Zion: Colleges out of balance

[VDZ]

I just heard the prices of the skills at colleges can't be changed.
If the prices are that high at standard, it's just insane.
Morbyd rarely plays, but he has a net worth of 1100s (300s more than me (I work hard each day for my cash), and about 3 times as much as the #3).

With the college prices this high, owning a college is just getting rich by doing nothing.
You don't even need a worker!
I mean, 100% of the cash paid for the skills (which are quite expensive) goes to the college's owner!

I think the colleges are out of balance. Colleges are much more profitable than the rest of the economy.
Shouldn't each part of the economy at least be near as profitable as the others?

[zaroba]

unless mit recently changed something:
profit = (sale price - min price) for schools, so he can't be making 100% profit

this is the main reason schools aren't usually buildable by players on worlds i make.
either players set em high and get rich easily by taking money from others too easily, or they set em low as possible and complain and cry about a bug when thier not making any money

[fhko]

Suggestion For Possible Future Situations:
Would it be possible to have an item (for our purposes lets call it diploma') that grants the player a specified skill...either for consuming the diploma (like a character would normally consume food or drink)...

...or simply by having it in their inventory (this one might be good for a war type game...having a shovel gives you the build bunker skill while a hammer would allow for the build war factory skill)

This could mean that the owner of a school that produces these item needs to make sure they always have plenty of raw materials, cash and/or employees to actively turn a profit.

To further put a stress on maintaining a working building you might also add an item for each level of the skill (back to the shovel-bunker example...standard shovel would provide Build Bunker Lv1...a Titanium and Fiber glass shovel [which is lighter and stronger] would allow the user Build Bunker Lv2...while a backhoe gives Build Bunker Lv3) each item requires progressively more time, money, employees and materials to make.

...Once again simply an idea...

[zaroba]

i had thought about suggesting that when i was making the origional z13 bdat. i was thinking it would be neat if thier were gov buildings selling things like 'Industry Permit' etc that would be needed by the player to build stuff. but that wasen't coded yet. so instead i had gov buildings selling things like 'Industry Enrollment' that could be exchanged for a skill at the school. But due to new player difficulty and lack of a free skill, i mostly removed that in favor of the generic schools. but its still in place for Build Manufacturing and Build Inustrial to stop players getting those two skills as thier first skill for free.

thought about posting it in the feature requests, but then some problems came to mind:
- thiers no way to limit the 'skills' you could obtain. players could buy some, stock em in thier house, then buy others and essentually get every skill available, unstocking the one they need from thier house when they need it.
- not all players would need to buy the things. players could give em to each other to use to build stuff (granted, this isen't much difference from a player building a building and selling it to another player).
- players could freely give away the 'skill' to other players when no longer wanting it. for some worlds (liek the republic and other simple worlds) this woulden't work. For an economy world (like sabrada and zoric) this would also be a money loophole.
- if a player had a bunch of expensive ones in thier house and died or went inactive, another player could buy the house and get thousands of s worth of free skills.


keep in mind, i only thought of these problems since zoric is an economy world.
if a world was set up differently, all these problems might not exist.

[Mit]

unless mit recently changed something:
profit = (sale price - min price) for schools, so he can't be making 100% profit

This is a fixed school, not a standard one.. so it doesnt work that way.

i had thought about suggesting that when i was making the origional z13 bdat. i was thinking it would be neat if thier were gov buildings selling things like 'Industry Permit' etc that would be needed by the player to build stuff. but that wasen't coded yet.

there any reason why that can't be done with an item thats exchanged for a skill? Thats pretty much what zion does - giving out grades that can be exchanged for the basic skills. If you give 1 of the item away as part of the default inv, you avoid most of the issues with ppl giving away their skills.
I don't particularly like the idea of having items that count as skills themselves, partly for all the reasons u mention, but partly just coz it overcomplicates a lot of the code.

anyway.. back to the original point..

With the college prices this high, owning a college is just getting rich by doing nothing.
You don't even need a worker!

Fair enuf.. will have a look at changing that. In defense.. building a college takes a fair bit of work beforehand, so it justifies having some reward.

[VDZ]

In defense.. building a college takes a fair bit of work beforehand, so it justifies having some reward.

Yes, but it has a reward for just having it and doing nothing. You don't even have to set prices!