Fargo

I like to remove global chat and communication between hostile nations. I think there is just no good reason for that in general, its a game not a chatroom. Diplomacy is going to be done with politics mechanics. If local chat in harbours stays you also have an opportunity to chat there. What we should have is maybe some kind of emotes or signaling e.g. to salute after a good fight. Btw. i dont think this is something the community should decide about. 1) Now the population is low, and many guys like the global while not much is happening in their nation and in general, but thats shortsighted. 2) People who like to be rude, offend and incite, shouldnt be able to affect this decision.

Im sorry if i offended you, it wasnt intended. But this isnt much about opinions. If you claim nonesense and then try to defend your believes for all means, ignoring points, twisting arguments and searching for discrepancies, its going to be harsh. Look, i never said anybody should be prevented from playing the game how he wants to. I explained why labour needs balancing and why it makes sense to restrict production capacities by labour. The difference to only gold is that labour is independent from playtime (and gold). A rich crafter or clan is not able to pull out more ships than others. Economy is driven by demand. Its the same issue you have with gold sinks. Not the production is important, but the amount of goods needed to be replaced that dictates it. Thats why gold balancing needs to be based on consumption goods needed to be replaced. Labour is seperate, it cant generate gold or gold sinks. And you finally agreed on that above, so we can end it here nevertheless. You know that rare upgrades all stay forever? You should inform yourself how money sinks work, if you dont trust my words.

Then call it overabundant supply if you have problems with the word inflation, but stick to the point. When labour is overabundant, its value is decreasing, and it looses its function as a limitating factor. Thats the point, because gold also lost that function. Youre talking about other limiting factors, but resource availiability or production capacity is not ment to be a limiting factor. Those would intervene much too late. Things are much more simple in the game, because the only purpose of gold and labour is ship production. In terms of gold it is no difference to own gold value to gather resources for 100 ships, to own resources for 100 ships, or to own 100 ships. You cant serioulsy tell that a situation of inflation and overabundant labour supply would be fine. You cant fix broken gold balancing by breaking up labour balancing as well. In any rational way this makes absolutely no sense, and you can easily proofe that it isnt working that way.

Inflation is a process of devaluation, not specifically for gold. When we generate much more LH each day than needed to be replaced, low demand and high supply would decrease value. The amount that can be stored by yourself is limited, but you can store infinite labour within crafted items, unless gold is restricting you. Thats the difference between the actual situation and the example (not ment to reflect the actual situation). When we have equally too much labour and gold, nothing is limiting production, labour and gold both loose value equally. But the actual eco is much more inflated by gold, labour is limiting, thats why prices are high and the market isnt flooded. (Probably also because its dead anyway.) Im only worried about, that you might just not want to understand. Your point is that reducing labour cost/increasing production rates works as a gold sink. Stacking resources, materials and ships is no gold sink for two reasons. You can trade those items back into gold, and they never rot/keep value forever. You can see it as different currencies, trading one for another 1v1 doesnt sink anything. Yes you payed the npc, but it doesnt matter if everybody is rich of gold, or rich of ships and therefore gold and labour, economy and crafting become meaningless. Eco is "crashed", when it becomes meaningless, when players stop caring about profit. Well, than you must be ignorant. I ment competetive high quality ships, not grey ships or one dura ships you cant use with mods. Then i misunderstood. That isnt helpful. x/y=1 has infinite solutions, i cant say if labour balancing, gold balancing, or both are causing the issue. You need to estimate x or y, and that would finally mean estimating the amount of labour or gold that needs to be replaced. Also that you can calculate a ratio doesnt mean that labour is affecting gold balancing. You can calculate ratios for anything.

