Sweat-economy question...

[Immortal]

With the change in the ingame auction data, price manipulation on (L) items and stackables now fails as you need to order a lot of it...and it's hilariously obvious what are resells and what aren't. e.g. skill chips. You can track certain chips being resold over the week by auction history - if the value of the chip you are looking at is sold within the last day...well you just ousted a reseller.

Ofc... it's not really that difficult... most of them don't bother hiding that fact. From what i've seen there are multiaccounting resellers there too...outbidding themselves...sad

Back on topic, for most people mindforce is a fun option, rather than a useful one. It's slow. And the majority of good chips are in the hands of resellers (cos no one will buy them ). But even VIII NB sucks, aside from the range.

Space pirates... may see an increase drop in MF chips, a want for ME nad hence sweat... there is a floor it's determined by how patient resellers are.

But if u wnat an equation sweat price~(MF_users)/(sweat_gatherers)

[QuintusMagnus]

Originally Posted by thoreau

The long term price of sweat has been in decline with several sharp peaks when a new Mindforce chip was introduced.

I remember sweat at 4pec when I started. At that time the max bottles of sweat from any mob was 3 but a mob never ran out of sweat. You could also trap mobs and then sweat endlessly.

Prices started to fall to about 2pec and stayed at that level for around a year. When Mindark introduced the Firestorm chip prices ticked upwards again for a short time.

The prices of sweat then became unsteady as MA introduced the teleport chip, the wormhole chip, the resurrection chip, and changed the game mechanic as to how sweat was collected. Now you can obtain lots of sweat from a mob but each mob has a limited amount of sweat.

If you are interested in this you can do some reverse engineering to find the price of sweat over time.

You can look at the auction history of Mindforce and Nexus. Since MF is simply Nexus + Sweat you should be able to estimate the price of sweat.

Then if you look at the old VU notes you should be able to mark the times when either MF chips were introduced or the sweating mechanic was changed. You should be able to make a pretty informative graph with this information.

Gee, throw a good topic out there and everybody replies like mad! Thanks for the read everybody!

Hmm, wow, interesting. Another factor to involve, an end-product addition making sweat briefly more valuable. Alright, so now the lowest floor I've heard is two pecs there, which is what, a pec above TT? That's certainly interesting, although early stages of the game may need to be discounted to an extent as both a learning process by the market and by MindArk itself....

[QuintusMagnus]

Originally Posted by saintvio

sweat price will continue to go down as long as:

nexus is rare enough to get a decent markup

and/or

MA doesnt do a VU that makes MF more useful

imo the only real way sweat price goes up is if MA makes MF useful.


saint

Alright, but what do you think the bottom of the market is? That's what I'm curious to see, at the present rate the MOST I've seen anybody buy sweat for was 7 peds/k, but what I DON'T know is if anybody has a clue what the lowest average price has been, roughly, and whether the market was starting to get undersupplied since sweaters were moving onto other things. I'm trying to get a good sense for whether MA is actively "managing" the sweat economy, as it were.

[QuintusMagnus]

Originally Posted by Daikiba Old

Afaik sweat price has been in steady decline. When I started it was 1.5, shortly before that it was around 2.0 and before that even up to 4.0 or 5.0 (i've heard).
The major changes in the price were due to MA changes on the availability of sweat, e.g. increased "drop rate", removal of sweating cap etc. There was also a short-lived rise in the price once when MA "fixed" the possibility of trapping mobs and sweating them.
I think, as you suggested, the price of nexus does influence the price of sweat (nexus price goes up, sweat price goes down and vice versa), but only to a small extent. I remember times when both of them went up at the same time and down at the same time.
The steady decline that has been going on even when there has been no changes to sweat/nexus availability can probably be attributed partly to the fact that MF skillers have slowly realized how uneconomical MF is even with ME at ~200% and they have realized that Hades(heim) will freeze over before MA introduces some useful economical MF chips.

With sweat at ~0.5 I think it's getting close to the bottom, providing there are no changes to sweat availability - simply because people will stop sweating if it gets much lower...but that is just a hunch.

edited: was being a bit slow to write this post, so didn't see thoreau's, lol

Something that just occurred to me also, though, is that the market may actually have a rather low bottom, as no matter what there will be some people who still refuse to deposit and will continue doing the 'free' thing at any price, thus allowing for further market pulldown than would normally be the case...

[QuintusMagnus]

Originally Posted by Harvest

Last I knew the TT value of sweat was 0....so if you put10k sweat in the tt your in for a suprise

I think realisticly we could see sweat prices as low as 0.01 or lower but thats in extreme case. Lets say you triple the noobs and no one stays...just floods the market with sweat. ME wont fall in price but the sweat will.

IMO sweat was made so noobs could check out the game and what it offers for free. Sweat a little buy some ammo, try hunting...sweat a little buy mining stuff and try mining. Its not designed to "live off" sweat a little, buy ML35.... sweat a little withdraw, type thing.

So though I belive MA will make the mind force chips do more things or more atractive, I do not see them ever makeing them "too" atractive or crazy ppl will spend hours leaching the system for a couple dollars.

Though I do sweat some times for a change in pace of what im doing, I have never unerstood that....spending hours to get about $10 when you could had just got a second job(or a first for that matter) and made 100% more.

One thing I'll point out, though, is that if the sweat price WERE to drop like that, SOMEBODY would eat the profits, and some undoubtedly would try to undercut them. My guess in that scenario, would be the miners, since they're long used to 1.38-1.44 for the nexus, so they'll probably try to get raised rates. Of course, the ME sellers could TRY to take those profits, but it would be doubtful in the long haul to maintain them, I think, since the ME demand is so slim that it's a very cutthroat business.

