heero200 - A Possible Economy Fix

Devilskarma - Raging Tide

Obviously "removing auto cultivation" has been undoubtedly suggested in numerous threads and should be done... but...

Is it a possibility that in the gold exchange itself, an npc "floor" and "ceiling" can be implemented?

At the bottom end, saying no one is buying gold, a player who has gold would be able to sell their unwanted gold at the npc floor of 500,000 coin.

At the top end, saying no one is selling gold, a player who wants to buy gold would be able to buy gold with their unwanted coin at the npc ceiling of 2,000,000 coin.

This would guarantee a stable economy in every server and leaves no way for players to start selling cash shop merchandise above the the max gold-coin limit, with the exception of very dumb buyers b:chuckle.

ZentDreigon - Raging Tide

I got a bit confused. b:surrender Maybe I need more coffee.

If by "gold Exchange" you mean the AH Gold Trading I read somewhere in forums the cap is 4mil. Just a few more weeks. b:shocked

I won't debate about the inflation concept, which is what is happening. There's already too many great arguments on forums.

opkossy

Nobody would ever have any reason to charge zen for gold except for ilack of knowledge about this function if this were to ever be made.

And without people charging, PWI becomes a dead weight that needs to be shut down. If gold prices are to fall, it has to be player driven as well since trying to force a cap like this with the current methods of coin generation just isn't going to work well.

Devilskarma - Raging Tide

OPKossy wrote: »

Nobody would ever have any reason to charge zen for gold except for ilack of knowledge about this function if this were to ever be made.

And without people charging, PWI becomes a dead weight that needs to be shut down. If gold prices are to fall, it has to be player driven as well since trying to force a cap like this with the current methods of coin generation just isn't going to work well.

Why not? This would lower the max cap of 4 mil down to 2 mil (at which, the in-game economy was actually quite booming), with no way for players to sell cash shop items over the cap.

opkossy

Devilskarma - Raging Tide wrote: »

Why not? This would lower the max cap of 4 mil down to 2 mil (at which, the in-game economy was actually quite booming), with no way for players to sell cash shop items over the cap.

If players can buy gold directly using coin, which is very easy to come across nowadays, then there is no reason to charge for ZEN ever because... you can just use your coin to get it even if nobody's selling any... and nobody will be selling any because that function would exist so they'd have no need to use RL cash to get something that's trivially obtainable via ingame methods.

And the only way to keep people from selling above the gold cap if/when the economy spirals enough for people to ignore the gold trade is to make all boutique items untradable so that you have to either charge ZEN yourself or buy gold from others to get them.... and that option just opens up the path to making a LOT of people less inclined to bother playing period as they'd lose access to both useful ingame items AND vanity items as well.


The problem with what you're trying to suggest is that it's flawed at the very core and trying to force this sort of thing so late in the game is only going to make things worse... and that's before accounting for the fact your proposed change means people will never bother charging ZEN because they'll never have any need to do so which would get the game shut down.

To expand on what I said before, if gold prices are to fall, it has to be because of external changes that cause the players to lower the value just as those same sorts of external changes caused it to rise to begin with. Trying to force a heavy-handed change to the system itself is pretty much doomed to failure with the only question being how badly it would backfire. If the cost of gold is no longer player-driven as it's forced to go down, it simply won't be able to work in anything but the shortest of short terms.

Bhavyy - Raging Tide

Devilskarma - Raging Tide wrote: »

Why not? This would lower the max cap of 4 mil down to 2 mil (at which, the in-game economy was actually quite booming), with no way for players to sell cash shop items over the cap.

To summarise what kossy said: because it's a shiit idea.

You haven't thought it through properly and you clearly have zero understanding of what the problem is and is being caused by. It's not as simple as high gold prices and a surplus of game generated coins.

