Ingame cash -- time for a change?

You must not have been around for the first money glitch

The real issues isnt the money, it is the acquired wealth through items people have now. The money could be wiped, but it would be a short term fix. The people with the items would have to wait to sell, but eventually the same people will be back to doing the same things. I dont think there is a fix anymore. The devs were asleep at the switch and now the economy is toast.

I have a couple of ancillary statements -

First, in regards to fairness: a lot of the money in game right now isn't there because of "hard work" or fairness, it's there because of the cash glitch and the fact that people cried up a storm when the mere mention of a reset was whispered.

People who started with a couple billion at the beginning of the SNAFU suddenly had tens of billions on multiple characters, reset happens, the cap was 25 B/player, now there's still literally trillions in the economy that wasn't there before on hundreds of accounts who never had billions before.

That didn't come from hard work and savvy businessmanship, that came from exploiting exigent circumstances and riding out the storm, then selling a bunch of stuff that was probably also glitched, but that was definitely exacerbated because of the forced scarcity that a very small sliver of our player base absolutely insists upon maintaining. And you're not wrong about that being a problem, it's definitely an issue.

Using the OP's example, 1 player - > 30 chars x 15B a piece, 450B on *one player* alone, as a result of those two issues. Good for him, but he didn't make that by running Plans and selling surplus Soders.

Second - and I know this isn't really your point but I do think it bears mentioning for everyone out there who is super in love with their imaginary zeros - you CAN make a million in about a week just by running old content and selling off plans. If you ran it all consistently you could probably do it in a day.

That money, once it enters the economy? Is never leaving the economy, except in the form of Soders, Repairs, and Broker fees. The economy would eventually recover because of that factor alone - cash in never actually effectively comes out. Not in any amount equal to what went in. Eventually there WOULD be billions in the economy again, it just wouldn't be so heavily bottlenecked and unevenly distributed, and it would have gotten there through actual work and dedicated grind, instead of cash glitching and Time Capsule Lotto.

Equalizing the cash factor and removing forced scarcity = problem solved. Right now, the charm's wearing thin though - Status Symbol MMO isn't the game I signed up to play, and when there are games with better mechanics and raw play out there the only thing we're really left with is the IP and the ability to customize, and customization loses its luster when you're dealing with such parasitic and exploitative internal economic conditions.

Points taken, don't disagree.

As someone who lost like half their net worth I can assure you it was not a joke.

I concur. You could take half my cash again, and I'd groan about it but I'm not likely to quit anytime soon. Most of the people who say they'd quit or even just unsubscribe are disingenuous.

I don't think this is still true. The big "Tax" that happened took a lot of money out of the economy. Unless there's a new cash-duping hack that's been discovered (which is entirely possible) I'd say most of the money in game is clean. But inflation is still going on. I think you're underestimating how easy it still is to make money off the broker. Most of my ~20 characters are now back to being worth between 2 and 10 billion. I just started a new one, and just dumping things on to the broker while leveling over a couple of days they're up to 50 million from scratch with no cash transferred to them.

Based on private discussions I had just before the Tax, that's not generally true. The accounts that went from nothing to billions overnight were found to be glitching and banned. Most of the accounts that made real money in that time had a lot to begin with.

And this, right here, is the real source of our economic problems. Inflation is real. The Devs see it and know all about it. There just aren't any good cash sinks in the game, and there won't be until the cash cap on premium players gets eased greatly or eliminated.

When cash circulates, that's good. But when it is produced infinitely and never leaves the economy, that doesn't seem to me to be a formula for long-term health.

Uhm, the handful of people doing the actual glitching were, sure.

The money they produced, injected into the economy, and that was later soaked up by all these "hard working" folks who were selling a single stack of Nth caches at a billion a pop or other ridiculous salepoint occurrences that took place during the period of cash injection?

There's a word for that in the real world - it's called "laundering counterfeit" and both ends of it are a criminal activity out here. There was no such thing as a 30 billion price point before the glitch occurred; there is now. That money came from somewhere, and in those amounts part of that somewhere is a xerox machine.

But it's not out of reach for long. Now while getting to 100 billion as Demon apparently has, might be, a 'reasonable' level of wealth will keep most going and by 'reasonable', I mean a billion or 2. Not so you say? Stabilizers are free if you grind every day...Megas come around every 3 time capsules. The last mega came with the mercurian flame box, which contained a shot at items that sell for 200-300 million a short time later. There are OP collections that still sell for 100's of millions of dollars that can be gathered by running the Atlantis or Speedster solos. There are OP components that sell for 8-10 million that drop in Open world or solo/duos. Even right now, the Pineapple chroma box sells for 60+ million. It's 100 marks. That's 10 days of running the seasonal and you can do it on 16 toons in <5 min per toon. It would sell better later, but right there that's almost 1 billion, so go get yo money!

Now....some don't want to do all that, fine. But to say it is 'unobtainable' is false. It's not 'easy to obtain' would be a better term. I'll give you newbies have a short learning curve to ramp up, but unless they are under a rock, the info is out there on what sells and how to make money in game.

Agreed killing off the gold sellers and perma banning cheats would go a long way to helping (or at least strip them to the bone and leave pennyless in the streets if they get to come back), that should have been done during the last mega glitch.

The only we'd ever 'fix' things in the economy is to wipe everyone to 0. Any amount of wealth left means that people with 100's of toons can horde what's allowed and combine later. And the only way that fix would ever be permanent would be if they can guarantee no further glitches and gold seller removal....which they can't. So at best, it's a temporary solution. Sorry, but I'm not giving up what I worked this hard on for a temp fix.

