MA's strategy on MU moving forward

Entropia Universe Economy General Economy Discussion
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The current token and rare token event (plus Legacy boxes) has rekindled my thoughts on where MA is planning the potential for players: markup!

Generally speaking, when MA introduces something new, the markup is usually quite high, as well as the gains to be had for the buyer too over a reasonable time.

For un(L) items, markups slowly come down as more items are available, such as rings, until the lower rings in this case have almost no mu at all on the AH.

For (L) stuff, there may be a balance over time, depending on how many crafters there are, or hunters on specific mobs, plus input material mus. There is also a risk that a material suddenly in demand for something new will raise mus to make another activity unattractive. With this event, people may not want to be repeating the explosives or welding wire missions, but everyone must do them once to get the rare at the end. The new higher explosives mu will strongly deter anyone from using launchers for a while, I think.

What I like is that MA is taking away the risk of not getting even one rare through chance, and replacing it with a cost in the form of mu to other players. That is a general economy point that I haven’t really noticed before. I’ve seen other pps implement daily missions with a selection of desired rewards which have mu, though, which reduces some of the need for wave-watching and can make an otherwise less attractive mob more attractive. This event has much bigger turnovers attached, though. MA still sees turnover gernerated for its own income, but is prepared to hand out the desired reward in this consistent, guaranteed way.

I hope that MA continues to get many players involved in the process of fewer players going for the latest, most desirable additions to EU. I’m hoping there will be an entire series of modular spaceships in UE5 that require relatively long chains, but also clarity right from the start of what is required for event completion, as here with this event.
I also hope buildings in UE5 will be similar, but again fully transparent in terms of the chains and benefits.

What points do forum people have on this?

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Agree.

Great way to kickstart the economy and ignite interest in crafting and mining. And the framework for the event is great; Would be exciting to see a similar, hunting-centered event in the future. Perhaps get players to Hunt certain Caly-mobs that are almost forgotten etc.

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Agreed

Good start that’s for sure. Obviously tweaks needed, but I’m sure they’ll get there.

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I put the word “markup” in that category of disgusting dirty words that need not be thought of unless I’m at work.

20% of my real-world career is spent calculating and monitoring markups for more products than could be stocked by 100 shopkeepers. I have a negative desire to deal with that here. I can’t be bothered with that sort of math when my existence in EU revolves fully around giving my math mind a break and immersing myself in a pixelated escape from the horrors of the real world.

But this is the beauty of EU; participation is optional.

This last update that re-introduced sitting down meant way more to me than the whole Resource Mayhem thing simply because in almost seven years of updates, it was the first time something was added to the things we can do with our avatars. We lost this ability years ago. We then lost the ability to drop things in the world (goodbye Easter PED hunts in Icarus…). We haven’t seen a new dance or emote in I don’t know how long. VU16 broke makeup sessions with its degraded camera control and memory leaks and here we are two VU’s and three support cases later with not a molecule of attention paid to that. This is where EU is sorely lacking. There are basic things that we should all be able to do with & to our avatars that we currently cannot do. We’re supposed to be a species that traversed the stars to travel from Earth to Calypso and can hop in a spaceship and travel to any of a half-dozen planets in our galaxy. We can plug implants in our heads that can make use of chips to teleport ourselves across the planet back to our homes.

…but we cannot even brush our own hair when we get there. facepalm

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Maybe a bit of a strange place to comment as you have, Sam, but sometimes it is a direct opposite that makes people feel they simply have to write their opinion now.
I even agree with you that there should be much more room for light entertainment here, as well as education (or learning by doing stuff), to be honest. However, markup is the competitive element players aim for to get closer to break even and feel that as their achievement if they get closer than others while doing their stuff.
Markup thus needs to be available to those who strive for it, and that is a lot of players, I believe. It’s a hard job to balance and plan the future economic twists and turns, so it also cannot afford to be messed up too much or disillusion/upset too many players.

As an aside, I haven’t mapped any postures or emotes since the UI got changed, but I have tried out sitting and lying down now. Baby steps there towards me reengaging with fun stuff while I mainly concentrate on the pure economics to see if I want to stay around into UE5 and beyond.

Edit: hot off the presses, the Resourse Mayhem thread mentions moving away from mu for (L) stuff etc towards the materials needed for hand-ins (Draniie). It’s an interesting point, but it channels one heck of a lot of attention to a specific subset of materials for a period of 6 weeks or so. There’s a lot to go through if planet partners can get their specific resources included. In this one it looks like it’s just the welding wires that have multi-planet mats if I’ve seen this correctly. Maybe a future event should widen the selection even more, but players don’t need to complete everything for the completion prize?

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Don’t have anything to say about the new events and mayhem but will share my view on MA strategy and game moving forward.

Unreal Engine 5 is a big step forward a very new engine a big step for a game company like MindArk.

This game Entropia Universe needs to be more like a game and not a casino for the uber rich. $100 should last a month a month, I can play and buy any game for that price on Xbox or Steam or Epic games and the fun and excitement last much longer.

I hope to see new game play mechanics and game play features with the new engine maybe a few cut scenes like other AAA games to learn more about Calypso and the Universe.

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The event making the economy boom is great but this isn’t a way to simply get a rare token. Getting gems to drop while crafting requires massive luck for even the best crafters in game.

You can made extenders and dclass until the event ends and not drop a single gem. Which makes sense because you have about the same odds of dropping 1000 PED of gems that you do from dropping a rare in annihalation.

Overall I think the events great I just don’t believe you should be able to repeat it 30 times inflating the number of tokens and deflating their value.

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I think the proliferation of unlimited items is a long term problem for the economy of EU. other than those that are lost/destroyed by accident or through the owner suddenly no longer playing (death, etc) over a long period unless the population continually increases, eventually everyone who isn’t F2P will be running around with UL everything with no need to buy anything except enhancers and nanocubes. weapon/armor/amp crafting are a foundation on which most other crafting (components grinding, intermediate crafting) are built and supply. and the mu for hunting loot and mining all feed into this. there is already too much UL gear in the game today.

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