There are better ideas than this floating around. The general jist if them is the typical "coin sink" idea. What needs to happen is a large amount of coin being taken out of the game as well as coin trading rather than people hoarding it. Something like increasing the supply token reward given from NW. Maybe if they implemented something like event gold cards in the forges to increase the number of people spending coins to turn their supply tokens into useful items.

But alas - all of these ideas are as pointless as each other no matter how good they are because nothing we say on here has ever been taken seriously unless it's some sort of glitch that can be exploited or a text problem lol!

I mean - PWE or Wanmei or whoever it is that decides are more likely to fix the gap at the end of the warsong bridge than fix the economy. Why? Because now people either have to bot with multiple toons that they won't play or cash shop in order to just get by and be able to play most of what the game now has to offer. And all botting does is make the coin they farm worth that little bit less hence driving more people to cash shop.

Why would they want to change this? Why are people still crying about the economy as if they haven't realised it's exactly where the people who earn money from the business want it to be.

trands

ZentDreigon - Raging Tide wrote: »

I got a bit confused. b:surrender Maybe I need more coffee.

If by "gold Exchange" you mean the AH Gold Trading I read somewhere in forums the cap is 4mil. Just a few more weeks. b:shocked

I won't debate about the inflation concept, which is what is happening. There's already too many great arguments on forums.

The current gold cap is an illusion, as you can sell boutique items for more then (price in gold*4mil). It only affects how gold is sold. The suggestion would be PWE providing gold unlimited at 2mil. Like an NPC selling gold at 2mil and buying gold at 500k. That would keep all gold/items sold and purchased within those limits.

If I were to see that, my conclusion would be PWI shutting down within 12 months and I would jump on the 1st good game I find. Having no money-exclusive content would totally flip the situation but be just as bad. The only sane way to keep a f2p+cashshop running is a balance between unbound farmable content, bound farmable content and boutique content. Right now, high-end characters (not even mentionning "endgame") require way to much gold to make+maintain while requiring little to no unbound farming.

Devilskarma - Raging Tide

Ok, so WHY would no one charge with a 2,000,000 coin cap that is enforced with an npc selling that 2,000,000 coin gold? The clientel charged the **** out of it at less than that even. The 2,000,000 coin enforced cap would be no different. OF COURSE DO NOT IMPLEMENT while botting is still in the game b:shocked good lordy lord. And yes, they should throw some crown of madness and sot, etc into the game at some crazi-high ridiculous prices... SoT could be 2.5-3 BILLION coin and people would absofugginlutely still buy it. Crown of Madness, same thing... BUT HIGHER PRICED, and people would still buy it.

b:fatb on that b:scorn

Everyone is so much more interested in having a say (of which as bhavyy stated, none of us do have... ie, any say you think you have is an illusion) in how the game builds rather than the longevity AND integrity of the game. Should give me the reins and i'll do what this company aint got the cohonies to do that would make this game last another decade or more and see wow beaten.

opkossy

... Please at least read my post. I clearly explain just what you're after is a bad idea.


Yeah people used to sell gold for as low as 52k once upon a time. I was around for that when the game was new and fresh.

Guess what? Coin was also MUCH more valuable at that time due to being harder to acquire in addition to the fact that everyone still had to deal with (to the time) heavy coin losses from learning skills, repair costs, and so on. Once upon a time, having 10m was considered being an extremely elite person and one of the very top. Now 10m isn't even pocket change and we have people with hundreds of millions or billions of coin in their pocket. You cannot try to make a change like this without doing something about that first. And I honestly haven't even bothered including the bot as a factor for coin being so ridiculously easy to acquire nowadays that what you're suggesting would do nothing more than cause problems.


It's not about having a say or not. Some ideas just aren't very good ones and this is one of them. Also, even if you had theoretical control of PWE, you'd still be unable to legally perform changes of the type and scale required to stand up to your claim. Unless, of course, you felt like risking jail (among other things) and either had like-minded employees or were willing and knowledgeable enough to do everything yourself.

