AKA how fast you tend to get rich in videogames by hoarding like a loot goblin then selling months old rusted swords to every vendor in town until you can buy your own kingdom. Things tend to work well during a game's first 10 to 20 hours at absolute best but sooner or later you end up overpowered and with more money than you know what to buy with it.How do you fix that? How do you balance an economy so the player always feels on the level and never abounding with cash? How do you keep it 'grounded'?
>>3683318>How do you fix that?You don't. Autismos will go to any length regardless. Trying to fix their retarded behavior would just make the game worse for normal people.
Play a Dragon Quest game. You make currency scarce and trick the player into making expensive purchases by making them unsure of whether or not they'll find better equipment in exploration.
>>3683318Was never done properly
>>3683318>How do you fix that?By making everything scarce, like, you know, in real life.
>>3683318>How do you fix that?Deus Ex never really had a store system, but there were NPCs who would take money for items occasionally. The currency was basically useless most of the time, but you would bump into a dude who stole a box of landmines and was pawning them off. NPCs who bought stuff was even rarer and was usually drugs or something. It wasn't something you could plan for. It was less "I better hoard all the stuff I can to cash out" and more "Ya never know..."
>>3683326basically this. even with something like timing the entire game min-maxing autismos will find a way to break the economy. you can't build your entire game around those people.
>>3683318Who cares? Money is worthless anyway. No spare houses or businesses to invest in. Our hero will die without land, a wife, and lots of children to grow old with
>>3683809Murderhobo fate
>>3683318It's old but Phantasy Star 2 did money really well. You *never* had enough money for all the top gear in shops and constantly had to choose between buying a new pair of shoes for every party member or buy one guy the ceramic sword and hope for the best. Findable equipment and cash were almost always pitiful. Whenever you grinded enough to have money for the latest cool shit for every party member you'd usually also discover a new town with a new shop that had everything a tier better then the last one and half an order of magnitude more expensive. The value and scarcity of money remained pretty constant right through to the endgame, you never found your party awash with cash and nothing to spend it on until the final bosses. There was no secret gimmick to this, the developers just really carefully balanced the cost of items and the amount dropped by random encounters so that you could afford some but not all of what you wanted and had to make tough choices.
>>3683318Unless a game has a pretty obvious money exploit, that generally doesn't happen until the ass end of the game when shop frequency slows down considerably relative to the amount of fights you're getting into.In most JRPGs, you're generally better off buying gear from every other town anyway.
>>3683318Make currency A, B, C. At first you give them A, they stockpiled it ? It's ok, mid game items are bought with currency B etc.Or take away all their money everysome time, just tell them, so they can actually spend it.
>>3683318Ask gaijin
>>3683944Know those amazon river parasite fishes that swim up your ass or your dick and inflate? Hope you get several of those. You fucking cunt.
>>3683944>Make currency A, B, C. At first you give them A, they stockpiled it ? It's ok, mid game items are bought with currency BSo like Dragon Age, where you start off with copper coins then silver then gold
>>3683318Plenty of games fixed that. Just make money hard to farm. Award the major chunk of it from story progression and one-time quests. Don't make NPCs buy junk, or pay nothing for it.Developers let you be rich because why not. It's a fantasy game.
Remove 95% of items from the world since they’re just junk with no purpose other than to be sold. Make loot interesting again.
>>3683962Clutter management is rpg jow
>>3684138Now*
>>3683318you make gold have weight.
>>3683962This unironicallyAnd also, death that must be paid for revival, and get incrementally expansive with level ups. Drpgs do this and their economies tend to hold up pretty well until late game. Eventually you accumulate a lot of wealth but that should be expected, you became a very high level dungeoneer, It makes Sense for one to be rich.
>>3685057But bg3 has wooden spoons and the hero from wotr made his riches selling eggs and port wine!
>>3683318Inventory limits, vendor stock limits, inflation. Bartering or non-global currency. Balance the game so the player actually uses items.Also this >>3683962
>>3683318>selling months old rusted swordsJust stop this. No merchant should buy your scrap. Except maybe a dedicated scrap merchant, who could then just pay according to weight.
