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Author’s Note: This is the second and probably final addendum to my Treatise on the Ultima Online Economy. It includes several noteworthy additions to specific skills, along with a few further comments on the overall economic system. Once again, there are too many contributors for me to thank them all here, but this time I would specifically like to thank Serina for her comments. I would also like to quote Designer Dragon's response to the Treatise: "We plan to eventually implement almost all of it."
The Time Factor: Why?
I would like to thank Thorin IronForge for reminding me of the another major economic factor that is often missing from Ultima Online's system: time. In any economy, a time factor is required in the equation describing the value of any item. UO achieves this effect by requiring a significant time investment to earn the skills necessary to be successful at a skill, and by forcing those who gather raw materials to spend time doing so. Furthermore, certain professions do require a time investment during item creation, notably Inscription (which takes time to recover the skill) and Bowcraft (which takes time to manufacture the item). Unfortunately, the time requirements do not apply equally to all items in all skills, which causes severe problems for the economy. The time factor should apply to all items in three parts: acquiring the resources, manufacturing the items, and transporting the items (or the raw materials, if appropriate).
The Time Factor: Resource Acquisition
It is my opinion that the time factor for the gathering of raw materials is, for the most part, correctly done. "Permanent" resources take time to harvest (with mining, fishing, or lumberjacking). Other raw materials come from animals and monsters, which are typically unreliable as sources because they are not always easy to find. Given the relative values of the materials, however, it is currently far too easy to make money from animal and monster hides, which are fairly plentiful; the quantity of raw materials (but not the means of acquiring them) needs review.
The Time Factor: Transportation
In a real economy, the transportation time for moving both raw materials and products is a significant part of the cost of any item. In UO, this is almost perfectly implemented, but for one major, showstopping flaw: the Recall spell. A simple fix to Recall to perform the stamina check done on movement would significantly improve the economic system overall, by allowing for regional supply and demand to affect prices. It would become worthwhile to use pack horses and boats to move large amounts of goods. Once Recall is fixed, it will also be helpful to review boat carrying capacity and speed: currently, all boats are essentially identical. It would be interesting to provide varying rates of travel and holds depending on boat model (dragon boat or not) and size (small/medium/large). This would also have other positive effects on the game, encouraging more extensive use of this underused feature (leading to ideas like piracy, fleets, etc.).
The Time Factor: Production
Production times are wildly skewed from skill to skill, giving some skills a large advantage in time investment. This is an area where resource acquisition and transportation time differences could be balanced out, but currently this is largely ignored. Certain skills (boweyery, for example) take time for both material acquisition and item creation; other skills (tailoring) provide nearly instant gratification for both stages. This is easily fixed by adding "animations" to all skills: for tailoring, adding an animation to the loom and the sewing kit would be very beneficial. Many contributors have proposed that it is necessary to make complex item creation take a very long time (i.e. if making a ring tunic takes five seconds, making a plate one should take two minutes). I believe that this is not strictly necessary (although it would be beneficial) because of the time commitment that should be required to reach the skill level necessary to create the complex item.
Consignment
An interesting, but possibly hard-to-implement addition to the economy: consignment.
The idea is straightforward: as in the real world, you use a shopkeeper as a
middleman in a deal between buyer and seller, allowing the seller to carry on his
normal business while his items are being sold to the buyer. The shopkeeper keeps a
small amount of the proceeds, of course. In UO, the idea is the same. The seller
can try to "consign" his items (this does require a new shopkeeper keyword, of course)
instead of selling it. He is allowed to specify the price to charge for the item.
If the item is successfully sold, he shopkeeper keeps a certain percentage, perhaps 15%.
The buyer gets a good deal on the item (less than the normal shopkeeper price) and the
seller gets more money than he would from selling it to the shopkeeper outright. Of
course, he takes the chance that the item is never sold. This idea provides many of
the benefits of vendors without the world clutter and resource drain they cause, and
provides the items in their normal shops, in the easy to use shopkeeper "buy"
window (instead of the sometimes annoying vendor inventories). [Editor's Note: please
see my Comments on Vendors, wherein I examine the conceptual
problems with vendors.]
