I had an idea to make gold farming a thing of the past, or to at least make it way harder.
Gold farmers use the AH to buy item at low cost, sell at high price, use that to sell you currencies, player pay to buy item sold by them, rince and repeate.
I never bought energy/gold from farmer but i am affected by the high prices set at the AH because of them.
One easy way to stop that is simply to make items bought from the AH BoP... Ya, bind on pickup. Legitamate player will use what is bought on the AH for themselve not to resell it later. Farmer just do that.
Let the Dev do that minor change and bye bye farmers, they will have to go out and grind to be able to sell items.... good luck making a living that way.
Sounds ok, however I have bought things for a lil alt with another character too, that would become impossible too, unless they make credits transferrable within 1 account (not between accounts of course).
Easy fix , set a max price for items , if , when you look at the item, its value is 5000 credits , max sale price on the exchange is 10x that amount , problem solved.
You know I can sort of understand this but I may have a higher level character with more money and buy the item for my lower level and send it to them. Can not do this if the items is bound.
But here is another idea. How about we the player base start taking some action ourselves? You see an item on the AH that is over priced there are two things to do.
1. Do not buy it.
2. Stop being so damned greedy and start selling them at the gold farmers level. All they do is sell them even higher the next time.
But nope we will all just allow them to inflate the economy and we will just follow suit like good little lemmings and not take any action ourselves. Why because most players out there are greedy and will say hey if others are selling this for 500,000 for this item then so will I even though it is not worth it.
I think the state of the game is making them cringe already. I cant believe they are making any money selling in this game.
Well, they are selling 100k for £15. Considering the community of zone chat in general, i think a lot of people would buy that, and the gold sellers of course can then make about £150 per hour with basic farm techniques at Admiral level.
Transfering item from your toon would be bad, ie your admiral could send all his goodies to his lower cousins, quest item and AH items. the way to not impeed the game and keep the AH BoP is to make energie transferable period. IF you want to help a friend by givnig him some energie, your choice really. The goal is to make gold farming a thng of the past, or at the very least impractical.
You know I can sort of understand this but I may have a higher level character with more money and buy the item for my lower level and send it to them. Can not do this if the items is bound.
But here is another idea. How about we the player base start taking some action ourselves? You see an item on the AH that is over priced there are two things to do.
1. Do not buy it.
2. Stop being so damned greedy and start selling them at the gold farmers level. All they do is sell them even higher the next time.
But nope we will all just allow them to inflate the economy and we will just follow suit like good little lemmings and not take any action ourselves. Why because most players out there are greedy and will say hey if others are selling this for 500,000 for this item then so will I even though it is not worth it.
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I never bought energy/gold from farmer but i am affected by the high prices set at the AH because of them.
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I do hope you realize that those "high prices" are not gold sellers, but rather your normal players and your normal MMO economy at work. I'd like to use the term "greedy", but it's not really greed if everyone has tons of credits to spare with absolutely no cash sinks whatsoever in-game.
You can blame the sellers for many issues, this however isn't one of them...
Firstly, there are better ways to combat the gold sellers that to make changes to our game of this magnitude. The moment you start changing fundamentals for things like the Exchange that impacts all paying players - they've won. The end.
Secondly, I don't get all this ill will against the AH and against people that use the system to make money. I personally don't game the system for credits but I have no problem with people that want to try it. Call it greed, call it whatever you want. Thats just the way an economy works. Also, you may be surprised at the fact that a great number of regular players sell at high prices trying to make credits. Its not all gold-sellers.
I hear all the people complaining about "stupidly high prices" and yet I have never had any trouble picking up whatever I want for reasonable prices. I just had to look a bit. Right now most items on the exchange have huge ranges of prices attached to them. Looking for a console yesterday I could see it on there with prices ranging from 5k right up to over 100k ECs.
What the exchange actually needs is the ability to "Sort" results by price to make it easier for players to simply ignore the stupidly high ones. Alot of the higher price items sell just because the tools are not there to easily find the cheaper items and people are sometimes too lazy to search for them (and admittedly they should not have to).
