Ship building economy fault

[Stix]

Ok, the problem is simple, 95% of player crafted ship are exceptional, the simple reason being a Exceptional ship is exponentially better than a basic ship and the cost in labour and resources between a basic and exceptional is minimal.  Players can easily acquire the money and resources to build and purchase Exceptional ships so that is what is used almost exclusively.  There are 4 quality levels which are not utilised and I believe should be.

 

There are numerous solutions to this problem but in essence I suggest each quality level of ship should be exponentially more expensive in both labour and resources.  Keep basic ships how they are, materials and labour are good, they require some work but every player can afford ships but not so much that they are disposable.  But lets for instance sake make each level of quality require 5 times more resources and labour (Call it the shipbuilder selecting the best materials) so that they really are special.  I'd be happy to see exceptional ships cost 50 times the materials and labour they currently do, sure not many people would use them but that's the point!  People will still build them and they will be expensive as hell but they will actually be "exceptional" ships not just what everyone sails.

 

It will have no effect on people being able to play and enjoy the game, basic ships will cost no more than they currently do BUT people will start using them! Those small bonus that higher quality ships give will actually mean something in pvp because not everyone will use them!

 

There are a few different methods that could be used for increasing the labour and material requirements for higher quality ships, the method is irrelevant, crafting notes, potbs "lineship bundles or MOV's", use of rare resources or simple huge increase in common materials but lets make higher quality ships expensive, really expensive and special not common.

 

Thoughts?

[McFatts]

I think you are on to something, I'm not sure about the 5x factor or not but yes, as of right now there is little point to making anything but gold ships.  Also with the current BP system there is no point in building anything else if you want to learn a BP.  

[thomas aagaard]

Some of the mods require more materials for the better versions..
So have better ships require more materials is a good idea...

 

 

A factor 5 might be to much. So basic be 100% to today, and the exceptional maybe 300%

 

But that can be balanced later.

[Isaac J Smith]

I honestly think - Do away with crafting notes, instead allow for the Crafting of "Basic Oak Frame Parts, Common Oak Frame Parts, etc. etc." And have an exceptional ship require exceptional parts, with the exceptional parts requiring more LH and materials to craft - For instance, a Basic large carriage might be what we currently have, whilst an exceptional large carriage might require 2x materials, 2x LH, and maybe even a specific craft level. By changing to this sort of system, they could even make it so that exceptional ships produce more crafting exp for the crafter.

Edited August 19, 2016 by isaac_j_smith

[Kronans]

that is becose the demand is for those ships. if you contact a crafter he can make you a different one that fits you the price will not be so much difference tho becose it is only nots that is the difference.

Edited August 19, 2016 by Kronans

[Sir Isaac Redwood]

I can see your point but if you think about the effects for PvP this is not a good idea.

 

With such rare exceptional ships Players will only operate in fleets that attack for 100% risk-free ganking of inferior ships or fleets and run from everything else. Currently there are Players that will not run from an even fight (or even one with the Odds against them) and rather sink some of the attacking ships even tough they are likely loosing their ship themselves. You will not see the latter when a ship is super special and costs an arm and a leg ...

[Hethwill]

I would only touch this part ( I find the basic suggestion interesting ) after the full War&Peace with hostility play is implemented and see what becoems of pvp.

[Septimius Severus]

Crazy, increasing the grind and the waiting is a mistake. Think how much time takes to gather the resources, convert them into materials and click to do a first rate. We are talking of several days.

Also, doing 4 high grade notes cost you an entire day of LH.

And now you want a 5x factor. Absolutely crazy, pvp is going to be destroyed at a 5x factor instead.

No it wont be destroyed, because less good ships can be used... The whole point is that exceptional ships should be harder to get so that having them is more interesting in combat because exceptional ships would be less common... Pvp is not destroyed at all

[maturin]

Exceptional ships should really cost more labor hours and materials.

 

For example, an exceptional frigate should require lots of Knees, while a Basic one does not. Basic ships should require far fewer iron fittings, etc.

