An EC Phoenix box would literally make EC inflation go so crazy no one would be able to earn enough to afford anything on the exchange.
Just add this to your insanely long list of wrong.
Exchange Prices are dictated by supply and demand.. basic economics. If no one could afford the exchange prices then sellers would lower the prices to the point where the items started to sell. No one is going to price something at 1B EC knowing that no one has that much money. If they do, it sits there forever. Sellers have two choices.. lower the price or keep the item.
It's the same way that the Dilithium to Zen rate decreases with Phoenix Box events. When people are low in Dilithium, they won't pay a lot for Zen so the price comes down.
While I hate taxes they just might slow down something that is really pushing inflation: the parasites who systematically buy up all of an item below a set price and immediately repost them at highly inflated prices. I just watched what must have been a bot of some kind buy up all of the Federation blue quality research scientist doffs that were under a million at high speed and dump them right back at over a million each for instance.
While I hate taxes they just might slow down something that is really pushing inflation: the parasites who systematically buy up all of an item below a set price and immediately repost them at highly inflated prices. I just watched what must have been a bot of some kind buy up all of the Federation blue quality research scientist doffs that were under a million at high speed and dump them right back at over a million each for instance.
I think the solution to that problem is a listing fee in dilithium. No amount of EC taxed onto the exchange will change the way the exchange works - it will just make prices higher and raise inflation. I don't even think a time gated exchange would change much for the people who are controlling the market...and it would probably tick off people who wanted to buy things...if it were more an auction instead of a flat fee selling platform at least it would slow down people who would otherwise be manipulating the market.
Or we could just realize there isn't anything at all wrong with players manipulating the market. Market Ferengi are NOT parasites >.<
Phoenixcs blue doffs... ok so they now sell for a million. You got a few spare ? Post them at 900k... 2 or 3 people do that and boom the market now has 100 of them instead of 20, and after an hour or so they are at 300k if that is what they are actually worth. If they stay at 1 million then I guess that is what they are worth.
Artificial manipulation only works short term even on low volume big ticket items. If a market becomes attractive someone else will fill the need... as nothing in this game is actually really all that rare. Even promo ships are not super rare with all the promos Cryptic runs.
If those blue doffs where not worth 1 million each... with in an hour 3x as many will be posted under a million. If they don't have said value they won't keep it.
Not sure why people take such personal offense to people working the market. You also have to understand with something things like Doffs Cryptics cycle of promotions effect pricing. Things that sell for one price while an event is on that drops tons of that item on the market, will sell for more when that promo ends.
The thing is it won't. At this current point in the game's life, it is physically impossible to create any kind of ec sink that will impact the rich without completely ruining the game for the poor. The rich will get richer and the poor will be trapped by a tax or similar sink. The only way to combat this "inflation" is to combat it from a different perspective from items themselves.
Something like increasing supply of desirable items?
As Exchange prices do fluctuate based on Supply and Demand.
Exactly. I've been mentioning it before the only realistic way to lower the price of items on the exchange is to make them more common. Do something like increase the drop rates of Lockbox ships to 2.5% and Promo ships to 5%. You'd get tons more people opening them by actually paying for keys themselves and tons more people selling the ships and driving them way down. I don't know if you remember the time when the acheros and vonph were in the infinity box but they were as low as 70 mil despite being elite lockbox ships because of how common they were.
An alternative method would be to make the infinity prize boxes themselves tradeable but I think that would have a much smaller impact.
The main issue with just making more things... is there is actually a very fine line between hard to get, and so easy that no one bothers. Exchange "workers" the games Ferengi may get a bad rap but the bottom line is without that mechanic of people playing the market the game would die. Cryptic NEEDS exchange Ferengi keeping promo ships over a billion EC and Lobi ships at 200m and lockbox at 400-500m... and the good space traits at 8m+ ect ect. Because if all that stuff was suddenly worthless or devalued greatly. No one would have any incentive at all to drop $20 bucks on Zen to buy keys to sell. Or stay logged in for 3 or 4 hours a night farming Dill like a pakled.
What phoenix did at least the first few runs... was deplete stockpiles. Which brought prices down nicely, and no one was upset cause they got value for what they burned. A tax adds no value its just a burn... which might be good might be bad hard to say this game doesn't exactly have as large a market as some other MMO examples. What they need to come up with is something that gives people a reason to spend their stockpiles. Valuable stuff in STO is horded. Think of all the people holding stacks of event items, infinity trait boxes, ect ect. There isn't a shortage of anything in the game really. Sure you might look at the exchange and only see 5 or 6 of something listed but there are 100s and perhaps 1000s in banks. If a EC sink is treated as an event like phoenix where its timed and burning your EC on the event is worth wile... all that stored wealth will flood the market. Granted between events its possible everything goes up as those still holding will be in an even better position to price fix.
I don't know the more I think about it the more I think Cryptic may have waited to long to try and have any sort of direct EC control mechanism. Perhaps something as simple as a new fleet holding that burns tons of EC is the better way to go. The colony holding did eat a lot of spare Dil... phoenix wasn't alone in keeping dil from skyrocketing. What we need is a Ferengi cameo on Star Trek Discovery so Cryptic can get the ok to bring a Ferengi fleet holding in. lol
Dude... You realize the reason Borticus is wanting to reduce inflation is BECAUSE the Ships are at 400-500 mil and 200 mil and 1 billion? Like that's literally the entire reason he started asking for ideas. And people still would have plenty of TRIBBLE reason to log in. Dude keys have been 4 mil for like 4 years now and lockbox ships used to be around 250mil on average and tons of people still were logging in and doing all their stuff. I don't think you understand how the game works.
