Constructive (keyword) Criticism of Arx Systems

[Lisse24]

@tempest said in Constructive (keyword) Criticism of Arx Systems:

@meg
Why does a game like Arx not have more system guides?

Nobody really tells you how to /use/ any of the systems. Sure, they'll tell you "enter this command, and then do this, and you get X". Nobody is telling you 'oh yeah, you need to do x, y, and z, to actually get much out of doing this thing', even though most of the not-new players know that stuff.

I don't know if it's because the game is "competitive" or what, but people seem incredibly inclined towards keeping the 'tricks' they learn about the systems to themselves, and the only way to learn these things as a new player is "just go run face first into the wall 20 times until you figure it out".

Yup, this is one of my beefs with Arx. The systems are so complex and so indepth that unless you're willing to devote a ton of time into figuring them out, you'll always be outgamed by a person who has the time to do all the math and figure all the things out. It's like playing a game like Axis and Allies, it's not for you if you just want a casual play.

I recently made a very, very low-level char, just to poke around again and see what's going on here for a bit. RP has been fun, but I did ask around for help with understanding the new market/haggle systems. I got, "Look at Help haggle and help broker." Yup, I see those they tell me ... nothing. They tell me nothing. Since I'm trying not to get dragged into the ultra competitive, negative/toxic side of Arx, I just shrugged and went on my way. Someday, I'll be bored enough that I sit down and work out how those commands go.

Which brings me to the other thing that keeps me from ever fully committing to Arx again - the general atmosphere. It's not healthy. Just look over at the other threads. I think a lot of this is due to competitiveness and I think the game would overall benefit from tamping down on the number of scoreboards it keeps and making it easier for individual players to do and access things without having to go through gatekeepers.

I'm basing the latter on the comments in the other thread about HoHs being bogged down in messages and work RP. That's not healthy for anyone involved. It's not healthy for HoH's to have to do stuff instead of pursuing their own RP and it's not healthy for members of Orgs to have to go through a third party to get what they want. A lot of it is due to having a hierarchical social structure, and a lot of people want the political play, I guess, but I also think it's contributing to a lot of the feelings of frustration and resentment, which there obviously are.

[Too Old For This]

@lisse24 Hey! So if you want a quick and dirty rundown on haggling and the broker, feel free to page me in game. Lore is the character name. Sorry you couldn't get more help initially, I think a lot of people get burnt out from being asked the same questions over and over, so it gets condensed down to 'look at the help file'. I've gotten the same response for asking questions about specific things. Mostly I just try not to take it personally and poke at someone I know for the help I need.

[Groth]

@too-old-for-this said in Constructive (keyword) Criticism of Arx Systems:

@groth But that bonus is what helps me to get a better price on the amount.

Probably by less then you think, if you want to get the entire 25 bonus 75% of the time, you should be trying to grab 250 resources at a time . This bonus is then added to the result of your actual haggle roll which with perfect stats is about 150 which by the time the actual discount % is calculated means you're getting 66% to 78% instead of 61% to 73%.

What that means is that effectively your buy price drops by 25 and sell price increases by 25. This means that on average by spending 10 AP you'd be liquidating 250 resources for 380-440 silver for a total of 95,000-110,000 a batch. If you tried to convert AP to silver that way it means you'd spend 10 AP to buy 250 resources for 110 to 170 silver for a total of 27,500-42,500. So from an AP to Silver perspective, the conservative approach earns 68k to 83k which is pretty good and pretty close to what you get by just trying to grab 1000 resources at a time but it's still less because quantity has a quality all its own. Trying to grab 800+ at a time also means sometimes you'll crit and actually get a haggle deal for over 800 resources, in fact the average crit with 4/5 is for 860, which means aiming at 700 would net the entire bonus 75% of the time.

I can probably make a google sheet later if you want this in a more readable format.

PS: If you buy Perception 5, your 75% point will go up to 290 resources non-crit and 780 crit and increase your profit per 20 AP by something like 10,000

[Pyrephox]

I'm not sure that AP, even AP trading, is the problem - or, at least, it may only be a problem because of an overarching other issue: Lack of scarcity.

