My Not So Private Crusade Against Macroing

[ThirdEmperor]

How about ceramic coins? You can build them out of clay, one clay=two coins, that would allow everyone to have coins, the only problem would be that once all players had access to coin making coins would flood H&H and become worthless. Total disaster.
The only way around this is to make a special material used only for crafting coins, and only a set amount of it would exist at any one time, but that's pretty much what we have and macroers would have a monopoly by day 1.

[ThirdEmperor]

What`s wrong with simply using tiny chips of ANY metal as money? Tin, Copper, Iron, Silver, Gold. Made in alloying crucible (so, accessible to anyone). Could be smelted back to nuggets.
The only problem I see here is a quality of the metal that goes into and out of the coins. I`d suggest a coin for say every 1q of a nugget, but I suppose that system can be abused when smelting back larger quantities of coins to make higher quality nuggets. Maybe cap the number of coins that can be smelted into nugget at once by Smithing skill or the quality of crucible (roughly appropriate to what q metal would have been recieved when processing common ore).

Granted, that will also require some stacking implementation on devs side, because no way you going to fit even 100 coins in a keyring-type purse.

What's wrong is nobody but a few macroers and obsessed players have mines. Whats worse, as soon as coins actually become worth something, macroers will mass produce them, inflating everything ridiculously and screwing everyone who can't play 24/7

[arriel]

What's wrong is nobody but a few macroers and obsessed players have mines. Whats worse, as soon as coins actually become worth something, macroers will mass produce them, inflating everything ridiculously and screwing everyone who can't play 24/7

Why you think it won`t happen to anything else used as a currency? I mean, macro pwn regardless, so does nolife.
You`ll have to trade for metal sooner or later. The scarcity of metal is another topic entirely. Historically, gold wasn`t that widespread either, and very few had it.

If you are a hermit, like I am, you won`t need money that much. If you travel cities, you`ll be able to trade money for chantrelles, cavebulbs, silk, linen, etc, just like you are now trading metals. If macroers mass-produce money, all these products would just cost more in terms of coins - they are still needed on market regardless, and you`ll get more metals in return. So I can`t see why mass-production can be in their favor.

[ThirdEmperor]

How about Jorb or Loftar gives everyone a startup cash sum of a coin that can't be produced, and overtime they introduce an ingame system where the supply of the coin is controlled by lets say random spawning of a special rock to mine the coin from. Im not sure whether this would be regarded as a form of NPC or neither am I sure if its in the nature of Loftar to give everyone something for free (but wasn't there an occasion when Jorb handed out pumpkins?).

That answer your question?

As for why inflation matters, it means that the economy becomes useless for non-macroers, say macroe 1 some how spits out 100 cast iron bars and turns them into cic, for the sake of simplicity lets say there was already 100,000 cic in the economy, this means all cic prices must double or the shopkeepers will lose money, because the more coins in the economy the less they're worth. Whats worse the price increase will hurt those who don't macro because their money is halved in value, in essence stealing half their coins from them. The only way around this is for everyone to macro. Hence: Inflation = Tears of devoted players

[burgingham]

You neither have any idea on how macros work nor do you on how a monetary economy functions, do you?

[ThirdEmperor]

Actually I know quite a bit, although I'm ashamed to admit I did forget to factor in supply vs. demand. As for macroes as far as I know they repeat a task endlessly until they're turned off. You probably know more tho, why don't you explain it?
I based this off the little I do know, money changes value depending on how much money there is compared to how much goods there is in the market, therefor a drastic increase in coin supply without a corresponding increase in the goods supply reduces the value of coins in general. I probably left something out, could you try to add it in for me? Thanx.

[burgingham]

For the macros, I am by no means any good in making them nor do I use them much. But I have seen quite alot of them for this game and I can assure you that it would take too much work to make a macro which mines, smelts and then turns bars into coins. Even if you did make one it would be very prone to failure. So better just mine yourself.

The monetary system wouldn't like work at all without a backup in form of a central bank, which would have to be run by either NPC's (which the devs don't want) or a large group of players (but then the possibility of corruption/abuse cannot be ruled out). Even with such a bank we have no people who would be able to steer the monetary course correctly. My knowledge on this is limited as well, but I am damn sure there is a reason independant specialists control the central banks worldwide.

What is even more important though is that I think (and this has been discussed before) that any kind of forced in monetary system would completely the spirit of this games economy. The devs had avery hard time with implementing vending stands and only used coins as a currency because they couldn't come up with another solution that quick.

[arriel]

Actually I know quite a bit, although I'm ashamed to admit I did forget to factor in supply vs. demand. As for macroes as far as I know they repeat a task endlessly until they're turned off. You probably know more tho, why don't you explain it?
I based this off the little I do know, money changes value depending on how much money there is compared to how much goods there is in the market, therefor a drastic increase in coin supply without a corresponding increase in the goods supply reduces the value of coins in general. I probably left something out, could you try to add it in for me? Thanx.

I don`t get it.
Say I have a chest of chantrelles. I go exchange it for 3 cast irons and make a plow.
Now, say it was 30q irons. We have monetary exchange, so I get 90 cast iron coins for my chest. I melt coins into 3 bars and make my plow. Or I melt one bar, make nuggets, dig couple of cellars and a handful of keys, and still have 60 coins left, I then go and buy linen thread from my neighbour for the rest of the cash.

Now! Let`s say the guys on the mountain dug all night long on macro (dunno if you can really do that Oo), so now thay have 300 cast irons for trade. I still have my one chest of chantrelles, so I exchange it for their 3 cast irons. What has changed? If they change prices, I`ll find another supplier. If they buy all linen threads from my neighbour with the rest of their cast iron, I`ll just go with plan A and make a plow. Whatever they do, it doesn`t make metals less valuable than they are.

[ThirdEmperor]

Supply and Demand my good man! You correct, the cast iron would be as valuable as ever UNTIL THE MACROER TRADES IT. Imagine the hypothetical town A, everyone in town A is a farmer and needs three iron bars to make a farming tool they desperatly need, but no one in town has any. Then the macroer comes to town and trades them all 3 CI bars, suddenly they all have enough ci to make their tools and therefor need it less. Before the farmers greatly needed ci to build tools, now they have more ci, and therefor don't need it as much, meaning they will trade less for it and therefor the value of ci has dropped in village A

[Potjeh]

What if I macro linen, or RoBs, or silk? All more plausible than macroing coins.