Baldur's Gate : The Sword Coast Chronicles : NWN2 Persistent World

This is amazing!

Do you think it's healthy for server economy to have a exclusive market for only traded items that are so rare that only trading item for item is worth because gold is simply useless for someone playing here and grinding for many years?

yyj wrote: ↑Tue Dec 08, 2020 3:05 pm Do you think it's healthy for server economy to have a exclusive market for only traded items that are so rare that only trading item for item is worth because gold is simply useless for someone playing here and grinding for many years?

Absolutely not, and this is something that I would love to address, but unfortunately any solution that I've been able to think of which would create a stable system where this is not the case is not viable because players would find it to be highly objectionable. The matter of the server economy is really tricky. I'll try to make an infographic over the winter to explain the difficulty.

yyj wrote: ↑Tue Dec 08, 2020 3:05 pm Do you think it's healthy for server economy to have a exclusive market for only traded items that are so rare that only trading item for item is worth because gold is simply useless for someone playing here and grinding for many years?

This is a *very* limited set of items. Bye-and-large, what is in the loot table is not even CLOSE to what is available in epic shops. Where the true 'trade' only market really comes in to play is those rare epic RIG creations that have synergistic enchantments, possibly past or present DM awards for long time plots where a given player forwarded RP for a large portion of playerbase, and of course those Grandfathered items, which to be quite honest are far less important than they were even 2-3 years ago as a quite large percentage of the players that had those items are no longer logging in.

As to server economy, I do not believe there is any way for it to become healthy again, at least not in a way that would be palatable by the player base. The reason gold is useless is because whatever a long time player wants on whatever new PC they create can just be muled/gifted/whatever from other characters. No items ever found, purchased or traded for ever leaves the economy while gold constantly pours in, so of course over more than a decade the economy gets relatively shot.

chad878262 wrote: ↑Tue Dec 08, 2020 3:15 pmAs to server economy, I do not believe there is any way for it to become healthy again, at least not in a way that would be palatable by the player base. The reason gold is useless is because whatever a long time player wants on whatever new PC they create can just be muled/gifted/whatever from other characters. No items ever found, purchased or traded for ever leaves the economy while gold constantly pours in, so of course over more than a decade the economy gets relatively shot.

I believe this could be fixed with decent gold sinks. Perhaps not easily, but it's doable. Over the years player housing has been a hotly requested topic, and thus far it has been shut down. With the upcoming server split, which will put less strain on the entirety of the server at large, it might be time to revisit that option. Another option is to disallow mule characters, and instead have item storages, which in turn are paid for based on a percentage of the value of the stored items.

Anyway. That was slightly off-topic.

I'll test the White Dragon again, and other things as well, when the next update hits.

zhazz wrote: ↑Tue Dec 08, 2020 3:25 pm

chad878262 wrote: ↑Tue Dec 08, 2020 3:15 pmAs to server economy, I do not believe there is any way for it to become healthy again, at least not in a way that would be palatable by the player base. The reason gold is useless is because whatever a long time player wants on whatever new PC they create can just be muled/gifted/whatever from other characters. No items ever found, purchased or traded for ever leaves the economy while gold constantly pours in, so of course over more than a decade the economy gets relatively shot.

I believe this could be fixed with decent gold sinks. Perhaps not easily, but it's doable. Over the years player housing has been a hotly requested topic, and thus far it has been shut down. With the upcoming server split, which will put less strain on the entirety of the server at large, it might be time to revisit that option. Another option is to disallow mule characters, and instead have item storages, which in turn are paid for based on a percentage of the value of the stored items.

Anyway. That was slightly off-topic.

I'll test the White Dragon again, and other things as well, when the next update hits.

I'm personally not against item sinks. I've proposed it previously - allowing players to spend items/their entire inventory to participate in events they otherwise would be barred from.

Hoihe wrote: ↑Tue Dec 08, 2020 3:33 pm I'm personally not against item sinks. I've proposed it previously - allowing players to spend items/their entire inventory to participate in events they otherwise would be barred from.

Voluntary item loss to participate in events would either not balance the economy or would be so exorbitantly expensive as to make certain events exclusive to very wealthy players. The amount of item loss required to maintain a stable economy would mean that few PCs would have a set of +4 gear and not all would have a set of +3 gear. "Item sinks" was a catchall that included all ways to lose items and is not necessarily analogous to the gold sinks we have in our economy at present.

Rest assured, nearly everyone would be very, very unhappy with the measures that would create a stable economy in the long-term.

