'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.'
In the real world, inflation is controlled by governments (in theory) by the amount of money in circulation (which the government controls). Generally speaking, the more money in circulation, the less it's worth (it's more complex than that, but on a basic level).
MMORPGs have no such limit. Money is created by players, based on how much they play. So companies try to control inflation by creating sinks to destroy the money. Or to artificially limit how much money a player can have (and any excess money being destroyed).
Its here' in the real world, there's no 'dollars limit' on the size of your bank account. How much more expensive has it made items like loaves of bread, cars, etc?
First off, last I heard, there's a "stealth" limit on bank accounts, the 250k or whatever it is that the FDIC insures each and every bank account for. Don't want to have a bank closure wipe out your money, the insurance will cover it.
Still, if 50k for a "fancy" suit vs 1k for a "regular" suit is any indication (note, both use more-or-less the exact same materials) of how "infinite bank accounts" can handle things, the "Ferengi of Earth" know that to attract even more profit, you have to be able and willing to price in various bands that will attract people of various means...
But I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around how the Champion of the Selfless People of Cardassia can sit here and, with a straight face, ask for an increase to a limit that no sane and selfless person should ever hit? I mean, "wealth" to a selfless person is more a measure of how (s)he can manipulate the world to take care "of the other guy".
It can be argued that if you're starting to accumulate this much wealth, perhaps you aren't being as selfless as you can be. Further demonstrated by my ongoing lack of a TOS "promotional" ship of any style, preferably Federation Connie. I'd venture it's high time for a demonstration of "Cardassian Selflessness" and use some of this transient wealth to care for a poor little Temporal Agent Vulcan... (who has 17 mil EC and maybe 30 mil EC over the entire account...)
Detecting big-time "anti-old-school" bias here. NX? Lobi. TOS/TMP Connie? Super-promotion-box. (aka the two hardest ways to get ships) Excelsior & all 3 TNG "big hero" ships? C-Store. Please Equalize...
To rob a line: [quote: Mariemaia Kushrenada] Forum Posting is much like an endless waltz. The three beats of war, peace and revolution continue on forever. However, opinions will change upon the reading of my post.[/quote]
To be completely honest, I don't see the need to increase the personal EC limit. Perhaps bump the exchange limit to 1B, seems kinda arbitrary to stick it at 750M.
It would be less of a hinderance to F2P players if the unexpanded EC limit was a bit bigger than 10M, since inflation has caused 10M to be peanuts it does seem less of an inconvienience and more of a hinderance to be limited so low. Bumping that to ~20 would let people buy some good gear from the exchange while still leaving the cap increase a valuable purchase.
As for the Account Bank, it has always bothered me that the character credit balance has always been higher. Seems rather backwards... In my opinion the bank should be able to store much more than an individual character. So, if it were up to me, I'd leave the character balance at 1B and bump the Account Bank storage capacity to 10B.
Crazy? Yeah, probably. But it would allow players to store credits in one place instead of creating a bunch of extra characters just to store funds.
The only thing that would be accomplished by raising EC caps would be sending inflation through the roof. This is a classic dog whistle thread. No one feels pity for those whose speculative fortunes were wiped out by the Infinity lockbox, investment is risk.
Why, and how, would raising the ec caps affect inflation?
There are no limits on bank account sizes in the real world. If the limits on the sizes of bank accounts were what drove inflation, wouldn't having them infinitely large like we do result in extremely high inflation?
False analogy fallacy.
The real world is infinitely more complex, having financial regulations and taxation, games like this are far more simplistic and have no such things. Only greed rules here, bigger numerical limits for inventories and exchange listings will result in more price gouging, hence inflation. Past activity and behavior is the best predictor for estimating future activity and behavior. What I describe is what resulted from the last increase, hence it is reasonable to expect the same results will arise from the same actions. It is unreasonable to expect different results will arise from the same actions. But you already knew that.
If you want to more easily store your wealth, as well as achieve a reliable return on your investment, you can just buy keys. Keys have only ever steadily increased in value long-term, and they always will since selling them is Cryptic's main source of income. A man with lobes for business and storage woes can simply do that, and not make a dog whistle thread like this to ask for means to artificially inflate existing wealth.
"I'm sorry, I can't hear you over the sound of how awesome I am."
