Fargo

@Phaserburn Then produce your daily iron and sell it. Nobody would force you into anything. Making features redundant on purpose just because you are tied after work? I dont think so.

For economy and gameplay it is quite important that labor is the limiting factor, not the production rate. When you have enough labor to do everything, first you dont have to make decisons. Brain dead daily harvesting, do you think this is good game design? How much labor is availiable needs to be balanced. When players stockpile too much resources, they become redundant. You might not notice it doing selfsupply, not interacting with the market. But local markets are empty. Why? Because nobody buys anything. Why? Because poor design leads to self supply and poor balancing to inflation. Who suffers? Anyone enjoying local trade, crafting for profit and competing economically, and new players that cant do anything but join a clan... to then get everything for free. A major purpose of production rates might be, that players shouldnt be able to build a new bulding and harvst resources using all their labor immediately.

The point is you are wasting not only your time, but everyones time, by adding, changing or removing features, based on a broken core game. Everything you add, this included, might be redundant once you fixed basic mechanics after a full wipe. And this is not just since today, but for a whole year now. It makes no sense to care about new players, but ignore inflation that especially affects new players. It is a joke to claim that materials are redundant while every single good is inflated since month... Everything you did against ganking didnt solve the cause of the issue, and becomes redundant the moment you achieve that. BR restrictions, everything you did to reduce 1st rate PBs becomes redundant once you reduced 1st rate production naturally. Etc. We might like a features that might not work with existent features, and even make an existent feature redundant. You are responsible to make everything that gets added to the game work. Could you confirm that? Then look at the game please. Im just working on a topic pointing out once again how you made crafting and local trade redundant, and how poorly this is designed. Dont you want us to help you engineering the most perfect game possible? Or what is the goal. Making a game that not everyone hates? Thats a pretty good description of current NA...

What you don't understand is what the reasons are for this... And that if you won't figure this out and improve the actual game, nothing you can do will be able to keep new players in the game.

Ofcourse, but it most likely wont be an exchange. Doubloons are no currency like reals are. Doubloons are more a material like teak logs. Port drop/trader loot vs. amount of reals earned results in a certain value of teak logs. But did players exchange teak logs for gold/reals? No, because everyone needs them to craft good ships. Even if you had more than enough, you would stockpile them. Just try to buy teak logs, or doubloons. Doubloons sell for 500+ reals currently. 4mio reals for a first rate just for doubloons. 100mio. gold. Ofcourse other than logs not everyone demands doubloons for large ships, but the majority probably does. When crafting an item consumes 5 different "currencies", over time 4/5 of those most likely loose value, unless the game is balanced perfectly. Without teak logs, you alteast are able to use different logs. Without doubloons/marks/permits, the production stops. Resources (so labor and reals) that cant be consumed anymore, inflate. Fixed exchange rates would balance it, but this would remove the purpose of having different currencies. What even is the purpose of doubloons, when they are earned in the same ways reals are earned? The point is, is nobody realising how stupid this is? How difficult this is to balance? That either labor is the limiting factor and all these extra currencies become "redundant", or labor becomes redundant? Well its just labor isnt it... No, make labor redundant and you can remove labor and all crafting from the game. Local markets aswell, that are all about trading labor. You could just make the admiralty sell ships for only doubloons or reals. If we want meaningful crafting and player trade, labor needs to be the limiting factor of prodution. When i sell my doubloons to the lone contract that buys 500 D's for 15 reals in gustavia, because i dont care, this isnt proof that exchange is happening. If exchange happened, there would be competition. When contracts asking for 300 and less reals are filled, probably because newer and unexperienced players not owning redundant amounts of reals yet dont know what theyre doing. Otherwise they would place sell contracts, test what D's sell for, and triple the profit. When lots of players would sell D's, there would be lots of sell contracts. Idk, maybe thats the case in neutral ports?!

When doubloons are supposed to be a currency, first of all let players place contracs in doubloons and reals...

No understanding what you want to say, could you rephrase? What is an average player supposed to earn? People are talking about 100k+ income within hours. Did it increase? Otherwise its redundant. 4 reals/crew is probably redundant. Craftable upgrades i see consume 300-440 reals.10 Hull repairs consume 420 reals, 10 Rig repairs 380 reals, 200 rum consumes 1k reals. What do you mean? Will there be an exchange npc? Buying from other players isnt removing reals from economy. How much is this supposed to be? Probably redundant compared with income of hundreds of players. Fitting a medium 5th-4th rate ship consumes ~10k reals for cannons, ~2k reals for crew, ~1k reals for upgrades (if crafted), ~2k reals for repairs and rum. 15k reals. Crafting the ship itself consumes ~15k reals aswell. If the ratio is similar for all ships, the insurance would print ~50k reals. 50 - (15+15) = 20k reals. So replacing a fully fitted medium ship prints about 20k reals in this case. How prevent inflation?

Once again, labor must not be tradable! The production capacity of each person needs to be limited. That even if this guy is a dedicated trader, he cannot determine the value of doubloons. And that he wont ask a fair price if competition isnt forcing him to do so. Also that reals and the whole economy are probably redundant for you, so you just filled that contracte because you had enough doubloons you wont need... Just tell me what the price was, and we can test it.

