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GTN Economy Balance Needed


Vayek

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I was away from the game for a handful of years, only to return to absolutely insanity in the GTN prices. And I'm curious why this problem hasn't been solved before now.

 

A quick and easy solution would be to seed the market and force prices down by giving supply (at least temporarily).

 

1. Identify the items selling on the GTN for the past year or so

2. Seed the market with hundreds or thousands of copies of that item for a set price (much lower than the market is currently demanding)

3. All credits spent on seeded items are removed from the player economy forever and deleted

4. Players who wish to sell goods and make a profit will be forced to post those same goods for lower than seeder prices (because people will only buy the lowest priced of that item)

5. Once the market stabalizes and the excess of credits has been removed from the economy, remove the seeders from the market and let the player driven economy take back control

 

This would solve the economy problem inside of 90 days.

 

*Heads Up*

Now I'm not foolish to think there won't be any super toxic and negative responses to this. So, let me just say this now, I simply will not be repsonding to toxic and negative stuff. Simple as that. Don't have time for that in life. ;)

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What Xord is getting at is (probably) the part about looking for existing threads on the same subject. You certainly *should* look at that part.

 

Anyway, back to the idea itself. I have a few questions:

 

* How would you prevent those seeder items from being bought up by the people with oodles of credits and stocked for later, thus removing the excess supply? (There *are* solutions, but I'm interested in seeing your proposal.)

* Why would BioWare want to give away that many copies of Cartel Market items?

* Why didn't you address the excessive supply of *credits*, which is a key part of the problem?(1)

 

(1) Player-to-player inflation in MMORPGs occurs when it is too easy to acquire lots of money (credits) and too hard to spend them.

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I was away from the game for a handful of years, only to return to absolutely insanity in the GTN prices. And I'm curious why this problem hasn't been solved before now.

 

A quick and easy solution would be to seed the market and force prices down by giving supply (at least temporarily).

 

1. Identify the items selling on the GTN for the past year or so

2. Seed the market with hundreds or thousands of copies of that item for a set price (much lower than the market is currently demanding)

3. All credits spent on seeded items are removed from the player economy forever and deleted

4. Players who wish to sell goods and make a profit will be forced to post those same goods for lower than seeder prices (because people will only buy the lowest priced of that item)

5. Once the market stabalizes and the excess of credits has been removed from the economy, remove the seeders from the market and let the player driven economy take back control

 

This would solve the economy problem inside of 90 days.

 

*Heads Up*

Now I'm not foolish to think there won't be any super toxic and negative responses to this. So, let me just say this now, I simply will not be repsonding to toxic and negative stuff. Simple as that. Don't have time for that in life. ;)

You have taken neither capitalism nor player behavior into account. Ever heard of buying wholesale?

 

If I'm selling WonderWidgets on the GTN, and I'm selling them for X, and suddenly I see a bunch of WonderWidgets being sold for for X - 90%, you dang well better believe I'm going to scoop them all up and reprice them for however much I want to sell them, and if the game re-seeds more at a lower price, yep, I'm buying those, too.

 

Players spend hours doing nothing but playing the GTN for all it's worth, buying low and selling high. Not a crime.

 

For the game to introduce a ton of any given commodity priced less than current market rates does not mean a sudden stampede of thousands of players buying them at a low price. It means 3 or 4 players buying every bushel of that under-priced commodity and reselling them at market rates -- that being, what people will pay.

 

Artificially lowering commodity prices by seeding a ton of them won't garner the result you want.

Promise you that.

Edited by xordevoreaux
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I have said it before, and I'll say it again, institute a BoL vendor, who sells everything from S 1 PvP to {COOL THING}.

 

Make it credits only.

 

There. Credits leaving the economy, happy players, and no secondary market.

This will never happen because if they sell all the Shiny Stuff from NPC Vendors for Credits, no one will buy them from the Cartel Market anymore.

And we all know that the Cartel Market is a Main Source from where Bioware gets the money from.

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I exactly writed this a while back here and all of these wiseguys here were quick enough to defend GTN prices.

 

Economy is completely broken for months, and they finally doing something about it in 7.0, but then again, ı doubt it will fix anything.

 

I have seen so many responses where people explained, gave tips how to make or increase credits rapidly. Some players just aren't interested in making the attempt. That's no big deal until some of those same players start complaining about GTN prices. Once that happens enough, the good ol' devs step in and significantly reduce the amount of credits players can make through mission rewards and loot instead of adding pricey credit sinks that would appeal to players that have amassed tons of credits.

