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How to Solve Inflation, But Not Really
"Give Everyone The Option To Pay 400k Per Day To Try And Get 300k/100m Back And/Or Some Fashion, But Cap Gold Rewards Given To The Population At 6.6b Per Week Even Though Item Prices Remain The Same."
400k, huh? I'm assuming that the gold prizes will be constant, but this seems like this would only serve to make poor people poorer as they gamble their funds on trying to win the lotto. The middle players make 400k quite easily, so they'd only profit. The rich players wouldn't waste their time (if they were smart), because most of them RMT or farm 10-100m+ items to sell.
Comments
It's got Greta all over it.
I think its more of a hobby for them.
Um... This person wasn't Greta.
Not necessarily. Reducing gold doesn't solve the problem of item value over profit incentive. If only even 100 gold existed in the game, the kraken hearts and erg materials would be priced to cost a proportional amount, because it's worth a lot by player demand. Taking the means of transaction away doesn't change the demand or supply. You're attacking the children of the problem; not the actual problem. Currency could then just become something like "[x] amount of material;" you'd just make marketing harder by forcing us into a barter economy through gold destruction. You're essentially blaming the object and not the people using the object. The gold is a tool used to obtain the sought items. It's not an absolute and it doesn't control the item's value.
Of course it would take time as people adjusted. If there was less gold going around, it's possible that there might be bartering for compensation, indeed that happens now, but reducing the gold supply will reduce inflation, because most folks will want gold for what they are selling, but if the gold ain't there then they'll have to lower their prices. It's the same idea that monetary policy has in the real world.
Basic micro-economics tells us though that increasing the supply of a good lowers it's price. If Nexon can make Kraken Hearts more available, of course the price will drop, in fact we see this all the time when old webshop items or old event items become available again. That still leaves all that gold laying around to make something else expensive.
The problem is that, although they will never say so, inflation is actually good from Nexon's point of view. The more expensive an item the more likely you'll use the webshop, either to get it directly or to buy stuff to sell in-game to get it. Folks that never spend money on the game, as far as Nexon is concerned, don't exist, they are just part of the landscape and only add colour and atmosphere to the game for those that do.
You're still blaming the gold, though. Gold does not determine value. Removing the gold does not lower the value of the items: It only raises the value of the gold, so the item value will adjust accordingly. The gold is only a representation of the item's value. If the Heart is 1b on Nao, it'd be 300m on Tarlach/Ruairi/Mari in my estimation, while gacha items typically sold for 25m and reforges for 400k-800k. Everything proportionately adjusted with the merge.
So, my question is: Why not just go after the causes of the high demand and low supply, rather than attack the median and assume people with the gold will all fall in line to have their gold taken away without a fight? It doesn't matter how much gold people have if the item isn't worth a lot. I don't see people complaining about holy water prices among this inflation. I don't see people complaining about Thin Thread Balls, either. It's particularly aimed at hard-to-obtain items most people won't bother getting strong enough to farm or bother forming teams over. I don't think this is a coincidence that inflation is irrelevant to items common enough to obtain without much effort.
Ironically, that's one of the arguments folks have cited against merging, HEY WAS THAT A TRICK TO TRAP ME It would expand the money supply and so bring on inflation and it did. This is why things got more expensive. The connexion between money supply and inflation is well established in the study of economics. If there's more money to go around then sellers can demand more and get it. The opposite is also true.
Inspite of that you are correct in that you can make some headway by expanding the supply of a good; that does lower prices. Okay, so we do that for Kraken hearts but there's still other things around to spend money on. Well I guess we can increase the supply of them, and so on. So, why not just let more things be available through NPCs; they have infinite supply AND they eat gold!
Right, that was me, and I don't care.
I still want them to increase the bank limits that way I don't have to deal with 3rd parties.