Well, you claimed that labour is significantly affecting gold balancing/inflation, thats why we started this discussion. Lets get back to this, so maybe we can end it soonish;). You said income should be balanced with the possible gold sink. Your simplified example was a ship costs 1mio and takes 10 days to craft, the possible money sink is 100k/day. Now lets add to this that the ship is also sunk each 10 days. Max money sink and real money sink are 100k/day, income was 1mio/day. To fix the situation by gold balancing, we can reduce the income to 100k. How should labour fix the problem? By decreasing labour cost to one day, the possible sink becomes 1mio gold/day. But the ship still only sinks each 10 days, the real money sink is still 100k/day. What happened? Instead of fixing gold inflation, we generated labour inflation in addition. The result would be 10 times more ship supply than demand, everything looses value, eco crashes, etc. You could try to define that as a money sink, but over time the market would be saturated by cheap ships, materials and resources. And finally labour didnt had any affect on gold balancing. What if gold cost was fine already and labour balancing restricted people to do pvp and sink enough gold? Decreasing labour costs would fix it in that case. I dont think you can increase demands by decreasing costs. Buy/gather oak to craft planks. Buy iron ingots to craft iron fittings. Buy/gather iron ore and coal to craft ingots. Those are not just simple to craft, but also belog to the most needed materials. Craftable labour contracts are nonesense, lets hope they get rid of this again with the next patch. No, as i just said, assume resources dont require labour anymore. Nothing that costs gold and labour at the same time without changing the total amount of labour used for goods, no labour sinking gold. Balancing would still be fine, because gold and labour are balanced seperately. Its not important what is more restricting. Building capacities dont have much to do with general labour balancing. When they dont restrict the production of recources needed, they just define how resource production is distributed. No doubt that labour is the most restricting factor here, but that doesnt mean it is restricting anything! Claiming that labour is restricting and ships take too long to craft is a ridiculous claim, while the whole server stacks incredible amounts of ships. Those ships are crafted, what do you mean by npc ships?

Ofcourse its a disagreement, because your method assumes that labour is balanced. Its another big claim to say that people refuse to use their LH, because they dont want to take 3 minutes each day to produce basic stuff. This is not sensible and nonsense to consider for balancing. If it would be much effort, ok, but it is not. "labour does not sink enough gold" I mean just tell me how you would improve balancing based on that statement. How would you know if you have to decrease the labour cost for resources, if you have to increase the gold cost, or if you have to increase the general labour generation?! I dont think you can, because youre missing a reference point. Labour in general does not sink anything. The only connection between labour and gold balancing is that both are based on the amount of consumption goods that needs to be replaced. Another example. Assume we change the labour distribution and resources dont require labour anymore. Now resources are only restricted by gold and building capacities. If there was a gold-labour connection before, suddenly it disappeared?! Again, we are talking about 5 dura ships each 2 days. Look at the facts instead of claiming what you believe: 1) People are able to stack hundreds of best quality ships. 2) Over two years it was no problem that ships took too long to craft. 3) With stiffness-speed rng, people could afford to throw away the trash ships. Ship cost was basically twice as high, and we had this for a very long time. In general you cant compare those games directly, unless the combat speed is similar (=ship lifetime).

Why not keep it simple?! You want to set 100k bounty, you pay 100k at the bounty board, you might pay 10% fee to the bounty office, sinking that person grants 100k. Using alts would only transfer gold between your chars. The fee would be a small additional gold sink. Setting a minimum bounty would prevent bounty spamming.

Well, you didnt made that clear looking at the topic name and your first post;) And in that way rng would be fine (probably you shouldnt make speed a random attribute). Rng for minor boni is no problem at all. The problem is crafting a fir or teak ship that relies on speed, when speed is based on rng. But to be a gold sink, rng needs to generate ships that get thrown away. Either rng is fair and balanced, or its a money sink. One excludes the other.

I think i found the major missunderstanding causing this discussion. As i said, you assume that labour is well balanced already. But you cant tell that just because people are using all their labour. People would always do this, until gold becomes a limiting factor. You could have high gold inflation and labour inflation at the same time, and you wouldnt notice it with your method. All you can tell is about limiting factors. My question is not how much people use their labour to transform gold inflation into resource inflation. The question is how much labour do 2000 people need to generate, to supply themselfes with all consumption goods. When i can answer this, i will know the amount of goods that needs to be replaced. When i say sunk, i mean lost, or needs to be replaced. If you throw away an old ship, well its not technically sunk, but the result is the same. It needs to be replaced. "The major money sink is defined by all consumption goods that need to be replaced." Ships that you buy but never use for example are no consumption goods. Well, of course it should be about needs. If it was about player wishes, they would take everything and for free. Balancing based on player wishes would be horrible. The need definition could exclude first rates for example, so by pure labour balancing those ships become limited. Your PB fleets would run out of ships if your nation would produce mostly first rates. And that is no hard cap on production numbers, it is a cap for production capacity. You still can supply the same number of ships, but 3rd and second rates instead of first rates.

