Unwanted equilibrium in Cantr's resource/production system.

[Cogliostro]

Before we even start, in the distance an angry murmur can already be heard: "Oh no, no no! Don't change anything, because that will devalue good X, and my character has collected a lot of X so that's how he feels he is rich and his life is a success, so don't change anything. Period."

Whatever these people want to say, I have said and will say a hundred more times (if necessary) that we need radical, game-balance-altering changes if Cantr is to survive and prosper. The current artificial equilibrium has grown entirely stale, and that's obvious to anyone, even new players. The subject of this post is the stale equilibrium of the resource system and production. If you look at the wiki and compare the production rates, requirements and yields for many different goods you will see that they all follow two basic criteria:

1) From the perspective of the player, everything is produced at (roughly) the same rate. That is, it doesn't matter that you are producing hematite, bread, or piernik (??? all-powerful Polish lobby). The point we want to make is that there is no order-of-magnitude advantage in producing any particular good over any other. There are small advantages in some, but everything is really clumped together and nothing is ever producible enmasse, except perhaps potatos or carrots.

2) Project requirements are written with an eye for "how it works in the real world", and where possible try to emulate how much dough you need for a pie, how much meat for a stew, etc. - in the real world.

Who here doesn't see the glaring and irreconcilable contradiction between (1) and (2)? In the real world some industries and areas of production yield dozens, hundreds of times more profit than some others. The spread is incredibly diverse. In Cantr the spread is clumped, artificially, around a single point of equilibrium, but the project requirements irrationally continue to ask for "realistic" amounts of stuff.

What all this leads to is that in most of Cantr's industries, especially the more advanced ones, people make stuff for their own needs only and then stop. They intuitively understand that everything is nerfed, so why bother with that long, tedious work, when you could just as well be doing some other project, always with about equal (very low) profitability. Whoever it is that keeps setting many of Cantr's projects and things like that to require 20 days, 40 days... you are not doing yourself a favour here by ignoring that players are real people, and their time is the most valuable thing that there is in their lives. You, on the other hand, treat it as though it was an infinite, replenishable resource, thinking perhaps that this way you are "balancing" something and engendering scarcity which you think leads to economical activaiton and prosperity. I mean, this is not an economics forum, but even a child can see that this idea is utterly ridiculous; it's only educated people who religiously continue to believe in it. The confusion is between the positive role of scarcity in value-formation, (we don't have X, so we want it, so its value to us goes up) and the opposite, negative role of scarcity in game design (no one has any X, so no one cares about X - why did we expend effort to put X in the game?).

Guys, I will tell you a heretical thing now. We have to un-balance Cantr's production and resource gathering. Its sorry steady-state equilibrium, in part, is ruining the entire game for everyone, by stealing the excitement of "business enterprises", or being a manufacturer, or a professional Cantrian farmer. But how I propose to do this is a little different than you might think. Let's look at our goals and see if we all agree on them:

- Factories. If a character finds a well-equipped building, they should feel like they've struck gold, and set about to haul over the different raws they own to produce things. They will only do this if they know that the result of their labour will be orders of magnitude more than what they put in: time and raws. Principle of disproportionate profitability in (ranked by strength): factory-style production and harvesters, more basic machinery, farming.

- Excess in goods that in the real world have excess, is desirable. So that producing something for 3 days generates an amount of this something that is enough three times over for myself and for trading it to others.

- A different approach to time (labour time). We can no longer treat it as a replenishable resource and stupidly use it to "balance" things against each other. Every character's life is actually very limited, look at the statistics. The vast majority die before reaching 25. We have to take this into account! Of course we have to! It's a mystery why we still don't. The problem with labour time is that goods aren't produced if people feel they take too long and yield too little - and it doesn't matter to them how "rare" or valuable we are trying to make the good by way of this, or what we were trying to "balance".

[Piscator]

I'd really like to tell you much I find your pompous, arrogant little essays annoying, but I don't want to bore the reader with pages of text.

