Ladder vs Non Ladder

[Crosby4HyG]

I recently reinstalled the mod and am really enjoying grinding some of the late game challenges with my old Vesseldin. My question is can I separate the trade forum into ladder vs NL? I’ve found some really good stuff and I’d like to have a few people to trade with. Thanks!

[Sandraptor]

From my understanding, almost the entire community plays only ladder. It resets a few times a year, I think once a quarter. I'm personally kinda waiting until the next season to jump in early. The nice part about new ladders is it keeps the items valuable/rare/sought after by resetting to a state where we don't have anything -- otherwise there's a million of every item and the value goes way down.

[cma78]

Maybe in one perspective, but in another items has no future therefore they can never be precious or valuable, you know you're gonna lose everything 3-4 months time ,that removes the value that items would have otherwise, most non-ladder servers has been poorly done, this one is no different as it suffers from the season's stupidity just like vanilla.

For that reason i won't be playing after this season unless its singleplayer, my attention span is far too intense to remake characters every third month, the whole mainstream zoom zoom mentallity this mod cater to is not for me, when i create something its to last not to throw it away 3 months after and waste my time.

[demoner]

Having seasons that comes and goes is a great way to keep an economy fresh, have fairly frequent game updates and keep players coming back. You dont have to make a new ladder character every 3 months if you dont want to. You can play old nonladder characters just the same, just make sure to log in every now and then so the account doesn't deactivate.

As far as the economy, having it the way it is now lets drop rates be fairly decent when it comes to rare items. Of course a Xis rune is much more valuable at the start of a season than 2 months in, and it shouldn't be made rarer just because of depreciation. Right now the game is set up where in about a month, if you know what you're doing, you could complete the game. Some people take less time some people take more, but having a fresh economy along with the patch cycle has proven successful for the devs.

[Istaryu]

...having a fresh economy...

Fresh economy when ppl are hoarding thousands and tens of thousands tg It is everything but fresh.

[Holtzhammer]

...having a fresh economy...

Fresh economy when ppl are hoarding thousands and tens of thousands tg It is everything but fresh.

Economies are influenced by all kinds of factors, and this mod is no different. Speculation on which builds will be more effective based on balancing changes alter each season's dynamics -- but the design philosophy focuses primarily on how those changes will effect the LADDER, and not NL.

If we're keeping in the tenets of "what are the aspects of a community (and thus a robust economy) that matter?" lets look at the following:

Community was based on:

(A)Most important aspects:
1. Need
2. Communication

(B) Secondary importance:
1. Reciprocity
2. Environment
3. Time (sharing time as well)

There's are lots of collections of people at a place at a time, but these are not a "community". Season ticket holders are a "community"; you get to know the people around you.-- you develop a "sense of community"
Question: How do you differentiate between people at a like place at a like time?

How does all that translate into Median XL?

We need to systemically understand the relationship between a community identity (Ladder v. NL v. SP) and the level of user engagement. I like using Zhang (2018) work on understanding and structuring multi-community spaces using two aspects: how distinctive(niche) a community's interest relative to the other, and how dynamic(volatile) these interests are over time. Using these axes, we can get a picture of the salience of a specific community's "identity" and dynamics of how its evolved over time -- context is everything. Phrased another way we also look for the salience of the Ladder community juxtaposed to the Non-Ladder/Single-player, but how?

(A)1: Need.
Each ladder season a new "need" arises -- a positive correlation curve with a low standard deviation -- for increasingly rarer items. The Ladder (as a community with a sense of self) creates this and perpetuates it through competition. Data shows, roughly, a small minority of players (consistently the same subgroups) at the top of the leader boards and everyone else trailing a mile away. Why? Is it a lack of deep game & encounter mechanics knowledge? Regression analysis is likely yes.

If I were to go further and analyze the trading logs I could further determine where the majority of mid to high-end items are coming from and whose buying them in order to understand distinct trends.

(A)2: Communication

EDITS IN PROGRESS. Ill fill in the other 4 aspects over time on this post.

[bapcja]

Maybe in one perspective, but in another items has no future therefore they can never be precious or valuable, you know you're gonna lose everything 3-4 months time ,that removes the value that items would have otherwise, most non-ladder servers has been poorly done, this one is no different as it suffers from the season's stupidity just like vanilla.

For that reason i won't be playing after this season unless its singleplayer, my attention span is far too intense to remake characters every third month, the whole mainstream zoom zoom mentallity this mod cater to is not for me, when i create something its to last not to throw it away 3 months after and waste my time.

youre supposed to play a different build each ladder for the game to feel fresh. economy is fucked anyway, because of tg. Veteran players dont even farm items for tg. they just play busted builds to sell hard charms in the first few days then drop hundreds on key items for their go-to builds.