I'll see Rule 18 and raise to Rule 239 also from canon - 'Never be afraid to mislabel a product.'
You know like saying to think like a Vulcan because it's logical to have the TOS T6 Constitution in a Promo Pack, when you're really thinking like a Ferengi. The Promo Pack being the best way to make oodles of profit after the cold water thrown on that with the release of the Infinity Lockbox. Now, see Rule 18 above.
'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.'
No matter how high the Exchange or Character EC limits are, a hard-to-get exclusive item will almost always be priced above the EC limit. You raise the Exchange limit to 10 Billion, the T6 Connie will cost you 11 Billion.
No matter how high the Exchange or Character EC limits are, a hard-to-get exclusive item will almost always be priced above the EC limit. You raise the Exchange limit to 10 Billion, the T6 Connie will cost you 11 Billion.
Haha. no.
Annoraxes were already sold for over 750m when the ex limit still was 500m.
Just do the math. 10k tribble test server stats are there. There is average 1 ship in 90 pack's.
Pack costed mostly 16.5m during the promo. R&d pack you get worth 2m, lobi you get worth 3m / pack.
So its net 11.5m the cost of open one pack.
90 x 11,5m is 1035m.
Most of the times you were able to buy the ship around 1 - 1,1b.
I have sold all my opened ship's for around that price.
Of course there are some trader to buy for 1b and sell for 1,2-1,3 if can.
Even i bought one for 900, that was sold to other trader for 1b, and he sold to somebody for 1,3b.
You can buy lower, if know how and where, or you can buy expensiver from Zone chat of course.
If ex cap would be increased to 2b, and peoples try to sell the ship for 2b, a lot of people, like me, just would buy promo pack's and open a lot of ship, its just 1/90, with big numbers there is no luck, and we would just start to sell them cheaper, because when pack cost x ec, and you have to open y pack to get one, you cant sell for much more than x*y or if you try, you will be undercutted, its sure.
The cost of making this ship is 1b, asking for 1,1-1,3 for them is their profit for their investments.
There is nothing problem with it.
You think its too much? Do the same, and sell a bit cheaper than them.
Not need to post "i got one from 5 pack" or something similar. I said average 1/90 by the 10k test result. Of course anybody can win the ship even from 1 lucky pack, but not those are the ones you can buy, the one's are for sale mostly from the high roller's, and they arent winning ship's from every 5th pack. My result was 9 ship is 708 pack, and i sold them between 1 - 1,1b
(And before you start counting for me, how much zen was that, it was 5300 zen, and rest of them was in-game EC)
Ex limit not raising the price's. Ex limit help decrease the price's, as idiots always undercut each other.
For an item that there is not on ex, peoples not really undercut each other, if there is a better offer, they are just waiting till its gone, if ex limit would be 1b, most of the private sold century pack's would be posted to ex instead, where everybody could buy them, and not sure they were buy off immediately when peoples know there can be posted a lot more anytime, so not sure i can sell for 1,1b or higher.
No matter how high the Exchange or Character EC limits are, a hard-to-get exclusive item will almost always be priced above the EC limit. You raise the Exchange limit to 10 Billion, the T6 Connie will cost you 11 Billion.
100% false.
When you see "TRIBBLE" in my posts, it's because I manually typed "TRIBBLE" and censored myself.
I do not see a need to increase the EC cap. It only benefits a very small fraction of the player base while it can potentially have negative consequences for all other players.
Increasing the EC cap can give the perception that the intrinsic value of EC has diminished which can lead to inflation. That is because doing so will eventually increase the "money supply". I believe back in 2014 there was a lot of threads revolving around EC inflation due to the fact that EC was every easy to get and there were no EC sinks to get rid of that currency. The result of "easy EC" was inflated Exchange prices. While Cryptic did not create any EC sinks, at least they cut the default value of all items so that vendor trashing them yielded less EC and I think they also reduced the reward for completing Tour The Galaxy. I assume they made other changes I am not aware of.
Earning EC is fairly easy. I could stand at the Exchange and simply play the market, but that isn't fun for me. Most of the time I do not bother whereas other times I might spend 20 - 30 minutes just browsing around for something worth while to trade. Therefore, since EC is relatively easy to earn an increase in the EC cap per character can have a detrimental effect on the game itself since players know they can have more than 1 billion EC per character.