Ulquiorraa__ - Raging Tide

I would suggest they change wht we get from npcing dq.... To become something else than coins and problem solved .. I give it 6 months and gold goes back to 2.5 mil on RT.

heerohex#3018

Sorry im gonna agree with what's been said on this one. Something needs to be done to stabilise this but I agree that this may not be the solution for now. So im not going to Log.

Thanks,

Olbaze - Sanctuary

OPKossy wrote: »

Guess what? Coin was also MUCH more valuable at that time due to being harder to acquire in addition to the fact that everyone still had to deal with (to the time) heavy coin losses from learning skills, repair costs, and so on. Once upon a time, having 10m was considered being an extremely elite person and one of the very top. Now 10m isn't even pocket change and we have people with hundreds of millions or billions of coin in their pocket. You cannot try to make a change like this without doing something about that first. And I honestly haven't even bothered including the bot as a factor for coin being so ridiculously easy to acquire nowadays that what you're suggesting would do nothing more than cause problems.

Not just that, but there are other motivators behind high gold prices.

Firstly, sales on packs put a minimum on gold via tokens. You'll never see gold go below a certain point due to the ability of directly converting tokens to coin. That minimum isn't very high, with the lowest pack being at 18 silver a piece and 15 tokens, resulting in a minimum of 849,915 coins per gold. Any less and you can make guaranteed profit by buying gold, then packs and opening them.

Secondly, the biggest buyers of gold (merchants) are all ridiculously rich. Heck, as far as merchants are concerned, gold is capped at a point where people are not willing to pay for the goods at a profitable margin. And that is definitely nowhere even close to the current 3,999,900. Double that and you're there. Heck, as a merchant, I am more upset about the gold cap being so low, as now I am stuck waiting hours for my gold.

Thirdly, people are used to the high gold price. If you put in a 2m NPC cap, you would see people with thousands of gold rioting. You would end up with PWE needing to refund thousands of people for it. And you would upset all of the markets. Everything would be in a volatile state, with some sellers slashing their prices in an attempt to reinvest while majority would try to slow down the price drop to minimize their losses. Meanwhile, others with 1000s of millions of coin would be buying hundreds of gold from an NPC, because no one would be selling any gold.

Putting a ridiculously low (yes, 2m is that) cap on gold overnight would destroy the game. If they wanted to lower gold prices (which they don't because it means more zen sales), they would have to do it very slowly, over a very long time period, along with reducing the frequency of all sales by a massive margin. I'm talking Ocean Orbs every 3 months tops, +11/+12 orbs once a year or never, Dragon's Fires every 6 months. And by "very little, very slow", I mean something like 100k every 1-3 months.

Basically, to fix the economy, you have to take as long as you took to "ruin" it.

Evryn - Morai

TLDR for lazy reader 4 posts below:
Only way to fix the economy is to cut off the amount of coins being pumped into it, and the most efficient way of doing that is to erase the value of DQ items so that long-term botting becomes unprofitable.


Since OpKossy was linking here from a previous thread, and that there's a whole bunch of threads on this, I'll post my reply here:

Fixing the economy won't be easy.
There are a couple of playergroups of people involved in this, and a few possible scenarios:

The gold sellers.
- People who sell gold to get coin. Typically these are people who don't have a lot of time to play the game and want to spend their time developing their character. They need gold for repairs, crafting and other stuff and are not able to grind to get it.
- People who grind the "free Zen" offers to get Zen, then get gold that way and convert some into coin.

The gold buyers
- Casual players: These are typically the newer players to the game who need a little gold to get the items that aren't obtainable outside of the boutique, such as inventory stones. They typically don't have much coin or means to grind, and aren't geared up yet. They pump a little coin in the economy.
- Merchants: These are players who set up one or more cat shops to sell items to other players and take a profit margin at the goods. These syphon coins from players, particulary the botter group, but don't actually generate any coins themselves. Prices and margins set by them are a good indicator of the state of the economy.
- Botters: These are players who use one or more characters to continually grind NPCs for drops, then sell them to make coins. These players will generate several million coins per character per day, which are subsequently dumped into the economy. I myself belong to this group.

