Poor Game Economy

sinistro1978

Legion gear going for up to 7k. Isn't this the same game where most world drops won't even get you 1 global from a vendor and silver accounts have a low resource limit? Things have gotten so bad lately that most traders offer Cosmic Keys as an alternative to resources. Why? Because most players don't carry the kind of cash that traders expect for a rare drop.

I have 3 suggestions:

1. Increase the drop rates on rare costume unlocks/mods from Alerts and Legion's gear from lockboxes.

2. Up the amount of resources vendors give you for items.

3. Up the resource limit for Silver accounts (this is coming from a LT).

I don't blame the traders for the prices they're asking for. Drop rates on the items listed above are really horrible at the moment. I can see going through 10-20 lockboxes for a piece of Legion gear, but 40+? That's just insane. Another good example is the 70+ runs I did on Harmon Labs the last time it was up. Not even 1 Depleted Uranium Core drop. With so little ways of making good money in-game, why does the drop rates on nice things have to be so crazy? Is PWE hellbent on making Cosmic Keys the new currency? I hope not.

sekimen

It won't fix the economy. Once you break the economy of an online game, I think that's the most difficult thing to fix. CO's has been broken since the infinite resources exploit a few years ago, where a ton of people exploited it before it was fixed.

Also, speaking of poor economy, this also translates oddly into the C-Store as well. For example, you need around 700 Global to completely retcon a character. If you sell each cosmic key for 100G, that's 7 keys, or 700ZEN. A Full Retcon token is 1250ZEN.

pizzataro

Increasing the gained resources, is like printing more money in real life. And as you may know, this will only make it worse.

What makes the game economy broken is if there is no balance in the items you can acquire from the NPC's and the items dropped ingame.

We gain by killing monsters. We then use the money to buy stuff from someone else in the market.
So the money is not destroyed, it is dumped into the market and is now circulating arround.
The more we kill, the more we dump into the market.
After a while, there is so much money circulating that you end up seeing rediculous prices.

So you don't want to circulate more money in the economy, you want to get rid of it. And in a game it can be done by implementing NPC item(s) that is/are worth a huge ammount of money. Something people would want to buy, even if it costs them 1/2 of all their money.

Also, there should be expensive temporary items. To keep the money flowing away.

And I saw that CO did a good job on this part. There are a lot of great expensive NPC items!
If not for those items, the Economy would have been much worse.

roughbearmattach

sekimen wrote: »

It won't fix the economy. Once you break the economy of an online game, I think that's the most difficult thing to fix. CO's has been broken since the infinite resources exploit a few years ago, where a ton of people exploited it before it was fixed.

Also, speaking of poor economy, this also translates oddly into the C-Store as well. For example, you need around 700 Global to completely retcon a character. If you sell each cosmic key for 100G, that's 7 keys, or 700ZEN. A Full Retcon token is 1250ZEN.

Yep. That seems to be the issue for me, too. Keys are the new currency.

I was going to buy a super-magnifier in the C-Store, but I could instead buy and sell 3 keys, and get enough G to get one from another hero.


Still, I don't think the economy is broken. It is still supply and demand, and there are people that will pay a massive amount of G for items with the ever-so-slightly-better stats.

drmechano

One of the ways to bring down the alert costume drop prices would be to put them in as Silver Recognition costume.

It would give people something to spend them on once they've gotten the Silver Recognition gear and costumes.

Hell make them cost say 500 Silver Recognition each, that's still quite a lot so they become more common but still require a lot of time.

