I was pretty enthusiastic about Albion Online for various reasons: open world PvP, free market, player built structures affecting everyone. Of course the game is in beta, so bugs and unbalanced things are expected. But systemic broken things are not. And I've just found one:
So I found a way to make $125/month worth of in-game currency with a literal single click. Can it be worse? Sure can, it's $125/month per alt. Because every subscribed alt gets his daily focus. You can subscribe alts with 2500 gold ($12) by the way and of course you can get this gold from other players, so running a 100-alt farm is free.
Having a fundamental system broken 3 months before release is pretty bad. The whole crafting skill tree revolves around focus, every perk increases the amount of actions you can perform before you're out of focus. Can it be worse than having to redesign everything so late? Sure can! When the dev answers to the report: "Should be corrected by market forces. Among other factors, there is not an infinite market for [the item I created]."
This was an "I don't even" class answer. At first, for the market to correct anything, it needs rational actors. Games are filled with M&S and socials who just want to have fun and won't use their focus at all or use it on island crops. I've tried it just to see if I'm missing something. No, I don't. They use the focus to get a few 0.8K seeds back. So they won't use the focus on Slate crafting.
Secondly, even if there are enough rational actors (or just a few guys with hundreds of alts), they generate Slate materials demand and Slate supply, indeed driving the prices to the point where Slate crafting doesn't worth it - with 45% material return. But then what will happen with ordinary Joe who wants to craft with 0% material return? He'll be royally screwed, losing nearly half of his investment every time he presses craft. As rational actors move to various markets, the equilibrium will be reached: only open World building, focus-using crafting will be any profitable. Casuals trying their luck with crafting? No-no.
Thirdly, as alts proliferate, they drive the gold prices up. Every new alt needs to buy 2500 gold per month to keep operating. With this focus madness, the price will soon be over 1000 silver/gold, meaning that a grinder needs to farm 2.5M silver per month or 625K per week. There is a silver looted toplist, showing that the top 600 (out of 30K made that on last week). They will be so happy to see that their grinding hours are worth less than the price of a coffee and will be absolutely sure that this is because of some evil cashgrab by the devs.
Which leads us to the saddest point: the devs aren't looking cashgrabbing. The P2W in the game is the lowest possible: you can trade gold for silver with other players. There is no cash shop. There are barely any cosmetics (no $50 stripper outfit). They aren't even making a killing on alts, as they allow 3 character per account and you can start a new account for $30 with no further payment. They could demand $ for every alt creation if they had a devious plan to make 100+ alts mandatory for competitive players (you can literally play 100 alts for focus, as the focus bank fills in 3 days and you can log in, craft and log off in less than 5 minutes, so you can rotate 100 alts with 2-3 hours per day "playtime").
Please don't say something stupid like "but every alt you subscribe is paid by someone". Nothing stop devs to buy player gold for spawned silver. If their plan would be to drive gold prices so high that only the top 5% grinder can play for free and everyone else must buy gold for consumables, they could do it without making the alt-crafters rich. They could just spawn a character with a zillion silver and start buying gold for 1000 silver each, cutting the middle man who will RMT the alted silver away creating competition for the legit gold shop.
I'm afraid they are so bold and oblivious, because during beta, the silver prices didn't explode. But that's because it's beta and no one will actually run a 100 alts farm just to lose the income to a patch+server wipe. They test it with one alt, make a note and move to the next thing to test. When the game is released and no more server wipes are possible, then they'll go crazy.
I'm nothing sort of devastated. I've found a really great game with non-cashgrabbing devs, I see that the market will explode in a month after release and the devs don't do anything, because "the market will correct it". Shall I spend $1000 to buy 33 accounts for an unreleased game and run 100 alts just to prove them wrong?! I'm not a saint! But if they release like this, the "hype" will be: horrible cashgrab MMO, you can only progress by paying, as crafting is broken as everything you craft cost less than materials and gathering is broken because there are plenty of materials (45% material back means +81% more items and you must craft everything twice, so there will be 3x more end products from the same amount of materials than should be) and grinding is a joke (grind 50 hours to save $15).
I could really use some advice here.
So I found a way to make $125/month worth of in-game currency with a literal single click. Can it be worse? Sure can, it's $125/month per alt. Because every subscribed alt gets his daily focus. You can subscribe alts with 2500 gold ($12) by the way and of course you can get this gold from other players, so running a 100-alt farm is free.
