Do something about the price of Kronos being sold on the broker. It's ridiculous. 344 million on Skyfire. I pay for a sub so I don't need them but the cost of things is getting out of hand. Cost of sub is the same, cost of a Krono is the same....yet people are blaming the economy and inflation for the price increase. Limit the amount they can be sold for on the broker. You can do it.
why change that? on the contrary it is only a bonus for the team. the player will therefore be more tempted to buy them to make money in game. Even if he already has a subscription.
If you limit what they can be posted for on the broker, players will just... stop selling them on the broker. Welcome to 'WTS Krono, XXX Million, PST' 24/7 in every channel. This is a *bad* idea.
The price of Kronos is a function of run-away inflation caused by people committing exploits for plat. the only thing that will fix the inflation is to implement a lot more plat sinks - they have to remove a lot of plat permanently from the economy. The broker is just swapping plat around among players, it does nothing to remove plat from the economy. Every time you do a quest or kill a mob just about we are creating more in-game money. In the beginning of the game, things like house rents and mender's bills were sufficient to drain play pout at about the same rate it was being created. With plat duping or whatever it is, people have way too much plat. If you have a billion plat, you're more likely to spend a few hundred million on a Krono, or a shiny, etc. That drives inflation, because people can charge those prices and get people to pay them the asking price. If we'd like to have a better in-game economy, we all have to be willing to feel the pinch of play drains such as higher mending costs without whining about it.
Yeah, pretty much this. Kronos are a high-value commodity due to being tied to real world currency. They do not generate plat. They may be a symptom, but they are not a cause. The overabundance of plat caused by years of exploits, as well as legitimate ways of generating plat, have meant that they concentrate and magnify the issue and thus have have become a poster boy of the overall issues with the economy, simply because by definition they are going to be amongst the highest valued. If it were not Krono, it would be something else. For example, look at Eve's Plex, which is basically what Krono was based off. In the same amount of time, it has not experienced anywhere near the amount of inflation. That's because there is an economy that has a steady flow of currency out (through destruction and GM actions), as well as a steady flow in (through player farming). They even post economy reports on a regular basis explaining exactly what is going on. And that's not for the lack of entrepreneurial players in Eve; if any community would know how to manipulate prices, it's them. And yet still, the Plex market is relatively stable. Removing or restricting Krono will do nothing to "help" the economy, it would just shift the problem elsewhere, because the problem isn't Krono. It's the absolute mad amount of plat that exists, and how badly distributed it is. The only way to combat it, would absolutely enrage a large portion of the player base, so don't expect that to happen.
Maybe next expansion they could have some special dungeons that cost a million plat to access, 1000 plat to open a chest, 10k plat to collect a shiny.
Kronos are not directly the cause of the problem no, but they do play a role in the problem. Most items of any value in game have been made no-trade or heirloom, therefor Kronos tend to be the one big tradable item of any value and have become a sort of currency themselves. Whenever you sell any item for real money that can then be traded to others in game for game currency you are tying game currency value to real world currency, that will never be a recipe for a working game economy. Because of this hugely inflated value they are the go to commodity for those people who are causing the root problem. There are websites where people are (Against ToS) selling literally hundreds (or thousands between them all) of Kronos at prices much lower than Daybreak. What this tells me is that these Kronos were A. duped in some way or B. bought with duped platinum and are then being sold for real world money as a source of revenue to exploiters. So given the fact that these exploiters do not care about the value of plat and can generate unlimited supply of it through duping, it does in fact lead to Kronos causing inflation because the dupers would not be generating all the excess plat if they didn't have a monetary motivation to do so. Bottom line is daybreak needs to find and plug the exploits that are flooding the game with excess platinum and they then need to add platinum sinks that are capable of removing what is already out there. These need to be targeted and desirable sinks to those who have excess platinum and not things that are required for normal gameplay to those who are not swimming in a huge money pit like scrooge mcduck. The problem for daybreak here is that deflating the value of the krono in game also makes it less likely new or returning players buy them to be able to afford anything in game - hurting their bottom line. In the long run I have never liked the idea of kronos to begin with, at least as a for real cash item. They themselves obviously make an amazing plat sink if they had just been put on an npc for sale for platinum instead of for real money and made No-Trade. Implemented in this way they could easily drain coffers of the rich over time, and the plat price could be regulated and adjusted by daybreak to reflect current economic state of game. Making them No-Trade would also punish those who are selling them on third party sites because they would be stuck with hundreds of Kronos they can't sell. I won't pretend I have all the answers to this problem, but closing your eyes or burying your head in the sand is not the answer. The fact that Kronos have inflated by HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS in a couple months shows this is a real problem that needs to be addressed by devs.
Honestly they just need to reset Economy soon as they find the Plat Dupe that is going around, Krono's were at 450mil last night before I went to sleep, now they are over 700mil when I woke up.... this is absurd, people are going to start quitting that rely on others to get adornments and other items that aren't easily obtainable for a casual player.
700mill?! Holy crap, people! This is just greed at its worst. Why be THAT greedy?! We're all supposed to be having fun playing a game, I agree with Bord, us casuals are gonna be screwed over.
