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I think its time for a price cap on the exchange
halfmoon10
Member Posts: 94 Arc User
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You could always craft your own at MK II till you get the one with the traits you want then upgrade it or get the Risian kit for 1000 lohlunat favors which can be Re-engineered to give you [Kp/Wpn][KPerf]x3[Proc] when fully upgraded. At the time that I posted this you could get 1000 favors for just over 16 million off the exchange if you don't have a stockpile from earlier summer events.
With that said, certain items are going to sell for more than others for a variety of reasons. Some ships as a prime example have traits and/or consoles that people use for certain build types. Certain weapon types sell for more due to rarity or use in certain builds. Some items sell for more because there's not alot of them and supply is limited. Other items that may not sell for alot generally will sell for far far more if they have certain modifiers or rolls on them. Case and point the ones with Kperfx3 mods. Those are exceedingly rare and will fetch a pretty penny.
Overall the exchange is driven by the laws of supply and demand. I'm all for safeguards to prevent one small group of people from controlling the entirety of the exchange, keeping bots out and similar. With that said however purely because something is going for more than you personally are willing to pay does NOT mean there is something wrong or that there needs to be price caps put in place. If you want the item but don't want to pay the asking price then try to make/find one of your own. I'm all for them doing things to lower inflation to bring prices back down, but putting caps on the exchange will NOT work just like it doesn't work IRL.
Next, putting a lower price cap on the exchange will NOT force prices down. All you're going to do is force items into the secondary black market trade channels like already happens with other items. Items that sell for over 1.5b credits are traded directly between players, usually with box keys as the chief currency. Things like the Cstore coupons are still bought and sold between players even though they were never meant to be listed on the exchange. Not allowing their listing doesn't stop it, just forces it into an obscured secondary market. If anything the price cap on the exchange needs to be increased so folks can see more of the market.
Simply raising the cap doesn't mean people will start receiving the cap, it simply means they can ask for more, and you as the player can see those listings. Where as right now you have no way of knowing if dude asking you for 1.7b for that particular item is the cheapest buy or not. Raising the cap and seeing higher priced items on the exchange doesn't mean prices have suddenly gone up overnight, it means you're now able to see items that were already there which are now being handled through the exchange instead of black market trade channels.
Lastly, there are certain items that are WAY overpriced for what they do and have no business being anywhere near the price point they are. as the saying goes caveat emptor, buyer beware.
Star Trek Online volunteer Community Moderator
No one is going to list things for drastically less then they are worth. They will just sell them in trade channels. Its like Promo box ships. They crossed the exchange limit long ago... which is why you won't find any of them on the exchange. To get one you have to find a trading channel. People don't list things on the exchange that aren't going to sell. This means low level (not counting mk2s that people upgrade) stuff is in general not going to be listed at all. Cryptic addressed this ages ago by adding levelless items that can be used till end game. Low level items that drop with desirable traits will still get listed and sold, especially things like kits that can be easily upgraded for end game.
On console, boff transfers are half-broken (can't mail boffs that are in the recruitment pool) so listing at a crazy high prices is the only way to transfer them to an alternate character.
Other than that, supply and demand + acquisition cost/time/effort. Creating a beam bank Mk II just takes white mats and 5 minutes, but getting one with [ Pen ] mod can take 10+ rolls, an hour+ of time, and a pile of mats. Getting an Exotic Particle Field Exciter with [ EPG ] mod might take 10+ days and piles of very rare mats that cost dil to craft. One with [ PhaDis ] instead will be much cheaper.
Listing fees also kill markets. If you want to do everything in trade channels like most games by all means add taxes. I wouldn't list anything of value on the exchange if it was taxed. I would just trade it. Then the poor new players would really have no idea what anythings value was. Anything that was priced over 100m or so would just not be on the exchange to compare. Pricing would be shady as heck.
The truth is everything is priced exactly as it should be.
Your correct about crafted things. Ya anyone can craft a mk 2 and roll over and over trying to get a full set of pen. The question is what is my time worth to you if I do it for you. If I sell you 5 weapons at 500k each.... is that really overpriced. Your right that could have easily taken 50 rolls to get 5 [pen] weapons. I mean pay 2.5m EC or roll 50 of them 5 at a time for 20 min yourself.
