Incidentally, yes, warriors are boring. Totems/Necromancy/Sacraments aren't even unique to their guilds, they steal them off other people. But it's your choice if you want to be one.

Hater

Pshh, mage combat is identical to druid combat, and I was a geomancer in the first weeks of the game.

But we have Tosha. It's quite hard if you go alone there. You will get honours line and nice life/mana/ego blessing for whole RL day.

It could be nice if there could be more places like this one.
And this new islands are cool too.

IRE never really had the level of complexity other muds had when it came to mobs. Part of it is because theres only so much you can do against a mob (ie point staff, cosmic fire, swing/jab, kick, punch). So it becomes rather simple, the harder you hit, the more you can tank, the better you can kill. It has very little strategic application and is pretty much a no brainer in other words boring.

This relates to things like runs, where you go on a stretch of events with an end in mind which would usually relate to a reward. Usually there would be that big bad boss at the end but we have no such thing. Mainly because we cant exactly come up with big bad bosses because with only being able to do so much to a mob all it really is, is who can bring the most people to take it out. Also, we have no viable rewards save for umm gold and more gold... actually thats inaccurate there are the blessing quests which are a little bit like runs but yeah thats like one and not exactly challenging.

Economy isnt really much here either... most of our trades are dead and the main source of income for almost everybody is hunting. If you're trying to make a living off your tradeskill then you're not making much at all. Being a merchant on Lusternia is very unfullfilling, its even discouraging because of rampant underselling.

Anyway point I was trying to make was theres not much else you can do in the realms that will give you a challenge save for pvp. In my opinion PvP here is excellent, just that theres not much else after that.

EDIT:
the first time i did tosha i did it by myself and after going 10 mins into the pit it was over. Generally you dont even call runs, runs unless you are in need of a party to do it... you know the whole part where you have your healers your tanks your off tanks etc... or you have your lines where the warriors are infront, your priests in the middle and your mages at the back... you know, where people have their designated tasks... group dynamics?

timux? wtf

I wonder if it could ever change...

So true.

Player driven economy. Don't like it, change it.

Problems being, 1) Astral needs nerfed, 2) Gorgogs need nerfed, and 3) Because people can just undercut infinitely (because, essentially, trade isn't necessary to live, although receiving the boons of other peoples' trades are), trades are dead, as Alger says. If gold from OTHER sources was lowered, trades might see a bit more life, but it's not something you can fix so well.

I would disagree, at the start some trades did very well. Herbs and Jewelry are two that come to mind, but since then those with the skills have given up on pricing scemes and as such the trade skills have died.

That's partially because of the whole pricing scheme thing, yes, but also because jewellery's cost was high INITIALLY but due to low decay times and not much need for replacements once everyone is kitted out things tend to die off. And everyone has a tradeskill, so people generally aren't going to make much money off it.

Herbs' decline is probably because it's the most common tradeskill now, I'd imagine. Everyone has it, so they're forced to undercut everyone else to make sales. People are selling yarrow at 4 FREAKING PER here. And they don't have any minimum, because they can get their "bare essentials" more easily from hunting, and "bare essentials" are minimal anyway. Especially when a lot of guilds can make their OWN food, and jewellery/clothes/armour lasts a long time.

EDIT: Keep in mind I only took like 9 months of Business & Economics and this is just speculation, BTW.

I still make quite nice money from doing enchantments every now and then, just need to find someone to provide cheap powerstones.

If I don't sell for cheap, I'm not gonna sell at all. I don't see how I can change it.
Initially, people like Val were getting tons of money for jewelry and gems only because most of people didn't have a clue how much does it cost to produce it. Those times are gone and they will never come back. (Unless, maybe, you were the only one person with certain tradeskill in the game)

It is a player driven economy and ultimately it would be up to us if we wanted to revive our gold circulation. Though in reality such things dont really work without governing bodies that will look after the economy and will regulate it with certain fiscal/monetary policies and laws. Of course such governing bodies could (should?) be emulated as well by our cities(hoping that all current bodies have an interest in it and is willing to think such things through, yes thats very unlikely). But then you have another problem... how do you stabilize an economy with an almost infinite currency injection rate, eratic comm supply/prices, monopolized trades under warring nations etc. Anyway, yes it would take a lot of time and effort, would also take some know how... but if you really think about it... thats a bit much to ask of the playerbase, a lot like asking all of us to have eco backgrounds.

i dont know if that made sense im trired... quiet

The problem is that it is only a player controlled economy to a certain point. Commodities are not player controlled, and there are no player-controlled organisations that can regulate trade affairs. There are few things I can do as a Trademaster to prevent a member of my cartel from underpricing everyone else, safe for getting him kicked out of the city/commune and enemied so he can't use whatever trade room he needs to do his craft (forge, alembic), but even then he can just go to some other city/commune and use theirs.

