The purpose of this write up is to go over the MxO economy and crafting systems, before the latest patch (34). The intended audience is the MxO developers and producers and as such may not be of interest to the community. If you have no desire to go into great detail, please disregard this post.
There are a few basic concepts to an economy that I'll be covering before I go into the details of the previous MxO system. The first is the value of the currency. The value of items is dictated upon the scale of currency to necessity. A good comparison to this theory, is the value of the US dollar. In the early 1900's you could get by and live a fairly good life on 4-5 thousand dollars per year. In today's age, that is far below the poverty line. So the first thing one must do when analyzing an entire economy is grasping the scale of the currency and how it scales to necessity and value.
In MxO, 1 million information may seem like a huge amount, compared to other MMO's or even the US economy, however, when you see that in order to upgrade just 1 ability tree at level 30 takes over 1 million information (i.e. from 29 to 30), that 1 million info becomes less valuable, due to the necessity of character progression (and even more so when you factor in purchasing new abilities, as well as clothing costs, weapons, tools, pills, etc.).
MxO Economy & Crafting (pre patch 34)
The MxO economy was based around users crafting items, of which there were two primary types: Source Code, and Non Source Code. A Source Code Item (SCI), is an item that would be created from fragments, that would be required to be compiled before a usable item is brought into existance. A Non Source Code Item (NSCI) is an item which does not require compilation during the crafting process. The only NSCI items in game were abilities so from here on out, it is assumed in this document that all items other than abilities are to be considered SCI, and require compiling.
In order to craft an item in MxO you would require a few things: information, bits, and time. Each item, whether ability or other, would require at least 4 fragments to create. Each fragment is made up of, on average, 3 bits per fragment. This means that on the average, items would cost around 15-20 bits per item. Factor in costs for creating each fragment, then the item and the time involved. There is a total of 47 craftable fragments and 8 bits in the game. In my opinion, the Monolith staff did a fairly good job of making sure each item would require it's own unique set of fragments, as well as the fact that there was not 1 or two fragments that were reused again and again (outside of those that could be purchased from a vendor... more on this later).
Now in order to get bits, you could either decompile items, loot missions and mobs, or craft, then decompile the items you crafted. The later was the strategy I used, it required time, information, and a bit of research to make it worthwhile.
How does decompiling work?
The mechanics behind decompiling is one of those sticky wickets that few seemed to realize or publicly acknowledge from beta forward. How did MxO decide what bits you get per item? It's actually fairly simple, and inso doing quite elegant. Let's take an item and break it down: Green T-Shirt (one of my personal favorites). This item is made of 4 fragments. Below is a quick map for bits, to frags, to item:
Green Dress Shirt (male):
(fragment: bits needed for frag.)
- Class Routine: Item = 1 2
- Function Subroutine: Apparel = 1 4
- Variable Frag: U04 = 6 6
- Variable Frag: C26 = 6 6
Total Bits (for 1 craft)= Bit 6 (4), Bit 1 (2), Bit 2 (2), Bit 4 (1)
Here's how the decompiling process worked. Let's say you crafted a source code for the aforementioned Green Dress Shirt. You compile all source and get 15 usable items in your inventory. When you go to decompile those items, you have 4 frags slots to create the item, so you get back 4 bits per decompile. Each decompile, goes through one layer of the bit “stream” of the frament slot. So Decompile 1 you get 1, 1, 6, 6. Decompile 2 you get 2, 4, 6, 6, etc
** Note the bit picked per decompile may have be random in order, but you ALWAYS got the bit from the frag definition. It was NOT arbitrary and was ALWAYS based upon the frags you put into the final item.
While this may seem elementary once you've been introduced to it, believe me, it was much more difficult trying to document this entire system over 2+ months and then finding good items to decompile for the bits that you wanted. Low on bit 6's? Find an item that is made up primarily of 6's then craft 6 source codes (15*6= 90 final items to decompile, which was about ¼ of what I would do on a heavy decompiling day per bit).
The thing that everyone appears to be missing in assuming that this is easy, is that there is a 10 second timer delay on decompiling. So if I actually craft 90 items, it will take me a bare minimum of 15 minutes to decompile all those items. That of course is assuming I can do so perfectly, without missing a timer, nor does that include inventory space issues of transferring those items back and forth. A good realistic estimate of the time involved for crafting, then decompiling 90 items would be about 20 minutes. Now we also had 6 source codes times 4 frags per SCI. Fragments require crafting and info costs, so our final total for 90 items to decompile is as follows:
- Time = 20 minutes
- Information = 600 (100/SCI)
- 9000 (100/compile)
- + 2160 (90/frag/SCI)
- Total Info = 11760
- Bits needed = 8 Bit 1
- 4 Bit 2
- 4 Bit 4
- 24 Bit 6
Total Bits Yielded ( halfed, minus needed)
- 82 Bit 1
- 41 Bit 2
- 41 Bit 4
- 156 Bit 6
So you just spent 11760 info, ate 40 bits you had lying around, and came out with 320 bits at the end of it all. Now we cherry picked an item that was heavy on bit 6's so due to the fact that not all frags need 6's you will need to repeat this process for each bit you need for the items you're making. Bit 1 and 2 are easy because they're in all items, so those we don't need to worry about so much. However, bit 3, and 8 do not have a cherry item that I found at least, so any frags that require those bits, will require much more time and info (double to quad). Also remember that most frags average 3 bits per frag, so instead of getting 2 6's per decompile, it can be down to 1 per 3 decompiles for inefficient items. Bascially half to third the Total Bits Yielded above for non-optimal decompiles.
Now taking the average (again this is the most optimal bit I have found yet), the average cost per bit, including those bits needed to create the original item is 36.75 per bit gained. Including those bits that are non optimal, we'll bump that number up to 50 info per bit gained. Time is 6.1 seconds per bit (1 and 2 are easy and in everything so they are not included), or to average for non-efficient bits, we'll bump that up to 10 seconds per bit. So assuming you agree with these numbers the following is true:
On average, a single bit takes 50 info and 10 seconds to create..