Dude... You realize the reason Borticus is wanting to reduce inflation is BECAUSE the Ships are at 400-500 mil and 200 mil and 1 billion? Like that's literally the entire reason he started asking for ideas. [...]
Did Borticus actually state that, because it wasn't in his tweet that started this thread. Post a link for us please where Borticus goes into more depth about why he asked for ideas on this issue.
[...]Not sure why people take such personal offense to people working the market. [...]
Mostly envy and ignorance, I'd say. Although, I suppose there is some inherent problems in the game when there is such enormous wealth disparities and you do get some items essentially monopolized and priced well out of what the market price would be if there was actual competition. I don't think this happens on ships like some people seem to think, but I've seen it on some doffs. Granted you're right that eventually the monopoly does get broken and a fair market price rediscovered. Great posts btw.
While I hate taxes they just might slow down something that is really pushing inflation: the parasites who systematically buy up all of an item below a set price and immediately repost them at highly inflated prices. I just watched what must have been a bot of some kind buy up all of the Federation blue quality research scientist doffs that were under a million at high speed and dump them right back at over a million each for instance.
I think the solution to that problem is a listing fee in dilithium. No amount of EC taxed onto the exchange will change the way the exchange works - it will just make prices higher and raise inflation. I don't even think a time gated exchange would change much for the people who are controlling the market...and it would probably tick off people who wanted to buy things...if it were more an auction instead of a flat fee selling platform at least it would slow down people who would otherwise be manipulating the market.
Or we could just realize there isn't anything at all wrong with players manipulating the market. Market Ferengi are NOT parasites >.<
Phoenixcs blue doffs... ok so they now sell for a million. You got a few spare ? Post them at 900k... 2 or 3 people do that and boom the market now has 100 of them instead of 20, and after an hour or so they are at 300k if that is what they are actually worth. If they stay at 1 million then I guess that is what they are worth.
Artificial manipulation only works short term even on low volume big ticket items. If a market becomes attractive someone else will fill the need... as nothing in this game is actually really all that rare. Even promo ships are not super rare with all the promos Cryptic runs.
If those blue doffs where not worth 1 million each... with in an hour 3x as many will be posted under a million. If they don't have said value they won't keep it.
Not sure why people take such personal offense to people working the market. You also have to understand with something things like Doffs Cryptics cycle of promotions effect pricing. Things that sell for one price while an event is on that drops tons of that item on the market, will sell for more when that promo ends.
That would only be true if the scope of market manipulation was THAT small. Its not. In your example, let's say blue Doffs are listed at a million and someone who has two of them wants to sell them quickly - that person can list them at 900,000 and feel like they're giving someone a deal. Now imagine the opposite scenario. Someone who only has 10 blue Doffs lists nine of them at 10million EC and one at 1 million EC. Now someone who wants to buy a blue Doff thinks that the one for 1 million is a steal and buys it, then re-lists it at 9 million. The guy who just sold one of his ten will de-list and re-list his Doffs and put them back up at 8.5 million with one doff listed at 2 million. The process repeats. It is too easy to corner the market in this game and without any anti-monopoly powers in this game, no way to control it when someone does exactly that. You can't rely on the goodness of humanity to just list things at a "fair" price. This is why EC inflation is a problem. It doesn't matter that there's a cap on how much EC a player can have - the player can have multiple accounts. A single player with a few billion EC can corner some part of the market and then branch out into other parts, consuming more and more items and creating an integrated monopoly.
I know this can happen because I DID it. There were months where I was the primary vendor of blue and green computer chips - listing them at multiple price points and buying up anyone who listed at a lower price. I could short the market if someone wanted to list more chips than I could list on a given day and had no problem losing money in order to drive other people out of the market. I made billions. Eventually I got bored with it. Am I a Ferengi? Well, yes...
And guess what you didn't do anything wrong. If no one noticed that was a prime market to do exchange battle... that is their loss and your gain.
I am not seeing the issue. Your talking about one niche thing few people care about so no one works it. Things like doffs, traits, boffs, weapons and common R&D stuffs... its not possible to work the market like that for more then short periods of time, and it will require a ton of capital investment and a good chance you will loose more then you make. Sure you can try and post 20 items at a lower price or 999 stacks of whatever as your price blocks... but if you get greedy chances are someone will come and buy them all from you at the lower price.
Your taking as an example one very small item and extrapolating that to the entire market. You want to know how much it doesn't work take any popular space trait like say repair crews or something list 20 for 2 million less then the going rate. You will either sell them all instantly or find 10 listed under it in a very short time. The market self corrects just like the real world. Why would anyone fault you for buying up computer chip futures ? If no one else sees the market and you are turning a profit good for you, that doesn't contribute to inflation at all as the wider market corrects things to their true value. Guess what things people find annoying to collect have value, sounds like you figured that out.
The thing is it won't. At this current point in the game's life, it is physically impossible to create any kind of ec sink that will impact the rich without completely ruining the game for the poor. The rich will get richer and the poor will be trapped by a tax or similar sink. The only way to combat this "inflation" is to combat it from a different perspective from items themselves.