Common cartels don't even have proper means to communicate internally, hell I can't even find out which people are in my cartel and which are not, safe for checking every individual member of my commune.

So, as I said, even though it is player controlled to a certain extent, it's not the kind of control that lets you set up efficient pricing policies and similar. If I could lock people's trading abilities, make sure nobody sells to them... yes. But I can't. If I could make sure I have a way to communicate with novices who pick up a tradeskill without having any clue, had a channel to talk to them, helpscrolls to refer them to, projects to keep track of things, maybe I could, but, I don't, so I can't.

The problem has only one source really, Astral gives way too much gold, in a way too easy manner, without any limitations to it, because you can just keep linking for more critters.

The reason people use their tradeskills is either for themselves, or to help out a friend. Except the rare alchemist or enchanter, no one is making any gold that'd make it worth the effort. If you want gold, you go to astral for half an hour and you got 20K.

Gorgogs too.

So, this was about warriors being boring/not boring?

For me, they're definately not. Their concept rocks, they certainly do not need any kind of overhaul. All they need is:

1) some more active skills, that can be done off equilibrium, so we can create combinations with our tertiary skillset.

2) an athletics specialization, so there's more character to the different kinds of knights.

i like the off EQ idea a lot, i can ecto-insert move here, or crucify-insert move here. sounds like fun to me!

That is impossible. It's a laissez faire system, which means no one can control it. Players could try making cartels like OPEC, but the blackmarket would most likely thwart that like in other IRE games. (I never had a problem beating Oakstone's mandated price floors by simply knowing the right people.) Though a city's government could have some influence on it. Suppose that one city took all the comms it got tithed from the villages and hoarded them in a private storeroom. That would cause prices to rise a little bit. Then if they release all of it to the market then prices would drop some. But that is about the most influence they could have that I can think of.

A high currency supply really doesn't have anything to do with the low prices on everything, as I believe has been proposed here. In fact a high supply of currency causes prices to rise, not drop, thus increasing profits when measured in currency rather than real value. The only time that a flood of currency impacts an economy is when the economy is flooded with currency, but holders of currency do not get an proportional piece of the new proverbial pie. Like if I receive the new fiat bills, I have more wealth. But since you have the same amount of fiat before the flood of currency, whose value dropped as a result in the increased supply I received, you actually lost monetary value, which is reflected by my gain. So that sort of deficit spending situation has the same outcome of taxing one person and giving it to another.

But that is not really the scenerio regarding there being a flood of currency in Lusternia's economy. Suppose that the money supply was doubled by giving everyone gold coins equal to the amount they already owned. Prices for everything would double, but since everyone has twice as much money, the real prices would stay the same. This is effectively what has happened in Lusternia vs. places like Achaea where gold is harder to get. (The true measure of wealth and profit is not in gold coinsm which is why I always say our credit prices in gold are misleading since the value of gold is low in Lusternia; the gold price is higher, but the real value price is probably comperable.) Rather, the true measure of wealth and profit is in the total sum of goods and services available for consumption, which is the only reason for production and profit to begin with. If in one realm I have 200 gold and bread costs 10 gold, and in another realm I have 400 gold but bread costs 30 gold, I am actually wealthier in the 200 gold realm because I have the capacity to consume more bread than the other realm. That is also effectively what would happen if gold supplies were cut (or increased) evenly from all the sources of gold (bashing, quests, etc.). Since everyone would put the same proportional effort into acquiring gold, they would have the same proportion of the economy's total gold, and thus the same proportional wealth and purchasing power.

So since Lusternia has easier gold to get than other places, and that should raise prices, why are prices lower than other IRE games? I suspect it is due to the supply of goods being even more swelled than the supply of gold vs. other places. With more people manufacturing goods and services, thereby removing the restriction seen in other realms that rely on fixed NPC supply or on monopolistic guilds, supply of those things is higher here, causing their value to drop. Also, monopoly is much harder here, which would have the same effect of reducing supply. Oakstone-like cartels are difficult to hold together, and since villages tithe comms, it is hard for a player to go to a comm shop right when it refreshes its supply and buy up the whole supply in an attempt to corner the market; a city can simply sell its tithed supply to counter that.

I've probably rambled on too much, but economy I think is the most fascinating thing in the IRE games. I love observing it and theorizing it. So in summary, when measuring your profits, the ultimate measure is not in the sum of gold you earn, but rather the sum of goods you become able to acquire as a result of the transaction.


And yes, I've always found knights in general to be dull for me, be it MUDs or RPGs like D&D. I always like to play the shady spell caster or, at least with D&D, a monk for the kung-fu factor.