I was lying to myself. Its actually hard to make money in PW this days.

There is couple of problems, which are the cause of these issues we see in economy right now.

The botting and certain pack sales flooded so much coin into economy its not even funny but there is no proper coin sinks. As a result there is still absurd amount of coins as leftover in the economy.

The 2nd problem, which escalates the issue is how the people with lot of coin(Endgame players) dont need anything from people with lower gear. They dont need TT mats, crafting service or even FSP coins. They already got their NW upgrades and so on. What I am trying to say, the coin isnt moving from those bottomless vaults to anywhere but buying gold. The coin lower economy makes goes to goodies of higher economy but it doesnt really come back down, which is a problem.

The next expansion should make things better, massive coin sink and new mats, which endgame players are interested in. Can I promise the mats are easy enough to farm? No but its not even that important. The harder they are to farm, the more expensive they will be. As such having decent gear should be enough to have access to decent farming potential.

Ps. The orb market is what it is because there has been no D.fire pack sale in closer to a year. I dont count the **** sale we had few months back.

If you want to just whine and moan, be my quest. I feel I sufficiently explained why the situation is as it is. If they hadnt taken away botting, every level of economy would be screwed, not just the lower level. I wouldnt call endgame goodies a blooming market but they are pretty decent.

Simple Answer to everything if u dont want to cash shop your **** off then merchant your **** off if you dont want to do that then go without

All of us need to find a new game that is affordable as this one not only is repetitive and boring but it squeezes your last dime out of you. Any money we have "extra" should go to feeding the poor and NOT to this game!

kievil said:

Threads like this crack me up. Six years later and nothing's changed.



PWI basically went full-on private server "OP Donor Pack" when they put the R9 badge up for sale in 2010. It's been a shambling, decaying corpse ever since, but as long as people are still opening their wallets, PWE will keep breaking out the defibrillator paddles, adrenaline shots, and formaldehyde.​​

I would say it's been fairly aggressive on monetization ever since anniversary packs first showed up. R9 was arguably a bit worse but a majority of end game gear has been sourced from the cash shop at most points in time ever since we got packs. Keep in mind lunar was really rather good and fairly rare just before we got packs.

Anyway overall it moves up and down a bit over time and gets worse for f2p players as the player base ages. In terms of the company however it's been more or less the same **** for the vast majority of the games life.

Really the only reason people think it's getting worse is because we have less noobs to sell **** to. Well that and a small number of really overt multi-boxing techniques and slowly degrade the situation (seriously just give a short escalating autoban to people who log in 8+ accounts from the same IP like you do for open proxies. It's kinda hard to defend 8+ accounts at once).

The new expansion will bring a new farming instance with a new set of materials which endgame players will need for their new weapons. I am sure it's going to create a new market. How good that market will be, we don't know. I do believe there will be some profit to be made there, depending on how hard the instance is to farm. If it's like FSP which seemed hard at first, but then people learnt how to do it even with "crappy alts", then it will be fine. If it's very time consuming like Quicksand Maze.... I hope not.

The housing system itself supposedly requires various amounts of coin to upgrade stuff, so there will be a coin sink there as the house is required for farming the new weapons. It won't save the economy, but changes are on their way.

With that said, the biggest problem is that we have very few coin sinks. There is still too much coin in the economy and the people that have money generally don't need to spend it on any upgrades that aren't in the boutique, so they either buy gold (merchants) or charge (CS'ers). There is little need for the things people can farm. People need gold, the demand rises, the gold price rises, the prices for everything else rises etc.

FSP coins are an exception but there is a limit to how many you can farm per day, and then the S packs require Catalysts from the boutique anyway (for those that want S cards).


I farmed R9rr for Desdi two summers ago through Lunar. I did have a little help from a friend, we farmed together. Point is, EoDs and Lunar gold mats were still in a very high demand. We farmed a lot during a long 2x and made good money, Then I refined to +7 with event gold (Dragon points, codes, etc.) and grabbed Morai shards. I was good to go and join the big guys and be a (considerable) factor in PvP. That's not something one can easily do nowadays if they don't merchant or CS (not to mention all the stuff besides the gear one has to get). Just an example of how things changed.

I do believe casual players can still get by, though. It does depend on how "casual" they are though, and what exactly they want out of the game.

bloodedone87 said:

...
All the ''experts'' in economy told on forum that after dq items will be nerfed its gonna be milk and honey. Well its almost 2 years since dq prices were nerfed, we had prices of 90% of the items nerfed and its not better. Things got even worse compared to the Autocultivatong Era
...

I am glad, that we have answer of our community manager thenamesdomino for this thread, more he had answered many times already. Below are examples.
From http://forum.arcgames.com/pwi/discussion/comment/12709863/#Comment_12709863

thenamesdomino said:

18. Gold prices have inflated up to 5 million each. The game has a cap made for 4, but server sustainability was made off of it being 2-3.
- This one's a bit tricky, The gold exchange rates are not something we should mess with because it's run by the player-driven economy.
...
Inflation is also a natural consequence of an MMO’s longevity, as coins are a renewable, non-finite resource.