Something like increasing supply of desirable items?
As Exchange prices do fluctuate based on Supply and Demand.
Exactly. I've been mentioning it before the only realistic way to lower the price of items on the exchange is to make them more common. Do something like increase the drop rates of Lockbox ships to 2.5% and Promo ships to 5%. You'd get tons more people opening them by actually paying for keys themselves and tons more people selling the ships and driving them way down. I don't know if you remember the time when the acheros and vonph were in the infinity box but they were as low as 70 mil despite being elite lockbox ships because of how common they were.
An alternative method would be to make the infinity prize boxes themselves tradeable but I think that would have a much smaller impact.
The main issue with just making more things... is there is actually a very fine line between hard to get, and so easy that no one bothers. Exchange "workers" the games Ferengi may get a bad rap but the bottom line is without that mechanic of people playing the market the game would die. Cryptic NEEDS exchange Ferengi keeping promo ships over a billion EC and Lobi ships at 200m and lockbox at 400-500m... and the good space traits at 8m+ ect ect. Because if all that stuff was suddenly worthless or devalued greatly. No one would have any incentive at all to drop $20 bucks on Zen to buy keys to sell. Or stay logged in for 3 or 4 hours a night farming Dill like a pakled.
What phoenix did at least the first few runs... was deplete stockpiles. Which brought prices down nicely, and no one was upset cause they got value for what they burned. A tax adds no value its just a burn... which might be good might be bad hard to say this game doesn't exactly have as large a market as some other MMO examples. What they need to come up with is something that gives people a reason to spend their stockpiles. Valuable stuff in STO is horded. Think of all the people holding stacks of event items, infinity trait boxes, ect ect. There isn't a shortage of anything in the game really. Sure you might look at the exchange and only see 5 or 6 of something listed but there are 100s and perhaps 1000s in banks. If a EC sink is treated as an event like phoenix where its timed and burning your EC on the event is worth wile... all that stored wealth will flood the market. Granted between events its possible everything goes up as those still holding will be in an even better position to price fix.
I don't know the more I think about it the more I think Cryptic may have waited to long to try and have any sort of direct EC control mechanism. Perhaps something as simple as a new fleet holding that burns tons of EC is the better way to go. The colony holding did eat a lot of spare Dil... phoenix wasn't alone in keeping dil from skyrocketing. What we need is a Ferengi cameo on Star Trek Discovery so Cryptic can get the ok to bring a Ferengi fleet holding in. lol
Dude... You realize the reason Borticus is wanting to reduce inflation is BECAUSE the Ships are at 400-500 mil and 200 mil and 1 billion? Like that's literally the entire reason he started asking for ideas. And people still would have plenty of TRIBBLE reason to log in. Dude keys have been 4 mil for like 4 years now and lockbox ships used to be around 250mil on average and tons of people still were logging in and doing all their stuff. I don't think you understand how the game works.
I think your remembering wrong... you mean back when I was trading Bug ships for more then the EC cap on the exchanged allowed.
Back when keys where more like 2 million you mean... back when you could open lockboxes all day with EC and turn a guaranteed profit. The fact is the game has had massive DEFLATION not inflation. Go through the list of special doffs today and see how many of them sell for more then a few million EC.
Ships went up because Cryptic made them more valuable. T5 lockbox sold for less because there was a smaller market for them. People now buy T6s to park them stripping a console, or for a ship trait or a special weapon. They made the ships more desirable but the supply is the same. I'm not suggesting they should bring the supply up either... frankly the pricing on T6 ships right now is fine.
EC costs of golden snitch ships are exactly where Cryptic should want them.
If you where to buy $20 of zen right now to convert to EC you would get 2400 zen. If you grabbed keys with the sale price that is 30 or so keys or 135 million EC. or about 60 million short of a T6 Lobi class ship. So Lobi ships right now with current pricing cost around $25-30 bucks. If you spend $50 you get 6300 zen or around 80 keys so 360 million... which will buy you a number of T6 Lockbox ship. So the less attractive lockbox ships cost around 50 bucks and the more attractive ones like the crossfield run around $60.
Those prices are exactly the same as they have been for years. If you are new and want to buy a lockbox ship with cash.... 30-60 bucks depending. With a promo ship costing you more like $150 which is pretty close to what it would have cost you to buy a bug ship 4 or 5 years ago selling keys or fleet modules.
So the lockbox ships cost exactly what they have always cost in terms of real $. All the smaller bits the traits the doffs weapons ect... are all MUCH cheaper then they have ever been.
So as I have said I am all for cryptic trying to kill some of the "old money" in STO... by offering some form of EC Phoenix / EC burning event that rewards account bound stuffs to kill the pool of stockpiled EC and items. But I hardly think the market is in need of some heavy handed intervention either. All they will do is cut off their nose to spite their face. If the ships drop so that any new player can spend $10 in zen sell a few keys and buy their dream ship... Cryptic is going to loose a lot of cash.
Oh, and the other thing about the LOTRO Auction House, they show the name of the Character that put the item up for sale. Right now we only see the name of the Character that bought the item you listed in the email you get.
Showing the Posters name would have some confirmitory effects about who is doing what to prices.
'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.'
A normie goes "Oh, what's this?"
An otaku goes "UwU, what's this?"
A furry goes "OwO, what's this?"
