Hello again HWS Community!
Its been a really interesting several weeks of conversation. Thanks to everyone who participated in the poll I posted and for the new voting that you all contributed as the season came to a close.
I’m excited about the work and thought that has gone in to the economy and I’m excited to announce the changes as well as share a bit more about where we’re at on projects we’re not yet ready to implement. A huge special thanks to Hayawen (will tag in final post) for his help.
As a reminder, the overrideing theme is encouraging active play. So many of you from so many different seasons tell me stories of having to go out into the HWS universe and EARN what you got initially. My goal is to continue to
Summary
- Dynamic Pricing will be implemented on the HWS Traders
- Adjust the bank
- Nerf the deconstructor
- HWS Trader Adjustments
Not Yet Live/In Process
- Dynamic pricing on in game traders
- Loot tables implemented for certain EGS missions and POIs to increase their value and standardize results for players
- Test a change to the way RP is earned through RP bases on PvP playfields by moving an RP base to the System instead of on planet.
- Add a market processing fee
Dynamic Pricing
Dynamic pricing means the prices that the game offers to sell and buy items is based on activity from the player market. Our goal is to ensure that the economy is consistent across the different places items can be acquired from and to ensure that the economy is primarily player driven. This change will have a heavy impact on the economy and will take several weeks of monitoring due to how the process will start. We will not know how its really working at first since it will take time for everyone to get used to how this mechanic works so please resist the urge to make a snap judgement in the early days of implementation.
Specifically, when HWS Trader packages are built, the actual sale price will now be set by the dynamic price calculation. The calculation will be a closely guarded secret and has built in methods for resisting blatant price manipulation by highly coordinated players. It is a new game mechanic for players looking to have an economic focused HWS experience while ensuring that everyday players are able to participate fairly.
I will be closely monitoring this system as we get it up and running. Please let me know directly if you see anything that looks off.
The Bank
The bank and its interest has been the most discussed and debated item each time the economy is brought up. I am certain that it is impossible to make a change to the bank that will make everyone happy so I’m going to do my best with this and will keep an eye on it as well. I want to assure everyone that I did multiple revisions on the new bank numbers from extremely drastic to barely noticeable. At the end of the day we’re changing a lot in the economy so I decided to go with a modest change for now. Again, thanks to everyone who has given input on this.
The bank provides value to players in 2 ways. 1. It gives daily interest and 2. It allows players to carry money between seasons. In exchange for those 2 benefits it requires 3 things. 1. Money for the upgrade, 2. Money that gets “frozen” in order to achieve interest and 3. RP. As I try to balance the economy towards players getting out and actively earning, one of the biggest issues is the motivation to do so since there is so much money continually made available to active players. However, we also have less active players who just login occasionally and collect their interest and do 1 or 2 things in game. I want to make sure that HWS is still a place where those players are welcome and feel like they can participate in they activity they want to focus on.
To ensure I got this change right, in addition to looking into how much money a player can earn per hour while active, I also looked into the common costs of PvP activities like building a warship and supplying it with ammo. I have tried to ensure that if all anyone wants to do is login and buy what they need to get into a PvP fight that they will still be able to do that, while players looking to grow and increase their Bank/OCD levels or gain meaningful reserves of money will need to actively play the game in some way.
Overall, Daily max interest is coming down, the cost of some of the upgrades is coming down a bit, and the amount of money that has to be kept in reserve is also coming down. Less daily interest, but also less cash tied up.
Here is a table of the new bank levels. Thanks to @Dr.Dark for the template I used to do this:
Summary
Deconstructor Nerf
The deconstructor is important to new players and advanced players who need to reorganize their inventory to be more useful for whatever they’re working on. A single player should not need more than a couple of them available to them to handle this. The problem we have run into is that massive deconstructing farms were built, mostly to handle HWS Trader packs that were selling advanced components for much less than their component parts were worth. To prevent players from buying HWS Trader packs, deconstructing them, and relisting the parts we have decided to nerf the deconstructor so only 50% of the item’s value is returned.
HWS Traders
HWS Trader prices are discussed above but in addition to dynamic pricing, rare ores and ingots can no longer be placed in HWS Trader packages.
I am taking responsibility for these changes so if something about the economy doesn’t look right, please reach out. I am very greatful to those of you who have spent time with me on discord calls and given your feedback in the forums. We’ll keep working on this in order to make the game as fun as we can for everyone.
Looking forward to seeing you all out there!
