A Fair Cash Wipe (Economy Fix)

broker has been out for little over a week now with most trade restrictions being around almost as long and it looks like early next week for any kind of return to form(based on a comment on twitter) so at this point I have to say its unlikely that a full cash wipe is coming, otherwise they would have wiped and had the broker back online last week.

Exactly. And if anybody from Daybreak is reading the thread, they need to realise that this is not a "one solution fits all" type problem. Or even a universal problem.

A few ideas for fixing the economy

1.reset everyone to 0 give in game items(material,auras, and others. or feat points or a free month membership as compensation and come out with a new currency that’s broker use only and get rid of cash trading(this also puts spam bots out of business. Would also need to get rid of the repair armor feature

2.put a cash cap on what things can be sold for example op collection max out at 100mil they can go for lower but 100mil is max and make it so each color(common, uncommon, rare etc) have their own price cap so the rarest have the highest max and the lowest cap out at significantly lower prices.

3.make cash like stabilizers where it’s shared across toons and then cap the amount each account can have if you go over the limit your excess cash is sent to escrow until you go under your cash limit to prevent loss of money.

4.Devs make dummy accounts that sell rare, hard to find and old items like original booster bundle items that are no longer in circulation and possibly new original items such as new materials, auras, base items pets then delete the accounts which deletes the money to help clean dirty money from the game.

Any number of these used by themselves or in combination with each other would help bring the economy back into reality.

unfortunately none of these solutions are realistic, however I do like the numbers 3 but I want them to simply put a glass cap on all cash for a couple of months, but they will need to have in several cash sinks while the glass cap is enabled

And by glass cap I mean like you can have like 2 million cash but if you're sitting at 5 billion you cannot make any more money until you're under that 2 million cash mark. No money is lost just no more money can be generated

I just commented about this in another thread actually:
https://forums.daybreakgames.com/dc...ity-and-the-broker.306180/page-4#post-4283462

See my quote below, they have been and are right now... taking action against outside influence. Sure you can't shut down the gold sites BUT you can shut down their hopes and dreams by implementing what they should be called, more robust anti-spam measures. You can also shut down the outside influence of trading via those methods against the TOS by actually banning accounts that state they WTS/WTB/WTT for any of the same methods. Also they don't need to monitor every transaction etc as you mentioned - this is what automated database queries are for.

Ohh and Hi Rein, should of said hey at start of quoting you - hope you've been well!

This would just be putting more of those items into the hands of the people who broke the economy.

That's where you are wrong. They can shut them down. They take them to court, is it expensive yes, is it time consuming yes. But in the end it may be necessary for them to spend the time and money in order to close at least the largest offenders. Make it more expensive for them to operate than what they can generate selling cash in game and they will shut down or move on and become someone else's problem. Not the best solution but perhaps a needed one.

"Want a fast and easy to bleed money out of the game." This isn't a fix, its a corrective action suggestion after the cheaters are taken care of.

Howdy TLS...thanks and I've been fine, just suffering a bit of inventory bloat at this point...hoping for some resolution to come.

Just saying, even if they set up a query, there would need to be some human intervention...maybe a lot of it...to tell 'legit' transactions from gold sellers. You and I have done business in game and I've sent you money in the mail. So how does DBG know that the million I send you is not because you paid me outside the game vs for some cats you gave me? So if the query is written to watch for A) money sent to a toon outside the account (a shared cash bank slot solves this too), and is B) over X number of dollars and C) sent from an account that is lower than a specific CR (I'd guess most sellers are not CR grinders as well) and maybe D) the same account that sends over X number of cash transactions a week/day. That would generate a result that would indeed point to many of the gold selling transactions...but it would also catch some legit transactions...so you couldn't auto ban. Also I'm sure the seller would catch on to the pattern and adjust....just as they do to get around the shout/trade chat restrictions already in place.

I'm 100% in agreement that they could do a lot more...not sure if they would or could put the time and effort into monitoring and maintaining things to adjust to the ever changing sellers. I think you'd see a burst of success that would drop off fairly quick. Just saying even if they could plink off all the trade/shout chat barkers, actually finding and stopping the seller accounts is different. I still say the only way to catch those is a 'sting' operation having someone buy gold and follow the supply chain to the cash holding accounts. Then do targeted queries to track the cash back vs queries watching all transactions in general. Either way I think we'll find out soon. Got on a toon last night that had about 10 completed broker sales with 0 days on the notification mail...and they would have finished or expired around the time the broker was taken down...so they are doing something.

Reinheld

Most are overseas which are outside US jurisdiction, you can try to make them to court but that's a waste, time capsules content trade does combat them but in a far less ethical and anti consumer way

So how do they know when the cheaters are taken care of? Let's say I have 300 million and some cheat has 10 billion and we use our henchmen/orbitals/sidekicks exactly the same. The cheat can use his stuff for a lot longer than I can as I'll be broke and won't be able to afford to pop those things. Yeah...that sounds like the cheats are being taken care of....way better than the honest player. As far as 'fast', the numbers you propose don't amount to much (5K+ say 100 ticks per henchmen a use=6K a use) even if you popped them 50 times a day (that seems like a lot of henchmen use...but sure), you'd only get rid of 300K a day, so in 10 days it would burn 3 million...100 days for 30 million....3 years to eat up 300 million. Seems pretty slow to me...especially if the cheaters just stop using orbital/henchmen/sidekicks.

