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AlmostNotsuper

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AlmostNotsuper
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  • How to Solve Inflation, But Not Really

    Easy there, bucko. I'm not your personal entertainment and this reduces my motivation to take you seriously in any way.
    Ahahaha! You can't control what I find entertaining and what I don't! Neither can I, unfortunately.

    And I'm not your 'bucko', pal.
    I don't take it personally at all, but keep the hope alive that I may someday do so. :)

    The "personal look" was aimed at the devs avoiding responsibility. But, I don't solely blame the devs, either. They're not gods; they can't foresee every possible exploit. They can take measures of prevention. They can mitigate incentive to break ToS. I'm aiming at the option in italics, since the option before it hasn't worked in the last 10 years.
    My mistake. I only assumed you took such accusations personally, since all of your arguments seem preemptively made to deter anyone from talking about bots/alts as a meaningful source of inflation, when no one brought it up before you did. I don't spend much time on the forums these days, though, so maybe it is a common topic of conversation and I haven't noticed.

    The way I see it, what I suggested later on in my post was a method of mitigating incentive to break ToS. It's just not the one you want (increasing drop rates of some items you spam for).
    That's why they lowered the gold reward of Conflict, years ago.

    I already made the comparison: you're still conflating [who receives the gold] with [how much gold is being made]. You're also somehow still concluding that [x] amount of gold made with [1 player with 7 characters (alts)] is somehow different than [x] amount of gold made with [1 player and 7 characters (players)]. It's still generated gold and it's still the same generated gold. It doesn't matter who holds the gold. In both cases, it's still [x] gold times [# of people in the mission].

    A bot can only rotate a limited amount of alts. That number is far below the total active players doing other content. 2m per hour on bots is nothing compared to Purification Spamming, Raiding, various other Shadow Missions, Generation Quests, Squire Quests, and all sorts of other content being done on a daily basis. No, it's not all in the hands of one player, but it doesn't matter. In this case, it would accumulate through different, smaller transactions in the market, rather than large, chunky transactions.
    That's what I'm trying to get you to realize. It's not '[x] gold times [# of people]; it's [x] gold times [# of characters], and it never should have been, when there isn't a built-in way for all players to do this. It's bad game design.

    You're also assuming that, whenever someone who carries alts into missions to generate extra gold (or has a bot do it for them), isn't doing this, a party of players necessarily appears to spam in their place. The potential for gold generation may have been the same, but the result most likely was not.

    And yes, I'm aware that conflict spam is no longer a thing. I wonder why they nerfed it if it wasn't a problem...
    It's still the same amount of gold moving around. The [when], [where], [how], and [who] are completely irrelevant.

    That is solved by "market correction." There is a distinct reason why I keep bringing up "Supply versus Demand."

    If you've been a part of the recent stock trends in any way, you'd realize that the only thing a (option) seller can do is ask for the price while the only thing a buyer can do is pay it or offer another. Back to Mabinogi: When a price is paid, the item creeps towards that value. But, human greed can only be staved off for so long; if people stop buying the item at that price, the price falls. If the supply of that item increases, that also drops the price. If the sellers raise the price, that reduces the number of people who can afford it and extends the waiting time before a sale is made. Sellers that don't have that patience drop the price (that's why you keep seeing people undercut everyone for attempts at quick profit). But, that also doesn't cement price. If the price is too low, someone can have an easier time at making higher offers to gain leverage and that will raise it.

    People for some reason like to look at markets through a lens of absolutism. No price is set in stone until it's universally -- or at least 99% of time -- deemed worthless.
    There's more to it than that. Both the low and high poles tend to be very stable - not just the low. In other words, it's not only when an item is deemed worthless 99%+ of the time, but when it's worth a ton to 99%+ of everyone, that the price will stabilize. The only difference is, at the low end there's a cap of 'basically 0', and at the high end, the cap of 'basically a bajillion' is something that shifts with inflation.

