Pricecap tweak to improve productbalance

Ideas on how the game could be improved and suggestions for subsequent versions of the game

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Guest

Re: Pricecap tweak to improve productbalance

Post by Guest » Wed Mar 07, 2012 11:00 am

Reason why there is enough grain for the breweries? Cause most beerbrewers produce them theirselves (for qualitycontrol?).
Incrising herbsproduction will make the herbs (allready most profitable farmproduct) jump ahead of the other farmproducts by too much, causing again unbalance. Advertising and teaching kapiplayers if they want the most profitable farmproduct, to produce herbs, is a better option than change the game.

And me saying that incrising the herbsproduction will probably not be the answer since it leads to other problem, while I'm using 80.000 herbs PER HOUR is saying a lot (i guess, or I'm just plain stupid haha). Ow, and I hereby officially make my excuse for using up so many of the servers herbs!

Guest

Re: Pricecap tweak to improve productbalance

Post by Guest » Wed Mar 07, 2012 11:20 am

I was a total fanatic about things that needed changing on the statsprices. But the more experienced I became and more I thought about it, I can see why changing it doesn't have to help get rid of the unbalancing.

I do believe if Upjers upped the max statsprice of eiderdowns for example, this would have hardly any negative side-effects. But only for the products which are now totally useless! I'm sorry Fierz, but not for schnapps, since that product can actually give you a decent profit (compared to eiderdowns!!).

Guest

Re: Pricecap tweak to improve productbalance

Post by Guest » Wed Mar 07, 2012 12:51 pm

Basically, the widening out of product value would widen out the fun of production. Simply put. It would really add to the game, I personally feel and I've been playing since end of '08 :D

Guest

Re: Pricecap tweak to improve productbalance

Post by Guest » Wed Mar 07, 2012 1:16 pm

I don't credit them with thinking through some of the later products.
When they were first brought out and then for quite a while, I turned a better profit from quills than from beer. Grain prices were still tolerable and I hadn't hit the dreaded price cap yet. It's hard to remember back so far but then I did hit the price cap. And also, the slower speed of production hit me when the price caps hit and I killed off the quill business.
They wouldn't cut back the cap on beer too much because of the number of players it would piss off (my take on it) but quills being a niche product wasn't that difficult to mess with. Same with eiderdowns, I don't suppose they planned for one of the more expensive farm products to massively drag down the profitability so much. The price caps need a review, as a whole. Not just one or a few products.

PS: it might have been the upward revision of the beer price cap that killed the quills business.
Last edited by Guest on Wed Mar 07, 2012 1:20 pm, edited 2 times in total.

Guest

Re: Pricecap tweak to improve productbalance

Post by Guest » Wed Mar 07, 2012 1:18 pm

I know... :)
I would LOVE the game to have lots of viable products! I would love the diversity! Endless joy! :)

It's just hard to get there... which solutions help and which are counter-productive to provide a basic sense of balance. It should not be the goal to make every product as profitable as the next! It's allowed to have lousy products and high profit ones. But the "lousy" ones should just be helped a bit to make them "below average" instead of plain lousy.

Guest

Re: Pricecap tweak to improve productbalance

Post by Guest » Thu Mar 08, 2012 12:07 pm

In my agreement with PK, I would also contradict (as you state yourself that your statements are self- contradicting, logically, that is OK):

Even with lots of products being there for decoration only, there is still enough variety in the game to keep it interesting for me, but then again perhaps I am a geek.

What I fail to follow is what the price cap actually does, I think it does this:
a) The price cap changes the statistics, it is possible to sell goods at a higher price, but this will not increase the statistics price beyond the price cap. This is now happening with fruit.
b) Sales speed depend on market prices as per statistics, quality, and perhaps saturation of the market.
The price cap only influences sales speed when a) comes into play.
So, for example for Eiderdowns (or gold jewelery, my personal favorite), the price cap has no direct effect.
Do you also think (or know) it works this way ?

So how could the price cap still influence the Eiderdowns price ?
I have been thinking about it, and could only found this, rather convoluted mechanism.
Here are my assumptions, please correct me when I am wrong:
c) In the market stalls, the percentage of people that are satisfied with my prices is independent of market price and quality.
Does anyone know if there is a fixed relation between the shown percentage, my price and the price cap ?
d) Many players make their market stall pricing decision based on the shown percentage.

Combining c) and d), if the price cap were increased, people would offer their products at a higher price, thus eading to a higher market price, and thus to an increased profitability of the products.

Does this make any sense, or is there a completely different way ?


PS: In my book (profit per worker hour) bread is king right now. So with all these various opinions about a simple matter of most profitable farm product, the game stays interesting for me...

Guest

Re: Pricecap tweak to improve productbalance

Post by Guest » Fri Mar 09, 2012 12:39 am

C) the price you set relative to the current stats price is what affects the %.
What the cap does is limit our potential to push the stats price further up.

Trouble with that simple mechanism is that although higher quality is supposed to counter the the price cap's stat price limiting factor, our server is a slow growing one and there aren't enough new players taking it up to keep the stats quality low.
This causes the high quality products to have a corresponding crappy stats (cap) price.

