And people wonder why the PvP queues are so dead.
 
Honestly, the primary means to monetarily progress should not be this. The real reason for crafters (or what should be, if Carbine would make crafted items more competitive already) is for one player to assist MULTIPLE players in their progressions and self-expression (architects here.) That's cool. It's also a fun way to build a player business. It doesn't work right now though because it's a struggle between making BoE drops obsolete by buffing crafting and making crafts obsolete by protecting drops. I think Carbine had a nice plan to merge the two needs with digichron power core drops, but I guess they ditched that idea for whatever reason.
 
Honestly, what this game needs is more reasons for people to invest in player housing and more reasons to invest in crafted gear. Fix the dang elder rest exp issue already, provide more incentives for decor items, keep making changes to make warplots more accessible (we've got a weekly warplot thing going right now, finally, which is pretty nice.) fix the darn no-third-slot addibility on crafted blues, PLEASE add rare core drops, make a better effort to differentiate different research tier levels, and if you do all that, not only will you give crafters a business, but a cool one. Not vending.
 
Death to vending. As it is, all these changes are probably too late. I doubt it's in any way easy to regain players you've lost. The population is too low now, and that makes some things like warplots highly unlikely to ever get off the ground now no matter how accessible you make them. Carbine's actions are too reactionary. They fix problems after the damage is done, which barely helps. Warplots should have been 20-30 man to begin with. Heck, there should have even been 5 and 10-mans for cool small team coordinations. It would have made warplots far more accessible to begin with, hooked people into warplots early, and thus made it easier to coordinate 40 mans once plenty of people were already invested in warplots. I'm focusing too much on one detail now, but that's my more-than-2-cents.
 
Carbine has too many awesome features in this game that are lost due to small details like this. People don't see the features, so they quit early.	
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@EagleOrion: Why shouldn't people play "such an primitive proces" as farming/grinding and crafting? These things are a part of this game and many other online MMO's. In WoW I did the same (without house farming because that wasn't in the game) I got on my flying mount and go from mine to mine to garther and sell the mats. With that money i could buy nice stuff and pay my repair bills.
A Good economy is part of a game like this. And the crafting is a major part of Wildstar. Carbine did a fantastic job with the crafting itself. Its alot of fun to craft, but its not rewarding at the moment. Its only a money sink and nobody will buy the crafted stuff because it is not good enough right now.
The dungeons, humor, raids and stuff are also fantastic. But I can do both ingame. I'll run dungeons and raids with the guild when I can, and do dailies/farming/grinding and crafting at times I am not needed or when we don't do anything together. So its a big part of the game for me and I was hoping to pay my repair bills with the crafting and make my own fantastic gear.
 
That the PvP is dead don't have anything to do with crafting/farming. I'm not an PvP player and don't like PvP in any game. So I won't play PvP, but rarther level a new alt. 
 
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Honestly, what this game needs is more reasons for people to invest in player housing and more reasons to invest in crafted gear. 
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			Every one has the right to enjoy what part of the game they choose, if they enjoy crafting and doing economics the they should not be held back by blanket constrictions placed on crafting system, I am pretty sure if they suddenly removed your right to Raid or do dungeons you all would be as pissed as us craters Don't attack a section of the game just because you don't find it fun and interesting. Housing and the crafting system is what I got this game for, but i also fell in love with the combat system. Ever since the days if houses and Guild Halls of Everquest II i have look forward to a game that can procure such a task as giving us Guild Halls so we can use our skills at decorating to create beautiful works of art. So dot Bash it just because its not your style. we should have equal rights in what happens to our hobbies that we enjoy.	
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			There was a bug, that random plots spawned full 5 nodes every 5 minutes, that's why you could make a lot of money.	
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There was a bug, that random plots spawned full 5 nodes every 5 minutes, that's why you could make a lot of money.
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Think about it, why are we playing this game?
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MMO's became popular because they are "something for everyone".  Somehow this has gotten twisted into "if ur not doin everything ur doin it rong."  Don't be one of those people.
 
A functioning player economy depends on suppliers, crafters, customers and currency sources.  The customers go out into the open world to get currency which they trade to the crafters for product they can use to tackle larger challenges to make more currency.  The crafters pay suppliers for the raw materials and intermediate crafts they need to make the product to sell to the customers.
 
Currency flow in Wildstar is, well, dysfunctional.  It's better than it used to be but sources are still too stingy and sinks are far too plentiful and expensive.  Basically the customers have a WalMart or Dollar Store budget, if that.
 
The sales interface itself, the auction house UI, is subpar.  For example I can search on Brutality, but I can't specify a minimum so I get a ton of hits with 3.  Making it hard to shop for the piece you need is another barrier.
 
The big hit crafting took in Drop 3 was the lowered stat cap and (significantly) improved drop rate of blues and epics.  Even open world drops are now clearly better.  Why fight the AH and spend what little gold you have on an item that's obsoleted by one that can be farmed in about a week?
 
Customers aren't buying from Crafters and Crafters aren't buying from suppliers.  Suppliers are left selling to vendors and crafters are shuttering their benches and turning into farmers.
 
