Felicia's personal gold count sits at 380,000 sovereigns, and she's also fully stocked with equipment, enchantments, consumables, crafting materials, and even some luxury items. I think that's probably a startling amount of money for a fairly new character like Felicia, but I've been bashing a lot for a little over a month now. Over a month! After all of that constant bashing, I can afford the beginnings of my aethermanse and have a 30,000 gold "float" left over. (Granted, I'm also making money more efficiently now than I was when I started.) Felicia has a lot of money for a very old-fashioned reason: hard work.

380,000 sovereigns isn't what I would consider a "large stockpile" by any stretch of the imagination. The most important stuff in Lusternia — rare and powerful beasts, aetherships, trans skills, clans, cartels, and artifacts, just to name a few — are enormously expensive. We're talking about hundreds of thousands of sovereigns for the cheapest of these items, and many millions for the most expensive items. Those items form the real economy of this game, and credits are the true currency. Gold and sundry items like socks and tinderboxes are sprinklings of flavor, mere plankton compared to the whale that is stuff that really matters, in the ocean that is Lusternia.

That's why I resent the little sundry items becoming at least 50% more expensive all of a sudden. I donate substantial quantities of real money on occasion (I'm a save-until-the-sale-and-splurge type), but I also want to earn some of that stuff in-game. Leaching away at my ability to stockpile gold for stuff that really matters by making sundry items more expensive is incredibly annoying to me, because it takes long enough to grind out the gold for those items as-is.

A pipe rune costs the equivalent of 350,000 gold. A pipe rune! Lessons cost over 1,100 gold each! All I'm saying is, hundreds of thousands of gold really should be the norm, given the economic baseline we're dealing with here. That only 100 people in the entire game have more than 100,000 gold is actually shocking to me personally.

As you gain levels and might and generally move up in the world, the things you set your sights on move from cheap, like herbs, enchantments, and armour, to expensive, like credits for lessons and artifacts, a manse, a throne, and so on. This is how it's gone for me, anyway, and I assume I'm fairly typical. I've gone from carrying around a few thousand gold as I save up for what I want, to carrying around tens of thousands as I save up. So I'm not sure about this method of gauging gold saturation.

100k gold isn't really a lot of gold, million is starting to approach a lot. I can sit down for 1-3 hours and make 100k gold bashing prime while sharing half the area with someone else, but I'm a higher level and know approximately when the thing I killed first is going to respawn so I can reach it about when the first one pops up to start over.

-As a newbie bashing newton I can make between 20-40k gold just bashing the lower tier of gnomes/finks, then for the next 20-30 levels the gold is from pilgrims/scholars/bards and rockeaters (oozes if I'm in Glomdoring). Around 40-50 depending on how squishy I feel I'll try out krokani/aslaran/naga which are nearly always interrupted because it's slow killing these at low levels (especially warrior at low levels with entry level weapons). Used to be able to do gorgogs around 70-75 but I'm having issues with them at 95 (I'm a faeling though so eh) with them helping each other out so I'd be a lot more skeptic about doing them at lower levels now. Now I can get up to these levels in a couple days, getting level 70+ is easy. I bashed my way up gold to get masterweapons and I got them around 68 I think from a discount from my paladin mentor I believe. There are other sources not listed here but these are the main money makers for a new player that I can see. Others are a bit harder, cats, lucidian/freaks. Then there are comm quests which are a little behind in gold for the effort they take sometimes (which is just a personal opinion on the gold/hour ratio on these other bashing quests). There are probably new ones that came out that I don't know anything about.

When I started a paladin alt over a year ago I think it was like 40k for each bashing weapon, plus 20k for plate armor maybe 10k for helm (Not sure on this one) then a pvp weapon costs about 40k each as well. I don't know if prices went down when I was gone for a year but this is how it went when I started a paladin alt a while ago. That's quite a hefty gold requirement already and commodity prices went up for forging? Ouch I don't think I want to touch a warrior class as a newbie again unless I'm missing something. :s I'm just wondering what the entry price for being a warrior is now with masterweapons/plate I could be worried over nothing.

This is not to mention I was helping a new shadowdancer get some vials for refilling and told them the price for vials and what they ranged and I gave them four, they were like whoa that's like 1000 gold! It really seems like a lot coming out of newton. I think clothies are fine really I saw a robe 125 cloth, you can get cloth for 16 gold at it's lowest though, but I haven't seen that since I came back so I'll just use the glomdoring comm price of 23. 2875 gold isn't really that big to worry about, need a powerstone to enchant it and that's about 2k, still leaves a profit if you sell in a shop at normal prices after the change. I think tailoring seems ok, most of the lower level tailoring doubled in commodity price which is going to make regular clothes cost maybe 200 gold more which kind of sucks because the marketability of them is really low anyways, but people who want to look snazzy are still going to look for clothes to look snazzy so I don't think it's going to be a big issue for shop owners at least.

I was kind of worried in the first place, but looking at it now the only thing I'm worried about is forging, artisan (mostly pipes), tailoring splendours, I don't know what sorcelglass is but probably that too. Forging because of the cost for new players, artisan because they have a low income and a really specific customer base of manse owners, except for kegs/pipes/bard weapons, splendour robes because of their new high price and needing to shear them and lose most of the commodities to replace. (please let us REWEAVE SPLENDOURS or something to get rid of all magic effects on them and make our robes good as new.)

This is about the third time I've seen this today. Whether it's allowing enchanters to disenchant splendours and re-enchant, or this, please give us poor tailors some recourse. As it is, it's entirely possible to sink a thousand or so comms into a set of splendours, only for them to decay and lose prestige.

