Cash Crunch?

Discussion in 'General Gameplay Discussion' started by Elostirion, Sep 9, 2021.

  1. Elostirion Well-Known Member

    Lots of threads about stat crunching. The short is- that would be a lot of coding and testing.

    What about.....a Cash Crunch?

    Currently 100 copper make a silver, etc.

    If we changed that to 1000 copper make a silver and on up, and crunched every character's and guild's balances to the new standard, then we'd be back to buying and selling things to each other with thousands of plat instead of millions. A moderate-small convenience many times a day for all of us, much simpler coding (fewer knock-on effects that also have to be changed).

    Changing vendor prices and quest rewards would be a nice thing too, but that might be past the effort/benefit balance point. Unless we wanted to actually use the other three coin types we have and make 10,000 copper exchange to a silver. With that rate, Krono would sell on my server for 15 plat or so, and quest rewards/vendor prices would have to also be database-updated to the new rates.

    Would something like that be worthwhile, or would the risk of forgetting one obscure vendor somewhere who sells stuff a million times too well be a dealbreaker?
  2. Priority Well-Known Member

    And, the point of this would be what? Just making it easier for dupers to make even more money in relation to those playing as intended? I just don't see a point.
    Melt likes this.
  3. Geroblue Well-Known Member

    My characters are poor as it is. If one has 1000 plat, I'm amazed.
    Breanna and Daryx like this.
  4. Standard Member

    The only way to fix the plat problem is to make it worthless.

    Introduce a new currency separate from c/s/g/p, block the use of c/s/g/p currency in all transactions and on the broker, effectively make it no trade. Change mobs loot tables to drop the new currency instead of c/s/g/p.

    Economy reset.
    Muffincookie likes this.
  5. Hartsmith Well-Known Member

    Aaaand then a lot of people would be pissed and quit playing. While I am not one of those with a seemingly endless supply of plat, I am not sure I'd want to stay if what I do have became worthless.

    Because all my characters pool their resources and contribute to sustaining two different guilds by myself, I am just going to say I am against an economy "reset". It's taken me a lot of years to get what I have, and most of it was pure chance that I had a bunch of tinkered items and portable tradeskill stations in my storage or on the market waiting to be sold when the devs did whatever they did that turned them into unlimited use items. I wasn't playing this game at the time so didn't even know about it when I came back until after accidentally underselling quite a few.

    I remember feeling exactly like you before my supply of tinkered items became unlimited usage, and I still feel that way when I see so many items I want being sold for amounts of plat that exceed my ability to pay even now.

    I would love it if they could separate the "haves" from those of us that have not.
  6. Geroblue Well-Known Member

    I think, personal opinion, that folks who charge huge amounts of plat for under adv level 30 items, might be thinking of retiring their character who puts such prices on broker items.

    I see items I find rather easily going for over a thousand plat. So I sell it for less than that. Probably under 10 plat. I check back a day or two later, and they have dropped their prices to a few gold pieces. Which such common items for low level characters should be at those prices anyway.
    Schmetterling, Breanna and Hartsmith like this.
  7. Finora Well-Known Member



    just my opinion but honestly, what would that actually accomplish? Not everyone is rolling in plat and there are whole systems that are based on the current values of coins and changing what the coins are worth forces those systems to be looked at and changed too. And all the vendors, especially the low level ones would have to have all their prices reset. Sounds like a whole lot of work for practically zero benefit overall and a sizable potential for something to get missed and messed up. That risks opening up an exploit.

    If anything should be done to currency at this point without making people frustrated and angry, it would be adding a new one. Call it like a mithril coin or celestial crystal or lunar rupee or whatever, but just something that is higher than plat.

    They could also add a specialty currency to the next expansion and have no normal Norrathian currency as loot and the dropped items sellable for that new currency or a minimal amount of common Norrathian currency at certain merchants. I'd think something like that would stem the flow of high level plat a bit, it would provide a sort of reset between the haves & have nots as some others have put it at the high level.
    Schmetterling and Elostirion like this.
  8. Elostirion Well-Known Member


    The point was just a QOL issue. Typing all those zeroes every time you bought and sold something, carefully counting zeroes to make sure you don't mess up on broker prices, or needing a custom UI to even type enough zeroes to get the price you need, is slightly onerous.

    That said, I like this solution of yours much better than mine (and better than your other one too). Easier to code, easier to implement, harder to mess up.
  9. MightyMeaghan Well-Known Member

    Yeah, adding a new denomination above platinum would make the most logical sense if they were to do something, like a velium piece or something else within theme.
  10. Banana Tree Member

    How difficult can it be to at least add a freaking comma?
    Svenone, Schmetterling and Manafizzle like this.
  11. Geroblue Well-Known Member

    It would depend on the software. Some I have worked with, easy. Others, no commas.
    Schmetterling, Breanna and Hartsmith like this.
  12. Arandar Well-Known Member

    If they're using the standard C sprintf function (which I think would be likely, given the age of the code base) then they would have to change that code. They do this already for on-screen combat hits, they just obviously don't think it's important for currency.

