Afk resource gathering of reagents, "What is a resource?"

[ScoobyDoO]

Okay, so AFK buying regs is not the problem at all, the problem you have is your angry at the people that use these regs to mark scrolls and use those scrolls to sell to a vendor AFK for a profit? (correct me if I'm wrong, I've never ever had a scribe or even know what resources it takes to create a scroll). This is just me guessing by what your complaining about. So your idea is, if you stop AFK reg buying, this will slow down the scroll selling profit so much that it wouldn't even be worth doing it? I don't know. Again, who cares.

[Elph]

Okay, so AFK buying regs is not the problem at all, the problem you have is your angry at the people that use these regs to mark scrolls and use those scrolls to sell to a vendor AFK for a profit? (correct me if I'm wrong, I've never ever had a scribe or even know what resources it takes to create a scroll). This is just me guessing by what your complaining about. So your idea is, if you stop AFK reg buying, this will slow down the scroll selling profit so much that it wouldn't even be worth doing it? I don't know. Again, who cares.

If blacksmiths and carpenters (even cooks) can't AFK gather their resources, then why can scribes?

[Pirul]

They could IF they buy their ingots, boards, etc from NPC shops instead of mining them themselves AFK.

[chainsoar]

hi Kaivan I love you in a completely normal and healthy way

no homo

[Elph]

They could IF they buy their ingots, boards, etc from NPC shops instead of mining them themselves AFK.

I don't see why this ought to be allowed either. It's still AFK gathering.

[Pirul]

They could IF they buy their ingots, boards, etc from NPC shops instead of mining them themselves AFK.

I don't see why this ought to be allowed either. It's still AFK gathering.

No, it is not AFK gathering, it's AFK buying. You gather something when you pick it up without a fair compensation. You buy something when you have to pay for it.

Ok, let me try to break this down further...and this is probably my last post on the matter (...not really, who am I kidding, but anyway...):

Ok, so your issue is not with AFK reg buying for resale to other players, as we have established that is not creating gold from thin air. Much less AFK buying for self consuption, as that is quite self explanatory. Your issue is SPECIFICALLY with AFK buying materials for scribing, and then selling the scrolls while attending to NPC's (because selling anything to NPCs while AFK is still against the rules), am I right?

So scribing. Breaking down the process: You buy regs AFK (legal since you're not adding gold into the economy, actually quite the contrary), you buy scrolls AFK (legal since you're not adding gold into the economy, actually quite the contrary), you inscribe them AFK effectively adding value to the raw materials (same as crafting wooden shields, robes or katanas) and place them in your house/bank AFK for sale at a later time when you can be attending.

During that process you are not "creating" gold into the economy, you are adding value to raw materials previously purchased. The process of adding value applies to many processes in the game...processes which are legally done AFK a lot of the time, by a lot of people. Should making wooden shields AFK also be illegal? No? Ok....How about if I go and buy my regs from Azheman and use those to inscribe while AFK, is THAT illegal? No? So I MUST pay Azheman a premium for him to go AFK buy the regs for me? I can't do it myself?

Listen, I get where you're coming from. And I whole heartedly agree with Lightshade that it sucks that people are spending more and more time AFK than actually playing the game. However, the bottom line is: where do you draw the line? The first thing you MUST protect in a shard is it's economy. How? By making sure that you cannot create gold from thin air without a player behind the keyboard. If you go kill a dragon, fish up a mib, or mine some ingots to sell to NPCs, it's all fine, as long as you're actually there to do it. But let's be realistic, this is a 12 year old game that most of us play for nostalgia. And for some of us, the 90's teenagers, we now have families and work that take up our time. Some of us are not willing to spend hours upon hours watching our characters macro cutting bandages because we have other obligations. If we were forced to attend macro everything MANY of us would not play here. The owner of the shard and his team recognize this and have to allow some leniency regarding AFK activity. The issue is where to draw the line. The line has been drawn where it is because of the reasons explained previously in this thread. First and foremost, you try to protect the economy, but you also allow a certain amount of liniency for practical purposes. And the bottom line is that AFK reg buying does not kill the economy as AFK mining or lumberjacking can.

[Elph]

The problem is this. Either way, gold is still very simple to create out of thin air.

If a blacksmith AFK buys ingots, and crafts them into a sellable item, and then sells them for 30% profit, then they're still bringing gold, potentially loads of it, into the system. And being able to gather the resources (through buying them), and crafting them, while AFK, means that it can be done in massive quantities.

Sure, someone mining AFK will net more profit in doing so, but that is not the issue here, doing so is already prevented through rules (although I will suggest an alternative method that eliminates the need for these rules completely, jump to last 2 paragraphs if you'd like)

With reagents we have the same process. AFK gathering of them, crafting into scrolls, and then selling them to all the various mages in towns. With about an hour of active playtime per day, a person can earn well in excess of 50k, I've heard some say its over 100k, (and one would wonder just how far it could go with multiple scribes.)


