We are getting close to 27k. I saw them at 25k on AB a few days ago. I can't even afford nothing on the server. I need to apply for Norrathian Welfare before the new expansion comes.
the thing about kronos is it is difficult for other sellers to undercut the current prices because when you do you won't drive down the price the people that are selling the expensive ones will just buy yours up and sell them for more. lets not forget that removing the broker surcharge from krono sales did nothing but make them more expensive for those that actually bought straight from people's houses because the sellers just absorbed the charge into their sale price, changing it now would just bring the price up even more. TLE is another example of something driving the price up. the problem is the price just keeps going up with few if any pressures to bring the price down. anyone who has piles of plat (or is making piles of plat) i think will be inclined to say that 'everything is fine' DB should do something to encourage the price to drop (reducing the krono dollar price won't affect the plat cost IMHO) I'm sure DBG would prefer MORE krono being bought at lower plat prices then few kronos being sold at high plat prices. DBG only gets money when a krono enters circulation, the more entering the circulation the better
Wait for the expansion when people actually need plat again. People who need plat will buy Krono. Supply goes Up. Lots of Kronos will become available, but the demand will remain similar. Supply Goes Up, Demand stays the same, Price goes down.
it can't be unreachable for the majority of players, if it was than they wouldn't sell and it would drop in price clearly
Price will not go down, simple inflation. This thread was started in May and Krono prices have constantly gone up, and will continue to do so. Just look at TLE, they started at 1 plat and in a month jumped to 10 plat.
When this thread was created Kronos had just jumped from a two years average of 3k up to 11k. In a very short period of time they were 15k. Now they are 27k. The OP was spot on. I believe the Krono timer idea and the Krono pattern ideas (consumes the second you get it from broker) are perfect solutions.
"Too much money chasing the same goods." Thanx, everyone, for providing one of the most entertaining threads I've read in a long, long while.
To be fair every day the amount of coin available on the TLE servers grows by a significant percentage. Starting from making copper, and moving to better coins as quest rewards is going to make a huge difference in the rate even the best players can rake in day to day. Prices can't stabilize on the TLE until the growth of what can be earned becomes close to stable.
24~30k again on AB, which is pretty hilarious. I'm betting there's some relation to the super-crackdown on duped Kronos awhile back, since those seemed to have kept the prices down due to a flooding off the market. And my friends wonder why I say I still prefer to just pay the 15$ lol.
I'm not asking for them to be cheap or affordable for just anyone, just not ridiculous. I could probably buy all of them on the broker, and I am saying the price is ridiculous. The majority of their price has more to do with price manipulation than actual supply and demand. As for people willing to pay the ridiculous prices, most of them are just the investors flipping on each other.
But the problem goes far beyond just making kronos less ridiculous, it affects the whole economy. No matter what level we are, people will continue to buy and sell kronos. Masters, rares, equipment, etc. all become more obsolete as new content gets released, but kronos will always remain a consistent item in the economy. Because of this, it greatly affects the prices of any item because it acts as a baseline for the pricing of anything else. If kronos go up, then so will the prices of almost everything else. So this artificial inflation of the price of kronos by price manipulation will have a huge impact on the economy in the long run. In the short run, it will probably be nice for DBG because people may want to buy more kronos to rake in extra plat. But ultimately this will make the game much harder for less hardcore people to keep up. The greater the price manipulation of kronos, then the more it will polarize the population. With the way things are going, kronos are going to continue to skyrocket and help inflate everything else. This will make it more difficult for less hardcore people to afford almost any item, especially decent gear, spells, etc. and then their performance in groups/raids will take a huge hit, especially as content makes gear more and more powerful. This will make it harder for less hardcore people to even run zones to either get better stuff or plat to buy better stuff. It will make the game not very fun for these players if they can't even do anything because no one will accept them in groups or just insult them the entire time because their gear sucks. The game will then mainly cater to people playing several hours a day or rich enough to buy plat and decrease the population even further. So again, I'm not asking for kronos to become cheap or affordable. Just stop the price manipulation so that it won't destroy the economy in the long run, and ultimately the game.
If "almost any item, especially decent gear, spells, etc" is worth so much, nothing stops a "less hardcore" player going out, acquiring some of the said items via legitimate means, and selling them for current prices, of which you claim Krono provides a baseline price for. Significant inflation has been going on prior to the introduction of Krono, at the same or even higher rates than present. If you want to make a case for ideas to help control inflation, I wish you well. I suspect the item boosting mechanics of next expansion may help somewhat. However, it is obvious that threads like this exist because some people believe Krono should be raining from the sky in Norrath, free for anyone to collect for very little effort. Reality is a whole different creature.