 

In other words, the players that know how to make credits that have been making credits, will continue to make credits, while those that aren't interested in that will now struggle to make what they were making. GTN prices will not go down. People will still come here to complain. Bioware stands to gain the most because players that can't afford GTN prices for cartel market items will see Cartel Coins as their only realistic option.

 

lol @ "finally doing something about it"

Edited by BRKMSN
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Inflation in the game functions the same way it does in the real world. Perhaps with less subtleties. BW could increase the supply. Instead of 5 items being available on the GTN, have 30. If there is more to buy competition for sales would increase lowering prices. BW could pump the game with credits. This is a major contributor to the inflation.

 

IMO, the only thing that hasn't been addressed is the Fee to put items on the GTN. Instead of basing the fee on the item, base the fee on the price the item is being put up fort. Increasing the fee would help 2 fold. Would help discourage over the top pricing. Since you're paying a larger fee for the higher asking price. Would also pull credits out of the economy over time. I would institute this change in Price Tiers. Hypothetical example. 1-500000 credits is 6%. 500000-10000000 is 12%. 10000000 - 10000000 would be 15% and so on. Just made up numbers....Just an idea.

Edited by Xhelis
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Why on earth would Bioware do anything to the GTN? The hyper-inflation is to their benefit. Let's look at it.

 

Nearly all the really high priced items on the GTN as purchasable through the Cartel Market. Letting the prices stay very high means many players will not be able to afford the credits price. This in turn encourages them to buy it with real money from Bioware.

 

Bioware is taking efforts to reduce the supply of credits in the game. Not a lot though, so GTN prices aren't likely to drop. It will, to the casual observer, perhaps look like they are taking action. However it isn't going to really do much.

 

Make items a pain to get in game but easy if you want to spend some cash is pretty standard tactic for mobile and free to play games.

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  • 1 month later...

I too think that with alot of items that are on sale on the GTN have ridiculous prices.

Like, let's say there's an item for 890 million credits... If i want an item that is THAT expensive...

 

Well, let's just say that i know some people "play the GTN" but i am not good at that so the only ways that i can actually make some money with is with either doing daily world quests and using my crew skills, but that does'nt really earn you alot of money. So if i want an item from the GTN that is THAT ridiculously pricey... it would take me months to get that amount of cash.

 

I mean who do those sellers think we are?

Bill Gates? Donald Trump? Elon Musk? Vince McMahon?

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IMO, the only thing that hasn't been addressed is the Fee to put items on the GTN. Instead of basing the fee on the item, base the fee on the price the item is being put up fort. Increasing the fee would help 2 fold. Would help discourage over the top pricing. Since you're paying a larger fee for the higher asking price. Would also pull credits out of the economy over time. I would institute this change in Price Tiers. Hypothetical example. 1-500000 credits is 6%. 500000-10000000 is 12%. 10000000 - 10000000 would be 15% and so on. Just made up numbers....Just an idea.

 

I agree, this is a good idea in principle if using lower percentages than above. And they could take it one step further by applying a similar scaled system to the GTN commission (Tax) that Bioware take after a successful sale.

 

But this would only work if it’s used in conjunction with a few other measures to stop people circumventing it with player to player trades. Ie, limiting the amount of credits or items players can trade outside of the GTN.

 

Currently the GTN tax is a flat 8%. But if Bioware added a scaling tax system based on the sell price, they could even lower the tax on lower end items and put downward pressure on people listing items too expensive.

 

Start the GTN tax at 4% for items under 50,000 credits and slowly increase the tax to 12% for top tier pricing above 100 million credits. At the same time, limit the credit trades between players to 100 million credits.

 

You could then have a listing fee that starts at 2% for items under 50,000 credits and maxes out at 8% for items over 100 million credits.

 

This would be an effective credit sink when all combined together. For each sale under 50,000 it would have an effective “sink tax” of 6% that would scale up to 20% for items over 100 million credits.

 

Bioware could even take it one step further by only refunding 50% of the list fee tax. But I think that should be held in reserve as an option to see how the other changes work first.

 

The important part for this type of system to work is curtailing the black market trades between players. If players can easily circumvent the GTN credit sink, these changes would be meaningless.

Edited by TrixxieTriss
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Why on earth would Bioware do anything to the GTN? The hyper-inflation is to their benefit. Let's look at it.

 

Nearly all the really high priced items on the GTN as purchasable through the Cartel Market. Letting the prices stay very high means many players will not be able to afford the credits price. This in turn encourages them to buy it with real money from Bioware.

