[Zakizo]

It’s been established long ago that the core system of SL2 is its combat system, but I believe that it would benefit immensely from having more than one core system. As it stands the combat system is impressively complex, but just about every other system is basic and un-engaging. This poses a problem when a player wants to change their focus to keep things from getting stale, but there’s nothing interesting to change focus to. I believe it’s time to take steady steps towards making other central systems as engaging as the combat system itself. I’ll be dedicating this thread to economics, and if this is well-received then I may suggest more in the future (but not immediately, because this takes a lot of time).

Right now the murai system is handled in a very basic way: Murai is initially gained through dungeons, selling items to NPCs, and quests (but mostly dungeons) and used for repairs, upgrades, guilds, etcetera. While these things are fine, they’re not enough to prevent murai from piling up, and putting in the effort to become rich doesn’t feel like as much of an accomplishment as it should since past a certain point murai is effectively useless. In this case I believe it’s better to take baby steps, so this is a building block suggestion that I hope can open the door to great things in the future.

Concept: To make a system that allows players to make a financial impact in different areas, creates a more alive and interesting environment, provides additional murai sources, and introduces and promotes further uses of murai aside from buying items.

How it works: Firstly, each town/city/etc would need a “treasury.” Far from just being a useless variable identical to the amount of murai the area holds, it would instead be a percentage indicator of the area’s current wealth. This would drop by 1% every IC day (subject to adjustment if it ever seems too fast or too slow). An area with a wealth level that’s high will function normally, but if an area’s wealth level drops too low, poverty-stricken citizens may occasionally wander about with increased frequency (easily recognizable by ragged clothing/robes). Of course, there are many special events that could be tied in with the increasing or decreasing of this value, so there’s a lot of room to get creative. Wealth level would be increased by 0.001% for every 1 mura spent in the area (essentially making 1% equal to 1,000 murai). Black beast attacks, as well as future negative events, could decrease the affected area’s wealth by 1% when they occur.

There should be a way to feed murai directly to any area’s treasury (not unlike donations to Hikari) for the rich to dump their murai off on, and someone who donates the most to an area in an IC month could receive a special reward through l-net’s gift function. If linking each shop NPC to a specific area is (understandably) too much of a hassle, this could also be the primary/only method of increasing an area’s wealth.

On the subject of additional sources of murai, dungeons are nice to have, but sometimes people just don’t feel like killing monsters for a living. I believe that certain NPCs should give you simpler tasks to complete that reward murai based on how competent you are at the given task. Take Risu, for example. Rather than having her prepare all of the food herself all of the time, she could have a conversation topic where she hires the character to help her fill an order. She would then give them special ingredients that can be used to make a special (unusable, though it could still give exp to the craft) food item through cooking to be given back to her. The murai reward would scale to the character’s cooking level, and this task would only be performable once per in-game day. Other NPCs like blacksmiths could give similar tasks.

Why this would be beneficial: This adds a dynamic way to set areas apart to keep them from feeling stagnate, giving us a more immersive world. An area could fall into poverty, but all it would take is a few motivated characters to change that. Not to mention the interesting consequences that would happen to a town if its wealthy benefactors were jailed, kidnapped, or met untimely ends. That in itself adds a completely new angle to role-play. It also has a lot of potential to be built upon in the future, meaning the game itself will come closer to reaching its full potential.

Feedback is of course both encouraged and appreciated from the community as a whole. I’m unsure of how feasible this is to implement, but it would certainly make the game more enjoyable for me.

Edit: Just a minor typo correction.