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Economics 101
petraabelli
Member Posts: 0 Arc User
I've always enjoyed watching the economies in MMO games. Developers put a lot of thought into them and are usually wary of making adjustments that could ruin a game's economy. I've seen gold sellers ruin economies like in FFXI and bots ruin economies like in Diablo 3, but this is the first time I've seen the developers ruin an economy right out of the gate. While 30/40$ for a mount is 3x/4x more than the price in other games that alone isn't what has made a mess of the game. The founders packs are what spurred the inflation of astral diamonds and the invisible wall of 24k AD per day is what keeps normal players from being able to afford even bad items on the AH.
A normal player can inject 24K AD into the game each day where as a foundry pack will inject 600k/2000k AD into the system. That means Founders packs put 24+/83+ days worth of farming AD into the game, more actually because it is very unlikely that the majority of players cap the 24k rough AD limit. The result of this is a large amount of inflation until they stop selling founders packs or until the excess AD is out of the market through purchasing items from vendors. A smarter system would have been to bundle zen with the Founders pack because that wouldn't have caused the in game currency to "crash". You see games like guild wars 2 where they let people buy game currency with real money, but that doesn't cause the large problem this game is facing because it doesn't inject the in game currency into the game.
There is a lot of complaining about prices in this game and I think they are at least in part justified. If you wanted to buy the 4000zen mount in this economy, as a result of the above inflation, it would take 4000zen or 1,640,000AD at 410AD per zen. That's 67 days of farming AD which is an absurd amount for a normal player. The most common excuse I've heard is that you should just sell things on the AH and it's easy to get that amount of AD, but most of that is money is supplied from the founders which is what's causing the inflation in the first place.
The separation of in game currencies gold/AD is in my opinion another big mistake, It forces players to do a handful of events if they want to farm money without using the AH.
In the end I hope developers learn from this and don't put the in game currency used for their AH into their founders packs.
A normal player can inject 24K AD into the game each day where as a foundry pack will inject 600k/2000k AD into the system. That means Founders packs put 24+/83+ days worth of farming AD into the game, more actually because it is very unlikely that the majority of players cap the 24k rough AD limit. The result of this is a large amount of inflation until they stop selling founders packs or until the excess AD is out of the market through purchasing items from vendors. A smarter system would have been to bundle zen with the Founders pack because that wouldn't have caused the in game currency to "crash". You see games like guild wars 2 where they let people buy game currency with real money, but that doesn't cause the large problem this game is facing because it doesn't inject the in game currency into the game.
There is a lot of complaining about prices in this game and I think they are at least in part justified. If you wanted to buy the 4000zen mount in this economy, as a result of the above inflation, it would take 4000zen or 1,640,000AD at 410AD per zen. That's 67 days of farming AD which is an absurd amount for a normal player. The most common excuse I've heard is that you should just sell things on the AH and it's easy to get that amount of AD, but most of that is money is supplied from the founders which is what's causing the inflation in the first place.
The separation of in game currencies gold/AD is in my opinion another big mistake, It forces players to do a handful of events if they want to farm money without using the AH.
In the end I hope developers learn from this and don't put the in game currency used for their AH into their founders packs.
Post edited by petraabelli on
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Shure this doesn't help the person with no intention of spending any money and just selling AD , but honestly your not their biggest concern. This totally helps the free player who spends a little AD a month .
One of the main reasons Cryptic put AD into the Founder's packs was to ensure that there was an existing pool of AD when the game launched. Otherwise, there was a risk that AD would be consumed as fast as it was generated, leaving a very small AD supply, which in turn would cause extreme fluctuations in the AD/Zen rate.
The economy didn't exist before launch, but it's ruined from it's non-existant state!
It's Schroedinger's Argument!
On a serious note, though: The injection of currency to begin with is a stimulus to start the economy. As more players continue playing that economy will go down. After all the only things you can actually spend AD or Zen on (rather than just shuffling it around the playerbase) are items that eliminate the currency in question from circulation. Without the initial influx of AD there would be no economy because there would be no money: People would be spending it on the items from the stores and the like and thus destroy that instance of currency.
-Rachel-
Using the AD/Zen conversion feature isn't injecting AD into the economy, that AD is already in the economy it's just owned by someone else. The founders packs actually increase the supply of AD because it is literally creating it.
Founders zen doesn't help a free player it causes the AD a free player would farm to be worth less in the market place. It helps people who buy zen and then purchase AD. It doesn't even really help Founders because it inflates the price of their AD and they'd be better off holding onto AD until the prices settle down. Regardless, a stable economy promotes a better game and a larger retention in player base. You may disregard the free players but that in itself is a huge mistake because these games are designed to bring in a large base of free players and convert those free players into paying players. Also, I'm not a free player, so you can list that with the other things you're wrong about.
If you really wanted to buy into this game the better deal is to buy zen and convert it to AD.