Devs: How to fix rampant inflation.

Long... so either be patient, or just skip to the last post, and repeat things everyone else has already said .

There are a number of perennial requests that are related to in-game cash.

1. Please raise the cash cap
2. Please fix insane broker prices.
3. Please lower repair costs.

The first two are inevitably the result of the cash glitch way back when.
The third is a fairly reasonable request, but is stifled without either dropping repair costs, *or* raising the cash limit. It also means that Vendor items would need their prices to be adjusted to still make some items unaffordable to non-Members.

However. The solution is here in the form of Source Marks - and the fact that they can be converted to Quarks.

At present, Quarks > Cash > Source Marks, in terms of utility.

You can only buy items from the Quark Vendor with Quarks, or you can spend millions to buy them (or their collections etc.) from the Broker. Source Marks can be used to buy pretty much anything that isn't covered by those two (and also Quarks)

In order to allow repair costs to be cheaper, we need to make the order be: -

Quarks> Source Marks > Cash.

Two suggestions spring to mind, one of which the glitchers are not going to like but they go hand-in-hand...

1. Allow Repair costs to be alternatively paid with Source Marks.
2. Reign in the insane inflation, as follows: -

a. Announce that there will be a cash hard reset of all accounts with over 100,000,000 in-game cash in ONE YEARS TIME.
b. Allow Source Marks to be bought during that time for X amount of in-game cash.
c. Reset all accounts down to 100,000,000 maximum at the end of that year.
d. Watch the Broker normalise.

Cash hard reset wouldn't work. You'd spread out your billions on alt toons, alt psn's/accounts, or use the mail to store it temporarily.

I beg your pardon but I earned my $600m+ the hard way. If my cash were to suddenly reset, I would be very very unhappy.

Honestly I don't see the broker "normalizing" that way. It's already significantly hard to get anywhere close 100k cash or something just using cash drops from instances. Removing most of the money might make everything "cheaper" on the broker, but that consequently will also make it harder to even get the cash to pay for the "cheaper" items.

Agreed.

It won't be gone - you just need to trade it in for SM. which you can then trade in for Quarks. And your 100,000,000 will be proportionally worth *more*, because it's the most *anyone* will have? At present it is not.

I think you misunderstand how many times 1,000,000,000 divides by 100,000,000. How many accounts do you have?

Having the devs step in and "fix the insane broker prices" would not go over very well. They've always been hands-off in that regard and let players determine market value on items. Shifting on that would create some backlash.

It comes down to this with broker prices: if people weren't willing to pay those prices, they wouldn't be that high. As long as someone's buying at those prices, they'll keep selling at those prices.

better idea, let's observe the natural balance of supply and demand in economics for once? the items are the "price" they are because the game broker works like a free market, people "can" put stuff up for however high they want, and supply and demand will dictate who will on average buy it if anybody, as nobody buying what you're selling is the reverse hydra head of a free market, buyers whim partially drives it. let's ask ourselves "what is going for millions and even billions?" and the answer is? most of you probably already mentally said "capsule, booster bundle, and DLC specific rares." and you'd be largely right. now two of those can be changed and one of them already is being handled slowly but surely with the stabilizer event>quark>quark vendor system, but i don't see two of those changing. maybe make rare DLC related stuff like the expensive DLC secondary vendor rewards? could work and it would knockout a good bit of the inflation, along with 2 resurgences a year. the way i see it, you can pay in two things in life: money or time. unless we want to legalize blood sacrifices again which i would be in favor of ......

Supply and demand only works when there is not a huge enforced disparity between the richest and the poorest in an economy, and no false constraints on the availability of wealth.

With the richest having no real limit to their wealth, and the poorest capped at 1500, you must see that that is a lopsided equation - NOT a free market.

To have a truly free market, you would need to give F2P and Premium unlimited access to their cash. "Free" it is not.

What you actually have is a "regulated market" .

