Based on what I see loot routinely selling for on channels, it is my opinion that if the price of a Krono was to quadruple today, they would be at the comparable value I believe they are worth.
Who are these supposed "gold sellers", and where are they getting their gold? The major influx of plat has been not from playing the game, but from buying bags of plat from the loyalty merchant - and you cannot do that on a temporary F2P account. There are no other major sources of plat in the game.
I am fully aware of that. No need to be condescending. Personally I see no point in purchasing SLR items for exhorbitant prices when they will simply be outdated within a few months. Therefore I do tend to have plat rattling around. Right now my plat "budget" doesn't include purchasing krono due to krono ranking up there with the SLR junk. Not worth the price being asked.
Can't a bot group clear a raid instance? That adds up. How often do raid instances reset now? And how many are there?
It's clear there is some form of plat dupe or similar going on somewhere. It's not like someone suddenly decided to buy all the krono on every server for a week or two. Dupe the plat, buy the krono and sell for RL cash. Run out of plat? Dupe it again.
I've heard that the last year or months ago some folks duped tons of kronos, so maybe is not plat, just some kronos that are still on the wild.
you mean the keys that leads the umbrite chests? if thats the case, wouldn't be easy for the devs just to make avaliable myth gear for everyone so the market won't be expensive #iwantmythgear
I'm curious why? if I have 2 or 10 or 20 kronos why i should sell them cheaper on broker or why I should raise the price, I've seen people in our server that has above 30 or 90 kronos with the prices that they want. Anyways I bought my 5 kronos for sale this winter sale from DBG and in order to get the best plat I need to sold them very expensive
This happened in 2013. The dupe exploiter forgot that kronos represent a financial figure that the company has to keep on the books, since every one is essentially a $15 promissory note for game time. Each and every krono has some internal identifier that makes it unique. Since they're the only ones selling "newly minted" kronos, you bet that DBG knows exactly how many are in circulation and how many are used for monthly access, and what all the ID numbers are. It's a relatively trivial matter for someone with backend access to the database to compare the number of krono sold vs (kronos circulating + kronos used for monthly access). If this number doesn't balance, then DBG is gonna be ALL OVER THAT (tax, legal liability, financial reporting requirements, audits). The other thing the stupid dupers failed to note is that DBG can follow a transaction backwards. They know who sold a bad krono. They can trace every transaction to the point where the mystery fake krono originated.The dumb-[deleted] who pulled this exploit lost over 50 accounts and was perma-banned. When the dupe happened, you could see it because you'd buy a krono on the broker, the money would go away, but you would never get your krono. To quote the exploiter, at that point "it went POOF". The entire thread is immortalized over on Flames, and the mods deleted out all the details the goof provided on how he was doing the exploit. The "POOF" combined with the banning should have removed all the bad krono, and if it didn't, then the company would have done it from the back end.
The reason krono prices skyrocket is that people make toons on servers where the price is cheaper and buy kronos there. It's account-wide, so they then can sell the krono wherever the price is high. You can go to TLE, make a toon, then use your knowledge of collections to heap shinies on the broker, reap plat, buy cheap krono, rinse and repeat.
--------------- Something I'm not seeing discussed here is the fact that there are multiple streams of entrepreneurial-ship going on: the K you buy goes on your account. It is immediately available in all other DBG games. Among the questions we could ask in this discussion might be: how many players are buying K for whatever the market price is on the TLE's and then utilizing it to manipulate whatever they want in whatever of DBG's other games they want to? I bet someone privy to all of DBG's games might be able to chime in on this point, from both sides of the debate. I do know that players in EQ I for instance, specifically mention how they 'put their currency into Krono' for periods of time. Might be a smart investment; might also be a way to plan for manipulation by those who play all DBG's games, from the 'entrepreneurial' point of view. Also this: Loyalty points are shared across all your characters on all servers within EQ II. So, earn them on one server -- say on the TLE, then claim those on a live server with one of your other characters and go run over and buy those bags of money from the Loyalty vendor.. o-0. One other question I wonder about is -- is it necessarily only 'plat' duping going on? I'm guessing there are other hacks potentially interesting to nefarious intent which could then affect the economy. Let us hope that the hard working staff at DBG are right there with metrics and a plan if they believe the rise is not just a market adjustment.
Lets see if I remember this correctly. 500p for 5 loyalty tokens. 2 tokens per day, so that equals out to 200p per subscribed account? Not bad for doing next to nothing. But it does cost real dollars for the subscription. If I remember correctly ToV era instances reward 20p per instance. If you equipped a whole set of phantom crafted gear you should be able to curb stomp the simpler instances in 15-30 min (with a full bot group of 95s). You should be able to do another 2 quests in each instance for an extra 5p each. Without going to the temple there are 5 of the easier instances in VI. So bottom feeding you're talking about 150p per toon in a bot group per day, which can be done in about 2 hours. All of this with an extremely complicated script and a few computers (6 junkers, or more likely several accounts per computer). That is 900p per bot group. Now lets consider that this is all within reach for F2P accounts. You can't repeat these instances every 90 min for the big reward, but you can create enough F2P accounts that you can do the most efficient loop of plat earning instances, switch to another F2P account and repeat. That is 12k plat per day for no human effort. All you need is hardware and bandwidth. Oh, and complete disregard for DGB's terms of service. Though since all of these F2P accounts are disposable, even if the accounts get banned you'll be able to get new bot groups up and running the same content in a day or so. So no, plat bags aren't the major contributor to plat. It is a factor, just not as huge as you might think.
Once again I point out that no matter how many dungeons they do, that is not a major source of NEW plat. It is NEW plat that causes inflation, not SLR or the few plat you get from killing mobs in a dungeon.
I keep hearing things like this, but nobody has ever been able to explain just how the actual mechanics of plat duping would work when it is all server side. So I call this one baloney. I has seen the same thing happen in real life - one example is back in the 80's the Hunt Brothers decided they were going to corner the market on silver. For a few weeks, everyone and their dog was buying silver, because it was a "sure thing". Billions were poured into, from people you would never think had more than 50 cents between paydays.