A werewolf goes "Awoo, what's this?"
"It's nothing personal, I just don't feel like I've gotten to know a person until I've sniffed their crotch." "We said 'no' to Mr. Curiosity. We're not home. Curiosity is not welcome, it is not to be invited in. Curiosity...is bad. It gets you in trouble, it gets you killed, and more importantly...it makes you poor!"
Passion and Serenity are one.
I gain power by understanding both.
In the chaos of their battle, I bring order.
I am a shadow, darkness born from light.
The Force is united within me.
They should not start listing seller names. Last thing we need is yet another vector for beggars to harass players, the lockbox winner annoncements are already bad enough.
[...]Not sure why people take such personal offense to people working the market. [...]
Mostly envy and ignorance, I'd say. Although, I suppose there is some inherent problems in the game when there is such enormous wealth disparities and you do get some items essentially monopolized and priced well out of what the market price would be if there was actual competition. I don't think this happens on ships like some people seem to think, but I've seen it on some doffs. Granted you're right that eventually the monopoly does get broken and a fair market price rediscovered. Great posts btw.
I think part of the problem is that you can too easily "flip" things. It's rather unrealistic to be able to buy something and immediately relist at a 10% markup. But people do that daily and it's part of what drives exchange prices up.
Some more thoughts. No inflation is not real in this game, no one has made an convincing argument. Again, I don't expect anyone to be convinced, but my thoughts are still from that perspective.
Flipping is annoying and people don't like it, but the problem of flipping is for two reasons. Number one, people are usually willing to pay more than the price it was listed at, and two, people listing it have no idea what that price is. Or to put it another way, no one except market hawks actually has an understanding of the real supply/demand of various items. This is sadly a market tool that doesn't even exist in most games, the ability to look at the sale prices and times of various things and gauge your selling price accordingly. If you see a graph listing the last 10 sales over a year, you know it doesn't sell fast at whatever prices are there. If you see a graph listing the last 10 sales over minutes, you can probably price it higher and still expect a sale.
The only way to "fix" flipping is to have a tool like that in the game. Anything else is most likely going to have detrimental side effects.
I've also been thinking about gambling style sinks, and I have concluded these are actually a pretty bad idea. Why? We have to look at real world examples. Consider a lot of poverty in the USA. There are places where people struggle to put anything in a savings account, have terrible credit, yet they are going around with designer clothes, expensive shoes, and a good phone, probably with a number of other luxury items in their home like high quality TVs, for example. These people are poor because they make bad choices with money. The reasons for that are not for this thread, but, lets think about this in game terms.
A lifesub to STO gets 500 zenbux a month. After half a year, that sub has saved up 3000 zen, enough for a T6 ship. Well someone can decide to buy a ship right there. If they want a lot of ships, though, what is the better option? Wait for a sale, number one, but maybe wait another 6 months and get 6000 zenbux, then you can buy 3 ships for the price of 2. Or, get your 6000 zenbux and wait for a sale to only spend 4800 on 3 ships. After 4 years, person buying a ship every time they get 3k has 8 ships. The person only buying on sales after a full year has managed to get 5 ship sets, or 15 ships.
Now there is certain value to getting the one ship out of a set you might want and ignore the others, but it is easy to see that the better play, if you want complete sets of ships, is to wait for your zenbux to come in, however they come in from dilithium conversion, RMT, or time, to make the most of it in bulk purchases during sales.
Who is the type of person that is bad with money, though? Is it the poor or the rich, the spacepoor or spacerich? Its usually the poor that makes worse money decisions and thus is usually short of it. Spacerich people buying/selling ships probably aren't going to be dumping their billions of EC on gambling items that exist to be a net negative EC sink, while the spacepoor, who should otherwise be saving up to buy what they want may be more likely to take a gamble on EC boxes, get nothing of value, and stay poor. Any fixed sink could have that effect, but a gambling sink would be the most pronounced.
And that points to one of the big issues in STO economics. Liquidity. If you have billions of EC, what do you even want? Maybe keys. Ships, sure. Do you need upgrade kits or RnD mats? Not many. Do you need equipment? Not much. What else is there? Chances are if you've got billions of spacebux, you don't need anything from the little people, unless someone gets lucky to win a ship you want from a box. That's also why the billions of EC sitting in someone's 17 alt banks doesn't matter much for inflation, because they aren't actually buying anything with it.
I think part of the problem is that you can too easily "flip" things. It's rather unrealistic to be able to buy something and immediately relist at a 10% markup. But people do that daily and it's part of what drives exchange prices up.
That's definitely not what I was saying, and it's not how the exchange and flipping work. Unless you can monopolize a market you can't just artificially push a price up like you're suggesting. Flipping in STO exists as Foxrockssocks above explained because a great many people using the exchange are ignorant of or don't care to know what the actual market price of what it is they are selling. The market price is the convergence point of where a price is met where a seller is willing to sell and buying is willing to buy. The meeting point of supply and demand. If someone lists something well bellow the market price a market participant can buy that item and relist it at a price more aligned with the market, and then be rewarded by the market with significant profits. This isn't price gouging or market manipulation, it's market correction. If you were to buy a load of items that were listed at the market value and added 10% to the cost, that's likely to result in you stuck with some market listings that won't sell.
I'm not sure where your comment about it being "rather unrealistic" comes from, you'll have to explain that further as it doesn't make sense to me in the context of the subject matter.