Don't like that someone listed a bunch of ensing level skills on the exchange for 100k each. OK fine you know where the vendor is, enjoy 2 or 3 load screens and go get it yourself, then a few more load screens to get back to where you where if you like.
Lockbox stuff is priced where it is because it costs real money. People seem to expect other people to spend real $ then throw away their winnings for a couple rounds of vendor trash farming worth of game currency. Yes that space trait you want might cost you 30m EC... it cost someone else anywhere from $1-3 you can't just say a key costs 115 zen you have to understand a key is far more likely to give you a worthless ground kit box or even a couple R&D salvage then an actual space trait. You could burn 20 keys to get 1 space trait never mind a ship. For the kits in question... you can take those lockbox cast off boxes and be annoyed or you can open 100 of them find the FEW very few that are going to pop out with [kpref]x2 and price them accordingly. They are rare. (and good)
For what its worth in regard to people using the exchange as storage. PC Side. Cryptic has fixed that. You can now list a max 40 items on the exchange, if you have items in your mailbox they count as a sales slot. So as they expire they max your "storage" space. Storing things in the bank and mail used to be a thing. It isn't all that convenient anymore and isn't that common. In general if you see something you believe is priced wrong... take another look. Yes some silly looking doffs have value for specific missions... some kits that are low level, have the right mods on them. In almost every case where someone points out a look look this is over priced. There is a reason... it comes from a lockbox, it only drops out of a specific duty officer pack, its annoying to roll, or its on the exchange as a convince. Or it has some value they haven't considered. (I mean that is common in a game with so many undocumented mechanics.) As an example I made a killing at one point sucking up all the reman bridge officers with standard infiltrator... leveling toons people didn't always understand the value of those. I would buy them for a few hundred thousand and sell them for 50-150m. I wasn't ripping anyone off the only ways to produce them is annoying as hell time consuming and random (it involves trying as hard as you can to fail a specific rare doff mission)... or you have to roll toons over and over deleting them once you get beyond getting green boffs as rewards. (when I say I made a killing I would find 2-3 a month mostly looking on Saturday Sunday afternoons... they were still stupid rare. But I was able to do that for months before everyone figured out they were not cast offs.)
And lower level gear is just much rarer than Mk 12. Moreover, when at that level, many players would rather use something than selling it simply because they're still collecting their gear (as opposed to a level 65 captain who can usually sell off everything he collects). That further explains what you're seeing here.
Would I pay this? No, probably not. Does this mean a price cap is required? No.
I would never pay that for a ground kit no.
[kperf]x2 though on some of those old kits that have interesting secondaries, like spamming sci skills and the like are desirable. (The op posted pics of old Fluidic kits with good mods... those are the kits that proc shield pen psionic damage when you use basic skills... like engi turret and mine dropping, sci skill spamming ect) I have sold old lockbox kperf kits for 100m before. There is a market for them. I would say realistically 100m is the ceiling for a good ground kit... with 10-20m being more realistic. But supply and demand. Not many people willing to do what needs done to produce them.
Ones with the right traits are actually rare. I mean people are free to spend 20-30m for 200 stupid lockbox kit boxes... and open them all trying to land one that way. Chances are they will get 200 useless kits they will end up vendor trashing and just being out 20-30m... but gambling is encouraged.
I mean do I think as an example this guy has any hope of getting this price.....
No lol... but I think you can see the potential of this specific kit with a spread fire weapon + suppression barrage on a tac.
I don't think it's worth 1.5b no but its not worth nothing either. lol
Star Trek Online volunteer Community Moderator
There is no magic formula to determine which will happen and to what degree, so the devs are probably hesitant to gamble with it at this late stage and are instead exploring other options (which will probably take a while).
If STO started that with a tax on the exchange from the get go that might be a different story. So... right now we need viable sinks that people WANT to interact with.
And making it even harder to do, it needs to be something that won't cannibalize dil sinks or zen sales.
For example, Cryptic offering lock box omni beams for 50-100 million EC would use up a lot of EC, but would cut into key sales. The same with anything that's currently in the zen store like elite captain and boff tokens.