 

Bioware is taking efforts to reduce the supply of credits in the game. Not a lot though, so GTN prices aren't likely to drop. It will, to the casual observer, perhaps look like they are taking action. However it isn't going to really do much.

 

Make items a pain to get in game but easy if you want to spend some cash is pretty standard tactic for mobile and free to play games.

This. There are many ways they could address the problem if they actually wanted to, but they don't want to and never have. It's not an accident that credit generation reduction efforts end up hurting new / poorer players the most; they are the ones most reliant on farming for being able to get anything they want off GTN instead of CM, so naturally they are targeted 1st under the guise of "curbing inflation."

 

The inflation is mostly irrelevant; the main drawback to it is hurting new / poorer players who haven't had the benefit of building wealth for a long time, which again, is to BW's benefit for profits. You look at crappy bronze CM items that nobody wants, that there are tons of, the listings will go down as far as the minimum sale price sometimes. This despite the hyper inflation and listings for hundreds of millions that actually get bought.

 

If they really wanted to curb inflation drastically, off the top of my head, they could probably just delete credits. Clear the GTN listings temporarily and at the same time, delete a percentage of credits on every player. Idk if they have the software to automate that and yeah, it'd be very drastic, but like, if they were really serious about it, there are probably ways is the point, without this tepid nonsense of pretending like they care about inflation by cutting down credit gain from missions a tiny bit or putting some expensive vendor items in the game that a handful of rich players will buy. It wouldn't be a long-term solution, but it would bring the numbers down somewhat. However, it still wouldn't do much for new / poorer players and why inflation hurts them. Bringing the farming gains closer to GTN listings helps, but only insofar as the supply is high enough to meet the increased demand and with how small the playerbase is now, there just aren't as many people putting duplicates up, leap frogging each other, to drive prices down.

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If they really wanted to curb inflation drastically, off the top of my head, they could probably just delete credits. Clear the GTN listings temporarily and at the same time, delete a percentage of credits on every player.

Do you want the game to die with the reputation of "the one that stole half its players' gold"? (More likely hyperbolised as "all" rather than "half"...)

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The way I see it, more price regulation is needed from the devs and BioWare themselves = price caps. And listing EVERY CM Item that has ever been released on the Cartel Market 'catalog' (including ALL decos and ALL dyes). Get rid of gambling Hypercrates altogether. When was the last time a sexy female outfit (Jori Daragon outfit as example) was listed 'openly' or featured discount on the CM?? Edited by JepFareborn
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Do you want the game to die with the reputation of "the one that stole half its players' gold"? (More likely hyperbolised as "all" rather than "half"...)

You gonna support it as a serious idea otherwise?

 

I wasn't making a suggestion to them. It was just supposed to be a quick off the cuff way to indicate that if they were really serious about inflation and deemed it enough of a problem, they could probably get drastic. The measures they've taken have always been the opposite of drastic, tepid and minuscule, like using a teaspoon to try to empty a lake. Or perhaps leaning down next to the lake and going, "Hey buddy, you want to... you want to have less water in you? Maybe? There's some desert over yonder if you want to be like that, I could maybe help with that somehow."

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1. Get rid of all credits ingame.

2. Get rid of all Cartel coins ingame.

3. Based on Credits and cartel coins players get compensations in terms of token per account (Not character)

4. Those token can be used in the cartel market for items OR for a large amount of credits. You can not do both.

5. Some ppl choose items from the cartel market others choose alot of credits.

6. Both sides exchange credits or items over the GTN.

7. The market regulates itself downward as massive credits are not present anymore.

8. Overpricing cartel items serves no purpose as no one could afford them in the transition phase.

9. Hoarding items is also not possible as cartel items can only be purchased once and not multiple times.

10. Problem solved.

 

After a fixed amount of time everything goes its usual way again.

 

I didn't say the solution is enjoyable nor that many players would absolute rage against it. But the issue is easy to fix like real life economics. On paper that is. The fact that 99% of the playerbase would absolutely hate this is another story.

 

However the same problem would arise again over time by the simple fact that the economy would do the exact same thing again. Hoard credits. Hoard items. Sell one item at a time while you have 90+ in storage collecting dust simply to keep the demand high but the supply low.

 

While fixing this problem is simple to do and relative easy as well i see no purpose in doing so? It was never easier to make alot of money playing the GTN? You could just use an item everyone uses or needs and start hoarding it. Sell it. Take the money and buy more of it from the GTN and repeat this till your storage is full. After some time you have enough money to buy the GTN empty of said items and you are the only provider now. If someone else puts it into the GTN you simply buy it and hoard it.

