Weed farming
2007-04-23
For those of you who've arrived hoping for the latest tips for growing good gear, I'm sorry to disappoint you but this post is about growing pipe-weed in the new Lord of the Rings Online game. It's a tale of illicit riches, scientific progress and discovery, hopes dashed and even a change in the laws of physics themselves! Well, biology, but somehow changing the laws of physics sounds more impressive (if no more epic as far as life on this planet goes...).
As always, please don't turn away just because I mentioned a computer game: the article is intended for a general audience, and will keep geekery down to a quaint and endearing level*. Besides, you made it this far...
* I wish.
As a diversion from the relentless slaughter, massively multiplayer online games tend to offer a few non-combat activities to indulge in, often including crafting. In some games it's little more than a way of wasting some time and perhaps making a bit of in-game cash, but in games like Star Wars Galaxies the crafting was so involved that many players spent their in-game time running a vast trade empire, Sim-game style, rather than being out slaughtering banthas with everyone else.
One of the professions available in LotRO is that of farmer. The farmer can grow various food plants, which are next to useless (but might be handy later on if anyone can be bothered to get far into the cooking professions), and also pipe-weed, which is absolutely useless. Well, your character can do a smoking animation using it, and each variety of weed makes a different 'smoke shape', but it's of no practical use.
There will now be a brief pause while everyone gets the 'I bet it's not tobacco' jokes out of their systems.
Anyway, the farmer buys seeds, water and fertiliser from the computerised vendor. He runs out to the field and uses the first of his 'recipes' to plant a crop, then harvests it, getting an assortment of 'poor' plants and 'fair' plants. When he gets near a workbench, he can use the other two 'recipes' to turn the fair plants into finished product, and the poor plants into more seeds. He sells the finished product back to the non-player farmer character, then he buys more water and fertiliser and goes out to plant more. When he's had enough practice, he moves up to better varieties of weed, then eventually learns how to use Soil of Rivendell to improve the crop.
Once you've spent several hours and a fair bit of in-game money practising your farming, and got your character to 'Master Expert', you can grow a crop that makes a profit. A very large profit. It'll turn a 300 silver investment into 600 silver in a couple of hours, and this in a game where few people have more than a couple of hundred silver because it costs so much to learn new skills and repair your equipment after fighting. (And because the game is new, and most people are quite low level).
However, there's more to farming than the money. You can get more interesting varieties of pipe-weed by cross-breeding your existing ones. With a quick look online (it's information I could have got in-game, but it would have risked lots of money...) I found out a little of how it worked, and set myself some goals.
In short, you can buy the instructions to plant a field with a mix of Longbottom Leaf seeds and Sweet Lobelia seeds, and the resultant crop will be some combination of those two and a completely new variety: Muddy Foot. Similarly, mixing Muddy Foot with Southern Star begets Dragon's Breath. Dragon's Breath and Sweet Galenas will make Eagle's Nest. And that's not even the half of it: staring with other low-tier varieties there's a whole other tree in order to get the one that goes with Eagle's Nest to get the Ultimate Weed.
It's called Wizard's Something. I forget what.
So there's me, thinking that not only is this an interesting diversion, but that it would be good fun for my guild to have stocks of each kind of pipe-weed and seeds to grow more. Longbottom Leaf, Southern Star and Sweet Galenas are crops my character knows how to cultivate, and the vendor NPC is happy to sell them to me. Problem is getting some Sweet Lobelia seeds to start me off...
The website mentions a quest, and it's easy to find. A hungry Hobbit wants 5 servings of eggs and onions and 5 hard biscuits, and will exchange a full Hobbit breakfast and some Sweet Lobelia seeds. So I get the help of a guildmate whose character can cook. I rush off to grow some onions, buy the other ingredients, and meet him at an oven, only to find that the eggs and onions need to be prepared over a camp fire. The cook can make a camp fire, but he doesn't have the materials, so we go to the auction house to see what we can find.
