They had one, but the requirements went up.

400. 200 comms are for the one-hander shofa and nekai.

I'm glad I'm not the poor bastard has to sit and make 80 redtint.

...oh snap, I'd been thinking in terms of two-handers all this time. They went and doubled the price of masterweapons too. Mrr.

As someone who regularly mixes hundreds of tints for their shop, rest assured, that is nothing.

The thought of dozens of people suddenly needing twice as many tints, on the other hand.

Is there a particular reason it's been decided to try and burn down the fat of organisational commodity stores? Fluidity seems like a good thing, but seeking it out for its own sake seems pointless, when organisations will be negligibly affected, but individuals will be greatly inconvenienced.

I dislike commodity quests being encouraged to the detriment of tradeskills. Commodity quests are a way to occupy your time, but they are repetitive, and not much fun due to the repetition involved. On the other hand, I got a lot of satisfaction from writing up a sword design and having it forged. Tradeskills are an outlet for creativity, commodity quests are a grind.

It seems like levies on organisations would have been a more precisely aimed, better way of draining their surpluses, if that itself was the primary goal. Adding upkeep to something, or offering them projects with high commodity costs, for example.

That also requires 160 wood, and wood is one of the more scarce commodities in cities.

Yeah, I know. I forget what I designed that to have, but it was probably 20 wood, 10 cloth, 10 rope, 10 redtint before the changes.

There are also issues with the prices not readjusting based on stock.

Ragniliff has it right about the tithes as well - once village stock reaches its max, everything else produced is tithed directly to the org, regardless of government structure, resulting in a perpetual creation of more of the same commodities that no one is using. Raising the village stock is not going to change this, only defer the effect by a week, so this is really not an answer. I sometimes feel like changes are made before people take the time to learn how things really work. Hey Glomdoring, Why exactly do you have 110,000 leather, shouldn't you lower the price? Well, we already sell for less than villages do, but they just keep giving it to us.

It never crossed my mind that this was a bug... as she said, if a village has full stock, they send all the surplus to the controlling org. This makes sense, and whoever coded this had to have decided that would happen. It may be a useful change to consider stopping this - it would certainly cut down on excess amounts of useless commodities. As far as the useful commodities go, however, there will be no real difference whether you change it or not, because people seek these out in the villages, and they rarely get to max stock (When is the last time you saw a market with 250 reasonably priced wood, for example?).

Another factor contributing to the excess of commodities is the quests themselves. Aside from rockeaters, the useful commodities cannot really be quested for without raiding, but the less useful commodities can be quested for easily, and so still more of them are produced, especially by commercial governments.

Finally on the subject of stockpiling commodities in general - aside from the cases of lesser used commodities where it just happens, this is something which we have sought out to do. 30k wood and gems did not just appear in our markets - as noted, they simply don't get tithed, but over a long period of time (a year - as we started from zilch in the case of most comms), we have bought low and stored them and stored them - never denying their availability, but always seeking out more. Why? Because higher numbers are better than lower numbers. It feels a bit like the reward for accumulating a lot of this is to have it devalued, which stinks.

I didn't make the change, and had little if nothing to do with the decision, heh. I'm more or less simply commenting from a spectator's viewpoint, as I took no part in coding them. I've not really looked that deeply into commodity tithing beyond how it's impacted by feelings. It was a consensus I did agree with, though!

As to the stocks, Glomdoring is not the only one with pretty crazy reserves. Really, they're on top, but that's to be expected from having a lot of villages for a while - and the other orgs are pretty bloated, too.

Two days ago. Then I bought it out, because, hell, who knew that the price floor for wood was 33 gold or less?

(I'm migrating my post here from Lusternia Twits, since this thread is a more appropriate venue.)



It crossed my mind as well that a storage cap would have been much more effective at curtailing surplus commodities than a universal commodity requirement increase.

