A Fair Cash Wipe (Economy Fix)

And your way, the people who traded fair and square will be punished just as if they had cheated. No thanks. The only fair way to do it is to find the cheats and remove their money, and ONLY their money.

Dcuo cash being tied to real money is EXACTLY why it needs a sledgehammer taken to it

That's why a progressive wipe would be the most fair, if we're to the "wipe cash" phase. 10% of 1,000 will hurt more than 10% of 1,000,000,000. We want to preserve basic ratios of wealth while bringing the overall inflationary levels to something a little more reasonable.

Unless you're one of the Marxist revolutionary "Eat the Rich!" types floating around here. For a game. Because they aren't as good at the game. Might as well start redistributing the Elite gear while we're at it.

I'd be able to live with that, but I think some things would need to happen first to make it so people can't loophole their way out of the wipe.
1) Create a shared cash slot in the bank
2) combine all cash on the account into a single pile...so people who have distributed 999,999,999 to 20 toons don't end up right back at 10Bil after the wipe....They would be at 2Bil, which is still a pretty good start.
3) Cancel any mail transactions that are in transit so money could not be hid in mail transfers
4) once the final post wipe cash number is calculated, convert that pile to some new currency (DCUOgold or whatever), so any nooks and crannies where cash is hid away and missed is gone forever if it's later dug up. Purge the 'cash' from the DB, starting fresh with the new currency.
5) Place the new currency in the shared bank slot for cash. Members can withdraw as needed on whichever toon they want, Premiums and F2P are kind of screwed at 0 for the start (like it would take long to refill the 2K or 3K wallet), but could withdraw if they went member or bought an 'escrow' token. All money collected over 3K per toon goes into the shared bank cash slot going forward, taking the place of 'escrow'.
6) remove cash trade from the mail (no longer needed to move money between a single account toon), leave the broker cap in place at 1Bil and make hand to hand transfers of cash limited to 100Mil. This would allow for 'friendly' transfers of money, although make them more of a hassle and would greatly hamstring the gold sellers who mail their gold...and would now have to 'meet' with someone, maybe for several transfers for each sale. Relatively high ticket items would have to go through the broker until at some point we break the economy again...in which case this all starts over.

Reinheld

PS...I know that's a lot of changes, but I don't think there is a simple way to somewhat fairly wipe the cash problem that the cheats haven't already found a work around for.

PPS....and I'm not proposing this because I'm broke....the opposite, I would lose a few billion I definitely ground my butt off for, but the way it is now, even the hardest grinder won't be able to catch up as the next TC and DLC come out. Trash seasonal drops were already posted for 1 bil before the broker went down...it's just the status quo now.

i set new prices over the years. if something sold for 100m previously and none are on the broker, i typically double the last one i knew about that sold. supply and demand. my increase in OP collection drops appear to favor certain toons, so i capitalize on that luck rate more than anything else. but as far as the increase cash flow? no. although it appears i get the rare collections often, this is not the case. i do have more money saved now but that's because there's not really anything i want off the broker (when it was still turned on).

Money wipe won't do a thing until they stop the egpal site and money sites they need to disable mailing money. And then it b faster to track people.

Or just take out broker all together b4 tc capsules and booster bundles money wasn't a deal. And the game ran just fine

perhaps the best solution is to remove the concept of game money, give us free limitless repairs and sodas, and make nothing tradable? sarcasm aside... i get what you're saying, but that doesn't mean i have to agree... at the very end of the day..... this preorder, lifetime subscriber still does not agree money should be wiped or taken away.

WTF? There are just so many things completely out of touch with reality in that statement. I wouldn't even know where to begin.

Pretty much this. I suspect anyone who's sitting on large sums has distributed it already.

My thoughts are a scaling cash sink, prior to a posted cash cap. By scaling have items (styles, pets and base items) that are progressively more pricey. Of course items should be account bound and not be attached to feats.

This would give give people a period of time, say a month, to voluntarily spend their excess on these items and then create an account cash cap of X (let's say 500m for argument's sake). I say this as someone who has more than that amount, it'd at least go some way to salving hard feelings about a cap.

Even better in conjunction with this make wallets account wide. That'd both be a feature many have asked for in the past as well as prevent account distribution.

