FRG Economy

[Bri]

reading people talk about the "economy" makes me sad and cry..

[Dreadark]

To be honest, i skipped over a lot of everyone's walls of text. It was too much effort for me to read but i got the gyst of them all. I have another point i want to bring up which is included in the economy discussion. Tiers lower than legendary are too common. In the last crate the lowest tier you could even get was unlikely. (not meaning to shit on tobias, the crates were very well put together and he did good work EXCEPT CAN WE TALK ABOUT HOW U DIDNT SCALE TIERS THAT REQUIRE KILLS AT A RANGE TO DIFFERENT GUNS? HOW ARE U SUPPOSED TO GET HS KILLS ON A HUGE 1024 METRES AWAY???????) And they were only 300 coin crates. I get that they didnt include coins but what ever happened to not being able to open a guaranteed "rare" item. If I remember correctly thats the reason Brass didn't like the 4000 point rolls on NTG when they first came out cause it was a guaranteed good gun. Maybe im talking out of my ass but its gotten to the point where things drop almost too easily in my opinion. Basically any legendary or lower with a suffix is practically worthless. Primordials are pretty cheap too. Say you open 100 crates and get a single primordial out of it (which is still very lucky), you can get maybe 5k coins off it if you sell it.

I also agree with everything Kuro said. Coin sinks can only work to a level. For example like he mentioned, I'm sure Bri never plans to ever get below 1000k coins.

[Brassx]

(12-04-2017, 11:13 PM)Dreadark Wrote:  To be honest, i skipped over a lot of everyone's walls of text. It was too much effort for me to read but i got the gyst of them all. I have another point i want to bring up which is included in the economy discussion. Tiers lower than legendary are too common. In the last crate the lowest tier you could even get was unlikely. (not meaning to shit on tobias, the crates were very well put together and he did good work EXCEPT CAN WE TALK ABOUT HOW U DIDNT SCALE TIERS THAT REQUIRE KILLS AT A RANGE TO DIFFERENT GUNS? HOW ARE U SUPPOSED TO GET HS KILLS ON A HUGE 1024 METRES AWAY???????) And they were only 300 coin crates. I get that they didnt include coins but what ever happened to not being able to open a guaranteed "rare" item. If I remember correctly thats the reason Brass didn't like the 4000 point rolls on NTG when they first came out cause it was a guaranteed good gun. Maybe im talking out of my ass but its gotten to the point where things drop almost too easily in my opinion. Basically any legendary or lower with a suffix is practically worthless. Primordials are pretty cheap too. Say you open 100 crates and get a single primordial out of it (which is still very lucky), you can get maybe 5k coins off it if you sell it.

I also agree with everything Kuro said. Coin sinks can only work to a level. For example like he mentioned, I'm sure Bri never plans to ever get below 1000k coins.

Over time 'rare' items become less rare(as more come into the system, with more ways to gain loot), standards rise, etc. The backbone of FRG was Crates. That was what coins were mostly for. You'd sell an item for coins, just to pour it into crates trying to get something cool. Just slowly over the years, the standards have risen on what is 'cool' enough to make it worth going for, and what isn't.

Crates are still a huge thing, but people stopped wanting to open crates. They stopped caring about items if they weren't 'best in slot' or useful(or super rare). We have Keys which serves as a great thing to put them into, but you're only returned with more 'junk' most of the time(which isn't really a bad thing).

It's not a simple problem to solve. Currently with crate design, it's almost pointless to make brand new lower tier items to be honest, because not many people really care about them. That's why most of the development is spent on the primordial/Godlikes of crates. It's a common issue in a lot of loot-based games.

Although, some primordials are worth much more than others. That's just how it is with anything though, somethings of the same rarity have different prices. It's just how it goes with player-controlled economies.

Kind of off topic from above, but one thing that might be cool is another key smith type NPC on the lobby. It will only be usable with certain items/crates. But it could take 10 common items from a crate series to give you x1 of that crate series.

The UI would let you know what item dropped from what crate series.


EDIT2:

What about for new crate series, we add a 'suffix table' to the crate. Any item rolled from that crate can get said unique suffixes applied to them. Even items from the global table if said crate has access to that.

[Poison]

(12-05-2017, 12:59 AM)Brassx Wrote:  

(12-04-2017, 11:13 PM)Dreadark Wrote:  To be honest, i skipped over a lot of everyone's walls of text. It was too much effort for me to read but i got the gyst of them all. I have another point i want to bring up which is included in the economy discussion. Tiers lower than legendary are too common. In the last crate the lowest tier you could even get was unlikely. (not meaning to shit on tobias, the crates were very well put together and he did good work EXCEPT CAN WE TALK ABOUT HOW U DIDNT SCALE TIERS THAT REQUIRE KILLS AT A RANGE TO DIFFERENT GUNS? HOW ARE U SUPPOSED TO GET HS KILLS ON A HUGE 1024 METRES AWAY???????) And they were only 300 coin crates. I get that they didnt include coins but what ever happened to not being able to open a guaranteed "rare" item. If I remember correctly thats the reason Brass didn't like the 4000 point rolls on NTG when they first came out cause it was a guaranteed good gun. Maybe im talking out of my ass but its gotten to the point where things drop almost too easily in my opinion. Basically any legendary or lower with a suffix is practically worthless. Primordials are pretty cheap too. Say you open 100 crates and get a single primordial out of it (which is still very lucky), you can get maybe 5k coins off it if you sell it.

