[CF List] The 'dis'economy of crossfire

[Mark Wedel]

  Will try to catch up on all the stuff pretty quickly:

Gems and altars:  While the basic gems may not offer a huge portability over 
basic coinage, the special gems certainly do.  It would be simple enough to make 
sure the gem shop stocks sufficient number of those to cover the number people 
would buy.

  As for altars, altars which take 'money', only look at coinage.  It should be 
very easy to modify it to also take gems.  The title portion of this doesn't 
make a different - it just looks at the item type, and then sees the value of 
the object.  Note that altars don't make change.  The only issue is that there 
are probably still places out there in which the altar is set to only take gold 
coins or whatever.  Shouldn't be too hard to fix those up.  With this, you could 
then only need to carry gems and not worry about coinage.

  For shops, you would still need to manually drop the gems necessary to cover 
the purchase price - that probably isn't a very big deal.


Treasure in monsters:  Very easy to remove the pure monetary portion of high 
level treasure lists.  I'm sure the idea of some of these having lots of 
treasure goes back to the general lore of dragons having huge treasure.

  Looking at titans, I don't see them having much monetary treasure - its 
probably the bonecrusher, and the fact the weapon/armor they have may be 
magical.  But certainly tuning down the treasure of some monsters would help 
out.  and as said, its easy to do.

  What should perhaps be done is make some of the artifacts these monsters have 
not occur all the time.  Maybe a titan ha a bonecrusher 5% of the time, and the 
rest just uses a sword or something (the titan could just have a very high 
damage rating so if he doesn't have a good weapon, he is still nasty with his 
attacks).  That in itself probably makes things more interesting - might have to 
fight numerous monsters of the right type before you get that artifact your after.

  Note that even if pure monetary treasure is removed from monsters (eg, coinage 
and gems), they may still have some good items.  IT was said that the chests in 
high level dungeons were chock full of stuff.  Monsters in higher level dungeons 
also have better stuff.

  I wonder if it would be 'fairer' if the quality of stuff is more directly 
based on the level of the monster, and not the difficulty of the map.  Eg, a 
dragon on an otherwise low level map would still have his good stuff.  An orc on 
a really high map wouldn't really have anything better than if he was on a low 
level map (this is an extreme case, but would happen as it is now).


statues for the highest bidder:  Yeah, I probably am underestimating it.  Doing 
this should be pretty easy - the statue can hold how much money was used to pay 
for it.  Can make it even nastier in that if someone takes the statue from you 
(by paying more), the amount you put to it is now gone, and you start from 0. 
Thus, even if you have the statue dedicated to yourself, you may still toss 
money on it to make it more difficult for someone to steal it from you.


Training:  Wouldn't be too hard to do.  Have to be some form of sliding scale - 
low level people shouldn't get hard by this, but you do want to hit the high 
level people.  Maybe only have training for level 20+ people?  This also adds 
another penalty to death - not only did you lose some levels, when you re-gain 
them, you will need to pay for them again.  Question would be - should price be 
for just overall level, or for each skill you have that you may go up in?

  Doing the coding shouldn't be too hard - just change the add_exp function so 
that if you have enough to be higher level, it says something like 'you are 
ready to train', but don't have it actually update the level.  Then, when you go 
to the training facilility and pay the cost, it would update the level and give 
you the appropriate benefits for it (hp/sp/grace/whatever else).


Exp:  The type is currently a signed int - this allows values up to 2.1 billion. 
   The highest for any level right now is roughly 130 million (the last couple 
entries on the table are a bit odd - they are meant so that the player can max 
his skill categories without maxing his total exp).  But it still means that exp 
can go up tenfold or so.  So if it currently takes 3 months to get to level 110, 
increasing the total would take 30 months (hypothetically).  Of course, if we go 
to a 64 bit value, these limits are not relevant).  So increasing the cost at 
the mid levels is easier.

  This is my take on the current exp model:  Levels up to 5 are very easy to get 
- I can usually start a character and get to level 5 in just an hour or two of 
play (clearing out the beginners dungeon gets you at least level 3).  Levels 5 
to 15 are a bit slower, and probably a pretty good pace.  Levels above that can 
go pretty quickly, as you have spells that destroy large amounts of monsters 
worth good exp.

  A few quick notes:  Even with simple experience, there is a bug/feature in the 
awarding of exp - the amount you get is still adjusted based on your _skill_ 
level and the monsters level.  This means you can get a lot of exp if you can 
weaken a monster in the skill you are good at, but perform the kill with a skill 
which is low level.  I'll fix that up.

  Taking a quick look at the monsters, the jessy is worth 2 million exp. 
Several monsters worth half a mill each.  Some of these should perhaps be 
reduced some?


  Taxes:  This is tough - while basing it on play time makes the most sense, if 
anything, this would discourage comradry on the server - if your character is 
logged in, you better be making money by adventuring, because standing around 
will cost you money (either in taxes or rent or whatever else).  I'm not sure 
that is a good thing, but perhaps something to revisit.


  I would suggest we try a few things first, and see what effect it has.  Doing 
a more controlled atmosphere is probably a good idea in general, otherwise it 
could turn out that things are out of whack in the other direction.

  So I think the ideas to try:

Equipment damage and repair costs.
Reducing amount of money from most higher level monsters.
Making gems accepted on things that normally require coinage, and making good 
gems available in near unlimited quantites in the gem shops.

  Not coincedently, these are probably the easiest things to do.