It's all about supply and demand. And inflation. I occasionally buy a kroon for cash and sell it on the broker to raise plat for purchases by my various toons. Prices for other things on the broker have been going up. A lot. I wouldn't bother with selling Krono at the old prices as I wouldn't get enough for it to be worth my while. At these prices I do. When prices rise across the board, so will prices on Krono. If you want me to keep selling Krono on the broker they have to be at a price point which makes sense compared to prices of other items on the broker.
Excuse me, but you don't know anything about me or my situation, or how I pay for my subscription. Your reply is nothing but rude and offensive. Not that I should have to explain myself to you (or anyone for that matter), but I pay for my subscription with real money and NOT virtual coins. I may be "too poor to afford what others can" if we are speaking of exotic vacations and fancy sports cars, but I assure you... I can certainly afford to pay my subscription. (And the only thing I feel "entitled" to is attention from my husband.) And no, I don't like the price of Krono on the EQ2 broker. I still think it's ridiculous that they cost so much, and my personal financial situation has absolutely nothing to do with my opinion.
There is nothing that can be done about it except (1) DBG making more plat sinks to suck up the plat sloshing in the economy, and (2) people refusing to buy kronos at prices that the buyer deems too high. I can put a shiny up on the broker for 7000p. It's not likely to move fast or at all at that price. If I priced it at 700p, it would be much more likely to sell, but still I won't get a fast turnover. If it's in the 200p range, then the likelihood of a quick sale is much greater. The only reason krono prices are as high as they are is people buying them cheap and selling them at much higher prices. It's also likely that after the server mergers the prices will change, perhaps dramatically. The demand will change because of the sudden difference in population.
Maybe there are foolish people selling Krono at below market prices. People taking advantage and buying those low priced Krono is not the reason the price is high. The reason the price is high is that the current balance point between supply and demand is at the current price. There may be individuals who have attempted to corner the market in Krono or any other commodity. This is very difficult to do when there are people producing the commodity. The Hunt brothers famously learned this in 1980 when they attempted to corner the world silver market. The problem with trying to control a commodity market as an investor is that your efforts to bring down the supply spur producers to increase their output due to the higher price. Then, when you try to sell some of the commodity, you sell into a market with larger supply than when you started buying in the first place. What has happened is that the speculator has made the producers extra profit to their own detriment. The moral of the story is not to try to corner the market unless you're a significant producer, OPEC or De Beers for instance. The interesting situation with Krono is that it quite literally is one of the few assets in EQ2 that doesn't devaluate over time. Plat supply gets larger. Equipment becomes easier to get. Inflation is rampant and Krono is one of the few assets that reliably keeps up and is freely tradable. It makes no sense to hold onto plat, because it is constantly depreciating, so anyone that doesn't want to watch their wealth wither away under the pressure of inflation buys Krono, even if they want to sell the Krono for plat later. The situation on the EQ2 live servers may be exacerbated by players leaving the game. In the past, when a player left, their plat would sit idle, collecting dust and devaluating outside of the economy. Now, players are purchasing Krono on their way out for use in another game or another server. This means all of that plat is not sitting idle when a player leaves. It gets injected into the economy on their way out. This creates an even more powerful plat inflation in the economy as the number of plat available per actively playing player goes up. So, as player interest declines in the live servers, not only does Krono supply go down, but people cashing out plat for Krono goes up. This is why Krono have gone up near 10-fold on live servers in the last year. It isn't evil capitalists. It's the market dynamics of capital flight from EQ2 live servers, a much more dramatic version of what is happening in real world China.
I checked several times, when the prices of krono jump up, it always happen at the same time in all server within less an hour, which means someone can control the price across the servers? Thats really weird.
What on earth happened to make Kronos shoot up past 20k? I logged on to AB for the first time in maybe two months, and they've tripled in price? Did the Norrathan Central Bank decide to pin the Plat to the Zimbabwean dollar? Are the TLE servers to blame? People buying them up to flog on the TLE markets? Or has the server merging just caused the floodgates to open?
