"-responded with the urgency and gravity-"

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The price of Kronos on early TLP servers is constrained by how much plat you can farm, which is limited by time .. High value items follow the price of Kronos or are sold in Kronos, this is true across all servers .. Prior to Exploit on Oakwynd, I could farm enough to buy a KEI spell in a few weeks, after exploit maybe in a year ..
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In RL all economies are constrained .. Primarily by workers hourly wages .. Since on TLP servers those HGs don't pay any more per hour you cannot have real inflation like in a RL economy where you can pay workers more .. Those that cannot afford or do not trade in Kronos, are hurt the same way People in RL are hurt by inflation, especially if they are on a fixed income .. If you are trading Kronos or banking in them then it had little effect, because Kronos are an Inflation Hedge
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On Standard Servers there has been quite a bit of inflation .. Driven by trade skill items and the fact a lot of Plat has accumulated on them over the years .. Top Items on TLP and Standard Servers are priced in Kronos and are not that different, making Kronos a good inflation Hedge ..
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After Fix and Bans apparently .. Prices are coming back down and as soon as able I will buy my KEI spell before some other idiot wrecks the economy ..

Everyone is in here arguing about free markets and giving examples with Gamestop and stocks... I find this hilarious, because the markets being destroyed (which they are) isn't why I canceled my subs.

I canceled my subs because of the woefully insufficient way this problem was dealt with, and the fact that we have been seeing this pattern from DPG for years and years, and it's finally too much for me to continue monetarily supporting.

Yeah, we get it, plat is just inflated and now you can get back "on top" by 1) buying a Krono from the DPG store (this is what DPG would want, after all, so where is their motivation to fix this problem?) and selling it for the hugely inflated price, or 2) going to farm items now instead of plat, and selling those items for hugely inflated prices. By doing so, you're back "in the economy" and even have a considerable leg up on the "Norrathian economy" because the NPC vendors are too stupid to know about inflation; your tradeskill mats still cost exactly the same as they did before, except now you have 10x the plat you would have had otherwise. As far as the GAME ECONOMY is concerned, this is surmountable by either of the two methods I outlined above.

I was offline the entire time this whole thing blew up. As such, I did not benefit from plat dupes (I don't even have the Tradeskill Depot anyway), nor did I receive the millions of plats or Krono handouts that were happening in the Bazaar. I missed out entirely on this. And yet, since then, I have sold some items on my Bazaar mule for prices that I consider to be wholly outrageous (non-raid Kunark class gear for 25k a pop? lol gimme a break). So yes, dealing with the inflation of platinum is surmountable.

That's not the real issue at hand here.

Any problem with a game that would warrant an immediate action of taking the servers offline and doing a rollback (which this absolutely did, as it was not a bug just on Oakwynd, but game-wide) should have been done just that: immediately. The complete and total lack of immediate action, lack of communication (the PR speak post we got from Angeliana was complete and total fluff), and a delayed AND misappropriate resolution to the problem (if I understand it, the only fix was to properly limit the cap of items in the Tradeskill Depot to the levels they were originally intended to be at, that's it???) is really the issue here, and the reason why I canceled all my subs.

I will give them SOME benefit of the doubt, in that given the timing of the whole thing, they MAY have actually responded "as soon as feasibly possible" due to the holidays. But I am seeing reports that they knew about this bug for days before that and took no action, though I have no way of substantiating those claims, and if that's true, then it means they have ulterior motives, which probably point to increased Krono sales. Let's be real here, they are a for-profit comany, and they are owned by a for-profit company. If they saw this issue as a way to sell additional Kronos, they probably let it go to bolster their bottom line. And the fact that one of two proposed ways to deal with the economy problem is to buy a Krono from the DPG store and sell it in-game, should tell you something about why they have failed to appropriately address this problem.

And that's what I ultimately decided I can no longer support. I have a few Krono left on my account, I'll play until those are gone, then it's time to say goodbye to EQ and the incompetent, greedy companies that own and operate it.

They CAN still make this right (although it is not going to be through a rollback; far too much time has passed for that to be a viable option) by fixing the actual bug, banning exploiter accounts, and offering a good faith olive branch to make it right. But I have absolutely zero hope this will happen. If it did, I would re-sub. But I'm expecting to be done with EQ for good in a few short months. Sad day.

then everyone starts selling kronos, they lose value. cycle keeps going and just like in real life, the game economy has massive inflation. its you good sir and or madam that does not understand economics.

Friend, you're right. But you're arguing with a guy that doesn't understand inflation. Don't bother; they either (1) are trolling; (2) are incredibly stupid; (3) know they're wrong, but benefited so much from the current situation that holding their position gives them some moral salve.

"Never argue with stupid people. They will drag you down to their level and beat you with experience."

I agree with everything you said except the part where in a hyper inflated economy you could no longer farm for items like KEI in a reasonable time. You can't do this by farming plat, but you can do it by farming items that weren't duplicated.

That's the value of a Krono and not the price. Two entirely different things. And you can still farm enough in a few weeks. You just can't farm raw plat. You now have to farm desired items, whether it be specific weapons, gear, TS items, etc etc. Plat lost its value due to inflation. That's it. It's not like every item in game was duplicated a million times over. It's not lke they actually duplicated the hard to farm TS mats and then cornered the market that way.

Plat lost it's value. In which there are ways to obtain a lot of plat to have what would be considered a decent amount again.

Yes, because there's so many Krono floating around on live servers that they've dropped back down in value...good example!

Here's the problem: Inflation only affected platinum values.
It did not affect Krono prices. $18 allowed me to purchase 1,000 items before inflation, $18 allows me to buy 1,000 items after inflation
Selling 100 TS items allowed me to buy a weapon before inflation, selling 100 TS items after inflation allows me to buy a weapon.

