Is EU's RCE collapsing?

[QuintusMagnus]

Originally Posted by TimUnleashed

Creative destruction? I'm not familiar with that term... but if you say so

I guess my thinking is more from the perspective that if the economy in general is doing well then we all do well. I don't necessarily need to get more sales than anyone else, but if we give people a reason to enter the malls then we have a greater chance of making sales than if they don't enter the malls. For the greater good of the community, diversity is incredibly powerful in my opinion. It also creates more competition, and healthy competition is a good thing for everyone except tycoons, methinks.



I agree with you, and would only add that my perspective is that there is an opportunity in the fact that people aren't currently motivated to go to malls. If we can find ways of giving that motivation, by value-adding (see our website for how WE'RE trying to achieve that), then more people will come to the malls and every shop owner benefits, as well as the economy as a whole.


Good point. I agree.




Yep value adding is the way to attract people to shops. There are things that auction can't do - like show you an entire suit of armour in one hit (IF you know where to shop, of course - but it's a shopkeeper's responsibility to make that known).

Auction really is a very easy way out for the majority of people, and allows one to be VERY lazy in terms of trade. This makes shops looks harder to use than they actually are. Whenever I give myself a tour of the malls, I'm always pleasantly surprised by all the interesting things I come across, and it's always an enjoyable experience. Like going to a bookshop instead of amazon.com.

Creative destruction is an economics term. Essentially, the idea is as follows: The US grows alot of grain and a few independent people make 4 or 5 automobiles a year. Then one day, a guy named Henry makes a car and is cheeky enough to name it after himself, and makes a Ford factory that's hugely efficient. Thus, all those indy car makers are wiped out (the destruction) while the economy hires more people and produces more cars (creation). Hence creative destruction, one of the best things in economics (or else we'd all still be blacksmiths and shepherds).

Yes, Value Added is the key. They really need a way to make it have that catalog so that people know where shops are, but honestly I think it'd be great if shops even started thinking and planning more within their local community, maybe locating all the fashion shops together, all the armor shops, etc (or at least big groups of them), so that people who have an interest in a particular product will be more encouraged to "stroll the selection" rather than be off-put by having to go through fifty fashion shops to find the ghost armor they want....

[QuintusMagnus]

Originally Posted by Acronoid

NO the sky is not falling *djeez*
Shops are empty, because:
- we don't need that much shops
- shops are expensive to keep
- people hate the lag in shopping buildings
- auction is easier
- knowing a few crafters is more eco
- every second in game not hunting is a wasted one

About ppl chipping out:
many people chip out, some of them come back and kick thereselfs for chipping out in the first place. New players come and buy the chips. It's evolution I guess, not only EU, but the playerbase is dynamic too.
EU population is growing (getting more crowdy if you compare) so the sky is not falling.

Good point about the lag, I hadn't considered that. It's something akin to a government telling its people to build a city out in the jungle, but then telling them that it wont build a highway to the city, only a dirt and gravel road...infrastructure is one of the most important things MA can do to help their product/"country"....

[Tseng]

First off, i really hope that the economy is (finally) colapsing. Many may ask themselves now: Why? A modern economy can't grow indefinitly, so in order for the economy to stay at a healty level (or grow) it's necessary that it collapes completly (or almost completly). That's how it worked in real. Every few decades or century, a countries economy went so bad that it goes so far that at one point the people barely earn enough to survive.

Basicly every strong economy we have nowadays (or in the past 15 years) was in countries who had their economy completly destroyed (through riots, civil wars or even from world war). When an economy is completly destroyed, it's usually built up with newest technologies and thus after a decade or two of built up brings it to one of the worlds leading ones. So was germany, japan, usa and many other countries (which already passed their peaks and grow smaller). So i don't think a collapse of EU's economy would be a bad thing. At it's lowest point, basicly everything should be devauled and the economy cylce can begin again :P



Second point: I really don't know what's the matter with the lag issue. I have no lag at all and i'm (for our present time) on a quite low connection (2MBit downstream is considerer low imho, when 6-16 Mbits became so common that most in bigger cities have it). And if i enter a large shop with many items it takes no 2 sec until all of them are displayed. Or someone else here using ISDN with EU? :P

Only other thing could be old/slow hardware, but this is actually not really a lag, but just bad performance (sometimes also called hardware lag). Lag as stand-alone term is always refering to the delay in a (network)connection aka Latency.