But hey , so no offense taken, all right?

Anyway, you don't make any sense. If you were able to produce a huge excess of goods, what would you do with it? Nothing is hardly ever consumed, so if a character has one knife he doesn't need another. You would just sit on a huge pile of rubbish.

[Cogliostro]

You would produce in excess using: factory-style machinery, lesser machinery, and farming. There's no reason for this to apply to bone knives!

Having produced items or goods in excess of what you need, you would share or trade it with others. In exchange for their excess goods. Having no excess goods means there is no point to trading.

We have another problem that every location tends to be able to produce almost everything. I think this is not helping the situation any, either. How much better would everything be, if each location could produce it's own thing in great excess. For example, a bakery could produce bread and cooked food in enormous amounts.

[Chris]

The production system is fine. Some things, like bone tools, are very easy to make. Other things, like a van, are very hard and require organization and cooperation over time -- which is as it should be.

The reason for people trying the game and not liking it is its slow pace. They expect to sign on and have things happening right away. In most places, things are pretty quiet most of the time. In most MMOGs, when you see a character, the player is at the keyboard and doing things in the game world. When you see a character in Cantr, more often than not, the player is not online at that moment. In that sense, it's more like a play-by-email game than a MUD/MUSH or a contemporary MMOG.

[Jos Elkink]

I know that the resource balance is not good as it stands. Or actually, must more for produced goods like buildings and vehicles, the current situation is not good. But I'm not sure I see a solution in your story ...

[BZR]

I know that the resource balance is not good as it stands. Or actually, must more for produced goods like buildings and vehicles, the current situation is not good. But I'm not sure I see a solution in your story ...

Exacly, we all se the problem, but your solution is completely senseless for me. Fully equiped building is not a value nowadays, because you can go to a neighbouring location, propably abandoned, where you can have a factory for yourself.

For me, the only way you can fix it is increasing the number of consumable goods in game. As for now, only food is consumable, but it's almost everywhere free to take and easily gathered.

[Caesar]

Consumption and decay.

The reason there are many companies in 'the real world' is because the things they produce are needed.

They are for two reasons.
The products will either be consumed;
Food, toothpaste, glue, pens, etc, etc..

Or the products will decay;
Cars, furniture, machinery..


They have to either be repaired, requiring raw materials, or more likely, machinery components, or replaced.


Imagine the world a bit smaller.

There are one million persons and just one factory producing furniture.
Well, everyone wants furniture.
So the factory produces, and produces, and produces...
Eventually everyone will have furniture.

Now, with decay of their furniture the situation will continue like this;

Every few years a part of the population will have to replace their furniture, which means the factory is still a necessity.

And now, without decay;

Every has got their furniture. Great! And now what..? What will we do...? We do not need any new furniture. Let's produce a few reserves and then close the factory. Perhaps some day, when the population grows. (Or perhaps stays at the same numbers, just like 'Cantr') we will be able to produce a few more sets every once in a while.


Conclusion;

Without decay and consumption needs for production will be obsolete.
Even if you start producing less, eventually you'll reach the point where everyone has got their furniture, or their never-depleting toothpaste-generator.

[Cogliostro]

Huh. There's no reasoning with the scarcity-model adepts, is there? If something isn't consumed, you don't need to constantly produce more of it. Way to state the obvious, folks.

Where we differ is that I don't have any religious conviction that producing more, more, more, is the way to prosperity and interesting economic arrangements in the game. As I see it, there isn't any big problem with over-saturation with goods or items. Look how many people in the game have little or nothing to their name. If there was ever an issue with overproduction as your shocking theories anticipated, then I have some news for you, human greed and the tendency to hoard stuff has solved it for us. In effect, all of that over-produced stuff is locked away somewhere, and each start-up has to make their own stuff from scratch. Some people even hoard machinery, and will tell you to build your own smelter for example - even though there's no way one person, even a town leader, could possibly continuously run the four-five smelters they inherited from past generations.