2020/12/08—

Graypeaks (CR 27) with PC Lvl 30 Surface Aasimar (solo) — 2nd run after Loot Rebalance

Chest:
54 gp
Potion of Ghostly Visage

Chest:
49 gp
Scroll of Slay Living
Alexandrite gem

Chest Outside Beholder Cave:
34 gp
Gold Necklace

Beholder Cave Chest:
49 gp
Potion of Bear’s Endurance Greater
Potion of Barksin

Yellow Named Fire Giant drop:
BURNING STICK!!! Haha funny devs.

Chest (got a crunch alert!):
Broken Item
36 gp
Potions of Bears Endurance
Grenade: Alchemists fire

---

Fire Giant General’s Cave—

Fire Giant General:
Quarterstaff Paladin 0 Level bonus spell; Fortitude -2
Shurikens +1
Scroll of Camouflage
5000gp

Chest:
Rapier +1
34 gp

Chest:
56 gp
Silver Necklace

Chest (got a crunch alert!)
Broken Item
54 gp
Crossbow, Light: EB +1, Mighty +3, Hide +1

Chest:
1547 gp

---

Stone Giants’ Chest:
46 gp
Garnet

Chest (got a crunch alert):
240 gp

Fire Giant drop (I know this doesn’t count, but…):
Clothes: CHA +1; Spell Immunity: Harm


The 2nd run was WORSE than my 1st run (in spoiler). And I am honest here, not omitting anything or skewing numbers.

I didn't log the items I was getting but I was keeping track of how much coins was accumulating in my bag.

Earlier me and another friend did a run consisting of the following..

Grey Peaks - Target Fire Giant and Balor
next was..
Frostking, lich, and lizard caves.

Total coins made from drops loots chests selling of recent finds etc..
little short of 30k gold.
Attempted to recharge 3 wands at 20% . All three broke.
Recharged two wands there after. Cost 22k+ and another 16k spent = give or take 38k .

The loot in plain general is not worth the run, even with a rare item drop of something that feels like 000000.0001% chance of it even droppin. This is just me ..but before I would do one epic loot run in a 4 hour period consisting of Serpent temple +Wyvern lair, Frost King, Grey peaks, and ziggurat. And that was not often. I barely get around to doing it once a day.

If I needed quick coins just to help supply my consumables, I would go to Greenest, Island and crab cave, Nashkel mines and Reaching woods. With Nashkel minds being added ONLY if I had the time or was even motivated to do it. But all in all I was fine, I wasn't getting dirt rich. Im a simple casual player. Before I made enough coins to balance my spending.

NOW im working harder and gaining so little and once I replenish consumables, etc I see a loss instead of a gain. Even before they even touched the loot system recently , players had days where they complaint of getting trash for loot. But atleast somethings helped you break even. Now its just makes me rather chill and wait for quests every week. People talking about new epic dungeons but nope not interested if loots system like this. I been avoiding serpent temple cause the mobs basically SPAM dispell there. Every time I get dispelled I cringe knowing" damn coins just got wasted!"

Next time if i DO go on a loot run I will make sure to log the items . However I doubt I need too, every player I have spoken with all say the same thing when asked hows their looting .. "Trash or its Sucks"

I still manage to make some profit but it's not guaranteed a run will be profitable at all. I just find so much trash loot, like unenhanced items and semi-cursed items like +2 hide -1 str. None of it really sells very well. And poison... So much poison xD

To put it kindly. The loot re-balancing program needs some work! It's just not worth the time and effort as it is. I would suggest doing away with most of the junk and increasing the gold a lot. I know there are those out there that would miss stopping in the middle of an exploring expedition and running/teleporting back to a merchant just to unload that 400gp full plate. Or you could just do what most people are doing and leave it on the ground. When you don't have much time and just want to do a quick loot run, it's just not worth it!

Recharging wands after one run isn't a fair comparison unless you are using 49 charges of your wands.... Even if you use 3 charges of each wand per "run" that is 15 runs at 30k each or 450K that it cost you 38K in consumables.

jclay65 wrote: ↑Sun Dec 13, 2020 2:31 pm To put it kindly. The loot re-balancing program needs some work! It's just not worth the time and effort as it is. I would suggest doing away with most of the junk and increasing the gold a lot. I know there are those out there that would miss stopping in the middle of an exploring expedition and running/teleporting back to a merchant just to unload that 400gp full plate. Or you could just do what most people are doing and leave it on the ground. When you don't have much time and just want to do a quick loot run, it's just not worth it!