Sorcelglass scrolls are created by bookbinders. Each scroll can be used to enchant five "plain" vials. Once enchanted, the vials gain a fancy description and their decay value is doubled (so 150 days becomes 300 days).

The cost-effectiveness of sorcelglass vials was already in the negative, since each one used to cost about 3x as much as a regular vial, and that was for the cheaper designs. The only reason to purchase them was for vanity's sake.

Now that more commodities are required to create each sorcelglass scroll (not sure how many), the expenditure for this vanity is even higher than before. If I'd had to pay 6x the cost of a normal vial for the sorcelglass vials I have now, it's a safe bet I would've stuck to regular garnet or sapphire vials.

Given the stated reasoning for the changes (too many comms exist) I feel like something that regularly sucked hundreds, if not thousands of comms from the markets is probably not likely to get changed, though who knows. Also, as a general statement... people seem to exert ridiculous amounts of commodities chasing after these 70/70+ splendours, which are as rare as 55/55+ regular robes, so fairly rare. They're always quoted as the norm... but they're an outlier. If people were content with anything over 65/65 - as most people are with anything over 50/50 for regular robes - this wouldn't be as much of a problem.

After these changes, however, I think it's fairly likely that more people than before will be content with less-than-perfect splendours, thus negating any stockpile curtailment.

This "reduce stockpiles" campaign hinges upon one assumption: That people will continue crafting and bartering the same quantity of goods they had been previously. All of human history suggests that this is not the case, that in fact jacking up costs reduces consumer spending and harms craftspeople and merchants.

It just shifts the focus of comms to less common less expensive ones. Leather in celest 20gp per, cloth and silk about 120 - 150 gp per. Result before change, I started designing more leather clothes.

Ok, here's my take on it.

Everyone is freaked out because it is shocking. It's an abrupt change and no warning was given. One moment a piece of clothing took 30 cloth to make, the next it took 60. That was poorly done. Also, it annoys people because it's gonna be ineffective at it's stated purpose. It really won't stop people from stockpiling things. Because it is human nature to stockpile things. It's a survival mechanism left over from our caveman days that most everyone has (some people even have it to unhealthy degrees - ever see that Hoarders show: ). Even before there was anything to do with great gobs of power, cities and communes were imposing crazy restrictions on people so they could stockpile power. What makes commodities any different?

So, in the execution this has been a bit of a flop. And in the results, I think it will too.

That said, I don't think it's quite the end of crafting that everyone seems to be making it out to be. Eventually, people will just be used to the fact that that piece of clothing takes 60 cloth. Only folks who've been around for ages will pull their 'I remember when that only took 30 cloth!' act and everyone'll make jokes about walking uphill both ways in the snow barefoot to get to the dinosaur they rode to school on. Yeah, there'll be an adjustment factor. But that's something else that is part of human nature.

So, anyway, that's my take on it.

When I was a bookbinder, we didn't have any of these fancy "scrolls" or whatever. We used stone tablets. And not just one stone tablet per book. Ohhh, no. We were bookBINDERS. Each book was a collection of stone tablets. My journal alone weighed 292 pounds. People would say things like, "Wow, that guy is huge! Is he the Ebonguard Champion?" And I'd say, "Nah, he's their librarian."

We didn't have any fancy-schmancy carving tools, either. You carved a tablet by banging on it with another tablet, and if you broke one of your tablets in the process, that was your tough luck. We grew to like it, though - the community-building times of the collective tablet drives as we took the herds from Wisconsin.

What were we talking about, again?

Tell us another stoooory grandpa Crow!

For the most part, I agree. Comparing Lusternia one year in to now, there's a noticeable inflation. We'll adjust. We'll see more egg dishes, rope clothing (macramé?) and things of that nature. And if things get horribly out of whack, the admins will have to change things up again. This isn't the first time the inner workings of comms production and usage have been tweaked. Wait until the ship hits the van before you call foul and even then, it's not the end of the Basin.

That said, please make a change to splendours. I favor the approach of tailors being able to perfectly mend their own splendours with no chance of failure resulting in loss of prestige. This means that acquiring high stats might still be a large initial investment of time and gold, but then the tailor will be able to maintain the robes indefinitely for only mending costs.

Optionally, alongside that, give enchanters the ability to disenchant greatrobes and splendours. This will stimulate business for enchanters, as people will be more likely to request ongoing robe enchantment. The side effect would be a lesser initial investment for robes, since they won't have to be recrafted from scratch each time. That's not as significant for greatrobes as it is for splendours, since those greatrobes that don't meet the desired stats can be stuffed in a shop for quick-and-cheap purchase (novices and fresh-from-absence nudies being the target consumers). This would have a much more significant effect on splendours, as splendours self-destruct when a new splendour is crafted.

More money changing hands due to crafts is good for the game economy. I appreciate the need for gold sinks, and that's really what comms do for us. But the trade economy is heavily skewed to a few trades, meaning anyone else who wants to acquire money for those items they need have to get it by hunting/influencing - which works in opposition of gold sinks.

Thank you, Glomdoring, for never disappointing us with a moment of peace.

I'm not sure that the idea that we're going to see more thrones made of eggs now is really a great way to make crafters feel better about this change.

Sorry, but when you're raiding us exclusively when none of us are around to defend to steal our miners/geomyci because you know you wouldn't be able to otherwise, we get agitated. You're bringing this on yourself.

Does the word 'incongruous' mean anything to you?

Maybe not... but... now I want that throne!

There's been mention of boiled leather hammers. I'm drafting ideas in my head for nekai made largely of leather, tints, and lesser-used gemstones. "An ugly nekai of pocked stone," using turquoise and bloodstone, is probably going to be the most logical out of the bunch.

Stuff's going to look stupid, but maybe my novices won't have to be punching gorgogs to death.

You're welcome. Fun times!