test content
Logo
What is the Arc Client?
Install Arc
Is our AD sinks destroying the community?
ennea
Member Posts: 41
Edit: not sure why moderator moved my thread into the other weird economy thread that has nothing to do with my content =(
As some have noticed, the games economy is deflating. Whether that is good or bad, deflation will always destroy the entire games economy in the long run. Why is this happening?
Now before we go into that lets quickly identify the current state of economy. Most T2 sets are now able to be bought for under 10k a piece, with the best sets at only 150-300k. This is in fact the most pressing issue and part of the reason why Dev's have wanted to introduce Bind On Pickup. When new players can buy the best gear for under 50k ad, or for only 1.2mil ad which is under a 100 dollars real life money, Your economy is in trouble as player goals are too easily reached.
Bots and enchantment prices. In my opinion , bots are the only things keeping enchantment prices in check as lets be honest, needing roughly 450k pieces of enchantment is blatantly a stupid sink and a flawed system, that aside, besides enchantment prices, Bots are siphoning out the economy AD through the auction house cut. Most bots do not put back into the economy but encourage spending, meaning perishable items does not return and the ad trade goes one way, OUT. If you cannot understand this, just think of it this way, a player buys item, but also does daily/dungeon/etc to sell items and make ad. A bot sells items but never buys. So new AD does not get shared but gets filtered mainly into a stockpile , a bottleneck per se until a real life player buys the AD with RL cash.
Effectively, New ad introduced into the game are only through dailies and leadership. BUT the average player does not finish both the pvp / foundry / dungeon daily everyday. Thus at best, the average player gains roughly 2k (praying) + 4k + lets average 2k for foundry and Dreadvault dungeon per day. SO only 8k through quest, then unless you have high leadership, lets increase the daily gain to 10k daily.
Now lets go back to why the economy is deflating. In simple terms, The average player makes 10k new ad a day, However even though say 2k players log on a day, and new 20 million ad is introduced, ALMOST all that ad is going into the AH cut fees , or enchant removal/ zen store / keys / pets. Meaning there is negative inflation. Now couple that with a badly bid/undercut/snipe AH system , what you have is players are unable to sell goods that deserve a premium price, as NOONE has any AD , and everything gets undercut. But yet items which deserve to have premium prices, are unable to be sold as there is also not enough new players adding to the pool of fresh AD , thus deflation is still occuring. Give it another 2 months, and your games economy will thus be dead.
TLDR: Economy is failing not just because of supply and demand. The average player makes 10k ad, almost all are being siphoned out but games badly designed cash shop agenda ( zen store/ unbinding runes/ mount upgrades/ pets and STEEP AH cut) T2 sets cost less than 20k for 4 pieces, and the most premium sets can be bought at less than 100 real life dollars. effectively, in 2 months time, baring supply and demand, the games economy will be dead.
BTW. Gift of Tymora was exploited like mad by many players doing foundry farming, and yet that huge surplus of AD has not even combated the steep deflation rate. Barring Crafted shirt/pants; CN / T2 gear are now at 300k and going down. Effectively Cryptics main source of income which is about 5 % of the pop which spends money, will soon have NO MORE REASON TO SPEND RL MONEY. add in decreasing player base, you have a soon to be non profitable business model.
As some have noticed, the games economy is deflating. Whether that is good or bad, deflation will always destroy the entire games economy in the long run. Why is this happening?
Now before we go into that lets quickly identify the current state of economy. Most T2 sets are now able to be bought for under 10k a piece, with the best sets at only 150-300k. This is in fact the most pressing issue and part of the reason why Dev's have wanted to introduce Bind On Pickup. When new players can buy the best gear for under 50k ad, or for only 1.2mil ad which is under a 100 dollars real life money, Your economy is in trouble as player goals are too easily reached.
Bots and enchantment prices. In my opinion , bots are the only things keeping enchantment prices in check as lets be honest, needing roughly 450k pieces of enchantment is blatantly a stupid sink and a flawed system, that aside, besides enchantment prices, Bots are siphoning out the economy AD through the auction house cut. Most bots do not put back into the economy but encourage spending, meaning perishable items does not return and the ad trade goes one way, OUT. If you cannot understand this, just think of it this way, a player buys item, but also does daily/dungeon/etc to sell items and make ad. A bot sells items but never buys. So new AD does not get shared but gets filtered mainly into a stockpile , a bottleneck per se until a real life player buys the AD with RL cash.
Effectively, New ad introduced into the game are only through dailies and leadership. BUT the average player does not finish both the pvp / foundry / dungeon daily everyday. Thus at best, the average player gains roughly 2k (praying) + 4k + lets average 2k for foundry and Dreadvault dungeon per day. SO only 8k through quest, then unless you have high leadership, lets increase the daily gain to 10k daily.