I used to sell quills for close to a 1000cT each before they f'd it right up with the caps. I drove it up largely on my own with one or two other players also doing the same or at least riding the wave of increasing value. The the price cap killed that nice industry. I keep quotin the quills example because it's simple and I ran with them quite well. There are other products that have the same issue.
Schnapps, for example. Production speed and cost of ingredients is much greater than beer, however, it's a niche product, always was. The price cap killed the schnapps maker's capacity to set higher prices and ultimately higher quality gets you increasingly dwindling returns.
Even in beer, I think my daily sales are a great % of the average stats quantity and I see the change in average quality when I regularly drain the markets. I often see that someone else is also selling very high quality beer and makes a big impact too.
I think their intention with price caps was also to steer players towards products other than beer and chairs, however, player base size and the availability of raw material suppliers is the real problem stopping the production of more complex/resource intensive products.
I gotta say, the price cap solution works well for other servers, perhaps. But on this server it's skewed the whole thing.

Guest

Re: Pricecap tweak to improve productbalance

Post by Guest » Fri Mar 09, 2012 5:04 am

I can see where the guys iare coming from even if I don't completely agree with the line of thought. What I DO agree with, and I think that we are on the same page, is that all the ingredients as well as the final products should be adjusted in value and production. Why could it not be done? Kapi-Regnum has 6 servers and looks pretty darn popular. I would be willing to bet that if the time was taking to "update and expand" that Kapi-Regnum, which is already probably my top favorite game that i have played in the last 5 years (hey, I am still here after almost 3.5 years. ;) ), and it can make this rockin' game even better. Why not, powers that be? You have a winner in kapilands and kapi-regnum. Run with what you know and bring it to whole new levels!

We do indeed appreciate that this game has been expanded on in the last year. They are like little gems that are placed in the game and I really think the game could really benefit if there is suddenly all these new avenues exploding various pathways that have not been known before! :D

BTW, never ever shut down this game or I will need to cry. It holds sentimental feeling for me and I am truly a sentimental slob. Now I will take my hormones back to my city with me and await new and exciting goodies. :mrgreen:

Kapi-Regnum ROCKS! :twisted: :twisted: :twisted:

Guest

Re: Pricecap tweak to improve productbalance

Post by Guest » Wed Mar 14, 2012 1:56 am

Let me be clear that when I talk about creating balance, I am not talking about making everything the same, but making some things make more sense than they do. Remember, this started over the issue of herbs being worth more raw, than in their processed goods like schnapps. That is an economic absurdity. And there will always be certain divergences from reality, because this is a closed system/game. No closed system can ever be consistent (Goedels Proof, I think) But this issue is not a necessary one.

I think some are missing the point. Herbs are already the lowest per-hour production rate in raw resources of any farm good. But they have the highest utilization rate of nearly any raw resource in the game. I can't think of anything that has more uses, at the first tier, including beets. Though to be fair to the mighty beet, nothing uses 300 herbs for a single unit of production. But heck, there are two farm goods that use herbs. They can't get off the freaking farm before they are in demand! So to my eye their production rate is clearly the place to stop. This is a classic example of the problem with supply-side economics.

Of course, another avenue of inquiry might include making every single good in the game salable in a stall somewhere. Incense is an indulgence. And the whole idea of the printing press was to make BOOKS an available commodity. (Which it just happened to do.)
Just sayin'.... 8)

Guest

Re: Pricecap tweak to improve productbalance

Post by Guest » Thu Mar 15, 2012 1:27 am

I do not agree that the production rate is the problem, if a product is scarce, the price should be allowed to go up.
Utos original suggestion to select more sensible price caps that take different production rates and cap cost of raw materials into account seems to be sufficient to me.

In any case, fixed price caps are bound to continue to make problems unless inflation in the Regnum is stopped.

I agree about the books though...

Guest

Re: Pricecap tweak to improve productbalance

Post by Guest » Thu Mar 15, 2012 2:09 am

pk wrote:The price caps need a review, as a whole. Not just one or a few products.

uhhhhhh.... yeah it does! :roll:

Guest

Re: Pricecap tweak to improve productbalance

Post by Guest » Thu Mar 15, 2012 10:24 am

I have this hunch that Mr Upjers is twirling his whiskers at us, sipping some damn cheap schnapps he bought and mocking us with a distinctly French titter.

That and they are generally ignoring us. Back to 'partial boycott' of this grey, drab forum.
Boo

Duffhead
upjers staff
Posts: 123
Joined: Thu Mar 19, 2009 12:06 pm

Re: Pricecap tweak to improve productbalance

Post by Duffhead » Thu Mar 15, 2012 12:57 pm

You know, just because you see no-one in red posting here that often, it doesn't mean we don't read it. We just simply can't comment on every suggestion posted in every single one of our forums, I think that should be clear. If your suggestions are concise, they will be passed on to the programmer, who then decides if they're feasible or not (since we can't), but even in that case, we cannot give you feedback for every suggestion. It's simply too time-consuming. Thank you very much for your understanding.

Guest

Re: Pricecap tweak to improve productbalance

Post by Guest » Thu Mar 15, 2012 1:53 pm

A couple of times a week isn't bad :)

Now, untwirl that whisker....

Guest

Re: Pricecap tweak to improve productbalance

Post by Guest » Fri Mar 16, 2012 9:22 pm

Duffhead wrote:You know, just because you see no-one in red posting here that often, it doesn't mean we don't read it.
:shock:

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