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Very true. You'll breeze through the game until level 40ish, maybe 50ish, and even there you'll be fine with whatever equipment you can get your hands on through normal levelling and maybe a bit of barter with your friends/guild.
See my arguments against respec in a nearby thread for some related thoughts.

About the suggestions section, there were a few appearances by Ankama's representatives, and there's a sticky requesting feedback by Troyle himself, so at least some token attention is being paid. Now, whether any of that feedback is going to be heard and taken to heart is another matter, but no harm can come from talking about things there, can it?

Taxes play a role as well, seeing as you have to pay to put up an Item, instead of paying once it's been sold. So if you only have 20 Kamas and want to set a piece for 20K and pay a storage tax of 9K and it doesn't sell, you've made quite a loss. If you only put it up for 10K and pay a tax of 4K and sell it, you make a profit, if you don't you wont lose as much!


This post has been edited by monixion - March 20, 2012, 18:46:59.

true but the nation needs tax :/

Like I said, a tax on sold items. Aka if you sold it for 20 they'd take 3 Kamas, is a better way of doing it then taking Kamas before you've sold it. If you don't have many Kamas you don't want to lose more before you've even made any. It's probably why most sell low.


This post has been edited by monixion - March 20, 2012, 18:55:45.

You can't exactly come out and say "lol u guise, sel higr!" and expect everyone to instantly adjust the prices. Thing is, prices come from a variety of complex factors (Supply and demand being the more well-known ones, but there's much more at work here) that take years to learn to understand and manipulate, even in a tiny and simplistic economy like Wakfu's and you can't expect every player to be familiar with the way this all works, or even bother to try estimating the proper course of action.
Truth of the matter is, the chalkboard system we have now is overly sensitive to someone causing a snowball effect by putting an item for sale just one Kama lower than their competition - not so bad when that's 0,2% of the price, ridiculous when it's 5%.Sure, that'll sell their item quicker (But only if there are buyers for the item in the first place, which is not always the case), but at the risk of making all future sales less profitable for everyone.
From these two statements: the only way an item's market price is going to rise is if said item's more rare than it's valuable. Otherwise, that same snowball effect is going to keep the price low. Case in point: compare anything involving ghostoplasm to Gobball set items.

It's not in the equipment prices, either: materials are arguably more important for an economy, and no amount of Kamas you throw into the system is going to make those appear out of nowhere. The system right now is gridlocked, with miners pumping out more Kamas than anyone needs (And not having much to spend them on), crafters pumping out more gear than anyone needs (That they're also unable to sell), and gatherers not bringing out nearly enough materials (Because crafters need so much and have so little Kamas to spend on something they won't profit from). Dropped equipment is probably the only thing that's currently more or less traded. Maybe some of the rarer crafted items, but with no-one selling the materials, they're basically just as well as dropped ones. There must be some breaker to get it flowing, and I doubt that can be achieved purely from the players' side. Best thing I can suggest is start selling materials, even if it's not strictly as profitable as minting directly - after all, what use is money when you have nothing to spend it on? But I'm not sure that's going to work.

On a more theoretical note: it's never the players' fault. It's the developers, for not making a system fit for the players in the first place, not explaining it well enough, or not altering it to fit the players once they've had their way with it. Players will by their nature find all the weaknesses and loopholes in the system, and exploit them for all they're worth. It falls on the developer to fix and close them as quickly as possible.

Is there a reason there are no buy orders in this game?
That would help stimulate the market a bit. I'll happily buy materials but cba to check the market all the time hoping that someone is selling the materials I need.


This post has been edited by Torle - March 20, 2012, 20:11:06.

The upgrade idea is stupid, and hopefully won't ever come to pass in Wakfu.

It ruined Dofus' balance, and will do so to Wakfu as well. Keep the equipment as it is.

And what's wrong with the prices? I'm not seeing your point here. The market is going pretty well, people are buying and selling at pretty high rates. Only for 1-5 kamas, but if that's the prices, that's the prices.

Just like real-life, you can't just put out stuff at a high price and expect the prices to go up. Nor can you expect that, just because you think the prices are too low, people will just blindly buy from you if you put it higher.

I saw this guy in Bonta attempting to sell a gobball headgear for 15 kamas. He stood there for DAYS, and never sold it. Why? Because he was trying to take a price no one was willing to pay. I wouldn't ever buy bread again if all bakers decided that bread should cost 5 $ a piece. Not many would, and that's is why the price isn't higher than it is.

This is even more true in a game like Wakfu, where everything is obtainable by yourself. Sure, it might take a few hours... but if it saves you the ridiculous amount of kamas buyers are trying to force on you, and it earns you a few levels as well, it's worth it.

Sellers always lose to buyers. That's how all modern markets work. The only exception is the few unique products that is really difficult to get otherwise - And that's how the Crafters earn their keep in Wakfu.

But no, you aren't going to be making thousands of kamas on crafting this stuff. If you thought that, I'm wondering why you even started playing Wakfu instead of Dofus in the first place. Wrong game if you are looking for inflated markets.

@Torle: That would be pretty nice, yeah. Ressources in general are rarely ever sold to fair prices. If anyone would offer 10 of a kind for 2 or something instead 1 for 1 kama I'd happily buy instead of gathering the ressource myself. That is hardly profitable for the one selling the ressource though, he could simply mine some metal instead and get a lot more kamas.