I'm going to make a few rough assumptions here for the sake of the scenarios.
Player "BuyZen" has alloted a weekly budget to himself that allows him to buy 50 gold each week.
Player "FreeZen" manages to grind 10 gold with the free zen offers in a week.
Player "CasualJoe" does some Jolly Jones runs each day, netting him some 4 million each week. He also sells some mid-level mats to MarketMia for an additional 1 million.
Player "MarketMia" sells various stuffs and makes 10 million by buying and reselling stuff for a slightly higher price.
Player "BottingBen" runs 2 bots, each making about 2 million per day (which is a low estimate), totalling 28 million per week.


Now, let's try to discuss a few scenarios.
First, as elsewhere proposed: A gold cap of 2 million
Player BuyZen and FreeZen will be unhappy: They can get less money for their coins even when they know their gold is worth much more. They stop selling in the auctionhouse and end up buying some tokens, then sell their gold over the world channel, which essentially removes the 4 million cap that there currently is. Gold is now sold by open auction to whomever offers most at the time.
Player CasualJoe can no longer find gold to buy in the auctionhouse. Since he can't manage to keep up with the amount of gold being asked on the worldchannel, he can't buy gold anywhere. Items of the boutique become inaccessible to him. He contemplates leaving the game.
Player MarketMia notices that the gold price is going up - which means in essence, the coin value is going down. She adjusts her market prices upwards accordingly.
Player BottingBen just keeps going. With almost 30 million per week to spend, he's not worried. And if it becomes a problem, he can always add more bots.
Danger for scenario: Loss of new/casual players and a near total loss of coin value.

Second scenario: Raise the gold price cap, doubling it to 8 million
Players FreeZen and BuyZen will be happy. If many people are buying gold, they can get more coins for their gold. They raise their prices accordingly. Gold price continues to rise as a result.
Player CasualJoe can not keep up with these prices. He might need to run Jolly Jones for over 2 weeks just to get 1 gold. He contemplates to leave the game.
Player MarketMia notices that the gold price is going up - which means in essence, the coin value is going down. She adjusts her market prices upwards accordingly.
Player BottingBen just keeps going. With almost 30 million per week to spend, he's not worried. And if it becomes a problem, he can always add more bots.
Danger for scenario: Loss of new/casual players and a near total loss of coin value.

Third scenario: Eliminate botting profitability by reducing DQ items to 1 coin
Direct result is that bot returns drop from 2 million to 100.000 per day (rough guesstimate).
Player BottingBen is unhappy: He's making only 1/20th of the coins he made before, now roughly 1.4 million per week. He is forced to stop buying gold and can't spend much at MarketMia anymore either. He contemplates becoming CheatingBen by using a fully automated bot, but knows it won't help his income much since most of it came from the DQ items.
Player MarketMia notices that people are selling items to her, but not buying anymore. She lowers both buy and sell prices to compensate for this, and temporarily stops buying items until the market stabilises.
Player CasualJoe notices he can't sell goods to MarketMia anymore, but still makes 4 million per week from Jollies. As gold prices drop, he can get it easier.
Players BuyZen and FreeZen notice that people are not buying gold anymore for the prices they offer and are forced to lower the gold selling prices on the auction house.
Danger for scenario: Greatly benefits the people who have saved a large amount of coin on bank accounts.