No, no. You have it wrong. I know I've pointed out that combining several servers worth of gold didn't help anything and contributed to inflation, but I never solely blamed that. I usually list it among other factors all adding up to a singular main point: the artificial and also disproportionate raise in demand and the failure to also raise supply to meet that demand. I've actually made that basic argument since day one, while I was attempting to reason with Alexinians back on the Discord in 2019. The inflation of gold did not help, I repeat that and still believe it to be true. But, your primary argument is that the gold is the sole problem and it is not so.
Economic study does not correlate money supply with inflation; it correlates high demand and low supply with inflation. The money is the median. If people have more money, they can buy more things, so inventory declines more quickly, which means prices must be raised to sustain the supply inventory. It is absolutely important that we recognize the difference, here: the gold in itself does not alone cause the inflation; it does contribute, yet not to a degree where eradicating its existence would solve the fundamental issue of item value as value is not determined by gold. Value is determined by people on a basis of supply versus demand. The gold simply helped measured the item value and more gold meant more accurate measurements in proportion, but on a wider scale. I said earlier that this measuring scale proportionately adjusted with total gold in possession with the new population, but I did not say that item value proportionately raised alongside it. This is why RMT is such a problem is the first place: the gold's value measurement scaled past predictable proportions to meet the new value of the exponentially increased item demand and ironically still wasn't enough.
I use Kraken hearts as an example because that's usually what most of this boils down to. It and the Misty Red Gems along with general Erg mats tend to be the primary aim when discussing inflation, because everyone can reasonably afford everything else, including briogh as an example for what used to be high priced and then fell off over time with lowered demand and increased supply. When they started throwing free Briogh at everyone, the prices immediately tanked even more than they already were, because of the abundant supply. But, when they gave everyone free Erg 35 catalysts, Corrupted Apostle Leathers rose in value, because so many people now needed them to get to Erg 40. Gold had no part in either of those circumstances whatsoever. The gold, again, was the median by which we determined value. More gold in the game does raise the price, yes, but that demonstrably is not the underlying root of the problem. We combined three servers worth of gold, but we also combined three servers worth of demand from people who had the gold and we did not raise supply to match it and that ultimately led to the disproportionate inflation. If I was not clear on that, I apologize.
Here's chart that basically summarizes what I just said, and it includes your idea that basically boils down to taxing everyone harder to take away their gold (which would add to the inflation, because people would have to spend more gold to do content and this would reflect upon item prices) -- my points generally address what's on the left-hand side:
Demand-pull inflation: "aggregate demand growing faster than aggregate supply (growth too rapid)"
You're missing my point. I'm not disagreeing with you on the idea that more gold in the game is inducing inflation and that gold has value in itself; my chart evens shows that I agree. I'm disagreeing with your assertion that the majority of the weight of inflation simply sits upon how much gold exists in the game; my position is supported by the fact that the gold inflation has no effect on items that have little or no demand in the first place. Additionally, I'm sure your prices on Alexina still remain high, even though you've lost a chunk of your population, because demand still exists for rare items despite the decline in gold circulation. Therefore, gold is not the heaviest factor contributing to why items have inflated in value and attempts to remove more of it is just putting a band-aid on the bleeding wound. You have to address the supply and demand, but I haven't seen you make any mention of it whatsoever.
Your example of how the silver market tanked literally supports my argument that doing the same thing for rare items in terms of accessibility would drive down prices. But, I'm not targeting specific items with this argument: I'm stating that there needs to be a general effort put towards encouraging players to generally run more content instead of trying to take their gold away; you're assuming everyone is just going to fall in line and willingly throw their gold into the gold sinks -- they won't and they don't do it now as they take every chance to avoid repair fees and taxes. If you try to "force" them to, they'll simply factor the costs into their prices (because we do that for trade unlocks) and that ironically will yet again cause inflation as my chart demonstrates.