However, I don't think credit prices will skyrocket as a result of this. If anything, they will decrease, because there will be less gold floating around out there for people to spend. A decrease in the demand for credits (which is the logical result of people having less gold available to spend) will cause the price of credits to sink somewhat. Imperian's credit prices are ridiculous because their high-level areas produce far more gold than those of other IRE games, creating a top-heavy economy (unfortunately for them, this also hurts their influx of new players). Remember, the value of credits is actually measured in the time necessary to acquire the gold, not the gold itself.

While it is a fact that the actual quantity of gold sovereigns in circulation won't increase or decrease due to a rise in commodity requirements, the average player will still have less gold available to spend. Organization governments stand to profit (or not, if people react to this change by tightening their belts, which ironically will exacerbate stockpiling), since commodities are primarily sold from their caches. The general effect on the populace will be one of having less gold to spend all around.

As I see it, the cost of living for your average player has now been heightened. Craftspeople and their customers will bear the brunt of it — craftspeople because they'll probably be selling fewer items now that everything's more expensive (and still making the same profit per item), customers because they'll certainly be paying a higher price for everything, no "probably" about it.

Constructive criticism:
Hm... hm. Basic, real-world economic principles (which are all I'm able to grasp, personally) don't directly cover this situation. A piece of paper won't magically require 10x more wood pulp to manufacture all of a sudden, which is essentially what's happened in Lusternia with these commodity increases.

The logical solution to decrease commodity stockpiling without damaging the rest of the economy is to create a commodity sink that doesn't also affect the fundamental value of crafted items. As Talan pointed out, the game mechanics themselves have encouraged stockpiling, and now that there are huge stockpiles of commodities, players will apparently be punished for it. This is inherently unfair, since no one realized that the admins considered stockpiling to be a problem until yesterday. I find it troublesome that problems in Lusternia are allowed to fester for years, and then are hastily addressed by sweeping (and universally unpopular) changes.

These commodity requirement increases are very similar to the proposed VA upkeep costs in that regard. There was no mechanical limit on the number of VAs an organization could raise for years (except for a flat, one-time power cost), until one day the administration decided there were "too many VAs," and an upkeep cost was proposed. This upkeep cost threatens the status of existing VAs who aren't combat aficionados.

Reactionary, after-the-fact changes of this nature will always be unpopular, and are often unfair. I believe a way must be found to accomplish the intended goal without punishing everyone for no reason. It also rankles me that these sorts of changes are sprung on us without warning and without first taking the temperature of players' reactions to the proposed changes.

Constructive proposals:
I'm not the first to touch on this, but commodity stockpiles should be taxed or drained directly if we wish to decrease stockpiling. Crafting should be left alone. It is far too damaging to everyone to simply increase commodity requirements by a factor of ten, unless it's on a temporary basis.

Expensive organizational projects could be implemented to drain stockpiles. A direct, rising percentage tax could implemented, so that (for example) stockpiles under 5,000 are not taxed, stockpiles of 5,000-10,000 are taxed by 2% per RL day (i.e., 500-1,000 comms are simply subtracted from the pile each Lusternian month), stockpiles from 10,001-20,000 are taxed by 5% per RL day, and anything over 20,000 is taxed by a whopping 10% per RL day.

You could even implement NPCs who will purchase excess commodities or accept them in trade for some modest but attractive (and unique) advantage. Only organization leaders and treasurers would have access to this system, of course.

I hope they don't increase the cost of knight weapons and armor, it's already way more expensive to get started as a knight than it is as other classes!

I think what we could really use is a system of commodity sinks. In Magnagora there's a room where people are building tons of siege weapons and stuff, but those have never been used in-game to my knowledge. Maybe they should be

I have to say I like the idea of one time commodity sinks accompanying back end changes to how the comms are tithed and a limit to how much can be stored.

Seeing a design suddenly jump from needing 90 silk to needing 150 HURT. Rather a lot, considering that anyone outside of Glomdoring likely doesn't have access to that much silk at once, or must pay something on the order of 120 per silk. (I remember hearing that it was going for this in Angkrag and sending novices in to retrieve it at one point, actually.) And as someone whose gold on hand rarely exceeds 10k, I'm honestly not sure how I'll be able to continue operating at such high prices. For those that can easily generate 10-15k gold an hour, this isn't likely to have as hard of an impact. They're already beyond really needing to worry about how much they're paying for their goods. For the level 10 knight who's now finding out that his plate armour is going to cost him several real life days of work, I weep.