Having a fundamental system broken 3 months before release is pretty bad. The whole crafting skill tree revolves around focus, every perk increases the amount of actions you can perform before you're out of focus. Can it be worse than having to redesign everything so late? Sure can! When the dev answers to the report: "Should be corrected by market forces. Among other factors, there is not an infinite market for [the item I created]."
This was an "I don't even" class answer. At first, for the market to correct anything, it needs rational actors. Games are filled with M&S and socials who just want to have fun and won't use their focus at all or use it on island crops. I've tried it just to see if I'm missing something. No, I don't. They use the focus to get a few 0.8K seeds back. So they won't use the focus on Slate crafting.
Secondly, even if there are enough rational actors (or just a few guys with hundreds of alts), they generate Slate materials demand and Slate supply, indeed driving the prices to the point where Slate crafting doesn't worth it - with 45% material return. But then what will happen with ordinary Joe who wants to craft with 0% material return? He'll be royally screwed, losing nearly half of his investment every time he presses craft. As rational actors move to various markets, the equilibrium will be reached: only open World building, focus-using crafting will be any profitable. Casuals trying their luck with crafting? No-no.
Thirdly, as alts proliferate, they drive the gold prices up. Every new alt needs to buy 2500 gold per month to keep operating. With this focus madness, the price will soon be over 1000 silver/gold, meaning that a grinder needs to farm 2.5M silver per month or 625K per week. There is a silver looted toplist, showing that the top 600 (out of 30K made that on last week). They will be so happy to see that their grinding hours are worth less than the price of a coffee and will be absolutely sure that this is because of some evil cashgrab by the devs.
Which leads us to the saddest point: the devs aren't looking cashgrabbing. The P2W in the game is the lowest possible: you can trade gold for silver with other players. There is no cash shop. There are barely any cosmetics (no $50 stripper outfit). They aren't even making a killing on alts, as they allow 3 character per account and you can start a new account for $30 with no further payment. They could demand $ for every alt creation if they had a devious plan to make 100+ alts mandatory for competitive players (you can literally play 100 alts for focus, as the focus bank fills in 3 days and you can log in, craft and log off in less than 5 minutes, so you can rotate 100 alts with 2-3 hours per day "playtime").
Please don't say something stupid like "but every alt you subscribe is paid by someone". Nothing stop devs to buy player gold for spawned silver. If their plan would be to drive gold prices so high that only the top 5% grinder can play for free and everyone else must buy gold for consumables, they could do it without making the alt-crafters rich. They could just spawn a character with a zillion silver and start buying gold for 1000 silver each, cutting the middle man who will RMT the alted silver away creating competition for the legit gold shop.
I'm afraid they are so bold and oblivious, because during beta, the silver prices didn't explode. But that's because it's beta and no one will actually run a 100 alts farm just to lose the income to a patch+server wipe. They test it with one alt, make a note and move to the next thing to test. When the game is released and no more server wipes are possible, then they'll go crazy.
I'm nothing sort of devastated. I've found a really great game with non-cashgrabbing devs, I see that the market will explode in a month after release and the devs don't do anything, because "the market will correct it". Shall I spend $1000 to buy 33 accounts for an unreleased game and run 100 alts just to prove them wrong?! I'm not a saint! But if they release like this, the "hype" will be: horrible cashgrab MMO, you can only progress by paying, as crafting is broken as everything you craft cost less than materials and gathering is broken because there are plenty of materials (45% material back means +81% more items and you must craft everything twice, so there will be 3x more end products from the same amount of materials than should be) and grinding is a joke (grind 50 hours to save $15).
I could really use some advice here.
16 comments:
"I'd like to stress that performing the action needs no player skill or extensive character training. Anyone can check that mark and get his 155K silver every day, or 4.7M per month."
Anyone? Refining tier 6 stone blocks takes some character training, enough so that probably less than 0.1% of Albion online characters currently have that skill. You are exaggerating the problem; which will indeed be corrected by market forces. 1000 silver/gold a month after the end of beta? That figure sounds likely, but that's not the market exploding. That's just a reasonable figure to expect a month after retail release. You've exposed a profitable niche, which will now probably nosedive since you shined light on it. I'm not convinced of anything else of your doomsday scenario, or, to put it another way, I think that most of your doomsday scenario is likely, but not that bad. Much crafting being negative profit? That happens in most MMOs, even for many products in EVE. AO's crafting system gives you xp for crafting, which EVE's system doesn't, so of course much crafting will be negative profit in AO. That's normal for MMOs, it's not a disaster. It's not great, but it's not unusual. I'm not going to address the rest of your post because it all goes about the same.