We buy the 'recipe' for 'campfire materials', only to find that it's for woodworkers, so he logs in with another character. After a while of wandering the wilderness looking for wood, we have campfire materials, and a few minutes later we're sitting around a fire just outside the south gate of Bree.
That's one of the things I like about the game. Although it's taken various liberties with the established lore - you've got to, if the game is to be playable - going to the places from the books and films is quite good fun.
Eventually I have the food I need, and I get my seeds. And although the Hobbit only wants one set from me, I persuade a couple of guild-mates to do the quest themselves so I can get more. I run off to the fields, and eventually get a nice crop of Sweet Lobelia, complete with some poor plants to facilitate the next crop. Quite a while later, after spending lots of money and running the occasional crop of Sweet Galenas to stay in the black, I've got small but potentially sustainable stores of seeds for Sweet Lobelia, Muddy Foot and even a handful of Dragon's Breath.
But this will all change. In fact, by the time you read this the patch has probably already gone live. See, letting players make so much money is bad for the game: the inflation ruins the economy and the fact that other ways of making money don't compete leads players to neglect them. So I completely sympathise with the developers, who needed to fix it. But I'm not happy with the solution they chose.
Before the patch, each 'poor' plant could be turned into three seeds: enough for half the next crop. That is, in order to avoid losing seeds, a crop had to include two poor plants, and the average is around that (a fraction more, but I didn't bother working out how much). The change is to the recipe that makes the seeds, reducing the return to one-for-one: enough for one-sixth of the crop.
A quick glance shows that people growing Sweet Galenas for profit will make roughly a third of the seeds they need to carry on, and will have to buy from the vendor to fix the shortfall. Problem solved.
Except that I can't buy the seeds. I jumped through loads of hoops to get the Sweet Lobelia seeds, and had to do so again when my initial crop didn't give me enough to carry on. Then I slowly built up a stock of those, selling off the finished weed to claw back a tiny fraction of the money I'd spent on getting the seeds and learning the 'recipes', until I had enough to start speculating on the Muddy Foot, and so on.
Now that I can't get enough seeds from a crop to plant the next one, the project is over. Full stop.
Were there alternatives? Sure there were...
The simplest answer is to change the prices. If I can spend 300s to make 300s in two hours, work out what you'd like me to be able to make in two hours (the investment shouldn't be relevant, but my level might be) and reduce the sale price of the finished product to adjust. My buying price and my selling price are under the developers' control, as are the equations and the probabilities that determine my returns.
Another relatively easy fix would be to leave the original seed recipe at the new reduced level, and put in an additional recipe to turn fair plants into seeds. The gold farmers have their output reduced, as before, but those of us who are in it for progress rather than money could mash up the healthy (and valuable) plants for more seeds. The cross-breeding programme could continue, but it would do so at the expense of the saleable crop, which is fair enough.
On the other hand, there's a slightly larger issue here. In the course of this farming I bought ingredients from a computer vendor, used them to create a more valuable commodity, which I sold back to the same guy. Why are there no other players involved?
The best solution for the game would be to make the pipe-weed desirable by other players (and that's the hard bit): not too good, but worth buying at the auction house. Perhaps it already is, with the novelty value of the smoke animations, but except for the one that blows a big heart-shaped smoke ring I don't much like them. Then slash the price at which the vendor will buy it. I mean really cut it so that it would never even cover costs.
This achieves a number of things. The current system has no economic dynamics. The vendor will always buy, at fixed price. If you alter the product to generate a demand among other players and remove the unlimited demand the computer has (or make it uneconomical), then the product is produced and consumed by players and is subject to normal supply/demand economics. Some people might make a fortune, still, but because demand is under control (roughly proportional to the number of players on the server, perhaps) if too many people try to do it, they will each make less. You've also involved more players in the auction house and the player-driven economy, and the more people get involved in the massively multiplayer aspects of a MMOG the better.