I don't think this won't have as large an impact on gold farmers, that's another issue, but I think it'd reduce the overall cash in the circular flow and would hopefully mitigate some of the hard feelings. I get that people without the cash would likely feel left out, but at the end of the day the benefit to them is they'd have a more approachable marketplace as a whole once the process is complete.

So, please, explain to me why it's fair for me to lose cash from my account, most of which was earned before the start of this year. Fair would be removing cash from the cheats and glitchers, and those who have deliberately taken advantage of this situation (so anybody who sold anything for a grossly inflated price), instead of from people who have done nothing wrong.

You cut off the rest of the sentence where I said "If we're at the 'wipe cash' phase". Ideally, there won't be any money removed from players in general (i.e. the ones who have done nothing wrong). With any luck, once the easily spotted glitchers/cash hoarders/etc are banned/removed from the economy, what is left that is floating around won't be too far out of line with what the entire monetary supply should be.

The issues we're facing is the fungibility of cash and how quickly you can launder it. Coordinated syndicates of accounts/toons could sell a few strategically overpriced items in the AH to shift cash quickly and suddenly it's three or four transactions back from the glitcher...or the glitcher bought a bunch of stuff off the AH to pass off the cash just to randos who started to raise prices because things were selling for the higher prices. Things snowballed. It would take a team of forensic accountants a long time to sort through all of that to figure out who is guilty and who isn't. I imagine the dev team doesn't have the time nor inclination to do that much specialized work.

So please, if you wish to engage on the topic...at least read an entire sentence before flying off the handle.

so you want us who have been here since launch and have done nothing wrong to our cash taken away. That doesnt seem so fair to me, But as long as i get all the **** ive sold on the broker since launch back i guess i could live with that if not just like everyone else says Id just walk away from the game. Sucks but Im not suffering because half a dozen assclots cheat

So, what does all this mean with regards to when the broker or something else will be put back online ?

Never bought the Gold spam crap.

Probably put (besides membership) maybe 100 bucks in 8 years.

Have around 15 million game cash via 5 toons.

8 years nowhere close to a billion let alone multiple billions.

I don't care what they do really.

I am not smart on math, especially when it comes to taxes. I expected to see straight values, but a cursory glance tells me there's no way in gehenna that a straight 75% on 2.7bil leaves 1.07bil behind.

Using 260M (I'm too lazy to work out the higher values) is the example, I am assuming:
0-50 would remain untaxed.
50-100 (a total of 50M) is taxed at 10%.
100-260M (a total of 160M) is taxed at 25%.

This would create a bell curve of "diminishing returns" instead of a straight line, and ends up at the 215M you stated.

It's probably a more elegant solution out of a series of nothing-but-bad options, regardless of necessity. I think for me, I am going to just hunker down and ride this out. Where we end up is where we end up. I don't mean to sound like "I only have pocket change so I don't care what happens", but I honestly don't know of a good solution.

My personal suspicion is that there is simply going to be a cut-off value, but I don't know the devs minds. All I can say is, "Good luck everyone, and I'll see you on the dark side of the moon."

You are right about what you are saying. Each bracket gets taxed at that amount. This way also, you don’t “win” by having 999M and 1B gets screwed.

What you said about there being a cutoff value is my suspicion as well, that’s why I am suggesting what I am suggesting, in order to avoid that at least.

I've read the whole thread (and all the others on the same topic). They all contain people crying out for cash wipes (some of them for wipes down to zero, some for "progressive" wipes). I'm still waiting for somebody (anybody) to satisfactorily explain how removing anything from people who have done nothing wrong would be fair.

No cash wipe, please.

Simply fix the glitches, punish the handful of glitchers and let those of us who earned their money honestly (through the selling of collections, TC items and furniture) - keep it.

I'm hovering right below 500 million right now...tipped 1 billion briefly a few months ago.

No need for a full game cash wipe.

If I pool all my characters together, I may have somewhere between 60-70 million. I did play the broker some but this was before we merge with ps3/4. I made my biggest fortune selling the kick me sign when it was popular, I split the money with another person when we sold it on the broker. But I actually made more money selling plans in the vendor and just playing the game. When plans are selling for 23k-36 k, you can build up revenue, might take longer then vendor but it's possible to make a few millions just playing the game.

So my question what about people like me who just played the game and selling stuff in the vendor? Should we get a money wipe too?

I prosed an idea on another thread.