I fully support any initiative to make it easier for new players to play a little more self sufficiently.
Hoarding is fundamentally an economically detrimental effect. Usually a well developed economy has a high velocity of money. Less RMP transactions means that things aren’t accurately priced, and usually means a more stagnant and slow economy. This is pretty evident from the price of seeds. Most recent KZ prices for seeds:
His discord thread had more comprehensive data.
What’s even more shocking is this:
That is the cumulative seed balances from the data warehouse.
EDIT: For clarity, the above 9 colors represent the 9 class seeds. T1 seeds and plain seeds haven’t been included.
People are just hoarding seeds like there’s going to be a big payout at the end. From a macro perspective this never ends well. These whales are going to be very angry once seed prices start going down. And the moment prices trend downwards people will rush to sell (slowed down slightly by corn count, but most of the stockpilers are whales, so there’s no shortage of corns) and prices will crash. I am supportive of anything that creates a more stable “reserve”. Not this ever increasing stockpile.
The reason this hurts smaller players is if you have < 5 lands and <12 unicorns, you are getting a ton of rewards that you aren’t using. Especially if you consider most of these players don’t have high harvest bonuses. So once you plant the seeds that you use, you have to plant to sell. But you can’t sell immediately because you have to reach the bundle threshold. So smaller players are stuck waiting for them to reach this threshold to sell so that they can buy the seed that they want. Sometimes even planting the seeds is not viable for them because the bonus isn’t good enough. So they literally have to have empty fields and keep collecting poop/gather till they get enough seeds to sell.
The answer to this is of course to spend more money buying the seeds. But fundamentally in this market people don’t want to keep pumping money into a game. Ideally once you put some money in, you are able to progress slowly without feeling “stuck”. If you want to progress faster you can pump more money in.
The current system greatly benefits whales. They have enough lands to keep hitting the threshold, and if they choose to sell they can do so. But they aren’t because the prices keep going up. So it’s a game of chicken whales are playing with each other and when a few start running for the exit the prices will crash as everyone will try to get out at the same time. The person deeply affected by this is the smaller player who is stuck with higher and higher seed prices in the meantime and stuck waiting a while to collect enough other seeds to sell. At certain points you run out of berries to gather with (happened to me many times even though I’m a larger holder), and then if you don’t have RBW to buy more immediately you’re only playing the poop collecting game till you can gather again.
We need a way so smaller players are not so reliant on this RNG of seed drops, and they can focus on getting the materials they want so they keep keep playing the farm sim. The poop sim is pretty boring, so anything to make it more interesting would be great imo.
The only people affected by the change are the huge stockpilers looking for a payout. Again I implore you to look at the above chart. That is not natural of any economy. You ideally want raw materials to be “used” not stock piled.
Every game will have stockpilers and that’s ok, but if literally everyone stock piles the result is never good. If smaller players can avoid the game the whales are playing and get the materials they need to advance, it would be a lot more motivating. Right now it feels like you need a “large” base to get started recursively, and if you start small, there’s a whole lot of waiting.
Snapshot: