GM Response: DQ Mats price change

Maragon - Dreamweaver wrote: »

I posted this into another thread but see that it has a good place in this thread, this was in response to somebody saying that it's the developers have good ideas for lowering the Gold prices:

If they really want to lower gold prices then they would nerf Best luck tokens and TW pay. The people buying gold from the AH are not the people relying on DQs for their income. The ONLY people I have heard talking about the price of gold since before it went over 200-250k have been TW factions. Y? Because theyre the ones that buy it. But theyre not in the lvl range where dq drops are significant enough. Therefore people that depend on dq as their main source of income will have to infact farm them 25% longer then they are right now.

Did u not read? Frankie said that the reason for the nerf was because of the bot problem on the china servers. The idea that they are doing it to lower gold prices has been concocted in these forums and has been spread so much that evidently people think its true as evidenced by your post.

the game lost its balance last year when they introduced packs the first time. then they put in BH which allows people to level quickly without doing anything other then dailies. because of this people didnt need to kill stuff, so there were fewer dqs being npcd so LESS coin coming in that way. people get to the level where dqs are not significant much faster which again leads to fewer dqs being npcd.

remember ~560mil per week in tw pay pumped into the economy besides the 10mil notes from best luck. Dont tell me that isnt a big factor.

The coin that I create (new coin influx into the economy) has not changed from the first day here. Its mostly from npcing drops like the majority of players. the influx that has changed from day one of the server though is the hundreds of millions from TW and then best luck. that money drives the price up because the amount of money in the system goes up. the prices rise in comparison to the coin available to the people benefitting from that influx. in other words, the rise in numbers is a perceived difference while the actual difference to them is less. The current prices are, in fact, THE PROPER PRICES for the amount of coin coming into the economy from those huge means. this only hurts the non cash non TW people.

You know what.
If i could afford it I would get my alts inventory extensions.
If i could afford it I would get fashion for my toons.
If i could afford it I would get aeorgear for my alts (replaced the stupid cardboard TB wings on my psyb:chuckle).
If i could afford it I would might even buy my alts a mount.

Why does that matter?...that means that PWI is infact LOSING gold because I am not creating demand. And I know there are many more that are the same way.

Lowering DQs will in fact cause less demand for gold in AH even though the prices will NOT change relative to DQ prices as people seem to think. And even if they did, even if they in fact did go down say 15% (factoring in other gear drops) then people will still have to farm the same amount of time they do now for gold if they want it. there would be no change. only a perceived change until people realize that nothing really happened.

Sorry for wall of text.

That's a fine response. You've pointed out several critical things I failed to think of. Are you saying that there would be less demand for gold due to the change in DQ prices or that the economy will eventually balance out, I'm a bit confused by your last paragraph.

I assume you meant that there will be less demand for gold.
I can only think that this wasn't the intention for PWI, just makes no sense, but once the prices of DQ items have been lowered I doubt they'll be raised again. Perhaps they'll release a new item or way to create money which will fill the gap which was left by the reduce of DQ sale prices, that 15% that you mentioned, right?

Correct me if I'm wrong, of course.

I don't mind being wrong/having a different opinion. It makes people think b:pleased

P.s. Your post isn't a wall of text but is structured, I like.

Maragon - Dreamweaver wrote: »

If they really want to lower gold prices then they would nerf [...] TW pay. The people buying gold from the AH are not the people relying on DQs for their income. The ONLY people I have heard talking about the price of gold since before it went over 200-250k have been TW factions. Y? Because theyre the ones that buy it. But theyre not in the lvl range where dq drops are significant enough. Therefore people that depend on dq as their main source of income will have to infact farm them 25% longer then they are right now.

[...]

remember ~560mil per week in tw pay pumped into the economy besides the 10mil notes from best luck. Dont tell me that isnt a big factor.

The coin that I create (new coin influx into the economy) has not changed from the first day here. Its mostly from npcing drops like the majority of players. the influx that has changed from day one of the server though is the hundreds of millions from TW [...]. that money drives the price up because the amount of money in the system goes up. the prices rise in comparison to the coin available to the people benefitting from that influx. in other words, the rise in numbers is a perceived difference while the actual difference to them is less. The current prices are, in fact, THE PROPER PRICES for the amount of coin coming into the economy from those huge means. this only hurts the non cash non TW people.

[...]