>>3683318Easy, you design Dragon Quest 1 but never replicate the most compelling gameplay features in any other future sequel.>>3684864Go back to your containment board, /osrg/ **I will see you there buddy, hope you had a good Christmas bro**>>3683962God, I hate collect-a-thons. Just make the game shorter, smaller, more interesting and give me useful loot gained through luck and questing. Not just nickel and dime Bethesda sundries where maybe if I keep holding onto junk that has a negligible encumbrance of 0.1 pounds, I can rub them together at a crafting station for something nominally useful.All I want is an open-world RPG that doesn't insist on telling a story, but demands meaningful resource management of you, achieving that wonderful "do I go back or press on?" gameplay.>>3685057Fuck, Wizardry achieved this in 1980. I hate this timeline.
How to design money in a srpg? Looting enemy divisions after killing and inventory is very limited or get paid per mission?
>>3683956>no platinum or electrum coinsA downgrade
>>3683318>balancing gamesYou don't. All the best games ever made are incredibly unbalanced. And balance patches have never made a bad game good. Fuck balance.
>>3683318>limited inventory space>crucial to balance carrying consumables to carrying loot out on each adventure>non-negligible repair costsyou're welcome
>>3685080>But bg3 has wooden spoons and the hero from wotr made his riches selling eggs and port wine!OHHHH YEAHHHH I LOVE SELLING SPOONS AND PORT WINE
>>3685809Necromancer extraordinaire and wine lover. I'm gaale and omg I love wine and cats, too?>he's literally me
>>3683318What are the biggest flaws today's rpg have? What to do with money? Clearly no one would buy trash and make trash seller rich, what else is bad in today's rpg?
>>3685801>crucial to balance carrying consumables to carrying loot out on each adventurePeople are already hesitant to use consumables.At the end of a day you'll just get complaints from "forced" multiple runs to vendors, and frustrating inventory management.Keep in mind that gamers are retard babies who think wasting their life for 2 virtual copper coins is better than whatever game design you had in mind. Or something along those lines.
>>3685995>People are already hesitant to use consumables.Sounds like game being too easy so you don't need them or there being too easy ways to circumvent using consumables with unlimited alternatives like abundant healing magic in most games. Bitch you might wanna carry that bandage, antidote etc around to close your wound, detox or whatever.>multiple runs to vendorsmake it so you have extremely limited time to carry your shit around (due to content resetting or whatnot), you get one comfortable two-way trip and any more won't usually be viable option.> and frustrating inventory management.skill issue honestly>Keep in mind that gamers are retard babies who think wasting their life for 2 virtual copper coins is better than whatever game design you had in mind. Or something along those lines.can't argue anything there, that how it be
Money is useless in videogames I play
>>3686029Hp and healing mechanics are seldom thought through, just hp bloat and heal spam.
Think about what D&D and Final Fantasy does and don't do that
>>3683485They took it too far in DQ8>You have to grind money just to kind of, almost, equip your dudes>Same with levels, mandatory metal slime hunt to not spend hours fighting mobs>Paying for an inn takes a good chunk of your money, getting healing items takes another, so even your hard earned nickles get taxed by the game>Entire guide dedicated to win at the casino to make ends meet (it usually boils down to "save often and get lucky)
The only way to "balance" an economy is having actual long-term investments (houses, businesses, etc.) that you can always throw money at. RPGs don't usually do this, and just place an arbitrary number on certain gear they sell at shops.
>>3683318>How do you fix that? How do you balance an economy so the player always feels on the level and never abounding with cash? How do you keep it 'grounded'?no grinding, at all
Metaphor and DQ3 have a strange way of doing this. Effectively, the economy is rough and requires grinding, but there are classes that drastically reduce the needed grind by providing more money or extra drop items. The tradeoff is that the classes either aren't the strongest otherwise, or are very finicky to use.