To any poor STO newbies reading this and wanting a new EC making tip, here's another in relation to this topic of flipping. You can increase your EC rapidly by knowing various niches of the in game market very well. A good way to start is to figure out some item on the exchange you want for your character that you have enough EC to buy but seems too expensive a purchase relative to the EC you have. Whenever you have an opportunity check that item on the market, and once you think you see a listing significantly bellow the market price buy it. But don't use the item, re-list the item at market value. If it sells you just made a significant profit, if it doesn't and you were very wrong about what the market price was you at least have an item you wanted anyway. However, if your doing it right you probably weren't wrong and can repeat this process several times until you make enough EC to keep one of the items you bought and have the same or more EC than you started with. Better yet you now know one area of the market and can keep playing with it to make more EC.
Would a good way to go... the problem is GPL is so easy to get with admiralty missions. And the dabo wheel doesn't eat all that much EC. When dabo first appeared what 8 years back or so 300 ec a roll wasn't nothing. Not much then either really.
I would say take the current GPL store and multiply the costs by 10 and make all GPL items account bound. Make the max Dabo wheel bet 100k or so then add a new tier of GPL items to the store that have actual real value... even a GPL purchased Phoenix lite type upgrade. OR perhaps instead of ship XP boosters that have been thrown around... how about a max ship XP token. The idea being you can purchase with GPL a token that costs enough that it would cost you a good 1-10 million EC worth of converted EC, depending on how lucky you are. That way your not giving any one that is super rich any real advantage... and poor players could still get in on the dabo wheel with lower bids and hope for some luck. If you bid 10k a dot instead of a 100k max you would get a better conversion rate likely even though the payouts are less.
The key would be account bound rewards, and rewards attractive enough to entice EC->GPL conversion.
0
rattler2Member, Star Trek Online ModeratorPosts: 58,673Community Moderator
The problem with GPL is there's really nothing worth getting for GPL right now. So we're all basically stockpiling GPL with no means of removing it.
I can't take it anymore! Could everyone just chill out for two seconds before something CRAZY happens again?!
The nut who actually ground out many packs. The resident forum voice of reason (I HAZ FORUM REP! YAY!)
normal text = me speaking as fellow formite colored text = mod mode
The problem with GPL is there's really nothing worth getting for GPL right now. So we're all basically stockpiling GPL with no means of removing it.
No doubt if they add useful things to do with it... they will have to jack the costs up to account for all the stockpile... and more important how easy it is to get GPL by doing nothing via admiralty mission. And account binding at least some of the most attractive GPL items.
0
rattler2Member, Star Trek Online ModeratorPosts: 58,673Community Moderator
Hell... if they converted the Dilithium Store outfits into GPL store I wouldn't mind paying 2 mil GPL for the Enterprise MACO per character.
I can't take it anymore! Could everyone just chill out for two seconds before something CRAZY happens again?!
The nut who actually ground out many packs. The resident forum voice of reason (I HAZ FORUM REP! YAY!)
normal text = me speaking as fellow formite colored text = mod mode
A normie goes "Oh, what's this?"
An otaku goes "UwU, what's this?"
A furry goes "OwO, what's this?"
A werewolf goes "Awoo, what's this?"
"It's nothing personal, I just don't feel like I've gotten to know a person until I've sniffed their crotch." "We said 'no' to Mr. Curiosity. We're not home. Curiosity is not welcome, it is not to be invited in. Curiosity...is bad. It gets you in trouble, it gets you killed, and more importantly...it makes you poor!"
Passion and Serenity are one.
I gain power by understanding both.
In the chaos of their battle, I bring order.
I am a shadow, darkness born from light.
The Force is united within me.
I think part of the problem is that you can too easily "flip" things. It's rather unrealistic to be able to buy something and immediately relist at a 10% markup. But people do that daily and it's part of what drives exchange prices up.
That's definitely not what I was saying, and it's not how the exchange and flipping work. Unless you can monopolize a market you can't just artificially push a price up like you're suggesting. Flipping in STO exists as Foxrockssocks above explained because a great many people using the exchange are ignorant of or don't care to know what the actual market price of what it is they are selling. The market price is the convergence point of where a price is met where a seller is willing to sell and buying is willing to buy. The meeting point of supply and demand. If someone lists something well bellow the market price a market participant can buy that item and relist it at a price more aligned with the market, and then be rewarded by the market with significant profits. This isn't price gouging or market manipulation, it's market correction. If you were to buy a load of items that were listed at the market value and added 10% to the cost, that's likely to result in you stuck with some market listings that won't sell.
Obviously you need to push the minimum price up when flipping like this. You're not going to get a sale if you try to sell at 1.1M and the lowest currently listed price is 1M. But if you buy anything below 1.1M and relist at 1.1M? Now your stuff is at least tied for lowest.
I'm not sure where your comment about it being "rather unrealistic" comes from, you'll have to explain that further as it doesn't make sense to me in the context of the subject matter.
IRL stuff like buying a house or car always comes with assorted fees and paperwork that must be completed before you can resell it. You need to register the title which is a small fee. Cars typically have transportation costs. Also, while it doesn't always happen, people who flip houses and cars often make an effort to improve them to increase the resale value.
Even stock market trading has listing fees. (to pay the people who actually man the stock market)
A normie goes "Oh, what's this?"
