Changes to Gold Drops

Xavin

Lol, right. Nobody's rigging the credit market. It's not like all the credits weren't purchased the second the announce post was made and then placed back on the market at absolutely ridiculous prices. And I've heard names, or a name, tossed around. I'm not trying to point any fingers at specific people though, because that's kinda a crappy thing to do when I don't have hard proof.

Teani

Larion said:

I'm all for taking a wait-and-see attitude to see how this shakes out, but the fact of the matter is that a lot of things not related to credit economy have just gotten 10 times more expensive as well, and there will be people who never bought cryptic chests or credits who will be affected by that.

Some of this has to do with the changes to the Commodities. They don't flow into the cities constantly anymore, meaning the prices for them went up. In turn, that means things that require commodities have to be adjusted. I made some calculations regarding the cost of making certain enchantments people use regularly, like resistances, sigils and such, and realized I was selling my things at a HUGE loss. Some commodities are over 300 gold each and if you need four or five of those for an enchantment, you can't sell them for 3-400 gold anymore.

Larion

Right. And what we're saying is that people aren't doing it to stick a middle finger to Aetolia administration, they're doing it because economically it's the smart thing to do.

Toz

Xavin said:

Lol, right. Nobody's rigging the credit market. It's not like all the credits weren't purchased the second the announce post was made and then placed back on the market at absolutely ridiculous prices. And I've heard names, or a name, tossed around. I'm not trying to point any fingers at specific people though, because that's kinda a crappy thing to do when I don't have hard proof.

A ton of credits sub 9k were purchased by 1-2 people, and at least 1 of those 2 people just dropped like a thousand credits on artifacts/class skills. So that's a thousand credits off the market right there, and there sure weren't that many credits on credits for sale before that. It's kinda crappy to say things like that are happening period without hard proof, since it's essentially fearmongering/shaming.

Xavin

Double post for reasons:

Here's what concerns me. We have at peak, what, a hundred concurrent players? A hundred twenty at the most? Which gives us a total playerbase of what, around a hundred fifty if you count the people that are at wonky times?

Chests get yanked from the market and immediately the credit market gets dropped to about 65,000 gold per credit by one or a handful of individuals. And you want to tell me that lack of restraint on the part of a handful of players isn't the problem? Honestly?

Can you at least see how people might suspect that the credit market has less to do with economics, and more to do with a handful of people who have grown to feel entitled to the absurdity that was possible through cryptic chests deciding to throw a fit when those chests were taken away?

Ezalor

@Xavin you're missing the point. Who cares if someone is doing that? You have to be able to find another buyer if you wanted to do that and the fact that another buyer exists willing to pay the higher price means they were going to buy out the cheap credits anyway. It literally makes no difference to the economy whether or not someone is doing that. If someone is willing to pay 10k per credit and Person A has credits at below 10k it doesn't matter if that person gets them off Person A for below 10k or Person B who bought them and then resold them at 10k. The price will still settle at 10k.

Here's some stuff you can read if you still don't get it: http://www.investopedia.com/university/economics/economics3.asp

You can also try googling Microeconomics 101 or something idk.

Larion

I don't know what to tell you. I work on Wall Street, so to me it's an entirely understandable reaction to changes in the market.

If you don't like it, you should probably point a finger at the administration who chose to introduce such a sudden and turbulent change to the market rather than to the market participants who chose to take advantage of it.

Toz

Xavin said:

Double post for reasons:

Here's what concerns me. We have at peak, what, a hundred concurrent players? A hundred twenty at the most? Which gives us a total playerbase of what, around a hundred fifty if you count the people that are at wonky times?

Chests get yanked from the market and immediately the credit market gets dropped to about 65,000 gold per credit by one or a handful of individuals. And you want to tell me that lack of restraint on the part of a handful of players isn't the problem? Honestly?

Can you at least see how people might suspect that the credit market has less to do with economics, and more to do with a handful of people who have grown to feel entitled to the absurdity that was possible through cryptic chests deciding to throw a fit when those chests were taken away?

...What? What else are they going to spend their gold on? The gold that they, you know, worked hard to make to spend on advancing their characters? If you're sitting on a few million gold, and a reliable source of credit generation goes away (the only one, in fact), *WHAT ELSE IS THERE TO BUY*? Why would you NOT invest heavily as soon as possible, dumping a worthless commodity for one with value? The problem is the admin kneecapped the already staggering economy by removing the only thing that kept gold value standardized, and as I said before, unless someone wants to play Santa and hand out artifacts, people are going to want to collect credits with IG currency. This is not wrong, this is known as 'grinding'.

Xavin

Okay, I'm sorry. My bad. How -dare- I ask the people who have more gold than they know what to do with exercise just a little bit of restraint before they ruin the credit market for the people who aren't absolutely rolling in cash, or look at the bigger picture for what amounts to a rather small community of people.

Let me ask you this: What, exactly, was keeping the credit prices stable before cryptic chests were even a thing? Because yeah, they had crept upwards, but they were fairly stable in cost and it's not like gold generation was any harder back then than it was a few weeks ago. Honestly, the catching point for me is the statement that cryptic chests were the only thing keeping the value of credits stable, when they had been fairly stable for years with only minor inflation going on without the existence of chests.

