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$ Solution to STO's Monetary/Currency Problem: Decimation $
repetitiveepic
Member Posts: 6,549 Arc User
The biggest problem with STO for quite some time now has been the increasingly inappropriate bank and exchange currency limits.
STO's game economy has grown over the last 7 years and what seemed at the start to be a large sum of EC is not quite so substantial in the game today.
There are two possible solutions: either raise the bank and exchange limits, or decrease the amount of currency in circulation.
I am told by people knowledgeable about computer programming that there are limits to the size of numbers that a computer can handle. This makes raising the currency caps a short-term solution at best. I would be happy to see them doubled to 2b personal bank. 1b account bank, and 1.5b exchange limit, but it could only ever be a temporary solution.
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A better and more long lasting, but perhaps more difficult to implement solution would be Decimation.
The developers could decimate the currency, dividing all ec in the game - whether in personal, fleet or account banks - by ten.
It would of course also be necessary to divide all ec rewards in the game, without any exceptions, by ten.
This would have the effect of increasing all the currency caps by a factor of ten, without changing the value of any item or of currency itself.
100m in today's ec would become 10m. 1b would become 100m, and 10b would become 1b. It would finally mean something to be a space billionaire.
A lockbox key would cost 500k, a lockbox ship would cost 30m, a promo ship would cost 150m.
The gruelling quality of life problems caused by the low currency caps would be eliminated completely. A new day would dawn.
Please support beneficial change and lend your valuable voice to the cause of quality-of-life for the player! Please support either raising the caps or decimating the currency!
STO's game economy has grown over the last 7 years and what seemed at the start to be a large sum of EC is not quite so substantial in the game today.
There are two possible solutions: either raise the bank and exchange limits, or decrease the amount of currency in circulation.
I am told by people knowledgeable about computer programming that there are limits to the size of numbers that a computer can handle. This makes raising the currency caps a short-term solution at best. I would be happy to see them doubled to 2b personal bank. 1b account bank, and 1.5b exchange limit, but it could only ever be a temporary solution.
--
A better and more long lasting, but perhaps more difficult to implement solution would be Decimation.
The developers could decimate the currency, dividing all ec in the game - whether in personal, fleet or account banks - by ten.
It would of course also be necessary to divide all ec rewards in the game, without any exceptions, by ten.
This would have the effect of increasing all the currency caps by a factor of ten, without changing the value of any item or of currency itself.
100m in today's ec would become 10m. 1b would become 100m, and 10b would become 1b. It would finally mean something to be a space billionaire.
A lockbox key would cost 500k, a lockbox ship would cost 30m, a promo ship would cost 150m.
The gruelling quality of life problems caused by the low currency caps would be eliminated completely. A new day would dawn.
Please support beneficial change and lend your valuable voice to the cause of quality-of-life for the player! Please support either raising the caps or decimating the currency!
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I honestly don't know why there is a cap on the exchange at all. It will still be a cap that the playerbase is willing to pay for an item so why not make it unlimited?
I mean that there shouldn't be a cap on that amount of ec that you can have nor the amount of ec that can be charged on the exchange for an item. The price would still be subject to supply and demand.
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However, I cannot agree with effectively stealing 90% of players' wealth. This would create much discord among players who would feel they were robbed by the developers of their hard-earned currency.
There needs to be a way to remove EC from the economy without arbitrarily taking it away.
A signed 32-bit integer should support a number up to 2 billion (2^31). Since you can't have negative EC (that I know of) there's no reason the game shouldn't be able to allow a full 4 billion (2^32). And endlessly more when 64-bit is used.
Loving the elegance of that idea!
I read it. No need to for the condescending tone. I understand that the actual value of EC would remain (assuming that in-game prices/fees were also reduced accordingly). I was , however, referring to the perception that players would no doubt have of being robbed by the developers.
The massive amount of currency floating around isn't the real problem, it's merely a symptom of the real issue, which is there is not enough things to spend money on (aside from the Exchange, which would not remove EC from the economy only redistribute it to other players). Sadly this issue has been around for quite a while, and has only gotten worse with Admirality and other means of aquiring EC with little effort.
