That would actually hold true if there was a plat sink. Already past the 2 billion plat mark, I can afford to buy all the Kronos I want. Thank you Daybreak for the outdated bazaar system which I can manipulate and create a monopoly on by having 10-15 traders up.
I stand by my earlier statement of limiting the amount of plat that can be held by any single account, not chars, total on the account. Say 25 million for subscribers. 2.5 million for FTP. To deal with the price of Krono's on servers make them no trade then put a Krono vendor somewhere in game that sells them for what DB considers a fair price. For that matter wonder how much resources it would take for them to sell plat to credit card users through the offline market place like they do Krono's, expansions, DB cash. Right now what you are seeing is the consequences of an unregulated free market run amok (nice little reflection of what is/was going on in the real world). It may seem draconian and "unamerican" but meh this is Norrath and the developers can pretty much do what they want whether the player base likes it or not. Admittedly they want to try and keep as many subscribers as possible and in an ideal world attract more so such action might have a profoundly negative effect. It would sure wipe out a good chunk of the excess plat people are so concerned about and with limited finances people would be less willing to pay huge amounts for stuff and prices would drop to reflect that.
I really hope you actually do this. Can you fill us in on your narcotic ring while you're at it? Nobody would ever read this far into the thread anyway.
Daybreak wants to sell Krono for $$$... not for plat.. No way they would ever put Krono on a vendor. Putting a plat limit on an account means nothing. Because you can buy things with it. Buy 1mil Blue Diamonds, buy more Krono. So that actually puts even more pressure on the Krono price. High Krono prices helps Daybreak sell more Krono for $$$. Not worth your time farming for 1.3mil to buy a krono, then you spend $$ to buy a krono. I'm interested to see if the /baz 2.2mil limit will be "solved" when Krono begin to get that high. Krono buyers and sellers provide a service. They should be able to receive a service fee for providing people the ability to buy a krono anytime. PS : Kravitz - that is a lot of plat if it's true. With that amount of plat - you could "set" the price of Krono. i.e /buyer for say 1.3mil and /trader for 1.3 mil. This would eliminate the incentive for folks to trade krono on that server. Just wondering if you ever done it, or considered it?
LoL you just did read this far? It's true, and I already have for my server. No competition, in fact, I inflate the prices and monopolize on certain items on my 10-15 traders I keep up up by buying the whole market out on certain items every couple of weeks, to maintain a monopoly. Best way to obtain plat while afk= setup a trader. Not my fault I can manipulate the bazaar this way, I've been asking for them to improve the bazaar system for over 10 years now, if they can't do it, why not manipulate it?
I'm thinking DBG are not too fussed about you buying Kronos so long as you keep paying for you 10-15 accounts.
Every krono used is extra money for dbg. Trade them, inflate them, whatever you find to do with them, accounting cares about the initial purchase and that's about it.
Unconsumed Krono are an accounting liability for Daybreak. That was the windfall of prog servers, a ton (ton) of Krono were actually nommed, finally booking the profits.
Krono have become a "new currency" in EQ I don't think this is what they had in mind when they introduced them. Plat farmers/sellers are loving it. If DB wants to control the market a few simple changes is all that is required; - make them no trade outside of the account that purchased them - offer alternatives to players to purchase them in game ( vendor that offers them for plat) - offer plat packages like they do for DB cash purchasable with a credit card. By limiting each account to a maximum amount of plat that can be held on that account you take control of how much "currency" is out there governments do it all the time to control inflation / devaluation of their currency. Again another market control measure. There are some people out there that for various reasons are not able to pay to play with a Credit Card and are dependent on using Krono for their monthly subscription(s) since Game cards got phased out. Inflated Krono prices in game is costing DB monthly subscribers.
