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The virtual economy in Ultima Online could be one of the most interesting and important features of the game, but as it currently stands, it has major flaws that prevent it from reaching its potential. In an effort to help Origin understand and remedy these problems, I have studied every "commercial" profession in the game and I believe I may be able to offer some useful insights. By "commercial," I mean those skills for which the main use is producing goods from raw materials for sale to shops or adventurers. These are distinguished from the "adventuring" skills, which may also yield goods in a more indirect way, and the three "raw materials" skills (fishing, lumberjacking, and mining) which extract goods from the world for use by the commercial skills. I also do not address skills which make money without consuming resources, such as begging or skills like item identification that PCs will sometimes pay other PCs to perform [Agamar of Moonglow has a long and interesting post which covers these topics along with mine].
Other UO-Related Comments:
[ Manufacturing
| Farming
| Community
| Guilds
| Vendors
| Houses
| Advancement
| Boats
]
Noteworthy Essays, Proposals, and Other Pages:
[ Faceless' Treatise
| Tiera's Tidbits
| Crafting Essays
| Bob Hanson's Pages
| Player Monsters
]
[ Laws of Online World Design
]
First, I think I should make an attempt to explain how I feel the virtual economy should work in general. One of the major problems with the economy right now is that the NPC shopkeepers, who function as the clearinghouse for most PC sales and purchases, do not keep track of long-term supply and demand. This makes it easier to play the game, since the stores periodically restock with goods and gold without reflecting the current state of demand for their products, but it is unrealistic and it hurts commercial PCs. It is my belief that if the economy were made completely supply-and-demand based, allowing prices to drop to 1gp (never zero) or rise indefinitely, that the prices would work out correctly.
True Supply and Demand Can Work
The main argument against a pure supply-and-demand economy is that the money supply would become very tight, but I don’t believe this is necessarily the case. The way this should work is that adventurers gain money from monsters and dungeons. In this case, "money" means gold and jewels; converting jewels to gold at the jeweler’s should always be possible. The adventurers also collect a certain (small) amount of goods that are useless to them, such as clothing, extra weapons, extra armor, etc. from their kills. They sell these goods to the appropriate shops, lowering the prices on those goods somewhat, and purchase items that they need such as food, better armor, better weapons, reagents, and the like. Meanwhile, commercial PCs would be working to produce those needed items. The pure supply-and-demand economy is a tight market only if it is a closed economy, but because adventurers will be constantly bringing treasure into the towns this is not the case. One adjustment that should probably be made to make this work would be for monsters and dungeon chests to provide very few items that can be made by PCs (less food, less clothing, less armor/weapons) and more money and jewels.
Shops as Part of the Chain
Another facet of the UO economy that makes it difficult for traditional economics to function is that the shopkeepers buy and sell the same items (with a large markup), and also buy and sell the raw materials needed to make items that can be sold back to them. The nature of UO means that it is desirable for a character to be able to purchase raw materials, manufacture goods, and sell them back to the shopkeeper at a profit. In order for this to work, however, the shopkeeper markup must be reduced from its current 100%. The effect of the current system is something like the following: a PC extracts 5gp worth of raw materials from the world and sells them to the shop. Another PC purchases the raw materials for 10gp with shop markup, and manufactures goods worth 8gp, selling them back to the shopkeeper. The shop then sells them to another PC for 16gp. This is a money-losing proposition for PC manufacturers, since the shopkeeper only pays 8gp for the product that cost 10gp to make. The situation is exacerbated by the fact that new characters who have not yet mastered their craft will waste a good amount of material before making the product. This tends to force PCs to acquire their raw materials from other sources, either by extracting them from the wilderness themselves or by finding another PC who offers them at a reasonable price. Forcing PC manufacturers to get their materials this way seems reasonable, but doesn’t work as it stands for several reasons. First: NPC shops provide certain raw materials that are rare or absent in the wilderness. This is a simple problem with the current state of the world, and will hopefully be gradually remedied; one possible solution would be to modify the restocking system such that items are continuously restocked as they are consumed in the world. For example, if an item breaks (i.e. weapons) or is used up (i.e. reagents) it will reappear in the world. It may be spawned as a raw material (ore for weapons, wild reagents, etc.) or it may be stocked in a store (either as the final item or its component parts). Second: since shop restocking resets prices and some materials are inaccurately priced, shops sometimes undercut PC suppliers. Allowing true supply and demand (with minimal restocking and persistent tracking of supply and demand across restocking) should fix this. Third: NPC shops are always open, while PC suppliers are inconsistent. If NPC buy and sell prices were closer, at least for raw materials, the system could function in a more desirable manner; the above example could be profitable if the PC were able to purchase the materials for, say, 6gp instead of 10. The shops would act as a middleman in the PC-to-PC trade system, which is, I believe, the intended effect.
