Introduction
Hello and welcome to my first post. My name is Nillstan of the Tarlach server. If you play on a different server and believe that all I say in this article doesn't apply to you, by all means leave. But I'm absolutely sure that all servers will fall victim to this same fate. You may also feel that I'm fulla crap. That's you. If you feel this way, get lost. Odds are you got here by accident anyway. Get it? Got it? Good. Let’s get into it.
The Mabiconomy Past
We're gonna start with the Mabiconomy as it once was. Way back when it didn't SUCK. The high tiered items were stable. Celtics, Demonics, And other weapons and armours of that tier will be considered God tier for this page. They were also stable. Players who've played to post 5k had access to God tier gear almost exclusively. High tier gear was for post 1k players and newbies who got it as a gift. Everything else, Mid and Low tier gear and items, were for newer players. But all of them were accessible, and if you needed to get rid of an item it was possible. There was always someone who wanted your items. Even low tier ones. And you know what all decent tiered items had in common? They were all made by dedicated productioners like Repnto and I. But then the several gachas screwed everything up. And that's where the Mabiconomy as it is now comes in. And it's trash.
The Mabiconomy Present
Nowadays, everything is so outta wack it’s not even funny. Because of the gachas.
Low and mid tier items have fallen off the map. They exist to almost no one. High tiered items are steadily losing value, becoming low tier items. In fact, the only thing holding (Former)high tiered items on the board are the Celtics and Dragon Gear. And even they, what used to be God tiered items, are losing value at an alarming rate. And don’t even get me started on the Demonics. The market for Demonics is so low that I cant even rightfully say it exists anymore, except forGloomies. Then again, the Demonic Market had a huge screwup from DevCat and the Mabinogi team. The gachas were not kind to these. Because by having Demonics come from the Gacha as well, the Mabi Team added an extremely huge amount of Demonics into circulation, almost matching the number of players there are. Part of what made the Demonics special, and so valuable, was the fact that they were so rare! Before the Gacha Screw-Up, they had to be made. And they could only be crafted by masters of crafting. And those who’d rather make things than break them are rare as it is in any MMO(Extremely Vague. Mabi has many dedicated crafters). The Demonics added to the Gacha rewards ruined the Demonic Market. Because why would you pay millions for an item that you can just get from the gacha for minimal effort?
You may be asking yourself, well what does the gacha have to do with Mabi’s economy? Well, a lot really. Take a look through Belvast’s Shops. Have a look at what you’ll find. 9 out of 10 Items you’ll find are gacha exclusive. That’s right. The gacha items flooded the market, becoming the only High and God tier items. They cant be made. If you try to sell a non-gacha item, odds are you’ll have to dig into the deepest crevices of Mabi’s player base to find a buyer. It’s near impossible. That places fault on both Mabi’s Dev team, and the PTP(Pay-To-Play) Gamers. You did this. You ruined the market for everyone who doesn’t drop hundreds on this game. And the worst part is this, you probably don’t even realize it.
By paying real money for the gacha items and flooding the player market with them, you removed all High and God tiered items from circulation. You may think that this isn’t a big deal. After all, cant the gacha items just take the place of the former tiered items and everything just level out again? NO! THEY CANT! By removing the old Tiered items, you remove the need for production! By having the Gacha take over the market, you cut more than half of the player base out of the economy! Gacha items are expensive. Too expensive for players with no Gacha items to keep up. And this is where The Mabiconomy Stands as is. Now for the prediction.