An otaku goes "UwU, what's this?"
A furry goes "OwO, what's this?"
A werewolf goes "Awoo, what's this?"
"It's nothing personal, I just don't feel like I've gotten to know a person until I've sniffed their crotch." "We said 'no' to Mr. Curiosity. We're not home. Curiosity is not welcome, it is not to be invited in. Curiosity...is bad. It gets you in trouble, it gets you killed, and more importantly...it makes you poor!"
Passion and Serenity are one.
I gain power by understanding both.
In the chaos of their battle, I bring order.
I am a shadow, darkness born from light.
The Force is united within me.
As far as GPL goes, that is another example of Cryptic mismanagement. If you remember when the Ferengi Admiralty Campaign was first introduced the GPL related Assignments had GPL rewards in the 10s to 100s of thousands. They were supposed to add new things in the GPL Store but never did and they decided to drastically reduce the GPL rewards by 100s of percentage instead.
'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.'
As far as GPL goes, that is another example of Cryptic mismanagement. If you remember when the Ferengi Admiralty Campaign was first introduced the GPL related Assignments had GPL rewards in the 10s to 100s of thousands. They were supposed to add new things in the GPL Store but never did and they decided to drastically reduce the GPL rewards by 100s of percentage instead.
GPL is like the "PVP" in this game, or the "competitive wargames TFOs." Abandonware. Would be better if Cryptic did something to make GPL worth something, rather than trying to find an "inflation problem" with EC.
I'm not sure where your comment about it being "rather unrealistic" comes from, you'll have to explain that further as it doesn't make sense to me in the context of the subject matter.
IRL stuff like buying a house or car always comes with assorted fees and paperwork that must be completed before you can resell it. You need to register the title which is a small fee. Cars typically have transportation costs. Also, while it doesn't always happen, people who flip houses and cars often make an effort to improve them to increase the resale value.
Even stock market trading has listing fees. (to pay the people who actually man the stock market)
STO's exchange however is 100% free.
That's great, my character doesn't live on Earth, let alone pre-Federation Earth. All my played characters presently are KDF or Romulan/KDF. The Klingon Empire doesn't have all these stupid fees, not even on the Federation Citizens I sell to KDF forced labor brigades and Orion slave traders.
Comments
Just add this to your insanely long list of wrong.
Exchange Prices are dictated by supply and demand.. basic economics. If no one could afford the exchange prices then sellers would lower the prices to the point where the items started to sell. No one is going to price something at 1B EC knowing that no one has that much money. If they do, it sits there forever. Sellers have two choices.. lower the price or keep the item.
It's the same way that the Dilithium to Zen rate decreases with Phoenix Box events. When people are low in Dilithium, they won't pay a lot for Zen so the price comes down.
Basic stuff.
Literally every single word you have posted in this entire thread has been wrong to a frighting degree and everyone knows it but you.
By all means though.. keep sharing your 'expertise,' it's quite amusing.
Or we could just realize there isn't anything at all wrong with players manipulating the market. Market Ferengi are NOT parasites >.<
Phoenixcs blue doffs... ok so they now sell for a million. You got a few spare ? Post them at 900k... 2 or 3 people do that and boom the market now has 100 of them instead of 20, and after an hour or so they are at 300k if that is what they are actually worth. If they stay at 1 million then I guess that is what they are worth.
Artificial manipulation only works short term even on low volume big ticket items. If a market becomes attractive someone else will fill the need... as nothing in this game is actually really all that rare. Even promo ships are not super rare with all the promos Cryptic runs.
If those blue doffs where not worth 1 million each... with in an hour 3x as many will be posted under a million. If they don't have said value they won't keep it.
Not sure why people take such personal offense to people working the market. You also have to understand with something things like Doffs Cryptics cycle of promotions effect pricing. Things that sell for one price while an event is on that drops tons of that item on the market, will sell for more when that promo ends.
Dude... You realize the reason Borticus is wanting to reduce inflation is BECAUSE the Ships are at 400-500 mil and 200 mil and 1 billion? Like that's literally the entire reason he started asking for ideas. And people still would have plenty of TRIBBLE reason to log in. Dude keys have been 4 mil for like 4 years now and lockbox ships used to be around 250mil on average and tons of people still were logging in and doing all their stuff. I don't think you understand how the game works.
Did Borticus actually state that, because it wasn't in his tweet that started this thread. Post a link for us please where Borticus goes into more depth about why he asked for ideas on this issue.
Mostly envy and ignorance, I'd say. Although, I suppose there is some inherent problems in the game when there is such enormous wealth disparities and you do get some items essentially monopolized and priced well out of what the market price would be if there was actual competition. I don't think this happens on ships like some people seem to think, but I've seen it on some doffs. Granted you're right that eventually the monopoly does get broken and a fair market price rediscovered. Great posts btw.
And guess what you didn't do anything wrong. If no one noticed that was a prime market to do exchange battle... that is their loss and your gain.
I am not seeing the issue. Your talking about one niche thing few people care about so no one works it. Things like doffs, traits, boffs, weapons and common R&D stuffs... its not possible to work the market like that for more then short periods of time, and it will require a ton of capital investment and a good chance you will loose more then you make. Sure you can try and post 20 items at a lower price or 999 stacks of whatever as your price blocks... but if you get greedy chances are someone will come and buy them all from you at the lower price.
