Ingame cash -- time for a change?

Demon's recent thread really illustrated some of the many problems with the game's ingame economy. In it he has almost 30 characters (mostly mules storing his valuable items and cash I'd guess) with more than 15 BILLION ingame cash (probably per character??).

Without getting into the ethics of how he gained his ingame Bezos status, I find myself wondering how realistic it would be to convert our accounts to a shared wallet (across all their characters) with a cap at 1bil? What do you think Devs? Charon? Panderus? Mepps? Bueller?!

Yes, I realize there are implications for the shadow-economy built around ingame item sales with real world money, and therefore potential risk to TC and BoosterBundle sales. I'm not concerned about them though.

I think it's time for this. Overdue even. Wondering what other players think.

I have a decent amount of in game cash-- about 11 b-- and many toons holding onto rare and expensive items.

I would be happy to have everyone's money reset to a more reasonable level. It's all out of control imo.

Agree. The broker itself is a mini-game here, but playing it means artificially inflating prices to the point where ingame items are unobtainable for the average (or especially new) player. It becomes a barrier for investing time into the game when you know everything is outside your reach.

I don't think EU or other platforms are as effected as USPCPS are, but things are getting more expensive over time and out of reach, so definitely something need to be done about this. Especially when people get their money in a not legit way.

If we took gold sellers out of the equation, had kept glitchers perm banned and had a money reset the economy would be amazing right now and not nearly as daunting for newer players.

Unless they change the two systems responsible for the absurdity we have in the broker (BB/TC) that most likely won’t solve anything.

The "tax" they implemented after the last glitch was a joke. I have also would stand to lose a LOT of money, but something definitely needs to be done

Yup. The unban of a whole heap of people that occured (the TC-glitching) just set us up for an economy to be further spiraled out of control, where it is basically controlled by the same people who now keep buying up the supply of items just to resell. The Reseller-trend has become a nasty plague in within our community and economy.

Nothing about it is balanced, and a person shouln't have to spend most of their playtime staring at a Broker item-screen praying for low sale-items to repost and flip for higher price later, in order to stay in a "healthy" state within the economy. Nothing about this inflated mess is healthy what so ever, LOL!

But of course, those who have taken advantage of the inflation to become richer will have a severe problem and threaten to quit regarding ANY healthy changes to this. Because, well, people are greedy and selfish.

EU it's way worse, less players and less unique / rare collections, it's crazy. Prizes are out of control.

I don't really think EU is out of control, we don't have items going for billions as far as I know. But I am not well invested in trade chat to know enough, I just know what I see on broker - highest I ever seen was maybe 600m.

If daybreak fixs the economy well some of their most hardcore players might quit, so they are kinda stuck. Unless they are willing to make some tough choices about going about fixxing it.

Shared in game wallet, sure, capping the amount of cash a player can hold, no.

In terms of resetting cash it's difficult to ascertain a fair way to do it, on the one hand the fairest way to do it is to reset everyone to zero but on the other hand it penalizes the effort put in by existing players.

Doing nothing stands to lose new players, deleting cash stands to lose existing players.

Either approach however isn't going to change whether or not you can get your hands on that new shiny item you want via the broker, because the scarcity of those items is tied to the other elephant in the room you're not talking about, being loot boxes.

Until that changes you're always going to be at the mercy of those powerful enough to control supply and demand or the RNG system itself just not giving you what you want.

That isn't going to change if you have less money it'll just give the perception that something is more affordable because it's 1million instead of 1billion, it's a matter of perspective, if everyone is reset and has no money then 1million is as unachievable as 1billion.

Their most hardcore players won't quit, they will just threaten to, unless the changes made are too harsh and unjust.

But hey, if the choice is to not do anything just so that a small amount of players can keep exploiting the economy which impacts everyone as a whole, or to do something that makes more than a circle of players involved in various types of exploits happy, then my vote would be on actually doing something.

An easy place to start is got the devs to take more actions on gold sellers. reset all gold sellers to 0 then IP ban the gold sellers.

Just make it so items can only be traded once and then become account bound. Kill those resellers' business and exploitation.

It's not silly at all.

Most of the money on the USPS servers is dirty money. There was so much shadiness that went on around TCs, people glitching, being banned then unbanned then gold sellers and people who exploit players who are less in the know.

People spend real money to try to keep up. Sure, that's on them but the economy is out of control and it's not about taking anything away from people's "hard work"-- it's about leveling the playing field for those who didn't benefit from all of the dirty business that went down to make the economy go bonkers in the first place.

I tend to think some people disagreeing with this thread only disagree because what they have to lose may not have been gotten on the up and up.

I suggest a bounty system to incentivize player reporting of this kind of behaviour. A player could be rewarded with 10% of what's in the gold farmer's account they report. Obv the Devs would investigate the account to confirm it's violating the rules but once confirmed it gets shut down and the good samaritan gets a reward for it.

Exactly, it's a million dollars gamble to please a few players. Most income to keep the game going comes from items that can be sold on the broker or trade (like replays) and people who spend IRL money to sell the items won't be very pleased if they lose any of it, even if just a little. It's very different from wiping the money from people who had over 25b, that are like 10 or 20 exploiters.

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Not to mention everyone with more than 1b could just stock cash on multiple accounts or even buy millions of sodas to abuse the system and have unlimited cash, breaking the economy even further. If someone with 10b buys sodas they have over 7b in stock to wipe the broker and inflate prices.

Not exaaaaactly because the money you get from enemies and plans makes it easier for new players to enter the economy if everyone is working on the thousands and millions instead of billions (although in the other hand items sold on the vendors that are used by new players, like soda enhancers and items you can salvage for prestige are much more accessible if you can sell a quantum field for 4 million instead of 400k).

But this is a pretty though issue, the rarest items, like new materials and new auras have skyrocketed after the money glitch, in the other hand, things like TC gear, lockbox items, base items and old auras are proportionally much more affordable right now.

Oh that number is way higher than that my friend.