DCUO already did a cash reset to 100mil in 2012 I want to say because of the rampant money exploit on the USPS3. All players did was mail them separate mails, have multiple accounts with money on them, bought everything that was expensive on the broker to later resell etc. Sure the unintelligent players that wanted to keep all the money on a single toon so they could look at it were reset but the majority who had money had multiple ways to spread it out.

more like a primitive caste system if anything. I most definitely agree that if we're going to have as many raid/alert failures as i've had the past week over people's failures to perform adequately then armor repairing allowance needs to go up a good 5k or so. however time should still be a viable replacement currency even in this closed permanent caste system DCUO has going, nothing that can really be done about booster bundles though, those items are permanently rare and will probably stay that way. though i do like the devs' new strategy of rewarding rare materials/stuff through the vendor for a good few weeks worth of DLC specific currency, both cuts off some of the stuff that can be sold for millions and slightly prolongs content involvement and relevancy.

I have no complaint about cosmetics commanding ridiculous prices. Because they aren't progression. Buying those is a vanity issue, not a game issue. But then I am a Spike, not a Vorthos .

There's actually quite a lot of interesting stuff to read in that article (and it's links) as to why the Player base disagrees so much . Mostly, people don't recognise that other kinds of player (that are not their own) exist.

Just to be fair, though, if a F2P or Premium player isn't subscribing or paying for escrow access, should they have the same amount of access to that market as those that do pay?

Probably not, but I don't want to hear that "free market" argument again, when it's obvious that the "free market" only applies to Members. In other words, it's a "closed market".

Well, the easy way to deal with that is for mailed cash to just go straight into your account. That was how it worked in around 2013-2014 - and I believe it still *does* work that way if a Legendary sends cash to a Premium? Let me check that.

And buying expensive stuff that you will inevitably sell at a huge loss later isn't really efficient, when you can trade the cash for the alternative currencies.

ah, i see. you're most likely referring to things like the reagents for the omnipotent cloak in JLD then? can't ever really say i've chased after that sort of thing, our system of progression in regards to omnipotents and DLC to DLC/expansion seems analogous to WoW's which replaces stuff gained nearly every DLC/expansion come the end and start of the old/new one. i'd have to say i'm more of a johnny than anything with a bit of vorthos thrown in, gotta look semi-nice with a bit of flare while laying down and planning those elaborate strategies XD.

Personally, no. I don't actually *want* anything in particular off the broker. I'm grinding for those reagents, because I want the feeling of achievement when I get them. This thread isn't me crying about not being able to buy something, it's an attempt to fix the ridiculous inflation we're experiencing for *everyone*.

I'm naturally altruistic, seriously.

The cash cap has nothing to do with inflation or money glitching.

The developers are in direct control of anything a premium player can choose to purchase with their cap.

The glitching didn't affect premium players because they have never participated in the broker anyway, your assertion that those two things are intertwined is materially incorrect.

In regards to inflation itself, yes that is an issue that affects any player that chooses to buy escrow unlocks or subscribe. This has occurred because of two things glitching and 9 years of inflation.

Hard resetting the cash might work in the most barbaric and brutal manner possible but it also won't work because it will make your customers quit.

Many people have now earned large sums legit, not all rich players are glitchers despite the fact misinformed people like to just bandy around that allegation, some are for sure but unless you have reasonable grounds to believe so, then you shouldn't just assert it as fact.

What you really need is a good money sink to start naturally pulling the money out of the economy without any hard resets.

You want people to get rid of cash on their own so i agree with some of your ideas, possibly buying some marks as time limited events, creating a sense of urgency to spend, perhaps allow people to buy replays in the same way

If you can naturally pull the money out of the economy and it's no longer there for the majority of players anyway then the broker will stabilize because people simply don't have the money to buy 300mil auras.

You need to just give people reasons to spend the money that they won't resist.

Premium players have nothing to do with this.

Pass. I don't need Quarks. I don't need Source Marks.

Out of curiosity are you a paying subscriber or premium?