Your taking as an example one very small item and extrapolating that to the entire market. You want to know how much it doesn't work take any popular space trait like say repair crews or something list 20 for 2 million less then the going rate. You will either sell them all instantly or find 10 listed under it in a very short time. The market self corrects just like the real world. Why would anyone fault you for buying up computer chip futures ? If no one else sees the market and you are turning a profit good for you, that doesn't contribute to inflation at all as the wider market corrects things to their true value. Guess what things people find annoying to collect have value, sounds like you figured that out.
I think your remembering wrong... you mean back when I was trading Bug ships for more then the EC cap on the exchanged allowed.
Back when keys where more like 2 million you mean... back when you could open lockboxes all day with EC and turn a guaranteed profit. The fact is the game has had massive DEFLATION not inflation. Go through the list of special doffs today and see how many of them sell for more then a few million EC.
Ships went up because Cryptic made them more valuable. T5 lockbox sold for less because there was a smaller market for them. People now buy T6s to park them stripping a console, or for a ship trait or a special weapon. They made the ships more desirable but the supply is the same. I'm not suggesting they should bring the supply up either... frankly the pricing on T6 ships right now is fine.
EC costs of golden snitch ships are exactly where Cryptic should want them.
If you where to buy $20 of zen right now to convert to EC you would get 2400 zen. If you grabbed keys with the sale price that is 30 or so keys or 135 million EC. or about 60 million short of a T6 Lobi class ship. So Lobi ships right now with current pricing cost around $25-30 bucks. If you spend $50 you get 6300 zen or around 80 keys so 360 million... which will buy you a number of T6 Lockbox ship. So the less attractive lockbox ships cost around 50 bucks and the more attractive ones like the crossfield run around $60.
Those prices are exactly the same as they have been for years. If you are new and want to buy a lockbox ship with cash.... 30-60 bucks depending. With a promo ship costing you more like $150 which is pretty close to what it would have cost you to buy a bug ship 4 or 5 years ago selling keys or fleet modules.
So the lockbox ships cost exactly what they have always cost in terms of real $. All the smaller bits the traits the doffs weapons ect... are all MUCH cheaper then they have ever been.
So as I have said I am all for cryptic trying to kill some of the "old money" in STO... by offering some form of EC Phoenix / EC burning event that rewards account bound stuffs to kill the pool of stockpiled EC and items. But I hardly think the market is in need of some heavy handed intervention either. All they will do is cut off their nose to spite their face. If the ships drop so that any new player can spend $10 in zen sell a few keys and buy their dream ship... Cryptic is going to loose a lot of cash.
Showing the Posters name would have some confirmitory effects about who is doing what to prices.
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.'
#LegalizeAwoo
A normie goes "Oh, what's this?"
An otaku goes "UwU, what's this?"
A furry goes "OwO, what's this?"
A werewolf goes "Awoo, what's this?"
"It's nothing personal, I just don't feel like I've gotten to know a person until I've sniffed their crotch."
"We said 'no' to Mr. Curiosity. We're not home. Curiosity is not welcome, it is not to be invited in. Curiosity...is bad. It gets you in trouble, it gets you killed, and more importantly...it makes you poor!"
My character Tsin'xing
Flipping is annoying and people don't like it, but the problem of flipping is for two reasons. Number one, people are usually willing to pay more than the price it was listed at, and two, people listing it have no idea what that price is. Or to put it another way, no one except market hawks actually has an understanding of the real supply/demand of various items. This is sadly a market tool that doesn't even exist in most games, the ability to look at the sale prices and times of various things and gauge your selling price accordingly. If you see a graph listing the last 10 sales over a year, you know it doesn't sell fast at whatever prices are there. If you see a graph listing the last 10 sales over minutes, you can probably price it higher and still expect a sale.
The only way to "fix" flipping is to have a tool like that in the game. Anything else is most likely going to have detrimental side effects.
I've also been thinking about gambling style sinks, and I have concluded these are actually a pretty bad idea. Why? We have to look at real world examples. Consider a lot of poverty in the USA. There are places where people struggle to put anything in a savings account, have terrible credit, yet they are going around with designer clothes, expensive shoes, and a good phone, probably with a number of other luxury items in their home like high quality TVs, for example. These people are poor because they make bad choices with money. The reasons for that are not for this thread, but, lets think about this in game terms.
A lifesub to STO gets 500 zenbux a month. After half a year, that sub has saved up 3000 zen, enough for a T6 ship. Well someone can decide to buy a ship right there. If they want a lot of ships, though, what is the better option? Wait for a sale, number one, but maybe wait another 6 months and get 6000 zenbux, then you can buy 3 ships for the price of 2. Or, get your 6000 zenbux and wait for a sale to only spend 4800 on 3 ships. After 4 years, person buying a ship every time they get 3k has 8 ships. The person only buying on sales after a full year has managed to get 5 ship sets, or 15 ships.
Now there is certain value to getting the one ship out of a set you might want and ignore the others, but it is easy to see that the better play, if you want complete sets of ships, is to wait for your zenbux to come in, however they come in from dilithium conversion, RMT, or time, to make the most of it in bulk purchases during sales.