Fourth scenario: Eliminate botting by removing autocultivation
Player BottingBen is unhappy: He can't make money at all anymore. He now has 2 options: Use a custom bot (they're available on the net here and there) or revert to doing Jollies. If BottingBen becomes CheatingBen he'll have a massive advantage over other players, and he knows the GMs don't consider banning cheaters a priority since he's reported other non-autocultivation bots, which have not been banned.
Player MarketMia notices that people are selling items to her, but not buying anymore. She lowers both buy and sell prices to compensate for this, and temporarily stops buying items until the market stabilises.
Player CasualJoe notices he can't sell goods to MarketMia anymore, but still makes 4 million per week from Jollies. As gold prices drop, he can get it easier.
Players BuyZen and FreeZen notice that people are not buying gold anymore for the prices they offer and are forced to lower the gold selling prices on the auction house.
Danger for scenario: Greatly benefits the people who have saved a large amount of coin on bank accounts. Greatly benefits cheaters who use bots other then autocultivation.

Fifth scenario: A gold cap of 4 million, with an infinity of gold offered at the 4 million cap
Players BuyZen and FreeZen keep selling their gold at just under the 4 million cap, and are happy enough. No real change for them.
Player MarketMia notices no real change.
Player CasualJoe still needs to grind a lot before getting his coins, but at least he knows how long he'll need to work before getting what he wants.
Player BottingBen is happy: He has a guaranteed 9 gold per week to spend per bot he creates. It is more then he needs, so he considers selling a bit of gold for real money to BuyZen (whom he knows from buying gold outside of the AH a few times), at a price lower then that PWI offers.
Danger for scenario: Risk to PWI as a company if people start to sell that gold outside of the game, undercutting PWI's own price. Player BuyZen might end up buying gold from BottingBen and giving him real money for it.


In my opinion, only scenario 3 is a viable fix for the economy. Eliminate botting as a source of income and FORCE people to quest for cash again. No "automatic moneymaking". That will force people to return to Jolly Jones for coin making and at the same time makes all non-autocultivation bots obsolete. Coin returns for complex quests in my opinion are the way to go, since those are extremely hard to write bots for. That makes autocultivation only useful for leveling up characters - which I hope was it's original intent.
If you go that way, please add a few additional punica pulp grinders to Jolly Jones at Lost city, since that one will be extremely busy, just as it was before autocultivation.

chengsiliu

scenario 4 is just make botter-cheater happy. Why not secenaria 3? so that kill the cheater as well.

PWI clearly know any gold price drop always make CSer unhappy though Non-CSer is always happy for that.

another thing pwi doing is make sale frequently, which make CSer happy. They don't need to sell golds and spend more to buy stuff from merchant b4 sale come. Though, it makes gold price high and merchant is angry for that.

Anyway, make more money and keep CSer happy is most important thing to the company. If they think they earn enough money they need , they may give some cookies to non-CSer. Or they just figure out how to get more money or simply shut down the game.

Evryn - Morai wrote: »

Since OpKossy was linking here from a previous thread, and that there's a whole bunch of threads on this, I'll post my reply here:

Fixing the economy won't be easy.
There are a couple of playergroups of people involved in this, and a few possible scenarios:

The gold sellers.
- People who sell gold to get coin. Typically these are people who don't have a lot of time to play the game and want to spend their time developing their character. They need gold for repairs, crafting and other stuff and are not able to grind to get it.
- People who grind the "free Zen" offers to get Zen, then get gold that way and convert some into coin.

The gold buyers
- Casual players: These are typically the newer players to the game who need a little gold to get the items that aren't obtainable outside of the boutique, such as inventory stones. They typically don't have much coin or means to grind, and aren't geared up yet. They pump a little coin in the economy.
- Merchants: These are players who set up one or more cat shops to sell items to other players and take a profit margin at the goods. These syphon coins from players, particulary the botter group, but don't actually generate any coins themselves. Prices and margins set by them are a good indicator of the state of the economy.
- Botters: These are players who use one or more characters to continually grind NPCs for drops, then sell them to make coins. These players will generate several million coins per character per day, which are subsequently dumped into the economy. I myself belong to this group.