I also agree with everything Kuro said. Coin sinks can only work to a level. For example like he mentioned, I'm sure Bri never plans to ever get below 1000k coins.

Over time 'rare' items become less rare(as more come into the system, with more ways to gain loot), standards rise, etc. The backbone of FRG was Crates. That was what coins were mostly for. You'd sell an item for coins, just to pour it into crates trying to get something cool. Just slowly over the years, the standards have risen on what is 'cool' enough to make it worth going for, and what isn't.

Crates are still a huge thing, but people stopped wanting to open crates. They stopped caring about items if they weren't 'best in slot' or useful(or super rare). We have Keys which serves as a great thing to put them into, but you're only returned with more 'junk' most of the time(which isn't really a bad thing).

It's not a simple problem to solve. Currently with crate design, it's almost pointless to make brand new lower tier items to be honest, because not many people really care about them. That's why most of the development is spent on the primordial/Godlikes of crates. It's a common issue in a lot of loot-based games.

Although, some primordials are worth much more than others. That's just how it is with anything though, somethings of the same rarity have different prices. It's just how it goes with player-controlled economies.

Kind of off topic from above, but one thing that might be cool is another key smith type NPC on the lobby. It will only be usable with certain items/crates. But it could take 10 common items from a crate series to give you x1 of that crate series.

The UI would let you know what item dropped from what crate series.


EDIT2:

What about for new crate series, we add a 'suffix table' to the crate. Any item rolled from that crate can get said unique suffixes applied to them. Even items from the global table if said crate has access to that.

+1 I'm ready for a tart of the pheonix

[Terran]

Empowered guns should be a drop that's much rarer, but have stat distribution (i.e for godlikes) different. You could get a Thrakos with high stability and low firerate, for example. Maybe give them a few points higher in each stat at random, or lower in some. It'd give godlikes variety and oddness.

Also, if you do something like this, give everyone an untradeable "RNG" rune that switches up those stats . Might find some REAL broken godlikes! Heh.
Or not. This idea sucks.

But yeah, getting 1024 range HS kills with a glock or huge? Mate, no. I expect a level per kill if I do that!

[Tarrasque]

I feel like any of the solutions here make the grind even more insane. I barely have the time to play as it is, and now you are telling me that the solution to the economy where it takes too long to get new things is to make things that already exist rarer?

I seem to be the only real one with this complaint though so maybe I'm just not really the target player for these things anymore.

Also I feel like a new crate that gives you godlikes that already exist, but with new suffixes just invalidates everything that already exists and you end up with the same problem as all the limited time godlikes where they are impossibly hard to acquire without actually rolling one yourself.

[Brassx]

(12-05-2017, 03:39 AM)Tarrasque Wrote:  I feel like any of the solutions here make the grind even more insane. I barely have the time to play as it is, and now you are telling me that the solution to the economy where it takes too long to get new things is to make things that already exist rarer?

You seem to be completely misunderstanding.


The 3 global drop table godlikes(tart, thrakos , and railgun), are having their rarities increased, then they are being 'replaced' with 3 brand new global drop table godlikes to compensate and add more variety.

Quote:Also I feel like a new crate that gives you godlikes that already exist, but with new suffixes just invalidates everything that already exists and you end up with the same problem as all the limited time godlikes where they are impossibly hard to acquire without actually rolling one yourself.

Eh, that may be fair, but it's an interesting spin on a new crate series and gives incentives to open that actual series even more so. That doesn't mean I need to add existing godlikes to it, but even new godlikes added to it would be cool. But it would just be an interesting way to put a spin on existing (lower than godlike) items obtainable from a new crate.

It's not much different than godlikes that have a chance to have extra suffixes upon roll. It wouldn't be a 100% chance to get said unique suffix from the crate, but a chance to.

EDIT:
Also, we can't really fully appeal to people with not much time to play. Content would get even more stale for the majority that can play for longer, and the server would die out much faster, unless we literally pumped out new crate/item/event content every few weeks. Which we simply do not have the resources for currently.

[Kuro]

Another thing we need to consider is how much easier it has gotten to obtain items in FRG. Events reward you a lot for simply completing them, so much so that I feel like a lot of people who play have gotten spoiled by all the free stuff.

A majority of us came from NTG where(for the longest time) the only way to acquire stuff was end round drops and the only way to get currency was by 10 minute increments or by flat out donating for it and I never remember people complaining about how hard the items there were hard to get.