    There's also locale considerations. The comma is used by some countries for current separators, but others use a period and you'd have to take that into account, as would anything which parses that output (although I suspect the number of people who care about parsing loot output is vanishingly small).

    That's not to say of that would be extraordinarily difficult. I'd also guess on the list of priorities, it would find itself at or near the very bottom.
    Geroblue likes this.
  13. Komatus Well-Known Member

    I have been playing at being a merchant on the broker for over 9 years now. Over 80 percent of my plat is from sales of gear, furniture, shinys, or buying and reselling kronos. I have bought for real cash 5 kronos and sold them in the past. Really didn't need to...lol. So if you are willing to put in some effort on the broker and sell stuff, you too can end up with a nice pile of plat. It just takes the doing of the work. As for the devs making any changes to the plat system...I'd say they have enough to work on right now without tearing into that. The current game cash system works okay for me.:)
  14. Sunlei Well-Known Member

    I don't play on live servers but I can understand where the broker game would be a huge pain in the *** with the economy as it is today.

    Perhaps there is a way to help people with buying and selling/pricing items...a new coin or 'bag of cash' that equals a million plats?

    This could even carry over to the stat bloat numbers. Not to see 30 ZEROs IMO makes the eq2 game more appealing to new players.

    Text in the default ui needs to be cleaned up, much easier to read.


    Another suggestion is for Devs to 'steal' the coding for those outside game 'cheat programs' for broker and crafting and put them to use inside the legit eq2 game.
  15. Geroblue Well-Known Member

    I still see adv level items under level 30 for thousands of plat. Of course, my posting this, the prices will reduce, and in a few weeks, they will jump up to absurd levels again.
    Breanna likes this.
  16. Sigrdrifa EQ2 Wiki Author

    The merchants in Phantom Sea allow you to convert 1,000 Far Seas Ferrin into a Far Seas Strongbox (you get to pay a transaction fee in plat to do so), then merchants in the same zone have stuff to sell for X number of the Strongboxes.

    However, that would hardly help the broker problem or the vast inflation.

    For now, I think they should add a Mithril coin worth 1,000 plat (or more), and integrate that into the broker, banker and other places coinage is displayed.

    But at the same time, they need to add some SIGNIFICANT plat sinks. Housing and repairs aren't enough any more. Repair costs should go up on a steepening curve based on the level and quality of your armor. There need to be other fees and costs that drain plat out of the economy.

    On Maj'Dul, my rule of thumb is to sell shinies that claim to be level 80 or less at 5,000p (or the prevailing broker price, whichever is lower, and stuff less than 100p goes into my guild hall shiny box). Level 90-105 goes for 9,000p, and above that I sell for 9,990p. The exception is when a new collection is added to the game, the first few days I will price at the prevailing broker price until the pricing idiocy stops.

    This doesn't make the low-level broker items affordable for true new players, but OTOH it's usually tens or hundreds of thousands of plat cheaper than what others are pricing for /shrug. The rule is "all the market will bear".... just because you see a spider from Stormhold priced at a million plat doesn't mean it actually SELLS for that.
    Kurei Hitaka likes this.
  17. Geroblue Well-Known Member

    If I sell, at say 25 plat, what I consider a more reasonable price, some have dropped their prices down into the gold piece range.

    But it does depend on what I'm selling.
  18. Kurei Hitaka Well-Known Member


    Exactly, Broker stuff and a new coin denomination really wouldn't help actually drain the plat. The player economy just moves the plat around, and as we've seen in the past, we really can't count on people to consider their own lack of plat to mean most of the population might be lacking in it save a small handful of millionaires moving Krono.

    Higher repair bills and maybe for level 130+ making spells vendor-purchased like how EQ1 does it could help bring the on-hand stashes down more.

    For comparison, FF14 has a similar issue where Gil isn't exactly finite, but the problem over there also isn't quite as bad as it is here. Despite that, they are basically uncapping the Travel Fees and adding new upper limits with the expansion as a bit of a money sink.

    We need something over here to stop people from sitting on their 25 million plat hordes until they spot an opportunity to influence the market lol.
  19. Schmetterling Well-Known Member

    how about adding a separate broker for items up to level , lets say 80 that has a price cut of no higher than 1000 plat or something like that .

    And I used to play a game with gold being the highest currency to use on the broker can you imagine those numbers .

    But the numbers did have more comas
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  20. AOE1 Well-Known Member

    Talk about coming up with ideas to totally run off players, there are some her that are doozies.
    Pixistik likes this.