Data shows, roughly, a small minority of players (consistently the same subgroups) at the top of the leader boards and everyone else trailing a mile away. Why? Is it a lack of deep game & encounter mechanics knowledge? Regression analysis is likely yes.

Why? The same clique dominates every season because they all help each other, funnel items to each other and fund their busted builds selling charms / flipping expensive items. this is why you see threads made about how bad is it for people to look into each others armories. in online arpgs people will use every possible exploit to get ahead and dont want their wealth-making builds go public.

tg should go away as fast as possible. the best idea would propably to split it into ladder tg and total tg. each time season ends all your ladder tg is added to your total tg (inactive). both numbers are shown on the forums for the bragging rights of course

[syllab]

tg should go away as fast as possible. the best idea would propably to split it into ladder tg and total tg. each time season ends all your ladder tg is added to your total tg (inactive). both numbers are shown on the forums for the bragging rights of course

People spend money to buy TG. What do you tell someone who bought 100 TG in a season and only spent 50 of it? "Sorry but half of your money was spent on a fart in a bottle"?

[RequiemLux]

Apparently, in its simplicity, the TG system manages to share some of the issues of the infinitely more complex real economy.
In my totally limited (and most likely ignorant) view, what you guys are trying to tackle are mainly two problems: inflation and monopoly (with the possibility of monopsony).

Possible ways to combat inflation and their negative consequences:
1a) Higher fees on auctions
Possible negative consequences of this are:

• Pushing people away from the Auction system and towards the WTB/WTS threads system.
• Giving ways to the creation of a cryptic economy where price checking becomes much harder.
• Less secure economy due to in-game trade issues and increased potential in lack of transparency.
• Efficency of this doesn't scale well in the context in which is produced.
• Moderating trades becomes extremely difficult.

2a) % Taxation on capitals
Possible negative consequences of this are:

• TG system failing in the long-run in favor of a barter system.
• Rise in economical short-termism driven actions (not necessarily too bad, but it's kinda complicated).

3a) Dev-Shop with timed sells of items made unobtainable outside of TG purchases
Possible negative consequences of this are:

• Optional content (like dyes) or "not-so-optional" content removed from the drop tables and locked behind paywalls.
• Would require a great amount of trust in the team when planning investments, since it creates a precedent that could easily spiral out of control if unchecked bad decisions occur. *cough* d3 *cough*

4a) Hard reset of capitals
Possible negative consequences of this are:

• Temporary half-assed solution.
• Pitchforks, angry mobs and fire, a lot of it.

Possible ways to combat monopoly/monopsony and their negative consequences:
1b) Cap on personal TGs
Possible negative consequences of this are:

• Same person + different IPs + different e-mails = Scrooge McDuck
• Organized crews of players to overtake and ruin the solo MP (with trade) experience.
• Possibly sabotaging the survivablity and growth of the project itself, ultimately dumbing the game experience to cater to a vast as possible audience in order to off-set the costs.

2b) Every other cap imaginable
Possible negative consequences of this are:

• Obviously setting up the project to fail.
• We would need an army, a HQ and an anthem for our wannabe comunist regime, and those don't come cheap.

3b) Redistribution of capitals
Possible negative consequences of this are:

• Events and giveaways with TGs rewards are now rigged, or should be for maximum efficiency.
• Limiting as much as possible the free/indipendent movements of TGs.
• MP Pro-players and moderate/high invested ones will lose much of their interest right quick.
• In the long run could be easier to end up with a bad case of TG inflation.

On first glance I'd say this are my 2cents on the TGs part of the argument, and I don't see a nice solution for the problems you say are present; but I'm just an uneducated man in economics and most likely a better view of thye situation just fly under my nose. ^^

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[bapcja]

tg should go away as fast as possible. the best idea would propably to split it into ladder tg and total tg. each time season ends all your ladder tg is added to your total tg (inactive). both numbers are shown on the forums for the bragging rights of course

People spend money to buy TG. What do you tell someone who bought 100 TG in a season and only spent 50 of it? "Sorry but half of your money was spent on a fart in a bottle"?

this hypothetical person could buy just enough tg for the item he wants to buy. there.

...

the effort that went into this post is commendable, but i dont see how any of the proposals would be better than simple "tg counter resets with seasons end". not that it matters, the veteran player clique would never let go of their hoards and means to dominate every season.