The Mabiconomy Future
Soon. Not later. Soon. That’s when the crash is coming. As the old tiered items fall even farther out of circulation, the gacha fills the market to the brim. Half the player base is cut out of the market completely. Only the PTP players, and some well standing FTP Players, are left standing. Trade resumes as normal. However, there’s a catch. Soon after, as more and more of the PTP Players amasses all the items they could ever dream of, the economy slows. Nothing gets bought or sold. It slows to a standstill, leaving the FTP Players poor, and the PTP Players so rich they don’t know what to do with themselves. Then, when everyone least expects it, BAM! The economy crashes. With no one buying or selling, everyone’s backpacks lose value so rapidly that all, And I do mean All, players will be left in poverty. But the PTP community, dead set in their ways, will see no change. In a rush to restore their backpacks to their former glory, they’ll turn to the same thing that ruined the economy in the first place. But the gacha wont save them. In fact, the gacha will push the economy even farther into poverty. The new gacha items will refill the market, pushing everyone but a select few straight back down into poverty. This process will repeat until only four or five players are sitting with backpacks of any kind of value. The economy will fail soon if nothing is done about it. But it’s not just about backpack value! With the economy dead and no one wanting the old tiered items, production too will die. All but three of the life skills will become useless. Almost half of the game’s core components are dead. And there’s almost no way to bring them back. Except for this.
The Saving Grace: How To Fix The Economy Before The Crash
These few suggestions are controversial. And believe me. I do want to hear what you think, so send me a note in-game if you got somethin’ to say.
1.Remove Demonics from the Saga and Gacha rewards
Doing this will return a major part of the economy, albeit slowly, back to circulation. They weren't that good of weapons to be sure, but the rarity was worth having way back when
2.Stop the Gacha as a Community
This will almost single handedly stop the crash from coming. I understand that people who do the gacha will probably not stop doing the gacha. All that really needs to be done is for them to stop flooding the market with the items, but gradually introduce the gacha items one at a time to avoid a crash. It doesn't have to stop altogether. The Gacha as a whole is a good thing. Bringing high value items into circulation. The problem comes from them putting craftables in, and from the players flooding the market with the Gachas uncraftables.
3.Revamp Production
The Music Q update brought about the return of an almost dead talent(The recreational half of music). We need one of these for production. New items, updated stats for old items, rebalances! All made through production, just as it should be. The God and High tiers will return to their former glory, replacing the gacha flood. The Low and Mid tier items will become useful again. All will be right with the world of Mabinogi, and everyone is a little richer at the end of the day.
Latest Edit
10/22/17
Everyone's making good points. I've said my piece. Me? I'm probably the least qualified to even talk about this to be honest. So I'll leave it in the hands of you, the larger player base. Enjoy the food for thought, and the arguments that will come with it.
Comments
Stopping gacha is a horrible idea in my opinion. Mabinogi is a free to play game so they need something that brings money. People always are going to want something and new items and people want something to return to the gacha so people do it. Everything loses value over time and I am very glad on it. Their have been items I have gotten for 2-5 mil when years ago they were 20-40mil (some even 50mil) I am glad items crash in value because it's more fair to people who can't afford to spend 50mil on one outfit.
D: You can't say that, you were the one who inspired me to choose style over power-creeping optimisation
#MakeDemonicsGodTierAgain
I meant in a sense that if someone is trying to sell a demonic weapon, they won't get the same value for say a CRK. And for someone who is purely focused on Stats/combat/gear, they would go for something like a CRK.
Exactly. Couldn't have said it better.
It never was and never will be a good economy.
I may have read wrong, but I think you misunderstand me. The Gacha as a whole, like I said, is a good thing for the company and the game. Flooding the market with all the Gacha crap is not.
Exactly. what is happenned to those Celtic royal battle axe crafter is exactly what you described
Those and most other Celtics.
Everything Wrong with obtaining usable, viable gear in the gacha.
The market is trash because there is no benefits to crafting (other than to obtain the god-tier gear), while at the same time all the gear you can create is no different than what you can get from the gacha or NPCs.
The entire economy is centered around end-game materials from elite/hardmode dungeons, skill books, synth'd dyes, event trash, and gacha trash (cosmetic + usable).
Case and point, go look at the blacksmithing list with NPC Store-obtainable only at: https://wiki.mabinogiworld.com/view/Blacksmithing_List
All of the gear is essentially useless, since training requires nothing but armor crafts and the armor you have to craft is only obtainable from Fleta. Finishing is an even bigger disappointment since you have to get a siren mask for any armor you can craft past Rank A.