Talfinel

It's sounding like being upset at the state of things, and people not having a clue how this type of market works.

I just wish there was this much effort being put into the real annoyances, like the waterwalking bull****.

Also @Xavin Credits will stay at whatever price people are willing to buy them at. That's the whole point. If you can only afford 5k per, but others are willing pay 15k per.. sorry but you can be damn sure people are going to seek out the 15k.

Toz

Xavin said:

Okay, I'm sorry. My bad. How -dare- I ask the people who have more gold than they know what to do with exercise just a little bit of restraint before they ruin the credit market for the people who aren't absolutely rolling in cash, or look at the bigger picture for what amounts to a rather small community of people.

Let me ask you this: What, exactly, was keeping the credit prices stable before cryptic chests were even a thing? Because yeah, they had crept upwards, but they were fairly stable in cost and it's not like gold generation was any harder back then than it was a few weeks ago. Honestly, the catching point for me is the statement that cryptic chests were the only thing keeping the value of credits stable, when they had been fairly stable for years with only minor inflation going on without the existence of chests.

Gold generation was not nearly so strong pre cryptic chests - power creep had it much easier to generate gold, and there was enough credits coming into the market to meet the demand at the price, keeping it stable. Now, as we see, there aren't enough credits coming in to meet current demand so the price rises. Economy 101.

As for your first question, yes. Somehow you managed to pervert people being good at gaining gold and spending it to enhance their characters/personal enjoyment into something awful and evil and twisted because you and others can't have fun without spending that much effort. The game is meant to reward people who work, not people who don't. The more we push the hardcore players away and favor the casual players, the more our playerbase erodes because those casual players don't stick around/contribute nearly as much as the hardcore, long-term players do. This isn't to say we shouldn't try to make things accessible for new players/casual players, but there is nothing wrong with hardcore players gaining an advantage (or spending their gold, in this case?)

Xavin

See, @Toz, that's where you're getting my point twisted. The hardcore players have some responsibility, at least in my opinion, to police themselves and realize when what they're doing might actually be damaging the ability of newer players to get a start at the game.

But that's my personal opinion. Again, I don't think it's asking too much to ask those handful of people that are rolling in millions of gold to exercise just a bit of restraint.

But thanks for the rather un-needed economics lesson. I get how the economics works. What I don't get is the resistance to the idea that a bit of restraint may be a good thing for the playerbase.

Toz

@Xavin, the playerbase shows a great deal of restraint. The credit market could be honestly, 100% ruined by a few people I could think of - but it won't happen because they're not out to cause trouble, just take care of their interests. The admins are the ones in charge of taking care of the playerbase as a whole, and while it might be nice when players consider the game as a whole, none of us are required (either restriction-wise or ethically) to take care of the whole game. We're players, not caretakers.

Ezalor

They made that gold, they have nothing else to spend it on, why wouldn't they buy credits. If your argument is now people are too rich and can just buy out every credit on the market regardless of whether or not they want to resell them then yeah, those people ARE the market which is exactly what's happening now and why I say the average player is getting crowded out.

The only reason it didn't happen pre-chests was because the high rollers didn't exist back then. Anybody with a huge amount of wealth then did it through buying credits IRL, not in game generation. It's only in the past couple years that people like Trikal, Zsadist, Mazzion, Munsia, and myself started accumulating massive amounts of game-generated wealth.

I think I've made just shy of 70 million gold to give you an idea of what magnitude I'm talking. I know for a fact that Trikal and Zsadist have made more. That much gold with nothing to spend any of it on except credits...yeah the credit market is going to explode with nothing tying it down.

If your argument is that rich people should hold onto their gold and refrain/be blocked from spending it for the greater good...idk what to say. That's like North Korea economics or something. I need to fix this problem so I am just going to block/take all of your money.

You're welcome for the lesson. I'm sure it made a difference since you're finally past the "reselling ruins market" stage.

Iselle

This discussion is giving me undergrad flashbacks.

Adam Smith!
The Invisible Hand!
Elastic goods!!

On the other hand, is it bad that I'm kind of enjoying how erudite everyone is about economic theory?

Alexina

Eh.

I don't agree that we as a playerbase should support intentionally malign behaviour that benefits the individual (just as such behaviour is not tolerated in real life). In many games, the players police themselves and I do not see why Aetolia should be a no-rules-apply zone. If the action of one hurts the well-being of the game as a whole, we should be able to question that action.

That said, I strongly feel like the current state of the credit market is not to blame on any single player. I made a thread months ago due to my belief that there was a surplus of gold in the game, and not enough expenses. The administration chose to remove one of the main gold sinks from the game, and the current situation is the result.

Xavin

If you don't think high rollers didn't exist pre-cryptic chests, I don't know what to tell you. There have been people sitting on millions of gold since before I even started playing. People have always had the capacity to clear the credit market or rig it.

Self-policing is something that used to happen here. And as @Alexina says, we shouldn't support intentionally malign behavior that benefits only the individual.

