Again, if they want to impose a higher cap for personal Ec and for Exchange listing, they're raise the cap. They aren't going to do some convoluted cockamamie currency mutation that has bulk of their playerbase screaming bloody murder than 9/10th of their money vanished even if their buying power isn't affected one bit.
I confess I did not read the entire thread, but neither of those proposals solves anything with the economy.
The "problem" is two-fold:
1.) There is more currency coming in than there is going out. (EC is primarily regulated as a medium for players trading amongst themselves, and nothing leaves the economy when such exchanges are made.)
2.) Economic Stagnancy. (Dilithium, not EC, is the primary currency used for the vast majority of items worth obtaining. Those who hoard EC do not have things they are interested/willing to put the currency back into circulation for. There is a lack of services, player or otherwise, for people to use EC on.)
As a hypothetical proposal: What do you think would happen to the economy if, say, you had a choice of spending EC OR Dilithium for upgrades?
I confess I did not read the entire thread, but neither of those proposals solves anything with the economy.
The "problem" is two-fold:
1.) There is more currency coming in than there is going out. (EC is primarily regulated as a medium for players trading amongst themselves, and nothing leaves the economy when such exchanges are made.)
2.) Economic Stagnancy. (Dilithium, not EC, is the primary currency used for the vast majority of items worth obtaining. Those who hoard EC do not have things they are interested/willing to put the currency back into circulation for. There is a lack of services, player or otherwise, for people to use EC on.)
As a hypothetical proposal: What do you think would happen to the economy if, say, you had a choice of spending EC OR Dilithium for upgrades?
I said something similar a couple pages back. Make items in the Dilithium store purchasable with Dil or EC at a 100:1 ratio. The DIl price is what it is or allow it to be purchased for 100x that amount of EC (So the 22nd Century M.A.C.O. outfit would be 1.7mil DIl or 170mil EC). Also put more costumes/unlocks and other assorted desirable but mostly cosmetic items, some of them consumable, in somewhere for purchase with EC. That is the only way to remove "excess" EC from the economy.
In addition, if you want to "control" and/or "regulate" prices on the exchange and elsewhere, they need to make the exceptionally rare items, less rare. If there is more supply, eventually, demand will go down as those desiring that item, will have obtained them therefore dropping prices in the process.
"Go play with your DPS in the corner, I don't care how big it is." ~ Me "There... are... four... lights!" ~Jean Luc Picard
Nope - that defeats the point of Dil: to prevent you from getting everything you want at the rate you play. Time gates stretch content, hopefully long enough to keep you pursuing your current goals until the next shiny comes along so you segue into a new pursuit.
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.
Problem whit that is like any other mmo game people make a living out of it,
They gather consol boff weapon ships that people whant,and they sell it on exchange
they get ec sell ec to retailer wich sell it back to player and the weel turns
so sto dev put a limit on ec you can have at once to stop pricing going up see!
so rising the limit of currency you can have will only make price go up.
Let's see if we can boil down the entire gist of the thread, and explain the problem so we can all talk about the same thing.
OP's Contention (as I understand it): There's too much EC in the game as it stands, the rate of outflow /= rate of inflow, and prices for things only have one way to go, up.
Ways to deal with the problem:
1.) Raise the caps on how much currency people can hold at any one time, and raise/eliminate posting caps for the exchange.
2.) Remove excess currency, making the same amount more relatively valuable (but potentially causing problems with low-cost items after multiple applications).
3.) Create and adjust a sink to increase the rate of outflow.
Option 1 just kicks the can down the road, and can pretty much be put out of consideration. It's akin to having a dam with essentially constant inflow, no outflow, and raising the crest height.
Option 2 is like having the same dam, suffering a breach and sudden drawdown, repairing it, and having it happen again eventually. It solves the problem only in the short term, and would have to be repeated eventually, making it unsustainable.
Option 3 is taking the spillways on the dam and opening or closing them by a sufficient amount so that inflow ~= outflow, allowing for adjustments to keep the water level where desired, as well as being able to adapt to any changes in inflow. This seems to me to be the most sustainable option.
The first option changes neither supply nor demand, the second changes supply but not demand, and the third changes demand, not supply. Creating a proper sink, determining what to include, and setting the prices at the right balance point would be an iterative process, but one that's less likely to cause later problems and short-term discontent over the loss of EC.
Edit: I've seen that Druk is fond of the phrase "storage crisis", so let me put it in those terms...you can either give yourself more room to store EC, or you can reduce the amount of EC you need to find a place to store. For most people, there isn't any such thing as a 'storage crisis' since the amount of goods/EC they have to find a place for comes nowhere close to the amount of space available to store it. If you genuinely have filled every personal bank/fleet bank/account bank to it's EC limit and item storage limit on the max number of toons on one or more accounts, meaning you have no more places to store wealth, you can probably throttle back the hoarding and still have enough to buy anything you want at any time.
[...] Players just want to get fairly rewarded for the keys they buy [...]
Unless I'm missing something, this seems to me like a reason that the idea as put forth in the OP might not work as well as you envision. Every key, fleet module, ship upgrade, lobi item, and even zen ultimately gets into the game through real money. If the people buying the keys/c-store items decide that they want to get at least 'X' value back out of something they spent real money to buy, then it might be that we never see keys posted much below 750k or 1 million. So, overnight, the amount of money on hand to everybody goes down to 10% of what it was, but costs go down to 15-20% of what they were, and everybody's relative buying power goes down significantly.
Since the cap things can be posted for on the exchange won't go down proportionally, what's to stop every Annorax from being posted for ~200m under the new scheme, a proportionally higher amount? The plan, as laid out, contains no constraint on how much can be asked for things. Sure, it creates a negative pressure on prices, but it has no guarantee that prices will track to the new relative value of EC. Reducing all EC values to 1/10 would most benefit people at or near the cap on multiple characters who carefully have to manage what's for sale lest they lose money...it won't benefit the 'space middle-class' any.
Phoenix box equivalent, with perhaps some long-sought item like a catalyst that allows you to fix mods on crafted stuff, seems like the best way to draw excess off the market quickly. Items that are consumable, preferably consumed in large quantities, and which are desirable and accessible to everybody.
[...] seek out ships, keys, and promo packs not for their usefulness as an item but only as a store of value. This makes them more expensive for everyone [...]
Exactly, so we need to make it more valuable, and more worth using as a way to store wealth. That can be done through the unsustainable 'decimation' originally proposed, or through a more sustainable and sufficiently strong sink. Trying to adjust the value via a stopgap solution is where we disagree.
Look at what happens each time the phoenix box comes around...before it was introduced the first time, the exchange was significantly over 400/zen. It's stabilized at ~300/zen now, but dipped as low as 200/zen the last time that sink was active. Even the possibility of the sink being present at a later date helps keep the prices lower and dilithium unconverted. If we had an EC sink, but it was only periodic, the value of EC would still go up between events because people would want to keep wealth present as EC for the next time it ran.
Here's a thought... Open up GPL as a legitimate, tradable, currency, make an exchange rate between currency types, and sell goods like ship mods, nonstandard weapons/armor, and other things via GPL. That could take some of the pressure off the EC market and actually help the EC market by providing a competitor.
Space Barbie Extraordinaire. Got a question about Space Barbie? Just ask.
Things I want in STO:
1) More character customization options such as more clothing options, letting the toon complexion affect the entire body, not just the head. Also a true RGB color picker applied to all costume and appearance options, which would allow for true appearance customization and homogenous colors instead of "this same exact color looks vastly different on two different pieces."
2) Bridge customization, not bridge packs. Let us pick a general layout and adjust the color palette, console appearance, and chair types, as well as more ready room layout options.
3) Customizable ground weapons, i.e. The aesthetic look of phaser dual pistols but they shoot antiproton bolts. For obvious reasons this would only apply to standard ground weapons.
4) For the love of Q please revamp Plasma Ground Weapons. They look like demented Supersoakers right now.
5) True Vanity Impulse and Deflector effects similar to Vanity Shields.
