Rum Consumption Will Fix More Than You Think

[Wesreidau]

 

Clickbait title is clickbait. Read this and marvel at the game design value of consumer capitalism.

Anyone play Puzzle Pirates? Rum was the fuel that made ships go. Without rum, crew performed all duties worse and your speed suffered. Rum was accordingly valuable, always being traded, producing commerce for sugar cane, soaking up labor hours, and generating reliable low-investment activity for merchants. In fact, my most memorable experience was a hold full of sugar and single-handedly fighting off a marauding player. I made a good profit as a lowly sloop skipper. But if your ship ran out of rum, it still sailed. You'd notice everything being just plain worse.

Of course, nobody likes a speed penalty. Everyone likes a speed BONUS. Wow, I get 5% or 10% better open world speed if I have rum in my hold? Wow! My ship normaly does 18 knots, but now it does 20 knots! This will be great!

How do we balance that? Simple.

 

We debuff all ship open-world speeds by what rum adds. Rum does nothing to affect the top speed of a ship, 

because we made all ships just a bit slower, and call normal speed rum bonus speed. Just like the Rested XP bonus in Warcraft.

Buwahahahahahaha!!! 

So we put a dozen rum units in our warships and set out. Rum is consumed based on crew size, so a big SOL will guzzle rum while the little sloop won't need hardly any at all. But since the bonus is slight, we can get by without it, and in a battle, won't suffer for not having it. Rum gets consumed, therefore, by the competitive crowd, by people with extra money, by the casual who runs a tight ship, by the newbie who's figured out the game. But if you forgot it, you're not too penalized. Just enough to lose an even race with someone who's paying for rum.

So... why?

With the latest patch, the sugar trade has collapsed. This will produce a demand for sugar, its shipping, its smuggling, and the barrels that hold rum will be produced as well. And that's iron, oak, tar... a lot of activity across the whole economy. Shipping rum to distant ports to sell on contract will be the equivalent of opening a gas station. Where can I get rum? Check the trade tool. Where could I sell rum? All the distant posts of the empire. Supplies of rum will be crucial for any PvP expedition, influencing alliances and international trade. The Red team has sugar, the Yellow team has none, they ally, Red players ship sugar to Yellow, Blue players intercept sugar merchants, so on. Money exchanges hands between players and alliances and the sugar ships pulling into Yellow harbors load up their holds to return something Red needs.

It also serves an important economic function in an MMO: a money sink.

Producing sugar costs gold and labor hours. Producing oak costs gold and labor hours. Producing tar costs gold and labor hours. Producing iron costs gold and labor hours. Producing coal costs gold and labor hours. Producing a barrel of rum removes a lot of gold from the game's economy.

With gold coming in from selling to NPCs (new money) and all the various gold rewards, we also need a way to destroy gold at the other end of the economy, pushing it out and keeping the money supply tight. Rum consumption serves this valuable purpose. While it produces a lot of exchange between players, actions that are gold supply neutral, it also destroys gold as producing resources from labor hours destroys gold.

And with the new delivery contracts creating millions of gold out of NPC interaction, it is vital gold be destroyed or we will face runaway inflation or bored end-game players sitting on mountains of cash.

Any level 1 player can start up the game for the first time, hear there's money to be made in producing rum, and start contributing to the rum barrels that high-end players have to consume in their ships of the line. This pumps money from rich end-game players to new and struggling players, destroying some of it.

I cannot explain how crucial it is that the level 1 player can feel useful in the economic system of his team.

It is granted that current sugar production ports are possibly too scarce for the purposes of international balance. One or two additional sugar production ports could be opened. Sugar ports could also be deliberately placed far from any national capital; we do not want another Carlisle-KPR hop.

Edited November 15, 2016 by Wesreidau

[Edward Canaday]

My only genuine concern with this concept is that rum is also used in Medkits.  This would potentially make it unreasonable for a newer (or habitually poor) player to carry medkits on his ship.  I know with doctor perk that medkits are less critically needed, but they can be a vital part of a player's ability to stay on the ocean longer.  I always hated it when I had to return to port because I didn't have any way to replenish lost crew.  

 

The money sink concept I like, I just don't know if rum is the way to go when it's already used in a variety of ways.

[Wesreidau]

Medkits are funny. They remain a bargain over crew hiring until you exceed 500 gold per crew replaced. Even paying a premium over 500 crew, you still enjoy the luxury of restoring crew while at sea, rather important to big ships of the line. Even with sugar trading at 750 per unit to an AI, we were seeing medkits crafted and sold in KPR to the tune of 333 gold per crew replaced. It would take quite a lot of sugar demand to make medkits too expensive for common consumption. Now, the large medkits we see the AI sell for 5,000 gold each aren't even tied to market prices (or market sanity).

We really do need a money sink, though, and this will also increase operating costs for high-crew ships. If you want to go 20 knots instead of 18, that is.

[Wesreidau]

That's not an argument against it, Hodo, and may as well be "ships don't operate on drinking water". Ships operate on crew. The last thing you want is a hung over, lazy, disloyal, mutinous crew of alcoholics without a drop to drink who's slacking around nursing hangovers and doing lousy work on the sails because they loathe their commanding officer. Or a crew dying of dehydration, starvation, scurvy and disease.

I'll also remind you guys that everything is a tradeoff and if we sacrifice that tiny bit of realism that not having a grog ration wouldn't actually influence how tight a sailor could haul a line, we gain everything in the original post. Including that bit of realism that ships had to be provisioned, without making it a matter of starvation. I mean, its not realistic that my 1st rate isn't full of tons of salt pork, biscuit, rum, fresh water, etc; that I'm not setting the crew's rations based on my remaining stores, that I'm not deciding to flog insubordination, that I'm not facing desertion by the alcoholics every time my teetotaling ship weighs anchor near a free town.

Nor is it realistic that I'm able to continue playing after a ship is sunk. But realism is at the pleasure of game design. This is a touch more realistic than not having any provisioning at all, yet creates a lot of player content in the form of supplying fleets and generating commerce.

[Wesreidau]

Well, sure. So you're not against anything I'm proposing at all, you just want a different name.

[Wesreidau]

Nothing like a lack of disagreement to bury a good idea in a suggestion form.

[Sea Archer]

I would prefer to have rum and provisions consumption for all crew above the free crew limit. This would let poor captains sail their frigates for free, while the ones who sail SoLs may pay for their big crews.

[Wesreidau]

Those are exactly the classes of ship that need that extra speed boost and would pay a premium for them. I'd have everyone pay for their rum, but low crew capacities simply drink less rum.