Honestly, the reason currency works in other video games. Lets take RPG's as our first example, is because they have sinks and dispensers. This somewhat prevents inflation and also allows developers to have an effect on the economy. In RPG's the dispensers would be things such as quests, killing raid bosses, clearing dungeons for loot. ETC.. This is comparable in haven to, farming, hunting, and foraging. However, the problem comes in that, there is no solid, structured, vendor. In RPG's you can rely on straight up cash from quests and killing monsters however in haven everything is an item. In RPG's you can sell small items like random pieces of cloth and trades materials to vendors. These vendors spit out an amount of cash to give based on the quality of the item. This is comparable to killing animals, and you constantly are getting things like bear teeth, boar tusks, deer antlers, etc... that at some point become no longer useful. Specific drops for different monsters that you can then sell to a vendor. Basically, these vendors have an infinite supply of money, and therefore selling antlers, blueberries, barley seeds or meat would be possible to make income infinitely thus inflating the system and ruining it.
This is where money Sinks come in. This is comparable to games like world of warcraft where you must spend money to get things like mounts and the ability to ride them as well as skills. Basically, money would have to be very easy to get as well as constantly being soaked in by a sink. Other menial things can soak up an economies money as well, like vanity items, methods of transportation etc.
This brings me to my third part. Not needing vendors in haven because its too much of a system or infrastructure to implement. As it is right now, the closest thing to currency in haven and hearth that has meaning full sinks and reasonable dispenses, is LP. There are all sorts of issues that can arise out of LP trading and what not, such as the value of curiosities skyrocketing but for the most part, with the new fate system, no one person should be getting an excessive amount of LP or rare curios. This would also be fairly balanced seeing as most types of players can all get curiosities.
Hunters can get bat wings, tusks, antlers, teeth, and make curios from hides and leather and etc.
Miners can get cats gold and petrified seashells (yuck) but can also make tiny abacus and tin soldiers to keep up with some of the better curios.
farmers can make straw dolls, harvest linen and silk to get some of those curios that I don't really know the names of.
and foragers can get all those good foragable curios like enthroned toads and what not.
Basically, the key to any currency is that any person can get it doing what they like as long as they put in the work. Not only that but this type of thing would remove the need for vendors since the characters are generating the currency on their own. Now, seeing as death removes like what 90% of a characters LP from the world? There will rarely ever be a problem with over inflation.
This means that all a noob has to do is craft some nettle clothes and pick some Q10 blueberries and sell it to farmers for LP. Basically trading skills for stats. So the farmer will get the stats he needs or whatever from eating the blueberry pies while the noob will get some good foundation for his character to get stronger. The more you sell berries the higher you can raise your survival and get better ones OR follow a different path and sell berries to get combat stats so you can sell boar meat to people for LP. Selling all your stuff? No problem sell, your high Q stuff that you don't have the stats to use properly for alot of LP and use that LP to get your character those stats to make it yourself or to buy it. Not only that but trading curiosities that give 7K LP for 5K LP to someone means you dont need too wait the 48 hours for the curio to finish studying. Essentially saving you time. This means not only will the buyer profit in LP overall, but the seller will get the quick LP he needs for Yeomanry too protect his goods or druidic right to increase silk production etc etc etc. The possibilities are literally endless and the best part is, all you would have to do is make LP trade-able.
I really want to hear what you guys think about this. I think it would definitely be something to try out. Even if its like a 2month experiment. If you tell haven players you're going to test a new system on a 2 month long world, You'd be suprised on how differently everyone plays. Not only that but eveyone would get LP faster.
MAJOR ISSUE WITH THIS SYSTEM AS POINTED OUT TO ME BY MAZE.
The dirty people that find joy in making a thousand alts to constantly right click trees and hit pick seeds will ruin it. People will make ten million alts and just get the EZ 5.5kLP you can get at the beginning and trade it to themselves. and basically, anyone who doesn't do this will be left behind. Now there are a few ways to solve this whos effectiveness varies. The first way being making a skill requirement to trade LP. For example, 5K LP for a skill called speech or something like that to share your knowledge ( learning points) with other people. This would reduce the want to spend an hour collecting seeds and samsara for like a couple hundred LP. However people would still have alts just to study curios all day then trade the LP back to themselves. Other ways vary such as making IP adress restricted LP trading, meaning you can't trade to yourself (which imo sucks). Another way would be to make LP convertable into coins. This brings the whole coin system back which I think sevenless pouch thing would work for this. Basically, you would have to make these coins study-able or something to convert it into LP meaning that you couldn't study a bunch of little ones you would have to study one big one. However, this removes functionality with trading curios because, why would you trade curios ever instead of just studying them when you'd have to spend time to study the LP anyways. Now another way of doing this would be to put a limit on how many coins of LP a person could consume(assuming you eat it like a sausage that gives LP) a day that gets reset everyday at midnight. This would allow for interesting things, like small trades being very valuable in the beginning and having large cupboards of 1k LP coins stored for later usage. Although this also could prove a hassel for devs to control aswell as nullifying the whole idea of making large trades or a lot of trades daily. So sticking with the LP coins idea, you could limit only the amount of LP coins you could consume from coins marked by your own IP Address. However, this too could be abused using VPN's and proxies. So therefore, regarding the experience system, it would have to be more strict on new characters or afk curio bots.
Basically, noobs will have to rely on LP coins as well as curios because they cant get enough experience to just use curios therefore preventing bots where as other characters who have already built up a lot of experience over their years can feel free to studying away on mirkwoods and batwings if they please.
Wrap up
All-in all, making LP convertible into trade-able coins that can be eaten like food to instantly gain LP (holding values to make more precise trades something like big medium and small coins in terms of LP like 1, 10 , 100, 1000 and 100000) would make starting up less menial and quicker as well as require less experience. It would also add a trading system that is stable and not really going to fall victim to inflation due to exp limitations aswell as death being a total loss of LP.
). This could be used for other nice things too, apart from coinpresses, so it should make larpers happy too.