Illikaal

Bidness man goin IN with the economics bomb drop.

Ishin

Intentionally malign. Lol.

Jensen

While I'm currently not doing this because I'm broke; I will and always will buy cheap credits and resell them for profit. Looking to make gold quick by selling low? I have time, buy them up. Market swing and you didn't swing with it? I'll buy them up. It's playing stocks. It's a risk vs reward. I may not earn my gold back and I may need to wait a long time. Same goes for comms, which I will do the same for. Economics are fun to me and an aspect (though not a great one) of this game.

Lim

man, this guy. 

Xenia

Talfinel said:

Also @Xavin Credits will stay at whatever price people are willing to buy them at. That's the whole point. If you can only afford 5k per, but others are willing pay 15k per.. sorry but you can be damn sure people are going to seek out the 15k.

I think this basically sums it up. I'll support with my own story! I only started buying credits regularly in the past year or so, but I'd been playing since 2013. I never grinder for gold, the prospect of having more than 100k gold in the bank or in hand was entirely foreign to me. There are arguments being floated about that this harms the new/casual player when the credits are priced so highly. I argue that it doesn't, considering for the first few years of playing the 'cheap' credit price was also too high for me. I survived. If anything, I'd argue a bit of struggle and hard work endears people to the game. Those who don't want to work to provide won't even have to. If they're charismatic enough, they will be provided for by their community and things will work out for them.

On a different note, I want to discuss coms, slightly off topic but would welcome anyone's opinion on how this will effect things.

I've never really been the sort to grind for the sake of grinding. If there was a spectrum between 'casual' and 'hardcore', I'd probably rank somewhere in the middle in favor of the casual side. If a community was hit hard by any/all of these changes, I'd say it was the crafting community. Being someone who manages shops with tons of designs (they are Moirean's and if ever she returns, the shops will be turned right back over to her as she's the one who's made them so profitable) that require lots of coms, I've been sitting back and working towards amassing the coms I'll need in the long term. This means I'm buying up from cities while I still can, and then keeping tabs on the village coms as I relied heavily on the free com market of the cityies, regularly buying 1000s of various coms at a time without having to wait a few days to refill things like wood, ore, etc.

When finally the commodity change is felt, I'm concerned about how this will effect the shop economy, especially with player created items that were made for the sake of flavor. I doubt there will be a way for players to go back and try to redact the number of coms required, I also doubt the standard for ingredients for items will be changed. I'm curious how (if at all) this will effect trying to provide healthy stock quantities of weapons and armor.

Satomi

All I see coming from this is that the prices of weapons/armor will be at roughly @Areka level. (Not to hate on Areka, you have beautifully designed stuff. It is just terribly expensive, when compared to the norm of other places I run.) I think I also read somewhere about how Teani had to up the price of enchantments/sigils because of the profit loss due to the raising prices of comms.

The only thing that shouldn't jump up in price is curatives that don't require additional commodities to stack (especially reanimation cures, since it just requires slicing up corpses and harvesting inks, last I recall)

In other words. *points at Achaea* That.

Xavin

Keep in mind that, at least back when I actively played last, Areka was pricing to compensate for the stuff that wasn't up to snuff that she smelted and didn't get a full recovery from and make at least a small profit. It strikes me that people have probably been selling at a loss when it comes to the high-quality forged goods if their prices haven't been on par with Areka's.

It also doesn't help that if you're selling a minimum target for forged goods, you're kinda at the mercy of RNG. If you're looking to turn a profit and you're trying to pay down your investment in a hammer and shop too? You'll be at a loss even if you're trying to compensate. Even before these changes. But we're definitely going to see the price on at least some things go up. I know when I've run a shop in the past and was mostly peddling enchants, I was charging just above the cost to create and scraping a bit of a profit for my time/investment in shop-related artis. The long and the short of it, though, is crafting has always been expensive and is only going to get more expensive as comm prices rise.

Though I have a feeling that the comm change may have more to do with the massive stockpiles of comms that the player-run cities currently have and have been maintaining for years.

Jensen

Comms are slightly different because you can also use denizen markets which average out where the cost ceiling is (depending on how desperate you get for their stock to resupply)

Xavin

Right, but remember that repeatedly buying out the same comm shop's supply of a particular comm increases the cost that shop asks for the next cycle, after it has refilled. So what we're going to see, logically, is the cities locking down their supply and only selling to citizens, through a city-run shop alongside people buying out the village-run comm shops, driving the prices up. And this is just a fact of crafting in aetolia, particularly for forging due to the RNG component. Some things are, by default, going to just get more expensive so that the suppliers can at least make a little gold for their time.

Jensen

You won't see the city shop as we all have set up intern prices already

Xavin

Well yes. The question is whether or not those will end up reacting to the overall market cost we'll see rising in the village shops, and at what point will the cities cut off sale of comms completely.

Satomi

If you want to see the Aetolian version of locking down comm prices for non citizens, look at Duiran. I lol'd at the sight of it.

Jensen

Enorian just straight up doesn't sell to noncitizens as of a few days ago