Nowhere in the real-world economy does a unit like the krono exist. With the krono you have an item that is desirable from a unique perspective: people with no real-world money but plenty of plat want to buy them, people with plenty of real-world money but no plat want to sell them. On the other side of that, people with normal amounts of real-world money and normal amounts of plat don't care about kronos. I'm one of those people. In fact, I'd say the majority of players are indifferent to the krono market. Unfortunately, the krono market is affecting the entire market. Everything is getting hyper-inflated because there are two different economies existing side-by-side in EQ2 - krono players and non-krono players. An analogy that comes to mind is something that happened when I was kid (which was a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away). When Nike first came around in the 70's, I was wearing cheap shoes to school, everyone did - Trax from K-Mart if I recall correctly, or Converse All-Stars, both of which could be bought for like 5 bucks. There were very few options. Then out of nowhere a few kids started wearing Nikes, which cost like 20 dollars. They became popular, and suddenly you had to wear Nikes or your chances of being cool were reduced to near zero. I remember my mom being not-so-happy about having to shell out 4 times more for shoes than she used to. After that, the whole shoe economy went straight to hell, and now, cool shoes will cost you 200 crisp ones or more. Outrageous. But if you want to play the tennis shoe game you have to figure out where to get the money. Today we see people who are unemployed, essentially worthless members of society walking around Section 8 housing projects wearing $200 shoes. But the point is, the genie is out of the bottle, and the economy of the game is going to suffer. There will be no limit to the devastation. I can tell you without hesitation that $1000 tennis shoes are out there somewhere, and when they come along, everyone will just have to deal with it. Can't blame SOE/Daybreak for loving the kronos. It might kill the game eventually, but they are making out like bandits in the meantime.
Did you really just try to compare EQ2 Krono's, to buying shoes back when you were a kid? Oh dear... Also, I hope you understand that nothing is being "hyper-inflated" because of Krono. The plat would be in the game, regardless of whether or not Krono existed. And having Krono is not a fashion trend like rocking the latest pair of designer shoes. Do you actually care about general plat inflation? If you do, I suggest you push the idea for solo quests, solo zones, heroic zones and raid zones to drop a whole lot less coin. Also, push for trash loot and general loot having a much lower vendor sale value. Why? Because they are what is generating plat (new plat added to the economy), and that is what is causing inflation. Funny though, no one seems to want to talk about fixing the real causes of EQ2's inflation... Wonder why?
I think the real problem with all the complaints related to cost of Krono is due to real life lack of education about basic economic tenets.....that or an unfortunate result of the schools teaching socialist ideals. The bottom line here, and with any free market system, is that if there wasn't someone willing to pay the price, then the cost would come down. If someone is willing to pay the price, then the cost will continue to increase until the point where there is no longer anyone willing to pay the price. It's not a good idea for DBG to step in and take over the market, which is what many of seem to be asking for. You are asking for a free market system to be taken over and controlled by a governing entity. The outcome of which will not be beneficial in the long run.