To some degree I can see the omni thing cutting into sales but simultaneously they also gave people the ability to get Corrosive Plasma weapons unlocked for your entire account. They may not have an omni but there is precedent that not everything may cut into sales as much as we might think. Of course for all I know they lost a chunk of change doing that so it can be argued either way until they show sales info one way or another.
Assuming they did something like this I could see them unlocking other weapon types for the account, but leaving the omnis in the box packs so if you want an omni you have to open the box packs still. Would be a major drag, but that could potentially still keep sales up on them.
The only games I've ever seen it work in are those that had it built in from the start. Something like WoW or similar where it was there from the start or almost from the start. If the goal is simply to remove currency from the game, then functionally yes it does work. However no one is simply going to eat that cost if they can help it. The cost will always get passed on to the buyer somehow and the taxes always do more harm than good.
In SWTOR they implemented taxes on personal trades to "close the personal trade loophole" instead of raising their exchange cap to get items back on their exchange. I could rant on that for awhlie but this is STO so keeping it purely to the relevant bits. While again functionally it does remove some currency from the game, it also locks prices in at certain points because of how they did it.
As an example, let's suppose I have a particular lightsaber hilt you want that normally sells for 4b credits on their exchange. Assuming it sold for the 4b credits at an 8% tax rate it would take 320m off the top in taxes and I would receive 3.68b. Now let's suppose you and I are guildmates and because of that I agreed to sell you the saber for 3b credits instead of 4b. Taxes on that should be 240m credits, however that's not how SWTOR did it. The tax rate in personal trades doesn't go down based on the values you and I slap in the boxes, it stays locked in at the 8% rate on the 4b. In other words the company decided the value of the saber hilt is 4b credits, thus anyone selling one or even giving it away is going to pay 320m credits regardless of what they do with it. So in essence it killed the willingness of the community to help out newer folks. Now to cover that cost of the taxes, people raised their prices and those taxes guarantee those prices aren't coming down. They say they "re-evaluate" the values every so often but I've yet to see the tax rates change a single time.
I bring all of that up to say this. While taxes functionally may remove currency from the game, they do more harm than they do good overall. If the taxes actually did something other than just getting deleted, people wouldn't care as much. Taxes are not the answer
Star Trek Online volunteer Community Moderator
By making it offer Alliance Gear it offers things that aren't available at other hubs. This one would also be a community built hub, kinda like how FF14 has had many community efforts to build areas like Revenant's Toll in Mor Dhona and the more recent Ishgard Housing District. Make it big enough that the whales alone can't just steamroll it by themselves, but also engaging enough that people WANT to interact with it. And in theory there might not even be a limit on the tiers or projects like there are with Fleet Holdings.
Inputs for ECs, Dilithium, Crafting Mats... hell even GPL!
Story wise we do have a reason to rebuild Khitomer because of the Klingon Civil War arc.
They want things out of reach of ground EC.
EC sinks if they ever did add more of them would have to eat the EC and NOT return items and things that you can currently get with real money. They could easily add another round of Rep gear... or some new fleet projects to unlock new perks or items. There is nothing stopping them from making a Plasma version of the disco rep weapon... or a Phaser version of the lukari rep weapon cost 50m EC. Nothing at all stopping that.... accept that like I already said its not in their interest to do so.
If you have played other games with taxes then you know the other thing it does. Is completely discourage anyone that has rare items ever listing them to begin with.
Many many MMOs exist with tax systems, and I can't think of a one where you can buy any of the top end gambled/cash shop item in their auction houses.
Pick your poison really. In STO everything that can be gotten with $ (accept a few bound things) can be bought with in game currency any time of the day without having to spam a trade channel or zone chat. The only acception being promo ships... as they have drifted over the exchange cap. (Which I 100% believe Cryptic is very much ok with... a game without golden snitches is a lesser money earner) On the other hand they could put taxes in place on the exchange... and sure it might perhaps possibly drop the pricing on some low end junk. The type of lockbox item you can buy for sub 10m EC. For everything over that its more likely the supply just dries up and people are forced to trade for anything they aren't willing to just gamble/buy themselves.