[Stix]

There is no extra grind at all but yes people sailing gold ships may be more likely to run from pvp.  We may as well delete the other 4 quality types if we are not going to use them. That is my whole point.

 

At the moment Ship A costs 100K (simplified obviously) for a basic version and 200K for an exceptional version but you can basically make the cost of your gold ship in 1 fleet battle.

 

Keep the Basic version of Ship A at 100K, no change, no effect on the grind, ship availability, player enjoyment etc.

 

Increase the "price" (be it labour hours, material, crafting notes whatever) of a Fine ship to 400K and a mastercraft to1000K and a exceptional to 10,000K  Now you will have 4 ship qualitys that will be used and mean something.  People won't have their entire docks filled with gold ships and will use Fine and Mastercraft ships to find the balance between performance and cost.  Now if you want a gold ship it's not disposable, you have to work for it and it is "exceptional" and special, maybe they will be out of reach to some casual players (Just like a Titan in EVE) but they can still enjoy the full experience of the game and use basic ships.

 

It provides a distinct challenge to everyday players and doesn't hurt casual players at all.  Yes it makes a small divide between players that play often and will use Gold ships but at the moment everyone uses gold ships so why even bother having the other qualities???

[Sir Isaac Redwood]

Like I wrote before this would have a very noticable negative impact on PvP.

Apart from the grind, there is a fine line in ship pricing for PvP: They should be high enough that you can not just through them away carelessly while being low enough that you can afford loosing one here and there. And IMO the current prices work well in this regard.

Ship prices in the range of 10 millions is just crazy. Nobody will use such a ship if he is not more than sure to dominate a fight.

 

If the alternative is deleting the other quality types so be it. At least it will not hurt PvP.

[Ronald Speirs]

I would have to say the whole economy and ship building doesn't work at all, the way it is now is people have ships that are exceptional and expensive to get the right build and most people would rather run then risk them or battle when they have a massive advantage that they wont lose their ship.

 

In saying this quality in both ships and modules should be scrapped, ship characteristics should be only based on wood types and then all trims and everything after are made with permanent modules, there should be 6 perma slots like hull, sails and guns and you should be able to stack them, there should only be 3 regular or general slots that are not stack able in their categories if its like internal and external hull, cannons, sails, boarding etc that way you can get to OP with a ship load out.

 

Make crafting have depth and also purpose and that supply and demand works and isn't to expensive that people actually buy the product and use it, not make everything to expensive that no one wants to risk doing the only thing this game has going for them atm which is a nice ship combat simulator, all the rest of the in-game features fail and that is why we have a drop in numbers as nothing has changed to bring the depth and structure and the failed pvp mechanics that allow people to avoid it even more, the alliance patch is prime example of nothing really changing to the actual structure, we already had our alliance via communication, so its not a big feature, work on having a working economy to give players actual purpose, player investment in ports and production buildings that you actually need to construct crafting parts, once they figure that out we might have a stable platform to build and OW that works but atm we might as well just go back to sea trials so that players can play the best part of the game while the rest actually gets done properly.

[Khell DarkWolf]

What if you kept the basic variants as is, but did away with the green, blue, purple and gold tiers and implement a different system for ship tier quality.

 

Crafting ships would now become variant subsets of the basic vanilla ship like they did in PotBS (but aren't tied to player level).

 

Example being:

 

- Heavy: Armor on all sides are increased, but the weight of armor increase gives less top speed for that ship

- Speed: Lighter construction and purposely crafted keels and hull for speed, but has less armor on all sides

- Retrofit: Ship is reconstructed for two purposes: To allow the player to choose to harbor extra gun emplacements of smaller calibers or to outfit the current basic emplacement locations with bigger caliber cannon classes then normal. (These two purposes could be split into two separate crafting variants if desired instead)

 

And then crafting notes work like this:

 

- Dependent on how many removable equipment slots you want, is tied to how many crafting notes you use for the crafting recipe

- The tier of Crafting note is tied to the level of ship class (I.E. High level notes are for 1st 2nd and 3rd rate ships, Mid level for 4th and 5th rate, low level 6th and below)

 

The additions to crafting like extra crew space etc etc would also be tied to the specific tiered crafting notes of that ship class.