The best thing to do is to actually create more characters to shift around EC rather than to increase the cap. Sure, doing so can be a hassle, but it is still a viable option. But assuming there is a hard cap of 50 characters per account, then the max EC an account can have is 50 billion EC. The way around that is to create a secondary STO account
to transfer EC to and when that secondary account is maxed out at 50 billion EC, then create a tertiary STO account.
So what is the difference between being able to have 150 billion EC in one account or 150 billion EC across 3 accounts (assuming 50 max characters per account)? In the end it is still 150 billion EC. The difference is perception.
If players see that they can currently have as much as 3 billion EC per character, then all other players will also have characters that can have 3 billion EC each. They therefore start to list items for higher prices on the Exchange. If no one can currently afford to purchase the item now because the items are too expensive.. no problem... after a while they can eventually accumulate more EC. However, the inflation game has just started so over time people assume players are continuously accumulating more and more EC, thus they can technically afford to pay more for items on the Exchange and prices go up even further.
Thus, while increasing the EC cap makes managing EC for an "ultra rich" player a lot more easier than spreading that currency over multiple accounts, it can make the game economy worse for just about everyone else.
I just had a funny realization. Super rich players are always blamed for inflating prices when they are merely buying and selling pre-existing EC whereas EC farmers that create new EC by farming patrol missions (which is literally printing money) are an actual reason that inflation is occurring. Also all players play story missions which rewards gear which inevitably creates new EC with nowhere for it to go and die. As druk said a cap increase would be nice but as I also said, an EC tax on trades would be nice too so that there is some way eject all the extra EC that's created by farmers.
When you see "TRIBBLE" in my posts, it's because I manually typed "TRIBBLE" and censored myself.
I've watched all the EC farming vids on youtube and read a lot of threads.
I still don't get how people have the time to accrue hundreds of millions of EC, let alone billions to go over the cap. It would be like a full-time job to earn that much EC.
Sure, you can sell stuff like ships to make a couple hundred million, but what is the point of EC if not to buy things like ships - seems somewhat self-defeating.
Do people really just spend hours a day farming EC?
To take that EC, buy Keys and off sell them on third party Gold Farmer sites.
Turning funny/fake money into RL money.
Increasing the EC cap can give the perception that the intrinsic value of EC has diminished which can lead to inflation. That is because doing so will eventually increase the "money supply".
Increasing the EC cap can give the perception that the intrinsic value of EC has diminished which can lead to inflation. That is because doing so will eventually increase the "money supply".
False.
Then explain your position. A one word reply has no value.
The futures market work on both perception and speculation. While it is far more complex than in game Exchange, the basic principals do apply and in my post I am primarily focused on perception.
You are alot of work.. You are claiming, that more EC is good for the Economy, and at the same time maintaining that Less dil is necessary to maintain the economy... And you are using each of the arguments counters to further your agenda towards your goal.
At least we all now have a valid argument, to simply ignore your statements, as you will only do whatever puts you in a better position.
Don't look silly... Don't call it the "Z-Store/Zen Store"...
Increasing the EC cap can give the perception that the intrinsic value of EC has diminished which can lead to inflation. That is because doing so will eventually increase the "money supply".
False.
Then explain your position. A one word reply has no value.
Sure it has. It says all that needs to be said, all that can truthfully be said, about the claim that the EC cap affects inflation: that it's not true.
All that affects inflation is the amount of EC created vs the amount of EC destroyed.
@repetitiveepic how about you actually explain why you want to be able why you want to be able to raise your EC cap limit to beyond 1 billion? You state it is a quality of life issue. Just how is it so, because you are limited to how much you can store at one time?
+1 to this idea for me too. I'd also support a sales/trade tax when EC is involved as has been suggested in the thread.
I support a tax too... That will allow me to futher increase the prices for the items I put up (and I sell alot)...
After all, Someone has to pay for the taxes, and it surely won't be me... An attitude likely shared by a lot of the people who, like me, make all their earnings from the Exchange.
Don't look silly... Don't call it the "Z-Store/Zen Store"...
I think discussions about the caps would be much more useful without the jealous comments by people who have never come close to the caps and never will.
Comments
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.'
MMORPGs have no such limit. Money is created by players, based on how much they play. So companies try to control inflation by creating sinks to destroy the money. Or to artificially limit how much money a player can have (and any excess money being destroyed).