@ Avirodar Yeah I did compare kronos to shoes, the point being that once a certain economic direction begins, there is no limiting it. People ITT are calling on Daybreak to set some kind of ceiling up for the plat price of kronos, and I'm trying to demonstrate by analogy that it doesn't work that way. When I was a kid, the idea of paying $20 for a pair of tennis shoes was unthinkable, but now there are $600 tennis shoes, made out of essentially the same materials as my old $5 shoes. I agree, the plat does exist in the game. In fact that's not really something to agree with or disagree with, it's just a fact. Most of the plat in the game, though, exists from people who spent years soloing raid zones when they still dropped raid plat. That was the watershed change in the economy. There simply is not that much plat to be had anymore from inside the game. I mean, I know a guy who used to run PR and SoH, with 12 toons, twice a week, for YEARS. Figure an average of 140p per run, over let's say 3 years - that's literally over a million plat. So you've got these enormous fortunes in the game, and these are people who don't blink at paying several thousand plat for a krono. As long as people like that exist, several thousand plat will be the price. Why should I sell something to a poor person for several hundred plat when I can sell the same thing to a rich person for several thousand? Then you've got others who missed that bonanza, or didn't do the work (because that's what running old raid zones over and over is). They'll never catch up, it's not even possible anymore to amass that kind of plat from in-game drops. There's no acceptable solution. Your idea - which I suppose is to increase the plat gained from normal gameplay - is just another path to more inflation. The real solution is to take from the rich, and give to no one. I mean, if you REALLY want to fix the economy, all lessons learned, new direction, a one-time fix that will repair it all - take everything over 5k plat per player and make it disappear. But that is unacceptable. People have spent many years building their wealth, and I wouldn't blame them a bit for raising hell about the mere suggestion that they should have it arbitrarily taken away. So we've got what we've got, rich people and poor people, just like the real world. And two different economies, just like the real world.
Commodities. Kronos are the only commodity on the market in EQ2. The real word has dozens of commodities. Commodities are products that are fungible and have intrinsic value. Commodities can be used in place of currency but typically real currency is a lot more convenient to work with. If what I just said makes no sense go read an intro economics text book because its too much to cover here. This is stuff that gets covered in chapter 1. And Shoes aren't commodities. Shoes are just like the stuff you see SLR in auction, over time they loose value. When its new the price is high, but only because of consumer demand. As soon as another item supplants the current item, the current item tumbles in price. Krono can't be supplanted by a newer krono, it holds value at a fixed rate.
@ Meirril Thanks for the condescending tone. I don't get that very often and I throw it out there quite a bit, so it's always a pleasure, as well as cosmic justice, when I get it directed at me. Consulting the first page of Economics 101 for Utter Morons, which I keep handy, it says quite clearly that commodities and kronos are not comparable. If you are trading kronos and trying to make money off them, that's a different story - anything can be a commodity if it is bought and sold. But this isn't the Wall Street Journal, and a pig is only a commodity until you decide to eat it. Then it's just bacon. The thing about pigs, though, is that they aren't the only thing to eat. You could eat a cow, an ear of corn, or bat guano instead (by the way, you do eat bat guano every time you eat a Dorito). I.E., you can take a pass on the pig and still eat well. But if you want to buy All-Access Daybreak membership for plat, the krono is your only choice. Therefore it is much more a currency than a commodity. And as I said, it is unique - I appreciate you attempting to relate it to something else, but you can't. What makes the krono a unique item is that it is a currency that is bought with other currency and sold to people who don't have currency. Literally the closest thing to a krono in the real world is a pack of cigarettes in prison.
Going by everything above you might know what the word commodity is, but it is also equally obvious that you don't understand it. I'd suggest taking a full semester course on economy and attempting to get a passing grade, so that you'd have to demonstrate to another human being that you actually understand basic concepts. Good luck.
@ Meirril Sorry pal, school's out. If you buy something for real money to sell for fake money, it's not a commodity. In fact, since EQ2 platinum has no defined monetary value in the real world, and in fact holds no value whatsoever to 99.99% of the planet's population, I'd say that makes the krono quite the opposite of a commodity. If you could pick up a krono, throw it at me, and hit me upside the head with it, then maybe it would be a commodity. It would also give you a much better chance to hurt my feelings than trying to insult my intelligence does.
If we could purchase SC with plat or with Kronoes that might help to level the various forms of currency, and would be a very real plat sink as well.
I think the main takeaway from all this is ... as long as Kronos are fully tradeable, the price will more often than not project upwards, & there is likely little-to-nothing DBG can do about it. They could, of course, make the Kronos non-tradeable, but why would they do so? IIRC, when SOE first introduced them to us, they explicitly suggested we price them high on the broker, so why they'd find ways to limit the price of Kronos now is beyond me
Not meaning to derail the thread, but for clarification, is that 140p for PR and 140p for SoH, or a 140p combined total?
