Greetings and salutations, friends! I am back in the lab this week :D My little warrior Princess Mia, who was born 4 weeks early, is doing really well. She is still in the hospital getting bigger. The contraption they have her in is sorta like the heating lamp at McDonalds-- they just flip her over every 30 minutes or so. Hopefully we will be able to take her home in a week or so... and begin her formal Jedi/Ninja/Parkour baby training.
On the same day that our Kickstarter was funded, we were approved by STEAM, I also found out that little Mia was on her way. Talk about the perfect trifecta of a day! Perhaps she is linked to AQ3D's destiny the same way Daimyo is linked to the original AdventureQuest? However, LOL, I was not allowed to share the good news at the time because... well, you know, things can happen. So we played that card pretty close to our vest.
Now.... it is time to talk about GOLD!
AdventureQuest 3D is still in Pre-Beta. Anything can change at this point. This is the beauty of this testing phase we are all a part of-- the power and ability to learn from our past mistakes and shape this game to be better.
So, if I may cut straight to the point, our previous games made it way too easy to get gold and as a result the gold prices on items are psychotic. Sure, it is really fun to get tons and tons of gold. But if you want to have trade and an auction house (someday... possibly), you need to have something of value to trade with. Naturally, this SHOULD be Gold. This is the primary topic of today's very interesting post.
You can find the value of any item or gold in a game by asking the simple question, "How long does it take to earn it?"
Keeping in mind we are purely talking about regular in-game gold here... not crafting, not microcurrency, not rep, nor rares... just gold. If it takes longer to get gold, then gold is worth more. If it is worth more, then items in shops will cost less. If it is not possible to exploit the system and get huge sums of gold quickly, then players will take gold seriously. If players take gold seriously, then a player would be confident in buying a sword off the auction house from you with gold. And, of course, you will be able to use the gold to buy things from other players.
Quick Example
The One hour Sword
Level 20, Fire
This sword always takes one hour of farming monsters for gold to acquire. It is pretty cool.
When I first talked about this on Twitter a lot of you said, "Why not use multiple currencies like other games!?". Of course referring to copper, silver, gold, platinum, etc which many games do. Due to our very limited screen real-estate on mobile and the level of complication it will add to the shops I do not think this is a very good idea for us. Sure, there are some other ways we could display it... but ultimately these options make things more complicated for both the programmers and the users.
When you are level 1, it makes a lot of sense that a monster will only give you a gold or two. That is easy and pretty logical. So the big question for us... is what is a good amount of gold for a level 50 monster to give us?
Well, I think a less experienced person would just start throwing out numbers. But if we are going to be really smart, we would figure out how much gold items SHOULD cost, and then work backwards. If we have three classes of items... 1. Common, 2. Superior, 3. Epic. A common item might only take an hour or two to acquire. So, maybe it should be about 1,000g. That seems like a lot of gold. So next we need to figure out how much a monster is worth and how many monsters I can kill and loot in an hour. Do not forget vendor trash (things that monsters drop JUST so you can sell it), the bonus value of running a dungeon, or if I am completing quests. In a densely populated dungeon I could easily take out 5 monsters per minute. So let us say 300-ish monsters an hour? Well, this is not good-- because when each monster could only be worth a little more than 2g. O_O Dangit, I am level 50! It feels like monsters need to be worth more than 2g a pop. We could fix by making monsters worth more gold, but not have ever monster drop gold. So maybe monster X drops 10 but monster Y drops nothing. But do not forget we will also get gold from vendor trash drops and quests.
20g a pop from monsters seems pretty reasonable. If we did this, we would be looking at about 6,000g per hour. Well, holy smokes... that is a lot! Well, maybe it is not so bad. Our other games are a lot higher than this. If monsters were worth around 20g, and you played super crazy for 10 hours, then that would be worth about 60K gold. If there were no ways to exploit or cheat the system, this is a pretty impressive number. Items would still have a pretty large number attached to them, but this is sorta reasonable.
I bet you could sell a top grade health potion for 100g (a stack of 100 on the auction house for about 10K gold)
A top tier level 50 epic item would probably sell for between 500K and 1 Million gold.
It is sorta funny to think that some of you reading this have degrees in economics and statistical analysis, while others may still be in grade school. The concept of inflation is one that all of us should understand. Which is simply... the more there is of something, the less it is worth.
Take water for example. We have TONS of water. It even falls from the sky. They give it to you for free at restaurants. Even though water is one of the most important things to sustaining life, yet we assign very little value to it. Just because there is so much of it. Try buying a car with water. (I can hear the inner voices of all you super smarty Mc'smarty pants about to get political, environmental, and talk about the economic opportunities of quality bottled water...we all know you are right.... just trying to illustrate a point here. Stay with me, OK?) Because... the moral of this tale is if there is too much of anything, it becomes worthless.
We do not want gold to be as common as water O_O
In a real trade system with other players, you need your gold to be valuable. So how can we make sure gold keeps its value? Well, there are a few good solutions. One, we can limit how much there is total. So there is only 10 Million gold total in the game, ever. But that is not really a good system for video game. Alternatively, we could put a theoretical limit on the amount of gold a "real player" could earn in a single day. This one is surprisingly easy to do-- I mean we already sorta did above. 60K for 10 hours of insano gold farm grinding at level 50. If we had numbers like that, then only exploits and automated bots could go possibly go higher-- and we could pretty easily stop them by putting a hard cap in place. BOOOM! Problem solved before it is even a problem. Instead of a hard cap, we could have diminishing returns after an extraordinary amount of game-play.
Troll "why monsters no drop da gold no more?"
Hork "cause you on 24 hours non-stop. Go outside and play!"
Troll "but me playing from smurtphone outside!"
Hork "..."
Cross-Platform Video Gamer world problems.
Up until now we have been talking about how to limit gold to make it more valuable. How about we flip this around and talk about how you can get MORE gold?
As a game maker, I really want you to log in and have fun no matter what kind of gamer you are. I used to be able to play 40 to 50 hours a week. These days... I only get coffee/stretch/potty breaks to login. Which, depending on the line for the secret underground lab's potty might yield 10 or so minutes. (Always wash your hands and phones after using the rest room.) This seems like a really good place for that daily boss fight / dungeon to come in. We can give big rewards at the start of each day with a once-per-day adventure that does not take much time to complete. Or instead we could give a bonus on your first few dungeon runs. Anything that gives you a dis-proportionally large reward at the start of your day's gaming. This would mean that if you only logged in and played for a little bit each day, you would be able to earn enough gold to get and make cool stuff.
"Do unto others..."
I am building this game with the team because I want to play it too. So as we all try out these ideas together brace with me knowing that some things we may get right on the first try (Hahahaha *crying from laughter*), and other things will have to get fix and redone and redone and redone (This is the definition of good game design) until they are right.
I asked Oishii if she could adjust the Gold and EXP curve on the Intro, BattleOn, and Greenguard forest. I also asked Captain Rhubarb if he could make a button on the admin site that would allow you to reset your character back to level 1, 0xp, 0gp upon pressing it to help[ us test it. I will let you know when those things are ready for us.
Battle on!
Artix
QUESTION: How much gold do you think things should be priced at? What is a good number for a common, superior, and epic weapon?
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