From http://forum.arcgames.com/pwi/discussion/comment/12709890/#Comment_12709890

thenamesdomino said:

19. The ever increasing divide between csers and non-cs'ers each update are driving many players away from the game
- This is an issue indicative of many games using a Free to Play model. There really is no one good solution for this. If it were up to me (And seriously I'm not blowing smoke here. Ask the other communities Ive worked with) I would give all the things for free if I could. BUT I also understand that this is still a business at the end of the day so I can't.

eeepsilon said:

I do get what you are saying but this person is not really a merchant in a tradional way. He and others like him are the kind that charge a lot of gold, then sell those golds as high as they can and buy what they want from other players or from the boutique with their own gold, then repeat.
For the way they behave I doubt they care about the economy or moving capital.
Again dont get me wrong on this, I am not saying that all cashers are like this, but there are people like that, you can call them greedy or idiots or whatever you like but they are there.

This could be a game economy but there are things that are not different from real life. So if pwe make a huge sale of those packs + this being a super old game with a lot of rich players you will see inflation, but if in addition to that a person or a group of persons are intentionally messing the prices of gold. well you will get even more inflation.

Again not saying that is the main factor but those person do mess up with the prices, and at least on Etherblade server almost anyone know of who Im talking about and what have they done. Of course Im not gonna name or shame anyone since is against the rules.

Honestly, thats similar to how I treat the gold I charge. I generally charge during charge promo and wait for sale, make sure I know when sales gonna end and camp for spend promo. If there is none, so be it, I just flip the gold for for lot more than I would of gotten when I charged. Thing is and the problem really with our economy, all the goodies for me are in gold. Be it the stuff I merch or the stuff I need for myself, exception being endgame shards but I am still bit away from where I can just shard myself completely on the spot. Point of this is, I buy gold constantly whatever the sale. Its been ~month since I last spent gold, I have managed to put ~3b coins into gold and I still have billions for day to day merching when I go trough west looking things to flip. Point being, I have no reason not to hoard gold the way I do and with how common good pack sales have been past year, its extremely safe to do too.

As for intentionally messing with prices, its extremely hard to pull off and profit from it. The power of supply and demand is strong one and the amount of big enough merchants to matter is still large enough so that couple big ones will only take serious net loss if they try to toy with market. Only market, which I might see vulnerable, is tomes but thats because there is very little supply and large demand. The issue with cornering market is you need a lot of capital to buy out competition, the market has to be closed enough with small enough supply so you can sell the items you bought for profit. If you arent making profit, whats the point?

Unless you mean gold prices being at 5m+? Its simply demand, I spent billions on last orchid sale and made profit at 5m gold by opening the packs. The free DoD per 500 packs made it extremely safe to open packs and as a result gambling made a lot of sense. It was very hard to lose and the chance to win big was what got gold up there. What I dont understand is Sochi packs, they werent nearly as good as orchids but prices were a lot higher for them. I guess seeing many enough ppl winning big made others want to try too, not a smart call on their part but oh well.

I honestly dont know any legit people you could be talking bout. The only person I know who legit toyed with a market, it was tomes back in archo, isnt a cashshopper that I know of. The massive cashshopper who tries to merch is pretty much running joke among more successful merchants as he prices things to point where nothing is gonna sell. Think he bought my cloudcharger robe for 55m, +8d or +9d it and tried to sell for 100m+. Pretty sure the robe hasnt sold yet and its been over a year now, granted I havent seen his main shop online for a while, maybe he gave up?

The problem in my eyes has always been the buying and selling of gold by some merchants in the auction house, I mean the ones who buy all the gold on sale and up the prices, this should have been looked at years ago and probably limited the amount of gold that can be purchased and sold in a day from 1 account, but its probably to late to do anything now. Using the auction house as a stock market has always been bad for the game imo.

bloodedone87 wrote: »

Been more than 3 months on Etherblade server since gold is non existent in AH and its still bad.

I think gold is rarely in AH at all since before the servers got merged.

Truly I think we are way past the point of fixing the issue by any means. The people who have it will keep making it harder for the people that don't until there is no one left to sell it to.
I went looking around recently and was just amazed at the number of people who have left the game in the past year or so. The most common reasons being A. lack of support from PWE, B. the completely broken in-game market, and C. the OP guilds intentionally making the game difficult for others.​​

saxroll said:

Honestly, thats similar to how I treat the gold I charge. I generally charge during charge promo and wait for sale, make sure I know when sales gonna end and camp for spend promo. If there is none, so be it, I just flip the gold for for lot more than I would of gotten when I charged. Thing is and the problem really with our economy, all the goodies for me are in gold. Be it the stuff I merch or the stuff I need for myself, exception being endgame shards but I am still bit away from where I can just shard myself completely on the spot. Point of this is, I buy gold constantly whatever the sale. Its been ~month since I last spent gold, I have managed to put ~3b coins into gold and I still have billions for day to day merching when I go trough west looking things to flip. Point being, I have no reason not to hoard gold the way I do and with how common good pack sales have been past year, its extremely safe to do too.