What would you have me say? send your post to the devs see if being indifferent to you is actually worse than hazing you?
"ignore him, things will fix themselves"
"he is funny" (but seriously can he do that?)
Which would you prefer? to late you made your choice
@Trego: refining T6 stones can be done by a one day old alt. I mean literally after I found this I sent my alt to refine T5 stones (which is one hour from start) and by doing so, she got the skill. Not even used LP, just by processing Granite she got it.
If we accept that crafting is negative profit, why bother "fixing" it by focus that makes everything worse.
1000 silver/gold means that PvE - except the absolute nolife, top tier PvE - will be a joke. Random guys logs in, does an expedition, some open World dungeon and made $0.1 over an hour. He will sure stay!
I have not a single minute in Albion (or EvE), but this being only available in an open pvp zone, is this also not a factor? Wormholes in EvE and certain areas offer richer return then others, but you need a group to protect you to gain that advantage. So its going to take the effort of a guild to profit from your little goldmine - this dilutes the profit even more. As well as the obvious market factors the dev mentioned.
Nope, it's safe city crafting: buy materials from marketplace, go to forge, press button, sell products. Can be done on 1 day old alt.
If hundreds of alts are trying to level by refining stones, then refining stones will be done at a large cost, which will be wasted when the market for slate blocks crashes due to hundreds of slate-producing alts. Let's see how much profit there is from refining slate blocks in 3-4 days, eh?
"If we accept that crafting is negative profit, why bother "fixing" it by focus that makes everything worse."
Why do you assume that the purpose of focus is to "fix" crafting? It seems clear to me that the purpose of focus is to reward premium players with 1000 focus per day.
"Random guys logs in, does an expedition, some open World dungeon and made $0.1 over an hour. He will sure stay!"
90% of the profit from doing open world dungeon is from essences/souls/artifact pieces, not from straight silver drops. expeditions aren't worth doing. It's still like 1$ an hour, but you're also getting the fame, and we're still very early in the beta, so prices will keep changing on items/essences and people will move to higher level dungeons. I don't know if people will stay or not, but I'm guessing that the average player of AO is thinking more about whether they're making enough from pve to fund their pvp, and less about the real world value of their farming.
You are missing the point that most people don't play games to make real world money so the rate they do earn it doesn't matter to them.
@Trego: if you force your way to T7 refining by buying stones and refining at loss, sure, you'll lose a lot. But if you only level slowly, using your daily focus, you make profit. I can process T7 stones without even spending a single LP, just by refining T6 with focus.
Dev wrote https://forum.albiononline.com/index.php/Thread/49690-Game-breaking-inbalance-156K-day-income-from-crafting-focus/?postID=495564#post495564
"Focus points make sure that a crafter can turn a profit in the first place. If there was no focus, a single crafter, with maxed out skills, could craft/refine an unlimited amount of items in such a way that he would always outcompete everybody else. Focus is our way to stop that, it essentially is a soft cap on how much you can craft with maximum efficiency. Focus makes sure that less skilled crafters and refiners have a role to play in the markets."
I believe him, as if the purpose would be to reward premium players, they would just give a flat +10% material back for all crafting. If the purpose would be to make people buy alts, they would just cut the login-logoff and sell "focus tonics" in the item shop.
"making enough from pve to fund their pvp, and less about the real world value of their farming" THEY ARE THE SAME THING! If your PvE has low real world value, then other players who throw $10 on the problem can outcompete you. If other players need to throw $1000 to outcompete your farming, you have nothing to fear, as most players won't do that.
Not sure what you are actually saying, so a few questions for clarification.
I appreciate that this particular set of questions might appear trollish. In this instance, however, this really can't be helped.
So...
Are you saying that a goblin being able to exploit the system to earn more than M&S is somehow wrong?
Or are you saying that goblin exploitation is not the way to correct the system but is actually a way to destroy it?
Maybe this system is ought to be destroyed?
Or are you saying you don't want the system corrected (and therefore destroyed) and just want it to stay a fairy tale blissful beta where noone is really playing seriously?
"As rational actors move to various markets, the equilibrium will be reached: only open World building, focus-using crafting will be any profitable. Casuals trying their luck with crafting? No-no."
I don't get that, if the price is at equilibrium, casuals will make the same ~1/30 of 2500 gold in silver than alts would, no? Except focus is "free" so I expect the price will be much lower eventually.
Sure, this will be stupidly profitable at launch, but so will watering alts. I don't see how that's a systemic problem.