It was a joke. The economy didn't change one bit. A lot of us lost a massive amount of cash, but it didn't take long to gain it all back within a month or 2. A lot of "legit" people went from nothing to billionaires over those few weeks during the glitch. When you had things like nth cache stacks going for a full billion(up from the regular price of like 2-3 hundred mill), then later half stacks going for that full billion, a lot of regular players made a lot of money. Nth detectors, semi rare collections, etc were being scooped up by glitchers for up to 10 times their worth. People don't realize how much of that money made its way into the economy. Literally everything in the broker skyrocketed by the end because people were trying to convert 100s of billions in cash into resources because they were afraid of a complete wipe. All that money used went to regular players taking advantage of super inflated broker pricing. My whole league had 10s of billions each by the end and not a single one was an actual glitcher. Just walk through the Watchtower and look at a the "billionaire" tags during that time. It was a farce.

If this is just going to ride out like this, then the devs need to remove the cash cap in trade.

100000% agreed on every point.

So many people were even spending more money on the marketplace to flip in the broker for astronomical prices. So the company had their own reasons for sitting on their hands until it was too late. They were probably raking in the cash too. Probably why they didn't go with a bigger wipe like the last time

I don't think reporting is the issue. If they wanted, the devs could just grab a 30 min log dump of LFG/Trade and HOD/WT chats and get probably 50 of the barkers and shut them down quickly, quicker than we could submit tickets and go through that process. However, until we run out of 'asdagw3basecn' names, barker accounts are easy to remake and likely would not really impact the sellers much.

The only reporting that would make a difference is to report the guy who hands you the billion you bought. And to get that guys name you need to get into the transaction. If that's sanctioned ahead of time, great...that's a sting operation and would likely work (and yes, maybe it comes with some reward). If not sanctioned, it's leaving you out in the wind to get caught buying from a gold seller, so no deal here.

It seems like the Devs should conduct some of these sting operations to feel out where the real accounts that hold the money are, wait s few weeks, then do a massive ban. Done right every so often, it could do a lot of real financial damage to these sellers and remove a lot of cash from the economy at the same time. Win-win-win.

Why are you trying to shut down a reasonable conversation about an important in game issue?

Respectfully, I think your expectations about what was going to happen with that event were too high. The Devs weren't looking to fix the economy in terms of a long-term change, they were just looking to undo the massive damage that was done by the cash glitch. Even a 100% cash wipe would have been a temporary solution. There's just too much in-game cash generated from play that has nowhere to go.

The only long-term fix I can see is to create more sinks for cash. Sadly, unless they can safely exclude premium players from those sinks, nothing like that is going to happen soon.

Friendly reminder to not feed the trolls.

Reporting is not the issue. I wasn't being obvious in my intention when I made the suggestion.

The objective of the suggestion is to make make violators paranoid. When people selling names, or items, or gold sellers etc are afraid the person they plan to do a transaction with, will get "paid" to turn them in, they'll disappear or at least exponentially decline. You'll never eliminate the problem, but you can aggressively prune it.

You had to know this thread was coming when you posted the other one.

Why haven't we been updated on why mailing cash is still disabled? We were told way back then that it was temporary and that more economy fixes were coming. All we have gotten is radio silence on the issue. If we aren't getting any kind of fixes, so be it. Just remove the cash trade cap, unlock cash mailing, and be done with it then. These 2 things are affecting more "legit" traders than anyone else imo. If there is still a game breaking bug preventing these things from happening just say so. Dev communication has usually been pretty good regarding most issues in this game. But this one, which arguably affects the community the most has been left with silence?

On the bright side, as long as you're in a "fight" with me, there's a couple people who will like your posts no matter how wrong-headed they are just because.pettiness. ¯\_(ヅ)_/¯

That said, this is a pretty chill discussion (especially considering the nature). People are apparently happy to politely explore the topic.

Good questions. Maybe this will come up soon? Supposedly we're due for a development update...

I'm going to chime in and say what I've said in other posts regarding the same topic. I have friends in game that play the broker and all that and while I don't care for it much, they enjoy it and I wouldn't want that taken from them. But at this point, yes something has to happen because a billion dollars is chump change. That gets you like a crappy aura.

It's not about who has what anymore, it's about who is ruining the game for others. I personally do not care about auras or materials or literally anything to do with styles so I say this as an outsider. But they're very important to some and they will most likely do anything to get what they want. When prices are in billions and they want it now, they most likely turn to gold sellers. Which brings in fake money or whatever and that passes on to the seller who now moves more fake money around. Not good.

Those that buy things strictly to resell need to be locked out of that option. Can't count the amount of times that a player will go into the broker, buy up all the million dollar catalysts and resell for 4mil a pop. Make every single item in game allowed to be sold once. All these broker players are doing is making it impossible for new players to progress by being able to buy catalysts or collections tied to sp which in turn makes a weaker player base which in turn angers the "op" players because they're stuck playing with sub par players. 1st rebuttal will be "they can play the broker too". No poop sherlock, they sure could. But it would be a lot better if they weren't and were actually out spending time learning how to play the game and working on getting stronger.

TC sales don't need to take a hit. Open one, don't get what you want, sell it. No more worries about the gamerich buying to resell so only people that truly want or need can get it.

Cash wipe, meh probably needed but if that 1 change was implemented, it wouldn't matter as much. But it would be good for the game overall to have a 10yr "do over" and just start us all from scratch with the changes made. I know we all want the game to last and we all know that requires bringing new players in. At the moment, those new players need to catch up on 3 to 6 artifacts, 15ish head and lower augs, make billions of in game cash, and grind out 10yrs of some seriously time consuming feats. Yet we don't seem to really want to help them even tho we say we do. The population needs to help but we don't.