So anyway, I've stashed my seeds away and stopped farming, to begin again only if they make cross-breeding workable again (and if it becomes too commercial I probably won't bother even then). In the meantime, I have to try and organise these thoughts and see if I can be bothered to post them on the game's official forums, in the hope that it might be noticed by some of the developers.
As always, please don't turn away just because I mentioned a computer game: the article is intended for a general audience, and will keep geekery down to a quaint and endearing level*. Besides, you made it this far...
* I wish.
As a diversion from the relentless slaughter, massively multiplayer online games tend to offer a few non-combat activities to indulge in, often including crafting. In some games it's little more than a way of wasting some time and perhaps making a bit of in-game cash, but in games like Star Wars Galaxies the crafting was so involved that many players spent their in-game time running a vast trade empire, Sim-game style, rather than being out slaughtering banthas with everyone else.
One of the professions available in LotRO is that of farmer. The farmer can grow various food plants, which are next to useless (but might be handy later on if anyone can be bothered to get far into the cooking professions), and also pipe-weed, which is absolutely useless. Well, your character can do a smoking animation using it, and each variety of weed makes a different 'smoke shape', but it's of no practical use.
There will now be a brief pause while everyone gets the 'I bet it's not tobacco' jokes out of their systems.
Anyway, the farmer buys seeds, water and fertiliser from the computerised vendor. He runs out to the field and uses the first of his 'recipes' to plant a crop, then harvests it, getting an assortment of 'poor' plants and 'fair' plants. When he gets near a workbench, he can use the other two 'recipes' to turn the fair plants into finished product, and the poor plants into more seeds. He sells the finished product back to the non-player farmer character, then he buys more water and fertiliser and goes out to plant more. When he's had enough practice, he moves up to better varieties of weed, then eventually learns how to use Soil of Rivendell to improve the crop.
Once you've spent several hours and a fair bit of in-game money practising your farming, and got your character to 'Master Expert', you can grow a crop that makes a profit. A very large profit. It'll turn a 300 silver investment into 600 silver in a couple of hours, and this in a game where few people have more than a couple of hundred silver because it costs so much to learn new skills and repair your equipment after fighting. (And because the game is new, and most people are quite low level).
However, there's more to farming than the money. You can get more interesting varieties of pipe-weed by cross-breeding your existing ones. With a quick look online (it's information I could have got in-game, but it would have risked lots of money...) I found out a little of how it worked, and set myself some goals.
In short, you can buy the instructions to plant a field with a mix of Longbottom Leaf seeds and Sweet Lobelia seeds, and the resultant crop will be some combination of those two and a completely new variety: Muddy Foot. Similarly, mixing Muddy Foot with Southern Star begets Dragon's Breath. Dragon's Breath and Sweet Galenas will make Eagle's Nest. And that's not even the half of it: staring with other low-tier varieties there's a whole other tree in order to get the one that goes with Eagle's Nest to get the Ultimate Weed.
It's called Wizard's Something. I forget what.
So there's me, thinking that not only is this an interesting diversion, but that it would be good fun for my guild to have stocks of each kind of pipe-weed and seeds to grow more. Longbottom Leaf, Southern Star and Sweet Galenas are crops my character knows how to cultivate, and the vendor NPC is happy to sell them to me. Problem is getting some Sweet Lobelia seeds to start me off...
The website mentions a quest, and it's easy to find. A hungry Hobbit wants 5 servings of eggs and onions and 5 hard biscuits, and will exchange a full Hobbit breakfast and some Sweet Lobelia seeds. So I get the help of a guildmate whose character can cook. I rush off to grow some onions, buy the other ingredients, and meet him at an oven, only to find that the eggs and onions need to be prepared over a camp fire. The cook can make a camp fire, but he doesn't have the materials, so we go to the auction house to see what we can find.
We buy the 'recipe' for 'campfire materials', only to find that it's for woodworkers, so he logs in with another character. After a while of wandering the wilderness looking for wood, we have campfire materials, and a few minutes later we're sitting around a fire just outside the south gate of Bree.