[Editor's Note: I receive more comments about my Blacksmithy section than any other, and I cannot possibly thank all the contributors or even include all of their suggestions. Many of the ideas I receive are actually part of other features of my overall economic plan (particularly comments about pricing and items automatically stocked in NPC shops); hopefully I am not leaving out many major points. Runesaber and Flux have both provided detailed analyses of the profession, and I hereby attempt to round out my treatment of it by including what I can of their suggestions.]
Although this would occur naturally if store restocking were "fixed" such that NPC-run shops were not automatically supplied, it is worth noting that NPC shops should (by default) supply only the basic armor (silver color, below average quality), leaving the more desirable variants to PC suppliers (who would, of course, be free to sell them to shops). The proposed changes to the overall economic system should also fix the incredibly low ingot supply in NPC shops, but that would be worth investigating separately as well. Prices, of course, are ever in need of review: currently, a nice magical weapon is worth about the same as a wooden shield in an NPC shop.
Low-level smiths should have a high failure (destruction) rate on repairs, encouraging adventurers to seek out the more skilled PCs. This should obviously be combined with the earlier suggestion to allow professionals to display their title ("Master Smith") if they desire, along with the ability for high-level smiths to etch their names into the works. Indeed, title display and creator identification are even more important than I had realized, because I have only recently become aware of the armor rating and durability bonuses provided by a good smith.
It would be beneficial to both Blacksmithy and Tinkering if the various tools used for smithing actually varied in performance. For example, tongs and sledgehammers both perform the same function, but are wildly different in price and weight. It would be great if certain items were more likely to be made well with different tools available (sledgehammers are unlikely to make quality chain mail, while tongs are probably insufficient for a good plate helm).
Just a quick idea to solve a problem raised by my earlier suggestions:
a contributor points out that it should be possible to beg (Begging skill)
for food. One of the basic tenets of my earlier suggestions for Cooking was
to make the penalties for not eating more severe; this would provide a way
for poor, unskilled new characters to satisfy that requirement.
By far the best idea I've heard for improving the currently useless Cartography skill is treasure caches [I would love to thank whoever originally suggested this on the message boards a few weeks ago, but I forget the name!]. In the earlier suggestions on Cartography I proposed adding a display of the local resources to the information shown on maps; the idea of treasure caches uses a similar idea. The character puts items -- the treasure -- into a chest, places the chest on the ground in the wilderness. (As a boon to the Tinkering and Carpentry skills, there could also be a requirement that the buried item be a locked chest.) Using a shovel on the chest "buries" the chest (with a check against Hiding), which makes the chest invisible and sets its decay time to several real-life days (ideally, the chest becomes visible again before decaying, allowing for the realistic possibility that it has worked its way out of the ground and into plain sight). The character must be carrying a blank map, which is automatically inscribed with a map to the area; if no map is available, a message would appear saying "You could bury that, but you'd never find it again without a map!". The quality of the map depends on the Cartography skill, and after the item is buried, any detail map made of the area will show the buried item (Cartographers make careful surveys of an area!); these two features should make Cartography much more useful. To retrieve a buried item, the finder must be carrying a map showing the treasure and must dig with a shovel on the exact tile where the item is buried. Whether the item is found or not would use a check on the Detect Hidden skill.
Not only would this idea provide significant improvements to several currently underutilized skills (Cartography, Hiding, Detect Hidden), it would also provide great opportunities for role-playing and would add a new and very interesting facet to the game. Again, I feel that this is one of the simplest and most exciting proposed additions to the game that I've heard in some time, and I hope to see it implemented soon.
One potion that is notable by its absence from the list of those
currently available is Restore Mana. This would obviously be
an extremely powerful potion, and would necessarily require many
reagents and be very expensive. I believe that it is worthwhile
considering, although obviously a good deal of thought needs to be
done to make sure it does not adversely affect game balance.
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