The Need for Skill Proficiency
A final necessary correction would make it more difficult for those who are not masters of a craft to make a profit at it, which is also desirable. This should happen naturally if the supply and demand system were allowed to function correctly. To make it possible to start a trade-based character, all skills should have low-end products that allow the PC to make a small profit while improving the skill, but any high-profit items should be limited to those who have become proficient at the craft. It should be impossible to make a profit at a craft with a skill level below Neophyte; anyone who wishes to pick up a new trade that is not a natural one for the character should lose money at it for a while. Neophytes and Novices should find it difficult to break even, although it should be possible; Apprentices should begin to make money, although slowly, and Journeyman and above should become progressively more lucrative. As noted, this will occur without intervention if the economy is allowed to function naturally, as long as the specific trades are examined and changed if necessary (see the notes on the individual trades) to tweak supply and demand. Unfortunately, even a correctly-tweaked supply will be thrown somewhat askew by those who use "helper" characters rather than investing in the economy, but hopefully a high skill requirement for desirable items will keep this to a minimum. [Note: in my opinion, such characters should be entirely eliminated by forcing each player to keep just one character per server, but I realize that this is a highly controversial viewpoint and I will not press it further. Skill requirements alone should be sufficient to achieve most of the desired effect.]
I will attempt to address the commercial skills in an
order reflecting the current interest in the skill; I therefore begin with
blacksmithy. Smithing is a particularly interesting skill because its products
are in such high demand by adventurers, which means that there is already
a somewhat functional economy based on the skill. My first-hand experience
with smithing is limited to the apprentice level, although I have sought
input from many master smiths and it seems that my experience largely holds
true at all levels: although smiths can produce desirable goods, to do
so profitably is extremely difficult. It almost certainly requires that
the smith be a miner as well, or have access to a large quantity of free
or very cheap ore or ingots. This is not because ingots are overpriced,
necessarily; they are indeed difficult to come by, especially for a new
miner who does not have easy access to a forge near the mountains. The
shopkeeper price for ingots (which seems to be based around 8gp or 4gp
when selling) seems to be fair. The problem is that finished iron goods
are much too cheap, and demand for them is limited because they are frequently
restocked in the stores and are readily available in treasure chests and
on monster corpses. This has wide-ranging effects on the game, because
it means that not only is it difficult to make a living as a smith, it
is much too easy for an adventurer to equip himself with quality weapons
and armor. I believe that if the supply of normal weapons and armor in
the dungeons was reduced, and if supply and demand were allowed to affect
the blacksmith shops correctly, PC smiths would find their products in
much higher demand. This would also have significant additional benefits
for game play as it would suddenly become much less common for every decent
warrior to be equipped with full plate, a good heater shield, and the best
weapon for their class.
It should be possible to mine the rarer ingots that NPCs
seem to use to create colored armor: gold, copper, silver, and black. This
could be skill- or location-dependent, or perhaps both.
There is also a good deal of interest in tailoring, and rightly so. Tailoring has always been a highly profitable skill in UO, and clothing is responsible for the wide variety of character appearances we see in the game. Tailored products are the most popular luxury items (tailored goods are not necessary to survive in the world, but everyone has them) and are therefore a vital part of the economy. Tailoring as a profession is also an interesting case study because its problems are very different from those of smithing. Where smithing has a major problem with the price ratio of material-to-product being too high (hard to make money), tailoring suffers, in part, from the opposite problem.