First off, last I heard, there's a "stealth" limit on bank accounts, the 250k or whatever it is that the FDIC insures each and every bank account for. Don't want to have a bank closure wipe out your money, the insurance will cover it.
Still, if 50k for a "fancy" suit vs 1k for a "regular" suit is any indication (note, both use more-or-less the exact same materials) of how "infinite bank accounts" can handle things, the "Ferengi of Earth" know that to attract even more profit, you have to be able and willing to price in various bands that will attract people of various means...
But I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around how the Champion of the Selfless People of Cardassia can sit here and, with a straight face, ask for an increase to a limit that no sane and selfless person should ever hit? I mean, "wealth" to a selfless person is more a measure of how (s)he can manipulate the world to take care "of the other guy".
It can be argued that if you're starting to accumulate this much wealth, perhaps you aren't being as selfless as you can be. Further demonstrated by my ongoing lack of a TOS "promotional" ship of any style, preferably Federation Connie. I'd venture it's high time for a demonstration of "Cardassian Selflessness" and use some of this transient wealth to care for a poor little Temporal Agent Vulcan... (who has 17 mil EC and maybe 30 mil EC over the entire account...)
To rob a line: [quote: Mariemaia Kushrenada] Forum Posting is much like an endless waltz. The three beats of war, peace and revolution continue on forever. However, opinions will change upon the reading of my post.[/quote]
It would be less of a hinderance to F2P players if the unexpanded EC limit was a bit bigger than 10M, since inflation has caused 10M to be peanuts it does seem less of an inconvienience and more of a hinderance to be limited so low. Bumping that to ~20 would let people buy some good gear from the exchange while still leaving the cap increase a valuable purchase.
As for the Account Bank, it has always bothered me that the character credit balance has always been higher. Seems rather backwards... In my opinion the bank should be able to store much more than an individual character. So, if it were up to me, I'd leave the character balance at 1B and bump the Account Bank storage capacity to 10B.
Crazy? Yeah, probably. But it would allow players to store credits in one place instead of creating a bunch of extra characters just to store funds.
*shrug*
False analogy fallacy.
The real world is infinitely more complex, having financial regulations and taxation, games like this are far more simplistic and have no such things. Only greed rules here, bigger numerical limits for inventories and exchange listings will result in more price gouging, hence inflation. Past activity and behavior is the best predictor for estimating future activity and behavior. What I describe is what resulted from the last increase, hence it is reasonable to expect the same results will arise from the same actions. It is unreasonable to expect different results will arise from the same actions. But you already knew that.
If you want to more easily store your wealth, as well as achieve a reliable return on your investment, you can just buy keys. Keys have only ever steadily increased in value long-term, and they always will since selling them is Cryptic's main source of income. A man with lobes for business and storage woes can simply do that, and not make a dog whistle thread like this to ask for means to artificially inflate existing wealth.
You know like saying to think like a Vulcan because it's logical to have the TOS T6 Constitution in a Promo Pack, when you're really thinking like a Ferengi. The Promo Pack being the best way to make oodles of profit after the cold water thrown on that with the release of the Infinity Lockbox. Now, see Rule 18 above.
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.'
Haha. no.
Annoraxes were already sold for over 750m when the ex limit still was 500m.
Just do the math. 10k tribble test server stats are there. There is average 1 ship in 90 pack's.
Pack costed mostly 16.5m during the promo. R&d pack you get worth 2m, lobi you get worth 3m / pack.
So its net 11.5m the cost of open one pack.
90 x 11,5m is 1035m.
Most of the times you were able to buy the ship around 1 - 1,1b.
I have sold all my opened ship's for around that price.
Of course there are some trader to buy for 1b and sell for 1,2-1,3 if can.
Even i bought one for 900, that was sold to other trader for 1b, and he sold to somebody for 1,3b.
You can buy lower, if know how and where, or you can buy expensiver from Zone chat of course.
If ex cap would be increased to 2b, and peoples try to sell the ship for 2b, a lot of people, like me, just would buy promo pack's and open a lot of ship, its just 1/90, with big numbers there is no luck, and we would just start to sell them cheaper, because when pack cost x ec, and you have to open y pack to get one, you cant sell for much more than x*y or if you try, you will be undercutted, its sure.
