Heh, wouldn't surprise me if they weren't some of the ones complaining the loudest on here about the price of them going up (afterall, it isn't like they're getting them free - they're having to give up pp, and everytime they have to increase their price that means less sales for them because who in their right mind would go to that shady place for only $4.) /Report doesn't do anything, make sure you're always clicking and selecting 'Report Spam'. Report spam is automated, it gets X number of submits on somebody and they get blocked automatically (and it does work - otherwise the spammers wouldn't have to keep getting new accounts and having new character names - it costs them money everytime people get together and report spam on their crap). /Report just marks it in the logs and then a human GM has to go through and look at it - doesn't happen nearly as fast as the server automatically blocking their account like report spam does.
As both a WoW and EQ2 player, thought I'd clear a few things up with these token comparisons. 1) The pool for them is the entirety of a realm, not just server based. So the prices on any American server will be the same. This does tend to stabilize the prices quite a bit. Earlier this morning the price was 23k gold, which is an amount you get quite incidentally doing normal things. I think if EQ2 did this, it would probably have a similar effect. Granted I'm pretty sure it's beyond the current development team, but that's a different problem entirely. 2) There's no upper or lower end on the price other than what supply and demand cause it to be. Before the bot clean up, they fluctuated from 18-28k. Now they're stable at 22-23k. Some of the other realms (notably Taiwan) have the tokens in the 250k range last I knew because there's less of them being put into the economy than being used up. As for the actual Krono prices, it kind of stinks that they go up and never come down but alas, it's the price we pay for them being fully tradeable. Goblins will find a way to make money and Krono are a good one.
What seems more likely to me is that Blizzard is using their ruse of a system to sell gold direct to players while making it appear that there is a player-player exchange going on. They could be shifting the in-game gold price for a WoW coin to maximize revenue by creating gold to pay for the unpurchased WoW coins. This would be a questionable activity on Blizzard's part, but seems more likely than them giving out WoW coins to remove gold from their economy. It could be that they think that not allowing WoW coins to be resold will maximize their revenue by eliminating them as a player asset. I'm not convinced. While re-sale makes it possible that a Krono will come back on the market, it also makes them more valuable since they are a plat price inflation hedge.
I don't have alot of faith in 'report spam' so I've been doing both. I've reported spam on the same account sometimes for 3 or 4 straight days, 50 times a day, with no apparent effect.
With the way the prices are rising, there can't be a shortage of buyers. Even if the population of people who can afford Krono is shrinking, the demand in the remaining population is high enough to continue to drive up the price. Also there are 3 ways for Krono to be removed from circulation. The first one is the obvious use Krono for subscription. The second one is players that purchase Krono for financial stability. While they might trade a few Krono for plat when they want to make a big purchase, the majority of the Krono they purchase is going to remain banked. They are purchasing Krono to maintain their fortune, like buying a foreign currency when your local currency is being debased. And the third method is if someone with Krono gets banned. With customer service reduced to a skeleton staff they have a tough time keeping up with people that need help. I don't think they have any time to deal with plat spammers, dupers or any other exploits. As such, its going to take months for a dev crafted response to come instead of days for customer service to do something. And honestly the rampant inflation makes the Krono even more attractive to buyers and sellers. Big numbers simply look good. Nevermind what its doing to the overall economy.
The spam filter only counts 1 report per account, though. 10 different accounts have to report the spammer within an unspecified timeframe (Gninja wouldn't tell us ) before it sits up and takes note.
Actually he said that 10 people have to all report the same instance of spam, if everyone reports once and then mutes them, then we're all reporting different messages. With the way he explained the system, the only way we're going to get 10 at once is if we all keep reporting them every single time they spam so hopefully we can eventually get 10 of us to hit it at once. Or someone on the staff would have to go in once a day and manually add a portion of whatever the current message is to the filter, if it even allows them to add things manually. Or they could start banning the spammers, which they've stated they don't do. (sigh) Goes back to the game and reports the spam I can see on my chat window
How do they find more than 10 people logged in at a time nowdays unless it's the brief moment when the patched together X3 that used to be the raidforce takes the flag and gets zoned into the raid zone?
So prices are coming down then? Still hanging around 7500pp each on Freeport but even that's down a few K from the 9500 they had risen to about a month or so ago. Shockingly the price drops seem to coincide with the plat spam disappearance.
The pool is international on EQ2 too. Back in the start of kronos I used this system to transfer plat from Splitpaw (EU) to Everfrost (US). I had toons on each but bulk of my money on Splitpaw at the time. Bought kronos from broker on Splitpaw, sold on Everfrost (for more coincidentally). Eventually prices became similar on both. I also had toons on AB and at times kronos were cheaper there just because supply was greater. Now it's more or less evened out over all servers. Big difference between EQ2 and WoW will be that kronos can be resold time and again. Therefore people stockpile them and sell them off later, like shares. No point doing that in WoW as it's one buy (for gold) and that's it. That's only useful if the buyer is genuinely going to use them for play time.
The big difference in WoW is that you can buy time with in-game currency directly. There is a set value in gold for time and the price a player can get for that time has to be less than that or people would just buy direct from the company store. While that keeps the value of time constant (and thus it doesn't fluxuate with the economy, so it doesn't act like an outside currency but rather as just a larger in-game currency) it also means that the gold selling community for WoW isn't affected by that company store. All it did was add more value to gold as far as they are concerned. In EQ2 its different. Krono is a way to measure plat vs real world money. And since it directly responds to the market forces of EQ2, its probably preferred by at least some plat sellers because EQ2 players don't question the legitimacy of Krono and its pricing.