Cloth Tailoring
The more commonly-used half of tailoring is making clothing from cloth, and this profession suffers badly from the current economy’s failure to adjust prices when supply and demand require a change. A flaw in the current pricing scheme makes spools of thread cost just 2gp, while finished products from that thread can be sold for over 20gp. The "raw materials" for cloth tailoring (wool, cotton, and flax) vary wildly in price, for no apparent reason. Cotton and flax appear rarely, if ever, in the wild (I have heard reports of wild cotton, but never seen it). This might explain the relatively high prices for these items, although given the extremely limited demand the price should not be as high as it is for cotton. Meanwhile, these "raw materials" can be converted, at a significant loss in value, to thread. As previously noted, thread is extremely cheap, despite the short supply (due to the shortage of cotton and flax) and significant demand. However, I believe that the value of thread may not be the problem; the problem is that all other tailored goods are based on the price of wool and its "product," yarn. Wool and yarn prices, and therefore the relative prices of all tailored goods, would probably gravitate towards the value of thread if allowed to move freely, due to the availability of wool and the current lack of demand for tailored products. Although all prices would be deflated somewhat, I still believe that cloth tailoring would be profitable for skilled tailors (see Tailoring Skill Comments, below).
Leather Tailoring
The creation of useful products from the hides of animals and monsters is another very worthwhile facet of tailoring. In this case, the problems of mismatched prices between raw materials and finished products is less severe, because most tailors hunt their own hides and do not purchase them (although they are cheap, they are in short supply). This makes leather products a pure-profit item, and reduces their impact on the economy. Only if the demand for leather products were increased would this become interesting; as it is, this is merely an easy-money sideline for most tailors, and a way to do a favor for a newbie (i.e., create leather armor). Tailors should be able to repair leather armor, just as a smith can repair metal armor, and tailors should be able to sew backpacks, pouches, and bags from a few hides. Optionally, give some chance that hides from monsters yield magical leather armor.
Improving Demand for Tailored Goods
The main problem with tailoring, however, is not the price or supply of the raw materials; rather, it is the lack of demand for the finished products. This brings us back to familiar ground, since similar flaws affect smithing, and a similar solution applies: increase adventurer demand for tailored goods. The supply of tailored cloth goods from adventuring is currently fairly reasonable, but since clothing never wears out, an adventurer need equip himself only once. If clothing slowly faded (requiring re-dyeing to restore the color) and wore out entirely after a few Britannia-weeks, demand would go up significantly. Many players would probably stop wearing tailored goods, which could be their choice but might also incur a penalty to dexterity (since the adventurer with nothing but armor on would be very uncomfortable). Greater demand for leather products would also be desirable, and would probably occur naturally if the prices of metal armor were closer to their true value (see the section on Blacksmithy). The demand for leather armor would also be improved if there were more realistic penalties for wearing metal armor, but I mention that only in passing because it makes for a worthy debate in itself.
One other major problem that affects PC tailors is that all characters can produce anything a master tailor can, given patience, and anyone can use the spinning wheel and loom with no skill check. I think it would be best if another skill (not tailoring) was required to use that equipment, because this would make tailoring parallel other skills like smithing. I also believe that certain tailored goods should require higher tailoring skill (anything "fancy," for example); and it would also be helpful if tailoring skill was required to correctly use dyes since this is a popular use of "tailoring" as well and currently does not require any skill. In addition, tailoring "raw materials" (wool, cotton, flax, and bolts of cloth) need a bug fix to prevent their being sold for full value when almost entirely used, and a quick review is required to fix certain tailoring products which are not salable (some bolts, bandanas, sashes, and full aprons).
Until recently, bowyery was a very popular moneymaking
profession due to the high prices offered by shops for items that were
relatively easy to make. Several changes have made bowyers less common,
which is probably a good thing; the historic overabundance reflected more
on the profession’s profitability than its enjoyability. This leads to
a short aside on the associated profession of the lumberjack.
First, lumber has become much more time-consuming to acquire.
This is a much-needed realism check for the system; now there is actually
a reason to become a good lumberjack (although the improvement rate on
lumberjacking seems incredibly slow). Lumberjacking as a profession, however,
is very limited since almost all bowyers and carpenters can cut their own
logs, meaning that demand from PC or NPC wood suppliers is very small.
Only if large amounts of logs were available for low prices from the shops
would PC bowyers and carpenters consider dropping their axes, and this
would probably result in a system too tedious and insufficiently profitable
for most lumberjacks.