 

So changes to crafting would be:

 

- Choose what ship you want to craft

- What variant do you want to make (Basic Vanilla, heavy, speed, Retrofit)

- How many removable upgrade slots do you want (Crafted ships have a base of one or two, notes increase the amount in per portion to how many slots you want)

- What extras (in-built modules) do you want outside of the upgrade slots (Crew space, Leak resistance, Rigging quality, stream-line for better turning, Strengthened masts, Strengthened rudder, Anchor speed for slowing down quicker etc) up to a base cap of maybe two

- Perm slots for crafted ships have a base of two, and MAYBE you can increase that as well. NPC basic ships would be far weaker then crafted ships with less options as well.

[KrakkenSmacken]

Basic, no notes.

 

Rate in below formula is 7=1 6=2 etc 

 

Tier 1 (Copper notes 1X Rate)  

Tier 2-3 (Silver Notes 2 X Rate ,3 X Rate)

Tier 4 (Gold notes 4 X Rate)

 

So Gold Niagara would cost 8 Gold notes, while a Gold Gold Santi would cost 28 and represent 7000 hours of labor, the real cost of ships.

 

This way getting Gold anything requires a level 50 crafter, and a huge expense.  Players would naturally gravitate to things they could afford, and this would naturally provide a greater mix of ship qualities.

[Wilson09]

Keep in mind:

Multi-accounting. Can be great boost to the company (more sales) short term, but game killing. I don´t want to meet

Lord. V´likes in an except. ship (4 accounts), while i can only afford to go out on a common / green ship.

 

Tricky task.

 

Answer: Don´t link it to labour + and material requirements.

 

for higher quality ships, the method is irrelevant:

- anything else what is related to your ingame-time and experience.

- nothing that can be "extracted" and transfered from a 2nd account.

[themule08]

As long as you can buy multiple accounts..don't change anything.. once that is not allowed do whaever.

[KrakkenSmacken]

Like I wrote before this would have a very noticable negative impact on PvP.

Apart from the grind, there is a fine line in ship pricing for PvP: They should be high enough that you can not just through them away carelessly while being low enough that you can afford loosing one here and there. And IMO the current prices work well in this regard.

Ship prices in the range of 10 millions is just crazy. Nobody will use such a ship if he is not more than sure to dominate a fight.

 

If the alternative is deleting the other quality types so be it. At least it will not hurt PvP.

 

 

I disagree.

 

Only ships that you build to the highest specifications would be in the range of 10 millions under the model I posted.  You could build a basic anything without a single note.  Those basics or a couple of steps higher should make up the bulk of ships fighting anyway.  

 

Exceptional should bloody well mean exceptional, not what everyone uses.  The cost scale up should be a very nasty hockey stick, not the linear +250 labor hrs per upgrades that first rates are now.  I found that I personally build to the best expectations all my ships, even the ones I will only use occasionally, simply because the cost of waiting for an upgraded version is about a days worth of hours.  If that was more like a weeks worth of hours, well then I would consider an upgrade here and their, and build most of my ships to lower specs.

 

Current model has fully upgraded ships being no real big deal unless your losing all dura from your ships once a day. From my experience you out grow your ships in class much faster than you sink them anyway.

As long as you can buy multiple accounts..don't change anything.. once that is not allowed do whaever.

I would love to hear a way to control that.

 

 Actually I think the entire internet world in general would love to hear a good way to control multi accounting. It's a problem that absolutely no developer has ever solved, so what makes you think NA is going to do any better of a job of it.

[Wilson09]

 Actually I think the entire internet world in general would love to hear a good way to control multi accounting. It's a problem that absolutely no developer has ever solved, so what makes you think NA is going to do any better of a job of it.