6) A greater payout for hitting T6 Reputations. Currently it takes more time and resources to get from T5 to T6 than it does to get from nothing to T5. Make that grind really pay out at the end.
7) Mirrorverse Refugee event similar to AoY/Delta/Gamma, complete with new Mirrorverse recruits for all factions.
8) Independent Faction, because yo ho yo ho a pirate's life for me!
'But to be logical is not to be right', and 'nothing' on God's earth could ever 'make it' right!'
Judge Dan Haywood
'As l speak now, the words are forming in my head.
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.'
I confess I did not read the entire thread, but neither of those proposals solves anything with the economy.
The "problem" is two-fold:
1.) There is more currency coming in than there is going out. (EC is primarily regulated as a medium for players trading amongst themselves, and nothing leaves the economy when such exchanges are made.)
2.) Economic Stagnancy. (Dilithium, not EC, is the primary currency used for the vast majority of items worth obtaining. Those who hoard EC do not have things they are interested/willing to put the currency back into circulation for. There is a lack of services, player or otherwise, for people to use EC on.)
As a hypothetical proposal: What do you think would happen to the economy if, say, you had a choice of spending EC OR Dilithium for upgrades?
You'd never be able to trade dil for zen again since dil would be so worthless.
Anyway, the problem isnt inflation, inflation is fine. Inflation has caused problems though- the Ec Storage Crisis and the Exchange Cap Crisis.
I confess I did not read the entire thread, but neither of those proposals solves anything with the economy.
The "problem" is two-fold:
1.) There is more currency coming in than there is going out. (EC is primarily regulated as a medium for players trading amongst themselves, and nothing leaves the economy when such exchanges are made.)
2.) Economic Stagnancy. (Dilithium, not EC, is the primary currency used for the vast majority of items worth obtaining. Those who hoard EC do not have things they are interested/willing to put the currency back into circulation for. There is a lack of services, player or otherwise, for people to use EC on.)
As a hypothetical proposal: What do you think would happen to the economy if, say, you had a choice of spending EC OR Dilithium for upgrades?
You'd never be able to trade dil for zen again since dil would be so worthless.
Anyway, the problem isnt inflation, inflation is fine. Inflation has caused problems though- the Ec Storage Crisis and the Exchange Cap Crisis.
Except it's only a crisis to you. Not to everyone else.
Star Trek Battles member. Want to roll with a good group of people regardless of fleets and not have to worry about DPS while doing STFs? Come join the channel and join in the fun!
Maybe a different tack will help in understanding the problem (this is all for fun anyway, since I don't see them messing around with the economy any time soon).
As a sort of devil's advocate, what's in it for me to 'decimate' the EC supply? Suppose the supply and all new sources were reduced the 1/10 overnight. Further suppose that the prices came down directly in proportion to the decrease in supply.
My relative buying power remains exactly the same, as does everyone else's. I'm no more or less able to buy that new ship I want, or a few keys/genetic resequencer/what have you. The relative prices for the most expensive stuff will, at best, remain the same. As an average player, my life doesn't get any better, and the problem ostensibly being solved only applies to a very few people.
Why would I want to get behind the idea of decimation, especially in preference to any other way of solving the problem, when I don't see any change?
Again, if they want to impose a higher cap for personal Ec and for Exchange listing, they're raise the cap. They aren't going to do some convoluted cockamamie currency mutation that has bulk of their playerbase screaming bloody murder than 9/10th of their money vanished even if their buying power isn't affected one bit.
The issue is, inappropriately long integers were chosen for the currency in sto, so there are computer programming limits to how large the caps can be. It was all in the OP.
As I recall, wasn't it also pointed out pretty quickly thereafter that it's not actually a computational problem at all? It's not like the game/program can't handle a significantly longer number, so the reason for the limits being set where there are, and the numbers being what they are is not related to computer performance.
Some people claim there is a limit, some claim there isn't. Only someone with insider knowledge can settle this question.
