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Economy of Gathering Tools
laxie
Member RarePosts: 1,123
I have been incredibly puzzled about the production price of gathering tools.
In most games, tools are easily accessible and fairly cheap. The premise is you buy it and then use it to collect resources worth a lot more than what you paid. For example, in GW2, you spend 10 silver on a 50 use pick axe. The resources you gather are worth a fair bit more.
In BDO, the first craftable pick axe has 20 uses and requires around 100 resource units to make. If I was generous with this and said you get 2.5 resources per use, you are still only making 50% of the investment. Let alone any kind of profit. How is this possible?
In most games, tools are easily accessible and fairly cheap. The premise is you buy it and then use it to collect resources worth a lot more than what you paid. For example, in GW2, you spend 10 silver on a 50 use pick axe. The resources you gather are worth a fair bit more.
In BDO, the first craftable pick axe has 20 uses and requires around 100 resource units to make. If I was generous with this and said you get 2.5 resources per use, you are still only making 50% of the investment. Let alone any kind of profit. How is this possible?
Comments
BDOs crafting appears to be generally "grindy", and it's probably a way to slow down the rate at which crafted items enter the game. If there's no way to lose crafted armour, weapons and boats, then making it a long and drawn-out process to make those items stops the game from being saturated in the first few weeks...
"Broken" system is just broken, it does not really matter when it happens. Same thing applies to gold farmers/RMT, they don't brake economy.
The actual, dangerous problem with this way of thinking is a coupling with power gaps. If you "slow down" the process of gearing up, it will create even larger gap between new and older players.
Wonder why this is such a typical attribute of Korean games...
It's almost as if the entire monetization strategy is designed to extract the maximum revenue possible in the first 3 months after launch...
My guess would be that the combination of slowing-things-down and coupling it with power gaps is a traditionally accepted technique to "encourage" players to spend more in the cash shop. In PVP-centric games, falling behind the power curve is usually fatal.
Such model is usually to be found in browser games - they provide large cash shop incentives and open new servers every week or so to diminish the effect of power gaps and start the show all over again. I would say this works effectively for low cost projects only, larger budgets simply need staying/lasting power this model is lacking.
In case of BDO, I would say it is a design intention. PA wants you to engage in crafting, thus they removed any complexity and trading, tailored the experience to be easily accessible to do solo, independently.
Crafting in progression driven game will be always lacking so in a way I agree with the "spirit" of the idea, I just doubt the implementation. One needs to be careful for the edges where being solo crafting friendly becomes solo crafting required - when player doesn't want to engage in crafting but has no other options because defunct market/economy.