So call it what you will, and try to minimize it all you want (I see no reason why someone would do so without having the desire to keep such a thing going for their own aims, or to protect the status quo). The fact is that AFK gathering of any sort can result in huge amounts of gold being put into the economy directly from NPCs by selling crafted items. A person could, in theory, do the same thing with multiple crafts, even making only 20-30% from their "investment" (and I do use the term loosely) and bring in steady daily incomes over 200k or more. Doesn't sound like much, perhaps, but over the course of a week, that's over a million gold. If more than one person does it, hell, if 5 people do it, their incomes could easily eclipse the entire server when it comes to PVM earnings.

And people do do it. Look at the mage shops. Nearly all of them are stacked with lvl 8 scrolls.


This could be fixed simply by having the NPC's refuse to purchase X amount of an idenitical items without hurting players who AFK gather for the sake of selling to players. In fact, if such a change existed, then AFK gathering of any sort could not lead to the gold faucet of selling crafted items to NPC's.

So are you against the faucet being turned off in the above mentioned way? Some are profiting from it. To those people, I would advise them to think about what sort of effect this could have, if not one year, but two or three years down the line. There simply are not enough NPC gold sinks to remove this gold from the economy. Sinks could be added (which will likely not be the case for the sake of era accuracy) or the faucets could be turned off. Eliminating AFK resource buys would be one way, but one which requires staff enforcement. With a simple code change (very simple) repeated items could be refused by vendors, and no amount of gathering, AFK or not, would bring gold into the economy. The resources would have to be sold to players or crafted (and prices would drop which would only be good news for the new players here). Otherwise, inflation will continue to rise unchecked, and there will be big problems down the line.

[Kaivan]

Pirul has already done a very good job of explaining the position, but I'll explain the distinction again.

We are looking at two distinct patterns of making profit from a vendor. Generically, they are:

Purchase resource from vendor (loss of gold) -> Transform resource into another resource (value added) -> Sale to vendor for profit

and

Gathering of resource from world (creation of new resource which has inherent value) -> Transformation of resource into another resource (value added) -> Sale to vendor for a profit

These two paths to the same end result have distinctly different beginnings, which is why our rule applies in one case and not in the other. In one instance, gold must be spent in order to acquire new gold, while in the other nothing must be spent in order to acquire new gold. On the flip side, selling items to a vendor, which is the realization of previous expenditures, is the only pragmatic location in the process where we can prevent players from reaping the same benefit when they don't simply create a new resource. This is because limiting AFK crafting (where the value is "added") has undue effects on other game play (crafting for your own use, crafting for vendors, etc.).

This is why that type of distinction exists, and the fact that the rule allows players to make a lot of gold by turning around resources they purchased while AFK and sell them while they aren't is a necessary step in preserving player freedom outside of these areas.

Also....

This could be fixed simply by having the NPC's refuse to purchase X amount of an idenitical items without hurting players who AFK gather for the sake of selling to players. In fact, if such a change existed, then AFK gathering of any sort could not lead to the gold faucet of selling crafted items to NPC's.

Vendors already have limits on what they will purchase. Specifically, they will not purchase items that they have more of than they want, they will pay decreasing amounts of gold for items as their inventory of that items increases, and they will only purchase items that they have funds to do so, which is quite limited. Anything more than that in an effort to combat players from selling to them as you describe would have an effect on legitimate player behavior, and would be a step away from mechanical accuracy, which is something that we won't do. Accurate mechanics come with both their pros and cons, and accepting them is fundamental to our goal.

[Budner]

I don't see the problem. Whenever I need regs I can usually find them. If not I can wait a little while and the vendors re-supply themselves. Meanwhile I keep a lot of regs in my bank box (like 1000 of each, or more), so I'm never caught without regs. Just takes a very minimal amount of effort.

[Pirul]

viewtopic.php?p=366796#p366796

Done. As Kaivan said, anything more than that is pretty much starting to mess with the game play or era accuracy, and staff simply will not do that here.

You can't pick and choose. You can't ban the AFK buying of regs. And you can't expect the GM's to monitor who is crafting scrolls from AFK bought resources because that simply is not possible. If you go broad and ban all AFK production of item, you effectively kill the shard. Your solution is limiting vendor money to purchase items, which is already done.

What other solution would you suggest?

[Elph]

Vendors already have limits on what they will purchase. Specifically, they will not purchase items that they have more of than they want, they will pay decreasing amounts of gold for items as their inventory of that items increases, and they will only purchase items that they have funds to do so, which is quite limited. Anything more than that in an effort to combat players from selling to them as you describe would have an effect on legitimate player behavior, and would be a step away from mechanical accuracy, which is something that we won't do. Accurate mechanics come with both their pros and cons, and accepting them is fundamental to our goal.

Obviously these limits are insufficient if a player can still make 100k a day selling recall scrolls.

The problem is not the 2k limit, 2k is a decent amount. But multiplied by 40 vendors in the server, that's 80k. An identical item limit would fix this issue once and for all.

Look, I don't really mind if you think its a good thing that some people can do this. Perhaps you think its nice for people to make their gold easily so they'll play later more. I don't really know. With vendors, mechanical accuracy has already been toyed with, so making that argument is sortof ridiculous. A legitimate player would be aided more by decreased inflation than being able to sell 20 coifs to a blacksmith.