Not to mention a lot of programming changes to implement. And the only way to know when to turn it off assumes that they know who the cheaters are...so they can see when they are actually impacted enough that we'd be 'good'....and if they knew exactly who they are they could just take action directly against them.

Reinheld

Was going to say what The Solowing said. If you think that DBG has deeper pockets than movie and music companies who cannot stop pirates who steal content and distribute it...I think you over-estimate their resources. And this is not even really 'Illegal'. Breaking the TOC can definitely catch you a ban...get you sent to court?...debatable. I do agree on the part that if you make it not worth their while to operate, they would slow or stop their activities. This is where adding a shared bank cash slot and stopping the ability to mail money would help...put a cap on hand to hand cash transactions too. Those steps would slow the spread of the sold cash...requiring more human intervention and time spend making trades of cash...meaning more manpower...meaning less profit for them (even at the 1$ a day they are probably paying their farmers). Going after their accounts in game to whack some of their stores of cash would also slow them down, and would cost less than a team of high priced real world lawyers. I doubt an intern programmer gets paid $300 an hour like some lawyers do...if so, sign me up.

Reinheld

Epic and Riot have both been know to take cheaters to court for violating their TOS/EULA's for their games. So I'm fairly sure it's a strong possibility as long as they actually have the will to go through with it.

Can't comment on those cases, but in the case of the gold sellers in DCUO...if you remove the whole money glitch issue, they weren't really cheating...they are taking advantage of the system and breaking TOS for sure, but generating gold and stabilizers on unlimited accounts is allowed and requires no cheating. As far as the actual infraction of selling the gold, it's no worse of an infraction than selling PSNs, your league hall or characters and accounts for RL cash (all of which no one is complaining about)....it's just a lot more annoying due to the chat broadcasts. Not saying the gold sellers aren't part of the problem due to the distribution, but if there was never any fake cash created their impact to the economy would be much lower and probably not worth a lawsuit. Now...taking the glitchers who caused the fake cash to court...sure. You can definitely say anyone who was creating money or items from thin air cheated and broke the game creating the need for DBG to take steps to correct things...meaning they are incurring damages by way of repair costs(dev hours) directly in response to the cheating. Honestly I think they could sue solely for the hours lost by Mepps having to police and take down these threads.

However...lest anyone think I'm defending the gold sellers...I'm not. I'd like to see them all gone, but I also realize the people who created the gold are the bigger threat and the excess gold in the game is the damage that needs to be repaired. I'd guess there are several individuals who have as much or more dirty money than even the sellers at this point. Think about it. The gold sellers benefit from having less gold in the economy. As it stand now, assuming the glitch mechanic is fixed but the gold is left as is now, they cannot compete with the pricing people are just shouting out in trade, meaning less earnings for them.

Reinheld

I'm fine with reset to zero and capping broker prices and I'm not broke sitting on a nice chunk of cash.
The broker has been out of hand for a while now and suspending trade and mail trade is ideally the best approach.
The game will live on we may lose a few but in the long run this is better for the game.
Compensation would be nice but unlikely.
Even if you traded sold straight up the money is tainted.
There are more important issues then money in my opinion the game lacks new player incentives to stay the skill gap, SP lower content unplayable its all about the end game and the end game content. This is my opinion and solely my take I feel as the the growth has peaked to a select few that continue to support the game with no upside for new players.

Well the thing about me and you trading items for cash was legit, you could see in chat logs and the messages in the mail what it was clearly for. Now if there are no chat logs, sure someone could have messaged you on a third-party service such as Discord, Skype, Social Media and asked you to pay money owed... some in this game still owe me hundreds of millions from pvp years ago, when leagues were offering prizes of 100mil for Friday Night Lights league vs league - I haven't seen them login for ages so I highly doubt I'll see that cash, ever.

Now let's examine that ^ statement: Sure people could just "give" people money, before 100mil was worthless due to Hyper-Inflation I had just given away 100mil just because the other player was fun to chat with and had a sense of humor - if you could only see how excited they were to receive the cash you would have had a smile on your face too! Thrilled is the word I would use to describe the tells sent back to me . People can do things that may seem odd but actually have underlying "good intentions". This differs greatly from a blatant lack-there-of in regards for the Terms of Service type of trades that have made the economy go into the toilet.