For crafting to work it must be competitive within their tier.  Yes, raid level drops needs to have an advantage.  In WoW and SW:TOR that differentiator was set bonuses (some work better than others).  Here?  Everything can so crafted product was nerfed to be clearly inferior.  Not really sure how or even if they're going to recover from that.
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For crafting to work it must be competitive within their tier.
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Its only going to get worse in drop 4.  As far as I can tell, the intent is to have crafted gear between veteran adventure and veteran dungeon blues.  They were remarkably coy about where that put research gear, but I got the impression that you'll be replacing your CW-4 Greatsword that took you 54 days to learn with a blue drop off the first boss in STL Vet. 
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			What they could do to rectify this problem in the future would be to make crafting recipes immediately obtainable.  With the mats being as plentiful as they are now makes items fairly cheap to make and they could base the total amount of stat allowed on a piece increase with the highest core of that tier so that its still possible to make really good gear but expensive and rare sense those cores aren't very common.  	
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PlasmaJohn explaned thecrafters situation very well. The crafting items should be better then the random drops that drops very often. And if we need a lot of (farming)mats to craft it, then the farmers have a use to farm for it.
 
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For crafting to work it must be competitive within their tier.  Yes, raid level drops needs to have an advantage.  In WoW and SW:TOR that differentiator was set bonuses (some work better than others).  Here?  Everything can so crafted product was nerfed to be clearly inferior.  Not really sure how or even if they're going to recover from that.
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MMO's became popular because they are "something for everyone".  Somehow this has gotten twisted into "if ur not doin everything ur doin it rong."  Don't be one of those people.
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@EagleOrion, I don't think PlasmaJohn was attacking you're post and what you are saying. I think there are alot of good reasons and suggestions in this topic so Carbine can do something about the crafting/farming/mining in Wildstar. So if we all could make a good plan and give it to Carbine, maybe they adjust the system so that de crafting is a good part of the game for the crafters.
 
I agree on the part that the farming houses, craft stuff and vendoring shouldn't be a part of the game. But if the crafted gear is useless for the players, why should anyone buy it at the actionhouse. So why are we crafting? And what to do with the crafts we make if we cannot sell them to players. We will salvage them or sell them to a vendor.
 
So if Carbine can manage to sort these parts out, nobody needs to sell automated crafted gear to a vendor.	
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To be fair out of all the MMORPGs this one has been the hardest to make money to sustain, and if you want to get off not paying a sub an investment of time to get the 10-11 plat for creed a month is another taxation on a player that is trying to enjoy a game.  Even sinces the days of EverQuest o yes back  in the jump in the DeLorean, it was the middle of March 1999  trading in a cave because there was no auction house at the time. Back in that era there was not even a map or a compass you had to carry a long-sword around just to know what direction north was, even in the hell there a thriving economy, players helping players. Take that all the way to today every time we find a way to profit in this economy it is cut down by the devs, if someone complains that person X is making more money then player Y people throw a fit when inturn player X plays 4 times as much as player Y and in return should have more possible Income. Merching harvestables has been the only stable way to ensure that you are making coin. You harvest for x number of hours vender x tiems and get x money. To be honest harvesting is not fun but in this game it is a REAL Necessary Evil.  For people that dont harvest they have the option of going to Malgrave or Grimvault and just mass farm kills to me this is another screwed up way of making coin, for every creature or material you sell to a vender and not a player is money that is being created, with this comes inflation.So if i take my 2k ore and sell it to the merchant i get say 3 plat that i just now invented or for every 1000 kills you do you add 3 plat into circulation. If you sell to a crafter like you sell  your 1k materials to a player and you make 1.5 plat then that crafter turns that materials and makes a 20 gold profit off your 1.5 plat, so in turn you are only brining 20 gold into the economy vs the 3 plat you would have if you vendered your items to a NPC. I know economics sucks but we need to keep the economic loop as closed as possible, in a perfect world we would have items available be equal to the amount of money in circulation. We do have factors in place to remove Coin from the circulation via repairs, taxie fees, items from merchants, costumes and these work as intented but, if we don’t make the crafting system worth working toward and exchange money player to player then we are going to have thing slowly spiral up to where it takes more time to farm for an item then the actual worth of an item.
 
In Conclusion we need to rely on our crafters for items, they need to expand the amount of items crafters are able to make, special items that require rare materials and harvesting to craft say one piece of raid gear a week or 2  per week. Give the power to the crafters and watch the game thrive. Keep the money in the system in the player network. I know many players that have max crafters but find it hard to sell even cutting the profit margin to 10 percent or even lower. Like I said in the beginning this game has been the hardest game to have an economic stable as a player than any other game. If I want money I am forced to spend hours harvesting to just make a miniscule amount of money for my effort .	
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In Conclusion we need to rely on our crafters for items, they need to expand the amount of items crafters are able to make, special items that require rare materials and harvesting to craft say one piece of raid gear a week or 2  per week. Give the power to the crafters and watch the game thrive.
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Kinetic Omni-plasm pricing has risen while Refined Sharshard Power Core pricing has dropped.  It is no longer profitable to make Sharshard cores (yes even with the omni-plasm discount skill) which was my main source of income.  Even if other non-research technologist items were salable I wouldn't go there because the RNG infested coordinate-crafting system is horrid.
 
Not sure if farming neighbor plots is going to be a viable long-term replacement as I wouldn't be surprised to see the vendor price on mats get severely reduced in the not so distant future.  And to be honest, I'd rather not spend that much time on it.
 
I can barely move the unbound world drops I get... I've had pretty much no luck trying to sell crafted lowbie equipment.  I'm guessing the (non-research) Expert pieces that command nice prices were made before the drop (over 100 mainstat).
 
My time here is CREDD dependent.  I've got enough to keep me going for a few months yet, but if I don't find an alternative stream of income I'm done for.	
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