Tinkering is a very valuable skill, as it allows the practitioner to manufacture a variety of items that are useful to other PCs, especially lockable chests (in combination with carpentry). Unfortunately, the prices on some of these items in the shops are artificially low – much lower than demand would dictate – and it is therefore unprofitable for a PC tinker to use up a valuable ingot to create them. Many items seem to be reasonably priced, however, and overall I believe that tinkering is essentially functional as a profession. Tinkers also have an interesting sideline in clocks and clock parts, which are nigh useless except for the occasional home decoration and for sale (at an artificially high value) to tinker shops; if supply and demand were implemented correctly, this would no longer be profitable. My recommendation on this is an interesting and somewhat complex one: make clocks more valuable by changing moongate travel. Currently, moongates are always operational, and they change phase quickly (within a real-time minute, at the maximum) so that it is rarely worth a traveler’s trouble to determine the phase. If they were adjusted to operate only at night (they are, after all, moongates) and their phases were slowed, clocks would become more valuable. This would be even truer if clocks reported the current moongate phase (in city-jumps) along with the current time.
Additions to Tinkering
Although tinkering is already quite useful, it also has a lot of potential additions to allow the creation of certain items which are currently in the game but not for sale and not possible to create. For example, NPC shops and houses are decorated with inkpots, model ships, plates and silverware, and other trinkets, which add to their aesthetic appeal. Allowing a tinker to create these items (glass and earthenware would require the ability to dig from the ground and use the resulting raw material in a fire) would offer a wonderful new realm of decorations for PC buildings. Another popular idea [again, Agamar of Moonglow] is to allow superior tinkers to create golems, which would be humanoid pets. They would require a large amount of ingots, springs, gears, reagents, and possibly – new addition – a brain. They would look like oddly colored full-plate NPCs, with no weapon.
The products of the carpenter are almost exclusively luxury items used by wealthy players in their homes. As such, they could be a valuable part of the economy (much like cloth items) since they encourage rich adventurers to put some of their money back into the system. Unfortunately, the current carpentry system allows anyone to create any carpentry item, regardless of skill. Combine this with the fact that carpentry does not presently consume wood on failure, and professional carpenters have no real value. These problems must be addressed (and the reader may note that the lack of a skill requirement is a recurring theme, affecting many professions) in order for PC carpenters to come into their own. Because – like tailored goods – carpentry products are luxury items, many homeowners would simply forego furniture entirely if they were forced to rely on PC carpenters. Despite this fact, I believe there would still be sufficient demand that it would still be a profitable profession.
Carpentry, like Tinkering, is a profession which has a lot of potential for interesting additional features. I have provided a separate document which details a particularly important one: building boats and houses.
Recently, cooking has become a much more valuable profession
that it had been in the past due to the improved feedback on the state
of hunger when a character eats and the necessity of eating to recover
quickly from battle. Nevertheless, monsters typically carry enough food
to keep most adventurers well fed, and food is cheap and plentiful in shops.
Therefore, I believe that cooking could also use a few improvements. One
interesting addition would be for foods to have varying effects depending
on the type of food. For example, sweet food such as cookies and cake could
give a large instant boost in stamina, but offer little improvement to
the diner’s hunger (and health recovery rate). Meat and bread would provide
a more filling meal, but might not help recover stamina so quickly. Also,
the supply of food from monsters could be decreased, which would force
adventurers to purchase more food from PCs and shops, which would in turn
drive up the prices to make cooking profitable – especially if food from
better chefs were made to provide more benefit. Currently, cooking is profitable
if the raw materials are free – which does happen – but not really worthwhile
if the raw materials must be purchased. Increased demand (and correspondingly
increased prices) would allow a good cook to make good money at the profession.
Other important fixes would be to provide more of the raw materials in
the wild, allowing cooks to harvest them with an appropriate tool (shovel,
axe, or knife), as well as having corpses yield more appropriate meats
(chicken from a chicken, not beef ribs!) and being able to milk cows. One
other very interesting idea for cooking would allow a master cook with
magery skills to create magical food, which could have additional benefits
other than just easing hunger.
As a brief aside, the skill of Taste Identification could
be tied with Cooking to make both skills more useful. For example, it could
be used to determine the relative hunger values of various foodstuffs.
It might allow a skilled chef to search the wilderness for mushrooms and
harvest them if appropriate. Taste Identification does have some potential
when combined with Cooking!