I honestly see people reading others posts which seem solid, good feedback and good intentions but I don't see people looking past the fog into the road ahead to realize what this will entail. Most in this thread and many others are basically saying it's okay to cut off our nose to spite our face whether they realize it or not. Daybreak may make a decision many of us aren't happy with but by that time it will be too late and their time capsules if they do what I believe they might won't really hold the value they did in the past which will be detrimental to their sales. I honestly don't see why everyone doesn't recognize the fact that all the psn/cashapp/other ways to buy and sell outside the TOS are what made Neon go to 10-15bil in a little over a week - think about it... why else would we finally see WTS Neon $100 Cashapp if the outside influence hadn't ran up prices - sometimes I feel like I'm arguing a point to 3 year olds who can only say "you look silly" and that isn't directed towards you it's just a general blanket statement to say that most of you never saw this coming until it was too late, I however kept logging-in and going WTH is this?!

After I started seeing WTS Neon for $100 CashApp I finally started reporting... within 48hrs of that I had submitted so many tickets about TOS violations that on the 49th hour (around that time, rough reference here) broker was disabled and trade restrictions were in place - so that tells me they saw the reports as valid AND decided to act on this (Thanks Devs!). I told them in a ticket "If they're selling Neon for $100, that's $100 less on stabilizers being spent" which is a valid point and I'm glad that statement seemed to make a difference and things have now come to this... which I'm unsure if I like broker and trade being restricted during launch of a brand new dlc. If they would have just kept the accounts banned things could have moved on - during the initial bans the outside "influences" were rarely being posted i.e. WTB/WTT/WTS for PayPal/PSN/CashApp etc so just the initial suspension put the fear of (you know who) in them! That's all it took lol, I was rolling around lol'n over it because those doing the most harm were now running scared. Some known scammers tried to post in trade chat and were basically told off and told that wasn't allowed anymore. You guys we don't need a wipe here, we just need the truly problematic players permanently banned and it made known that TOS violations will be reported, acted upon, and remedied in a timely manner - with some caps in place things would stabilize but you guys are basically saying right now "I've spent my hard-earned money on all these stabilizers and accrued money and items from them to only see all that be wiped and I'm okay with that" so the value of time capsules is apparently nothing now - why would Daybreak harm the value of their product that makes them so much cash to begin with?!?! This isn't entirely up to the dev team either, I'd imagine upper management is now involved as well.

We shall see, we shall see... grrrrrrrr

It was a lot to add to the reply....and most of it was exactly why we need some sort of adjustment, which I believe you are arguing against? Not sure anymore as you were referring to things 'losing value'...which is already the case and why we need some sort of 'wipe'.

People are worried about losing money...I get that...I am too. I ground things out just like a lot of people including sitting on items for years before selling. I will get screwed out of the cash that I accumulated from this....but that cash is worthless anyway. Case in point...a few months ago, I was selling 'Blue Azure mist' collections like 'St. Walker' for 80-100 million. While even back then some of that could be dirty money, the same thing right now can bring a billion+ possibly, so the money I generated is 10% value at best. The only money that is 'worth' anything is the money that has been generated recently(which the cheats have in piles...others only have a taste) and there is no way to retro track every transaction to collect all the piles of money that have been shuffled about. It would be nice if counterfeiters would print their fake money in red ink vs the standard green ink, as it would be so much easier to go find the fake money later....but of course that would defeat the purpose. If DBG had a way to tell the good from the bad money at the 1 dollar level, they could just Thanos the dirty cash away and some would lose lots...others would lose little or none...I'd guess that's impossible without an NSA level forensic accounting team to go over the logs (if they exist).

I go back to the fact that assuming they can't ID all the cash, and it remains in game, the only ones who are not already negatively impacted are the people who benefited the greatest...either buy making/buying gold or by attempting to profiteer, seeing what was going on and attempting to accumulate billions of quick cash. The guys who were doing the normal grind and caught a couple of high dollar items and sold, unknowing of the situation...and someone who did absolutely nothing for the last few months are already screwed if the dirty cash remains. Imagine you are someone who was 'rich' (1 billion) when taking a break 3 months ago. If you come back today and try to jump in the economy, what's your 1 bil worth now? If that same guy comes back and has 100 mil instead, I'm sure he'd be pissed (I would be too), but if all the prices drop as a result...is he worse off?

At this point I'd guess the discussion is moot. As of the last message in the 'announcement' thread, it sounds like the change is coming next week. I'd guess the decision is made already...one way or the other. My biggest concern is the items. I believe if cash is kept as is we'd see a change to items(at least TC or OP related items) being account bound or completely untradable, which to me is the absolute worst for us players as it further forces you to only buy TCs if you want those items and virtually guarantees having to spend more RL money to get things done (via replays or stabilizers).

As you say....we'll see.

Reinheld

I totally agree with punishment for those who exploited the money glitch, however if people have made a fortune in the game by pouring literally hundreds of real $$$ into time capsules and profiting for that, this is definitely NOT a fair suggestion.

If the 1st wave transactions of the exploit can be tracked, those doing so should either have their funds wiped or be banned (the wipe I believe is fair)

Anyone who made money off the “money glitchers” may not have known the source of where illegally obtained cash was coming from and probably sold something they attained through fair / luck channels, therefore these users shouldn’t be made to suffer.

Lastly, I believe if they are not going to completely banned those who exploited the glitch (remember, it only existed due to the system design) they should be excluded from the next account locked gifts dropped as punishment.