Edit: Btw this 1 kama lower game is a very interesting point too and I would like to point out in particular that the default setting only shows you the lowest prices. So even if you price the same as a competitor people might never see you goods. So it is much preferable to set them 1 kama lower.


This post has been edited by Shaleigh1 - March 20, 2012, 20:55:21.

+1

I don't know, you mention a few things and people think you're trying to force them on them, it's called a discussion. What's said here isn't going to affect the game in any way so don't know why people are getting so defensive of it. I like being able to make a shed load of kamas, and if people want to sell low they'll sell low. The only thing I think would benefit from a change is the Storage Tax.

But I'll let you keep arguing about it.

As an economist I must say I'm finding this discussion really interesting.

I've noticed some of the ideas speaking of Cartels, and I can't tell you already those ideas won't work, as Grichmann pointed out, Economy, be it a town or a game, works on an equation involving two factors: Offer = Demand.

When such formula exceeds in one of the factors, economy loses it's balance, if the demand is higher than the offer, the demanded product amount won't be enough to satisfy the needs of the buyers, so producers will start selling at higher prices to have higher profits.

If the opposite happens and the Offer is higher than the demand, producers will be forced to lower their prices to beat the competition and make a low but acceptable profit.

That's exactly what is happening in Wakfu right now, the Offer is much, much higher than the Demand. There are just too many products in circulation and not enough players to allocate all of them, and, since producing most of the things that are being sold has 0 cost due to the fact in Wakfu you can get any resource yourself, in our little economy most of the products are selling for their minimum to have profit, which is 1 Kama.

You can throw thousands of Kamas in this formula, nothing will change*, Wakfu works on a free-market system, there's nothing such as a government having a monopoly over some resources and there are no laws imposing prices to be lower than X and higher than Y, players can't change the way economy works, is Ankama themselves who have to work on this.

*The nominal value of Kamas might increase, although the intrinsic value of a Kama would be the same, in other words you might need 1000 kamas tu buy the same thing, but that 1000 Kamas would have the same value 1 Kama had before, and since Kamas need to be crafted, that would only make things worse.

The fact crafting in-game isn't valued is not a consequence of this Demand = Offer formula, but instead is a consequence of another factor that doesn't affect the "real life" economy, which is monster drops. In real life you can't just create stuff from nowhere, you can't punch a pig and have it drop a leather jacket. This makes Wakfu formula be always unbalanced, something like Demand = Offer + Extras

Now wanna hear a crazy solution to value Gathering and Crafting?

• Include resources from all professions in craft recipes all kind of equipment, of course some resources should be more specific than others, like an armorer should be needing lots of metals and a few of other resources.

I.e. A piwi hat could be crafted with 10 Wheat, 15 Piwi Beaks (drop), 10 Piwi Feathers, 5 Iron, 5 Ash cuttings, 2 Muddy shoes and 10 Thistle Flowers.

• Lower the rate monsters drop equipments to a really, really low percentage, you could even make them stop dropping equipment, but that might make prices grow too much.

If such a system was implemented, crafting would be nearly the only way to get equipment. That would mean a Tailor would have to buy (or gather) all of the items I've mentioned, thus having to interact with all of the professions in order to produce his Piwi hat. This would lead to the tailor having to spend X Kamas to get his resources and, in order to make profit, selling that piwi hat at least for X+1 Kamas.

To make this simpler to understand I escluded lots of minor factors from this theory, although this should be enough to shake the core of Wakfu economy.

Excuse me if this is a bit twisted as I'm not used to type in english using technical terms.

-Lindel

 


This post has been edited by Lindel - March 20, 2012, 22:53:04.

i hold monopoly over canoon powder and im a governor :3

+10000000

I too am an economist and this is what I've been trying to explain to my guild mate when I said the wakfu economy is screwed up. I like your suggestion of including as many professions in the making of one item and lowering the drop rates of equipment. I also think a some sort of equipment decay where you need resources or kamas to repair said equipment.

Explain please.

Yes, Lindel and Clashingharmony, very much yes, I would certainly like the game more if every piece of equipment had to be crafted and replaced/repaired! However, I don't think just altering the drop rates and the amount of items needed to craft things would affect the economy much: you still need to make (level+1) items to gain a single profession level, meaning 100 items to unlock new items every 5 levels. There's simply not enough players to actually use those items. Crafting in general needs different changes.

I've had a friend (Who doesn't play games like this) point out that this national/global search-centred economic system MMOG's use (AKA "auction") is closer to the stock exchange than it is to an actual goods market. I'm curious what actual economists think about the matter.


This post has been edited by Grichmann - March 21, 2012, 06:26:29.

I find it strange that people are talking about having too much Kama when the Drago-Express isn't running and various facilities need Kama to fix. [/observation]

But carry on. This conversation is interesting.  

well im doanting everytime i pass a exress at least 50 kama o.o but some people don't donate even 1 kama witch makes me very very sad -.- i mean if u can craft kama then at least put it in good use.. we are opening swamp one soon in bonta :/ will someone help me? ^^ if u pass throught the swamp and see express be nice and donate at least a bit