People get to the "endgame" way too fast here and never get to truly experience anything. There's a huge gap between basic entry level godlikes (railgun/tart) and harder to get highly demanded godlikes. The primordial rarity should have been the entry level tier but those are way too easy to get and anything below that is pretty much meaningless if not used for keys right now.

[Tarrasque]

(12-05-2017, 07:29 AM)Kuro Wrote:  Another thing we need to consider is how much easier it has gotten to obtain items in FRG. Events reward you a lot for simply completing them, so much so that I feel like a lot of people who play have gotten spoiled by all the free stuff.

A majority of us came from NTG where(for the longest time) the only way to acquire stuff was end round drops and the only way to get currency was by 10 minute increments or by flat out donating for it and I never remember people complaining about how hard the items there were hard to get.

People get to the "endgame" way too fast here and never get to truly experience anything. There's a huge gap between basic entry level godlikes (railgun/tart) and harder to get highly demanded godlikes. The primordial rarity should have been the entry level tier but those are way too easy to get and anything below that is pretty much meaningless if not used for keys right now.

I don't necessarily disagree with you, but I would like to expand on it and put on why I think the servers ended up with very different economies despite on the surface being very similar.

First off I would like to state as far as user experience and first getting into it I think frg vastly dwarves ntg although I think it made trading here a little less impactful and in the long-term makes returning a little trickier.

Ntg had a trading economy that dwarfed frg for a very long time. I think it was due to a few odd reasons although it's of course anecdotal evidence.

First off points were very rare so it ended up with a barter economy where prices aren't so set it stone. This means that people were far more open to taking compromises and over / underpaying for items just because they wanted them and not because they can look at market statistics and take an average.

Secondly there was an absurd number of possible variations within tiers and possible suffixes. It led to things that despite being an object that isn't statistically super rare it was practically unique so it had value. Ex. Godly deagle of lich I had for like 2 years. It's no more "rare" than any other suffixed godlike, but due to the way it just rolled in a certain way that it ended up getting offers of 200k+. When if you looked at it in a vacum the rarity says it should only be 15-25k depending on the time we are talking about.There were hundreds of items like that over time that were just unique just because there were so many ways to roll an item uniquely. Be it through exceptionally good stats, a suffix very well, or the average of the two. Frg is like destiny when ntg was closer to path of exile or Diablo in how items variated.  

Frg sacrificed the ability to truly have unique items like that over balance. Which while makes it vastly superior in most ways, but led to a bit of a shortcoming here. I can't think of a single item that is actually unique in a way that no one else will ever get.

On to the third reason is that LITERALLY anyone could get the rare item. Not just the old guard who put in god knows how many hours. It can be the person who hopped on for 15 minutes, it could be the person returning after two years, it could be the casual player who plays only on the weekends. There isn't an insane time sink to actually have the ability to acquire that rare item.


It's easier to get started into frg, but its way harder to get into trading things in the "mid to late" game. Instead of it being more of an even spread or rarity it feels like it's a straight line followed by a pit into infinity. Items are either incredibly rare or more common than dirt.

[Brassx]

(12-05-2017, 08:52 AM)Tarrasque Wrote:  I can't think of a single item that is actually unique in a way that no one else will ever get.

The main thing like that is the double suffix'd items. Those are pretty rare, and worth quite a bit more than the normal variant.

What exactly made that Godly unique? We have RNG stat builds, RNG suffixes, RNG traits, we also have support for multiple suffixes/traits per weapon (as stated above). What more is there to that deagle that makes it unique that is something we don't have with the current system? I don't quite see how we don't have even more variety when it comes to random rolls on weapons. (Not saying that it's not true, just trying to understand, as it's been so long since I've worked on NTG I don't exactly remember everything about the system I made there)

Behind the scenes FRG has a lot of the same concepts I came up with on NTG, but improved upon, and taken in a slightly different direction. A lot of things here are things I wanted in my original vision, but it was far too late to go that route.

You never truly know how things will really play out, no matter how much thought and planning you put into something.

Also, what was the rarest thing you've dropped on NTG? I can tell you right now that rarity values for items I made on NTG were much higher (post round there especially) than a lot of those on FRG(I mean some items on there got into the MILLIONS rarity value wise.). Item Crate 1's work almost the same as random rolls on NTG. Godlikes in that crate are in the same rarity bracket as XSSARB weapons were. Is that too rare..?

A tier between godlike/prim could help smooth the rarity curve, but the general rarity for items are this:


Legendary 1 in 128 - 1 in 512
Primordial 1 in 700 - 1 in 1k+
-gap here that needs to be filled-
Godlike 1 in 3,500 - 1 in 7k+ (varies depending on crate)

Quote:On to the third reason is that LITERALLY anyone could get the rare item. Not just the old guard who put in god knows how many hours. It can be the person who hopped on for 15 minutes, it could be the person returning after two years, it could be the casual player who plays only on the weekends. There isn't an insane time sink to actually have the ability to acquire that rare item.

Some people actually think new players have boosted luck here. The chances are exactly the same for anyone. Anyone could get rare items, it's the same thing here on FRG and always has been, so I'm not sure what you mean by that.