 

You cannot solve it completely. But the answer is: Programme a game where you don´t have something running in the background.

No one can stop a multi-account-player logging on his ALT and go spying or some other bullshit.

 

But, the introduction of "labor hours" was a big mistake. Mistake?

I strongly believe it was done purely to "cash-in" on the power-gamer in this game.

From the business viewpoint, a nice idea, nothing wrong with it.

 

Player´s just hate it, if you get an "unfair" advantage ingame by buying super-ammo through a cash-shop

or are able to afford super except. ships with 5 accounts easily.

 

So, right now. Inflation is "fantastic" as the multi-accounting-labour-hour machine has not a massive effect.

 

I don´t feel underpriviliged compared to Lord V. (4 Alts) in terms of gameplay.

 

To summarize:

Get rid of the labour hours!

Thats the answer.

[KrakkenSmacken]

You cannot solve it completely. But the answer is: Programme a game where you don´t have something running in the background.

No one can stop a multi-account-player logging on his ALT and go spying or some other bullshit.

 

But, the introduction of "labor hours" was a big mistake. Mistake?

I strongly believe it was done purely to "cash-in" on the power-gamer in this game.

From the business viewpoint, a nice idea, nothing wrong with it.

 

Player´s just hate it, if you get an "unfair" advantage ingame by buying super-ammo through a cash-shop

or are able to afford super except. ships with 5 accounts easily.

 

So, right now. Inflation is "fantastic" as the multi-accounting-labour-hour machine has not a massive effect.

 

I don´t feel underpriviliged compared to Lord V. (4 Alts) in terms of gameplay.

 

To summarize:

Get rid of the labour hours!

Thats the answer.

 

 

On part one, you are correct.  The solution is game play elements that are difficult or impossible to assign to a secondary account due to required human inputs.

 

On part two, I think you are incorrect.  I do not think Labor hours as a concept per se were or are the problem.  They provide a balancing mechanism where playing for extended periods of time does not improve your ability to produce ships, creating a breaking mechanism on mass production.  The problem comes from the ability to bypass that intended limitation with alt accounts, to produce more than the design is hinged around.

 

The solution is ... well I don't know what the solution to people using multi accounts to bypass the limitation. Unfortunately every mechanic that encourages co-operation in the construction process would be subject to the same problem, because at its essence muilt accounts are effectively the same as two players co-operating with themselves.  This is a huge problem because the goal is for large ship construction to either be a collaborative effort, or take an enormous amount of time.

 

So it's a baby with the bathwater problem.  Do you allow those with more time to dominate absolutely in the economy game, or do you put up with a few multi boxers behaving like those who can dedicate an inordinate amount of time to the game?

 

At least the multi boxers are spending money to do so, and the devs have taken the steps of limiting things to one avatar per account, and locking labor hour production across all servers to that account.  

 

I really don't see how much more they could do, and removing labor hours completely would remove all limits on ship production, and just imagine the first rate proliferation if currency was the only restriction.  

 

At least now it has some breaks, as opposed to being a runaway train going down hill.

Edited August 19, 2016 by KrakkenSmacken

[Wilson09]

>>They provide a balancing mechanism where playing for extended periods of time does not improve your ability to produce ships,

>>creating a breaking mechanism on mass production.  

They do.

 

But as we agree, other problems evolve (multi-accounting).

 

Balancing mechanism needed?

Simple. right now i can craft (you know better) a 3rd rate every 2nd day playing a solo-player game.

Okay, some clan members aid me a bit with mats.

 

Just limit a crafter to craft a.........

7th rate once per day

6th rate 2. day

5th rate 3. day

4th rate 4. day

3rd rate 5. day

2nd rate 6. day

1st rate  once per week

per game design.

 

 

Just an example. A simple cap on any dockyard reflecting the abilitiy to produce ships.

Reflecting production capacities. Very realistic.