So actually I was talking about a whole different thing and you missed the whole show. Jos was catching on, though - the problem isn't over or underproduction, it's the distribution of profitability among different types of industries. In Cantr, it's all very uniform, artificially so - we were trying to "balance stuff" on the one hand, but then on the other, we went and irrationally asked for real-world inspired build/make requirements. What happens is that you produce everything at about the same, slow speed. When in real life, good machinery enables you to produce certain things hundreds of times faster, more, etc.

How can we have, for example, realistic water requirements in cooking, when water production is so artificially slow that no one produces any except for their own private usage? It's the same contradiction for many other areas: rope, baked goods, etc. etc.

I think (and this is only a supposition of mine) that the way forward is to un-balance select areas of production, that is, make those areas realistically hyper-profitable. That will lead to easy excess in the given goods/resources, which then could be traded.

Here's where we face the problem that most towns can produce most types of things with equal success. Unless certain towns have significant advantages over their neighbours, no impetus is generated to produce anything in excess to trade to the others...

[catpurr]

The reason there are many companies in 'the real world' is because the things they produce are needed.

They are for two reasons.
The products will either be consumed;
Food, toothpaste, glue, pens, etc, etc..

Or the products will decay;
Cars, furniture, machinery..

While I understand your point and I think its a good one and it was true for 200 years "real world" it isn't any more. Well its complicated, aprox. 70%-80% of wealthfare is currently the "third sector", services, only 20-30% work in industry, agriculture that stuff we really really need to live is less than 1%! So actually only 20% of people "produce" stuff in the traditional sense of stuff. My personal opinion is while a good deal of the third sector is necessary another part is just bloated to be able to give at least almost everybody a job. Otherwise the whole system would break down first because people would consider it unfair that 30% still had to work, secondly people not kept busy by society either go depressive or start having stupid ideas.

Just had to bload a little about RL comparisons, you see how the job as the central thing of life hardly applies to the cantr world.

[Elros]

Cogliostro, let me start by saying I agree that the current Cantr system does not work too good. There are a lot of flaws in how it is set up, and it leaves certain aspects or areas of society lacking because of it.

You made some great observations in your posts, but I still did not see a solution to our problem. Don't get me wrong though, I do not expect you to come up with a solution to our complex situation. That is something that may never be solved. One good point you made is the general universal values of everything in Cantr is causing a problem. This is true, and I believe almost everyone would agree. That is why you have one half of the players wanting to go to one extreme by increasing rot and decay on food and other items, and then we have others on the other end of the spectrum like yu that are wanting to drastically increase resource availablilty.

Which way do we go, or what do we do? That is the question of the century...

[Dudel]

Elros... Do you do Both!? O.o

Make things available but have them rot quickly so that each area still kinda has to "pick one" but at the same time "single players" can still get what they need?

Iuno, spit balling.

[Money]

Honestly I just want to see the ability for buildings, and vehicles to be destroyed and decay over time. After I see the effects of that on the game I can start to think about the Decay, or Availability, or Decay and Availability thing going on in this thread

[*Wiro]

It'd be neat for potatoes and carrots to be gathered 10 gram a day when it's by hand. >:3 Or perhaps all foods. Mwhahahaha.

[Ryaga]

Perhaps RD does their job too well? Imbalance spurs markets, and creates tensions.

[catpurr]

That is why you have one half of the players wanting to go to one extreme by increasing rot and decay on food and other items, and then we have others on the other end of the spectrum like yu that are wanting to drastically increase resource availablilty.

Isnt this a False dichotomy? [ http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?FalseDichotomy ]

You define both things as *extremes*, and while Cogliostro drawed here as extremes they do not have to be set on extreme levels. You consider it as extremes because you made it into your mind as extremes.

Both ways coult just as well be implemented on an amount of balanced level....