The Economist ~ Housing: Finishing the job
Spite313
Dear friends,
Some time ago the admins made a landmark decision introducing a new industry- or rather reintroducing an old industry- in the form of housing. This was a landmark change in many ways, not least because they prevented house manufacturers from using Work as Manager (WAM) to produce houses or house raw materials, meaning all houses must be produced by workers.
I wrote three articles on the topic (here, here and here), with my basic conclusions being that the admins had fluffed it by rushing housing out without doing enough preparation. In short, the houses weren’t desireable enough to buy, were too expensive and were typically linear.
To explain what I mean by this, look at weapons. The cheapest weapon to use per unit of damage is Q7. Q1-Q6 is therefore worthless. That’s because the advantages of the weapons grow in line with the costs, rather than decreasing inversely to quality. The best system is one where the advantage gained by a quality increase is smaller each time until the difference between Q6 and Q7 is quite marginal indeed- or by tying it to something finite like workers that cannot be infinitely produced.
With housing not using WAM, using workers as an anchor to prices is probably the easiest system. Below you can see a simple little excel chart showing what the current system for housing is (Q1-Q3) based on max bonuses and Q5 House raw material companies:
The thing that leaps out immediately is that Q1 and Q2 are basically identical. Sure, one house has a lower entry cost, but Q1 is basically half a Q2 house. There’s no actual benefit it producing one over the other in terms of cost- except initial investment.
You will see a little column there called coefficient. That is simply the number of workers divided by the number of days duration the house has, reversed. In other words, how many “works” per day you need to produce a house. I decided to use that as the basis for designing my own system. Instead of making the numbers of workers and so on nice round numbers and just stumbling into a coefficient, I started with that.
I literally just made this up, so don’t read too much into it. Before you all go racing to the comment box, read the rest of the article.
So what does the coefficient mean? It is basically how many works per day you need to produce a house over that duration period. So for Q1, you need 0.5 works per day over 7 days, which gives a coefficient of 2. For Q3, you need 1 work per day. For Q7 you need 10 works per day.
Cost per day = arbitrary wage cost of 30cc
Tank = how much “total wellness increase” you get from the house
Regen = how much health per 6 minutes extra you get from the house
Regen/Tank coeff. = basically a cost/benefit comparison tool
Health from Regen = total health benefit over the lifetime of the house
I have been guided in this by two major principles:
1. All Qualities of house company must be viable as businesses (ie: have a market)
2. The upper qualities should be always in demand (supply will always be short)
A normal player with no source of income other than their wage should be able to afford a Q1-3 house (at least at production cost). Everything above that effectively means paying other people to produce it for you, with Q7 houses costing a huge amount (based on expected wage increases, something in the region of 12-15k cc per house). This means that whilst everyone should be able to buy a house, there will never be any oversupply. It’ll also massively drive up wages, which was the original point of houses.
I see the mission of this industry as to introduce a level of product cost and scarcity such as we experienced in early V1. By making this expensive and difficult to achieve, we reintroduce challenge. We also make it so a businessman with a Q1 house company can make a profit, and will make a profit with every upgrade he makes. In fact, with this system it’s entirely possible that lower Q companies could be more profitable than higher ones, depending on the market.
Q6 & Q7 houses would be incredibly desirable, especially to the 300-400 players who buy big gold packs every month, and to those who fight enough to be worth it. I see big markets too for Q5, which represents what a middle class citizen with a few companies could afford. Q1-3 are basically houses for newer players mainly reliant on their wage, with Q4 being aspirational. But at all levels, there is a market and the advantage increases. Importantly though, the cost/benefit for most players decreases as price increases, with Q7 companies likely being many times more expensive with marginal benefits. This will make them attractive to those who have the money to spend on small increases, but not the only viable option in the market.
These are just my initial ideas. Stuff I literally wrote on the back of envelopes at work. It’s by no means a finished product, but I am putting it out there at this early stage because I’m interested in the thoughts of mathematicians, programmers and economists who play the game- what would you do? Go from my two starting goals above, viable businesses and scarcity at all levels- and do your worst. If anyone is interested in collaborating with me, just shout.
Obviously the admins are under no obligation to listen, and in fact I’ve had no sign that they would. However in the past they have looked at suggestions by players, including me, favourably and I think by presenting a finished and logical work we have a decent chance of making positive change to the game. The current hiatus on the housing rollout certainly suggests they’re thinking it over- can’t help to throw our own hat in the ring.
Cheers for reading o/
Iain
Comments
MCMOOX je bio ovde !!!!!
vote
great article
ass licker
a little higher moron 😛
so....in short words....will housing industry fix economy or not?
It depends, how the higgher quality houses will look like (mostly its about the hp regen / 6 min). If they would apply changes to housing industry, same as lain introduced in the article, I think it would fix the economy at least a little...
Basics was that everyone that had any need for it produced their own. Thereafter they saw that if you placed a house it hanged indefinitely on big markets like the us market similarly HRM also hang there indefinitely. So after much deliberation most came to the conclusion there was no demand and started using their own houses. Which left them with the problem of their workers. I for one sold my entire housing layout it was about 2 Q1 and Q2 factories and 2 35 Gold HRM factories and upgraded a WEPS factory to Q7 and thereafter had a viable factory for workers and kept my 9 workers.
Whole market is freefalling its impossible to invest into any industry or to have any plan anymore other than just bunkering down during the final downfall.
True story... even the weapon factory Q7, which seems to be most financially rewarding is often on the border of profitability... currently there isn't any reasonable way to earn some good money besides hunting for medals...
