In-Game Economy for PVE-PVC Request

And how does not acknowledging someone’s expressed ideas (especially when asked to explain them) make for a more friendly conversation? I thought we were talking about ways this could work - and not really people’s writing styles or colloquialisms?

I apologize.

2 Likes

Why? for what? All I want is to know is if you understood what I was blabbering about. And if you did what you think about it maybe too…

I’m glad you like the idea, Del. Out of curiosity, what gear would you make out of copper and bronze?

1 Like

Pretty sure I can’t, because I think those are cleared out on each reboot. I haven’t tested this, though.

This confuses me. I mean, yeah, gold and silver are plentiful and renewable, but that only means that a coin-based economy would never work the same way as a real-life one, not that it wouldn’t work for our purposes.

We would all rather barter, but if you want a barter economy via player-placed NPCs, the GUI is going to be a fuсking nightmare. The only purpose of coins here would be to avoid having massive UX headaches.

That doesn’t mean it wouldn’t work. As long as the game allows players to put up stuff for sale, stuff that I might want to buy instead of grinding for it, it works. If you’re worried about devaluing the actual stuff so everyone just farms gold and silver instead of farming for other stuff, there are two things you’re overlooking:

  • The merchant inventory comes from players. Once the thing you want is out of stock, the merchant’s owner has to get it again somehow: farming, grinding, or whatever.
  • Gold and silver are plentiful and renewable, but the sources are finite and they still take time to respawn.

Even so, if you’re still worried about devaluing stuff, there are two solutions I can think of, off the top of my head:

  • Make all the prices in thousands (or maybe hundreds) of gold coins. Enforce this via the GUI, so you have to enter a whole number as a price, so if you enter 3, that means 3000 (or maybe 300) gold coins. That way people can still afford to buy something using their gold surplus, but it’s not trivial anymore.
  • Use a better currency, e.g. fragments of power.

From what I remember of Pippi, it adds gold, silver, and bronze coins as another “property” of your character. You can get them in various different ways, but the important thing to understand is that they have nothing to do with the gold or silver coin items you can loot around the world.

On most servers, there are merchants that allow you to convert the coin items into currency coins, but that’s just an admin’s decision. Also, most servers are configured to have you accrue a small amount of bronze coins every N minutes of being logged on.

And it works. The economy of those servers isn’t anything like its real-world counterpart, but do we really need that level of realism?

5 Likes

Oh, I meant as a safe place to temporarily drop stuff if you’re worried about the item getting sacrificed to the mesh gods.

1 Like

Oh, that. Yeah, I guess that would work, but nobody really wants to go do that when it comes to trading. The altar is nowhere near an obelisk, and the forges are guarded by NPCs. :slight_smile:

True. For my gameplay, I would not be expecting complete realism, just more immersion.

I was hoping that when someone suggested implementing a player-player barter window that more would accept that as an option that would work for them. An open window where players put items in and both have to hit accept perhaps. That way they have a safe trading option for item-item trades.

If they do not like the idea of using a currency for the player-placed NPC merchants, they would not be required to use it. I’ve seen a handful of clans on my server who have anywhere from 2-4 clan members who rarely, if not ever engage in the global chats. They either use clan chats or a Discord server. If they are in their own world having a good time and do not want to arrange a meeting up with another player to trade, I’d like to give them the option of stoping by and checking out my merchant stand and getting something they still need/want without breaking their own immersion by having to talk to me if they do not want to.

1 Like

A “solution” happily provided to you by Funcom.

I believe what JJDancer was trying to say (and I agree with her) is that people have no reason (currently) to want gold coins in return for their goods. People will trade their goods for something they want or need, avoiding gold coins, just as you mentioned.

If you need hardened brick and I have a surplus, I will be willing to trade with you for something I need, perhaps hardened leather, but currently, I have no need for gold coins, other than to grind them up and throw them on the HUGE pile I already have. In all honesty, gold coins are in the game right now, and people aren’t trading for them for this very reason, they have very little value. The way to give them value though, is not to make them more rare or more grindy to obtain. As @JJDancer said, If there was an NPC selling a Sword of Crom for 100k gold coins, I would then have a reason to trade my hardened brick for coins, as coins have value to me.

If gold coins did became a sought after currency and people did use it for trade, then a huge issue would be stack size and weight. @TeleTesselator mentioned this already, gold coins would need to become part of our characters’ UI. The problem with this is that coins can be found and made in the world, meaning you would have to actively decide to make a ‘deposit’ into the UI. Of course gold still has some uses in recipes such as alchemical base and jewelry, so once you have made a ‘deposit’ you may wish to make a withdrawal when you start running short. This makes it a lot more complicated than systems in other games.

With all this said I still feel like the game does not need a full blown economy overhaul. We as players are doing just fine bartering with each other in person. We could definitely use a proper method to trade though so we don’t have to drop valuable items on the ground. Who knows, maybe the dev’s will give us a proper trading screen as a QoL improvement in 3.0.

2 Likes

I get that part, I just don’t get why that means it “wouldn’t work”. I was trying to point out that the gold coins you get for your goods don’t have to have a very good in-game use (or rarity or whatever), as long as you can spend them on someone else’s goods. Being able to buy someone else’s stuff is what would make this system “work”.

Yep. And as long as we’re restricting the concept of trading to online trading, that’s all there is to it. As soon as you introduce offline trading, these coins get an additional use: the ability to buy someone else’s stuff.

I admit that I haven’t studied economics, but my understanding is that currency came into play in the real world precisely because barter proved insufficient. People didn’t really need little round pieces of metal, or bits of paper, they needed to eat, and get dressed, and whatnot. But you don’t always have apples right at the moment someone else has milk you need and wants apples for it.