Also the advantage of NO tax... is you get price wars. If someone is going to pay a listing fee for lets say a ship they put up at 1.3B. There is no way they are going to take it down to outprice someone that just listed one at 1.2B. As the game exists now that happens all the time. Someone lists a T6 at the proper market price. Someone else undercuts them 50m Then they decide no no I need the EC and relsit 10m less (60m less then previous). There are days where I have watched this happen for a few hours then laugh and buy both their ships at 200m under market. That doesn't happen in games where they pay listing fees.
IMO Cryptic has it 100% correct. No one lists things above what they are worth. You as a customer may not agree with their pricing. However if it doesn't sell they can either list it high forever.... or drop their price. The truth is 99% of what people consider over priced... sells at the price its listed at. No 1.2b isn't over priced for a T6 lockbox ship. 35m is not over priced for a space trait. 50-100m is not over priced for the space traits that drop out of a single specific low value doff pack.
I mean market working aside. Just playing the game auto generates a lot of EC. Do your 1 hour rep missions and make 40-60k every hour selling the junk drops out of them. Vender trash a million worth of stuff for a couple patrols that take min. Do a tour of the galaxy if you are so inclined. Just do a couple rounds of Admiralty missions for 200-500k per toon. I mean if your an average player with 10 toons... just doing Admiralty missions twice a day and clicking rep 1hr missions on each twice a day. You can easily earn 5m a day. That isn't jumping through hoops to run a silly tour mission daily. That is just clicking for 30 min or so. It shouldn't be all that big a deal for most players to essentially passively earn 100m EC in a month just playing a fairly small number of toons normally. If you really want to out of your way you can make much more than that without a whole lot of thought put into it.
I find that unlikely. A few hundred thousand maybe, but not a Million.
There are games with market (and sometimes other) tax where you can get just about anything in the market, even the high end stuff. Black Desert (at least before they changed the market system anyway, I am not familiar with the current model) and Second Life are two that spring to mind immediately, and I am fairly sure that others exist.
And yes, they are both strange cases nowadays with way more crafting than the typical game (more like EVE but without the pitfalls) which makes for a more complex market environment. STO is overly simplified in comparison (both market and crafting have the earmarks of afterthought bolt-ons rather than being part of the core of the game) and lacks many of the natural market forces which help keep the complex ones stable.
And yes, games like that with taxes have far less of those price wars but that is because when the ideal is to sell in one listing cycle they usually post at a point where they are reasonably sure it will do that instead of going high and inching back down to try and wring out every possible bit of currency they can.
And even in STO, for every one of those price-lowering wars there are dozens (or more) cases of parasitic price flipping and other market fixing, where for example someone with a lot of EC posts an item at a high price point and buys up all of the same item that are priced lower and reposts them at the higher price (it happens a lot with doffs for instance) in effect draining the lower end of the pool and causing an artificial scarcity to jack up the price.
You do have a point though in games where the tax is set too high or based on something other than the price of the offer itself, those do tend to annoy players to the point that they go elsewhere, like private trades (or even direct barter if the system considers any exchange containing currency to be a taxable sale regardless of how or where the transaction is done).
As for the prices themselves, you would be surprised how many people have lives outside of the game which limits playing time, which in turn makes mechanically going down a list of characters for even a half hour (what you describe only works if everything goes perfectly, frequent drops, often slow loading times, and other things like a bad run of the RNG for a character that day can make it take longer or fall short on EC yield) clicking on minigame buttons until their eyes cross from boredom instead of actually playing the main part of the game itself somewhat less than appealing.
Also, STO attracts all kinds of players and many (probably most) of them are attracted to other aspects of the game like combat, RP, Space Barbie, etc. rather than playing market tycoon for a large chunk of whatever gaming time they can squeeze out of a day.
We have patrols that you can do on repeat now. You can run Jupiter station... 2-3m a run 200k or so a run in vendor trash (use a vendor not your replicator every little bit counts). 10-12m to make a million in trash turn ins. I exaggerated a bit in the first post and I don't think people are really going to do 5 patrols every day.... but running a patrol on 5 different toons is the same difference. You get the daily patrol dill bonus and the same vendor trash.
I'm not suggesting its a great way to farm a billion EC. People run patrols anyway though is the point. If your turning in 150-200k every time you do a 2-3m patrol. I would say it's not that hard to make some pretty good EC over time.