I'm going to make a few rough assumptions here for the sake of the scenarios.
Player "BuyZen" has alloted a weekly budget to himself that allows him to buy 50 gold each week.
Player "FreeZen" manages to grind 10 gold with the free zen offers in a week.
Player "CasualJoe" does some Jolly Jones runs each day, netting him some 4 million each week. He also sells some mid-level mats to MarketMia for an additional 1 million.
Player "MarketMia" sells various stuffs and makes 10 million by buying and reselling stuff for a slightly higher price.
Player "BottingBen" runs 2 bots, each making about 2 million per day (which is a low estimate), totalling 28 million per week.


Now, let's try to discuss a few scenarios.
First, as elsewhere proposed: A gold cap of 2 million
Player BuyZen and FreeZen will be unhappy: They can get less money for their coins even when they know their gold is worth much more. They stop selling in the auctionhouse and end up buying some tokens, then sell their gold over the world channel, which essentially removes the 4 million cap that there currently is. Gold is now sold by open auction to whomever offers most at the time.
Player CasualJoe can no longer find gold to buy in the auctionhouse. Since he can't manage to keep up with the amount of gold being asked on the worldchannel, he can't buy gold anywhere. Items of the boutique become inaccessible to him. He contemplates leaving the game.
Player MarketMia notices that the gold price is going up - which means in essence, the coin value is going down. She adjusts her market prices upwards accordingly.
Player BottingBen just keeps going. With almost 30 million per week to spend, he's not worried. And if it becomes a problem, he can always add more bots.
Danger for scenario: Loss of new/casual players and a near total loss of coin value.

Second scenario: Raise the gold price cap, doubling it to 8 million
Players FreeZen and BuyZen will be happy. If many people are buying gold, they can get more coins for their gold. They raise their prices accordingly. Gold price continues to rise as a result.
Player CasualJoe can not keep up with these prices. He might need to run Jolly Jones for over 2 weeks just to get 1 gold. He contemplates to leave the game.
Player MarketMia notices that the gold price is going up - which means in essence, the coin value is going down. She adjusts her market prices upwards accordingly.
Player BottingBen just keeps going. With almost 30 million per week to spend, he's not worried. And if it becomes a problem, he can always add more bots.
Danger for scenario: Loss of new/casual players and a near total loss of coin value.

Third scenario: Eliminate botting profitability by reducing DQ items to 1 coin
Direct result is that bot returns drop from 2 million to 100.000 per day (rough guesstimate).
Player BottingBen is unhappy: He's making only 1/20th of the coins he made before, now roughly 1.4 million per week. He is forced to stop buying gold and can't spend much at MarketMia anymore either. He contemplates becoming CheatingBen by using a fully automated bot, but knows it won't help his income much since most of it came from the DQ items.
Player MarketMia notices that people are selling items to her, but not buying anymore. She lowers both buy and sell prices to compensate for this, and temporarily stops buying items until the market stabilises.
Player CasualJoe notices he can't sell goods to MarketMia anymore, but still makes 4 million per week from Jollies. As gold prices drop, he can get it easier.
Players BuyZen and FreeZen notice that people are not buying gold anymore for the prices they offer and are forced to lower the gold selling prices on the auction house.
Danger for scenario: Greatly benefits the people who have saved a large amount of coin on bank accounts.

Fourth scenario: Eliminate botting by removing autocultivation
Player BottingBen is unhappy: He can't make money at all anymore. He now has 2 options: Use a custom bot (they're available on the net here and there) or revert to doing Jollies. If BottingBen becomes CheatingBen he'll have a massive advantage over other players, and he knows the GMs don't consider banning cheaters a priority since he's reported other non-autocultivation bots, which have not been banned.
Player MarketMia notices that people are selling items to her, but not buying anymore. She lowers both buy and sell prices to compensate for this, and temporarily stops buying items until the market stabilises.
Player CasualJoe notices he can't sell goods to MarketMia anymore, but still makes 4 million per week from Jollies. As gold prices drop, he can get it easier.
Players BuyZen and FreeZen notice that people are not buying gold anymore for the prices they offer and are forced to lower the gold selling prices on the auction house.
Danger for scenario: Greatly benefits the people who have saved a large amount of coin on bank accounts. Greatly benefits cheaters who use bots other then autocultivation.

