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New GTN currency


sicariustenebris

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In order to curb hyperinflation, especially in light of the most recent development, something must be done. I propose a new GTN-specific currency, to be implemented as follows:

 

How?

- Servers go offline

- All GTN items are taken down from the GTN while servers are offline and sent to player mail.

- A patch is applied, containing the changes to the GTN system.

- Servers come back online.

- After the patch, items can only be listed for sale in exchange for '[new credits]'.

- A tax, like the current one on credits, can be kept.

 

What are '[new credits]'?

- Obtained via completing any complex task in-game (i.e. NOT from crew skills, NOT from farming NPC mob drops, NOT in exchange for easily obtainable/farmable resources/material nodes. All of these aforementioned activities CAN be completed by bots, and should NOT enable the accumulation of the new currency).

- Some examples of tasks that SHOULD reward the new currency: completing FP/GSF/PvP/Ops daily/weekly missions. Perhaps weekly heroic missions, or class story missions. Essentially, like the current gearing currencies.

- The '[new credits]' should NOT be obtainable or exchangeable from any vendor, to 100% guarantee that a currency exploit resulting from a bug pushed to the live servers is IMPOSSIBLE

- These credits should ONLY be useable on the GTN to buy directly from the GTN, and should NOT be mailable OR tradeable between players. Make them legacy-bound, if need be, to ensure this.

- The '[new credits]' COULD be stored in a legacy bank.

 

What happens when an item is bought on the GTN?

- The sale price of '[new credits]' is deducted from the buying players' amount of '[new credits]'

- Any GTN tax is applied

- The asking price of '[new credits]' is transferred to the selling player's in-game mail, minus the GTN tax.

 

Voila, you now have a thriving new economy based on in-game content completion alone, unperturbed by exploitable bugs or credit farming bots. Everyone gets to keep their billions of existing credits, which are still perfectly useable for the casino event, repairing gear, buying legacy perk unlocks, buying stronghold rooms, etc, etc. Everything except the place that is the primary, sole reason for exploitation (criminal or otherwise) of the in-game economics: cartel market items on the GTN.

 

What are the potential downsides?

- People might be quite upset that their billions of credits can no longer be used to purchase GTN listings. The alternative, however, is for them to have even those billions eventually reduced to near-worthlessness by further inflation.

- Some people might join activities that reward the new currency and simply be AFK. There are work-arounds for this, but it may be a problem initially.

- Probably others. Feel free to make constructive criticisms in replies to this post. This conversation needs to be had.

 

Cheers.

 

Edit: added another potential downside.

Edited by sicariustenebris
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Honestly this would do nothing but delay inflation, and annoy far more people then you realize. Nothing in this game is worth what people are asking for. Nothing in this game on the GTN is needed for you to play the game. You can be self sufficient and craft your own stim/adrenals or anything else you need.

 

None of the CM items are needed for this game either.

 

Edit: You could realistically play this game with only 5-10 million credits and not have any problems. Granted would be difficult to only ever get 5-10 million becuse credits drop like rain.

Edited by Toraak
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Honestly this would do nothing but delay inflation, and annoy far more people then you realize. Nothing in this game is worth what people are asking for. Nothing in this game on the GTN is needed for you to play the game. You can be self sufficient and craft your own stim/adrenals or anything else you need.

 

None of the CM items are needed for this game either.

 

Edit: You could realistically play this game with only 5-10 million credits and not have any problems. Granted would be difficult to only ever get 5-10 million becuse credits drop like rain.

 

Eventually, it is possible, likely even -inevitable- that this new currency would accumulate in quantity and lead to inflation, yes. However, inflation is not necessarily a problem. Up until the credit exploits in 5.0, the economy had inflated, but it was manageable. Hyperinflation, i.e. runaway inflation, is a problem, and I believe this new currency would remove the sources of hyperinflation that currently plague the economy as it exists in-game today.

 

Annoying people is the main concern I foresee too, yes. But I do think that the majority of people, upon contemplation, will see that this solution is far better for the economy and far fairer to players in the long term, while having the additional benefit of effectively eliminating the source of income for the organised crime that has (by Bioware's own admission) become entangled with SWTOR's economy in recent years.

 

To be clear, I am not suggesting that anyone lose their existing credits, or that their existing credits cannot be spent on other areas of the game. This new currency would be required ONLY for GTN sales.