Educated guess: since the current cap is 1 billion (short scale) a character's EC balance is most likely stored as a 32-bit integer, probably unsigned because there's no need for negative balances, which would make the theoretical maximum a little over 4 billion, or 2 billion if for some reason they went with a signed int. The next step up is to make it a 64-bit integer, which gives a theoretical cap of either 9 or 18 quintillion (a billion billion) which is, shall we say, unlikely. It's possible but very unlikely that they'd have used a floating point value, since there's no need for fractional EC amounts.
But this is all by the by. I don't see what you're getting at about a storage crisis. The only problem with a one billion cap is that selling things for more than that is impractical. If anything, it puts a hard upper limit on how much an item can possibly sell for*. But that brings me to what seems to be the root of your complaint: really rare stuff is too expensive.
Promo ships sell for the exchange cap or more because people are willing to spend that much on them; there'll always be someone prepared to drop a billion on EC on a Bug, a Sheshar, or what have you. Items like these end up being sold/bartered off-exchange, again, because there are people willing to pay through the nose.
The solution to excessive prices is not the one you propose, not by a long shot. I'm not going to go out on a limb and give an "ideal" fix for this but if you simply slash everyone's EC balance all that will happen is that the market will find a new equilibrium: prices will drop somewhat but there will be even less of an obstacle to sellers setting prices that are higher, relatively speaking, than before.
My idea would be to drastically increase supply of the really rare stuff. We all saw the effect that the infinity box had on prices: they went through the floor, which was a good thing. However, as much as we'd all like to see the ship drop rate on promo packs increase an order of magnitude or two**, Cryptic aren't going to do that until people stop buying as many boxes.
To be frank, druk, it seems that the basic flaw in your argument here is that you're looking at the problem through the eyes of someone who is fantastically wealthy in-game. The vast majority of players don't have multiple characters with 1 billion EC each and a full account bank. People who do would still be able to afford 1 billion for what have you if their balances were cut by 90%, but the rest of the player base would likely find it even harder to buy the ship they've always dreamed about. In other words, there would be no incentive for sellers to drop the prices of the really rare stuff, because a. the supply is vanishingly small and b. because there are still people out there willing to pay.
Look at it this way, if the EC cap and exchange cap were increased to ten billion tomorrow, do you really think there wouldn't be any of the ultra-rich prepared to consolidate all their EC to buy their dream ship?
I'm not even going to get started on the other issue at hand here: there's no real EC sink that I can think of. That, I grant you, will lead to people bumping up against the EC cap but that as they say is a first world problem, but ultimately I don't think it's the reason for high prices on rare stuff.
-
*I'm excluding barter and multi-step transactions here. The former is irrelevant to the discussion and the latter is just asking to get scammed.
**0.5% is just taking the mickey, especially on R&D boxes, but that's another argument.
Again, if they want to impose a higher cap for personal Ec and for Exchange listing, they're raise the cap. They aren't going to do some convoluted cockamamie currency mutation that has bulk of their playerbase screaming bloody murder than 9/10th of their money vanished even if their buying power isn't affected one bit.
The issue is, inappropriately long integers were chosen for the currency in sto, so there are computer programming limits to how large the caps can be. It was all in the OP.
No, that's a guess, which is almost certainly WRONG.
When the numbers are constrained by bit length, they tend to reveal themselves by being suspiciously close to powers of 2 (minus 1). Old console games with inventory stack sizes of 255 are an example. The Ec cap and exchange cap aren't even close to the limits of a PC game with 32 bit addressing. Those are design decisions not technical limitations.
What causes exchange prices to round to strange numbers sometimes?
I'd need a lot more very specific examples to even begin to start troubleshooting that . And given enough examples, they should be grouped up in a thread in the bug reporting forum so the people who can look under the hood can try and run it down, leading to actual fixes.
If ship prices are the sticking point, like other have said...
1.) increase drop rate
or
2.) make the ships 'reboxable' for a small Zen charge. Something like captain rename or etc. Then all those rare ships just sitting in space-dock will get more life out of them. Cryptic will make more money off of already won ships. Even if the ships aren't put on the Exchange, people would still 'rebox' them to pass to an alt. Of course, not sure how the Admiralty Cards would work... I guess you'd lose that too as it transfers? Or maybe Cryptic would be nice, and let that stay.
