Kronos. Umm. What?

What exactly happened to them? Several days ago they were going for around 2.8 - 3k. Been about that price for a good bit. Then yesterday they appeared to shoot up to 4k. And now today they're creeping up to the 5k marker.
Is something going on to cause the price to massively increase in such a short period of time?

they should have been at least 10k a long time ago.

the amount of mage boxes is directly related to how cheap kronos were for so long.

most mage armies have plenty of kronos to last them months and months at least at this point, so damage done.

More and more people are maxing out their characters. With nothing worth spending plat on, they buy Krono as a place to park their money, since the Krono will effectively keep pace with inflation.

There's also a good deal of fake buy/sell auctions going on to drive up prices. Lots of /anon level 1's in starter cities spamming auc and general channels all day.

The longer the servers are up, the more plat there is, the higher the price.

Doesn't help with all the resellers and such doing fake "wtb" advertisements or claiming to sell them higher, which drives more people to try and you artificially raise the price without reason.

Yeah I can't speak to Lockjaw, but Ragefire had 1 dude spam general/auction/commons with WTS 5k offers for about 2 days while at the same time spamming fake WTBs at 4.2/4.3k (of course never responding when kronos were offered). It just takes enough people believing these ads to artifically increase the price rapidly.

In all honesty though the price atm is about where they should be considering how much plat is on the server already.

It is clear abuse by a couple of individuals. Kronos took over 2 weeks to go up 1 k and now they're going up 1k a day. If anyone thinks that is logical they are blind. There really isn't that much plat on the server so I don't know what the end game of the person trying to push the prices up. Unless DBG is doing it on purpose. A few people have a couple of hundred kronos already im sure.

Timeline on LJ:
Before Transfers Kronos regularly sold from 2.5 - 2.7
Straight after transfers Kronos were up to 3k
One day after transfers Kronos 3.3k-3.5k
Two days after transfers Someone was buying at 4.1
Now we are sitting at 4.5-5?

No sorry there is something wrong here. The demand of kronos should not have increased with the transfers and yet the prices suddenly jacked up for no reason. Ragefire was approximately 3k-3.2kish at the time of the transfers.

First of all why is someone buying at 4.1 when everyone else is offering 3 to 3.3? That makes no sense whatsoever.. And yes i can confirm he was buying because i sold him two. When people were selling kronos for ~3k, Can someone please explain why the hell would anyone post a wtb krono at a price 1.1k over the normal price.

The conspiracy theorist in me thinks that DBG is doing this purposely to drive up prices so more people will purchase kronos if it's worth more plat in game. So many people bought kronos when they were worth only 2k plat, you think they're not going to now jump on the chance to buy more when it's worth triple that?

DBG's policy with transfers allowed it to happen. They jacked it up. Talk to them and their no level limit and almost no limit to how many times people can transfer. DBG shortsighted again.

theres a ton more plat on these servers than people think there is. 5k is still cheap for a krono imo. any caster or priest class can farm that in a few hours without tryin hard.

The question is not whether it is cheap or not. The question is why and how exactly can it go from taking 2 weeks to go up 1k to going up 1k everyday. People are very myopic because they think this doesn't affect them. Well guess what whether you buy kronos or not, don't plan on doing any loot worthy camps because they will be camped non stop 24/7 by boxers, even more than now.

Krono price WILL raise up .. quick.. it's actually amazing how cheap they've been for soo long.

There's very little to do with platinum in the game.. either the items are droppable and keep getting cheaper and cheaper as more of them come in the market , or the items are not-droppable, and you won't have anything to buy.

in either case, you should totally expect krono prices to skyrocket.

every billing cycle they will jump too as people who need a pile to keep their armies online will be scrambling for them.

im shocked it took this long for them to jump like this in all honesty, and ive actually seen the prices of several sought after items go down the last couple days.

kronos should end up with their own seperate economy. they will likely wind up costing a significant amount more than the most expensive high end gear, which is as it should be

The amount of total plat on the server tripled overnight. Of course the prices shot up.

Saw somebody buying 50 kronos on general chat on LJ today,I think some people buying a lot of them and retransfer to RF next week.

You are all crazy if you think this is a normal price increase. Kronos on LJ were 2.7-3k each on friday last week. Transfers opened up on Thursday. On saturday kronos were up to 3.5k. On sunday they jumped to 4k. Monday they went to 4.5k and Today they were 4.5-5k each.

The truth of what happened is that people who deal in kronos ( RMT or bot armies ) saw the lower prices on LJ. They loaded up a level 1 alt ( GG DBG having no level limit on transfers ) with plat and went to LJ to buy all the kronos up. This lowered the availability of kronos on LJ which raised the prices. This wasn't seen immediately. These same people then transferred BACK to RF ( GG DBG for allowing practically unlimited transfers available ) and sold the kronos for even more plat because they were a good 600-800 plat more on RF at the beginning of this.

They then transferred back to LJ with all this extra plat and bought even more kronos. Then when they had a lock on the market they started raising prices.

It was simple market manipulation because DBG refuses to think before they leap. They have had a long long time to think about this so it can only be deliberate. People either drop exorbitant amounts of plat on kronos ( which were holding fairly steady or on a gradual increase ) or they buy more kronos from DBG.

If you want somebody to shake your finger at look at DBG for their ridiculous lack of foresight ( again ). Either DBG is very very dumb or they knew this would happen and don't care/wanted it to happen.

You take your pick but no matter what the ones ultimately responsible is DBG. Two things would have stopped this.

1) 2 transfers total per character either way.
2) Minimum level to transfer characters either way (25 would have been good )

That's it. It's that simple to prevent this type of manipulation. The folks who took advantage of it just got extremely rich in game ( maybe even some out of it if they are RMT folk ) by taking advantage of DBG's ineptitude....again.

Im not getting your point. Lots of boxed accounts needing krono kept them cheap.. and now that the boxers have plenty of krono and there's less demand, they cost more?

This is EXACTLY what's going on on LJ.

Everything mentioned here is true, but it cannot fully account for this increase. The platinum supply (more specifically platinum per character) is the real basis for the economy. The transfers have not magically created more plat on both servers (as prices are skyrocketing on both) and arbitrage would only bring the prices on each closer together...not increase the price. Market manipulation has happened since day 1, and can cause swings, but not at this scale.

There is a plat dupe somewhere. Somehow, someone, or a group of people, have found a way to dupe plat. It may be related to transfers...it may be the rollbacks...it may be some unintended item or merchant left in with the Lockjaw fiasco....but duping must be happening. This reminds me of Fippy and the alchemy exploit.

The transfers in the 1st place should have been confined more.
Instead of a long period with unlimited transfers back an forth, it should have been more like 3 transfers per account, want to move more characters pay up....

What happened was people with a ton of plat + krono's transferred over on the 1st day to see that you could buy a plentiful supply of krono's at 2.7 - 3k like hotcakes on lockjaw.....

Once one smart trader took a look at that, buying a large amount of kronos and transfer back an forth just became the new market, like a global economy some people are just mad they didn't see it earlier.