If there's enough faucets, and not enough sinks, bad things happen to economies. We might somehow, in hubris, think this server is immune, but it is not. The longer it runs, the more these unlimited gold faucets will destroy the economy. And if you don't believe it, that's fine. Just you wait and see.

[Pirul]

Vendor mechanics have already been "toyed with" to make it more era accurate. So ignoring the fact that you want to go against the shard's main goal of mechanical era accuracy, what would limiting the number of items a vendor can buy do to the shard?

Kill the lockpicker who wants to sell 20 citrines? Or kill the carpenter who made 30 gnarled staffs to raise skill and now wants to sell them to get a little of his investment back?

The people you'd actually be hurting more are new players, as you'd be killing their best source of start up income. Ingots are already at an all time low of 5.5 - 6 gps per. Boards are at 2 gp per. Now you want new players to not be able to sell but 20 bows or 20 fancy shirts? Give them 600gp - 1k gps per day to train up their magery/reisist/etc? Oh wait, if someone else went to the vendor and sold 20 fancy shirts before you, you're SOL?

How many people do you actually think that buy regs AFK to craft into scrolls and sell to NPC's for a profit? There are 378 GM scribes on the shard, how many do you think created a SUPER complex macro to advanced their skill by AFK buying regs and scrolls?

...oh wait, is AFK reg buying still the issue here?

[Elph]

Vendor mechanics have already been "toyed with" to make it more era accurate. So ignoring the fact that you want to go against the shard's main goal of mechanical era accuracy, what would limiting the number of items a vendor can buy do to the shard?

Kill the lockpicker who wants to sell 20 citrines? Or kill the carpenter who made 30 gnarled staffs to raise skill and now wants to sell them to get a little of his investment back?

The people you'd actually be hurting more are new players, as you'd be killing their best source of start up income. Ingots are already at an all time low of 5.5 - 6 gps per. Boards are at 2 gp per. Now you want new players to not be able to sell but 20 bows or 20 fancy shirts? Give them 600gp - 1k gps per day to train up their magery/reisist/etc? Oh wait, if someone else went to the vendor and sold 20 fancy shirts before you, you're SOL?

How many people do you actually think that buy regs AFK to craft into scrolls and sell to NPC's for a profit? There are 378 GM scribes on the shard, how many do you think created a SUPER complex macro to advanced their skill by AFK buying regs and scrolls?

...oh wait, is AFK reg buying still the issue here?

Stopping AFK Reg buying is one option that would work to turn down the gold faucet.

New players would be aided by the deflation that would occur when players aren't bringing millions of gold into the system, and would save far more in their player-player purchases than the gold they could otherwise earn selling crafted items to NPC's. If sell limits were put in place, afk macro rules could well be abolished, leaving new players with a deflated resource market, as well as the ability to farm resources themselves without economic repercussions to the economy as a whole.

"How many people do you actually think that buy regs AFK to craft into scrolls and sell to NPC's for a profit?"

Just look at the mage shops. It doesn't take 200 scribes to max out on sales every time the vendor's gold inventory is refreshed. Correct my numbers if I'm wrong here, but vendors refresh every 30 minutes, no? So 2k per vendor, every 30 mins, * ~40 vendors of each type = the potential for 3,840,000 gp into the economy every single day. Odds are this amount isn't fully utilized, but if even half is, that's a hell of a lot of gold. Even if only 30% of that is profit, its 1,152,000 gold per day, 8,064,000 gold per week, 32 million gold per month.

The identical item limit could be set at a number which is low enough to make mass selling of the kind we see in scrolls unprofitable enough to end the practice, while high enough that new players can sell their crafted items to get on their feet. The current limit of gold (is this era accurate?) does little to address the problem, especially when considering the potential gold that can be earned in mass ways which are not as available to new players.

[Pirul]

So you're telling me we just spent 3 pages worth of discussion to end up with THAT? Did you even bother to look up how vendors work? Did you even follow the link I posted?

• Mage and Alchemy vendors no longer restock at an accelerated rate of 30 minutes.

...and additionally your premise is: let's affect non-afk people by limiting vendors? So if I go and dig up a lvl 5 chest or 100, and end up with some scrolls, or 5k stones worth of them (actual amount I have in my house), should I not be able to sell them?

[Elph]

So you're telling me we just spent 3 pages worth of discussion to end up with THAT? Did you even bother to look up how vendors work? Did you even follow the link I posted?

• Mage and Alchemy vendors no longer restock at an accelerated rate of 30 minutes.

...and additionally your premise is: let's affect non-afk people by limiting vendors? So if I go and dig up a lvl 5 chest or 100, and end up with some scrolls, or 5k stones worth of them (actual amount I have in my house), should I not be able to sell them?

You would still be able to sell them, and I would imagine in 5k there are many identicals, but it not like you're selling 10k flamestrike scrolls.

I'm sorry for not getting the restock time correct. What is the restock time then? The math would simply be adjusted.

Also, is the restock time the same as the gold inventory refresh time?