The cost of making this ship is 1b, asking for 1,1-1,3 for them is their profit for their investments.
There is nothing problem with it.
You think its too much? Do the same, and sell a bit cheaper than them.
Not need to post "i got one from 5 pack" or something similar. I said average 1/90 by the 10k test result. Of course anybody can win the ship even from 1 lucky pack, but not those are the ones you can buy, the one's are for sale mostly from the high roller's, and they arent winning ship's from every 5th pack. My result was 9 ship is 708 pack, and i sold them between 1 - 1,1b
(And before you start counting for me, how much zen was that, it was 5300 zen, and rest of them was in-game EC)
Ex limit not raising the price's. Ex limit help decrease the price's, as idiots always undercut each other.
For an item that there is not on ex, peoples not really undercut each other, if there is a better offer, they are just waiting till its gone, if ex limit would be 1b, most of the private sold century pack's would be posted to ex instead, where everybody could buy them, and not sure they were buy off immediately when peoples know there can be posted a lot more anytime, so not sure i can sell for 1,1b or higher.
Yup, items are meant to be sold on the exchange, but are sold on the black trading market instead.
I don't blame the players, I blame Cryptic for allowing the exploit to go on for so long.
We no longer need the trade system to send items or EC between characters, as we have an account bank.
If you want to sell an item to another player, the exchange is there for you as it always has been.
The only reason items go above the exchange limit, is because the players price gouge and they then move to the black market.
Would probably stop the gold sellers from selling EC and ships too.
Increasing the EC cap can give the perception that the intrinsic value of EC has diminished which can lead to inflation. That is because doing so will eventually increase the "money supply". I believe back in 2014 there was a lot of threads revolving around EC inflation due to the fact that EC was every easy to get and there were no EC sinks to get rid of that currency. The result of "easy EC" was inflated Exchange prices. While Cryptic did not create any EC sinks, at least they cut the default value of all items so that vendor trashing them yielded less EC and I think they also reduced the reward for completing Tour The Galaxy. I assume they made other changes I am not aware of.
Earning EC is fairly easy. I could stand at the Exchange and simply play the market, but that isn't fun for me. Most of the time I do not bother whereas other times I might spend 20 - 30 minutes just browsing around for something worth while to trade. Therefore, since EC is relatively easy to earn an increase in the EC cap per character can have a detrimental effect on the game itself since players know they can have more than 1 billion EC per character.
The best thing to do is to actually create more characters to shift around EC rather than to increase the cap. Sure, doing so can be a hassle, but it is still a viable option. But assuming there is a hard cap of 50 characters per account, then the max EC an account can have is 50 billion EC. The way around that is to create a secondary STO account
to transfer EC to and when that secondary account is maxed out at 50 billion EC, then create a tertiary STO account.
So what is the difference between being able to have 150 billion EC in one account or 150 billion EC across 3 accounts (assuming 50 max characters per account)? In the end it is still 150 billion EC. The difference is perception.
If players see that they can currently have as much as 3 billion EC per character, then all other players will also have characters that can have 3 billion EC each. They therefore start to list items for higher prices on the Exchange. If no one can currently afford to purchase the item now because the items are too expensive.. no problem... after a while they can eventually accumulate more EC. However, the inflation game has just started so over time people assume players are continuously accumulating more and more EC, thus they can technically afford to pay more for items on the Exchange and prices go up even further.
Thus, while increasing the EC cap makes managing EC for an "ultra rich" player a lot more easier than spreading that currency over multiple accounts, it can make the game economy worse for just about everyone else.
To take that EC, buy Keys and off sell them on third party Gold Farmer sites.
Turning funny/fake money into RL money.
False.
Then explain your position. A one word reply has no value.
The futures market work on both perception and speculation. While it is far more complex than in game Exchange, the basic principals do apply and in my post I am primarily focused on perception.
At least we all now have a valid argument, to simply ignore your statements, as you will only do whatever puts you in a better position.
All that affects inflation is the amount of EC created vs the amount of EC destroyed.
I support a tax too... That will allow me to futher increase the prices for the items I put up (and I sell alot)...
After all, Someone has to pay for the taxes, and it surely won't be me... An attitude likely shared by a lot of the people who, like me, make all their earnings from the Exchange.