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Author’s Note: This is most likely the first of a series of addenda to my treatise on the Ultima Online economy. The response to the original treatise has been incredible and I want to thank everyone who read it and sent comments. I would also like to thank Runesaber, Agamar of Moonglow, and especially Robert Olmstead, whose posts to the UO Vault's Beta Board contributed greatly to both the original essay and the comments that follow.
Although the overarching problem with the economy in general is the lack of true supply and demand, it has other features – some related to supply and demand, and others not – which deserve review as well. For example, shopkeepers could do some simple intelligent adjustment of their markup based on supply and demand: if a particular item has many suppliers willing to sell at a low cost and many buyers willing to pay a heavy price, the markup could remain at the 100% level. But if PC’s aren’t selling certain items to the shops, or if no one is buying at the listed price, the NPC could lower the markup first, and lower the "base price" as a last resort. Another element of the economy that is ignored in my original essay is the NPC residents of the towns. There are many, many NPC citizens, and they make good money training PCs and begging, as well as acquiring useful items by offering quests. They should work with the economy like everyone else – buying food, buying equipment for their profession, and selling items that aren’t appropriate for their skills. Ideally they would actually walk into the shops to trade, but this is probably too difficult to implement; a behind-the-scenes implementation would work just as well.
Skill Interdependence
[Selected items from Robert Olmstead’s Discourse on the UO economy.] As noted in the original treatise, one tricky part of the virtual economy is that, unlike in real life, shops tend to buy and sell the same items, and often sell raw materials which can be used to make items for sale back to the same shop. The nature of the game is such that it is desirable for PCs to be able to purchase those raw materials and sell the manufactured item back to the store at a profit. In order to make this process somewhat more realistic (and less costly for the shopkeepers), more interdependence between skills is necessary. Raising the basic skill requirements for making items would partially address this issue, but skilled craftsmen would still be able to drain a shopkeeper without interdependence with other skills. A few examples:
Skill Proficiency, Take II
The importance of skill proficiency requirements cannot be underestimated. In addition to the comments on this from the original treatise, it should also be noted that it is vital that all failures at a skill consume raw materials – currently this is not the case with skills like carpentry and tinkering. This will allow proficiency requirements for these skills to be done like they are for bowyering, with failure rates for the complex products very high at lower skill levels. Otherwise, it would be possible for unskilled craftsmen to eventually succeed, merely by trying enough times.
Proficiency requirements also lead to the concepts of quality and craftsmanship. These concepts, which relate to the skill of the gatherer of the raw material as well as that of the manufacturer, should be allowed to affect the usefulness and therefore the price of the product. These modifiers could be applied to all goods in the way that durability is currently applied to metal products from blacksmiths.
Skill Advancement
One serious problem with certain professional skills right now is that they are extremely difficult to advance. It seems likely that this is because the game has noticed that a lot of people are moderately skilled at that profession; there should be some sort of adjustment (like the one that obviously exists for swordsmanship) to allow these skills to rise. Many people would not consider it worth the sacrifice (in skill-cap points) to get their lumberjacking to 70 – make that high level effectively required to be a decent lumberjack, but allow those who wish to get there to do so. Making it difficult to raise these skills is desirable, but for a skill which is constantly used to increase by only a point or two in a real-time week or month seems overly restrictive. [I have personal experience with this problem affecting lumberjacking and tailoring; I believe it affects many other skills as well.]
Specialization
Many people have commented on the need to be able to specify which skills a character is interested in. This would, perhaps, slow the atrophy rate on those skills and ensure that they are not displaced by skills that are not marked in this way. A correct implementation of this would even allow the lowering of the skill cap (highly desirable, as it encourages specialization). This might also make it easier for a character who wishes to change professions to do so: simply remove the flag from the old profession and move it to the new one.
