Ying
5000+ hours played
Or you combine servers so the auction house has more players feeding it. If only there was an upcoming server merge.
DDO Economy
- Thread starter axebender
- Start date
droid327
Hardcore casual soloist
Why arent cards being duped, then? That still begs questions
Also if you know something about duping, post it. That's not "fight club" lol
Positive thinking
Well-known member
They arent duping because the cards are the perfect mouse trap, lets catch these little rats and get rid of them.
They cant post details here because thats a bannable offense, but you can bet they have forums outside here where they chat, post trading and exploits. One such forun is not even allowed to be mentioned here on the forums as it such a toxic forum for this game overall.
droid327
Hardcore casual soloist
It seems like there's two incompatible arguments, one that's often cited, in various threads over the months (eg: bringing back the card cruncher)...
- Duping is rampant and uncontrolled, and will render any attempt to fundamentally revitalize or rebuild the economy DOA
and then the one you're making now:
- Duping is self-limiting because anyone who dupes too much or dupes things that you'd really want to dupe gets caught and stopped
I dont see how both can be true at the same time
Thats what I'm proposing with things that cost more than the plat cap.
50k per hour is without even trying. Selling gear to the pawn exchange instead of the general vendor would up that by a lot. Actually trying could easily turn 100k an hour. That's without having to participate in a hypothetical economy. Assuming an economy is actually created, making 3 or 400k an hour would not be difficult.
This is why we need systems for alternative currency - because the core mechanics of the game are now so far gone that staying inside the plat cap is not possible.
droid327
Hardcore casual soloist
Neh, I just dont think thats how it would happen
The plat cap is only a problem now because of inflation. With a proper revaluation, the cap-to-generation-rate ratio still leaves enough granularity in the economy. Cap is $4M. Even at 400k per hour, that means it takes 10 hours (of dedicated grinding, not just from regular play patterns) to go from zero to cap. That's a significant investment of time just to guarantee you win an auction on something that isnt even valuable enough to put up on the ASAH instead...
But even if the cap is too low...the simpler solution is to simply increase the cap until the cap-to-generation ratio is better. No need to create an alternate currency just to get around the plat cap, which is purely arbitrary, especially once they move to 64 bit servers.
Aelonwy
DDO's Cosmetic Fashionista
If they had done that from the beginning I would agree with you... but now we have 9 expansions all with their own mini city areas and all the conveniences of any city hub. So why should the base of the game - Stormreach - have all its mercantile conveniences scattered willy-nilly like the city designers were tipping back a few too many? Especially when we have an obvious area in Stormreach labeled the Market? If anything we should have more zones branching off the Market with access to adventure packs... for instance, all the quests and quest givers grouped around the fountain. I understand the teleport to Gianthold what with the Dragon landing there but the Tower of Frost and Dragonblood Prophecy just feel like they're crowding the space. But head over to the Twelve and the massive area is barely used, certainly the Tower of the Twelve itself is barely used.
No. Its not.
The plat cap is a problem because the way the game is structured creates billions of plat a day in chest loot. No amount of plat sinks is going to fix that.
Except the cap cannot be raised.
No, it can't be raised even if they move to 64 bit servers.
This is called "technical debt". The devs made too many mistakes to undo at this point. The plat cap cannot be raised.
The only thing they could possibly do is burn all the lower tiers of currency and make 1 plat the smallest division of money in the game. Then yes they could raise the cap. Not only would this call for radical reprogramming, it would hurt the game in all sorts of myriad ways.
It would be far, far, far easier to leave the existing currency in place and create an alternative currency. But if we can't even agree on this, probably it will never happen.
I would love this. I really miss the way DDO felt pre-motu.
Since then I feel like each new expansion introduces and then immediately abandons a whole new world.
This is a very lowball estimate but let me walk you through my math, here:
Assume of the active players at any given time, 100 of them are creating an average of 50,000 new plat every hour by virtual of questing and selling. This is new plat being created by the core mechanics of the game.
That's 120,000,000 new plat being created every day.
The devs would have to radically re-write the way the game operates so that less plat is being generated before the current plat cap becomes tenable. An alternative currency that plat can be exchanged for is required.
It worked fine 15 years ago when the level cap was 20 and just having a million plat was more than you could spend in your entire life. Or when, hey, get this - you had alternative currencies like flawless red dragon scales and large devil scales, which is what players carried out large transactions with in the first place because there wasn't a nutload of new plat pouring into the game every day.
Now that cap is 34 and continues to go up, each chest pull at cap generates a few thousand new plat.