Stated before, inflation is a mixture of both availability of currency and disproportionately increased demand relative to generally unchanged supply, but it's not as if people are farming enough liquid currency to even compete with the level of demand; it's a bit silly to me to see people try to argue that a handful of people farming Shadow Wizard with alts to make 2m per hour destroys an entire economy when this has been going on for years and nobody complained about inflation. There aren't enough people sitting there every day farming Shadow Wizard in hopes to obtain one-and-a-half billion to be able to buy a Kraken Heart. No, people sell other high value items and you said yourself that this only encourages gold transfer; not gold creation.
The bottom line is that the RNG or incentive to do content was not adjusted to sustain a massive rise in demand, so the values of worthwhile items rocketed and that along with RMT and gold availability translated into gold inflation -- but only the demand holds the root level of influence. If people don't want the item, then it's just not going to be worth anything and the same applies in the opposite where items everyone wants tend to hold high prices in any circumstance: the amount of gold in the game has minimal effect by comparison to player demand and item availability.
The result is the same as that resulting from a strategy often used by new communities that move to America. The idea goes like this. You open a business, you do business with anyone but when YOU are the customer you ONLY go to a business owned by someone else in your community. The idea is then that, as a whole, money flows into your community but never flows out. We see this happening in the Mabinogi patrician community. Making more, and a lot more, "necessary" gold sinks reduces the flow of new gold into that community and increases the rate of outflow.
Increasing the availability of the highest end items will drop their prices. Having less gold in the game will do the same although likely it would take longer to do so. The benefit of increasing the supply of a good is you get faster but focused results. Lowering the money supply is slower but you get broader results, it also allows time for readjustment avoiding shocks. So, having NPCs involved can do both. Of course the NPCs don't have to actually sell Kraken hearts but if they can sell items or services that everyone needs, then it destroys gold. Repairs are such a service, but they alone aren't enough.
I'm not optimistic about the results, though.
Yeah, good talk! This was the kind of thing that they naively had in mind when they released the internet on the general public: a reasoned calm dialectic between folks; would that it was so. I wouldn't worry about gold sinks, or anything else that might manage inflation, though. The high price of things is good for Nexon and bad for gold sellers, so nothing's gonna change.
OwO What's this?
Those people farming SW with cousins making 2m per hour may not be as much of a problem anymore, because they aren't making that much gold relative to the huge supply we currently have in circulation. But people have been doing stuff like this for a long time, and I don't think it's a stretch to say that they're largely responsible for the current state of our gold supply. Remember, though the supply is so huge now that it's difficult to increase it by any significant proportion, or to generate a significant portion of it for oneself, it was not always, and it was indeed harmful to generate extra gold from thin air at that point. It is still harmful, just less significantly so, now that the supply of gold in circulation has already inflated so much.
Not only this, but initially, when most people either hadn't thought to do this or lacked the ability to do so (and also when they would've stood to gain the greatest amount of gold relative to what was already in circulation), these people had an inordinate amount of power over the economy. They could even, say, buy up the majority of any given expensive item and then arbitrarily increase the going price of it for funsies. That sound like anything that's ever happened? At least one item should come to mind for most people who were around at the time.
By the way, I was complaining about this years ago, when it was still pretty bad. My guess is, this was how much of the 'patrician class' Helsa speaks of got its start, but more likely they already existed and this was just when their activities became obvious.
Good to see that Helsa knows what's going on.
Anyway, the way I see it, the crazy RNG added to the game as of the last few years, was a reaction to the inflation of gold, and the methods people used to achieve this. The devs knew people would use alts to get this stuff if they really wanted it, and they knew that people would focus on these things as a new store of value, so they added very in-demand items with ultra-low drop rates. I know KR has a much higher population than we do, but you can't tell me players don't do the same thing over there.
As for this event changing anything, obviously it won't. Inflation of the gold supply is a problem that would generally take a long time to fix, assuming there was a way to keep people contently flushing gold down the toilet to begin with. Such a problem is best avoided to begin with, and exceedingly difficult to fix once it gets out of hand - like most of the problems this game has. Oh well.
This is in the past, not present. I have been aware for years that past actions affect the future. That was why I didn't want the merge to happen.