[QuintusMagnus]

Originally Posted by The Nightbird

TT of sweat is in fact 0.00001, so that is the absolute bottom... but given the nice eco of firestorm chips I'd say .0025 (or wherever ME is 150%) where the firestorm chips will have 4 eco.

Care to elaborate? Sorry, I don't have any chips myself. 2.5 peds/k sounds like a plausible floor, though perhaps it could go further south...

[QuintusMagnus]

Originally Posted by thoreau

Just another quick note - if MA adds features to pets that require more or different food you might see the price of fruit increase. If fruit is more profitable than sweat to gather, there will be less sweaters and over time as supply decreases the price should increase. The same goes for dung. If MA introduces something that makes dung more valuable to collect less people will sweat for a living.

So the system is perhaps a little more complicated that at first look.

Hmm, cross-industry competition. Interesting. I could see how it could work, although finding fruit is a much more rare thing, relatively speaking, than gathering sweat, is it not?

[QuintusMagnus]

Originally Posted by Tseng

When MindForce was first introduced, i remember that the "offensive" MindForce abilities was pretty economical inefficient. I think most of the offensive chips had a dmg/pec of below 4 pec, while even the worst ranged weapons had 4-5.

I'm not sure how much that changed today, since i haven't been that much into MindForce and to be honest, the only point interesting in MindForce are a hand full of abilities, like Teleport Chip and Heal chip (to heal up after killing a hard mob) and ressurection of course (hard and expensive to get).

So i think that this is the limiting factor of MindForce price/markup. For basicly all other weapons (exclude melee and the new ones with explosive projectiles), the cost of ammo was always 1 pec/cell @100% markup.

But MindForce changed this, since the TT value of Force Nexus was already 1 pec @100% markup without sweat. In the begining, a bottle Sweat was ~1 pec iirc and force nexus was slightly over TT (110% or so), which resulted in the markup of approx 200-210% for Mindessence.

At least even at the begin, the 200% was pretty expensive and not many people really used Mindforce other than to skill it for future changes/buffs.


So my suggestions for MindArk would be simply to cut the TT value of Force Nexus by half, but keep everything else like it is (i.e. an Ample deposit of Force Nexus will still return same TT value of it, just the double amount).

This would have the effect, that Sweat@~0.50 pec + Nexus@100% would be apporximate 1 pec in total (line a enegry or blp cell). At current markups this would result in 0.7 PEC per Nexus and 0.55 pec for Sweat for a total of 1.25 pec per ME.

Another side effect is, that this would allow more "space" for price fluctuations, without making the use of Mindforce uneconomical. And the price could be corrected by the market by supply and demand.

At the moment, this correction aren't possible, because the of the TT Value (and the current markup) of Nexus. With Nexus being 1 pec and Markup, the lowest possible price for ME would be 1.4 pec (with sweat for 0 ). But since no one gather sweat for free, there is at least 0.4-0.5 for sweat.

It's already proven that such a change could be easily done. MindArk already did a change in TT prices on some items/drops, shortly after PE went gold.

At this time, the hides and skins had a pretty low TT but droped pretty often (the TT value of most hides and skins was ~1-2 pec or so). With one VU, the prices simply changed and the skins/hides got merged. So if you had 50 Longu Skins at 1 pec before the VU you had 1 Longu Skin at 50 pec after the VU. (This also had some funny side effects, like having a stack of 0 skins, worth 3 pec or so :P)



The second way to improve this, would be to make the Sweat Gatherer skill much more efficient and more significantly increase the outcome when sweating, so that the amount of bottles you can sweat (and chance of success) significantly increase. So you if you sweat gather double amount of sweat per hour with 1-2k skill in Sweat Gathering, then you would earn the same amount for half price.

This idea is good for mindforce users since it would drop price of Mindessence by ~0.2-0.3 pec, fair solution for the hardcore sweaters but bad for real new players, since their income wouldnt be that good until their skills are high enough to increase their amount of gathering.



I like the first idea much better of course, since the drop in costs for ME would even allow people to use Mindforce to hunt, since i think almost no one does real hunting with Mindforce Blast Chips (hunting for sole purpose of skill increasing doesn't count :P) and mostly use it for defensive, healing or teleporting.

That is a good point, making ME more efficient for chip users would promote the use of the chip. However, I'd also point out that, while the miners would make a profit, the market for nexus would be flooded by this "double dipping" to keep finds up, so real mining returns may actually be lower as a result, unless the subsequent drop in prices results in a doubling of the users of MF.

[QuintusMagnus]

Further, I'd point out that when prices of ME DO climb above 210, which is a real rarity (ignore the price rigging of the auction!), people are far more prone to sell off their "cheap ME" from prior, cheaper batches that were made with the old nexus prices in place than they are to keep rushing present-price nexus based ME onto the market, so there IS a slight lag in price adjustment in real terms.

[Tseng]

Originally Posted by QuintusMagnus

However, I'd also point out that, while the miners would make a profit, the market for nexus would be flooded by this "double dipping" to keep finds up, so real mining returns may actually be lower as a result, unless the subsequent drop in prices results in a doubling of the users of MF.

That's the idea behind it. The price including for ME would drop from 2.1 pec now to 1.25-1.5 pec, which would greatly improve the economical value of Offensive Mindforce and bring it on a level almost equal to that of the other weapons.

We have to see it realisticly, the only people who buy ME todays, are the ones who use it too either gain skills for fun (Healing, Focusing Sweaters) or for the Mindforce utilities (Teleport, Warp, Resurrection).