Every action they do is essentially worth less in plat compared to all the big/rich players, which is my point. It may be worth more plat, but it is the relative amount obtainable compared to those other players that is amplified. I'm not saying they are incapable of making plat or anything, but that it amplifies the difference between the hardcore players who play a lot more or ones who buy plat with real money. That is the issue that will continue to increase as the price gets manipulated. And as far as kronos, it's probably not going to stop. They are seen as an investment and even if they get to something even more ridiculous like 50k, investors will probably still buy them from each other even if very few people are actually buying them for subscriptions. And of course inflation has occurred, but that has a lot to do with the amount of plat people can make due to basic game mechanics. The amount of plat made from loot and quests increases with level and other sources such as the loyalty bags. I'm sure the duping had a huge influence on it too. If you are referring to me in saying people want kronos for very little effort, again, that's not what I want. I just want the artificial inflation of them to be reduced so that it doesn't negatively affect the economy in the long run. Kronos will always increase in price due to the natural inflation of items and the fact that they are seen as investments. But this would be much more gradual than the insane price flipping that goes on. Imagine you were a new player just getting into the game. You wouldn't have much plat, your gear would be way worse than everyone else who has had several months to gear up and get better in every way. But if you tried to run any instances to get gear, your dps, tanking, healing, etc. would be way worse than what it would be if you actually had good gear, which a lot more people have at this point. Most people do not have the patience for grouping with under-performing players even if they have a good reason for it. Of course, some people are willing to help out and take the extra time to run an instance with someone with little experience or crappy gear, but a lot would just insult, kick, or put pressure on them to the point where it is not fun. Adding extra inflation would just amplify this situation even more, because it would take longer for them to catch up. The game would become more unfriendly to new players especially, which means the population will be less likely to increase at all. More casual players will also feel the effects too. Games like this are competitive and should be, but if it gets to the point where less hardcore players get pushed further behind, then the player base will eventually reduce to the most hardcore and richest players that can buy plat.
New players receive far more money from selling the stuff they collect as inflation rises though. Shineys for 10pp+ from the starting cities. It's all relative. And they can always buy annd then sell a krono and have enough plat to last all the way to level cap.
The basic problem is that there is too much cash in the economy of the game, so we have inflation. The amount varies from server to server and is related also to population. Every time we kill something, we get small cash rewards (or raid mobs, where you get huge cash rewards), which is like minting new money. To bring prices back down, you have to get to where everyone has a shortage of plat or at least a lot less of it in their pockets. Plat sinks are supposed to help even out the plat flow. DBG has been much better about introducing plat sinks of late. The ferrin merchant in Phantom Sea is a great example, because you ALSO pay plat to package the ferrin into 1K boxes, and there's a plat cost as well as a ferrin cost for the items. Mercenaries are another great example. There's not a darn thing anyone can do to control the krono prices. It's simply a function of how much free platinum is running around on a particular server. Raiders tend to end up with pretty full pockets because you get more money for raid kills than you do for wharf rats. Those of use with lots of alts never get rich, but a raider who doesn't really like any part of the game other than raiding may log in to raid then log off and not be seen again until the next raid. When they have a lot of plat, many people purchase kronos and use them to pay for their game play.
While small plat sinks like these help, the economy needs more drastic plat sinks. Ideally something that would remove a huge amount of plat at once and be voluntary. Throwing on the market or a vendor some sort of vanity item for a huge plat cost would help, but it has a lot of drawbacks. First, only so many people are going to want and be able to afford an expensive vanity item. After the initial rush only a few will be sold. Also if the plat sink is effective, as plat gets to be more valuable even less people would buy them unless the price adjusts somehow. Third as a vanity item a lot of people won't really feel any need to get it, so a lot of people who could afford it won't be interested. I think a really effective plat sink would be to combine some sort of auction system with an actual game play advantage of some kind. Either buying a limited number of buff items, (temporary?) access to some sort of premium zone, or even some sort of super-merc that you can only rent but can't obtain permanently. By offering a limited number of them for regular auction you create a high demand and the price naturally adjusts according to the market value of plat and whatever is offered. I think I'm going to post an example in a new thread. See "Raid Zone as Plat Sink"
I've heard that if you can't afford a Krono on the broker, you can buy one from DBG for only $15, & then, you can sell it on the broker for thousands of plat, with which you can then buy stuff you need. So, even if you're too clueless to know about Level Agnostic Dungeons, & too lacking in initiative to ask for help about this stuff, you can STILL gear up. Amazing!!! Less sarcasm: I'm not seeing where DBG can do anything to "stop the manipulation" without breaking other things. The ideas suggested have been uniformly awful. Most of what's been posted is a lot of rhetoric about poor n00bz being unable (why, I can't figure) to gear up to any acceptable level at all. I'm sorry, but if you actually know how to play EQ2, that "issue" is a non-issue, & it doesn't seem to have anything to do with Kronos at all. Why? Because, if you've any memory of the history of this game, Broker Inflation has been an "issue" since LONG before Kronos ever came around. I even said why, in my first post. It's a well-known principle of economics called "too much money chasing the same goods." Because, even if this isn't a "real" world, some principles of "real world" economics still hold true, & one of those is what happens when too many people have too much money & not enough "money sinks" pulling money out of the economy. We've seen this principle apply to EVERY MMO that has ever lasted more than a year or so; it's a natural part of server & game progression. TL;DNR = deal with it.
