Rising Gold Prices

Brael - Dreamweaver

Cholla - Harshlands wrote: »

How can you measure this?

Because I can do a little math, and know rational people will make the choice that benefits them the most, which also happens to be the more economical choice.

As of typing this, gold on DW is at 190k. This means, for an individual to buy a piece of gold they need 193,800 coin. In order to buy 10 GA's they need 2.9 gold which is 562,020 coin, of which 11,020 coin is removed from the economy. This also means each GA has a coin value of 56,202 coin.

Since, 56,202 coin is considerably less than 100,000 coin just about everyone that wants to obtain the maximum benefit for themselves is going to go the GA route rather than the coin route. Once you take the gold listing fee into consideration what you're left with is Jolly Old Jones removing .2958 gold (a large portion of which is being added currently) and 11,020 coin (most of which was already in existence) from the economy for each spring pack. The end result here is that it takes 9.07 GA fueled packs to suck out the same amount of coin as a single 100k pack.

In order to get gold prices down, the 100k option has to be considerably cheaper. If the goal were 120k gold for example, it would mean Mr. Jones needs to give away spring packs at a price of 35,496 coin each. Unfortunately, even this solution has issues with it as shards are one of the more used coin sinks in the game. At 35,496 per pack the value of Beautiful shards would drop further, to about 27.58% of their vendor price actually if you assume the ratio between the shard and GA price remains the same. The result of this would be sucking a lot of coin out of the system now, at the cost of having more coin in the system later. Although it would give them time to come up with a new coin sink and implement it.

xarfox

Hello Brael,

Your math is absolutely correct.

However, we wouldn't keep the coin requirement at 100k if no one was using it.

Blancheneige - Heavens Tear

Solandri - Heavens Tear wrote: »

If the ratio goes out of whack so there are too many free players, the price of gold goes up thus encouraging some of those free players to become pay players.

You are mostly wrong on this one. Once the price of gold gets too high for free players to afford to buy, the said free players move to another game. The higher this gap is, the more free players are bound to leave.

Corennes - Sanctuary

Unless lots and lots of people use the 100k coin option the event increases the amount of coins.

All the oracles that are gotten from the event give about 10k coins. The coins might not be all there right now but over the next weeks when the people use their oracles the coins in circulation will increase.

The only problem in the long run still are the the Chest of Coins since they will keep gold expensive forever...

Stickygreen - Heavens Tear

rofl... this is a joke... drain coins my ****. your trying to bleed us for every penny before **** releases.

yes, does draining the economy also including putting an ingame price to gold?

if you can open a box that gives you 1m thats is worth 5g

then 1 gold = 200k

nice try devs/gms your not fooling anyone.

i love you gms.. but why are you trying to feed us this BS?

Vitenka - Dreamweaver

I would point out that there are costs associated with getting the boxes.

And, on dreamweaver at least, people are selling *everything* incredibly cheaply, to get coins, to turn into oracles.

Even charms packs have gone down in price!

Crazydan - Heavens Tear

I love you guys *sarcasm off* Do u guys realize how hard it is to try to fix any economy its near impossible to do it on the first few tries so why dont u all relaex have some fun and remember only u can prevent un needed flames b:cute

TheGoliath - Heavens Tear

Crazydan - Heavens Tear wrote: »

I love you guys *sarcasm off* Do u guys realize how hard it is to try to fix any economy its near impossible to do it on the first few tries so why dont u all relaex have some fun and remember only u can prevent un needed flames b:cute

at least if u wanna fix the economy don't add the stupid stash of coins inside cube


most ppl who buy golds will just buy'em for themselfs to open the boxes (since it's like selling golds for 200k each) and therefore they will not put golds in AH or aniway less golds than before

like sticky said, BS

Fuzznutts - Sanctuary

Personally for me, I like to pay RL money to charge my zhen because doing the CS thing has been frustrating for me. I've tried many of times (and still trying) of trying to sell items to get coin (mats, herbs, armors, etc.) with no luck.

Of course please take into consideration that this is my first MMO and still learning how things work.

I do remember that when I first started playing that gold was about 95K, last I looked the other evening gold was about 195K. Most of my in game coin goes for things like repairs, TT mats, manu skills, etc. so I don't buy in game gold just because it's easier for me to purchase zhen.

But I do wish to say thank you to the GMs for at least inputting in this subject because I was beginning to wonder what was going on with gold.

*On a different note, I do agree with some other users on the fact of before new content comes out, please fix some of the current bugs. Seems like when the genies came out, a lot of problems and bugs were developed.

Notgood - Heavens Tear

I got a question with all, these sales, new mounts, need cash shop updates , charm packs, jolly jones, etc. Wouldn't you know that gold prices would soar up to 200k or even higher...bs the prices are high because of those things. THe prices are high because of a reason lets leave it at that and see what thoughts pop up

Zoe - Heavens Tear

Spoken like a true greedy person Solandri.

If the ingame price of gold is reflected on how much they need to pay in real money per gold, the sellers will quickly lower their prices if they want to be able to keep their own real money use lower.

PWE would have no fear of prices going too low because after all, players will only sell low to a certain point where it won't get lower no matter what because it would not be worth it to the sellers. That point would end up being the normal, true rate of 100k coins per gold or $1 per gold.

Inias - Heavens Tear

Brael - Dreamweaver wrote: »

Because I can do a little math, and know rational people will make the choice that benefits them the most, which also happens to be the more economical choice.

As of typing this, gold on DW is at 190k. This means, for an individual to buy a piece of gold they need 193,800 coin. In order to buy 10 GA's they need 2.9 gold which is 562,020 coin, of which 11,020 coin is removed from the economy. This also means each GA has a coin value of 56,202 coin.

Since, 56,202 coin is considerably less than 100,000 coin just about everyone that wants to obtain the maximum benefit for themselves is going to go the GA route rather than the coin route. Once you take the gold listing fee into consideration what you're left with is Jolly Old Jones removing .2958 gold (a large portion of which is being added currently) and 11,020 coin (most of which was already in existence) from the economy for each spring pack. The end result here is that it takes 9.07 GA fueled packs to suck out the same amount of coin as a single 100k pack.

In order to get gold prices down, the 100k option has to be considerably cheaper. If the goal were 120k gold for example, it would mean Mr. Jones needs to give away spring packs at a price of 35,496 coin each. Unfortunately, even this solution has issues with it as shards are one of the more used coin sinks in the game. At 35,496 per pack the value of Beautiful shards would drop further, to about 27.58% of their vendor price actually if you assume the ratio between the shard and GA price remains the same. The result of this would be sucking a lot of coin out of the system now, at the cost of having more coin in the system later. Although it would give them time to come up with a new coin sink and implement it.

so if i understand your text correctly , the money sink here is the "i buy gold from auctionhouse and pay a fee on it" ?

Miugre - Heavens Tear

xarfox wrote: »

Hello Brael,

Your math is absolutely correct.

However, we wouldn't keep the coin requirement at 100k if no one was using it.

And so are people using it? Are we seeing results here?

The last thing I want to do is sound mean, but I'll consider the staff's job done when they implement enough countermeasures to lower gold prices to about 120k at the most. Somehow, I don't think JJ is going to do that.

Solandri - Heavens Tear wrote: »

1. Like I said a couple pages back, caps result in shortages.

When the supply of gold equals the demand, the price is stable. If the demand exceeds supply, the prices goes up in response. This causes demand to diminish - some players are unwilling to pay the higher price so they drop out of the bidding. When demand once again equals supply, then the price stabilizes again at this higher price point.

If you cap the price of gold, then any time prices would have increased above the cap, demand will exceed supply. The top half of the gold sales at the auctioneer will be empty. If gold were capped at 200k, everyone will be placing bids for gold at 200k, and the people who placed their bids late will complain that they have to wait days or even weeks before they'll see any gold.

You see this happen with subsidized and rent controlled housing. You usually have to get on a waiting list to get into those apartments.

2. As has been explained, this creates a positive feedback loop. Demand for gold drives prices up, which due to gold prices also going up in RL $$ causes a drop in supply (fewer people creating gold with $$). The drop in supply drives up prices even more, causing a further drop in supply. And so on until nobody can afford to buy gold and PWI goes bankrupt.

And why in the world do you think it's fair that people who are playing for free should be able to force people who pay $$ for the game to pay more? If you think that's fair, wouldn't it also be fair for the people who pay for the game to increase the expenses of the free players, and force them to also pay $$ to play?

The market mechanism they've implemented for exchanging gold for coin insures a decent balance between free players and pay players. If the ratio goes out of whack so there are too many free players, the price of gold goes up thus encouraging some of those free players to become pay players. If there are too many pay players, the price of gold goes down and some of the pay players figure they can play for free and buy gold with coin instead of spending $$.

You can't prove that mechanism. See, this is the problem with free-market principles: it takes trends of human behavior and tries to turn them into certainties, which is a fallacy because you can never predict human behavior on such a large scale. Case in point: How can you prove that there are more pay-to-play players just because gold is high right now? If anything, I would say that your theory is incorrect just because we're having this discussion. This whole barrage of threads on the subject this week is just proof that people would sooner come out of the woodwork to call shennanigans on PWE's constant CS events than pay actual money for a video game...... and as well they should!

Zoe - Heavens Tear wrote: »

Spoken like a true greedy person Solandri.

If the ingame price of gold is reflected on how much they need to pay in real money per gold, the sellers will quickly lower their prices if they want to be able to keep their own real money use lower.

PWE would have no fear of prices going too low because after all, players will only sell low to a certain point where it won't get lower no matter what because it would not be worth it to the sellers. That point would end up being the normal, true rate of 100k coins per gold or $1 per gold.

And not only would their real money use be lowered, it would also mean that people couldn't buy at high prices if they wanted their gold to get sold. Most likely what would happen is PWE would have to set a floor on gold prices along with it... by precedent, that would probably be 100k... and then you'd have tons and tons of 100k offers, and there might be a little slowdown in people selling gold.

Perhaps (and I'm saying this because I anticipate Solandri picking up on it) there would be a "waiting list," in his terms, meaning if you bought gold at $1, you'd have to exercise some judgement in when to sell your gold. But if the waiting list gets backed up, what would free market principles dictate? Well, not so many people would be buying gold at once with the intent to sell it. Thus, we would end up with a balance... perhaps a short waiting list, but not a terribly long one I think.

swgs

xarfox wrote: »

Hello Brael,

Your math is absolutely correct.

However, we wouldn't keep the coin requirement at 100k if no one was using it.

I am just wondering, if the purpose of JJ event is to remove coins from the game, why have to have a option to exchange with GA. I am sure some people maybe using the coin option, but how many, 0.1%?

Walterthewf - Harshlands

i had no idea auction house gold trading fee was that big of a money sink.

Tabit - Sanctuary

I have one question for you GMs.

why is it stated that Jolly old jones is only problem with Gold prices?

Have you thought about the "new gold iron Hammer" might be causing it too.
5 gold to trade in to open a chest of coins worth 1 mil... hmmm not much profit.

Especially with Chest of coins giving 1 mil. just a thought.
Allow players to sell to NPCs the chest of Coins for 200k-250k.

That would substantially effect Gold prices.


No disrespect. It doesn't make sense to me for PWI to have that.

vampirenite

Tabit - Sanctuary wrote: »

Have you thought about the "new gold iron Hammer" might be causing it too.
5 gold to trade in to open a chest of coins worth 1 mil... hmmm not much profit.

Especially with Chest of coins giving 1 mil. just a thought.
Allow players to sell to NPCs the chest of Coins for 200k-250k.

That would substantially effect Gold prices.

Don't you have to complete the Cube to get this Chest? If so I expect the flow of Chests into the game is miniscule compared to Event items.

Therefore the effect is minimal.

Miugre - Heavens Tear

And do you happen to know how many people complete the cube of fate daily? It's quite significant from what I can tell, and the cube chests will only make more people do it. :P

Vitenka - Dreamweaver

People are offering to SELL the chests, for 750k. Dreamweaver gold supply just dried up.

vampirenite

Miugre - Heavens Tear wrote: »

And do you happen to know how many people complete the cube of fate daily? It's quite significant from what I can tell, and the cube chests will only make more people do it. :P

It might be as much as a few hundred daily ... however I am sure that is relatively small compared to the number of people doing the Jolly Old Jones event which is open to anyone with an Angel.

The Chest is worth 0 coins when Gold is 200K, 500K when Gold is 100K. I am surprised anyone can sell them at all at current Gold prices.

DarkSniper - Lost City

In my opinion if gold prices at all drop it will be in no way related to the Jolly Jones event or at all anything the GM's do.


In my opinion the only hope for the gold prices is two events which happen in the fall.



Think about it. In the Fall there is the release of a new game, I can't say what it is but I know a few players who already plan to leave for it. From what I have seen in past games people who spend money on games (gold buyers) are more attached to that game and are less likely to leave for this new game, than people who don't buy gold and haven't spent any money on PWI. Gold Sellers stay, some Gold Buyers leave, Same amount of gold, less buyers. Same supply, less demand, prices drop.

The other event that will impact the price of gold is School will be starting up soon. It's my experiance that the people who spend real life money on this game, are people with jobs, who are most likely not affected by school starting. So must of the Gold Sellers will be on the same amount. A lot of people who buy gold however will be going back to school. School means less play time, less money spent at auctioneer buying gold. Gold Sellers are on same amount of time, Gold Buyers are on less. Same supply, less demand.




Although I do love the Jolly Jones event, 90k G6 garnets are amazing, I already Have the gems for my HH70

Isala - Sanctuary

vampirenite wrote: »

Don't you have to complete the Cube to get this Chest? If so I expect the flow of Chests into the game is miniscule compared to Event items.

Therefore the effect is minimal.

I saw a player the other day trying to sell 10 of them the other day for 400k. He wasn't the only one, either. Kinda sad, when you think about it. A box holding 1 Million Coins, and people have to sell them because it's not financially viable to actually open them. Not that anyone is actually going to buy them anyway. All these chests are simply nothing more than a slot taken up in your inventory, since there's no point in actually opening the damn things for what it costs to do it.

david12345

Its really quite simple.



Now (majority of) gold buyers, they just want coins and will search for the safest and easiest way to aquire them. PWI dangles the no brainer, no risk offer before them: 5 gold to buy a perfect hammer then to open a box containing 1m in coin.

This means they don't have to worry if their items are bought by the non gold buyers. They don't have to worry about supply and demand. They dont have to worry about competition.

Its pretty much like they pay $5 and get 1m without any risk, save from passing the CoF, which is silly easy at higher levels. Not to mention the shed load you can get from delta.

Gold charms, dragon orbs, etc - none are as profitable or risk free as this. Gold buyers no longer spend their gold on them, instead they buy hammers. Its happening now. This means that the rest of the players, those who do NOT use real money to buy gold and use ingame coins to buy it, will either:

A) Suffer and shy away from boutique items (or pay ridiculous ingame coin prices to aquire them, which would lead them to .

Fold in and buy gold using real money.

To smooth it all in and appease the playerbase, they throw in Jolly Old Jones, claim its all his fault, and further excuse these sales by slamming "new content" down. Nonesense, espcially hard to swallow with statements such as "Currently gold prices are inflated, however they should fall back down after this event/sale, perhaps even to a lower benchmark since so much coin is being sunk out of the game right now."

When Jolly is gone, nothing will change. 5 gold will equal 1m ingame coin as long as this 1m box is in the game. This will make 1 gold worth around 200k. The chance the gold prices will drop to 103k or lower? Give me a break.

Stickygreen - Heavens Tear

chest of coins are incredibly easy to get

you can get about 12-15 a day depending on if you cube/do rebirth

each 3.5 hour rebirth run nets you 3 chests.

=18 chests per squad

im assuming each server completets 15-20 rebirths a day

270-360m flooded server every day.

Miugre - Heavens Tear

david12345 wrote: »

Its really quite simple.

The upcoming release of another game (you know which one) and the fear that many people will leave for it, may have triggered PWI into trying to milk their playerbase to the core.

Now (majority of) gold buyers, they just want coins and will search for the safest and easiest way to aquire them. PWI dangles the no brainer, no risk offer before them: 5 gold to buy a perfect hammer then to open a box containing 1m in coin.

This means they don't have to worry if their items are bought by the non gold buyers. They don't have to worry about supply and demand. They dont have to worry about competition.

Its pretty much like they pay $5 and get 1m without any risk, save from passing the CoF, which is silly easy at higher levels. Not to mention the shed load you can get from delta.

Gold charms, dragon orbs, etc - none are as profitable or risk free as this. Gold buyers no longer spend their gold on them, instead they buy hammers. Its happening now. This means that the rest of the players, those who do NOT use real money to buy gold and use ingame coins to buy it, will either:

A) Suffer and shy away from boutique items (or pay ridiculous ingame coin prices to aquire them, which would lead them to .

Fold in and buy gold using real money.

To smooth it all in and appease the playerbase, they throw in Jolly Old Jones, claim its all his fault, and further excuse these sales by slamming "new content" down. Nonesense, espcially hard to swallow with statements such as "Currently gold prices are inflated, however they should fall back down after this event/sale, perhaps even to a lower benchmark since so much coin is being sunk out of the game right now."

When Jolly is gone, nothing will change. 5 gold will equal 1m ingame coin as long as this 1m box is in the game. This will make 1 gold worth around 200k. The chance the gold prices will drop to 103k or lower? Give me a break.

I have to admit, I never looked at this from the angle of "5 gold = a painless 1mil." But you're right... the addition of these boxes will, at best, get more ZEN buyers to ignore the gold market... thus decreasing supply.

I think it's safe to say by now that the cube chests are the worst idea PWE's ever had. I'm seriously thinking we need to make a big poll on this and show them how many people are in favor of taking the chests out of the game.

Singsung - Sanctuary

david12345 wrote: »

Its really quite simple.

The upcoming release of another game (you know which one) and the fear that many people will leave for it, may have triggered PWI into trying to milk their playerbase to the core.