EC just happens in this game it's created at a pretty high rate. I cleaned my reputation boxes out of a couple toons today. I just let them accumulate. I would say I probably run the 1hr missions a couple times a day per toon... so after a month I have 60 boxes per reputation. Sitting there clicking them open and selling off the contents. That is I would guess around 750k per rep. Some a little less some a little more. That is 9 million EC per toon every month or two just trashing the things I collect from doing what most people do to earn Dill.
All the little sources of EC add up. If people are really too space poor to afford the odd 30m EC space trait on the exchange... they should probably slightly adjust their play style. Pick up the stupid vendor trash for the 2s it takes. Do your 1hr mark turn ins that stack up the Dill and Boxes of more vendor trash. Run Admiralty missions... and get 100% on all the missions not just the x/10 ones. All those little 50k payouts add up. Run at least one patrol every day per toon collect the patrol daily bonus dill... vendor 200k each toon. If you do Admiralty missions for 200k a day and a patrol trash collection for another 200k you have only burned a couple min per toon. If you have 10 toons you are easily generating 4-5m EC a day without doing much different. Go a little more out of your way if you like and you can push that to 10m a day with a pretty small number of toons, and little game time.
Fair points. I don't believe a tax would work in STO... as you say yourself the market is fairly simplified. I take your point that taxes can work in some titles. I think I agree with you that perhaps with more complicated economies it can work. I think you have to remember that in most of those types of games the developers hire actual economists to monitor and adjust. Cryptic won't be doing that so it would be a show alright.
I also don't believe the predatory stuff people talk about really actually happens all that often. I watch enough of the major markets to know its been a long time since anyone thought... hmm I'm going to buy up all of X or Y. Duty officers it might be possibly in a few niches but that is only because those are actually in fact RARE. I mean if I pull a Ciuelsza doff as an example... how many Krenim packs did I have to open to pop one of those ? I mean if the answer is 20 that is 100m EC worth of krenemi packs. (and we all know if you pull one super rare desirable doff out of 20 packs you should buy a lotto ticket). So if someone is upset that I buy the ones I see people list at 30-50m I don't care... they are worth way more then that so I buy them. I relist them at 120-150m cause they sell at that price. There is never more then 2-4 of them listed... and if you get one under 100m you got lucky.
Your example of Duty officers is a great one. The supply is small cause the odds on doff packs blow. It's one of the games many gamble mechanics. I am willing to dedicate 2-3 toons per faction to having nearly empty duty office rosters so I can open packs. If I'm doing all that work to supply the market why should I undersell things. If I find that random person posts one at half its value ya I'll buy it... cause it costs me a hell of a lot more then that to create them.
Anyway playing Market Tycoon is also a valid playstyle. lol
Rarity sets pricing is my point. If you don't believe me pick something with ZERO demand. Pick something like R&D bits like Power Surge Regulators. Early with the R&D changes those went for 30k a piece all day long for probably a year. Today you can go and find 5-6 listings on the exchange in the 5k range and that is all. You could easily go and buy them all up for 3-5m EC. Completely wipe the exchange out and relist them at 30k each again. You could... they won't sell but you could.
As I see it people complaining about predatory practices are simply upset they aren't scoring exchange deals as someone else is claiming. They will justify this with I don't have all day to play like some people.
Naw, it's more like the real world, as in:
"We want more tribbling money!"
Nowadays though, it feels like someone decided that lockbox ships, which have a higher Supply, should be the same as Promo ships, which have a lower Supply and Higher Demand.
I can understand the older stuff being more expensive because the competition isn't there like it is with newer stuff. But even WITH the competition of newer stuff, they're way overpriced compared to past lockbox ships.
Best is to either accept their greed or avoid using it
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Exactly. Looking at the supply side, when I have things like spare doffs or boffs to sell, I price them slightly lower than other listings. Prices have gone down. Most of them sell, but then someone undercuts my prices and theirs sell first. Prices have gone down. Someone else wanting a quick sale then uses an even lower price. Prices have gone down.
Once we all sell ours, the extra supply is gone and prices tend to rise back up to what they were before because that was the price that more patient sellers can make a sale at with the normal supply level when they're willing to wait.