Thats why we need to talk about average numbers. You dont know them, neither do i. But playing since steam release i have a good idea of ship lifetimes. 1. Its bad to have people generating much more labour than needed, because this makes it neglectable. Labour inflation if you want so, it would loose all value. Labour is distributed to promote player interactions, to not have 50 crafters doin all by themselfe. Its hard to say what numbers would be best and i dont claim to know that saying "roughly". When 2500 e.g. is for mostly first rates, people would use some more second rates when labour becomes limitating, maybe thats not too bad. 2. Only labour used to produce resources sinks money. All material crafting and building the final ships doesnt. Ofcourse about 75% of the generated gold should be sunk, but labour has nothing to do with this! Independent from how much labour is needed for resource production, the production cost can be adjusted how you want it to be. I always talk about average numbers and this was just a very simplified example. We need to look at the whole thing. When i say 10 gold is gained on average, this includes every source of income and every kind of player. You might earn 15 gold one day and 5 the other, but seen over some time 10 gold would be realistic. Maybe now the example explains it for you. When you capture a trader you bring resources into economy, which have a certain gold value. If you sell to a player, then he does not need to harvest those resources from the npc and therefore no new gold entered economy, but less gold is going to leave. The effect is the same. You need to look at the whole prozess. Harvesting resources removes gold, but only because someone sunk those resources previously. The amount of ships sunk defines the major money sink. Ofcourse there is a relationship, because seen in days of income and days to craft, balancing would be the same. When Z days of labour are sunk in Z days also Z days of gold income needs to be sunk in Z days. But thats not helpful not knowing Z. The point is that you cant tell about balancing/inflation without knowing ship lifetimes. You are assuming that all resources bought are sunk, that ship lifetime equals crafting time, that labour is perfectly balanced already. But if you would know the perfect balancing for labour, you would know the amount of ships sunk. Its a contradiction in itself. You might say that resources produced even without demand are a money sink, but thats not true. As long as labour is not limiting, gold inflation partly becomes resource inflation, but that doesnt make anything better.

Well you claimed that crafting takes too long, but thats not the case. In general it makes no sense to look at actual broken economy btw. Be careful not to mix up stuff. 5 dura ship = 5 ships in 2 days = 0,4 days/ship. The question is if you can compare the combat speed in those games. In NA it takes quite some time to loose a ship, 5 dura ships not rarely lasted for weeks and longer. No, its not. Look, the balancing of labour cost and generation/player needs to make sure that players can supply themselfe. When X amount of labour is sunk (ships+kits) by 2k players each day, 2k players need to generate roughly X amount of labour each day. This is seperate and independent from gold balancing. Assume you earn 10 gold, and you sink a ship worth 8 gold (resource value) each day. Balancing is fine and independent from labour balancing. Labour in this case just needs to make sure that your not limited to craft the one ship you need each day. Assume you could craft 100 ships each day, thats a possible money sink of 800 gold/day. 1) This is not important and says nothing about inflation, because you only stack 2 gold each day. 2) The gold wouldnt be sunk, until the 100 ships you crafted are lost. Its doesnt matter if you stack gold, or items of the same value that can be traded back into gold. Lets look at your example. A ship costs/sinks 1 mio., thats the pure resource value that goes to npcs. You earn 1 mio in a few hours, lets say one day of playtime, so 1mio/day. The ship uses 10 days of LH. This alone doesnt tell much, because its important to know the lifetime for that ship. If you sink a ship each 10 days, labour balancing would be fine, but gold rewards are 10 times too high/ ship cost 10 times too low. If you sink a ship each day, gold balancing would be fine, but either labour cost too high, or labour generation too low.

One golden 5th equals 5 golden 5th rate duras each 2 days, what seems more than enough. Labour has nothing to do with gold balancing, the high labour value we are used to is a result, not a cause of rising prices/inflation. But only if its rng between "good" and "trash" and therefore affecting ship cost (50% trash doubles the cost on average). Its the cost that matters, rng is just a very stupid way to increase it. Why not just increase the cost directly instead?! Its an option, but not sensible. We saw the results of trash ships swarming the market, generating fake supply. No we dont. As i said, all we need is something valuable, but not necessary. Hardcore players would have faster access to lets say expensive second and first rates, but the average player wont suffer while the common PB ships are 3rd rates. It would only take them longer to sail a first rate from time to time, but nothing is restricting them to do PBs in competetive ships at any time. Its possible that 90% of 2k players on a server are HC grinders and 10% casual players would suffer from average balancing, but 1) its highly unlikely, 2) it would be a successfull game.