[QuintusMagnus]

Originally Posted by Tseng

First off, i really hope that the economy is (finally) colapsing. Many may ask themselves now: Why? A modern economy can't grow indefinitly, so in order for the economy to stay at a healty level (or grow) it's necessary that it collapes completly (or almost completly). That's how it worked in real. Every few decades or century, a countries economy went so bad that it goes so far that at one point the people barely earn enough to survive.

Basicly every strong economy we have nowadays (or in the past 15 years) was in countries who had their economy completly destroyed (through riots, civil wars or even from world war). When an economy is completly destroyed, it's usually built up with newest technologies and thus after a decade or two of built up brings it to one of the worlds leading ones. So was germany, japan, usa and many other countries (which already passed their peaks and grow smaller). So i don't think a collapse of EU's economy would be a bad thing. At it's lowest point, basicly everything should be devauled and the economy cylce can begin again :P



Second point: I really don't know what's the matter with the lag issue. I have no lag at all and i'm (for our present time) on a quite low connection (2MBit downstream is considerer low imho, when 6-16 Mbits became so common that most in bigger cities have it). And if i enter a large shop with many items it takes no 2 sec until all of them are displayed. Or someone else here using ISDN with EU? :P

Only other thing could be old/slow hardware, but this is actually not really a lag, but just bad performance (sometimes also called hardware lag). Lag as stand-alone term is always refering to the delay in a (network)connection aka Latency.

It is hypothetically possible that a country's economy could never collapse. This one is not. Could it correct itself? Sure. For example, let's say that instead of having big swings, the economy was managed (or growing with few enough distortions wrought by society) that it only required mild corrections. In that way, it could dip to, say, .25% growth and never actually collapse, but instead slow down enough so that the businesses must correct their inefficient practices and such. It's presently a near impossibility that such a thing could happen as an absolute no-recession economy, but it IS possible.

Go to PA during peak hours. I've run the game on two different, rather slick machines, and it still OCCASSIONALLY can have issues. I merely pointed out, though, that if people are experiencing lag, that's an issue that could impact the performance of business, however I guess if it's hardware lag it's less MA (the "government's") fault, and more the user (and his "car")'s fault.

[Tussi]

Originally Posted by QuintusMagnus

It is hypothetically possible that a country's economy could never collapse. This one is not. Could it correct itself? Sure. For example, let's say that instead of having big swings, the economy was managed (or growing with few enough distortions wrought by society) that it only required mild corrections. In that way, it could dip to, say, .25% growth and never actually collapse, but instead slow down enough so that the businesses must correct their inefficient practices and such. It's presently a near impossibility that such a thing could happen as an absolute no-recession economy, but it IS possible.

Problem is that all dominant economic systems feature compound interest on money, which inevitable leads to an exponential growth of financial assets (which are generated through liabilities in the current systems), which in turn puts pressure on the economy to produce exponential growth to cover the financial market.

Only problem here is that no natural system (like a planet) can sustain an exponential growth rate - so as you stated correctly the hypothetical possibility you started with has no real chance to be witnessed in reality.

Go to PA during peak hours. I've run the game on two different, rather slick machines, and it still OCCASSIONALLY can have issues. I merely pointed out, though, that if people are experiencing lag, that's an issue that could impact the performance of business, however I guess if it's hardware lag it's less MA (the "government's") fault, and more the user (and his "car")'s fault.

I think the lag with the highest impact is that a good group of people sees EU as leasure time and not work - and should the gap between 'i want' and 'i get' be time- or money-wise to wide then it's percived as discouraging.

Also the service should be usable with the minimum required setting, there should be no need to have a 4GB RAM (2 on gfx-card and 2 as RAM) with Dual-Raid-0 setup (one raid for swapping, the other for serving game assets) of solid state disks (which can transfer faster than harddrives) to run the game smoothly.

At time i experience lag, is's preferably somewhere in the wilderness. And this type of lag was introduced some VU ago (together with fun-stuff like flying mobs, or the where's my brain periodes for eg. feffs W of Fury where they only ran around like headless chicken).