This is just me being curious. Is there any legitimate way folks have that kind of plat to buy krono with? I hadn't given it much thought but with prices climbing as high as they are now I'm actually wondering if the smart thing to do is to stay away from krono for now. I know there are some players who have built up quite a pile of plat over the years but really, hundreds of millions for ONE krono seems like a lot to me. I don't know. Maybe there are really players out there with THAT much plat to burn (plat they earned legitimately). When I used to play more hard core (now I casual solo mostly) I remember having more income... but not that much more. Even crafting and playing the broker... I dunno... can you make hundreds of millions that quickly? I regularly buy one or two now and then and sell them to fund my adventuring but as tempting as it is to buy a couple and sell them for a billion plat (that seems a bit ridiculous) if there really is some kind of dup nonsense behind the latest krono prices maybe the best thing to do is to hold off until we know what is going on. I want no part in a plat dup. Even being an unwitting buyer I wouldn't want to support that kind of nonsense. If it's just honestly that folks are willing to pay that much for a krono, well okay then. That's how markets work. But I'm starting to wonder about how fast and how high the krono price has climbed recently and if it's maybe an indication of a dup or some such. Does anyone know for certain this inflation is from a recent plat dup? Hopefully the DB folks a keeping an eye on it. Of course they probably are happy about the krono sales but a plat dup is a problem if there is one. Now I'm going to go flip a coin to decide if I should buy a krono and sell it for a crazy high price.
Sure. Sell shinies, in bulk. Also, sell temp adorns, mount tack, food, snacks, ammo that requires rare, etc. Look at the prices for ONE of those things on the broker. If I go out and hunt up a bunch of vampire bones and then turn those into shinies, I can make several million plat per day selling them on my one toon that does nothing but selling shinies. Once you have enough money for one Krono, buy it cheap as you can. Keep selling all that stuff you were selling before, but put the Krono up for sale for more than you paid for it. Even easier, purchase some Kronos at US$15 each, then sell them high. Plow the money back into buying cheap Kronos, then resell. Keep doing this, and soon it's two, three, four, ten Kronos you are selling. Many people do not have the patience to let the Kronos sit there on the broker and sell at a higher price, and people who want plat in hand will sell below the going market price for Kronos. If you can be patient and fleece the impatient, yes, you can legitimately get tons of plat. HOWEVER, this can't sustain the price of Kronos doubling every couple of days. Why? Because people don't have the plat. When you sell stuff on the broker, you are just moving plat around among toons. I'm not spending much of my plat, so it's not being redistributed, and you can expect that lots of other players hang onto a good wad of cash. New plat is created almost every time we kill a mob, finish a quest, get one of those bags o'plat from the Loyalty merchant. Some plat is destroyed every time we pay house or guild hall rent, repair armor, or buy things from in-game vendors that charge plat. Unfortunately, we do not have big enough plat sinks destroying plat. We get too much plat sloshing around the economy. EVEN THAT is not enough to cause the near-daily doubling of Krono prices. The only way to get this much excess plat in the economy is when someone finds a way to exploit. Sometimes people figure out how to dup plat. Sometimes people find the stupid things, like a vendor that will sell you a banana for 1c and another vendor that will buy that same banana for 2c, and a jerk makes a bot that will go buy as many bananas as a toon can haul from the first vendor, sell them to the second vendor, and double their money. Some idjits were popping the adorns off of gear in the various Tishan's Lockbox locations and selling the adorns for a copper or two, which is why adorns anywhere no longer sell for any value at all. In the past, the exploiters bragged and shared "how to" methods with their friends and guilds, who apparently thought dishonesty was the way to go and ran out and did the same thing. Eventually you get so many people in the know that someone reports it. I can't figure out why Daybreak is not able to pin down the current exploit and identify the exploiters, I can't imagine how you get an exploit of this size without someone slipping up and letting the cat out of the bag.
Thanks Sig. So it sounds like you're saying yes, there are legitimate ways to have earned that much disposable plat to be able to buy krono at stupid high prices AND the recent climb in krono prices is likely due to something less than legit? Did I interpret that correctly? Anyhow, think I'll wait a few days before I decide to buy another krono to sell. If prices keep going up quickly I'll know somethings up and hold off. If they level off or start dropping in price I'll feel less concerned and be more tempted to buy/sell one or two.
I no longer buy the plat dupe explanation. Sure there have been cheats, but nothing that we've seen recently, so nothing to explain the huge inflation over the last year.
Maybe it's just me selling the wrong type of thing then - because I have all max tradeskillers, sell shadowscream ammo, food, shinies, etc and I only have around 120 mill plat. (I cry a little saying the word "only" though there, because I remember my ex and I killing gnolls in Antonica and TS, they dropped about 2 silver, and my ex saying something to the affect of, "These gnolls are rich." My how 20 years goes by fast!)
I've posted about this in a few other places, but I'll say it again. I have a bunch of KA plants that I harvested regularly starting at the end of KA. I put the rares and the regular harvests on the broker. By PoP I had enough plat to start buying and selling kronos as the market moved up and down. At one point I had over 50 kronos and never paid any RL money for them. It takes time and watching the market, but it's still achievable.
You did interpret correctly. You might as well sell while the price is high. Doing so is not exploiting. The exploit is whoever is duping plat or whatever it is.