 

On that point, you are also largely correct that nothing is -needed- from the GTN (with the possible exception of materials that are otherwise prohibitively time-expensive/difficult to obtain, e.g. gold augmentation materials), and that objectively most if not all content -can- be completed with minimal credits. However, I do think that that argument is slightly side-stepping the issue I am highlighting. By that same logic, we needn't do anything about the hyperinflation -at all-, but I don't think that is the opinion that the majority of players have.

 

Everyone wants their character to look cool with cartel market items, and hyperinflation means the only easy way to accomplish that is by spending real currency. You could argue that since these are cosmetics, that is fair, and that is a valid argument. But that was not always the case. Cartel market items -were- easier to buy through the GTN in the past. So we have to decide if we want to penalise new players, by making them pay for the same cosmetics we older players could essentially have got for free in the past.

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● Gaia Online – Because of the presence of gold generators, the gold currency in Gaia Online experienced rapid hyperinflation, leading to a huge increase in the cost of goods.

 

To remedy this, the developers took the drastic step of offering to donate $250 to charity every time a player threw away 15 trillion gold.

 

article here

 

EA could offer, as an opt-in swap—not a requirement—something in exchange for players to discharge their entire credit holdings. Maybe a server transfer for every 2 billion credits discharged. People who want to hold onto their credits could, and those wanting server transfer for other than 1,000cc could get them.

 

Problem with that or any other similar idea is that it would drive up the demand for credits and in walk the credit farmers again.

Edited by xordevoreaux
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The main effect of this would be to drive *all* sales of anything interesting *off* the GTN. (We already see that anyway, since the effective price of lots of things is above the billion-credit GTN limit.)

 

Possibly, but then if it's happening already, and probably going to get worse, then what do we have to lose?

 

Sale of items might temporarily remain mostly in trade, for increasingly higher amounts of the old currency, but this will eventually reach the current hard limits imposed by the game (4.2bil). Eventually, over the natural course of players playing the game and being rewarded with the new, more value-stable currency, people would begin to favour it over the progressively further devalued old credits, and this could be further incentivised with small nudges toward the new system, such as introducing a trade tax for the old credits (like the GTN tax, but in trade), or even more drastic measures like putting a limit on the amount of old credits tradeable in one trade, like exists with the GTN.

 

Of course, the easiest way to solve the problem of people using old credits in trade in favour of the new currency would be to have both the GTN -and- trade use only the new currency, but people might be more upset by that.

 

I have seen many people suggest that the GTN price cap should be increased above 1bil, which -would- definitely go some way toward helping battle the rate of inflation, by increasing the amount of credits removed from the economy via GTN tax, but I don't see this as a viable long-term solution. As long as the root causes are not addressed, hyperinflation has no reason to not continue to get worse, and eventually even the new GTN price cap would be reached. So, then the cap would have to be raised again. It is at best a temporary solution. The root cause is at this point, in my view, unfortunately unsolvable. There are just too many credits in the economy and too many credits being constantly generated from nothing. You would have to expend far more time and effort going and addressing all the ways credits are being generated in vast quantities, and establishing credit sinks sufficient enough to result in a net loss of credits, than you would have to expend simply transitioning to a new currency system.

 

So, the options as I see it are:

- Start with a new currency. Keep old credits, but separate them completely from the GTN and possibly (quite likely) trade too.

Or;

- Painstakingly try and find and solve every potentially exploitable means of generating credits that exists in the game, of which there are surely many.

Or;

- Keep shifting the goal-posts with what would become increasingly frequent price cap increases to keep up with the increasing rate of inflation where gold sellers would, in my view, very likely maintain a monopoly over the economy and thus continue to drive inflation.

Or;

- Do nothing, and thus enable gold sellers to thrive even more successfully than they would if a GTN price cap increase were implemented.

 

Admittedly none are great options, but I think the first would be in every legitimate player's best interest.

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True enough, and there are loads of examples of things like that which have been implemented that do nothing but exacerbate an already dire situation. The tax evasion guild perk, for example, is nonsensical to me.

 

While we continue to use credits instead of some new currency we need essentially the exact opposite of that. For example the high cost of removing gold modifications from the old 258 gear, while in my view annoying, was a good idea because it was an effective credit sink. Similarly, amplifier tuning.

 

Again though, these are temporary solutions that only slow the rate of inflation.

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