Back to topic: The economy isn't collapsing, it's overheated and starting to choke. Go and ask a newcomer if he's ready to shell out - say 10k PED which is a reasponable figure - for gear in 1/2 to one year (because then he'll need it) while accepting that he won't be able to compete with high-level people the next 10 years.

Same goes for current midlevel players, but with a zero more left of the comma.

What answers do you get?

Tussi

[QuintusMagnus]

Originally Posted by Tussi

Problem is that all dominant economic systems feature compound interest on money, which inevitable leads to an exponential growth of financial assets (which are generated through liabilities in the current systems), which in turn puts pressure on the economy to produce exponential growth to cover the financial market.

Only problem here is that no natural system (like a planet) can sustain an exponential growth rate - so as you stated correctly the hypothetical possibility you started with has no real chance to be witnessed in reality.

I think the lag with the highest impact is that a good group of people sees EU as leasure time and not work - and should the gap between 'i want' and 'i get' be time- or money-wise to wide then it's percived as discouraging.

Also the service should be usable with the minimum required setting, there should be no need to have a 4GB RAM (2 on gfx-card and 2 as RAM) with Dual-Raid-0 setup (one raid for swapping, the other for serving game assets) of solid state disks (which can transfer faster than harddrives) to run the game smoothly.

At time i experience lag, is's preferably somewhere in the wilderness. And this type of lag was introduced some VU ago (together with fun-stuff like flying mobs, or the where's my brain periodes for eg. feffs W of Fury where they only ran around like headless chicken).

Back to topic: The economy isn't collapsing, it's overheated and starting to choke. Go and ask a newcomer if he's ready to shell out - say 10k PED which is a reasponable figure - for gear in 1/2 to one year (because then he'll need it) while accepting that he won't be able to compete with high-level people the next 10 years.

Same goes for current midlevel players, but with a zero more left of the comma.

What answers do you get?

Tussi

Again, as long as the rates stay below GDP growth, hypothetically that compound interest is covered. I didn't say it'd be easy, just that with the proper knowledge (including better forecasting techniques than we have today, which IS a possibility) then it'd be mathematically possible.

The planet may not sustain life indefinitely, true...but A) even with current technology, at full productiont his ole earth of ours could sustain something around 10 billion people, B) all countries follow the pattern that many EuroUnion countries have in which you reach a population "tipping point" and then decline (such as the gradually slowing rate of pop growth in the US after the baby boomers, the low rates in China, Japan, Germany, etc., and eventually the slowing rates in India, though that wont fully be realized for another 20-30 years), so the exponential consumption of resources will slow and it'll be a matter of technology growth, which tends to make more efficient rather than less efficient use of given resources. Further, as far as forecasting indefinitely, who says the earth will be fed resources only from terran sources? Asteroid/extraplanetary mining's been a possible, but currently too costly idea for about 30 years now....

Good points on the ease-of-use by lower rate computers. Everybody complains on graphics, but as games like Halo and WoW proved over the years, people will still play if they enjoy themselves, regardless of graphic quality to a certain extent (not an indefinite one, but up to a point).

Long-horizon returns on investment are a problem for asking people with a low commitment (newbies) to drop alot of money. Personally, I play the game with about 400ped to my name. I trade ME and occassionally other enmats, build up the profits to a certain point, then go mine a few favorite spots of mine (I'm a miner, not a hunter), sell that, and sometimes make a profit, sometimes don't, but then I take what I've got left either way and expand my money further. I started with 100 ped, so all in all not a bad bit of work. (note: I got lucky, admittedly. I had 2 strange signal events on my 4th day playing the game, expanded my money at the time out to about 300 ped, which I've since built up to 400 ped of seed money plus all the mining equipment and whatnot).

However, how exactly does one stop "overheating" in a game with no set interest rates? I don't think the overheating thing will present a tremendous problem; even if newbs slowed down entering the economy, there's enough core players in place to keep it slowly growing even in the absence of new blood for a significant period, I think.

Either way, it's kind of an interesting economic structure, because you infinite upward mobility but at the same time few start out in the "middle class," they generally roll in at the lower levels and either "cash out" quickly or stick to it and then start to invest or become a reseller. Thus you have an "older" upper class and younger lower classes relative to the game, so it's an interesting demographic and economic pattern.