Inflation only hit platinum values. Too bad there are other things in game that hold value that can be used as a currency as well. Inflation has to affect all the currency the same in order for it do damage to the economy. Sure this will affect a few people here and there, but for the most part, people adjust their prices to the inflation and and make the same plat values relative to what it was before inflation.

If before it took you 100pp to buy item X, and you had to sell 100 Spider Silks to obtain that, and inflation reduced the platinum value by a thousand, it now costs you 100,000pp to buy item X.

But it still only takes 100 Spider silks to acquire 100,000pp to buy item X. Nothing changed besides an arbitrary number.

Your example is absolutely true in a vacuum. And the fact that you are unaffected may be true, but it doesnt paint the full picture. There are external factors like general perception, aversion to buying krono, availability of gear.

You play on mischief so I'll use an example from mischief. We were at 2m krono for a long time due to dupe/exploits. The reason it was at 2mil is not because "thats what the free market dictated". 2mil is just the limit on bazaar pricing. It created an artificial ceiling. There was more crappy items and less good items on the bazaar, which again artificially limits the economy.

I don't know why you are so deadset on trying to prove inflation is bad lol

players shouldn't have to assume the responsibility that devs are careless and refuse to own up to their mistakes
end of discussion, there's no room for budging here.

if you disagree with this, and if the devs cared about cheating, they should be investigating your account

Absolutely. And general perception is usually a bad thing as people are unable to think for themselves and run off of hearsay. Which is what i'm trying to battle here.

And this wouldn't lead to an aversion of buying Krono, but would rather draw people towards it. And a lower availability of gear also also battles against inflation as the value of the gear itself never changed (much like the price of krono).

And that was free marketing right there. They chose to stick to the 2 million because you can move more Krono, faster, at that price than holding onto it trying to sell it for 3 (although it could have gone for 3 [just an example, wasn't there for the Krono spike]). Part of Free Market and free price setting. Also why some people drastically undercut. Sure they can "make more" overall selling closer to market value, but moving 5 products at 60% value a week is better than 2 products at 100% value a week.

Inflation as a whole is bad. But like you said, this is in a vacuum and only truly affecting the value of raw plat itself.

If every tradable item were to have been duplicated by a million, and all forms of currency rendered useless, then the economy would be screwed. But it's just one outlet which is countered by the Krono itself.

Can see the spider silk example. And even Tuco touched on it:

What do you mean, even Tuco???

Calling this 'inflation' implies this was typical market behavior.

A TLP with a GM assigned to do things like watch for plat exploits or ban *cough* people *cough* sitting in SG 24/7 would have an interesting economy.

I guess I'm a little confused about what your goal is here, do you just feel like hyperinflation needs some positive marketing or something? There are objective negatives to it that hurt server health that you've fully acknowledged so I guess I struggle to see what your point is.

Losing paths towards meaningfully saving up to buy items is a net negative for the server. The market for small plat exchanges for services (ports, buffs, etc) now being almost completely pointless is an objective net negative for server, and the difference there is noticeable already. Being railroaded into having to farm a small number of items that hold player value in order to accrue wealth is a pretty big net negative for server health, especially when automation is so rampant on Oakwynd and bots are already targeting this stuff. I don't think the fact that you can still drop real world money for mostly the same returns as before is a lot of consolation for people.

Haha I had screwed up and it was "even you touched on it" and then i realized that wasn't right and it was in fact you, TUCO, who had said it. I just didn't backspace far enough lol

But this is what comes to pass anyway. Which is why i said the economy/server wasn't destroyed. It was simply accelerated.

And simply farming raw platinum is about the only real path that was lost. Farming TS items, farming desired items, Krono, Power Leveling, all still there. Since the economy was flooded with Platinum, you just increase the price to match the inflation.

Only thing that's unable to increase it's value to match inflation is raw platinum output.

It was only accelerated if you consider an (effectively) infinite plat dupe to be the natural state of the game economy.
It's not.

What about all the players who didn't take advantage of the dup and don't have massive amounts of play to buy things? Kind of ruins the game for them if they can no longer afford to buy things from other players because of the massive increase in prices.

It's uncoupled level progression from economic progression, outside a few specific camps. Normally, in EQ, your gear progression follows your levels as you sell what you loot, buying upgrades as you go with the accumulated money. Major or chase upgrades are specifically camped or farmed for. You can still farm for stuff and you can still camp gear, but the accumulated money from leveling no longer matches the cost of items. Prior to the platinum dupe, you could spend a week, give or take, hitting mobs at the Grieg's End gate camp for AAs, and when you were finished you'd probably have enough money for a Cowl of Mortality. After the platinum dupe, you spend that same week working on AAs and have 3% the cost of that same item. So now to get the Cowl, I need to spend that week farming saleable items for the whales, which doesn't really progress my character, and I need to find time for that around getting my critical AAs, getting Emperor and VT-keyed, getting two kinds of Bane weapons and oh yeah PoP drops in five weeks.

The answer is buy a Krono.

It's obviously terrible for the game, but save your time and just buy a Krono.

Krono is still available to put you on par. And the majority of players buy/sell Krono. You can't tell me the same 10 people flood TLPs with tens of thousands of dollars worth of Krono themselves.

Had to do this before as well, but for some reason you didn't add that into account when you're farming for your cowl. But now since the inflation, this suddenly matters?

And this is one of those things where it's a good thing you can go out and farm the items you need. Everyone in game has the same opportunity.

"Oh noes, now I cannot afford to buy this level 60 weapon...would be a total shame if I could get into a group to go camp it"

Shocker: Most people don't buy krono.

This is overly dismissive of the importance of an in-game economy to players. Otherwise in-game currency has no meaning, and damages the immersion and feel of the world.