 

It was never easier to get rich fast than today.

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You gonna support it as a serious idea otherwise?

I wouldn't support deleting credits as any kind of idea. Doing something about the inflation is worth supporting, for sure, but I've thought for a while now that there's actually no way to fix it any more, that it's gone too far to be recovered.

 

Almost any means of combating GTN prices will drive traders off the GTN, and putting artificial limits on prices ((EDIT: in off-GTN trades END-EDIT)) will end as badly as it ends in the real world every time people try to put price controls in place.

Edited by SteveTheCynic
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This. There are many ways they could address the problem if they actually wanted to, but they don't want to and never have. It's not an accident that credit generation reduction efforts end up hurting new / poorer players the most; they are the ones most reliant on farming for being able to get anything they want off GTN instead of CM, so naturally they are targeted 1st under the guise of "curbing inflation."

 

The inflation is mostly irrelevant; the main drawback to it is hurting new / poorer players who haven't had the benefit of building wealth for a long time, which again, is to BW's benefit for profits. You look at crappy bronze CM items that nobody wants, that there are tons of, the listings will go down as far as the minimum sale price sometimes. This despite the hyper inflation and listings for hundreds of millions that actually get bought.

 

If they really wanted to curb inflation drastically, off the top of my head, they could probably just delete credits. Clear the GTN listings temporarily and at the same time, delete a percentage of credits on every player. Idk if they have the software to automate that and yeah, it'd be very drastic, but like, if they were really serious about it, there are probably ways is the point, without this tepid nonsense of pretending like they care about inflation by cutting down credit gain from missions a tiny bit or putting some expensive vendor items in the game that a handful of rich players will buy. It wouldn't be a long-term solution, but it would bring the numbers down somewhat. However, it still wouldn't do much for new / poorer players and why inflation hurts them. Bringing the farming gains closer to GTN listings helps, but only insofar as the supply is high enough to meet the increased demand and with how small the playerbase is now, there just aren't as many people putting duplicates up, leap frogging each other, to drive prices down.

 

Bioware can not delete credits. People have paid real cash on the CM so they can turn around and sell those items in game for credits. If Bioware ever deletes credits from players, they will forever be known as developers players can not trust and their CM sales will suffer. Bioware is never going to take an action that will negatively impact their revenue. Plus deleting credits does not fix inflation short term or long term.

 

The only way to fix inflation is to get players to voluntarily remove their credits via venders or unlocks at a consistent rate. Deleting credits is not the answer.

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Bioware can not delete credits. People have paid real cash on the CM so they can turn around and sell those items in game for credits. If Bioware ever deletes credits from players, they will forever be known as developers players can not trust and their CM sales will suffer. Bioware is never going to take an action that will negatively impact their revenue. Plus deleting credits does not fix inflation short term or long term.

 

The only way to fix inflation is to get players to voluntarily remove their credits via venders or unlocks at a consistent rate. Deleting credits is not the answer.

You're now the 2nd person who responded to that like it was a serious proposal, when it was just part of an overall post trying to make the point that they don't actually care about fixing inflation. Honestly, it doesn't matter whether it or anything else is a solution to inflation because it benefits them more to let it ride. There may come a time when it gets too out of hand and their hand is forced, but at the rate things are going, that will probably coincide with maintenance mode, so they will deem it as "we're not really here to do anything for the 5 remaining players at this point". We're already borderline in maintenance mode as it is.

 

Inflation seems impossible to fix because they don't want to fix it. They have never struggled with making decisions that are received poorly and cause players to leave in droves, it's almost a trademark of theirs, so that's clearly not any aspect of what's holding them back with whatever measures they could take.

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You're now the 2nd person who responded to that like it was a serious proposal, when it was just part of an overall post trying to make the point that they don't actually care about fixing inflation. Honestly, it doesn't matter whether it or anything else is a solution to inflation because it benefits them more to let it ride. There may come a time when it gets too out of hand and their hand is forced, but at the rate things are going, that will probably coincide with maintenance mode, so they will deem it as "we're not really here to do anything for the 5 remaining players at this point". We're already borderline in maintenance mode as it is.

 

Inflation seems impossible to fix because they don't want to fix it. They have never struggled with making decisions that are received poorly and cause players to leave in droves, it's almost a trademark of theirs, so that's clearly not any aspect of what's holding them back with whatever measures they could take.

 

you may have been joking about it but I have heard people actually suggest this as a permanent fix for inflation. Some players actually believe Bioware needs to just go through and delete credits anytime inflation hits a certain level some players do not like.

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