Silver and resources are effectively unlimited resources, really gated only by skills (which can fairly easily be pumped through activity + rs-hunting + teaching), and when they're acquired, can be turned into sort of an escalating feedback loop pretty easily - you can't trade AP right now, but you can still hire a haggler, or tap a protege, or buy raw resources/silver from someone who has nothing better to do with their time than generate it.

But that silver and those resources don't come from anywhere. Acquiring them has no opportunity cost or consequences, and they don't really represent anything real in the world. "Economic resources" don't reflect the wealth of a land that can be drained, they don't represent contracts with craftspeople who can be fully booked, even when it would make sense. Same for military (where do those new soldiers COME from? What isn't getting done on your lands because you decided to turn a thousand peasants into soldiers?), and even moreso for social. I think that feeds the playerbase's inclination to see acquiring these things as just a matter of "running code" rather than as IC actions that reflect things their characters are doing offscreen, things that matter.

And I think that sort of plays into a lot of the other issues - prestige balloons because people have effectively infinite resources to plug into chasing prestige. Investigations can be pushed along quickly, burning through clues, because dumping 50 resources every week isn't really that big of a deal, especially if you have two or three people helping you out. There's not a lot distinguishing non-leader nobles and commoners because there's no tension between them - and no pressing need to expand one's lands to grow, so no reason to not be friendly, diplomatic, and cooperative (which also contributes to resource/wealth/prestige bloat, because you only have to think about defending yourself from NPCs and not from hungry, hungry neighbors).

I remember, early in beta, staff talked about wanting to make sure that the wealth reflected in the world came from somewhere, that it could eventually be traced through the whole cycle. I feel like, in some ways, that's become a larger challenge as the game has expanded - in the rush to ensure that everyone has something to do, the coupling of 'thing to do' and 'what this means in the world' has been strained.

Unfortunately, the solution that comes to my mind would be a near total rework, and everyone would hate it. So I'm not sure what a GOOD solution would be, but I think it kinda has to start with looking at 'how much wealth, in silver AND resources does the Compact actually have and where is it', and reset things to reflect that, with systems that allow slow, risk-having growth (like conquering Abandoned territories (or your neighbors)), but fewer that just create silver/resources/materials out of whole cloth.

[Tempest]

Resources come from the resource farms, duh. All your house's serfs grow them.

[Groth]

Silver and Resources are not infinite, they're rate limited by AP and AP is the one true resource that Arx runs on. However you're right that AP essentially generates silver and resources from the ether.

It would be pretty cool to have Silver and Resources being generated by the dominions (With Arx itself and its market being a special super dominion) and filter their way to the PCs in finite quantities. In the same way it would be kind of cool to have the crafting materials be generated in limited quantities and the prices to some extent be determined by the demand.

[Tempest]

From my understanding, house income is...pretty insignificant.

Nobles don't get enough "allowance" to do anything with. Wow, I get 4k a week from my house. 16k a RL month. Okay. I guess it's good Arx doesn't use paper money ICly, or I'd probably be wiping my ass with my allowance.

And the houses themselves don't even really make enough to do anything with. Sure, 100k a week or whatever "seems" like a lot. (God forbid you're a smaller house. Oof.) But...with refining and stuff, the base price of materials, etc and that's like nothing. I think I spent somewhere like 300,000 silver when I picked up my character, making 3 pieces of exotic leather things? I could be remembering wrong. And that's not even...the top tier of thing. It's what, the 3rd best leather? 4th?

All the real "income" seems to come through spending AP to do things and how many PCs with the right skills do you have at your beck and call?

Which...seems a little backwards. IDK.

[Groth]

@tempest said in Constructive (keyword) Criticism of Arx Systems:

From my understanding, house income is...pretty insignificant.

Nobles don't get enough "allowance" to do anything with. Wow, I get 4k a week from my house. 16k a RL month. Okay. I guess it's good Arx doesn't use paper money ICly, or I'd probably be wiping my ass with my allowance.

And the houses themselves don't even really make enough to do anything with. Sure, 100k a week or whatever "seems" like a lot. (God forbid you're a smaller house. Oof.) But...with refining and stuff, the base price of materials, etc and that's like nothing. I think I spent somewhere like 300,000 silver when I picked up my character, making 3 pieces of exotic leather things? I could be remembering wrong. And that's not even...the top tier of thing. It's what, the 3rd best leather? 4th?