Another thank-you goes to Agamar of Moonglow for this
one: deep-sea fishing (beyond the ring of shallow water visible on Overview
around islands) should allow you to catch more exotic fish.
Inscription may be the single best-balanced "professional" skill under the current economy. It is very difficult for someone who is not an excellent scribe to make money at it, but a persistent practitioner can find it very profitable, both when selling to NPC shops and (especially) when selling to eager PC buyers. The raw material prices are reasonable (it is assumed that blank scrolls are spawned whenever someone uses a scroll, so the natural supply is fairly high and constant) and the finished product prices have good correspondence to the skill required to make them. The fact that both shops and PCs buy scrolls from scribes indicates that this is a profession that works right. Additionally, the difficulty of making money as a new scribe is balanced by the non-monetary benefits that come with the scribing skill (i.e., you can make scrolls for yourself and your friends). The only possible complaint is that scribes are forced to become excellent mages as well, but in my opinion, this is only common sense.
One additional note on blank scrolls gleaned from another virtual economist would be to allow the creation of paper from wood. Perhaps using a hammer or sledgehammer on kindling could create "wood chips" (the graphic could be the one used for dough) and using water on wood chips would bring up a window to create paper. The user would have the choice of creating either a blank map (with a check on Cartography), a blank scroll (with a check on Inscription), drafting paper (see Carpentry), or a book (also with a check on Inscription, and a requirement of 1 hide). An extension to the book idea would be to allow the conversion of ordinary books into spellbooks: perhaps targeting a blank book with the inscription cursor would have a chance of making a spellbook.
In some ways, alchemy is the ugly cousin of inscription, the other magic-related skill. The demand for potions is not particularly high, since most of the effects of potions are either temporary or achievable by other means; meanwhile, the supply on monster corpses is fairly high. Creating potions for sale to shops is now profitable (with the adjustment in reagent prices), but shop prices for potions are probably too high because there is, as noted, little demand. Sadly, this situation would likely be worsened under a pure supply and demand system, since reagents would likely be more expensive and potions would probably drop even lower in price. Reducing the supply from adventuring (i.e. limiting potion carrying to certain high-level magical monsters) would help the problem, although there is little to be done to solve the underlying fault, which is that most potions are not sufficiently useful. The truly useful potions require fairly large investment in reagents, and the value is typically worse than the corresponding spell. Some potions will remain popular, but I believe this will continue be a largely self-supporting trade (potions are used mostly by the alchemist who created them), regardless of any tweaks to supply and demand. Creating more powerful uses of potions is a tricky thing, because many of the obvious improvements might be overkill and would make alchemy too powerful.
Cartography is a potentially valuable skill that didn’t pan out. Raw material supply is not really a problem for Cartography – the problem is with the demand – but the note in the Inscription section about creating paper also applies to blank maps. The problem with cartography is lack of interest: the Overview macro provides a short-range view that is infinitely more useful than any small map, while larger maps are available from shops at very reasonable prices. The only hope for the current cartography skill, I think, would be to (a) remove the Overview macro, (b) force sailors to find PC cartographers instead of NPC mapmakers to chart the world for them, and (c) extend auto-navigation with map pins to land travel. Even these major changes probably can’t rescue the current functionality of cartography, however. Removing the Overview would be wildly unpopular, and some people would just keep a radar map handy in their favorite image viewer; few people would bother with the hard-to-read small-scale maps made by PC cartographers. Removing world maps and other large charts from the NPC supply would effectively remove them from the game, because every sailor playing has a cloth map of the world and a sextant. Few captains would to go to the trouble of finding a PC cartographer just to save a tiny bit of effort navigating. Auto-navigation on land would be difficult to use on a large-scale map and not particularly useful on the smaller ones.
Major Changes to Mapmaking
The only solution I see for cartography is to significantly enhance what the maps can do for you. For example, make it possible to use pins on a large-scale map for the target of the Mark spell. Offer an additional feature when making small-scale maps such that it will use coloring to show the current status of the area’s natural resources (lumber, ore, and fish) and any treasure that may be nearby (not inside buildings, though). Perhaps – and this might be a little harsh – require the use of a map to sail long distances (i.e. outside of the shallow water areas visible on radar). This would probably cause problems with sea monsters, etc., however.
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