Plus it gives the option of grinding them with a definite goal towards them, currently I could do a thousand Valarian Scarlet alerts and never see the drop, so why freaking bother as you mentioned money is ridiculously hard to come by unless you get lucky so there is sweet FA chance of me being able to pay the 5000 global price tag on most of her drop items.

smoochan

sinistro1978 wrote: »

I have 3 suggestions:

1. Increase the drop rates on rare costume unlocks/mods from Alerts and Legion's gear from lockboxes.

2. Up the amount of resources vendors give you for items.

3. Up the resource limit for Silver accounts (this is coming from a LT).

All three of your suggestions would cause inflation, which would case prices to go up even higher. The only ways to lower prices is to increase the supply of those things, which will happen with legion gear over time though probably not to an extent that you'll be happy with, or for them to implement some sort of price ceiling, which they won't do.

It's a good example of why in real life there are people who try to control the economy, to keep it from going out of control. In many MMOs, the people in charge will do this as well. But we have a super-economy, and a super-economy cannot be controlled!

aetharburn

Not to mention that Cryptic isn't helping by creating more pieces that only drop on a full moon, near a winding river, after performing an ancient Indian rite and then trading a rusty '66 Dodge Charger for eight and a half washing machines that were previously owned by a gypsy.

thompkins

I agree with pizzataro in that most of those things would be like printing more money, but I disagree that most of the globals get consumed by NPCs ingame.

The game gives very little to soak up resources so they don't go to another player. Every time I go out and grind globals directly, it's like I'm printing more money. Of that "new" money, a small percentage is consumed in bags, bank slots and respecs. However most (~95% ?) goes to other players and stays in circulation. Maybe I don't have enough alts? I don't know.

I agree that if every other player gives 5% to NPCs to eat it will eventually all get soaked up, but I think the rate at which globals get produced outpaces it.

Other games usually have usually tried to solve this problem with money sinks for guilds/level cap characters. Usually these are things that don't affect player power, or do affect player power but on a group rather than individual level. Popular options are base upkeep, changes to race/gender/class, or just ridiculously expensive cosmetic items. It's debatable how well this works though. Look at Anarchy Online for an example of a game with both many money sinks and out of control inflation at times.

nextnametaken

There are were no skull vests in the Auction house but a bunch of waist capes.

Maybe they could use the alerts to get some of those rare drops to drop more often by just running those enemies more often.

isometry

The problem is that the in-game economy has pretty much been left to rot. It's like the devs just expect us to stand around ren center buying keys.

It's fine that some things are exclusive to lockboxes, but we also need good items that are exclusive in-game drops, so that people have a reason to play the content, and so that players can realistically participate in the economy without spending a ton of real $.

somebob

The main problem is that unlike a lot of MMOs, there's no use for globals in CO.

What do you use them for (short of trading them with other players to buy things)?

1) Respecs
2) Changing costumes
3) Buying bags, heals, and rez items
4) ...
5) Profit?

You don't need to repair items or buy mounts or purchase ammo or any number of ways to eat into your cash reserves. So it just constantly grows and never goes down (short of the above).

And as mentioned before - yes, the exploit (of which Cryptic never banned anyone over because they had absolutely no way back then to track player incomes and/or set off any kind of warning flags if players drastically went over said expected money gain curves and such) really, really broke the economy. And it -never- recovered.

roughbearmattach

I rarely hold onto much G, and I pool resources over more than two dozen toons.
Why? I spend it on respecs, costumes, rez items, and buying things from other players (and the AH).

Some players keep all their resources, because they never buy anything, never respec, and never change costumes. That's how they play. Heck, I see level 40 toons that still have default costumes and names for given achetypes.

smoochan

Batman: Damn this economy, I want to buy those cool new Maxtanium Battarangs but Iron Man is charging way too much for them!

Sonic: Hey man that's rough. We could go stop like thirty bank robberies in a row if you want?

The Terminator: You know... I'm starting to get why those villains are robbing banks like five hundred times a day... hey how much did you say they give us for stopping those bank robberies?

Iron Man: What's up hoes, check out what I just got, anybody interested in buying this cool golden chariot, or this goofy looking skull mask, or this helmet that makes all your stuff go faster? :biggrin:

Batman, Sonic, Terminator: :mad: :mad: :mad: