PWI listen to your players.

XxZavxX - Raging Tide

WarrenWolfy - Sanctuary wrote: »

Even though I profit greatly from merchanting, I agree it should be nerfed. In fact, I know exactly how to do it.

The profitability of merchanting is directly related to the amount instability in the in-game economy. When prices are unstable, merchants win. When prices are stable, everybody else wins.

There was a period just before the first General Summer's Sale in which the cash-shop sales had become very predictable and stable, and thus merchanting profits had dropped. It was at the point where you could earn more much money farming than by merchanting.

But of course, then came General Summer's Sale, followed by 60% Pack Sales, followed by 65% Dragon Orb Sales, followed by etc..., etc..., etc... Prices de-stabalized again, and merchanting profits shot right back up to the top.

However, I suspect that what's good for in-game merchants (ie. unstable prices and the resulting buying frenzies) is probably also very good for PWI's cash-flow. To nerf us, they'd have to nerf their own business model too.

You are off course a little. You may be getting higher profits, but with gold prices having shot up to 1.4m (on RT) at one point, it has devalued coins too.

Lets take shards for example. They are what a lot of merchants are looking to buy for their main characters gear. I need to shard my chest eventually with Jades of Steady Defense. Right now I have 300mil or so.

Diamonds of Tigers were being sold at 3.5m, now I see a catshop buying them for 5m. So lets look at how much 4 Jades would cost me between then and now.

Pre-gold explosion: 9 DoTs x 3.5 = 31.5m (jade) + 3m installation fee... 4 jades x 34.5m = 138m to shard my chest.

Post-gold explostion (using just that one catshop's buying price): 9 x 5 = 45m + 3m = 4 x 48m = 192m to shard my chest now.

My current net worth then and now has hovered around 300m, because I am buying stuff for toons, not just amassing coins for the sole purpose of increasing my gold and coin hoard.

4 shards for r9 were about 46% of my wealth. Now they represent 64% of my wealth. And those aren't the only shards or items to rocket up like that too. Vit stones, lunar cape insigs, and some other stuff I have noticed had dramatically increased in price.

Also, when gold prices are stable at lower prices... especially 900k... I was selling packs at a faster rate than when they are at 1.3m.. It's simple. At lower prices you can sell a lot more because a lot more people can buy. And that's the kind of market very good merchants thrive in.

Miugre - Heavens Tear

WarrenWolfy - Sanctuary wrote: »

To be fair to PWI, though, it's possible that they really had no choice but to abandon their original, "We only sell vanity and convenience items in our cash-shop!" business model.

When they started up, the whole F2P-MMO market was in a bubble, and promising to not flood their game with cash-shop purchasable elite items was what was supposed to set them apart from the pack.

But the MMO bubble collapsed, and bankruptcies are everywhere. Most MMO games have died out and been shut-down, but meanwhile PWI is still opening more servers and churning out more games and more content.

So, as much as I feel the game would be better off balance-wise without the win-Packs in the cash-shop, I do have to credit PWI for running a successful and healthy MMO that they still keep updating with new content (heck, we just had a brand new event 1 hr. ago) while so many others are failing.

See, this part is what I take issue with.

For the first few games, I could forgive them. It's okay for a company to have a couple new, experimental projects. But now they have no fewer than TEN non-PWI games proudly displayed on their front page (and that's not even counting the Zynga-wannabe Facebook game they just released). If they're doing so well that they can afford to release a dozen games, they're doing well enough to fix PWI. Or at least cut back on the sales.

In short, PWI (and possibly some of their other games) are just afterthoughts in terms of PWE's business now. We're the cash cows. They create "new content" that has next to nothing to do with the original game design, keep our CS saturated with endless pack sales, and milk the heavy spenders among us (usually, those who crave pixelated "power" thinking it will bring them respect) to support their newest, unrelated, travesty of a game.

It all speaks to me of a common problem in today's capitalism - that being, how corporations just aren't interested in sustainability anymore. It's not worth it to make sure you have one good product that withstands the test of time, because it's more profitable to squeeze out new thing after new thing regardless of quality, and then let them rot when they've served their purpose. And that's the worst part - part of me worries that PWI is in that boat right now, in which case it's only those stupid few, the heavy spenders, giving them reason to even keep PWI running.

Psytrac - Dreamweaver

Mumintroll - Heavens Tear wrote: »

Other words. It will NEVER happen. They earning too much from packs and economy inflation. They became too greedy to cut their income. It will be even worse than is now for sure. It was very intelligent idea put options to get coins from packs. They make an inflation circle. More packs=more inflation thanks to banker notes.

Oh don't go any give them THAT idea..

Mumintroll - Heavens Tear

Psytrac - Dreamweaver wrote: »

Oh don't go any give them THAT idea..

Too late. They already did it.b:surrender
Edit:"They made an inflation circle. More packs=more inflation thanks to banker notes.