Unconsumed Krono are an accounting liability sort of like gift cards are. They become a huge asset when you get to write them off at the end of your company's life. What would be really epic would be if a couple of the top richest players would GIVE AWAY all their in-game krono supply, but only to already-paying players. If the supply was big enough, maybe you could disrupt DBG cash intake. That might get them to listen to you
Your first three points are in direct opposition to the primary goal of Kronos (revenue for DB and plat source for their customers). The first point is no different than a subscription, except it's more expensive. The second point removes all income from DBG, and they don't seem like the kind of company to give away the game for free. The third point is actually valid, but it's essentially what Kronos already do. Except using Kronos ensures that the value stays consistent with the inflation and valuation of all other in-game items that can be traded/sold, across all servers. Limiting the amount of pp on an account is nothing like how governments control the value of currency. Nobody tells you that there is a limit on the amount of money you can possess at once time. DBG already has lots of ways to control the value of currency, if they wished. The most obvious (and simple) control is drop rates. By increasing the supply (or demand) of an item, they control the value. If they want to remove plat from the game, just raise the merc cost. Or add some appealing items from vendors. Or even a luxury tax, lol. Which is why I think they already do have a handle on the market and they are perfectly content. The guys who have 15 traders are also taking 15 kronos out of the game each month. They don't care about the guy with 2 billion plat, because no matter how much he corners the market on particular goods, the cost of those goods will never go above the buyer's alternative cost (the cost to go farm it themselves). And the higher the cost of goods, the more krono DBG sells. I would think the only thing they are concerned with is whether anybody buys anything for real $ from unauthorized sellers
Limiting a certain amount of plat to an account is in game would be similar to passing a law in the USA that no one person is allowed to have more assets then 1 million dollars. That is an divisive propagandistic application of Marxism dividing the player population into the proletariat verses bourgeoisie, or the 99% verses the 1%. The issue with the limit of what can how much something is can be sold on a trader or bought on a buyer in bazaar is a technical issue. It is how the total amount of plat is defined / stored on by the server and client. The definition used by programming languages such as C, C++, Visual Basic, Java is a long integer, and there is a limit of just over 2 billion coppers. For some reason currency is stored as total of coppers and then displayed as plat, gold, silver, and copper. When looking at Boolean math and how it handles negative numbers, the actual limit is 2^31 coppers, or 2147483 plat, 6 gold, 4 silver, and 8 copper. There may be a hard coded within the interface limiting the transaction barter / buyer windows to 2 million platinum pieces. From my IT background the overhaul of that would fairly extensive. It would probably have to consist of having separate long integer fields for plat, gold, silver, and coppers. A better possible work around would be to allow players to trade for items using nobles in lieu of plat / gold / silver / copper. Another work around be to create new currencies managed by a separate field, and allow players to convert to that new currency. The proposed new currency would probably be convertible into 1:1,000,000 plat by the banker, and integrated into the buyer / trader windows.
Most methods to platsink the game won't hamper the ones with bloated bankrolls, but will destroy those without, blocking their progress. The best method I can think of, honestly, would be to do something like add a 'High Rollers' NPC to the Shadowhaven casino, who takes bets for something like 1000pp a pop, with terrible odds, but with something like a single krono (or other highly-desired tradeable item/consumable so it doesn't just turn into 'got them all, done with that platsink'). That's the kind of platsink that would suck a large portion of plat out of the economy without crippling those who aren't already rolling in plat and think spending 1.4mil is nothing.
The nobles merchant is a big plat sink with the most expensive item costing nearly 31,000,000 plat. Not easy to accumulate that much by any means. I think the relatively large amount of plat in the game irgth now is a rather good thing. i'd wage 50% of the plat moves around being used to buy and sell collecion items. Would it be nice if more items like those bought with nobles for large amounts of plat be made available to us? Considering half the mobs for the last 4 or 5 expansions drop a diamond I'd vote yes.
I think you could just go with a ratio of 1:1000 and still have plenty of price room Also allows the alternate currency to buy more things in the bazaar then those worth 1,000,000 plat and I don't think we will hit 2 trillion plat prices before the game sunsets. The only problem with solving the currency limit issue is I suspect it would encourage inflation to move at an even faster pace. Inflation hurts returning players bad enough as it is. I wrote up a post with this same solution but changed my mind on posting it. I think the current currency limit may help keep bazaar plat barons from boosting prices up even more. I could be wrong, just an opinion.