Once people can sort by price and find the bargains easily it will be highly likely that the over-priced goods will simply languish there on the Exchange not selling. Thats how the market will deflate. With decent buyer-tools!
When high-priced items don't sell then people are forced to take them off or reduce their prices. There are only 20 auction slots. If you plan to make money on Exchange then every one of those 20 slots is precious and you cannot afford to have items taking up that slot indefinately that are not selling. Its logical.
Also sellers, knowing that buyers can ignore their high-priced lots easily, will need to work much harder to compete in the market and will decide if they want to make a reasonably quick sale they need to keep their prices nearer to those at the lower end of the price range.
Its not caps and restrictions we need right now. Its improved functions, searching and sorting to make it easier to skip over the overpriced cr@p. We shouldn't need a Fisher Price Economy where everything is capped and restricted and watered down. Thats dull. Let the market find its own level.
I'd rather wait and see if Cryptic can solve for this problem in other ways. Restrictions on Trial accounts being able to send email, trade or use the Exchange perhaps.
Comments
Or make credits transferable to same account characters.
But here is another idea. How about we the player base start taking some action ourselves? You see an item on the AH that is over priced there are two things to do.
1. Do not buy it.
2. Stop being so damned greedy and start selling them at the gold farmers level. All they do is sell them even higher the next time.
But nope we will all just allow them to inflate the economy and we will just follow suit like good little lemmings and not take any action ourselves. Why because most players out there are greedy and will say hey if others are selling this for 500,000 for this item then so will I even though it is not worth it.
Well, they are selling 100k for £15. Considering the community of zone chat in general, i think a lot of people would buy that, and the gold sellers of course can then make about £150 per hour with basic farm techniques at Admiral level.
Just bind things from the Exchange to that account .. and viola ... same affect without any downsides for people rolling alts.
Iceshadow
That will never happen.
I do hope you realize that those "high prices" are not gold sellers, but rather your normal players and your normal MMO economy at work. I'd like to use the term "greedy", but it's not really greed if everyone has tons of credits to spare with absolutely no cash sinks whatsoever in-game.
You can blame the sellers for many issues, this however isn't one of them...
Secondly, I don't get all this ill will against the AH and against people that use the system to make money. I personally don't game the system for credits but I have no problem with people that want to try it. Call it greed, call it whatever you want. Thats just the way an economy works. Also, you may be surprised at the fact that a great number of regular players sell at high prices trying to make credits. Its not all gold-sellers.
I hear all the people complaining about "stupidly high prices" and yet I have never had any trouble picking up whatever I want for reasonable prices. I just had to look a bit. Right now most items on the exchange have huge ranges of prices attached to them. Looking for a console yesterday I could see it on there with prices ranging from 5k right up to over 100k ECs.
What the exchange actually needs is the ability to "Sort" results by price to make it easier for players to simply ignore the stupidly high ones. Alot of the higher price items sell just because the tools are not there to easily find the cheaper items and people are sometimes too lazy to search for them (and admittedly they should not have to).
Once people can sort by price and find the bargains easily it will be highly likely that the over-priced goods will simply languish there on the Exchange not selling. Thats how the market will deflate. With decent buyer-tools!
When high-priced items don't sell then people are forced to take them off or reduce their prices. There are only 20 auction slots. If you plan to make money on Exchange then every one of those 20 slots is precious and you cannot afford to have items taking up that slot indefinately that are not selling. Its logical.
Also sellers, knowing that buyers can ignore their high-priced lots easily, will need to work much harder to compete in the market and will decide if they want to make a reasonably quick sale they need to keep their prices nearer to those at the lower end of the price range.
Its not caps and restrictions we need right now. Its improved functions, searching and sorting to make it easier to skip over the overpriced cr@p. We shouldn't need a Fisher Price Economy where everything is capped and restricted and watered down. Thats dull. Let the market find its own level.
I'd rather wait and see if Cryptic can solve for this problem in other ways. Restrictions on Trial accounts being able to send email, trade or use the Exchange perhaps.