If stockpiling was the issue, find a way to hit the stockpiles directly. Cause a great flood that wipes out three fifths of the fish, and requires a system of rope levies to hold the flood waters back. Or have Gulliver pop into the basin, demand food, and then get tied up and sacrificed to Raezon, or something. Have the Wayfaire demand commodities from the cities to set up shop before they allow people in. Simultaneously, lower the cap, and make it so that if an org has more than x fruit, they don't get any more fruit. Or even make it overarching. All the excess fruit is taking up space, so there's less room for marble. There are so many fish in the stockroom, the workers used some wood and iron to make barrels to hold the extras. It doesn't even need to be entirely serious. Have Pimp-Masta Paavik show up and steal 1500 gems, gold, and silver from Glom for his bitchin' medallion of him wearing a bitchin' medallion. In commemoration of that time he wore a bitchin' medallion. Make him steal some cloth, and some feathers too for his coat, and fish for his aquarium shoes.

In short:

1) Return comm costs to either the level they were or -slightly- elevated.
2) Lower the commodity caps to more reasonable numbers.
3) Make a universal cap that means that no org can hit the cap for all their commodities
4) Have some event chew through the stockpiled comms.
5) Offer some recurring way for orgs with excess comms to offload the excess comms.

I like your ideas and you made me seriously laugh with:
It is 6am and I'm not getting much more wordsy than that, I'm afraid. "Your words made my brain respond good" is basically what I am attempting to get across here.

Marble instruments.... must design marble instruments.

While I like the change somewhat overall, not that there are five billion bards running around or anything, but perhaps lower grade instruments could be created for novices other than the one bob sells.

I've always been flabbergasted by the fact that I can compete with cities with commodities.
I had no idea such stockpiles existed to this degree. I've seen far too many Trade Ministers with no creativity what so ever, a couple around currently are decent though.

The changes may affect Varrin adversely, but the glut with some commodities needed to be addressed. Maybe I'll donate my stocks to Gaudiguch if the value falls through. I'm not to worried, I've always found the market side of the game interesting, even a change like this.

Wood - Always easy for me to obtain, takes a little work and patience
Grain - Interesting cycles, recently it seemed like the grain was far easier to obtain
Eggs - Omelettes for Breakfast, Lunch and Dinner anyone
Vegetables, Fruit - A little patience required if you want a decent price but easy enough

Some comms have puzzled me though, I haven't been able to affect them via quests in any way, Coal, Silver, Iron, Platinum etc
Maybe I'm missing something but without killing or moving miners around doesn't seem like it can be done.

Taxes on commodities would never work. We would just move them from the reserves to other non-taxed places, even encouraging that stagnant accumulation.

I also don't really like the idea of events that steal commodities, just for the sake of stealing them. It's not really fair to punish the organizations for policies that were not remotely discouraged until now (as far as I'm aware).

Giving a means to use the commodities for some benefit seems like the better idea. Something like the constructs perhaps, which required commodities to build at the onset, and then you could also add some commodity upkeep. However, the problem still lies in the fact that, the more practical commodities (wood, metals, etc) are the ones we lack the most. So in short, allow me to build a super fish-powered... thing that destroys the world.

Anyway, might as well see how this change plays out before speculating ways to further dampen the commodity market.

Excellent point, and makes me wonder how much of this glut is in those comms we always have too much of. I don't think often about the oversupply of eggs and poultry, so to me, I see a vicious drought because wood, gems, silver, cloth, and silk are hard to come by, and now I need 25-50% more. Talan has the right of it: maybe we need to adjust supply and demand on different comms differently. Make fewer vegetables and more silk, fewer milk and more wood, and the "glut" will correct itself without having to penalize the creativity-based trades.