Who is the type of person that is bad with money, though? Is it the poor or the rich, the spacepoor or spacerich? Its usually the poor that makes worse money decisions and thus is usually short of it. Spacerich people buying/selling ships probably aren't going to be dumping their billions of EC on gambling items that exist to be a net negative EC sink, while the spacepoor, who should otherwise be saving up to buy what they want may be more likely to take a gamble on EC boxes, get nothing of value, and stay poor. Any fixed sink could have that effect, but a gambling sink would be the most pronounced.
And that points to one of the big issues in STO economics. Liquidity. If you have billions of EC, what do you even want? Maybe keys. Ships, sure. Do you need upgrade kits or RnD mats? Not many. Do you need equipment? Not much. What else is there? Chances are if you've got billions of spacebux, you don't need anything from the little people, unless someone gets lucky to win a ship you want from a box. That's also why the billions of EC sitting in someone's 17 alt banks doesn't matter much for inflation, because they aren't actually buying anything with it.
That's definitely not what I was saying, and it's not how the exchange and flipping work. Unless you can monopolize a market you can't just artificially push a price up like you're suggesting. Flipping in STO exists as Foxrockssocks above explained because a great many people using the exchange are ignorant of or don't care to know what the actual market price of what it is they are selling. The market price is the convergence point of where a price is met where a seller is willing to sell and buying is willing to buy. The meeting point of supply and demand. If someone lists something well bellow the market price a market participant can buy that item and relist it at a price more aligned with the market, and then be rewarded by the market with significant profits. This isn't price gouging or market manipulation, it's market correction. If you were to buy a load of items that were listed at the market value and added 10% to the cost, that's likely to result in you stuck with some market listings that won't sell.
I'm not sure where your comment about it being "rather unrealistic" comes from, you'll have to explain that further as it doesn't make sense to me in the context of the subject matter.
To any poor STO newbies reading this and wanting a new EC making tip, here's another in relation to this topic of flipping. You can increase your EC rapidly by knowing various niches of the in game market very well. A good way to start is to figure out some item on the exchange you want for your character that you have enough EC to buy but seems too expensive a purchase relative to the EC you have. Whenever you have an opportunity check that item on the market, and once you think you see a listing significantly bellow the market price buy it. But don't use the item, re-list the item at market value. If it sells you just made a significant profit, if it doesn't and you were very wrong about what the market price was you at least have an item you wanted anyway. However, if your doing it right you probably weren't wrong and can repeat this process several times until you make enough EC to keep one of the items you bought and have the same or more EC than you started with. Better yet you now know one area of the market and can keep playing with it to make more EC.
Would a good way to go... the problem is GPL is so easy to get with admiralty missions. And the dabo wheel doesn't eat all that much EC. When dabo first appeared what 8 years back or so 300 ec a roll wasn't nothing. Not much then either really.
I would say take the current GPL store and multiply the costs by 10 and make all GPL items account bound. Make the max Dabo wheel bet 100k or so then add a new tier of GPL items to the store that have actual real value... even a GPL purchased Phoenix lite type upgrade. OR perhaps instead of ship XP boosters that have been thrown around... how about a max ship XP token. The idea being you can purchase with GPL a token that costs enough that it would cost you a good 1-10 million EC worth of converted EC, depending on how lucky you are. That way your not giving any one that is super rich any real advantage... and poor players could still get in on the dabo wheel with lower bids and hope for some luck. If you bid 10k a dot instead of a 100k max you would get a better conversion rate likely even though the payouts are less.
The key would be account bound rewards, and rewards attractive enough to entice EC->GPL conversion.
normal text = me speaking as fellow formite
colored text = mod mode
No doubt if they add useful things to do with it... they will have to jack the costs up to account for all the stockpile... and more important how easy it is to get GPL by doing nothing via admiralty mission. And account binding at least some of the most attractive GPL items.
normal text = me speaking as fellow formite
colored text = mod mode
#LegalizeAwoo
A normie goes "Oh, what's this?"
An otaku goes "UwU, what's this?"
A furry goes "OwO, what's this?"
A werewolf goes "Awoo, what's this?"
"It's nothing personal, I just don't feel like I've gotten to know a person until I've sniffed their crotch."
"We said 'no' to Mr. Curiosity. We're not home. Curiosity is not welcome, it is not to be invited in. Curiosity...is bad. It gets you in trouble, it gets you killed, and more importantly...it makes you poor!"
Even stock market trading has listing fees. (to pay the people who actually man the stock market)
STO's exchange however is 100% free.
My character Tsin'xing
#LegalizeAwoo
A normie goes "Oh, what's this?"
An otaku goes "UwU, what's this?"
A furry goes "OwO, what's this?"
A werewolf goes "Awoo, what's this?"
"It's nothing personal, I just don't feel like I've gotten to know a person until I've sniffed their crotch."
"We said 'no' to Mr. Curiosity. We're not home. Curiosity is not welcome, it is not to be invited in. Curiosity...is bad. It gets you in trouble, it gets you killed, and more importantly...it makes you poor!"
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.'
GPL is like the "PVP" in this game, or the "competitive wargames TFOs." Abandonware. Would be better if Cryptic did something to make GPL worth something, rather than trying to find an "inflation problem" with EC.
That's great, my character doesn't live on Earth, let alone pre-Federation Earth. All my played characters presently are KDF or Romulan/KDF. The Klingon Empire doesn't have all these stupid fees, not even on the Federation Citizens I sell to KDF forced labor brigades and Orion slave traders.