I am going through the loot table and redoing it in to a spreadsheet which will hopefully allow the dev team to do a more thorough rework. However, that is a much more time consuming task so no ETA yet.

So, after about a week of running epic areas/dungeons(somewhere in the '25-30 of them' range). The vast majority of my time was spent around the yeti area, lizard caves, frost giant keep, and Speartop(minus the dragon cave), with a few side trips to Durlags basement, Reaching woods, Crystal caves, Nashkel mines, and Serpent temple. As far as decent/auction-able items found: 1 composite shortbow +4, a +4 club, a few items with mid-level spell slots, and some +4 spot gloves(kept those ).

After all was said and done I've netted about 80,000 to 90,000 gp. FWIW, I think the only reason I even managed to accumulate this amount was due to a lack of consumables usage... maybe 2 heal potions, a handful of lesser restore potions, and nick-knacks that I found along the way, like heal kits, and I only managed to die twice.

Thoughts/observations:

- Loot drops from bosses were... pretty much consistently horrific (I just ran the FGK for the 5th time, he dropped +6hp chainmail, and boots with purple light, and his chests had about 79gp total, a fire agate, and mind fog + lesser dispel scrolls).
- The containers up on Speartop generated the best treasure.
- Nashkel mines and lizard caves were easily the most disappointing.
- Loot drops from monsters(when they dropped things) that weren't bosses were, surprisingly enough, sometimes better than the vast majority of containers I opened.
- Running the same 9 to 10 areas became stale pretty fast, lack of dungeon/area variety(in the epics at least) does not inspire me to do this on a regular basis.
- I'm thankful that I'm not trying to save up for any epic vendor gear on the character that I played.

So, yeah, end result: 1 week of looting 25 - 30 epic areas = 80 to 90k.

Just for comparisons sake, and this is not to say the old system didn't need a tune up, I estimate that I could run only the orc, gnoll, and troll caves in an hour and a bit(if I walked), find twice as many items, and net about 30,000+ gp after selling. Admittedly, this was a lot of earning potential for 1 or 2 hours play time. But, even if I decided to stretch my mid-level dungeon runs over the span of two or 3 days, at least this way... and here is the kicker... it allowed me to go at my own pace, and potentially left me more time to go and do other things, like explore, or even find RP (me... find RP... hahah, hilarious, I know).

Also for comparisons sake, I've been taking a different level 30 character to scour non-locked containers in the gibberling caves and Uldoons, and each time come away with more items/gold than when I am running two epic areas(between 8 - 10k after selling).

All things considered, I'm still waiting to see an upside to these changes. As previously stated, my loot-luck is historically terrible, but the sheer amount of time investment in loot running that is required to find something worthwhile, or even just to find items/gold as a means of selling/saving up for quality vendor items seems really daunting.

chad878262 wrote: ↑Sun Dec 13, 2020 3:13 pm Recharging wands after one run isn't a fair comparison unless you are using 49 charges of your wands.... Even if you use 3 charges of each wand per "run" that is 15 runs at 30k each or 450K that it cost you 38K in consumables.

Even still, I decided to recharge 1 wand during my week-long stint, at 12,000gp it sure felt like a bitter pill to swallow when I came away from three - four epic dungeons and didn't make that much.

I merely just wanted to share what I did from A-Z and how I felt afterwards. Correct however that the part about the wands is not a merit of claim.

However keep in mind I had to recharge the wand and when I did the price for it plus potions, scrolls, other magic devices, takes me to a negative. From what I made in that series of looting. Had I not needed to recharge a wand we looking only at about an 8k profit total.

That does not even amount to the effort and time honestly. I rather strong arm or blackmail someone it will have more fun in it. Please note I have no expertise regarding mechanics of this topic. Im just saying simply as a player who looks forward to logging in and catching some nice to awesome rp and spend a little time looting just to make sure I have enough ammos and potions and what not for the day. I am no longer feeling that I can only spend a little time looting. I fell I must beastmode every possible epic instance within ever reset to make a decent enough profits. That will lead to mindless looting and grinding. And quickly bring forth boredom. I have played numerous mmos, and im sure others can agree with me. When changing loot systems, its a very sensitive matter. In a mmo you have your merchants, you have your cashers and you have your farmers. (Glad BG don't have cashers.) Merchants need the farmers to bring product, farmers need the merchant to buy the product. Tippin that scale to one side causes problems.