Sometimes I think I play STO just to have something to complain about on the forums.
What causes exchange prices to round to strange numbers sometimes?
Doing division on an integer value. Try listing three items for one million and you'll see that the per-item price is given as 333,334. Where did the extra 2 EC come from, you may ask, but on a cursory glance it appears that fractional EC values are always rounded up in this context.
It's not a bug, it's just how the maths works. It doesn't actually affect anything because the lot as a whole still has an integer value for the price.
Now that is odd. If they were using a floating point value there would be some integers that couldn't be stored but I can't imagine why they would have done this.
Edit: it's certain decimal values that get rounded when stored as floats, not integers, so I don't think that's it.
It's been far too long since I did CS, but in my defence even people who spend all their days coding tend to forget about the intricacies of data types. I suppose a dev could tell us which one they're using but that would be academic at best and irrelevant to the topic at hand even if it weren't unlikely to happen.
Well look at what you get during Dilitium Bonus Weekends if you score the top reward from a VIP Dilitium Claim. It is not 10,000 Dilitium, which includes a 100% Bonus over the normal 5,000 (normal top reward). It is 10,001.
'But to be logical is not to be right', and 'nothing' on God's earth could ever 'make it' right!'
Judge Dan Haywood
'As l speak now, the words are forming in my head.
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.'
I'm beginning to see druk's point but it's a symptom rather than the actual problem. As people buy keys more and more EC is being introduced into the game but there's no outlet for it. It appears we need a Phoenix box type event for EC. Maybe a couple of days when players can buy keys for EC directly, rather than through the exchange? As it is there's nothing to remove serious EC from the economy besides fleet projects and the really rich will have run out of those a long time ago.
Comments
The "problem" is two-fold:
1.) There is more currency coming in than there is going out. (EC is primarily regulated as a medium for players trading amongst themselves, and nothing leaves the economy when such exchanges are made.)
2.) Economic Stagnancy. (Dilithium, not EC, is the primary currency used for the vast majority of items worth obtaining. Those who hoard EC do not have things they are interested/willing to put the currency back into circulation for. There is a lack of services, player or otherwise, for people to use EC on.)
As a hypothetical proposal: What do you think would happen to the economy if, say, you had a choice of spending EC OR Dilithium for upgrades?
I said something similar a couple pages back. Make items in the Dilithium store purchasable with Dil or EC at a 100:1 ratio. The DIl price is what it is or allow it to be purchased for 100x that amount of EC (So the 22nd Century M.A.C.O. outfit would be 1.7mil DIl or 170mil EC). Also put more costumes/unlocks and other assorted desirable but mostly cosmetic items, some of them consumable, in somewhere for purchase with EC. That is the only way to remove "excess" EC from the economy.
In addition, if you want to "control" and/or "regulate" prices on the exchange and elsewhere, they need to make the exceptionally rare items, less rare. If there is more supply, eventually, demand will go down as those desiring that item, will have obtained them therefore dropping prices in the process.
"There... are... four... lights!" ~Jean Luc Picard
My Ferengi, Kek, approves of this idea.
OP's Contention (as I understand it): There's too much EC in the game as it stands, the rate of outflow /= rate of inflow, and prices for things only have one way to go, up.
Ways to deal with the problem:
1.) Raise the caps on how much currency people can hold at any one time, and raise/eliminate posting caps for the exchange.
2.) Remove excess currency, making the same amount more relatively valuable (but potentially causing problems with low-cost items after multiple applications).
3.) Create and adjust a sink to increase the rate of outflow.
Option 1 just kicks the can down the road, and can pretty much be put out of consideration. It's akin to having a dam with essentially constant inflow, no outflow, and raising the crest height.
Option 2 is like having the same dam, suffering a breach and sudden drawdown, repairing it, and having it happen again eventually. It solves the problem only in the short term, and would have to be repeated eventually, making it unsustainable.
Option 3 is taking the spillways on the dam and opening or closing them by a sufficient amount so that inflow ~= outflow, allowing for adjustments to keep the water level where desired, as well as being able to adapt to any changes in inflow. This seems to me to be the most sustainable option.
