De-Commodification of Resources: Effects of Purity Update

[Hans_Lemurson]

With purity variance appearing now in nearly every facet of the game and causing greater cross-interactions than before (I'm looking at you, compost bins), there is going to result a massive change in the nature of the Economy of the game which I call the "De-Commodification of Resources". (There's probably a word for that)

What does this mean? Here's an example: There is no such thing as "Water" any more.

You ask: "What! What's all this bluish wet stuff then?"

You silly person, that's not water, that's 43.91 Mercury Water! I'll sell you some for 1$ per Liter. (Bring your own buckets.)

This is however nothing NEW, since we've already dealt with this in Crops. There's never been such a thing as "Cereal", it's always been "Salt Cereal" or "Mercury Cereal" with further gradations depending on the quality. This has made the acquisition and trading of Agricultural products somewhat...complicated.
Now this applies to everything. Everything.

EVERYTHING.

ALL THE THINGS!!!

You say: "Well, DUH."

No, YOU don't understand!
Everything is now 9 Things.
9?
Yeah, there are now 9 sub-categories for every single item in the game.
Medium Salt
High Salt
Medium Mercury
High Mercury
Medium Sulfur
High Sulfur
Medium Lead
High Lead
and
Garbage

Technically speaking, we were already dealing with "Garbage-quality" goods for everything that previously had no purity, and that the variation now makes all things strictly better. This is largely true, but is offset by the purity-bottleneck caused by Compost Bins. Purity is harder to achieve than before, and so therefore matters more than before, and so the isolation of different purities is now essential.

The necessity to keep separate the different purities will create a somewhat large inventory challenge. Every item will probably be useful at some point, but not just yet, so you will need to keep more stuff around for longer in order to ensure that you will have what you need when you need it. You could always choose to ignore the new purities, and just bet that the variance in the new resources will end up slightly better than 0% purity, and in many cases you'd be right, but not all.

Back to the Water example: there are some cases where 0% pure water, however annoying it was as a purity sink, is still better than what your local water supply now gives. If you want to make Mercury Pie Dough, and your local water has only 22.31 Mercury, then that is strictly worse than Water that previously gave you a flat 25.00 across the board. You cannot just use "Water" any more, because you cannot GET "Water" because, as I mentioned at the beginning, "Water" no longer exists. If you want to make less crappy pies, you are going to need to procure a supply of Mercury-Water.

This holds true for many resources: Wrong-Purity will be worse than Generic-Purity. Getting the RIGHT purity is now the name of the game. However, Purity is tied to the land. If your land and its surroundings do not have the resources you need of the right purity, then you will have to get them from somewhere else.

How do you get stuff from elsewhere?
Trading!
Port to Boston with 24 buckets.
Post "[Jamestown] WTB Salt Boards" in the trade forum.
Form trading partnerships with neighbors who are sitting on high quality nodes!
Umm...raid neighbors for their purity supplies?
Umm...

...Who am I kidding?

EVERYBODY MAKE ALTS!!!
Wander the world with a shovel and a bucket sampling the clay and water until you find a good spot and stick your leanto there. Other humans can't be relied upon to give you what you want when you want it! Enjoy your Massively Singleplayer experience.

[emeralddream]

Theese are the issues that made me consider quitting til we get a new server or wipe on current ones. I feel the snowball grind just keeps getting steeper and steeper and no way to catch up with our demigods on our servers as long as the demigods log in once in a while and thats not counting the demigods actually going around killing everyone who may become a threat sooner or later.

How on earth will you defend your decent purity node spot when some 300+ bile person comes along and wipes it out.

Not to mention everything you made up to this point was made obsolete.

The blight of Alt scouting for purity nodes with high bile mains following to remove all current occupiers is in full effect!

[Gallient]

I haven't actually explored the system and I like to derail

Good info OP. Have you tried making clay/pots and plant any trees yet?

Also regarding selling that merc water you found, what server (can PM)?

[dageir]

The city hub system does encourage trade to a higher degree than the HnH. Sure there will be some raiding because of the new purity system, but alot more since more things can be bought.

[Hans_Lemurson]

Theese are the issues that made me consider quitting til we get a new server or wipe on current ones. I feel the snowball grind just keeps getting steeper and steeper and no way to catch up with our demigods on our servers as long as the demigods log in once in a while and thats not counting the demigods actually going around killing everyone who may become a threat sooner or later.

How on earth will you defend your decent purity node spot when some 300+ bile person comes along and wipes it out.

Not to mention everything you made up to this point was made obsolete.

The blight of Alt scouting for purity nodes with high bile mains following to remove all current occupiers is in full effect!

It was technically always an issue, but it used to be that the most valuable things were your Fields or Mines. Fields could be made anywhere with equal result, and High-purity mines DID cause some conflict and make raiding targets...but only if you knew that a village had a good mine.

There were limits to how high the quality of goods were you could get from any given place, and then after that you would just make vast quantities.

Now however, with the quality of nearly ALL goods being tied to specific geographical locations, the value of certain pieces of Real Estate went THROUGH THE ROOF. Couple this with the fact that the relative value of an area can be determined from outside the claim (If there's good water nearby, how good is it inside the village?) and this results in the knowledge of value leaking out fairly easily.

When there is knowledge that something exists and a desire to have it, then there will be potential for much conflict.

However, my post was mostly talking about the effects on Inventory Management and Trading. I'm not sure the stalls will have enough slots to sell in bulk all of the new purity variants that will appear.

Good info OP. Have you tried making clay/pots and plant any trees yet?

Also regarding selling that merc water you found, what server (can PM)?

Haven't made any new pots yet, and sadly the water I spoke of was a hypothetical example. The best I've found is 34.27 next to my enemy's base.

The city hub system does encourage trade to a higher degree than the HnH. Sure there will be some raiding because of the new purity system, but alot more since more things can be bought.

Yeah, the ability to travel at 4 kilometers/second to trade makes it easier than traveling to raid at 4 meters/second.

However, since the ultimate point of Salem is to hunt "The most dangerous Game", there's always going to be some raiding. But now it'll be more lucrative because you are no longer simply obtaining things in quantity but can now obtain things that you cannot produce yourself.

[dageir]

Hope there is no "best place" for all things. That would ruin some interaction with trade/raid. Now every town might have to focus on a couple of things to increase purity in and trade/raid from others. I hope this will be the case at least.

[ysbryd]

First your scout alts will have to have highish stats to not nerf everything they find, and second, higher tier players are actually worse off, their 90/100% pure stuff is coming out of bins as 0% because of the difference in purity is larger, than my ****** 40% stuff which is still coming out at 2/3% because its closer to 0. Im still getting my head round most of this stuff, but I think trade will go the way of haven, ie, sell what you have good in and use an alt to do it, cos if they find out where your good stuff is, some high stater is gonna come stick a claim on it.

[Cik]

Right-on OP.

In addition to the other comments. . .in support, yes, alts need to be highly leveled alts now. In correction of trading, no, trading does not exist, never has never will.

[dageir]

Ok, no trading. Weird.

[Viackura]

what about using well water which is neutral