Sure looks like that's what they're doing right now. I find it real suspicious that they come out with coin chest, numerous sales, and Jolly Jones at this time. Maybe even more sales next week and the week after? b:byeb:byeb:bye

eatwithspoons

Singsung - Sanctuary wrote: »

Sure looks like that's what they're doing right now. I find it real suspicious that they come out with coin chest, numerous sales, and Jolly Jones at this time. Maybe even more sales next week and the week after? b:byeb:byeb:bye

Please do not make false accusations. They are a violation of the Terms of Service

jbeao

Alright, so im not flaming, bashing or insulting in any way.

The sales events are great and i agree that putting them with Jolly Jones will lower the gold prices after the events have departed. The gold boxes from the Cube and Rebirth are what the problems are going to be caused by. As everyone has stated earlier, you need a hammer in order to open the gold boxes. Each hammer costs 5 gold. People will think OMG I HAVE TO RAISE GOLD SO I MAKE MORE PROFIT. As rotten as it sounds.. all players have this greed in them, even myself. Once again like many people have said, gold prices will stay at 200k until the chests are completely wiped off. I understand that you, the GMs, did this to excite more players and to give them more rewards. I also understand that you need to promote Gold in Boutique in order to advance your company and pay your bills..My friend and I have each spent a little over $3000.00 each on this game... We still love this game and whenever someone talks about moving to **** or whatever game, we always say pwi ftw!!!! This game is full of material and barely lacks anything. Only iffy thing is its a game where you always want to spend xD (not a problem cuz its fun!) Many games lack to keep the interest of the players even with their cash shop items. You guys do an amazing job of getting our attention and keeping us playing!

I hate people sitting here complaining about quitting and threatening to quit when they just end up shutting up and playing. For those who keep bi&$@ing about this, either quit game or stfu and try to fix the problem by helping out GM's not bashing them. I have been a GM on an MMO and believe me.. it is not a walk in the park, you CAN NOT please everyone... My suggestion is just to look at making these coin boxes a limited time item rather than permanently leaving them on the server which may cause a huge economic inflation. Previous games ive played, i watched their ressurection scrolls hike from 50k to 1million following the same events that we are experiencing. I LOVE PWI and i seriously worry that something will damage it and crash the market and leave it extremly hard to play. Im here to stay and i want everyone to stay too because its funner that way! b:laugh

Now eatwithspoons dont think this was a bashing or flaming post because i love pwi and ive never complained about gold. Just a mere suggestion b:shutup

p.s. its funny i keep telling my friends omg im gonna email gm and suggest jolly jones again for the past 5 months and it finally came woot woot!!!! thx!! b:thanks

Isala - Sanctuary

eatwithspoons wrote: »

Please do not make false accusations. They are a violation of the Terms of Service

Just a thought, and I know this might get taken in a horribly wrong way, so I'll keep it as nice as possible.

We're Players. We have no way of actually knowing whether such a statement is a false accusation or not. All we've seen is a massive dump of Cash-Related content. In Real Life, such an event would be seen in businesses as well, but most of the time you only see such an enormous quantity of sales during what would be a "Going Out Of Business Sale". Your players are panicking because we're seeing signs of this in our game. It seems like the higher ups are panicking, and frankly, it scares the **** out of us. We're extremely concerned, and while some of us aren't careful about mincing words, the fact remains that we're kinda confused here. It's like you're looking at us from one way glass, like the kind people use to watch test subjects. We're being experimented on, and only the people on the other side have any idea what's going to happen next. How are we supposed to react? There's mass panic. Things are not getting better because of Jones, and the Chests in TT and Rebirth. They are getting worse, as people dump cash into the game to avoid the coin costs. When you can pop open a chest for 5 dollars that dumps in 1million coins into the economy, or spend 3 dollars for 10 shots at Jolly Old Jones, we're not seeing how either of these things are supposed to balance out the economy. We're looking for some clarifications here, that's all. Clarifications, and some acknowledgment that what we're saying is actually being heard by the higher ups, not ignored while they drain us of our money.

FionaCattail - Sanctuary

it's not just cube.. you get those chests from Rebirth also (gamma at least).. 1 for completing 8th wave.. and 1 for killing final boss..

and at 180k/G it's 900k to open it to get 1M while it's true that anything above that would still make a profit.. alot of people aren't going to want to take the time to wait for 5G just so they can get 100k.. I currently have like 24 of those boxes.. and while Xarfox said that after the last event things re-stablized at 120k what he neglected to tell you was that BEFORE the event (and the duke rose outfit/quest screwup) gold HIGHS were at 105k.. after the event, the LOWS were 120k