Now lets go back to why the economy is deflating. In simple terms, The average player makes 10k new ad a day, However even though say 2k players log on a day, and new 20 million ad is introduced, ALMOST all that ad is going into the AH cut fees , or enchant removal/ zen store / keys / pets. Meaning there is negative inflation. Now couple that with a badly bid/undercut/snipe AH system , what you have is players are unable to sell goods that deserve a premium price, as NOONE has any AD , and everything gets undercut. But yet items which deserve to have premium prices, are unable to be sold as there is also not enough new players adding to the pool of fresh AD , thus deflation is still occuring. Give it another 2 months, and your games economy will thus be dead.
TLDR: Economy is failing not just because of supply and demand. The average player makes 10k ad, almost all are being siphoned out but games badly designed cash shop agenda ( zen store/ unbinding runes/ mount upgrades/ pets and STEEP AH cut) T2 sets cost less than 20k for 4 pieces, and the most premium sets can be bought at less than 100 real life dollars. effectively, in 2 months time, baring supply and demand, the games economy will be dead.
BTW. Gift of Tymora was exploited like mad by many players doing foundry farming, and yet that huge surplus of AD has not even combated the steep deflation rate. Barring Crafted shirt/pants; CN / T2 gear are now at 300k and going down. Effectively Cryptics main source of income which is about 5 % of the pop which spends money, will soon have NO MORE REASON TO SPEND RL MONEY. add in decreasing player base, you have a soon to be non profitable business model.
Post edited by ennea on
0
Comments
---- FIRE EVERYTHING ! ----
People put up a helm for 1 mil AD because it is the only one out there. Eventually there will be 6 or more and the price goes down to a more reasonable level.
People put up refugees (leadership resource) for like 5k. They are not even worth 100.
Let me ask you...if you have a helm and list it for 500k and someone lists the next one for 499,999 how do you think the market will respond?
Someone will come along and offer the same helm for 450k. It sells leaving the higher priced ones up to rot.
Playing the market does not mean putting a piece of gear up for a stupid amount and then complain when it doesn't sell.
You should have said: TLDR: I make numbers with nothing to back them up, so I don't really have anything to say.
Also, the reason that the moderator moved your post was because your discussion points where the same ones as in the thread it was placed in. Instead of making another post, you should have just taken the discussion there, as the moderator suggested by moving your thread.
http://nw-forum.perfectworld.com/showthread.php?437011-collapsing-economy&p=5517151&viewfull=1#post5517151
your opinion is not so important that it warrants its own discussion forum.
---- FIRE EVERYTHING ! ----
There is zero speculation in my OP. The average player makes 8-10k FRESH ad daily , (not traded ad). The games sinks are leeching more that the players are supplying. All T2 loot prices are now dismal not because of oversupply but because of deflation. Enchantments are now the end game gear , which is an economy in itself controled by bots and build on a flawed system that fortunately or unfortunately becomes the now new End game loot.
The fact that the dungeons are ridiculously hard for MANY people will always cause them to use the AH if it's affordable/reachable for them and that, again, is a big "if". Many of the dungeons seem to require that you already have the gear in order to finish the dungeon to begin with. The difference between how hard the game is when leveling and how hard those epic dungeons are is massive to a lot of players.
Yes, if they don't do dailies or invoke or run dungeons and just rely on leadership. I made 400k last night running two dungeons. You want outrageous prices well then you will need a bigger supply pool. Once you buy BiS then how many more of them do you need to buy? Zero for that character. Supply is steady. Demand is low. Prices will drop and stabilize at what the community feels they are willing to pay.
So anyone not willing to cash shop to high heaven, bot, or buy Ƶ for real dollars'll have to grind up cash for a year for a single cosmetic for 1 character.
Bots, botters, RMTs have utterly decimated the economy in the game yet it's still alive and well- albeit corrupt as hell.
- You don't have enough data points to draw this conclusion: the economy, like every other new MMO/new shard or new RL product, begins inflated as supply is low and demand is high
- Your conclusions assume the trend will never change; markets have a mixture of self-correction (increase/decrease supply) and management (PWI making adjustments)
- I will never, ever spend $100 for gear in a game and I will never, ever grind for it either; wife & I quit many an MMO because of this and knowing this is generally the "end-game", we don't get particularly invested either. We have work/chores IRL and aren't looking for that in our entertainment and if it isn't fun, we'll move onto something else that is.
I agree with this totally. IF the system were different btw it would not be good because people could then manipulate the market and there would be no inbetween prices on anything. This happened in the last game I came from. The market was so highly manipulated the Devs couldn't keep up and they further made it more difficult for the players by forcing the loot into a serious low drop rate (which is the basis for any economy with an open forum for sales).
So basically what happened was items that were very common had reached the point of being broken (1 ad each equivalent) and items that were more rare than water in a desert became stupidly priced (12 gold each which would be the equivalent of about 1mil 200k each.) and keep in mind that the items they made extremely difficult to find in any solo situation were necessary for everything, enchantments, crafting temporary buff items, gear building etc. They also jumped the tier level of the gear with a power creep so if you wanted to be competitive in their open world pvp system you had to have the best, which had a very long delay on everything, and the weapons (which were named legendaries) took extremely long hours to farm because not everyone's online at the same time for grouping and solo was nearly impossible to find enough of the mats for these items.
