Don't Play in the Arm of the Dragon.

Salarr will always be the same.

"Another 200 orders for gear."

"Fuuuuuuuuu....." - Merchants and Hunters in the clan.


When I played the Salarr I can count on very few hands how much rp I could do compared to constantly and I mean constantly grebbing and gathering, while the crafters spammed up skills to try and fulfill orders.

Never again.

I'm inclined to think the sandbox ended as so many features became automated, and now the staff spends its time limiting players who take advantage of that automation, like the replenishing NPC merchants.  The fact is players should have things they can take advantage of.


A good sandbox is just a pile of resources waiting to be used, and the game we're here for is the handful of base social interactions we call roleplay.  If they really wanted to fix the economy a little, they would have NPCs ordering large amounts of a particular item so the whole playerbase can organize around them.  Make the economy about raw resources or transporting/storing items.

Hell, let's have Nenyuk offer a new service : a general store.  A grebber comes into this Nenyuki General Store with something like eight agafari logs pilfered from the far north.  The Nenyuki prices these logs and adds a fee on top for storing these logs.  The Nenyuki then pays out for the logs and gives the grebber a ticket marked with the month of the year that he can come back and exchange for those eight logs for the original price plus the storage fee.

Now this General Store isn't like your Walmart, it is general storage for the whole community.  So people can then come in and buy the logs the grebber dropped off at whatever price the Nenyuki is charging based on scarcity.  Also, the NPC merchants will regularly deplete the General Store to create a regular demand for certain goods.  When players are scarce, these NPC merchants will create a constant, steady demand that allows players to easily make good coin.  When business is booming, players will be forced to diversify as prices drop.  Pretty neat if you can code the NPC merchants to demand refined goods as the the price of raw resources drop.

Now the really interesting part is when the grebber tries to turn in his ticket.  If the price of his logs have risen, he can trade in the ticket and recover the logs at the lesser original price plus storage fee, making a profit.  That is unless the logs have become so scarce the General Store can't meet the order.  If the prices of logs have fallen, the grebber got a good deal when he first dropped off the logs and should just junk the ticket.  The ticket's worthless if you don't use it before a year is up, anyway.

It's basically like a stock market (all true markets function this way).  The grebber sells off stock in his labor plus an option to buy back later.

 That would be pretty damn good.  Then we can spend all day hating elves, spitting on elementalists, and fighting in bars because the real work is in playing the market.  People will kill industrious gatherers because they drive down the prices of goods.  So the lazy rule, and the hard working people have to keep doing random things to prevent being squashed.  There's your murder, corruption, and betrayal.

Let me point a few things that are really dumb about Arms "economy"

- Every PC is free. Slavery exists. Free ppl sell obsidian for a fortune to the city that has slaves working in the obsidian mines...

- Merchants will buy 6 obsidian daggers but not 7. Put a green stone in the hilt of said dagger and he'll buy 6 of those too! Or screw it just carve a design on the dagger and he'll buy 6 of those!

- Got a random bone flake you found? Yeah I'll give 2000 coins for that...

- It's been a hundred years. Oh look the price of every single item ever created is exactly the same. Inflation what's that?

At the end of the day what MOST RPI muds (or muds in general) lack is realism for an economy. People want to just code in some stuff and think it makes an economy but it doesn't.

Supply/Demand is the most basic thing you can code in. Not only that you can actively run the economy. Honestly if I had a big enough game I'd have 1-2 staffers that just do economy related roleplay stuff. There's a shortage of wood coming in from the forests? Well we better change all the prices for every wood item in the city. Oh the sorcerer-king is building a pyramid out of sandstone? All of a sudden every merchant in the city will buy sandstone, but only for a time until this project is complete.

Arm has never thought that to do stuff like that though. Think about how cool it would be to have a staffer overseeing IC construction projects, the amount of RP opportunities there are staggering. Instead of loading the generic unit of slaves working tirelessly in the sun you could actually have mini-RPTs surrounding the construction job. Get the PCs involved in it. Have them go gather the shit for it and turn it into whoever is buying for a bulk price. Once the job is over? That resource becomes less necessary.

This one was "fixed" by setting the merchants involved to have no coins. Sure, it's still possible to sell your bone flake, but only if you, for example, buy fifty bars of soap first.