Feedback Request 01/13/2013 - Trade Totems

[Xira]

Here, let me explain WHY I'm right, rather than just stating what's going to happen. Since it seems the devs aren't listening to simple statements, perhaps a historical argument will work.

In the USA back a long time ago, we backed our currency with gold. In fact, gold was often used as currency by itself among people. When the government decided to go off the gold standard(Nixon) they faced the problem that more and more people were simply using gold itself as currency. They wanted people to use their new thing, unbacked bills, to trade with. People refused to do this, so the government sent men with guns to many, many houses and demanded people's gold. It was made illegal to trade in gold. Enforced by men with guns. People were jailed and killed over their refusal to use unbacked bills. Eventually it became accepted to use unbacked bills, by governmental force of arms, and they repealed the laws making barter and gold owning illegal. People are still jailed over attempts to barter with gold and silver, if the owner of the business owed complains.

Since you aren't going to remove nails from the game and you can't stick a gun in our faces, you must provide something of value in return for your 'currencies' to create a demand for it. Until there is something of value given in return for currency by the game system to create an initial and ongoing demand, you are going to have a totally useless feature. I'm really not sure why you are developing it first, rather than something useful, but perhaps you just don't know how an economy works.

I liken it to Amazon Coins or BitCoins, the first is a disaster in the making and will never be widely adopted, the 2nd does provide value in that it's slightly harder for the government to control and confiscate, but is still not widely adopted because there are already established systems in place that are 'more legal'.

[Azzym]

Sorry if I am missing some thing you find important, but I am only listing things that are a true sink - nails are not on the list, because the stuff you create with nails (buildings, carts) are not "used up".

I like your post tomduril, it's spot on. Came to think about the nails when I read the quote above. Even though nails aren't a true sink every weaponcrafter grinding on the Tulip Club (or whatever it is named) spend quite a bit of nails on it. I'm not sure how many but if you need 10k clubs to get to 100 you have spent 20k nails. It's not a huge drain but it's probably more nails spent on levelling that skill alone than you spend on a smaller tribe, especially if you take the refunds into consideration.

[tomduril]

The major sink for nails is Wraincrafting - to be able to craft (and even learn the shemes) master carts you need to spend about 40k nails! There are other shemes for grinding on Wraincraft, but those need even more time (eg forager handles with 2 grass ropes).

Learning architecture, weaponcraft and wraincraft are a true sink for nails - you are right - *but* once you have built like 20 carts, you wont need any more nails. So basically it is not a real sink, in the sense that it is a sink for veteran players.

So eventually it will stack up at bigger tribes - unless you "throw nails" at new players that leave after 1 month (and spend like 3k nails on a skill they will not perform for the tribe). This is the only real sink at the moment (as far as I know) - players that use up resources and then leave ...