Why bother when you can just buy armor from an NPC with essentially the same stats, save the bonus stats.
Can't create an economy for equipment because the only gear worthy is from rank 3-1 smithing, engineering, and magic craft.
Know what would be fun? Reworking the crafting of this game to make it more enticing for new players to take up while making it more beneficial than NPC gear (significantly). Here are the steps:
sarcastically...We all know that isn't going to happen. They made it easy for anyone to train with AP training, Brionac, the training seals you can buy, training potions, etc. If they want to craft end-game gear for money then they are going to spend the money (real or fake). We are far too gone to save it now. The new server with weak NPC goods and no gacha is just about the best option we have to playing this game as it is suppose to be: fantasy life.
For now, we play this game for the content they are selling: Barbie's Dressing Room.
(had all the time in the world to type this... shame we won't get any of these changes because Nexon Korea controls all the content)
*edit* P.S, gacha is fine for cosmetics only and should totally be promoted for the company and for dressing up. Just saying crafting is pointless, usable equipment in the gacha is bad, and both of these are a total game killer.
Unfortunately recently developed crafting and high tier gachapon items from KR are either drastically overpowered when it comes to stat boosting, or require far too much effort to craft solo.
The one item the GMs talk about is the Soluna Blade, which some have speculated would take the entire mabi community to craft one.
The reason AP training was developed was to encourage returning players to invest AP to get their characters caught up skillwise without having to grind their skills.
It was also built for a convince factor, for players who might not enjoy grinding as much as others would.
If NPC gear were weakened, it would make them deemed useless and repair slaves.
The only option to improve crafting gear stats would be for KR to develop the perfect Crafting Revamp with a whole new slew of recipes and crafting skill effect buffs.
There are currently a number of revamps that KR hasn't spoken of that have yet to be completed, but the mention of Spirit Weapons was brought up once, as an idea of wanting to improve.
Currently the only options NA has to improve the marketplace is to address the outdated VIP Service and housing system slump, as well as releasing the Auction House system KR released.
Instead of having a finishing mini-game like Blacksmith and Tailoring, you have to toss everything into the pot and hope it rolls high stats.
Excuse me if I wanted to gamble I would open a gacha. At least the stuff dropping out of those come pre-reforged and enchanted.
Yeah I've had my whole system of players working on a soluna blade for about 3 months now. We're not even halfway. Its extremely hard to get to that point. Its like an even rarer version of the divines.
?
1: make checks untradable for a 24 hour duration, then reset all gold values in banks/pets and inventory > 100m to 100m and delete all checks
2: Allow a special limited time use of Defragmentation to turn gacha items into random checks between 100k-1m, expand Defrag table and add more useful mats
3: Buff blacksmithing and tailoring to give significant boosts on all equipment
4: Implement strong anti bot/macro protection, revert VHM/Conflict gold nerfs, make VIP/Daily double gold rewards
5: Increase rare drop rates across the board for NA
The two that would be more harm than good is #1 & 2. Shouldn't get rid of people's gold that they earned through the economy already present. The ability to trash items for instant gold is also more harmful than good, since that will still influence a P2W model that the Asian f2p market coined. Otherwise everything else is spot on.
I hear that NA doesn't even have mats for this in existence yet? Unsure if that's true..but yeah.
It's available, but the mats are so rare that there likely won't be one made in NA for a long time, and I have more than 50 players working on it. Honestly though, it's not even that great of a weapon. Its just how difficult it is to make that makes it valuable. Take the combined worth of all the divines in tarlach and you probably have the value of it.
1: A huge chunk of the gold on the server is botted or duped. Most of that gold is concentrated in relatively few hands. Thoss players can bid up prices for any item they want, meanwhile richest legit players have under 100m and ppl a bit over over would buy items, providing an economic stimulus.
2: This would be a temporary measure to stimulate liquidity in the market place and create a new midrange market, while lowering the glut of gacha items on the market.
Also I forgot #6 - eliminate all transaction fees and drastically lower gold cost of Special Upgrades.