It’s time to raise the broker and trade window caps

Ya know Walmart and a few companies started jacking up prices, despite some of the good being unaffected by the supply crisis just because they could. Just to pad the bottom line, id expect no different from players.

When I think of evil corporations, Walmart is at the top of the list about EA Games.

I dont think we need a price increase in the broker, we need more ways to drain the money out the system at least for a few months

I'd like to see the broker cap lifted. Trading is shady in game.

I am against raising the broker and trade caps. It only legitimizes and encourages higher price gouging in the game's economy.

This ^

The inflation is real, maybe time to take a few 0's out of everyone's wallet, I got enough in game cash that it would affect me but if it helps the system a bit it's better...
Tbh it's so bad that i don't even know that would help so... yeah

I know this discussion has gone round and round before, but you realize that the ONLY large cash sink in game is the broker fees right? Forcing people to hand to hand trade LESSENs the impact of that sink as it's not involved. Forcing people to do trades that will use over 1 trade window leads to more scamming opportunity.

The cash IS in game...how it got there notwithstanding. The only way to get it out is to consume it and with the 2nd biggest sink, gear repair, now out of the mix (with oracle bot), the more money filtered through the broker is a good thing, not bad.

And the broker does not generate any cash....period. It makes cash change hands. If you want to lobby for 'fixing' the economy, you should go after our 'cash' payments from runs or cash generated by selling items to in game vendors....those actually generate cash, which adds to the problem.

And you are right....the cap should be 10 bil...not 2. Each 10B listing will consume 500 million cash. THAT is a good sized sink.

The broker is your friend...don't fight it.

I'm down with this the day they can guarantee that there is 0 chance of another money glitch, item duping or whatever, that will then make my now lessened pile of money...even more worthless as compared to someone who will take advantage of those things.

As they have now way to guarantee that, I can't get behind it.

Wouldn’t a better solution be for Daybreak themselves to become a seller on the Broker, selling items as reduced cost to undermine the super high prices? I mean, they can create all of the inventory they want. It’s their game. They literally can create anything they want and sell it on the broker. This idea most likely will never happen.

Ahhh so the problem is that people trade outside the broker? for the sake of a joke, I will offer another option, reduce the limit for trading outside the broker to 100 million, so someone wants to sell something for 2 billion, you are welcome to 20 transactions ... hmmm ... maybe better up to 50 million? 40 trades.... well, or you can buy a couple of hundred different catalysts or other goods for 2 billion on a broker and exchange them in one trade, a double victory? or sell on a broker for 1 billion ... well, or something like that ... no, I'm sure that you will find some pitfalls here ... but this is just a joke ... sort of a joke ...; )

I’m not against the broker at all. I haven’t been fighting to not have it changed. All I’m saying is that the broker is the ONLY cash sink. And it’s not even a cash sink to begin with. That’s why in a previous post I suggested adding a way to the game to farm cash. I know weird. I want a cash sink but saying we need to be able to farm cash. However farming cash is a good way to slow down the profits of cash sellers. Why pay for it if you can readily farm it? By doing this you also get to increase the cost of cash through varied items. You can even replace prestige for cash or add an option to buy buffs with prestige or cash. Increase cost of repairing. Increase the tax size of the broker. Or have a scaling rack system. The higher an item cost the more it is taxed. Add a tax for trading directly. Limit how much you can trade directly while increases the limit for the broker. Add cosmetics to a vendor that can only be purchased with large amounts of cash.

My point is, there are so many ways that cash sink can be added and unless they add something than players will just continue to ask for the limits to be raids or removed over and over. Again, because there’s no draining of the in game cash

Sorry, but some way to get MORE cash in game won't stop gold sellers...cause guess what...they can farm it too, probably much better than you or I. They will lower the prices to keep ahead of the 'work vs pay for it' choice. We saw that when the glitch was active, the prices were down to insanity levels and they were still barking as much or MORE because now they were competing for scraps. Not sure if you've ever seen dogs fight over scraps, but it doesn't matter how small the scraps get....they will still fight over them...maybe harder even. I don't personally care about the gold seller's profits...which, in my opinion, will increase with some 'gold farm' route. The ONLY way you'll ever get rid of gold sellers (without taking away features from the users), is to hunt them and ban the accounts. If you ban enough accounts it will drive the prices up, and increase the work they need to do to maintain stores to sell...THAT will decrease their profits, maybe even to a point they give up on DC and move to the next game. Adding any way to add MORE cash to the game only makes the issue worse.

Take the gold sellers who were selling Comic materials. Do you think they went out and bought a bunch of booster bundles? Doubtful, they bought them off users and then used them as another thing to sell. People sell gold to the gold sellers in addition to whatever they farm. I'd honestly guess they don't 'farm' much at all, save a daily sign in to pick up stabilizers on the barkers. Gold sellers don't run content to get cash, they buy it from players (you ever queue in with one?...I haven't). If WE have more ways to get cash, WE will sell more to them...then they will sell more to us. Vicious cycle.