I also think, that Plato should do this 2 major changes to bring back at least a peace of economy to this crappy game:
1. Rise the limit of buying gold per day to at least 100g / day, which would allow at some point do speculations on the market
2. Remove completly working as manager option, which kills this game completly...
vote
V
V
The housing industry was a silly attempt by admins to try to decrese the ammount of people who are producing weapons. Unfortunately houses are for 4 types of players - players who have ridicilous ammount of RM factories, resource hoarders from weekly challenge, lower division tanks who earn BHs with FoodFights and the big tanks who doesn`t necesseraly need the house, but they`ll buy it anyway to save a couple EBs or simply because they can. Without changes in strength system, houses will have a very small market, because buying the house for that litttle ammount of additional energy only makes sence for the more powerful players - others shouldn`t even care about houses.
Will this industry fix anything? No
Will this industry be a success? Hell no
Without major fundamental changes in the game mechanics this industry is and will be appealing only to very few players.
couldn't agree more, currently there is absolutely no point buying houses of any quality, and there still won't be if they won't add some hp regen per 6 min to all houses...
(:
When are they going to add new houses ?
o7
o7
o/ v+s, i love your articles
Folded.
Few pointers from the top of my hea😛
1. You can buy Q3 house on the market for 2.3-2.5 gold. It gives +100 and it lasts for 7 days. For the old players (players that can afford to produce houses) 2.5 gold in a week is nothing, so why bother to produce one?
2. The demand is also decreased further with the inability to use different houses at the same time or to use several houses of the same quality at the same time (+100, +100, +100)
3. What will the economy gain from point 2? It will increase the demand of houses, it will increase the demand on the job market and the foremost will increase the demand of weapons because the BH hunters will not get one with 30-40 mil.
4. The biggest change that houses will bring is only if "Energy regeneration" is introduced.
Housing module at present is just another medal on your profile. It's not sexy and its not desirable. I'll just spend 400cc for a Q3 in a week and that's it.
If point 2 or 3 are introduced, than I'll seat down and think about spending 500-1000 gold to create factories and to hire people in my companies.
P.S. good article Iain
cheers,
@lain
I fully agree with you! Although I would change energy regen on Q6 to 12hp and on Q7 to 20, coz imho 30hp / 6 min might be to many 😉
I have an idea for your next article, as it seems the admins read yours sometimes.
House raw companies other than Q5 make absolutely no sense without WaM. The same worker produces different amounts of HRM at the same cost, meaning that lower Q HRM factories can never be profitable. This also applies to food and weapon factories. Most of the time hiring in anything below Q7 generates huge losses.
Enough for the introduction, let's move to the solution. I've seen many people asking for the reimplementation of the work skill. I was born after it had been removed so I cannot say much about that. I have something else, though - fractional work units. From the worker's perspective nothing would change - 1 shift per day as usual. From the employer's perspective, however, it would be different.
Every company would require a different amount of work units instead of the fixed 1 per production as is it now. It would be good if the amount of work were tied to the amount of required raw. Q7 factories could be the point of reference - 1 unit of work per 2000 raw. Therefore, a Q1 factory would consume 0.1 work unit and 200 raw.
This could make the value of work equal regardless of the company level and workers would be needed everywhere. Even young, small entrepreneurs could hire people profitably.
This turns critical when you start to take notes in the back of an envelope in the office. 🙂
I have a good job...Thats improves my economy in this game...Otherwise everything sucks.
Your regen/tank coefficients are totally wrong. It's definitely not "lower is better", because that would suggest that your Q1 house is more cost effective than Q3 in both "regen" and "tank", while it can be clearly seen that it's the other way around.
Let's compare the cost per day, it's 15cc for Q1 and 30cc for Q3, therefore Q3 is twice as expensive in the same span of time. At the same time Q1 gives 2hp/6min while Q3 gives 6hp/6min, so Q3 gives three times as much. Already can be seen that the HP regenerated by the Q3 house is 1.5 cheaper.
These coefficients aren't very informative and make your calculations very obscure. You could as well divide the cost / regen to calculate the cost of currency for every additional 1hp regen, it would give us the following values:
Q1 - 7.5 (having 1 additional hp per 6 minutes costs you 7.5 currency)
Q2 - 5
Q3 - 5
And then it's true that lower is better, but it contradicts with your conclusions.
I wholeheartedly agree that "1. All Qualities of house company must be viable as businesses (ie: have a market)", but in order to achieve that lower quality houses have to be more cost-effective than their higher quality counterparts, with no exception, because otherwise buying a lower quality house has NO BENEFITS over buying a higher quality one. That's the mistake that admins did in designing weapons, as a result, everything except Q7 is a junk.
In other words, Q(😵 > Q(X+1) in terms of cost efficiency, but naturally Q(😵
I agree the numbers are arbitrary (I said that several times) which is why I asked for input-as in sensible numbers to plug into it.
I agree that each Q should have marginally smaller benefit increase over the previous one for weapons, however there is another limiting factor in this which is wage costs. Because a q7 needs so many more workers to function, they will be disproportionately expensive beyond the ability of most players to pay.
v
http://www.erepublik.com/es/article/2439283/1/20
vote please!!
your opinions are important to us.
We will take your ideas into consideration.
-Plato
(Throws idea into the bin)
"Q6 & Q7 houses would be incredibly desirable, especially to the 300-400 players who buy big gold packs every month"
This is wrong. The gap between old/new players will grow even bigger.
The importance of card abusing will be even more if it is the way you say it.
even bigger? Now donors are weaklings, the only thing they can buy are energy bars, that i have plenty of from weeklys anyway.
and - whats important to notice - houses would be by players for players, so in theory building them would also bring profit.