While i entirely agree about Best of Luck Tokens, your statement about TW pay is entirely false. The economy did not start to inflate the way it has until packs came out, 1 year into the game. The map has been entirely owned by someone (except a few cities) since week 4 or 5 of old servers, and week 2 or 3 on servers since BHs. 560 mil is really not a whole lot compared to thousands of players selling their drops. You also dont realize that out of that 560 mil, about 25% or more goes back into a coin sink of fighting TW (not referring to charms, i'm refering to building towers & catapult scrolls and a % of TW bids and other such means of permanent coin removal from the system). Of the amount that remains, even in a guild owning half the map, i'm lucky to afford a charm. Do you think my 4 gold purchase per week times maybe 200 people is creating a huge inflation? (80-120 from a guild owning half the map, and the rest as portions of people who arent even getting a charm covered but at least a portion of it). If it was, that would have been happening since a month into the servers existance.

Even if you only earn 500k a week in selling drops, the amount added to the economy is already duplicated by only a little over 1000 people. There are many more people that play this game then just 1000 or so.

The fault lies (as i agree with you) in the 10 mil bank notes. Only 112 best luck tokens need to be found per week to replicate the TW amount into the system. With a 1.72% chance (Tiger Packs & Anni Packs, Coral was less), thats 6511 packs popped to achieve that. I know people who sit in archo popping over 100 an hour. They keep recycling their gains into more packs. This is creating the HUGE spike in demand for gold as well as funding itself with banknotes creating a self inflating cycle. The blame is entirely in packs, as evidenced also by the precise timing of the start of the surge in inflation.

Dont blame something which has been in the game since day 1 and never hurt the economy in the way you speculate.

Darksylph - Heavens Tear wrote: »

While i entirely agree about Best of Luck Tokens, your statement about TW pay is entirely false. The economy did not start to inflate the way it has until packs came out, 1 year into the game. The map has been entirely owned by someone (except a few cities) since week 4 or 5 of old servers, and week 2 or 3 on servers since BHs. 560 mil is really not a whole lot compared to thousands of players selling their drops. You also dont realize that out of that 560 mil, about 25% or more goes back into a coin sink of fighting TW (not referring to charms, i'm refering to building towers & catapult scrolls and a % of TW bids and other such means of permanent coin removal from the system). Of the amount that remains, even in a guild owning half the map, i'm lucky to afford a charm. Do you think my 4 gold purchase per week times maybe 200 people is creating a huge inflation? (80-120 from a guild owning half the map, and the rest as portions of people who arent even getting a charm covered but at least a portion of it). If it was, that would have been happening since a month into the servers existance.

Even if you only earn 500k a week in selling drops, the amount added to the economy is already duplicated by only a little over 1000 people. There are many more people that play this game then just 1000 or so.

The fault lies (as i agree with you) in the 10 mil bank notes. Only 112 best luck tokens need to be found per week to replicate the TW amount into the system. With a 1.72% chance (Tiger Packs & Anni Packs, Coral was less), thats 6511 packs popped to achieve that. I know people who sit in archo popping over 100 an hour. They keep recycling their gains into more packs. This is creating the HUGE spike in demand for gold as well as funding itself with banknotes creating a self inflating cycle. The blame is entirely in packs, as evidenced also by the precise timing of the start of the surge in inflation.

Dont blame something which has been in the game since day 1 and never hurt the economy in the way you speculate.

TW had been in the game since day 1 yes but the ~560 mil did not come in every week starting at day 1. the lands had to be conquered. the more of the land a single faction owns the fewer TWs there are a week and the less money is taken out by people doing TW. while you are correct that a decent percent goes out in just being in TW it still does negate the fact that the money created even after the cost of TW in bids and towers and cata and all still overshadows the money made by players from mobs below say lvl 70 after they take into account repairs and skills.

I am not going to go back and look but the maps were almost or just taken about the time of the packs which means, if i am correct, the fault of tw was blamed on the packs though yes packs are the large majority of the problem. I dont really know and dont really want to go look at the old maps.

dont take out the cost of tw and forget to take out the cost of just keeping up your character. grinding lvl 70 mobs my barb can lose as much as 30-40% in straight REPAIRS.

but yes i think its unanimous that best tokens->10mil was one of the worst ideas......following right behind the packs themselves.

Pattoe - Raging Tide wrote: »

That's a fine response. You've pointed out several critical things I failed to think of. Are you saying that there would be less demand for gold due to the change in DQ prices or that the economy will eventually balance out, I'm a bit confused by your last paragraph.

I assume you meant that there will be less demand for gold.
I can only think that this wasn't the intention for PWI, just makes no sense, but once the prices of DQ items have been lowered I doubt they'll be raised again. Perhaps they'll release a new item or way to create money which will fill the gap which was left by the reduce of DQ sale prices, that 15% that you mentioned, right?

Correct me if I'm wrong, of course.

I don't mind being wrong/having a different opinion. It makes people think b:pleased

P.s. Your post isn't a wall of text but is structured, I like.