    Imagine trying to sell some expensive item on the AH at a lower price. Now say that someone else is also selling this item, and wants to keep the price high. There is only so much of a discount you can apply to your item, before it becomes reasonable for that someone to buy your items and sell them at their price, provided they have the gold for this. If they want to keep that price high, there's not really anything you can do about it, unless it becomes possible to flood the market with so much of the item, that they can't possibly control the supply. And if this isn't consistently possible, then it'll only be a temporary drop in price.

    With this dynamic in mind, I hope you can see why "The [when], [where], [how], and [who]", actually do, and did, matter. With enough gold concentrated in one place, and a way to snipe the majority of an item's supply, you could hijack market tendencies to work for you - and effectively gatekeep possession of that item, and force inflation (of the items value, and the gold supply). You can argue that natural market tendencies would've resulted in this anyway, and you might be right in terms of the general direction of the shift; but there's no way it would happen so quickly, or to such an extent, without that initial concentration of gold which should not have happened in the first place.
    Alright. So, you'd also be suggesting that they backhand newer/weaker players -- again -- to yet again attempt to reduce bot activity in a particular area? And then what will you do when they adapt and start to farm another piece of content?
    It doesn't have to be some sort of punishment, and to the average player - including the new ones- it most likely would not be. The entire point of the system I suggested, is to make it more worthwhile to run SMs alone or bring along characters that will actually contribute (I.E., players and not alts). Given that you dislike leeches, I would've thought you'd approve of such a thing. To look at it more broadly, my suggested approach is not (just) to attempt to abolish the use of bots and cousins, but also to make it less appealing at every turn (or mitigate incentive to use them, as you would say).
    Do we just keep repeating history until either all the bots or new player traffic is near zero because of restrictions similar to the item drop/trade restriction? Take a guess as to which one is more likely to occur?
    Woah there. Bots =/= new players. And we're already at that point, anyway.

    And again, this is not so restrictive as you're making it sound. I thought of it with the specific goal of punishing botters/ohanas, and leaving regular players relatively unaffected.
    That quote is from neither of our posts and resemble nothing similarly stated.
    "No, the crazy RNG is a result of many factors, not excluding (including) reaction to the lenience of alts usage in KR's servers." <-You
    "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" <- My interpretation

    I did read what you said multiple times, and that was honestly the only way I could interpret it.
    The rules regarding alt usage, incentive to promote playing through content, and the RNG of the content. There need not be adaptation of leniency on all three; just one will do.
    The one in bold sounds best to me; though I suspect that when you say it, you mean that they should just continually make broken stuff like perseus weapons, that make all existing equipment irrelevant. Because that's worked so well already.

    You're referring to the first one in your other post though, right? So long as they make multi-clienting a built-in feature, a solution for all players, I'd be fine with that in NA. It'd still be lame though.
    You just said earlier in the same post that "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..."

    If the Devs had the means to control the creation of gold and what people spend gold upon, then why didn't they just use that instead of creating this roundabout route of making difficult content with mythical RNG drop rates? It's because they don't and you and I both know this. The big picture is that they can't control what we value. They can present us, say, Kraken Hearts and Perseus weaponry and people still opt to go with Divine/Demonic Lances, Staves, Chain Blades, and all sorts of (cheaper, less hectic, and closely performing) alternatives. The new Dev even acknowledged this through hard data when he listed the most popular talents in his address: they know what people commonly chose to use, but could not predict what they would choose and how often because they cannot read minds and cannot control human interest.
    My point was that they didn't do enough to control the generation of gold when it mattered, despite having the means. Not only that, but the way they were running the game at the time (everything desirable coming from outside of the game, almost nothing desirable coming from content) made it worse.

    The devs can directly control the creation of gold, and the destruction of gold. They decide gold drop rates, they decide what kinds of gold sinks are added and (basically) how unavoidable they are for players. The problem is, gold sinks (deletion) do not account for all of a player's spending, and they'd also need to influence how players move gold among themselves. As I said, gold generation was a huge problem, but is relatively irrelevant now that the damage is done and the supply of gold in circulation is so ginormous. It is generally more profitable to seek gold from other players than it is to try to generate it, hence why erg is such a huge gold-moving machine (all according to keikaku), and why stronger/wealthier players spend all of their time doing content that rewards items of value rather than tons of gold. This is not to say, by the way, that there's no benefit from sucking excess gold out of the economy.