 

Basically, same effect than labor hours. No TRANSFER possible

as the cap is tied to your abilitiy to CRAFT ships.

 

Okay, then power-gamer LV might level all his 4 ALTS to max. Rightfully, he has

earned the right to aid his preferred account with ships. I doubt he´d do it.

Maybe 1 ALT.

 

playing for extended periods of time does not improve your ability to produce ships

Achieved.

Edited August 19, 2016 by Wilson09

[Sir Isaac Redwood]

I disagree.

 

Only ships that you build to the highest specifications would be in the range of 10 millions under the model I posted.  You could build a basic anything without a single note.  Those basics or a couple of steps higher should make up the bulk of ships fighting anyway.

 

Think about it: With all the PvP limited to low-spec ships with low customisation possible (1-2 upgrades), the super expensive exceptionals will find themselves permanently tied to the docks as trophies to brag about (or used for risk-free ganking). Where is the gain?

 

 

Balancing mechanism needed?

Simple [...]

 

This actually looks like a sound idea! Simple but pretty effective.

 

 

[KrakkenSmacken]

 

Think about it: With all the PvP limited to low-spec ships with low customisation possible (1-2 upgrades), the super expensive exceptionals will find themselves permanently tied to the docks as trophies to brag about (or used for risk-free ganking). Where is the gain?

 

 

 

This actually looks like a sound idea! Simple but pretty effective.

 

 

 

 

 

Think about it? I have.  

 

The gain is in the potential for variety to naturally develop.

 

There are those that will go to any lengths to have the best stats and play the best meta, and there are those that will buy up to the maximum they can afford at time of purchase, and those that are cheap and will stick to basics due to costs.

 

Anytime you say "everyone will X", your making too broad of an assumption, like your trophies comment.  Right now everyone is doing X (exceptional construction) and If everyone is doing X, then whatever X is, it is no longer a choice or an option, but rather the standard.  That is what Gold level ships are now, the standard, for several reasons.

 

Crafting a Gold gives you the best chance at a BP.

Crafting a Gold costs no more resources that need hauling, except copper/silver/gold in such small quantities it's not really a challenge to source.  Effectively just 1 day of labor hours.

Makes the base ship better.

Makes room for more upgrades.

 

 

People who play a couple of times a week would wait to spend the hours, while those that play constantly would constantly feel the shortage.  The irony of this situation would be that the more frequent players would be less inclined to drive the best ships due to more frequent loss, while the less frequent players would have the labor resources to have the best ships.

 

In short, I think it would add more variety to what is essentially a all gold all the time current standard.

[Wilson09]

What´s the point? Should we not suggest....

"get rid of grey, green, blue?"

 

Unnessesary complexity. Craft a ship = finished.

 

Are there any players out there going for PvP on green ships?

I doubt it....

Edited August 20, 2016 by Wilson09

[Sea Archer]

If you want less exceptional ships crafted, it might be a solution to have the quality evolving with the number of ships crafted. So, everyone can craft the basic version as soon as the BP is available and the crafting level is reached. After building the first basic ship, the common quality is available. For fine ships three common ones must be crafted, for mastercraft 5 fines any for exceptional ships you need to do 10 mastercrafted before. This for every type of ship. This is simulating the training the crafters need to build better ships. There will be some, who will able to build all ships in gold in the end, but it will take a long time, especially for the big ships.

[Elric]

Gray or Gold ships - that is all I use or craft.  Gray for fleet ships, basic traders or to destroy to get BP's, gold for everything else.  I see no reason to craft anything else.  The only exception in all my ships are a few green from AI capture.

 

Like others, I think 3-4 notes is not enough of a difference in overall cost/effort to make an exceptional ship versus a basic ship.  If there was a much larger gulf between the quality of each ship, there would be less 'top of the line', fully modded ships out there.

 

I think heavily increased labor hours needed to craft each would give more reason to use some of the 'lesser' quality ships.

 

Alts are the only issue - so making labor contracts non-transferrable might help.