But, let's stop kidding ourselves. This aspect of the argument is clearly arbitrarily constructed to scapegoat bots as the main cause for concern, instead of taking a personal look at what caused inflation (other than disproportionate supply-demand created from artificially inflating populations and not incentivizing players to play through content):
What difference is there between one person farming Shadow Wizard with 7 other alts and a full-on 8 party team of individual players? The difference is that the runs are exponentially faster with the team of individuals. More gold is and was being generated from the individual parties, by comparison to the bots. You're conflating [who receives the gold] with [how much gold is being made]; those are two totally different arguments. One person with 2m per hour will always be and always was less significant than mass parties farming the same mission at faster speeds. You just simply cannot pretend other people haven't been (legally) doing the same gold farming to add convenience to the argument that "it's all the botters' fault!"
The activities have always been obvious. There's only so much you can do about cheaters before you start punishing rule-followers. The crusades against bots and hackers has stretched so far into the average players game experience that it's starting to backfire. People have pointed out the futility in adding more restrictions to players, that inevitably get circumvented. The bots still aren't gone. They'll never be gone. That's why they're such a convenient target for this kind of argument: it's "the evil that won't ever fade." So, it's easier to just blame bots instead of taking a hard look at how the economy is structured and reviewing past actions.
Are you suggesting that those who disagree do not? I'd not start making off-handed, baseless implications. That's a red flag that your argument is actually terrible, if you have to start invoking tribal, emotionally baiting fallacies.
No, the crazy RNG is a result of many factors, not excluding reaction to the lenience of alts usage in KR's servers. We simply get the RNG they get and it's scaled off of their playerbase. KR has been aware of alts being used to farm gold and items for a long time. KR did what NA did not: they adapted to these circumstances.
There isn't a way to keep people flushing gold out, because you can't control people. People can make decisions for themselves. If they don't want to lose gold, then they won't lose gold. They'll navigate around repair fees (Helsa is actually a great example of this, because they stated that they use throwaway weapons for lesser content, much like I used to do), they'll avoid taxes (easier now, since VIP negates it entirely), and use Auction-House discount coupons.
This means that you can't "just delete the gold," because we control the gold and we'll just create more. That means that you also can't "just ban the bots" to solve inflation. The gold represents a value that we -- as of now -- define. And if we lose that value, we'll transfer that value to other things (and that's how you got RMT).
There are four factors contributing to the gold supply:
1) Folks playing in good faith and picking up drops,
2) Folks botting for gold,
3) Gold sellers,
4) Event giveaways.
Number (2), folks botting for gold do contribute disproportionately on a per person basis but the overall biggest sources are (1) and (4) "The honest ones", since they effect so many times more people.
I think number (3), gold sellers, is the least contributor because I really do think it's just one guy. Also, from what the Dunby Square add bots of channel one have been saying, they are not willing to offer more gold, and I mean A LOT more gold, for the same dollar than before because their price has remained static for the last ten years. Since, private sale prices of items have risen, what? 10 times in ten years, at least for the most desirable items, then I see their business only surviving because it has zero overhead. As for their market, it would not surprise me if it is now virtually non-existent. You're not gonna buy the most desired items with blackmarket gold, it's cheaper just to go through the Webshop. You're not gonna use blackmarket gold to buy, say, leather, I mean unless you're stupid enough to risk permanent banning for leather. From Nexon's point of view this is the most important but that's for legal reasons not "in-game economy" reasons.
Since, the inflated prices make the Webshop that much more appealing and since, I believe, it has probably dried-up the gold sellers market, there's not really any incentive for Nexon to see that change. There are two types of people that play this game: those that spend money on it and those that don't. Nearly all of those that will quit over high prices are those that have spent little to none. Of course they'll never admit it, but to Nexon, these folks don't exist. They only serve to add colour and atmosphere for the folks frequenting the Webshop ie the folks that do exist.