>>3683318I don't. Grinding makes sense in blobbers and it makes sense that adventurers who live in the dungeons and only come back to sell/shower/sleep would be rich.
>>3683318Etrian Odyssey games handle it well, but it pretty much only works because of how their shops work>every monster drops materials of some sort, generally unique to that monster, like a tortoise will drop "Iron scales" or something>iron scales sell for 48 currency, and once you sell one to the shop it unlocks Platemail which you can buy for 980 currencyTaken as a whole it solves a whole lot of itemisation issues>shop is always relevant with current-level equipment>money is always relevant because you're guaranteed to always be scrounging to buy [new thing] just from the price ratios>monster drops are always relevant because they're how you unlock new items and accumulate enough money to actually buy things, and cheesing out a powerful monster early will always reward you with suitably powerful gear>chests are useful because they can give you straight cash (which feels great) or consumables made from drops you don't have access to yet
>>3686610Buying gear from every new shop in DQ is pointless because in most of them, that +2 Attack you get is only worth +1 Damage. I learned this the hard way in DQ9.
>>3687546Which is great, games should take inspiration from this system because It is the best implementation Ive seen in a long time
>>3687546That's an actual economy, what the other anon said.
>>3683962>make consumables >make them expensive to buy but barely worth selling>also make them near useless and not worth missing a turn to use them at all>also make spells that replicate the same effects and are objectively better in every senseFucking why is this still the default in RPGs to this day. Just get rid of consumables, they clearly can never do them right and have no desire to even try.
>>3688810It's especially laughable how owlcat did it. They are literal spells with different icons and a different animation. Some potions have range, lol.
>>3688962You mean they're not actual liquid that characters swallow??
>>3689018Some are, but they are still c&p from the spells, at least codewise. The rage potion works exactly like the spell, it even lacks the drinking animation. That's the type of jank that's filthy.
>>3689027Well I never!
>>3688810Consumables should regenerate and be per-encounter, or on a timer.
>>3689072Idk, sounds like a gamey gimmick. Grim dawn is introducing this. Qol, sure, but not every game should do it and regeneration should come with a cost. Witcher needs cider or something for his potions.
An issue with Japanese games is that they equate medieval or medieval-equivalent currencies like gold coins with Yen because it's their system. So for westerners starting a game with 1000 gold coins ounds like a lot, but in Japanese games tends to not be. Soon monsters are dropping thousands of gold a pop and weapon shops sell swords for 35k and the like. By the end game 80 hours later you've got several million which just feels wrong
>>368982199.9% of the time that's for precision reasons rather than whatever your headcanon is, especially if the game has large numbers of enemies per encounter (5+).
>>3689821How convenient for the heroes that the shops they visiting have exactly the exotic weapons they use and how convenient that each shop they visit has better versions of these weapons than the shop before.
>>3683318Tim caine has done videos that cover the basic philosophy of sources vs sinks.You need an a goal though "make it balanced" isn't a goal. It's too vague to be meaningful. It's almost as bad as saying "the goal is to make a good economy". And I think this sort of goal planning is beyond most people. They are not actually msking a game after all. They are talking about day dreams.
>>3688810South Park Stick of Truth, of all things, had an interesting idea in that you could use one consumable during your turn without consuming an action. But then they gave you consumables that did absurd shit like give you an extra turn, so that ruined it. If you toned down the potion effects, it'd probably be a good system.
>>3690782>South Park Stick of TruthI can't believe that this is a real thing. Just makes me think of that N64 game that was an FPS with throwing yellow snowballs or whatever. There's no way this is an actual RPG, this whole board is just pretending that it exists as a shaggy dog joke.
>>3690788One of the best rpg in the last decade or two is a badly made parody - absolute state of vidya. Pretty much everyone and their mother knows that game developers are basically money laudnerers at this point.
>>3690053Yeah I'm sure games made in the land where their currency is worth so little always having currencies in-game that are worth so little and start you out in the thousands have zero overlap whatsoever