The first option changes neither supply nor demand, the second changes supply but not demand, and the third changes demand, not supply. Creating a proper sink, determining what to include, and setting the prices at the right balance point would be an iterative process, but one that's less likely to cause later problems and short-term discontent over the loss of EC.
Edit: I've seen that Druk is fond of the phrase "storage crisis", so let me put it in those terms...you can either give yourself more room to store EC, or you can reduce the amount of EC you need to find a place to store. For most people, there isn't any such thing as a 'storage crisis' since the amount of goods/EC they have to find a place for comes nowhere close to the amount of space available to store it. If you genuinely have filled every personal bank/fleet bank/account bank to it's EC limit and item storage limit on the max number of toons on one or more accounts, meaning you have no more places to store wealth, you can probably throttle back the hoarding and still have enough to buy anything you want at any time.
Exactly, so we need to make it more valuable, and more worth using as a way to store wealth. That can be done through the unsustainable 'decimation' originally proposed, or through a more sustainable and sufficiently strong sink. Trying to adjust the value via a stopgap solution is where we disagree.
Look at what happens each time the phoenix box comes around...before it was introduced the first time, the exchange was significantly over 400/zen. It's stabilized at ~300/zen now, but dipped as low as 200/zen the last time that sink was active. Even the possibility of the sink being present at a later date helps keep the prices lower and dilithium unconverted. If we had an EC sink, but it was only periodic, the value of EC would still go up between events because people would want to keep wealth present as EC for the next time it ran.
Things I want in STO:
1) More character customization options such as more clothing options, letting the toon complexion affect the entire body, not just the head. Also a true RGB color picker applied to all costume and appearance options, which would allow for true appearance customization and homogenous colors instead of "this same exact color looks vastly different on two different pieces."
2) Bridge customization, not bridge packs. Let us pick a general layout and adjust the color palette, console appearance, and chair types, as well as more ready room layout options.
3) Customizable ground weapons, i.e. The aesthetic look of phaser dual pistols but they shoot antiproton bolts. For obvious reasons this would only apply to standard ground weapons.
4) For the love of Q please revamp Plasma Ground Weapons. They look like demented Supersoakers right now.
5) True Vanity Impulse and Deflector effects similar to Vanity Shields.
6) A greater payout for hitting T6 Reputations. Currently it takes more time and resources to get from T5 to T6 than it does to get from nothing to T5. Make that grind really pay out at the end.
7) Mirrorverse Refugee event similar to AoY/Delta/Gamma, complete with new Mirrorverse recruits for all factions.
8) Independent Faction, because yo ho yo ho a pirate's life for me!
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.'
Star Trek Battles member. Want to roll with a good group of people regardless of fleets and not have to worry about DPS while doing STFs? Come join the channel and join in the fun!
http://forum.arcgames.com/startrekonline/discussion/1145998/star-trek-battles-channel-got-canon/p1
As a sort of devil's advocate, what's in it for me to 'decimate' the EC supply? Suppose the supply and all new sources were reduced the 1/10 overnight. Further suppose that the prices came down directly in proportion to the decrease in supply.
My relative buying power remains exactly the same, as does everyone else's. I'm no more or less able to buy that new ship I want, or a few keys/genetic resequencer/what have you. The relative prices for the most expensive stuff will, at best, remain the same. As an average player, my life doesn't get any better, and the problem ostensibly being solved only applies to a very few people.
Why would I want to get behind the idea of decimation, especially in preference to any other way of solving the problem, when I don't see any change?
As I recall, wasn't it also pointed out pretty quickly thereafter that it's not actually a computational problem at all? It's not like the game/program can't handle a significantly longer number, so the reason for the limits being set where there are, and the numbers being what they are is not related to computer performance.
Educated guess: since the current cap is 1 billion (short scale) a character's EC balance is most likely stored as a 32-bit integer, probably unsigned because there's no need for negative balances, which would make the theoretical maximum a little over 4 billion, or 2 billion if for some reason they went with a signed int. The next step up is to make it a 64-bit integer, which gives a theoretical cap of either 9 or 18 quintillion (a billion billion) which is, shall we say, unlikely. It's possible but very unlikely that they'd have used a floating point value, since there's no need for fractional EC amounts.
