Maybe it is time for the Bazaar to actually get a piece of the action. As in you pay a "consignment fee". Perhaps 30-50% of final sale. Have Barter be free or a very modest fee. Also, have mobs stop dropping plat after X level and NPC merchants have to maintain a till instead of having infinite buying power. If they run out of money, you have to buy something from them. If they have nothing you need...well...find some rocks to kick. In a "real" economy, as in the Real World, we all know the score. You can't just go kill a racoon for gas money, and even if you did, all the palms you have to grease make that windfall from your racoon kill evaporate pretty fast. Plat has to be made harder to acquire and realistically vastly easier to made go poof. EQ has always had a problem of there only being only so much to buy but an infinite supply of money being printed. Its not like our toons have to pay taxes, buy insurance, pay interest on a mortgage, get swindled by a scam, have investments go south or any other of the infinite ways our RL economy sorts winners from bag holders. Now, none of this is more than likely worth the dev's time. Most players don't really have much in game money. It comes down to how much effort do they want to put into a problem that effects a small percentage of the player base. Maybe its a good thing that players can only charge whatever the hard cap is. With Krono really being the in game economy's true backing, perhaps have Krono/Plat conversion value be set by DPG and establish a NPC broker as the only means of trading plat for Krono and vis versa. No item barter and no player/player direct interaction. That NPC broker should also get "paid" for their services. As an example, if you buy a Krono, its 1.5 million plat and if you sell its only going to net 500k with the base "value" set at 1 million even. That's one million plat removed from the game in one transaction. Should keep inflation a bit in check. At least at the higher end. If no one sells a Krono to the Broker, then..there isn't any to buy. Bummer! Just have to buy one with RL money! To be fair, the Krono pool should be across all servers.
Have mobs stop dropping plat after a certain level and merchants run out of cash? That just means farmers change what they farm.
True. That would just screw over lower level people or those who don't bot a group. The goal is to take money out of the economy so the current currency has value versus just adding more zeros to the current money standard. It has to start somewhere. There could also be a window where everything is "No Trade" from release date but some items become tradable after X amount of months. It would suck for the devs if all that would have to be done manually on the loot table per ex-pac. Granted, there are some things from eons ago that are valuable but....they are valuable because they are exceptionally rare. Most true farmers just want to not pay for EQ with RL money since they might have more time than RL money. Or they are just smart farmers. If you get an item that is perceived to be high value in EQ, it either means you can sell it to kit out an alt or sell it to buy a Krono and not pay a sub. The lower plat players will probably USE that item before selling it. Its not like you can farm plat to sell on ebay and buy a Lambo these days. Krono sort of made it easy to buy plat with RL money with EQ's publisher getting a cut. That same philosophy can be used to take plat out of the in game economy since Krono is created by DPG and Plat is also created by DPG. The people buying Krono with plat are also those who are probably griping about not enough currency permutations in the baz. If I have a point, DPG has all the tools to get their economy under control, but it might be really easy to just do nothing and the end result doing little to no damage.
To be honest in an online game like this it wouldn't be possible to limit the amount of money in the game as you would end up having people hoard it and others not being able to make the purchases they need. In the long run it is impossible to take plat out of the economy as there will always be more that flows into it then leaves it.
Yep, does not make sense. I suggested the opposite. New Expansion and later expansions, drops this new currency off of mobs, just like how mobs usually drop 1-5 plat, well in the lvl 125s mobs will drop 1-5 new currency. Aka if you convert it backwards to plat that would be 1000, 5000 plat per kill. Speaking of mobs not dropping plat/new currency. I'm all for Instances mobs dropping less currency than OPEN WORLD. There should be a tradeoff, you farming for $$$$$ do open world. You farming for AAs XP, do instances. Game right now, guaranteed loot drops of chest, tons of glowing spell runes $$$$ in instances. No point in doing OPEN WORLD unless your getting quests to be able to do instances and if your doing hunter. Instance chest drops more loot than a named, and guaranteed, its not oops unlucky for 3 hours spawning the named that drops less than the instanced chest. So I'm all for OPEN WORLD mobs dropping this new currency which is 1000 to 1 ratio on plat.
And this doesn't make sense either, people complain about the amount of money in the game and you just want to make it worse? What would that do to all the people who can't hunt in the new expansion? Would that mean they can no longer afford to trade with other players?
If anything they need a QT for the EQ economy. Infinite money printing means infinite inflation, and we all know how bad inflation is for any economy.
Inflation will always happen. You can't stop it, but you can make things easier, by having proper currency. Imagine if they never printed anything higher than the $1 bill? At some point you need to create larger bills, or you have to take a suitcase with you, to purchase anything. Plat has been the highest currency for over 20 years. Common sense would say that it might be time to add a new currency??
You can't really compare a real currency to one in a digital game. The reason you need larger bills in reality is the lack of ability to carry around enough money. In a digital game like EQ you can carry around as much as you want and the only difference is the amount of zeros in the price. In reality the game will treat all currency as the base units and doesn't care how many different versions you have.
You don't understand anything about money apparently. Inflation now is only rampant as it is after the abandonment of the Breton-woods standard that pegged the dolar to a gold standard.
What does the bazaar price limit have to do with currency anyway? It seems to me the bazaar issue has nothing to do with the 32-bit copper limit at all. We have long been able to have more than 2M plat in inventory, and in the bank. I can transfer more than 2M plat to / from the bank, and to / from another player. The system is more than capable of tracking balance transfers of more than 2M plat per transaction. It seems to me this is a bazaar database and pricing issue. If they need to allow a price to be set in units of copper all the way to platinum then the 32-bit dynamic range will be a limit. They need to create a pricing database with less resolution - maybe just platinum. Create a new trader satchel and new bazaar search to access this database, and call it a day. Of course, I am not saying this would be easy, or whether it is worth it to DPG. But the idea that this would somehow impact every merchant in the game, or require a complete reworking of the currency system seems ludicrous to me.
Nobody wants to touch the old messy code for a problem that only really impacts the server everyone hates.
It has to do with how things are stored in the backend of the system. When the bazaar (or any merchant) has an item listed the game stores that price in copper. However when you have the money on you (or in your bank) it is stored in the currency that it is listed as . The limit for the bazaar is 2 billion copper and you would run into the same issues if you had over 2 billion in plat on you or in the bank.
Right. That's my point exactly. Make a new bazaar backend that stores prices in platinum. When I make a purchase from it, take it from my personal platinum inventory. Add it to the trader's platinum inventory. Leave all of the other outdated code alone. Conceptually, not that hard.
And I think you are vastly underestimating the amount of work that would take. The bazaar uses the same merchant system that every npc merchant uses.
And I think you like arguing for the sake of argument. I am underestimating nothing. Just stating how the bazaar pricing issue is not strictly tied to the copper-based currency system. There are ways to supplement it for high-priced items that would not require massive changes to the game.
Yes it is, just because you have an idea for doing something different doesn't mean it is possible/feasible or even easy to do. There is a reason why they haven't changed it in the past.
Clearly 1. they havent done it because its difficult and 2. its difficult because they havent done it and 3 stop asking for stuff they havent done because youre being difficult