Yes, we need another cash sink. Maybe the new base item vendor is it? I'd be fine with being able to purchase some league prestige for large sums (1B= 1 buff...1 statue...or 1 row in the bank?) But 100% an item for sale in the broker for 2B will destroy more cash than a hand to hand trade for 2B, because that trade gets rid of none.

I'm actually fine with that theory, joke or not. Put the broker to 4B and lower the trade to 1B. That will force more transactions to go through the broker, meaning more broker fees(whether the item sells or not BTW) and less price 'creep'. The only thing that holds prices in check is competition (same as the real world). In the broker you have 2 days to undercut someone to promote competition. In the Trade chat, the only competition depends on who else is selling the same item at the same time. Less competition=higher prices. More competition (in the broker) means more listing fees are consumed and more 'bad' cash out of the game.

I've suggested this, but not 'created' items....I'd say items that were confiscated from banned accounts. All those Neons, OG auras, Flaming Phoenix feathers, mountains of Nth caches and any other items that were scooped up during the glitch nonsense by the glitchers, then were locked into those banned accounts were Ill gotten gains. Those items should be put back into the general populace, and the devs could add them to the broker at 1 Bil apiece. Every Bil used to buy one off the broker is another bil that goes out of the game. Every one of these 'rare' items put back into the 'active' economy means more people have a chance at getting them, meaning prices can lower as competition goes up. MSuper can't get them all (get yours today!).

I also think there should be some tongue-in-cheek incentives. Make a title of "Billionaire" you buy from a vendor for a billion. Hell, have one for a trillion. Cash sinks are one of the best ways to combat inflation and having it be carrot rather than stick is even better. Not my favorite, of course, but it'd be good. I still think a billion dollar buff soder that lets you trivialize all content for half an hour would sell like hotcakes and take a lot of cash out of the system. Let people solo a few elites for a laugh, the economy stabilizes, its win-win.

I'll forgo my usual posting of the times I've suggested this in the past 5+ years, heh.

Raise the broker cap. Completely disable and get rid of trades.

This oversimplifies the real problems and tries to gloss over many of the reasons for the current inflation problem.

1. You're right about several causes of inflation. Exploits allowed a large amount of capital into the market, but this didn't benefit normal players, only the ones taking advantage of the exploit. What it did was put total market control into the hands of a group of dishonest individuals.

2. You have no evidence for this theory. In fact, cash sellers have a huge incentive to drive up prices on broker items as much as possible. Their entire business model relies on pushing players to want to turn to gold purchasing rather than gradually obtaining items. The higher the prices, the more money they can sell.

What would happen if you get group 1 (exploiters with market control) that are also in group 2 (money sellers)? The exact scenario we see playing out on the broker. By owning virtually the entire stock of rare items and having virtually limitless cash available, it's relatively easy to artificially inflate prices regardless of true supply and demand.

3. This is true in a real world economy, but not in game market where exploited cash allows for near absolute market domination. In other words, imagine what the economy would be like for airline fees if there was only one worldwide conglomerate that owned 80% of all airline businesses.

Nothing would change in this scenario by increasing the credit cap because the source of inflation is artificial, not natural. Rising prices aren't due to increased player demand/lower supply. They're deliberated caused by market manipulation. Adding more zeroes would only further increase the wealth of those controlling the market, nothing else.

When you're part of a group that has hundreds of trillions in cash, what are a few billion between friends?

500,000,000,000,000 (500 trillion)
10,000,000,000 (10 billion) = less than 0.1% of total capital.

1) Yes, but that was in the past. Mepps said when they did the cash wipe that the issue was widespread, almost everyone in the game had illegite money, so it's not like there are people controlling the market atm, everyone who had dozens of billions or trillions were banned or had their money sunk. Gold sellers and exploiters (who aren't exactly the same, a lot of gold sellers probably didn't know about the bug and a lot of people who did know about the bug didn't gold sell) controlled the market in the past, but they don't right now, there are too many players trading.

2) I don't think that's the case, everyone got wiped out of their cash a while ago, hardly anyone has a hundred billion right now and that can't even buy a month supply of shaded comics. And I don't understand why people keep repeating having a big stock of items will give them control of the market. There's no oligopolistic behaviour going on, everyone else can have access to pretty much all the items, in fact, the price of most items that aren't in the collection/aura/material category have decreased substantially over the last 2-3 years in comparision to the overall money we can get. The behaviour would happen if gold sellers kept purchasing items and not reselling them and there was no else to compete with them, but it doesn't seem to be the case. What happens and always happened, even before we had gold spammers in the chat, is that people buy the rarest items and keep them to sell later, but then it falls on the devs for having low drop rates and not bringing the items back.

3) The source of inflation was artificial, but I don't see prices growing more than the expected with the entrance of premium players in the market. One thing is inflation, another is a big monetary base caused by inflation in the past, which is what people are complaining about on this topic.

More so of this: You "happily" paying that much for an item is actively encouraging others to continue selling for such high prices rather than see no return and lower it over time (unless they're one of those people who consistently does it despite it not selling, but the definition of "insanity" exists for a reason).