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STO Hyper Inflation.
vamank
Member Posts: 366 Arc User
Has anyone else noticed that current high value items have nearly doubled in price? Most older lock box ships have skyrocketed and the supplies are dropping. I believe this because most people are opening Romulan Packs.
We need more EC sinks in the game. I would suggest attaching a reasonable EC cost to the rep projects as in 50k or more.
We need more EC sinks in the game. I would suggest attaching a reasonable EC cost to the rep projects as in 50k or more.
Post edited by vamank on
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Those who have all the stuff will continue to get all the stuff because you feel like you need to have the stuff to be competitive. And you will in some way shape or form find a way to pay for the stuff.
Economics 101... didn't they teach this in the Academy?
That and there are some people that can and have cornered parts of the market. Why last night I personally bought up every civilian doff that was under 20k EC forcing the market up to that level, if for a short while. With things like doff packs or even ships, people with enough EC can and will control the market.
Plus its not like STO needs any new EC sink. Have too much EC? Go build a starbase. Estimated cost is somewhere near 1 BILLION EC.
I understand free market economics. I was just curious if anyone else noticed the massive upswing in the prices of certain items recently and if anyone had any theories.
I have been watching the exchange almost everyday for the last year so I have a good idea of the price swings but when a handful of items jump 100+ Million EC, I get curious, hence the reason for my post.
The JHAS at least has seen its price come down. Silver lining?
I have no clue what the appeal of that ship still is - there are many other ships now - including Fleet ships that come close or even surpass it in performance.
Sure it is still in the top 3 ships in the game as far as power and manuverability - but it's no longer number 1 or number 1 by a huge margin.
Turn rate coupled with its firepower makes it a very good dogfighter.
Because it unlocks bug pets for jem dread also.
Is that worth $450 million EC?
Sure, there are ships with better turn rates and impulse mods. Those ships also have paper thin hulls. There are of course some ships with better damage potential (vape builds), but those ships can't dogfight. It's not just that the JHAS has firepower and maneuverability, it can also speed tank. The JHAS is the best of all worlds, no ship has yet to touch it.
Just try going 1v1 with a JHAS. If you're in an escort/destroyer that isn't the JHAS, you've probably already lost. Now of course, A2B FAW tankboat zombies have certainly knocked the JHAS off the top of the PvP food chain, but that's only due to an absurd mechanic. I still think the JHAS is flatly the single best PvP ship in the game.
*Someone want to give me one?*
We need ec sinks? YOu probably need a EC sink.
Dont talk for everyone.
Free market, everyone can decide their own price, and its usually based on availability/demand.
Stop whining. If someone wants to sell a bug ship for 1 ec they should do so, if they want to sell it for 500m ec they are free to do that as well.
The $500 million cap must have made it very difficult to sell any of them when there were none on the exchange - I heard of people selling them through zone chat for as much as $800 million - but to find that kind of buyer must be very time consuming.
Something else to also consider, now with the increased bank slots, some people, (to include myself) are not in a hurry anymore to load up the exchange to make space.
The way to offset inflation is to decrease the amount of ECs in the game. You do that by either not allowing things to be sold to vendors - IE, to Cryptic - or you create EC sinks to remove some of the EC from the economy.
Prices fluctuate. They go up (sometimes ridiculously high) and they come down.
There was a time when you could get 350 dil per zen.
Relax.
This. Most people only open the currently featured lockbox and don't bother with the older ones. Therefore the older lockbox ships tend to slowly vanish from the exchange, which makes the remaining ones all the more valuable.
They are not necessarily worth the price though. Their price is just a sign of their rarity, not one of actual usefulness. The Galor for example goes for over 200 million EC, even though it faces strong competition from c-store cruisers.
Yes . . . I find the Monbosh superior, but it significantly less expensive
I have been playing for a long time and have built a nice fortune in game. Inflation threatens the value of my EC and therefore lowers my buying power. Inflation is a threat to everyone, including the grinders. The buying power of running a handful of farming missions decreases with inflation.
Isn't there some MMO's that have a tax on Exchange sales?
If a tax was implemented, it would hurt the in game economy. People like myself that flip high priced items would stop trading on the exchange and would have less EC to buy keys, modules and other goodies which cryptic sells, which therefore decrease the demand, decrease demand which would lower prices and less people would buy them from the C Store for real money.