Where is the connection between inflation and rng?! To reduce inflation the first step is resonable balancing between gold rewards and ship cost + further costs. To control inflation just give people something expensive to buy/craft, that is valuable, but not necessary to play. This can be higher quality ships (only providing minor boni), first+second rates (not necessary in a 3rd rate meta), one specific ship of each class, or simply paints and marks.

The problem with rng as a money sink is, that by definition some rng outcomes need to be so bad, that ships become trash and get thrown away. Because if potential trash ships would be bought and used and therefore reduced demand, not more ships would need to be crafted than before.

I think its the right decision not to do artificial PVE zones. 1) How would you obtain a healthy balance between PVE and PVP guys on a mixed server? On the long term players would probably split up on two servers again, just named server 1 and 2 instead of PVP and PVE. The PVE zone would become more and more redundant for both servers. 2) I like both PVE and PVP and probably the majority of players does so. This would mean that PVP is more of a mixed PVP/PVE server nevertheless. I never had problems doing relaxed PVE alone or with friends on pvp3/pvp1. When i think about it i did way more PVE than PVP. The point of risk free afk trading, no need to comment... 3) If you want to do something for players avoiding PVP, do it in a natural way. For example secure the inside of friendly waters, increase the distance of free ports and capitals e.g. and dont force people to do missions in conquest areas. When basically PVE is secured by PVP, thats automatically leading to balancing/keeps the PVE guys distributed. 4) PVE only wont work on the long run, but if people like to stack infinite wealth and fill all their docks with meaningless ships, let them do it. If enough people play to keep this server up, its fine. If not enough people play, its probably not worth dealing with, we cant please the needs of everyone. New missions and better AI will be great for everyone, but to make pure PVE servers work you would need far more than that.

This is not an issue of 1 dura ships, but respawn mechanics. If actual respawning in nearest port becomes a problem, what is quite likely, only this needs to be changed. I guess they have this in mind already, cause it got pointed out in several discussions. Simply changing "teleport to nearest port" to "teleport to nearest outpost" should be fine. I think it would be nice that people you sank recently are out of the way a bit longer. Just read the discussions about 1 dura, your points not rudimentally scratch the gameplay advantages. In short: realism, immersion, captured ships valuable, more flexibility buying ships, more competition and player interaction.

Like this ideas. Just make it the more buildings of the same type produce in one port, the lower the production rate becomes. Maybe -5% each 10 buildings and -30% at max, so ports never become useless, but people are rewarded to craft in further ports, in general owning further ports gets rewarded. Events would be nice, just be careful with shortages. A storm destroying buildings, creatures reducing production rates, revolts increasing production costs, all fine, but a silver port suddenly becoming useless could restrict ship production. Its not realistic, but ship supply needs to be granted at any point. Yeah, but in the same way you should be rewarded somehow. There should be a cap of course, maybe +-15% for production cost. Right now sweden might be at +5%, brits at -10%. Nothing to worry about.

Could just depend on the amount of ports. The more ports you own, the lower the taxes+production costs/rates. Maybe its possible to track the number of ships sunk relative to the palyerbase of each nation instead. We need to keep it simple, dynamic taxes (that also cant be avoided unless you smuggle) would be fun to think about etc., but it probably would never make it in the game. BOT: I guess this just became redundant #wipehype

Of course you can, read my proposal. Just give people something meaningful to use the money for, thats a common measure to reduce inflation. Massive changes? We had a simple economy for about two years and inflation wasnt a noticable problem. We need something that is working/fun, it doesnt need to be perfect. Each ship sinking removes money equal to its resource production value out of the game, thats about 25k for a 5th rate dura up to 300k for a first rate. Crew and repair cost in addition. Basically everything you use is a consumption good and therefore a potential money sink. Yes, no need for those items, but with proper balancing even this would be no problem. Its no matter how many different income sources there are, if each on provides roughly the same amount of money per time spend.

What NPCs do you mean, we dont have NPCs that want to act similar to players. NA has players instead, much better, mostly more intelligent and easier to code. We dont receive gold from resource production, thats actually the biggest money sink we have. If there are npcs buying resources for fixed margins its something different, but all resources needed for crafting are produced for money that flows out of the game. On the other side the npc providing your combat rewards is printing money, but thats it. Nothing wrong with that as long as the balancing isnt too bad. Bad balancing would cause in/deflation, but even good balancing would result in slow inflation. What we saw is that changes can enable exploits that change balancing/cause inflation super fast. This is not ment to discuss the causes of inflation, but ideas to control it and to pump money out of eco right now.

