Frozenfire's Economy 103 Essay - January 2002

With the economy in ruins, there is a strong need for change. So far, we have covered two of the main problems - (uneven) inflation and severe imbalances in the risk/reward ratio (or even the lack of one) . If you have missed these two updates, please look for them in the <a href=”http://www.uopowergamers.com/a-jan02.shtml”>January Archives</a>. In this last piece on the economy, I will argue that self-sufficiency is bad for the economy.

Since day one, players have been selling treasure they have looted, items they have crafted or pets they tamed. At times it seems that almost anything can be sold, as long as you can find someone in need of it. The reasons for wanting an item are mainly twofold: <b>Utility</b>, i.e., a sword is useful for a fighter and a tamed horse can be ridden. <b>Status</b> is also a strong factor and many items have no practical use in the game, but still sell for large sums of gold. The whole rares trade is a testament to this need. In a sense, there is a third reason for demanding goods, and that is speculation. There are some players who buy goods low and resell them at a higher price, just as many traders do in real life.

These economic dependencies all add to the atmosphere of the game. They provide you with reasons to meet and interact with other players. Without player interaction, why play an online game? There are more than one way to interact, of course. Even a PK and his victims interact. As reasons go, trade is a major way to bring people together. People can choose to interact on a whim too, talking about anything and everything. The reason economic interaction is so important, in my mind, is because its interaction driven by the game logic and adds to the illusion of that persistent state world we all like to play in. Without context, UO becomes less of a game and more of a chat room.

UO has several features to support economic interaction: craft oriented skills and vendor deeds that can be placed in player owned housing. But supply is nothing without demand. Basically, since everyone can start five characters, each with 700 skill points, it’s common practice to have a “mule” on each account. This trend accelerated after the introduction of power hour, when skill gain was made much easier. Before, it required perhaps 100K ingots and many hours of work to GM Blacksmithy, something only few players would choose to do, and only if they really wanted to play a smith. Nowadays, many more players have their own smiths,.  Once they do, they don’t really need to go looking for someone else’s smith to craft them a suit of armor - they just make it themselves for the convenience of having one. And with 700 skill points a power mule -the ultimate in convenience - can look like this:

GM Blacksmithy

GM Fletching

GM Carpentry

GM Tailoring

GM Tinkering

GM Inscription

GM Alchemy

I think that’s a very uncommon template, but its very doable. You’re now basically self sufficient, as far as player craftable goods go) and you still have 4 other characters to do all you out-of-house playing.

Now this is an extreme example, but the trend is not looking good. Anyone who has a mule with at least 3 craft skills please raise your hand. Thanks, you can all take them down now. Glassblowing and Stone masonry added to the attractiveness of the craft skills they were based on, and even more people went out and GMd these skills. BODs clearly increased the number of smiths on all shards, and as Carpentry and Tailoring is included in the BOD system, expect the ranks of those crafts to swell considerably. Evocare had this to say om the subject: <i>"In addition, I find it hard to find a serious fault with the BOD system in regard to its effect of causing many more players to want to have blacksmith characters. Is it a bad thing that we introduced a presumably fun new metagame that caused a character type to become considerably more popular?
Although it has increased the supply of blacksmithing goods for now, it seems to me that causing players to want to play characters they hadn't previously considered would be something we want to achieve more often! If anything, it would seem we need to achieve this same level of success for many more character types, making it more difficult for players to be self sufficient in every aspect of the game.</i>

And he is, of course right. Yet I don’t agree, because he is not seeing the whole picture. Evocares logic is akin to the general who won the battles but lost the war. If everyone can do everything on the same shard, the need for players to craft goods and sell to each other is gone. And BODs for every craft doesnt do anything to stop self sufficiency, as my template above demonstrated. Since everyone are used to their 5 slots, we will have to live with that, because implementing a 1 character/shard limit now would be tantamount to a shard wipe. While that would reset fix the economy, it’s also an approach with results like loosing the baby when emptying the bathtub (nm its a Swedish saying directly translated, but you get my meaning).

A first step would be awareness of how the economy as a whole work and then implement small steps to increase the interdependencies in the game. Learning stone masonry and glassblowing should not have been as simple as reading a book. At the very least, they should require other supporting skills (like many house add-ons do) or even new skills of their own. Something could also have been done about the raw materials (sand/granite) which are plentiful. Had they been made significantly harder to obtain, more players would opt to buy from a fellow player instead of making their own items. Steps like these mean that fewer players would opt to take up the skill. And by Evocares measure, the new features would be less successful. On the other hand, if you consider the economy as a whole, the end result would have been much better. Id rather loose the battles, if that wons me the war- But thats me.

After UO:R, the scroll business lost out big time, as inscription was given a role in PvP (RA/Protection to be more specific). Ever since, scribe mages have become common PvP characters and inscription was made redundant on many a mule. Also, demon scrolls needed for resist, can now be made while training inscription - instead of buying from another player. A wiser choice would have been to have, say, Spirit Speak take the place of Inscription, since SS is currently useless and is not tied into the economy in anyway.

The UO economy is a delicate thing; any change to either supply or demand will have a noticeable impact. It is better to understand and consider the effect on the economy at the design stage, instead of reacting (if at all) to unanticipated aftermaths. That is, if OSI aims to revive the player driven economy that was hailed as a major break through when UO was launched. From the UO box: <i>"With its own virtual economy and ecology, Ultima Online is unmatched in realism. Monsters roam the countryside in search of food. Limited resources create a market ruled by supply and demand:"</i>. Players stay longer in UO than the average game, because of the friendships and bonds meed between players. Without player interaction, UO is reduced to patching short term content in the form of new items or monsters (pixel crack in the words of our Forum users). And besides, what does pixel crack matter when there is noone else around to share it with you? Self sufficence reduces the need to interact within the game context, and that’s why its bad for the economy and UO.