In the same vein, I don’t need gold and silver for anything other than alchemical base (or a handful of other crafting recipes), but I would still be perfectly okay with selling my surplus Tempersmith for gold just so that I can later spend that gold on someone else’s Black Blood pick if I happen to break my last one through inattention.

Of course, as you pointed out, I wouldn’t need gold for that, if there’s a player who needs a Tempersmith and has a Black Blood pick online. But that’s a pretty big “if”.

I honestly disagree with this. I don’t think that the way Pippi does it – by making these coins a property of your character – is necessary at all. Stack size and weight are a problem? Good. That makes the game even more interesting. Now you need to figure out how to transport your gold to make your purchase.

Again, I think people are overthinking this particular idea. It doesn’t need to be perfect, it just needs to be there.

I agree that a barter UI would be a nice QoL improvement. As for the “full blown economy overhaul”, I think that’s a moot point, really. I don’t think adding an offline trading system would require a full-blown overhaul. Just give people the ability to plop down some merchants, set their prices, stock their inventory, and let them figure out the rest for themselves. :man_shrugging:

I mean, I’ve seen it work on private servers with Pippi, and it’s nice. It wouldn’t revolutionize the game, but it would add a new aspect to it, a new way to have fun with it.

Look at it this way: not everyone is a completionist who derives special enjoyment from collecting one of every single thrall, pet, and item there is, but I still respect that there are people like that and they can have fun with Conan Exiles that way. In the same vein, not everyone would enjoy setting up shop, but quite a few of us would.

Is that enough for Funcom to prioritize that feature? I don’t know, but I’ll keep supporting suggestions like these in hope that Funcom might decide to do this some day :slight_smile:

5 Likes

Agreed, currency started when various societies started over specializing, which is not something I would like to see in Conan (outside of RP).

This^ 100%.
I am still all for a very simplistic solution.

2 Likes

Exactly.

Good word choice, and exactly right.

We think alike. Exactly so. Also on the first point if the merchant thrall is buying and selling then items and resources come in that way too. :wink:

This is really the only way to do it. (Like Qantas is the only way to fly - for people who don’t get my colloquialisms) Otherwise what, maybe a currency bag of infinite holding (which is the same thing in disguise) or wheelbarrows to cart the coin in - LOL

I don’t even think it can be done as such, I’ve certainly lever seen it. Maybe in a stock market simulator or something. :stuck_out_tongue:

I think the window idea :bulb: Sorry to keep mentioning ESO and Black Desert, but they both have exactly that. But that’s for player to player exchange. It doesn’t add immersion and really noting at all to the game. It just makes for a safer system than dropping bags in front of each other. In Conan as I’ve experienced it, it wouldn’t get used very much as only a tiny percentage of players not in the same clan ever meet or exchange anything. And if they are in the same clan well, a chest works just fine. Trade windows work in these other games because a) that’s a tiny percentage of 400 to 800 players on the server at once, and b) clans and guilds are not as tightly knit as they seem to be in Conan.

Exactly right. But it need not be complicated. Other games do this successfully as well. Most recent example is Cyberpunk 2077. As you run around the map you collect “junk” (let’s call them “gold coins” for now). You can break them down into crafting mats either manually or automatically or you can “sell all junk” at any bank :bank: ATM. For Conan, I’m envisioning that “ATM” to be a button press or a RMB selection option instead of virtual ATM map feature. It could also be “automatic” from a toggle in the player settings somewhere.

OK, but now that’s essentially the same as a barter system, or how is it different? Because it ONLY gold coins? Not a very brave distinction. ~=shrug=~

Sure, prolly true… But it’s fun. Virtual game design. LOL Seems to happen here a lot! And if it’s something clear, concise, and that a lot of folks want - it might be harder for them to mess up. :woozy_face:

Anyway, I’ve exhausted all my contributions and anything more would just be repeating myself. So those who find my writing style jolting or unfriendly can relax again. This girl is out… :call_me_hand:t6: hang loose…

1 Like

I guess looking at it from the perspective of a player who has just about everything, if I sold something for gold, I may as well be giving it away, since gold has no value to me ATM. The current barter system works well, since you can ask for something you may need or just do not feel like spending hours farming. ( A good example is trading something of value for a few thousand rocks, and avoiding the boring farming ).

Now if Funcom implemented NPC traders who only accepted gold, and sold more than a camel, than yes, I would want gold coins. Imagine if, instead of farming spiders for an hour, you could just go to a trader and purchase a few thousand Icor for gold coinage, I would love that.

2 Likes

Yep, as simple as that: only coins. That’s really what makes the difference between a barter economy and a currency-based economy, and that difference is really, really big.

Yeah, that’s what I would like to see, but all backed by players. If it’s all Funcom’s NPCs, then that actually requires that “full-blown economy overhaul”, and that’s where I would side with @DaVice: it’s a huge effort and it comes with all sorts of very thorny problems.

1 Like

Not gonna lie.

Dancer clothes lol.

3 Likes

I agree. First thing is make it so players on pve can unlock a container. This has been so dumb imo. That on pve one has to drop a loot bag to trade. Or if 9n 0ce I want to build beginner stations to help noobs get some crafting dome early on I cant. Access is locked.

1 Like

That is all well and good for online players @DaVice, but not all of us are online players. Singleplayers cannot trade with themselves. The only potential for trade we have are the existing NPC merchants. And the only way to achieve a deeper level of mercantile trading would be with a rework.

Strongly, STRONGLY agree with this request DelRioServerMaster.

1 Like

This topic was automatically closed 7 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.