What price? You seem to not understand how this works. The market isnt working based on honest people figuring out fair prices. Prices develop based on competition. No matter how experienced you are, you cant just figure out what a reasonable price is. When there are no contracts/competition, all you can do is set the first price very low/high. So you probably made a bad deal there. That there is zero competition on local markts has several reasons. From inflation (why sell something today thats worth 10% more tomorrow?), over contract fee (up to10% fee each time you need to adjust a contract price), to bad design (few professions allowing easy self supply, etc.). It was for example always about knowing the labor value in gold. You could find this out by looking at actual market prices, and see that e.g. ships usually sold for about 100 gold/LH. Then you could figure out what a reasonable price would be for every single labor based good. What was important when you tried to buy/sell something for that competition was very low, like materials, cannons or other ships. Otherwise you would pay the fee each time you need to adjust the price. What you could do constantly without contract fees to figure out when a good starts selling, or players start selling to you. Again doubloons are mainly a crafting material, not a currency. And because local trade has so many issues, people mostly supply themselfes, and stockpile materials. If you could buy the ship you need from the market for reals, you could sell your doubloons. But you cant, so people dont sell them. A major reason that you cant sell anything for profit is that people dont rely on your labor/goods, as long as they have labor contracts. When they dont like the market price, they can use labor contracts to craft it themselfes. And they can even trade the contracts to their friend if they arent a shipbuilder themselfes. So prices drop until it becomes impossible to sell anything with any margin. The effect of labor inflation caused by labor contracts, that didnt get wiped.

I just told you thats not the point... Imagine a bucket, and each day people throw reals into this bucket. No reals leave the bucket. See the problem?

The point is not that insurances are a major money print. The point is that they remove the major money sink.

Resource harvesting cost always was the major money sink. Removing this for ships with insurances, and even making it print additional currency, ofcourse has a major effect on inflation. Trade goods not effected by inflation, demand or anything are really bad too. But thats another topic.

No matter what you pay another player for those doubloons, these reals arent leaving the economy. Could you explain how enough reals are supposed to leave the economy to prevent inflation?

Production cost is only about 30k reals. So insurances are printing reals.... I really dont understand how it is possible to mess up economy in so many ways.

Im not saying they will. The whole point was that youre not having any idea what 1k iron means now compared with before. Fact is that labor cost overall for ships even decreased. So stop making unfounded claims everywhere. What if nations had very good reasons to attack and defends ports now? They would use whatever ships they own... or what else should they use?

Havent seen this yet. Hundreds to thousands also isnt much. When just a few players want to buy doubloons for the next 1-2 ships, we are talking about 100k demand already. The point is that players still own the inflated gold/reals. Why should they sell any valuable materials for reals. And doubloons are as much a currency as teak logs are. Both is mainly a crafting material. Why arent players selling teak logs? Or are they? In general such materials are stockpiled, not sold. I guess for newer players its profitable to sell their doubloon for lots of reals, cause they dont own 500k reals from prepatch. Or when you dont need doubloon stuff, cause youre just using 5th rates nevertheless, you would probably sell them. What price are those doubloons selling for?

Because they didnt wipe the first rate meta. What ships are competetive for RvR completely depends on the meta game. No firstrates means no need for first rates. Your 1000 iron are enough to craft several first rates aswell btw.

Any idea why?

Players cant print them. Npcs can.

The best thing that could happen is that labor contracts remain redundant because they are too expensive. When players can farm and trade labor efficiently again, its game over immediately. They should just be removed. Imagine crafting over time, so something that costs 1000 LH would instead take 24 hours to craft. Thats what labor originally represented, because crafting over time was technically a problem.

I guess you arent supposed to empty your buildings. Why should you? Production rate now just isnt a limiting factor, and thats a good thing. Makes palyers think instead of emptying everything whenever they can. Harvest cost of resources defines the cost of ships now, sadly materials are gone for no reason. You cant just decrease it until you can empty your buildings.

What is enough iron to craft 10 4th rates... If ships/resources are too expensive in general simply needs to be figured out based on real data, not based on what we think. We dont even know how expensive different ships are supposed to be, because devs dont share much information about their "new vision". We cant say anything about it, unless we arent able to leave port anymore with a crafted ship. I dont know the numbers from last patch. But last time i checked a 3rd rate was 3700 LH, an medium 5th rate 2000 LH. Now its 2900 LH and 1500 LH. Seems it actually decreased. Labor was redundant prepatch because of inflated CMs, maybe some people got used to this?! Dont let resource cost fool you. Labor cost of several materials, the major labor cost of ships, was transferred into only resources. Its impossible to tell how the overall labor cost changed, without knowing the numbers.

Reals Labor Doubloons Labor in Doubloons Essex 10k 1500 0 1200 Connie 22k 2400 3600 1900 Bellona 26k 2900 4150 2300 Bucket 34k 3300 5400 2700 Victory 37k 3700 7800 3000 For teak/teak ships and 1 teak log = 5 reals. Cannons would add about 50% labor and 10-20k reals. 1000 labor = 1 day of passive labor generation. So a fitted 4th rate takes about 3 days of labor. Question is what amount of reals and doubloons do players earn compared with that. It should be on average about 10k reals and 1200 Doubloons per day. Roughly.