Bounties!
Some issues and concerns and ideas, whee.
Concern: Bounty amounts can greatly influence the economy. To much money earned easily leads to problems, too little money that is too hard to earn leads to issues.
Concern: Risk vrs Reward. Higher bounties for harder things encourages killing more difficult monsters to get more funds. If the range is too small between them it makes more sense to kill lots of easy things quickly with little time to 'recover' between fights or spend resources on healing.
Concern: Time investment for funds hunting vrs time to earn funds via crafting should be somewhat equal. A skew one way or the other can cause issues.
Concern: Balancing promised income vrs random income (inspiration when foraging). While foraging is a good wa yto make coin, it's also random. If you're unlucky, you might get nothing. If you're very lucky, you might get lots. Uncertain gains being the best way to earn income can hurt people with limited time.
Observations so far:
Killed greenish huge spider. Earned 80i. Had to back off to heal 3 times to avoid dying.
Killed anaconda. Earned 1c. Small amount of healing required.
Killed wild cats. 20i earned from each. No healing required.
Killed horses. 2i each. No healing required.
Time investment for killing spiders and the like is pretty large, having to roam about to find them, healing, etc. Currently these bounties are so small it is not worth the time. In two hours i will make a handful of copper at the most in this manner and likely risk dying several times.
Foraging, in two hours I randomly found 70 copper from moments of inspiration.
So currently foraging is a lot safer, and much more rewarding, even if completely random.
My concern with that is that usually I have very limited play time. If I can play a couple hours in an evening I am extremely lucky. In most cases I can play a couple nights a week, and often even then it's a few hours. Relying on the random income really worries me due to that. I will have to spend almost all my time foraging. I probably will only be able to earn enough money by hunting if I spend absolutely all my time doing it. At this point in time I don't think I can invest in a deed.
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So here's some thoughts on the issues at hand that I had:
The primary reason the bounties are so low seems to be because on servers with high bounties that it made keeping deeds and such too easy, people had hordes of money.
Now, hordes of money is interesting, as I, with 72 fight skill and 60ql gear, even on a high bounty server, due to my play time, spend most of my hunting just to pay for my deed. I get to work on my deed about 30% of the time i'm on, the rest is making sure I can pay for it. The people I see with 'tons' of money seem to be those that have the time to hunt very often, and have the skill and gear to fight the hardest enemies, thus earn the maximum bounties. I myself have trouble killing hellhounds, and i run away from trolls. I struggle with crocodiles and scorpions but can manage them. The highest bounty I've ever gotten is 7 copper. I have however seen people getting bounties of 15+. Consider players that play with regular time, don't like hunting, and don't have the fighting skill to kill anything bigger than a bear or wolf which usually hand out about 2-4 copper. Of course, people that invest the time and effort to be able to kill those harder enemies should be rewarded for it - it takes a long time, and a lot of investment to have the gear to do it. So obviously they should earn more. But maybe not -that- much more.
I do think that bounties should be lower than they are in some places. Non hostile creatures probably don't need to give more than 25-50i. I do think it is important to have higher rewards for higher risks, so it's hard to find the balance here, but if a wild cat is worth 50i, a wolf is worth 75i, a bear is worth 1.5c, a crocodile 2c, a troll 5c? Plus their modifiers. That still seems a little low to me, but, just a rough and arbitrary set of numbers that seems at least kinda reasonable. I probably wouldn't bother with crocs but i'd be willing to take the time for bears and wolves at that point.
What I would really suggest is perhaps something along the lines of a diminishing return. I don't know if that is possible in wurm, which will make this a bit of a worthless write up, but whatever xd! The crown has to pay bounties to hunters, wants to encourage new settles to help the land thrive, etc. So what if they capped how much they would pay to each person? A person that doesn't really like hunting that much probably isn't going to hunt the maximum amount, whereas a person that spends all day hunting could empty out the kingdom coffers.
So what if you get to a certain amount of bounty earned, and the crown starts paying you less? And over another threshold a bit less? Incrementally. (As an example, say you earn 1 silver from hunting in a day. Then you get 10% less for the rest of the day. At 2 silver another 10% less. At 3 silver another 10% less. These numbers are just randomly picked mind you, as examples). The hunter can then decide at what point hunting is no longer worth the effort for them. This would allow bounties to be a bit 'bigger' (still lower than some places is a good idea i think), but still help slow down the build up of hordes of money and make the time investment of crafting be able to hopefully keep up with the time investment of hunting.
If that doesn't work my best suggestion is still just slimming down the window a bit. Or introduce other means of fixed income besides hunting. Because relying on random MOI is harsh, but the risk vrs reward in hunting is also harsh and some people don't have the time to roam the map, or just dont' like hunting at all.
Traders might help with this somewhat of course, but right now they are simply impossible to purchase so no testing can be done and won't be done for a long time I expect , and i'm not sure how much of a difference they will make. The trouble with traders is usually a few lucky people get to drain them and then everyone else is sol.