@maxim:
- there is no "goblinish" move here. No more understanding the system or expert skill is needed that log in alt, buy materials, press button, sell materials. This is a broken feature.
- what doesn't kill you make you stronger, hence goblin exploitation corrects the system. This problem allows so big exploitation that the system will collapse. Remember that it will be a newly released game with no invested playerbase. Casual will just say "OMG what I farmed in a week is worth less than $5 what a cashgrab game" and quits. They can fix it after, the game will have so negative hype that it won't recover.
- if the devs would be bent on cashgrab and run, they would grab the cash themselves instead of letting multiboxers do it. They could just sell the silver in an item shop. They could sell crafting focus in the item shop. They could sell alt slots in the item shop. They don't do either.
- I suggested them a solution, so I want it fixed.
@Hanura: casuals won't know about this. They blow their focus on watering carrots and complain how op is that (by the way, even that pays for an account).
"If there was no focus, a single crafter, with maxed out skills, could craft/refine an unlimited amount of items in such a way that he would always outcompete everybody else."
I'm all for systems that have diminishing returns to stop 24/7 crafting, but there is a massive caveat... it has to be really, really hard for a single individual to set up an alt farm. I think the devs have the "RP Goggles" on here, where they can't wrap their head around someone running an alt farm and utterly abusing their "First one is free" system.
Blizzard did the same thing in WoD, with the garrison resources. Instead of making the Garrison account wide, which would have been the sensible move, they set themselves up for people having 12 alts and just farming the Garrisons all day.
An in game "free market economy" is a dandy thing, but it cannot be laissez faire, it has to be controlled by an iron fist. As invisible an iron fist as possible, but the fist needs to be there.
@smokeman: But the devs for Albion have made the Garrison account wide, so there's no problem here, right? (Every character in Albion has to pay for premium separately, so in a comparison to WoW, every character in Albion is effectively its own account).
@gevlon: "If the purpose would be to make people buy alts, they would just cut the login-logoff and sell "focus tonics" in the item shop."
People react really badly to focus tonics. That would raise cries of "pay2win!". So we have an impasse here. I'm sticking to my position that they are doing this intentionally to encourage people to buy alts. Remember that they had a policy against multi-accounting, which would have prevented people from having more than 1 main + 2 alts legally, and changed that policy to allow multi-accounting, about 18 months ago, when they realized that their beta was going run so long. (Their stated explanation was that telling one person with 3 accounts apart from 3 family members with 1 account each was too difficult, which is a reasonable explanation, but why allow your 100 account farm?)
"THEY ARE THE SAME THING! If your PvE has low real world value, then other players who throw $10 on the problem can outcompete you"
That's not how this game works. Have you tried pvp in Albion? Throwing 10$ at the problem = you get killed by a group with superior teamwork/numbers, they loot you, they now have your gear, your 10$ geared them up, not you. If you are already highly skilled at pvp, then your alliance is gearing you up to take part in the 5x5 battles which control territory, so you don't need to throw 10$, or 1000$, at the game.
@Trego: every account gets 3 alts. If they wanted to encourage buying accounts, they would demand payment per character and not per 3. They have no reason to encourage in-account alts, as I pay (and paid) nothing for my (in-account) alts.
If they allow a 2-account farm, because they really can't tell it from 2 brothers or couple, they have to allow 3. If they allow 3, they have to allow 4. Finally, banning multi-accounting just give advantage to those who can mask their alt farm (I could run 2 chars completely separately, and after a year, one of them would make a blunder and lose everything to my main. It's better to only ban what you can clearly police (input multiplexing).
Most people won't PvP, they just want to "progress". If Joe sees that his buddy Jack has better gear after $10, he gets mad and quit.
- I suggested them a solution, so I want it fixed.
advice will fall on deaf ears. like "wisdom" or "the right thing to do" usually does.
I wouldn't put 1000 bucks on the line just to prove a point. I think what you presented in a somewhat hyped flavour is still logical and factual true.
and you don't have to wait to see this kind of design in action. these kind of "prevent somewhat" systems are everywhere and multi accounts or max charslots is always the way. want more energy in bdo for the night vendor? buy max charslots, level alts until they accumulate energy and done.
Heh, Gevlon:
"Shall I spend $1000 to buy 33 accounts for an unreleased game and run 100 alts just to prove them wrong?! I'm not a saint!"
Don't worry. Someone will do that for you! The same "Market forces" the devs think will fix everything, will in fact, "fix everything." But just in a very Machiavellian way.
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