FEEDBACK: Currency Creep

Discussion in 'Testing Feedback' started by GLoRToR, Nov 25, 2018.

  1. GLoRToR Well-Known Player

    The Broker, or as I like to call it, the Broken (lol) has insane inflation where significant Feat material cost increasingly stupid amounts of cash.

    For how important feats are, and how an increasing number of them are only available through Lootboxes, I feel it's important to address the issue of gold sellers in the game.

    I think checking their rates and offering a legitimate purchase of ingame currency with real money would probably curb the insanity of things costing tens of millions while the average mortal can at best make a fraction of that without "cheating".

    Additionally some manner of control, a daily price cap or earning cap would probably also be useful.
    • Like x 1
  2. Knarlydude Loyal Player

    That will make prices go even higher by making the demand higher because more unearned cash will be readily available.

    The only way to lower prices within the broker is by making an over abundance of supply and DCUO has two options to do this.

    1. Open up the broker for more players

    or

    2. Adjust the drop rates for all old TC's to work like the newest TC's.


    edit*
    I will add that added supply has to be greater than what people that try to manipulate the broker prices can handle or it will be all for naught.
    • Like x 2
  3. bigbadron alt Dedicated Player

    A cap on the broker will just cause people to sell their premium items for ridiculous prices through trade chat, which will reduce the availability of those items on the broker.
    • Like x 2
  4. GLoRToR Well-Known Player

    Talking about a hard cap on how much cash an account can receive a day. Less than ideal but it's my best idea.
    • Like x 1
  5. StealthBlue Loyal Player

    The issue is that cash enters the game through various methods (completing missions, selling items to vendors, etc) much faster than it leaves the game through various methods (broker fees, repair costs, vendor purchases, etc).

    The game was originally designed with a formula that increased vendor purchases and repair costs at the same rate that cash generation increased. However, with the introduction of free to play (and premium status), an issue began to emerge as the game progressed. A premium player could buy episodes, but their available cash was capped at $2000. When vendor prices started to poke over $2000 for gear, there was an issue because premium players could not access everything that they were paying for when purchasing an episode. This was caught on test, and vendor costs were capped at $2000 for gear.

    At this point, selling a single plan to a vendor gains you over $23,000 (or enough cash to buy 10 pieces of gear). The most cash you would need for the Elite set, normal set, and event set for both roles is $124,000, or just over 5 plans. No one buys all of that, though. If you are at end game, the most you use the event set for is to finish off the style feat with pieces you haven't got as drops.

    So what we really need is an increased money sink, something that would entice multiple purchases. The simplest method would be to remove the cash cap for premiums (and find something else to entice continued membership in its place outside the current perks), then re-instate the intended prices for vendors, and possibly increase repair costs as well.


    As to your suggestions, selling cash directly on the marketplace would have a severely detrimental effect. Those with deep pockets in real life would control the market (more than they already do) and prices would inflate even faster than they currently are. Also, a daily cap on how much you can earn would just cause less incentive to play, especially if that hard cap applied to broker sales and trades. Could you imagine how livid someone would be if they had two high ticket items on the broker and both sold the same day, resulting in them only receiving the cash for the sale of one of them? That would just result in fewer things being placed on the broker, and fewer things being traded. Which means you have to find everything yourself, and it would take longer to progress on collection feats and other feats tied to things that can be traded/sold.

    Edit: I just noticed this is in the testing feedback section of the forums. What does this have to do with testing? On test, you can basically print as much money as you need (not that there is any real need for money on test).
    • Like x 2
  6. bigbadron alt Dedicated Player

    How much would you suggest?
  7. MaryMagdalene_DCUO Well-Known Player

    Cap the broker, cash earning and punish everyone because you can't get that shiny toy?
    I've seen that foolish suggestion millions of times.
    • Like x 1
  8. Alrighty Then Loyal Player

    Supply and Demand are key here.
    Outside of draining all cash accounts; increase in supply has to happen.
    Unfortunately DCUO believes Ultra rare drops keep the game going.
    So I don't forsee a change to this horrid situation.
    • Like x 2
  9. GLoRToR Well-Known Player

    Some very good points here.
    I'm by no means an authority on economy so I'm simply out to raise awareness to the issue that I'm unlikely to amass 10 thousand million in gamecash to buy the collections I cannot attain in any other possible way.

    My goal is to be able to fairly attain everything in game that is actually related to the power of my character, ie skill points.
    As it stands, more and more feats are gated behind not just real life money but also random drop chance of things you pay for with real money AND then buying them on the broker is only possible if you buy money from gold sellers.
  10. Brit Loyal Player

    The game generates new currency (literally everything drops money, constantly adding to the pool) far quicker than it removes currency from the economy. The broker billion dollar prices simply re-allocate that money from one player to another, but remove very little from the actual economy, so it does little to combat inflation.

    The solution is not cash caps or throttling; it's cash-sinks. That's what it is always going to come down to. The game needs a way to remove more currency from the game than what you earn. That means something you buy, that you do not buy from another player, and that you need to do repeatedly.

    Existing cash-sinks are out there, like broker fees, soda costs, repair bills, and mainframe batteries. But in order to make each of these individual features available to Premium players, they simply do not remove significant enough amounts of currency to balance out the new currency constantly being generated.

    So what we need is something entirely optional, enoughso that Premiums do not require access to it, but enticing enough that subscribers will spend a ton of money on it, removing that money permanently from the economy.

    Imagine a vendor/respect chamber device that allowed you to tweak the appearance of the summonable Sidekick in exchange for in-game currency. Like a million bucks every time you reassign a slot of their gear, and an even higher price to change things like Gender, Body Type, Personality, or even *gasp* Name them. Hundreds of millions of in-game dollars would get sunk into that machine and out of the in-game economy, just so people could play around with cosmetics.

    Just one of millions of potential money-sinks, but something like that is needed to pull money out of the economy, otherwise prices will only grow worse and worse as time progresses.
    • Like x 2