The single most frequent suggestion for the original treatise’s section on blacksmithy is to allow players to create magic weapons and armor. Despite its popularity, however, this is a bad idea. If it were possible to enchant items – or for a sufficiently skilled smith to create enchanted products – there would be many players who would make it a goal to be able to do so. This is only natural, and would be a perfectly reasonable goal. However, it would also make finding such items in the dungeons completely uninteresting (after all, money is not in short supply for most adventurers, and they would probably be wearing and wielding the best possible gear; finding moderately enchanted items in the dungeon would not longer be exciting). As it stands, magical items are truly rare and interesting, and are the goal of many a PC quest. This should not be compromised by allowing players to create such items.
Another common comment on blacksmithy is that smiths should be able to reveal their skill level, at least above a certain point. This is obviously desirable, has little or no potential for unintended bad side effects, and should be implemented as soon as possible. A related idea would allow grandmaster smiths to inscribe their name in their creations. This latter suggestion would aid the PC manufacturer by adding a significant "coolness factor" to the item, and both ideas would aid the buyer in identifying the item’s high quality.
One problem that did not seem significant enough to make
an appearance in the original treatise is that NPCs can sell much-sought-after
colorful armor, which PCs cannot create. This should be reversed, allowing
PCs to create all colors (steel, iron, copper, black, and gold) if provided
with the correct ingots; as noted in the original essay,
mining these ingots could be location- or skill-dependent, or both. NPCs should not be able
to create colored armor, although this problem would likely fix itself
if shops were not allowed to reset their inventory – a basic tenet of the
original treatise. Fixing store restocking and supply and demand would
also address another major complaint: ingot price and supply, which are
too high and too low, respectively. This is also an area that would greatly
benefit from the markup-adjustment discussed above.
The most important new items for tailoring are discussed above in the section on skill interdependence. One additional change which would be worth thinking about would be to allow the creation of bone armor from hides and bones – i.e. a bone tunic from hides and those heavy piles of bones that appear in dungeons, etc. This idea has some of the same drawbacks as enchanting weapons (see Blacksmithy), but because skulls don’t appear in the game except as bone helms this would not artificially increase the supply of such helms, which are the most in-demand piece of bone armor.
[An important note, which applies in general but especially
to tailoring, is that provisioners buy far too many products – skullcaps,
bows and crossbows, etc. – that are not really in their field. Provisioners
should be much more limited in what they buy and sell.]
This skill is also discussed above in the section on skill
interdependence, but one additional note is worth making. Archery may be
the most complained-about combat skill in the game. One way to address
these complaints would be to allow bow or crossbow quality (as determined
by the skill of the manufacturer, and identified by arms lore) to determine
firing rate.
Two important addenda to the section on building boats and houses:
Sorely lacking from the original treatise’s section on Cooking is any mention of the benefits provided by a more highly skilled chef. Several other posts have addressed this, and they agree on the basic concept that food should be more and more helpful as the skill of the cook increases. The value of food from an unskilled chef is the subject of some debate; it should probably be zero, because raw food is readily available and if unskilled cooks can prepare the raw meat with any success, this will significantly reduce the need for skilled ones. The current "all or nothing" implementation, although unrealistic, offers more or less the desired functionality.
Another note is that multi-part food items should check the Cooking skill at all stages, to make such items truly a specialty of excellent cooks. It would also be helpful if NPC bakers could explain the steps required for multi-part foods, since some of them are not obvious.
Other would-be gourmets have proposed that the Cooking skill be checked during the carving of a corpse, with the better-skilled carver extracting more food and more varieties of food. This is an excellent idea and would have many positive implications for the Cooking skill.
Raw and cooked food weights need review. Food prices are
also in desperate need of review, but this should fix itself under a true
supply and demand system. However, NPCs do not recognize certain food items
as salable, notably fish steaks and stacks of muffins.
Several respondents to the original treatise have noted that the section on Alchemy is unnecessarily pessimistic. Alchemy has a lot of potential – especially because potions can be used during battle if the fighter is wielding a one-handed weapon – and should not be overlooked.
Perhaps the main problem with Alchemy is that its products too closely mirror effects available with magery, which most characters already have available (because they are at least partly a mage themselves, or are in close contact with someone who is). Giving Alchemy potions that provide effects not available through magery would greatly aid the skill:
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