Assume of the active players at any given time, 100 of them are creating an average of 50,000 new plat every hour by virtual of questing and selling. This is new plat being created by the core mechanics of the game.
That's 120,000,000 new plat being created every day.
The devs would have to radically re-write the way the game operates so that less plat is being generated before the current plat cap becomes tenable. An alternative currency that plat can be exchanged for is required.
It worked fine 15 years ago when the level cap was 20 and just having a million plat was more than you could spend in your entire life. Or when, hey, get this - you had alternative currencies like flawless red dragon scales and large devil scales, which is what players carried out large transactions with in the first place because there wasn't a nutload of new plat pouring into the game every day.
Now that cap is 34 and continues to go up, each chest pull at cap generates a few thousand new plat.
droid327
Hardcore casual soloist
And that describes very nicely the problem as it stands... But what happens when there's up to 75k an hour in available worthwhile plat sinks? That's kinda the point, when sinks offset sources the currency regains value, because it will start draining out of the P2P economy instead of into it... People will sell stuff on the market and then use the plat to buy stuff from the game
Bjond
Well-known member
It's trivial, not radical. Even if it's got multiple generation points, hunting them down and dividing by 10 or 100 or whatever would probably take all of 60m, including testing for a professional. Even an SSG coder could do it in day (no testing, of course, it's against company policy).
IMHO, it would be more important to post about whether you'd find a lively economy desirable or not rather than details. If SSG ever does any economy tuning, they won't listen to feedback. They'll come up with some strange hack that only makes sense to them, salt it with a few bugs, and call it done.
For my part, I do like a nice market board. I hate farming gear. I always try to buy before I go out to farm. The only game where I ever actually liked farming was ESO and that was due to their unique dungeon-set approach to gearing: collect ALL the items for a particular set and you and your alts can create infinite copies of it.
droid327
Hardcore casual soloist
Technically that's easy enough to describe. Economically, that's an imperfect solution. Trying to strangle the sources to revalue currency will work, eventually...but then you need to balance sinks with the new source rate, and that means existing stockpiles are now worth 10 or 100x the purchasing power they used to be, and will take 10 to 100x longer to reach new equilibrium.
That also means, eventually at least, going back and adjusting the price of everything sold for plat in game, unless you want it to suddenly cost 10-100x as much
Simply decreasing the source rate and calling it a day would be a bad bad way to do it, because most sinks now are "tax sinks": things you have to pay to keep playing, like gear repair and occasionally resetting your enhancements and buying heal and restorative consumables, or the AH house cut. There are few "booster sinks": things that make you stronger or faster or make playing more convenient, but are purely optional. We need more of those added to balance plat sourcing. Without those, cutting source will just make the game punitive... You'll be forced to spend all your plat just to keep playing.
I believe that the best way to make auctions work is to transfer raid items to BTA (or non-bound). Being able to sell rare drop items for example from MD and raid items for Astral; Shards would be great, I'm sure a lot of people would buy the items and consequently shards from the store, motivating people to sell items... I haven't even considered the possibility of selling for money like in new games...
But at least in one way the purchase of shards would be inevitable and thus generate more real income for the game.
But at least in one way the purchase of shards would be inevitable and thus generate more real income for the game.
droid327
Hardcore casual soloist
They absolutely would. In fact a lot of people would just buy shards and buy the items instead of actually raiding.
Then you'll be complaining that you can never fill a raid party, because all the other raiders are just waiting for you to do it and post the gear for them to buy
Especially on older raids where the gear is already more saturatedIt's a self destructive idea from the perspective of encouraging sustainable play from your playerbase, it incentivizes not playing
I don't agree. If it were like that, no one would play the new games. Many people want to play but don't want to grind. They buy equipment, buy a ready-made account and play with friends... Most people don't have time to spend grinding after grinding to get a rare item in MD...
I believe that would be a way out. I prefer to play, I like to play, I like to grind, etc., but I see fewer and fewer people with this desire, fewer and fewer people wanting to farm a Jebbers... and other items that are difficult to drop.
And if they can buy something, they don't spend the little time they have farming. That's what really discourages me... I stopped playing some games because it's 100% grinding sets and everything else, repetitive and tiring.
I believe that would be a way out. I prefer to play, I like to play, I like to grind, etc., but I see fewer and fewer people with this desire, fewer and fewer people wanting to farm a Jebbers... and other items that are difficult to drop.
And if they can buy something, they don't spend the little time they have farming. That's what really discourages me... I stopped playing some games because it's 100% grinding sets and everything else, repetitive and tiring.