Adding more EC sinks is really the only solution that wouldn't have horrible backlashes of players claiming the devs "stole" currency from them. Raising the caps to something higher like 50 billion wouldn't be a bad thing, as it would then put everything within range of selling on the exchange itself, but pulling more EC out of the system would have the same effect. It would just have to be something that everyone uses and more active players use more than less active so the people who have the piles of EC across multiple alts have to actually spend more of it to cause the system to bleed out the excess and have the intended effect you're going for. It's not really an easy problem to solve, and raising the caps is a band-aid solution to it, but it might be the best one to give the devs some time to come up with a few decent sinks.
I have my doubts about that. There are always people so obstinate that you could sit them down and explain your idea in painful detail and they would still not understand the concept.
Regardless, reducing the values won't solve the underlaying issue, eventually players would hit the cap again. Even at your suggested reduced values.
The only real 'fix' would be to implement more credit sinks to remove the money from the game.
Shrinking it will only buy time until it becomes a problem again.
Decimation wont alter much either, the space rich will still be rich.
Both options will just push more players towards the gold sellers.
What Cryptic really needs to do is grow a set and go after the causes of the problem.
We have gold sellers, their farming bots and players selling them EC for real cash, Cryptic needs to identify and track all of these accounts, then one day during maintenance blanket ban the lot of them.
Then there's the price gouging on the exchange, every item in game should have an EC value and the exchange set so that nothing can be put on for higher than it's EC value.
Both will remove a vast amount of EC from the game, but none of the suggestions in this thread will happen, why? because Cryptic are spineless and too scared to change anything that might hurt them financially.
I've studied it a bit--certainly not enough to become an expert. It tended to take on studying it as a part of monetary reform. However, in my studies of MMO economics, a currency devalue has to come from any means other than saying "10 EC from then is now worth 1 EC." That simply will not work, because we're constantly creating new money to the money supply. It's always being created for any reason you wish.
What you're offering is, at best, a stopgap measure. Make a "Phonics Box" event involving EC and watch every other price fall.
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Cryptic loves shortcuts. If they ever think the amounts of EC is too much, they will just put everything on binds on pickup and delete all EC lol... just look at NW, keys are bound to acc and gold coins are useless.
Exit this thread and just forget about this problem.
Likewise dividing everything by 10 would simply keep the status quo and unless it became an annual event the prices would climb back up due to the buying power that those who are ec rich and play the exchange would still command.
A phoenix box style thing would potentially have the same impact BUT it would have to contain sufficient account bound things that were enticing enough for the ec rich to blow their cash on them.
Pulling a neverwinter and making keys account bound would have a bigger impact (or make them only tradable via the exchange) as for the choicest items bartering keys seems to have taken over.
What's the point. If something was 385,000,000 credits on the market and you drop it down to say 385,000cr, and also drop our currency to match, you've changed NOTHING. Still just has hard to hit that 385,000 mark as it is 385,000,000.
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Which is different from having to empty your character of every single EC in order to receive what you were due from selling an item for 1b in Trade, how?
That's true, but only in the most literal sense. With computer memory measured in gigabytes, you certainly could have numbers high enough no MMO player could ever reach in a million years...if they wanted to set it up like that.
Even simply using a 64-bit variable would allow them to raise the cap to 18 billion times the current one.
No, you couldn't. The cheapest items are already priced at 20 EC, and vendor for as little as 8 EC at 40%. That would already have to be rounded up to 1 with a single decimation. There aren't extra zeroes to cut off.
l don't know.
l really don't know what l'm about to say, except l have a feeling about it.
That l must repeat the words that come without my knowledge.'
Actually this would be a worse problem, because you can't decimate the economy indefinately. Eventually, the dirt cheap items like hypos would be 1 EC, at which point you cannot decrease the prices any more without inflating the price of low end items. Not to mention that if/when players hit the cap again, the amount of wealth owned by the players would be absurd.
This would only postpone the problem while simultaneously making it worse for when it finally crops up again.
Which brings me back to adding more items/services to the game which require EC (ie. credit sinks), which would remove this excess wealth without the need to tamper with the credit caps or credit values.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to belittle you druk, at least you're coming up with ideas (some of which are rather clever), but this one won't work in the long run.