Fifth scenario: A gold cap of 4 million, with an infinity of gold offered at the 4 million cap
Players BuyZen and FreeZen keep selling their gold at just under the 4 million cap, and are happy enough. No real change for them.
Player MarketMia notices no real change.
Player CasualJoe still needs to grind a lot before getting his coins, but at least he knows how long he'll need to work before getting what he wants.
Player BottingBen is happy: He has a guaranteed 9 gold per week to spend per bot he creates. It is more then he needs, so he considers selling a bit of gold for real money to BuyZen (whom he knows from buying gold outside of the AH a few times), at a price lower then that PWI offers.
Danger for scenario: Risk to PWI as a company if people start to sell that gold outside of the game, undercutting PWI's own price. Player BuyZen might end up buying gold from BottingBen and giving him real money for it.


In my opinion, only scenario 4 is a viable fix for the economy. Eliminate botting as a source of income and FORCE people to quest for cash again. No "automatic moneymaking". That will force people to return to Jolly Jones for coin making and at the same time makes all non-autocultivation bots obsolete. Coin returns for complex quests in my opinion are the way to go, since those are extremely hard to write bots for. That makes autocultivation only useful for leveling up characters - which I hope was it's original intent.
If you go that way, please add a few additional punica pulp grinders to Jolly Jones at Lost city, since that one will be extremely busy, just as it was before autocultivation.

Evryn - Morai

Ye, my bad. Meant scenario 3: Removing the reason for people to bot, rather then the most convenient way to do it. Surpress the cause, not the symptom.

Viktorian - Archosaur

1 You ALL need a TLDRs js

2 to summarize what kossy said, no need to charge gold since it would be easier and less bank breaking just to buy the gold at your ceiling. no gold being bought means less and less and less gold being sold till eventually no gold period. unless the auto culti is taken out or Limited somehow the solution is to be a permanent coin sink.

3 i lost interest in this thread at bhavvys post. WAYYYYYY too long posts with no TLDRs

Olbaze - Sanctuary

Evryn - Morai wrote: »

The gold buyers
- Casual players: These are typically the newer players to the game who need a little gold to get the items that aren't obtainable outside of the boutique, such as inventory stones. They typically don't have much coin or means to grind, and aren't geared up yet. They pump a little coin in the economy.
- Merchants: These are players who set up one or more cat shops to sell items to other players and take a profit margin at the goods. These syphon coins from players, particulary the botter group, but don't actually generate any coins themselves. Prices and margins set by them are a good indicator of the state of the economy.

In a lot of cases, merchants are making their profits by selling goods to the casuals at prices that they cannot get elsewhere. This is because a merchant can, will and should buy the largest batch to get the best discount. That discount sometimes allows a merchant to sell the stuff cheaper than it would be to buy the smaller batches in the boutique. And in some cases, merchants can sell things cheaper because their large investment allows them to "beat the odds" so to speak.

And generally speaking, you shouldn't take a merchant's prices as being the going price of the market. In most cases, a merchant will set their price so that the sales they get fit with their need of getting more gold. Some merchants need tons of gold, others very little and changing your prices directly alters how fast your goods sell. However there are some cases where this is made irrelevant by the rarity or price of your merchandise. In those cases, the price doesn't really mean anything: the component is so rare that the buyer does not have alternatives, so the merchant can set their price to whatever they want.

Now, let's try to discuss a few scenarios.
First, as elsewhere proposed: A gold cap of 2 million
Danger for scenario: Loss of new/casual players and a near total loss of coin value.

Second scenario: Raise the gold price cap, doubling it to 8 million
Danger for scenario: Loss of new/casual players and a near total loss of coin value.

