Sweat-economy question...

[QuintusMagnus]

A potentially useful and at least interesting sweat market question...

Given how sweat price rates have fallen overall in the past four months (please, don't flame me, it's a simple fact that while in October you were "cheating the newbs" if you paid .55 for it whereas now you're "screwing the resellers" if you charge the same), I started thinking about something:

Is there a floor to the sweat market? I mean, one above the absolute TT value of sweat?

Not that this floor will be reached at any point, but seriously, is there one?

It's obvious that there's a point at which we reach a kind of ceiling...people generally start laughing sweaters out of the house once they ask for something like .7 for the stuff. People use up old inventories of it (what a classic economic reaction!) and start working just with their "buddy" who "can get it for cheap" (in other words, a sweater who's willing to undercut the perceived market to increase their volume turnover) and thus the market starts to descend back into equilibrium.

But is there a floor on the market? In most cases, it seems that sweat and nexus behave elastically. As Nexus becomes more scarce, its price rises and sweat prices are forced down by the limited demand for ME in general keeping its price (no matter HOW people rig it daily on the auction) relatively stable. So somebody has to pay the piper and the sweat price falls.

But let's say that Nexus kept being scarce? Sweat would obviously devalue, as it would have nothing to match up with it. But, short of an outright halt in nexus supply, could sweat actually fall to TT?

The better question may be, how far does it fall before sweaters stop sweating? Does that point exist whereby people will actually stop sweating enough that, temporarily at least, the sweat price will resurge due to an undersized demand? If that's the case, then there's clearly a floor-but what do you think that floor is?

Which poses a third question-does MA actively change the rate of Nexus supply on the market to manage the sweat market, or is the nexus supply more a response to the number of miners of enmats and MA's own preferences towards MF users? In other words, is MA managing the nexus supply to leverage sweaters, or to keep the price of ME at a certain level to keep the few who do continually using MF?

If the former is the case, it should then be possible to study the long term nexus supply and be able to pinpoint the point at which we say "MA will put more nexus on the market tomorrow and increase sweat rates."

The reason I say that, is that if Nexus prices slip and sweat prices climb by even a few points on the day that China or another wave of people joins us...well, we may have just learned how to peg the market.

And if not, and it's simply MA supplying miners at a given rate using a less eloquent formula, then I look forward to the day where MA stubs its toe and causes Nexus prices to skyrocket, so that we can see where the bottom of the market truly is.

Thoughts? Explanations? Theories on the elasticity of sweat and nexus?

Thanks for the read, I look forward to seeing if my theory is proven right at some point.

[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

[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

Ah, so you see it as a market which peaked only once and has been in steady decline. While I have been interested in the game for years, I only started playing about 6 months ago-anybody know for sure if sweat's been in constant decline?

In THAT case, we may be able to rapidly find out whether there's a producer-end floor on the market price. Interesting.

[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.

[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

[Harvest]

Originally Posted by QuintusMagnus

Is there a floor to the sweat market? I mean, one above the absolute TT value of sweat?

Not that this floor will be reached at any point, but seriously, is there one?

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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[Tseng]

Originally Posted by thoreau

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.

Mainly because the more advanced players wanted to skill up the teleport fast enough to use the higher teleport chip (higher demand on ME, lower supply on Force Nexus => Force Nexus Price goes up, while ME Markup has to stay in order to make the skilling not to huge money sink.

And while there are almost endless amount of sweaters (and sweat can be obtained anytime while Nexus requires luck to find), the only logical consequence is a drop in Sweat price.

Originally Posted by Daikiba Old

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.
<-cut->
.. 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.

You're wrong with the first statement of this quote. The price of Nexus is very important. As you stated in the second part, MF is pretty uneconomical at 200%. So 200-210% on ME is the upper limit people willing to pay for ME before it gets completly uneconomical.

So if Nexus price goes up, Sweat price MUST go down in order to keep the ME markup at at least 200%. If sweat doesn't go down, ME would cost 2.4 pec (or 240%) assuming 1 pec/bottle of sweat and 1.4 per Nexus.

You could argue, that people could stop buying Force Nexus until it's price drops, but this is not going to happen. Sweat can be found anytime and with much patience it doesnt costs you anything (and there are enough people willing to do it).

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.

Well that confirms what i suspected, that it's still pretty uneconomical profession and mainly used for its gimmick/tools (faster traveling, healing, ressurecting).

Well, with my suggestions from above (cutting TT value of Nexus by half), the price on ME would drop without a droping in Sweat price. It would even allow Sweat to climb up to 0.8 and still be at 150% markup at which MF would be somewhat CLOSE to a point where it could be considered as economical and at times when Nexus/Sweat is high on supply maybe even drop to 125%.