I'm saying the demand for gold will go down because the few people left outside of the big factions that do still buy gold in ah (and aside from the merchanters) will stop because they wont be able to feasibly do anymore. just like I stopped not long after it topped 200-225k. demand will go down but only slightlybecause as has been stated many times over the higher lvls (typically those in the big factions) are the ones that need gold for charms and such. (and the cash players will just buy their charm anyway) so gold prices will likely stay relatively the same making gold even more unreachable for the average player.

the 15% was a very liberal estimate of what may be the total loss of income after you factor in gear that you npc from drops. if your gross income drops by 15% i was saying that, because of the above point, gold is not going to go down by 15% but less if it does making gold even more unreachable for the average player because even if the physical number is lower the amount it is compared to what they are capable of making has gone up.

I just checked the price of gold. If i wanted to get my cleric (my main) a safe stone it would currently cost me 4.8mil. HA... wont happen. If gold were like it was back when I stared ~100-120k that would be more like 1.2-1.4 mil. That i would grind over a week or week and a half and buy (well 1.5-2 week now grinding on an alt because dqs at my lvl are laughable and it just gets worse from here). that is 12 gold some cash shopper didnt sell me which means its 12 bucks pw didnt make. if you calculate what I might buy on all my toons in gold from the AH if prices were lower it would be likely somewhere in the neighborhood of 500 bucks (herc aeorgears, inventory and safes maybe a few other things) how much have i bought? abt 20 gold.

OOO forgot to take into account the decreased demand in gold and probably another minor decrease in prices.....because of people quitting

but i do wanna thank you and dark for commenting with sanity and not just glancing and going FLAMEFLAMEFLAME

Dropping the dq price was a dumb move agreed. Do not blame the gms for it, even they do not like it. Gms cannot make game altering patches, its the devs that are doing this. Basically the devs destroyed this version of the game because a bunch of people in a completely different version were being dumb. Why this version cannot be different from that version in this aspect is beyond me. The point of having different versions is so that there can be different things on each version, like language, or dq prices. But I am not a game developer, maybe the devs should start their own forum so we can talk directly to them.

Like someone said earlier..actions speak louder than words Frankie.
We don't have anything against you, but the sugar coated words can only do so much to appease the general public.

First - to try and be constructive:

This game *is* still largely fun.

Events are fun.

There needs to be the possibility of greater localisation between versions. "Because China has it" is not a valid answer to a problem, and the players are not foolish enough to accept it.

There needs to be dedicated dev time to this version - and you need input from people who do play. At various different levels!

You need to be more active in fixing bugs and promised features. You can only distract people with shiny new things for so long.

We recognise that the cash-shop is your main means of making a profit.
Your original method - where various items which made the gameplay a little bit nicer was there; where you could play for a while and then go "Oh, I'd quite like a faster aerogear" and then buy gold... That was nice. I didn't mind that.

I very much do mind your crazed "Everyone must buy huge piles of gold now now now!" Slow and steady sales and much less intrusive.


Now, Let's sum up our problems:

GMs? It appears that 90% of your job is to LIE to the player base, in order to shield the increasingly corrupt Devs from criticism.

You have continually been told things to tell us which have later proved to be misleading at best. Thus we have been left with no choice but to simply assume that everything you tell us is false and every change will be for the worse.

Players can count. If an event makes a profit, we can and will realise this. And will extract coin from it mercilessly. You might want to do that math before we do.

I understand that there is a cultural gap here - but the Devs need to understand that there is an increasing discontent at our being treated as second class citizens.

And on that note - please, for crying out loud, PLEASE TEST YOUR PATCHES. The occasional piece of regression in a rare configuration? That's one thing. But every other patch reverts all the text to being Chinese! That indicates that you don't run the patched version even once before rolling it out.

Hackers. Find them, prevent their hacks from working (which is a continual cat and mouse game) and get rid of them. Don't punish your loyal player base.

Many people buy gold to sell it for coins. This means that there must be people that play that buy gold with coins.


Now the people they're trying to sell their gold to have fewer coins with which to buy gold. Unless of course they belong to a territory holding faction, and that faction will buy them gold and/or pay them enough that they can buy gold.

So they've hurt their own income. Lower incomes for non TW faction players means fewer people buying gold or at least, fewer people buying at current prices. So fewer coins = lower gold price = no difference. As has been said. (too lazy to find quotes)

Maybe

..what they're trying to do with this in our version, because we don't have a problem with gold farmers, is pressure more people into buying gold. It may very well work considering a large majority of the player base are very young.

But..

If more people buy gold with cash who will buy the gold from them? The people that are barely making enough for repairs off drops?

I'm not concerned about compensation because I won't believe we will be compensated until we have been, and it's successfully implemented.