Third scenario: Eliminate botting profitability by reducing DQ items to 1 coin
Danger for scenario: Greatly benefits the people who have saved a large amount of coin on bank accounts.

Fourth scenario: Eliminate botting by removing autocultivation
Danger for scenario: Greatly benefits the people who have saved a large amount of coin on bank accounts. Greatly benefits cheaters who use bots other then autocultivation.

Fifth scenario: A gold cap of 4 million, with an infinity of gold offered at the 4 million cap

Danger for scenario: Risk to PWI as a company if people start to sell that gold outside of the game, undercutting PWI's own price. Player BuyZen might end up buying gold from BottingBen and giving him real money for it.

First scenario: You simply cannot halve the cap overnight. That would literally destroy the whole economy because you'd see a massive amount of merchants having facemelting losses to deal with. If you wanted to lower the cap, you'd have to do it gradually over a year or so. And that would also have to come with reducing the incentive for the higher prices, meaning PWE would have to reduce the sales.

Second scenario: Oh yes. Currently, a merchant could break even as long as the gold is slightly below 5m. However, even without that factor, a casual player simply cannot afford to buy stuff at the current prices. While the merchants wouldn't be affected in their theoretical profit, their actual profit would go away because no one could afford to buy their stuff at the price that they need to sell to make the profit.

Third scenario: I don't think that reducing DQs to 1 coin would work without giving them some other meaning first. For example, bring back the DQ points with some massive improvements to what you can get with them. DQ points are good because most of it cannot be used to directly gain coin.

Fourth scenario: Not only that, but since people have gotten used to running autocultivation, a lot of them would go and look for the illegal bots. And since botting has been allowed for a while, the moral impact of it being bannable is lessened.

Fifth scenario: What would happen is that prices would keep going up and scamming would become an every day thing. It would also muddy the waters because without the Gold Auction, there is no proper way to gauge the price of Gold.

In my opinion, only scenario 3 is a viable fix for the economy. Eliminate botting as a source of income and FORCE people to quest for cash again. No "automatic moneymaking". That will force people to return to Jolly Jones for coin making and at the same time makes all non-autocultivation bots obsolete. Coin returns for complex quests in my opinion are the way to go, since those are extremely hard to write bots for. That makes autocultivation only useful for leveling up characters - which I hope was it's original intent.
If you go that way, please add a few additional punica pulp grinders to Jolly Jones at Lost city, since that one will be extremely busy, just as it was before autocultivation.

I don't think that we should necessarily do that. I would prefer if they did something about Nirvana and TTs. I don't want to play a game where coin is primarily generated by people who are willing and able to make dozens of alts to complete a single quest over and over.

NW can still be used to make a fair amount of coin, but since it's a PvP activity, it's dominated by the r9+ folk, the same people who dominate TW. I think we need another way to make coins in PvE. Tweaking Nirvana to make it relevant for the modern gear (supply tokens, basic badges) and modern buffs (anti-APS buffs) could be used to make Nirvana (or any instance for that matter) relevant again.

3 i lost interest in this thread at bhavvys post. WAYYYYYY too long posts with no TLDRs

Some things are serious in life. Serious things require attention to detail. That results in a lot of words being used. Particularly when a person is communicating an idea to someone else, they need to make it verbose to make sure that the other parties are able to understand exactly what this person's idea is.

Evryn - Morai

The PvE grind for coins has historically been Jolly Jones. If you want PvE coinmaking, simply remove the requirement for a token, and the 7-per-day limit of the Jolly quest so that people can grind those into infinity. The Dragon Quests could also be used for it I suppose - or heck, a random "go kill xx mobs of this type and come back, get xx coins" type of repeatable quest, much like "A solo task".

As for reducing the DQ items to 1 coin... if the DQ system isn't coming back, then just trash them and the Dragon Quest system as a whole. The only certain way to eliminate the coin generation by bots, is to eliminate the ability for any kind of bot to make coins.