The price of kronos is getting ridiculous. I think the biggest factor in this is price manipulation from people buying them up and raising the price. There may be other ways to solve this, but one idea would be to make it so that kronos could only be sold through the broker once, and after that they could only be traded in person. This would discourage investors from buying them out because then they would have to sell them through auction and trade in person, rather than just click a few times to flip them on the broker and wait over night (instead of spamming in chat to sell 20 kronos that only another investor would have bought on the broker). The broker just makes it way too easy for people to flip them, especially since there aren't even any broker fees. But this would still allow others to sell the kronos they buy from DBG on the broker or trade as much as they want in person.
All of which would reduce the incentive for people to buy Krono in the first place, thus reduce supply, thus drive up the price. DBG does not care about who ultimately ends up with the Krono in-game. It is intended to be a luxury item, and a valuable one at that. It was never intended to be an easily accessible, affordable item that any random casual can afford a few of, simply by rolling through a few solo quests. People that try to make some coin via reselling broker items, only succeed if they are still selling at a sufficient rate, at a price people are willing to pay. If cheaper alternatives constantly stream in, or the price is genuinely too high, they make nothing. Thus, the prices of Krono on the broker are based on a supply and demand rate of what people ARE willing to pay, so there is nothing ridiculous about it. If the price point is out of your league, you are not the intended recipient of the item, and you have absolutely no entitlement to expect otherwise.
The cheapest Krono on Butcherblock broker at this time is 24,825 plat. Yes, over 24k. THAT is ridiculous.
you know, not long ago i watched this same argument on rift about tradable rex. they were saying the exact same thing. but i will say now the same thing i said to them. you can't control krono in that way because it hurts everyone- not just people who may be buying for resell. there isn't anything wrong with selling them and if people want to buy them and spend a lot of plat, oh well, it makes the plat move around. if you don't like the price, go spend cash money to buy them. after you spend your own money on them, you might not be so mad about how much people are asking in return for the investment. i don't think the price is being manipulated, i think people just realize how little plat they get for their money. after all, it is real life money purchasing them and plat has to amount to enough to make that investment reasonable. personally i think it is the buyer who commands the price. if the buyer is willing to pay for it, then it will stay high. best solution- don't buy it with plat. go buy it with real money. if you don't think it is worth however much plat is being asked, then don't buy it. if your plat is worth more than their money, then spend your money on it. but don't come on the forums and gripe because they want to decide what is a fair exchange for real money vs plat. plat after all is a virtual currency and really not worth as much as you think it is. money on the other hand can buy way more in the real world than plat can.
hmm- let's see- if you round off a krono to $18 then that means that dollar for plat is about 1379 per dollar, not bad exchange really. or you could simply say 13.8 plat per penny. still not bad. plat really shouldn't be worth more than real money is. all in all, i simply think that the market will be controlled by supply and demand. if more people are buying, than what is being offered, then the price will go up. if more krono floats around the game, then the price will go down. putting restrictions on all players as individuals is not fair and won't work. after all, if they restrict me from selling a krono then they are also restricting you from buying one. the more restrictions, the less money they make because people will simply stop buying them. the whole reason they are in the game is to make plat off them. after all, it is way cheaper to pay for a month of membership with a debit card or paypal than it is to buy a krono.
Why is it ridiculous? Because you're too poor to afford what others can? Hate to break the bad news to you, but being able to buy Krono for plat via the EQ2 broker is a luxury, not an entitlement. Don't like the price of Krono on the EQ2 broker? Feel free to pay for a subscription, or take advantage of the generous FTP model. Alternatively, you could go to the DBG store, purchase lots & lots of Krono, and sell them in game, in order to help lower the average plat price for Krono (as it is ultimately controlled by supply vs demand). Have fun!
Krono were a great addition from the side of making money. It introduced a desirable, highly volatile commodity to an economy and left completely unchecked and to run free. The result? People have been constantly buying Krono from DBG and selling them so long as End Users (those who consume them) and Flippers (those who buy them to sell on 3rd Party Sites or to resell at a higher price) keep buying them. Only one of those is bad from a company profits point. Those who are using Sold/Bought/Duplicated Platinum to buy Krono to re-sell at $7-$9 which is money that should/could have been spent at $18 to Daybreak if the 3rd Party Seller did not exist. Some people oddly enough have no problems with Credit Risk and either monitor, modify or otherwise protect themselves when dealing with shady website dealers. I am of the belief that Krono's accelerated the cost of uncommon and rare goods beyond what it would have been normally. From a Player Standpoint Krono have been universally bad other than "free play for plat" which was only useful to 1 user at a time. Ultimately, it happened. Ultimately it's not going to change. It's making DBG money in some form and stimulating an economy. The only person who is left in the cold is the one who wants to use Krono for Subscription. Marketing Genius... Player Disaster. That's Krono for you. - I have no proof to back up my belief beyond what I feel I have observed over the years. I am not going to take the time to study it because I do not care to. I also am not going to really worry about it because it does not effect me.
don't yall get it? if it makes dbg money, why should they limit or control it? doing so cuts their own throats and i never saw any company who was willing to destroy their own profit just because some people didn't want to pay a certain price on the resell.