Eventually we'll either stop logging in or forget about it/get over it and keep playing.

This won't kill the game. People that buy gold will barely notice any change most likely. If it breaks the game for you it's a personal issue. Why should they care?

But if it's too easy to earn enough cash to buy gold, it would discourage people from buying it, but this would probably balance out because if it took 7 hours to earn 200 gold for herc... there wouldn't be enough gold to satisfy demand, laws f supply and demand would say gold prices would go up. (7 hours for 200 gold is an extreme example)

guys easy on Frankie. he took this job just before a lot of this mess came up which he likely couldnt foresee. he is just doing his job telling us what he is permitted as the devs in china give him information.

Has anyone else noticed that since frankie has been here there have been fewer of these threads close, more actually stickied to get feedback, and almost non existent cut-and-paste responses from mods just before a thread gets closed.

These kind of situations are rough on a CM and I think he is handling it well given the circumstances from pwchina

Thanks frankie

Luniko - Sanctuary wrote: »

Believe me, I would spend real money on the game if I could. But think about it - not everyone is from the USA. I am from Hungary and I earn about 70000 Hungarian forints a month. I have to give about 20000 to my freaking government though, so I'm happy if I get 50000 afterall. After paying all the bills and taxes, I have about 20000 HUF left. That is 100 american dollars. I have 100 dollars to buy food, clothes, etc... in 2 words, I have 100 dollars TO LIVE. I often have to go to work on foot because I do not have money to buy gas in my car!!! I would be the happiest person if I had spare money to spend on PWI, but I CANNOT waste money on pixels. So basically, people who cannot spend real money are SCREWED because we get EVEN LESS money from grinding thanks to the new DQ prices. Soooo easy for people who get thousands of dollars every month or are in a country with less taxes and can afford spending hundreds of dollars on games. But I work my **** off and still end up poor in this stupid country. I would move to the USA but I don't have money to buy a ticket. Born to the wrong place, and you're all screwed. =/

umm ok, I'm NOT from USA I'm actually from Turkey, and believe me I'm not made of money, life is not very easy in Istanbul, either. I also think that if they claim the game is free, they should give the option to play it for free.. I was trying to say that I find it appaling how they are trying to make it impossible to play for people like you. They say the game is a free mmorpg then they make changes like these to make it very frustrating to play for free.

I dont get 1000s of dollars I was just pointing out that if people want to spend hundereds on hercs or what not they have the right, but if you claim the game can also be played for free, it should be. Right now it is still playable for free but with more and more of these changes i dont think it will be for a long time. That was what i was protesting.

Miugre - Heavens Tear wrote: »

Okay... guys? Seriously? I hate this as much as the rest of you... believe me, I do... but I'm inclined to trust Frankie for a little while longer. That being said:

Well I don't know about the rest of the folks here, Frankie, but personally I didn't expect the big patch to hit this week. I assumed it'd have been at least another week, or two, before it happened (to say nothing of the oversaturation of tiger packs... seriously, PLEASE talk to the decision-makers up there about that??).

We - some of us, anyway - assumed you used this kind of cop-out because you simply provided no evidence to the contrary up to now. Tons of people were suggesting you'd do it. A single update to the first post would have clarified it for us, or a note in the patch thread. All I'm saying is, given available evidence, you could easily have predicted this kind of outcry.

Am I going to burn you at the stake for that? Pff, no. I'm not that petty. And neither are most people here. Angry, yes (at the DQ price change itself, not at you), but not petty... and the worst part is, it's actually kind of refreshing to be able to hold the chinese devs responsible for a Fail brought to our game, having grown used to having all our Fail made in-house by our own wonderful, shadowy product-management cabal who never talk to us.

At this point all I'm going to hold your toes to the fire on is just keeping up the pace. In essence: don't let those talks stagnate or fail. This community has suffered so many let-downs in the past six months or so in particular, that we're all becoming jaded - you can see it all over the forums. We need a victory - even a small one. It does a lot to you when you feel like you play for the team that can't even win one game.

In short, keep up the good work. We're counting on it.

You always have eloquently and intelligently-written posts, Mig. Jus' wanted to say that. b:cute

Well it's Done........ and nothing will ever change it, so .... ... ... n o - p o i n t .. as ever.

You ppl must understand that they don`t really care about our opinion (except when games are in beta tests) and if they make real money out of this they will sure go for it.

Some people saying about their country currency . . b:surrender
Just want to say my country currency ratio with $ is :
around 10000 = 1$
And most common people with family here usually get around 50000 for 1 day. b:surrender
So . . about 5$ a day and x30 mean 150$ a month. <.<

jus liek teh free genie resets rite?b:laugh