So they really cut off their hands of the players who were solo farming. At least in this game they haven't cut off access to essentials thru lot manipulation. (drop rates, implementing diminishing returns, making the game have a lopsided loot effect where 1 person gets all the loot no matter what the rolls are etc). This other game was Guild Wars 2 btw.
Yeah, I don't understand why so many people on the forum cry doom about the low price of T2 items, and then totally gloss over the fact that high-end enchants are still very hard to acquire. The end-game progression in this game is not trivial for the vast majority of players, guys. Y'all are too fixated on the paradigm in other games.
Right, but it's actually deflating a bit -- prices are decreasing for many items. This is due to fairly high supply of these items (they are all BOE dungeon drops, and are common items in fact in the game now) coupled with fairly low demand (most people have geared up mains, and also some alts, not constant high demand for these items). Items that are in high demand and low supply (new healer drops, top rank enchants) are showing very high prices. It's supply and demand. But the market in general is not inflating.
I ran quite a bit of foundry with my guild during this event from start to finish and I DON"T think we were exploiting the event? If my memory serves me the gift boxes were intended to drop just about anywhere you had to kill something.
Moreover the game has been live for just a little over a month now so I find it hard to believe there has been enough time for the game's economy to get into motion. Massive cheating through bots and exploits also isn't helping but I hope they are working to fix many of these issues.
Speaking of the green text, didn't they remove a lot of skill nodes in the game as a "solution" to some botting? Seems to me they did and it hurt the real players who needed those items. Instead of doing something, anything else, to solve it, they deleted. I truly hope this isn't a trend solution-wise.
- new AD formula does not take into account multiple characters. Many, many players have several AD farmer characters that do little besides pray and leadership all day. With 5 characters I make easily 75k daily when I am productive. There are days I do not bother, but that is another story.
- you only mention prices for a few items. There are tons of things that change hands daily in the AH ... crafting materials, gear, enchants, pets, consumables, just about anything available in the game finds its way into the AH.
- some of the price crash problems are due to PWE tampering. Take for example the alchemy crystal market: before the gift box event a week or so ago, there was a booming industry of converting cheap arcane shards (well under 1000 ad each) into the other two types (eldritch crystals and arcane crystals) which were selling for 2k and 4k respectively on my server. Then bam, boxes added that dropped a huge over supply into the market and the prices are still below 1000 for all 3 types. There are many examples of this sort of thing -- enchantments for example started dropping in even greater quantities when they nerfed the crafting node drops. Now, instead of crafting materials, high level zones give 4 or 5 enchantments per node. And the enchantment market crashed when this happened --- bots aside, even a casual farmer could gather hundreds of the things in a night of play.
- the biggest AD sink is probably AD to zen. Zen is then spent in the store, and out of the economy.
Every time there is something that is actually profitable, the bots & farmers jump on it. Duh. Then PWE makes a patch that tampers with the profits, and the combined effect of the patch and farmer over-production and over-supply kill the value of the item for a while. The bots and farmers keep doing it though, as any money is > no money, so even with low profits, they stick with a dead horse. Smart players fine a new way to make profits, and the process repeats. Currently, most of the market for desired items has been crashed by this method, apart from ultra rare items that are not easy to farm (some pets, for example). Even the lockbox horse has gone to 1/4 or less its early value due to the large # of people that pop boxes all day.
So my theory is the economy is fine, you are just seeing normal economic forces where PWE represents government tampering, bots and farmers represent industry, and players represent buyers. These forces create ripples and opportunity for profits, but like any system, the overall tendency is to be driven toward stability. Stability is what you are seeing.... a steady but low influx of diamonds into the economy daily, and as AD is removed from the system, its value increases, their relative value increases, and prices fall to represent the increased value of the AD.
It all makes sense, and it all seems to be more or less healthy.
Additionally, when some chance at a new exclusive item such as a super rare healing pet comes along in the zen store, tons of AD is spent purchasing zen rather than AH items. What do you think that does to AH prices?
But the devs already dropped drastically the T2 item drop rate. At the start, it was like 1 T2 every 3 runs. Then exploits started, the supply made the gear incredibly cheap, drop rates went down a bit but it didn't stop exploits. So, now, you make enough ADs when you level up to get a full T2 set. You don't even need to play the game or to pay for it to get BiS gear, and enchants just require some mules to pray every day.
Nowadays, if you're a new player, you have basically zero incentive to keep playing the game, because the best gear is so cheap you can instantly buy it from the AH with all the nice ADs you got from low level dungeons, daily pvps or skirmishes. That's hard facts, the devs have to do something, be it fixing exploits, making dungeons longer, or reduce the T2 drop rates to almost 0. No escape. Something has to be done, unless they're happy enough with the current players number. Of course, the easiest solution is playing with drop rates, but i'm not sure it would be the best one. So, you better make lobbying for fixes instead.
"Is it better to be feared or respected? I say, is it too much to ask for both?" -Tony Stark
Official NW_Legit_Community Forums