But this is all by the by. I don't see what you're getting at about a storage crisis. The only problem with a one billion cap is that selling things for more than that is impractical. If anything, it puts a hard upper limit on how much an item can possibly sell for*. But that brings me to what seems to be the root of your complaint: really rare stuff is too expensive.
Promo ships sell for the exchange cap or more because people are willing to spend that much on them; there'll always be someone prepared to drop a billion on EC on a Bug, a Sheshar, or what have you. Items like these end up being sold/bartered off-exchange, again, because there are people willing to pay through the nose.
The solution to excessive prices is not the one you propose, not by a long shot. I'm not going to go out on a limb and give an "ideal" fix for this but if you simply slash everyone's EC balance all that will happen is that the market will find a new equilibrium: prices will drop somewhat but there will be even less of an obstacle to sellers setting prices that are higher, relatively speaking, than before.
My idea would be to drastically increase supply of the really rare stuff. We all saw the effect that the infinity box had on prices: they went through the floor, which was a good thing. However, as much as we'd all like to see the ship drop rate on promo packs increase an order of magnitude or two**, Cryptic aren't going to do that until people stop buying as many boxes.
To be frank, druk, it seems that the basic flaw in your argument here is that you're looking at the problem through the eyes of someone who is fantastically wealthy in-game. The vast majority of players don't have multiple characters with 1 billion EC each and a full account bank. People who do would still be able to afford 1 billion for what have you if their balances were cut by 90%, but the rest of the player base would likely find it even harder to buy the ship they've always dreamed about. In other words, there would be no incentive for sellers to drop the prices of the really rare stuff, because a. the supply is vanishingly small and b. because there are still people out there willing to pay.
Look at it this way, if the EC cap and exchange cap were increased to ten billion tomorrow, do you really think there wouldn't be any of the ultra-rich prepared to consolidate all their EC to buy their dream ship?
I'm not even going to get started on the other issue at hand here: there's no real EC sink that I can think of. That, I grant you, will lead to people bumping up against the EC cap but that as they say is a first world problem, but ultimately I don't think it's the reason for high prices on rare stuff.
-
*I'm excluding barter and multi-step transactions here. The former is irrelevant to the discussion and the latter is just asking to get scammed.
**0.5% is just taking the mickey, especially on R&D boxes, but that's another argument.
No, that's a guess, which is almost certainly WRONG.
When the numbers are constrained by bit length, they tend to reveal themselves by being suspiciously close to powers of 2 (minus 1). Old console games with inventory stack sizes of 255 are an example. The Ec cap and exchange cap aren't even close to the limits of a PC game with 32 bit addressing. Those are design decisions not technical limitations.
I'd need a lot more very specific examples to even begin to start troubleshooting that
1.) increase drop rate
or
2.) make the ships 'reboxable' for a small Zen charge. Something like captain rename or etc. Then all those rare ships just sitting in space-dock will get more life out of them. Cryptic will make more money off of already won ships. Even if the ships aren't put on the Exchange, people would still 'rebox' them to pass to an alt. Of course, not sure how the Admiralty Cards would work... I guess you'd lose that too as it transfers? Or maybe Cryptic would be nice, and let that stay.
Doing division on an integer value. Try listing three items for one million and you'll see that the per-item price is given as 333,334. Where did the extra 2 EC come from, you may ask, but on a cursory glance it appears that fractional EC values are always rounded up in this context.
It's not a bug, it's just how the maths works. It doesn't actually affect anything because the lot as a whole still has an integer value for the price.
Edit: it's certain decimal values that get rounded when stored as floats, not integers, so I don't think that's it.
It's been far too long since I did CS, but in my defence even people who spend all their days coding tend to forget about the intricacies of data types. I suppose a dev could tell us which one they're using but that would be academic at best and irrelevant to the topic at hand even if it weren't unlikely to happen.
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.'