That's one of the things I like about the game. Although it's taken various liberties with the established lore - you've got to, if the game is to be playable - going to the places from the books and films is quite good fun.
Eventually I have the food I need, and I get my seeds. And although the Hobbit only wants one set from me, I persuade a couple of guild-mates to do the quest themselves so I can get more. I run off to the fields, and eventually get a nice crop of Sweet Lobelia, complete with some poor plants to facilitate the next crop. Quite a while later, after spending lots of money and running the occasional crop of Sweet Galenas to stay in the black, I've got small but potentially sustainable stores of seeds for Sweet Lobelia, Muddy Foot and even a handful of Dragon's Breath.
But this will all change. In fact, by the time you read this the patch has probably already gone live. See, letting players make so much money is bad for the game: the inflation ruins the economy and the fact that other ways of making money don't compete leads players to neglect them. So I completely sympathise with the developers, who needed to fix it. But I'm not happy with the solution they chose.
Before the patch, each 'poor' plant could be turned into three seeds: enough for half the next crop. That is, in order to avoid losing seeds, a crop had to include two poor plants, and the average is around that (a fraction more, but I didn't bother working out how much). The change is to the recipe that makes the seeds, reducing the return to one-for-one: enough for one-sixth of the crop.
A quick glance shows that people growing Sweet Galenas for profit will make roughly a third of the seeds they need to carry on, and will have to buy from the vendor to fix the shortfall. Problem solved.
Except that I can't buy the seeds. I jumped through loads of hoops to get the Sweet Lobelia seeds, and had to do so again when my initial crop didn't give me enough to carry on. Then I slowly built up a stock of those, selling off the finished weed to claw back a tiny fraction of the money I'd spent on getting the seeds and learning the 'recipes', until I had enough to start speculating on the Muddy Foot, and so on.
Now that I can't get enough seeds from a crop to plant the next one, the project is over. Full stop.
Were there alternatives? Sure there were...
The simplest answer is to change the prices. If I can spend 300s to make 300s in two hours, work out what you'd like me to be able to make in two hours (the investment shouldn't be relevant, but my level might be) and reduce the sale price of the finished product to adjust. My buying price and my selling price are under the developers' control, as are the equations and the probabilities that determine my returns.
Another relatively easy fix would be to leave the original seed recipe at the new reduced level, and put in an additional recipe to turn fair plants into seeds. The gold farmers have their output reduced, as before, but those of us who are in it for progress rather than money could mash up the healthy (and valuable) plants for more seeds. The cross-breeding programme could continue, but it would do so at the expense of the saleable crop, which is fair enough.
On the other hand, there's a slightly larger issue here. In the course of this farming I bought ingredients from a computer vendor, used them to create a more valuable commodity, which I sold back to the same guy. Why are there no other players involved?
The best solution for the game would be to make the pipe-weed desirable by other players (and that's the hard bit): not too good, but worth buying at the auction house. Perhaps it already is, with the novelty value of the smoke animations, but except for the one that blows a big heart-shaped smoke ring I don't much like them. Then slash the price at which the vendor will buy it. I mean really cut it so that it would never even cover costs.
This achieves a number of things. The current system has no economic dynamics. The vendor will always buy, at fixed price. If you alter the product to generate a demand among other players and remove the unlimited demand the computer has (or make it uneconomical), then the product is produced and consumed by players and is subject to normal supply/demand economics. Some people might make a fortune, still, but because demand is under control (roughly proportional to the number of players on the server, perhaps) if too many people try to do it, they will each make less. You've also involved more players in the auction house and the player-driven economy, and the more people get involved in the massively multiplayer aspects of a MMOG the better.
So anyway, I've stashed my seeds away and stopped farming, to begin again only if they make cross-breeding workable again (and if it becomes too commercial I probably won't bother even then). In the meantime, I have to try and organise these thoughts and see if I can be bothered to post them on the game's official forums, in the hope that it might be noticed by some of the developers.
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