As for intentionally messing with prices, its extremely hard to pull off and profit from it. The power of supply and demand is strong one and the amount of big enough merchants to matter is still large enough so that couple big ones will only take serious net loss if they try to toy with market. Only market, which I might see vulnerable, is tomes but thats because there is very little supply and large demand. The issue with cornering market is you need a lot of capital to buy out competition, the market has to be closed enough with small enough supply so you can sell the items you bought for profit. If you arent making profit, whats the point?

Unless you mean gold prices being at 5m+? Its simply demand, I spent billions on last orchid sale and made profit at 5m gold by opening the packs. The free DoD per 500 packs made it extremely safe to open packs and as a result gambling made a lot of sense. It was very hard to lose and the chance to win big was what got gold up there. What I dont understand is Sochi packs, they werent nearly as good as orchids but prices were a lot higher for them. I guess seeing many enough ppl winning big made others want to try too, not a smart call on their part but oh well.

I honestly dont know any legit people you could be talking bout. The only person I know who legit toyed with a market, it was tomes back in archo, isnt a cashshopper that I know of. The massive cashshopper who tries to merch is pretty much running joke among more successful merchants as he prices things to point where nothing is gonna sell. Think he bought my cloudcharger robe for 55m, +8d or +9d it and tried to sell for 100m+. Pretty sure the robe hasnt sold yet and its been over a year now, granted I havent seen his main shop online for a while, maybe he gave up?

Just to give you a quick answer on the crown packs, they were actually roughly profit neutral at the super high price gold was at. If you actually look at time rates they are roughly double most other packs for gems in addition to very high CoM/WoA rates. They were more random than orchids but just doing a item worth * drop chance calculation gives very good numbers for crown packs.

saxroll said:

standoffishman said:

Just to give you a quick answer on the crown packs, they were actually roughly profit neutral at the super high price gold was at. If you actually look at time rates they are roughly double most other packs for gems in addition to very high CoM/WoA rates. They were more random than orchids but just doing a item worth * drop chance calculation gives very good numbers for crown packs.

I generally do pack value estimations but when I saw I could sell sochi packs for 2m (8m per gold) I didnt even bother mathing but just sold and made 1,5b or so in profit. The CoM/Matchless prices have more than halved from what they were at their worst, mostly thanks to Sochi spam. Hard to say how that goes into all of it but yea, I still feel I made the right call in just selling my mountain of packs.

Oh, yeah that'll be server differences. We weren't really hitting 8m per gold that I recall over here. Actually the spike was slightly higher for the chip sale right before it if I recall correctly. You made the right call most likely, with my servers prices I got an evaluation of 1.606m per pack, which was slightly profitable. Still better than orchid packs, but not 8m gold better.

standoffishman said:

saxroll said:

standoffishman said:

Just to give you a quick answer on the crown packs, they were actually roughly profit neutral at the super high price gold was at. If you actually look at time rates they are roughly double most other packs for gems in addition to very high CoM/WoA rates. They were more random than orchids but just doing a item worth * drop chance calculation gives very good numbers for crown packs.

I generally do pack value estimations but when I saw I could sell sochi packs for 2m (8m per gold) I didnt even bother mathing but just sold and made 1,5b or so in profit. The CoM/Matchless prices have more than halved from what they were at their worst, mostly thanks to Sochi spam. Hard to say how that goes into all of it but yea, I still feel I made the right call in just selling my mountain of packs.

Oh, yeah that'll be server differences. We weren't really hitting 8m per gold that I recall over here. Actually the spike was slightly higher for the chip sale right before it if I recall correctly. You made the right call most likely, with my servers prices I got an evaluation of 1.606m per pack, which was slightly profitable. Still better than orchid packs, but not 8m gold better.

I was selling some for 2,3m, I dropped pretty quickly to 2m though due competition. But yea, we spiked pretty high for them and I managed to sell those 1,5kish packs in week or so. Considering I wasnt the cheapest shop, its hard to say if I could of gotten more or not as I those things were really flying back then.

But thats pretty high value for Sochi packs. I got 1176k from orchids but with the free DoD it was another 200k free per pack so just under 1,4m per pack. Not a huge difference but yea, Sochis were surprisingly good. Then again our market had insane demand for them, we must of had 20 CoMs pulled during that sale.

Ps. I want my damn orchid pack sale already.