All the real "income" seems to come through spending AP to do things and how many PCs with the right skills do you have at your beck and call?

Which...seems a little backwards. IDK.

There is a pattern in Arx design where you have an old system that generates values on the order of X. Then a new system is designed that generates values on the order of 10X which makes the old system look kind of quaint.

This is the case for Donate and Largesse vs Modeling and this is the case of Domain income and Lifestyle vs Haggling. I don't think that's how they intend things to be, just a consequence of the new systems being experimental and not tuned to be a coherent part of the whole. Assuming they're happy with the numbers that Haggling produce, I would expect them to increase both Household income and Lifestyle expenses by about 5-10 times at the same time they implement the automated house stipend payouts etc. They're probably holding off because they have grand plans(tm) for the dominions, the backend is practically a full on Orkfia style territory mini game.

[Too Old For This]

@groth Hmmmm, I'll have to tinker with it more and see if my numbers change. Right now 300 seems to be my sweet spot for Haggling, and I still occasionally have to roll more than once if I want to get the full 300 or the really good price. Admittedly, I haven't been buying resources from Haggle, I go through the broker so other people can get some of that silver flow too.

[Groth]

@too-old-for-this said in Constructive (keyword) Criticism of Arx Systems:

@groth Hmmmm, I'll have to tinker with it more and see if my numbers change. Right now 300 seems to be my sweet spot for Haggling, and I still occasionally have to roll more than once if I want to get the full 300 or the really good price. Admittedly, I haven't been buying resources from Haggle, I go through the broker so other people can get some of that silver flow too.

How worth it is it for you to rerun the deal because you didn't get the 25%? There's thousands of resources on the broker people are trying to sell for 300 or less right now.

Assuming you rolled 275 and thus got no bonus and you bought your resources for 300, your option now is to either spend 5 AP to sell them for 385 average for a profit of 23k or you spend 10 AP to try again and sell 300 resources for 410 average for a profit of 33k. That's you spending 5 AP for 'only' 10k, before accounting for the fact with your stats you only have a 50% chance of getting the full bonus at 300, which means about a quarter of the time the second roll will be a 'failure' too.

We can estimate three strategies.

Selling 250 at a time, henceforth called A.
Selling 300 at a time, henceforth called B.
Selling 2000 at a time, henceforth called C.

A will get the deal 75% of the time and reroll the rest. So if we want to be lazy and generous* we can say they spend 6.6 AP on finding the deal and they liquidate for 110 profit per resource, 27,500 total and 2400 silver per AP.
B will get the deal 50% of the time and reroll the rest. Again being lazy and generous we can say they spend 10 Ap on finding the deal, liquidate at 110 profit, 33,000 total and 2200 silver per AP.
C will get the deal 100% of the time. They'll spend 5 AP finding the deal and liquidate at 85 profit, 28,000 total and 2,800 silver per AP. If you add in crits which happen 5% of the time, that becomes 30,300 total and 3,000 silver per AP.

[jibberthehut]

@groth just haggle/findbuyer and collate from the broker. Buying the resources through haggle and then selling is horrifying waste of ap.it really is. Eats into profits.

[Roz]

The reason there aren't more guides is probably: time. Effort. The reason I don't believe people are actively trying to hoard the secrets of the systems is that there are a number of really fantastic guides here on the player wiki, including a "mechanics cheat sheet" Google doc that breaks down things like armor type vs craftsmanship and how skills are used in various sytems, along with other guides on usage of the various systems.

If you ask about a system and aren't just looking for the basic syntax stuff in helpfiles, please just come back and say that! I always give helpfiles first by default because tbh that's what most people who start asking about a topic end up needing. But people absolutely get more in-depth stuff on Info if they're like "Oh yeah I'm good with the syntax at all, but can you give me more detail on X thing."

[Groth]

@jibberthehut said in Constructive (keyword) Criticism of Arx Systems:

@groth just haggle/findbuyer and collate from the broker. Buying the resources through haggle and then selling is horrifying waste of ap.it really is. Eats into profits.

Actually unless the broker price is below 275, you make more silver per AP on your haggler if you buy it through haggle then broker.