Mhm, this does reduce cost greatly, but not to zero. Once Fergus (I actually use Elen) has fubarred my stuff I have to buy more, unless, I make one, find one, show my ankle for one, etc.
I was thinking it, but you said it. This is a harsh and sad reality of this game. If you're F2P, you have to hang around for a long, long time and be ready to dedicate yourself to this game. You have to diligently aim higher and be willing to take the longer road. Most people aren't here for that: they're here for a quick dopamine-laden rush to power and that's not happening here, not without opening your purse or wallet to pay someone (RMT, Nexon, Computer Sellers) or outright violating ToS. It's a symbiotic relationship: these issues of inflation that we discuss are of benefit Nexon's corporate wallet in some way, but the RMT is not and so they actively pursue eliminating that competition as it's also what the "righteous" players agree needs to be addressed.
You're right, but I personally don't think 1 gold per point (beginner weapons) is too much higher than zero.
What do you mean 'a personal look'? I'm not avoiding anything like that; it's not like I broke anything. I know you probably take it personally that I have a problem with people who did this, but know that I don't only (or even primarily) blame those people. Obviously it was the devs fault for leaving the opportunities in the first place, without making them equally accessible to all players.
A group spamming as a party may generate that gold faster than a single individual spamming with alts, but they still only generate gold for each player present. A player who carries alts, is generating an extra 7x as much gold as they would alone, and in this case, it's gold that would not be generated at all otherwise. Compare the number of players, to the number of accounts. Compare a group of players spamming SW as a party, to a group of players spamming SW individually, carrying alts with them. Now compare that in Conflict, where most of this actually took place, and where party play doesn't increase efficiency nearly as much, if one has the strength to solo it.
I'm aware that the inflation of the gold supply is not the only source of inflation overall, as you pointed out in previous posts. However, you don't seem to be considering that, when one possesses a large enough portion of the gold in circulation, they have the power to induce other sources of inflation, such as forcing somewhat-scarce items into further scarcity, and raising prices. While I cited 'funsies' as the reason for it in my post, this was what that example was meant to illustrate.
I disagree. They could've done more to mitigate the damage of methods like this. Just as you argue that inflation should be combated through more than just limiting the amount of gold in circulation, I argue that they could have (and should have) designed the systems that reward gold, so that using alts or bots would be less rewarding.
Want an example? It would've been great if all SMs gave rewards based on completion grades, like the secret shadow missions did. Grade players based on the time of completion and/or number of players, and then make it so players have to make some minimum contribution to qualify for any gold /exp reward at the end, and maybe even make it so players can increase the amount they receive by contributing more (though this would obviously have to be limited). I'm certain there are more ways to go about this, too.
*Baselessly implying that I complimented one person just to insult others by omission*
I didn't mean for this to be a part of my argument, I just wanted to praise Helsa for the explanation she gave. For what it's worth, my initial wording was more neutral, but I changed it to be less wordy. Next time I'll just like the post, I suppose. Sorry about that.
"The crazy RNG is not a result of KR accounting for the use of alts, but is in fact, the result of KR accounting for the use of alts and other things"
I didn't say that there were no other reasons; those were simply the ones I cited, because they were pertinent to the discussion. I actually did mention other reasons at first, but then I trimmed that down for excessive detail.
Out of curiosity, when you say that KR adapted while NA did not, do you mean the playerbase, or the game version?
You don't seem to understand. The devs HAVE the means to control the creation of gold, and what people have to spend gold on in order to continue to generate it. Everything that's possible, is possible because the devs made it possible (even if they can't/won't completely limit some of these factors directly). How do people avoid repair fees, of all things? Using free repair kits that the devs continually throw at them and/or VIP durability reduction. If they'd built the system properly and actively maintained its integrity instead of constantly sabotaging it for a quick buck or eVeNtS, we could have a much better game than we do currently. As it is, they did an alright job of repairing many of their mistakes via the erg system (but the erg system brought its own problems).