I buy a ship @100M to flip for 105M, a 5% tax would destroy my profit margin and I wouldn't bother. A 1% tax would be more reasonable and would help suck EC out of the Economy. They can also find more uses for EC as in buying decent gear from vendors.
I'm not sure your 5m free money is an incentive to *not* put a tax of sorts in...
But yeah, even 1% would be a start.
Please keep doing this, I need more money. The amount of doffs on the exchange for cheap has not been helpful to me (thanks to the Romulan Doff Pack promo), so whatever is done to raise prices makes me happy.
Also: am I the only one who thinks the MI event has been contributing heavily to the current inflationary spike? After two MI runs I've made roughly 400-500K EC, and I run it on multiple toons.
They go down? Really? The dil rate has been pretty consistently 130-134 for a year now with small variance only when there is a zen/ship sale one direction or the other. I can't imagine we'll ever see days of 80 dil per zen ever again. Not even the spire holding had a tangible impact on the going dil rate. Energy credits however have not fared nearly as well. Everything from fleet ship modules to lock box keys have slowly but surely gone up and up over the past year. If there are hikes and dips than the dips must be outnumbered 2 to 1 because for an entire year they have slowly but surely gone in one direction. :eek: If Cryptic wants to deflate the economy they might better make prestige outfits or vanity items that cost hundreds of millions of credits as opposed to nerfing tour the universe in the balls that helped the more casual players. I'm just glad I got my leech console when it went for 6 million. (supposedly at one point it was 1 million.) Now it's like 20. The chances of that dipping back to either earlier rate is about as likely as Cryptic giving the Galaxy universal seating.
I don't think that really qualifies as hyper-inflation. Especially if we are talking, as you mention, about a good where the supplies are dropping. We don't consider shares going up as inflation, do we? But if your average bread or energy cost start to rise, you get inflation.
Prices of duty officers have been going up to. In fact, I recently decided to hoard a specific common human refugee because his traits gives the best chances to get a purple human DOff in those asylum missions. Every time I see him for a decent price (less than 50k ECs) I quickly snatch him up because everyone seems to be selling him for around 125k - 200k ECs. I think I have this same refugee listed 10 times in my DOff roster. I actually ran out of slots and have been putting excess copies of him on the exchange for a lot of ECs. I need to buy more DOff slots soon so that I can remove them from the exchange.
It seems antiproton beam arrays have come down in price though so that's good. I bought 6 of them for like 500k - 600k ECs in February, but I have seen prices reach about 1 million ECs. Prices seems to be at around 700k - 800k now so at least it seems antiproton beam arrays are starting to get cheaper.
I don't really want to be bother tracking exchange prices in a stupid game though. I prefer track stock prices in a real securities exchange like the NYSE.
So I tack 5-10% more on to all my sales. How does that help you the buyer. lol
As others have said if you don't like the high prices don't buy that stuff. If things don't sell the price will drop.
The only way stuff can go up is if there is high demand or low supply... if there are both well that is a market working the way it is supposed to. In STO the other option you have is to obtain things yourself. If you don't like the price of X ship well buy lockbox keys and have at it. If you don't pull one perhaps you will get a better idea why someone thinks there pull was worth X amount of EC. I am not being facetious either. Often if X lockbox is high it means all the other stuff out of those boxes is as well. So as long as you are selling the stuff you pull often it costs you very little to open the boxes anyway... and worst case you have a nice stack of lobi after. However yes in most casts if you really are rolling for a ship you are going to spend the same amount of EC on keys as you would just paying the price for the ship.
Things like the galor / ferengi / time ships ect can be expensive because yes there not the most popular boxes.... and for someone to get there hands on one of those ships though lockboxs it can often mean 100s of millions of EC worth of keys... so no people won't give them away.
All a tax would do is have you and everyone else adding the extra 5% to your sell price.
The only thing a tax does in any MMO is remove Currency from the game. So if Cryptic felt people where earning EC to quickly by selling vendor trash or completing missions... a tax would be one way to remove some of that from the market. Without any backlash from players whos rewards would be getting nerfed. It does nothing to stop flipping items. On low priced items it may slow it slightly as flipping for small margins on smaller things won't be attractive to many... however in a game like STO where there are items like lockbox ships where in some cases one well funded player could easily buy the entire market out... it would never work the way the OP would hope for.