When you buy from the broker and sell on haggle your profit is 500*(Discount+0.10)-Broker Price
When you buy from haggle and sell on haggle, your profit is 500*(Discount+0.10) - 500*(1-discount)

The average discount of a max skill haggler is going to be 0.71 without the bonus, 0.05 better with the bonus before accounting for spending AP on rerolls.

Doing max volume:
500*( 0,71+0,10) - 500*(1-0,71) = 260 per resource per 20 AP = 1.3
500*(0,71+0,10)-300=105 per resource per 10 AP = 10,5
500*(0,71+0,10)-275 = 130 per resource per 10 AP = 13

Doing max profit:
500*( 0,76+0,10) - 500*(1-0,76) = 310 / 20 = 15,5
500*( 0,76+0,10) - 275 = 155 / 10 = 15,5

The reason for that is simply because the 10% bonus on haggle sell means the average price of resources as far as the game is concerned is 275 and haggling profit is symmetrical.

If a resource is on the broker for 275, you can either spend 10 AP haggle buying it for 120 and a profit of 155 or you can spend 10 AP haggle selling it for a profit of 155.

[jibberthehut]

@groth you brought math beyond 1/4 inch seam allowances and 5 to 8 ounce measurements out and I went cross eyed.

Edit: which is to say none of the above made a lick of sense to me (no please don't try to break it down or walk me through it my husband swiftly learned that won't work, I just suck at math rl)

[Groth]

@jibberthehut said in Constructive (keyword) Criticism of Arx Systems:

@groth you brought math beyond 1/4 inch seam allowances and 5 to 8 ounce measurements out and I went cross eyed.

Edit: which is to say none of the above made a lick of sense to me (no please don't try to break it down or walk me through it my husband swiftly learned that won't work, I just suck at math rl)

Basically there's three important numbers. How much can you sell for if you haggle? How much can you buy for if you haggle? What is the price on the broker? If the price on the broker is closer to the sell price then the buy price, then it's more AP efficient to haggle buy. If the price on the broker is closer to the buy price then the sell price, then it's more AP efficient to haggle sell.

Which all translates to, haggle buy is more profitable per AP then haggle sell if people are selling you resources for above 275 silver each.

[Kanye Qwest]

@jibberthehut for a difference of 2.5 silver per AP.

[jibberthehut]

@groth dude (or ladyn i dunno don't care) buy then sell and you are out 20 ap. That is a huuuge chunk of AP. That is a fifth of what an average person gets.

And while you may have a formula there, what is on paper doesn't always pan out in practice because your rolls will not always give you want you want. It's why you over ask on the first part and hope it doesn't shoot the moon on you.

In the few times i have haggled resources there is maybe once it actually said "i will buy 300-ish" it usually asks for between 400 - 600ish of them and never at higher than 350ish per.

Until ap has been settled and we know if it can be traded to people etc etc, theres no concrete value to give it like there was before (roughly 2.5k to 3.5k for one end point ap). Even the value in crafting is variable when it comes to ap.

[Pyrephox]

Which means that both routes are nearly equal, and each character should just make a choice based on what's more in line with their own goals and experiences. Which is actually an excellent indicator of a part of system flexibility that works.

[Kanye Qwest]

@pyrephox Yes. I don't honestly find this kind of display very constructive, because the projected margin is so slim it's in 'who gives a damn' territory, but is presented in a way that all but begs for interpretation by people who don't want to math out the systems as "oh no if I don't do this right I am at a big disadvantage".

[Pyrephox]

@kanye-qwest I think it's valuable in a way, to show that both methods work JUST FINE (when it comes to being competitively viable for a character regardless of which route you take), but probably is not helpful for people who just have to optimize to every fraction of a percent.

I admit, when I think about systems, I more try to think about play experience and the choices players have the option to make for their characters, rather than fine number optimization - although there's a place for that.

When I try to critique Arx's systems, though, it's always with a caveat that there are at least two huge systems which currently don't exist, but which are likely to change everything else around, in terms of character resources and actions: Dominion and Magic. And I can't even say that I know enough of what those are going to look like to speculate on their effects. I know what I would LIKE Dominion to look like, but that's a whole different thing.