Just a small suggestion while an asset wipe is probably not going to happen in the near future. When introducing the admiralty store, expand it and make all marks, paints, etc. availiable for gold in addition. Appropriately expensive ofcourse... people would spend millions just for paints. Prices might need adjustment when hyperinflation decreases, but just that would be a success. Ofcourse this would only affect the time until a full asset wipe is going to happen, but the effort should be very little. You could also test how good an inflation control based on those items would work with future inflation in mind (after release wipes are no option anymore). In addition people would have more opportunities to test the new admiralty items now. Why reward exploiters? There is no other way, but all rewards are consumables and will be gone after some time nevertheless. Why is inflation so bad, even if money exploits get fixed? Unless you raise all fixed npc prices and rewards, money wont recover its value. When items become expensive, only the labour value is rising. But labour is neglectable, because it increases your income in the same way. To show the dimension: If you own 100mio gold, thats currently worth the resource value of 5000 golden 5th rate duras. 5000 ships, even when you pvp much and loose a ship each day, thats 13 years of potential gameplay stored! The problem with inflation in general: When money looses meaning, so does everything directly related to it: Economy, trading, combat rewards, crew and repair cost. And so does the gameplay directly related to those.

Expensive 1st rates could solve the problem, but ofcourse only when you wipe the existing first rate meta. E.g. assumed that 1000 total players sink 80 port battle ships each day, its simple math to set the cost so that players are not able to keep up full first rate supply with the amount of LH availiable. Another solution is to change the rank distribution that depends on XP gain, total XP and average total playtime. If you need on average 50 hours for max rank, but the average NA player plays about 300 total hours, about 85% would play on max rank at any time. Change it back to 100 hours and it becomes 65%. No need for artificial limitations.

Mods as consumption goods would add more to economy and it wouldnt require much programming work. But i I dont really care how these boni get on the ship, if just some major balancing work would be done. Think about what mods currently do. Depending on my ship purpose i dont have to make any decisions about my mods. They only make ships in general more powerful. This adds nothing in terms of additional gameplay to the game. OW combat ships are always the same, so are PB ships and boarding ships. Currently mods are only an annoying necessity needed to not sail with major disadvantages. "The best" mod setup is not allowed to exist to make this an interesting feature. E.g. i would remove boarding mods completely that encorage people to skip the combat part. A boarding ship should never be a pure boarding ship, it should be trimmed for killing the enemy crew and raking, but still capably of doing anything else. Change boarding mods to improve manouverability, acceleration rates, use of grape shot, tacking ability, etc. Then they are not boarding specific, providing more options for all type of ships. Instead of always the same very specific ships we could have more diversity inbetween, that should be the goal. If you can use your personal allround ship for multiple purposes you also dont need multiple specific ships when boni become permanent, saving time/gold without limiting gameplay options. Sorry for offtopic.

In theory your proposal would work if costs dont differ. But refusing realism and removing everything exiting about shipbuilding, only for a psychologically reason that might not mean something at all?! Warcraft has no economy btw. I dont get your point against 1 dura. Again, there is no cost/effort difference (per dura) between 1 and 10 dura if set up correctly. Realism has nothing to do with hardcore here. We could paint the sea yellow for the same reasoning. Why should hulks i cannot use make me stay in the game in case i get wiped?! This is far-fetched and has nothing to do with durabilities. In case a nation gets wiped there needs to be a general solution. Even free ships wouldnt keep people in the nation in a situation like this, that in general is probably very unlikely to happen after we got alliances.

Guys, youre ignoring the same points again and again. One dura can only work/be fun, when you change the mod system and economy with it. Thats what we are talking about. Just randomly changing duras wont work, thats what your testing proofed. If you want to help, tell us why one dura shouldnt work against this background. Your post... basically contains nothing. One dura would on one hand push your income, you could sell captured ships on the market/use them. On the other hand ships become cheaper for you. 2-5 times more ships on the market plus captured ships would mean much more competition. Players need to buy ships more often means more player interaction, what in general makes this game fun. Thats exactly how it should be, and its "just" a matter of general balancing no matter how many duras we have. Keep in mind that since day one nobody really cared about crafting, adjusted or finetuned something. And rng made half of the ships produced trash, this wont happen anymore. Who shall define the prices? Fixed npc prices would be a no go for a free market.