    Erg and the various insane RNG drops were both examples of the devs injecting value where they wanted to focus player attention, in order to get players moving gold around. You can say that people decide to use other things instead, but these are still what the majority of them are chasing, according to your own claims. The devs can, in fact, indirectly control the movement of gold between players over the long-term, by setting up the goals that players will chase after. They just have to make those things alluring and/or accessible enough. It may not be direct or immediate, but it does work.
    Well, I'm sorry to tell you that not everyone has 100 stacks of free perfect repair kits lying around from the 300 gachas they bought that gave them out for free with each opening. Not everyone uses VIP. Some people have to actually deal with repair fees (made worse after shoving x10 repair costs enchants on their lance/chain blade for 7 total extra max, because their friends told them it was "meta").
    I did not mention the repair kits to say that everyone should be using them; I'm not one of those players with a stockpile of repair kits either. My point was that repair costs are basically a universal gold sink that no one can escape from entirely, except through means that the devs themselves provided. Stop handing out 'skip repairs' tickets, and people won't be able to avoid repairs.
    Sure, I'll agree that systematically nuking the entire repair system built to counterbalance gold generation is a bad idea. I'll also agree that it could use some reform. But, it's still a rain drop in an ocean compared to supply and demand. All of this is a distraction from addressing the actual problem; we're circling around the obvious (yet, difficult) solution of supply-demand economics. Prices of nearly every previously high-value non-gacha item (including echostones, much to my own dismay) have been significantly nuked due to some action or event introduced by our GM overlords, except Tech Duinn items, because of temporarily raised access and supply. When things went back to normal, prices rebalanced or rose even higher than the median due to resultant, freshly created demand. There's no getting around it; we have to address supply-demand.
    I don't exactly disagree with you, but there are better ways to do this than to simply increase drop rates of a few notorious items. There are other problems with the game, and other solutions to this problem, that could also help with other problems. I even agree that drop rates should increase, but only provided certain other things happen also.

    Strange that it edited before I edited anything... the forums are janky as ever, I see.
    Pectyl
  • How to Solve Inflation, But Not Really

    The fun commences.
    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 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.
    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!"

    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.
    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.

    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.
    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.

    *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.
    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.

    "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?
    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).

    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).
    PectylSherri
  • How to Solve Inflation, But Not Really

    Helsa wrote: »
    This was... a reasoned calm dialectic between folks

    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.
    Pectyl
  • Possible Elf Rework Soon?

    Pip-Boy wrote: »
    Archery has usability issues in North America but don't expect that to be fixed any time soon or at all since it works as intended and is very powerful in Korea.

    If there's one thing that's often overlooked about the Elves is that they have the highest movement speed. There's a reason why people pay hundreds of millions for Grade S Wave Sweepers; the positioning advantage it gives you is huge. With spellwalk for instance they become nigh untouchable magic spammers. Fully decked out Elves are arguably the best magic users in the game. This also applies to Alchemy with the new guard cylinders that reduce load time giving you more opportunities to reposition.

    This guy said what I wanted to say, but more concisely. I'd like to point out that while there are things that alleviate the problems with archery (ER reforges, erg), none of them are easily obtained, and archery is pretty unreliable without them.
    Vasumati wrote: »
    I should also mention that giants 'downside' is no archery. But then there's throwing attack...
    Throwing attack loads instantly, fires instantly and cant miss (it TECHNICALLY can... Its happened to me twice in nine years or so...). It has a damage multiplier of 900% and scales with str. All that on a 5 second cooldown (zero on ego). Id hardly call throwing attack a 'downside'.

    Yeah. This would've been OK if we were still limited to a single ego, but it's kinda broken now.

    It's like if only elves got bash, and it scaled off dex instead of str (although, close combat with only bash would be pretty bad against most things).
    @Vasumati

    i left out chains deliberately, even giants can benefit from chains if they do dex centered talents. and your right about the lack of str of course. but i dont use shurikens for damage, shadow binds title is great for dungeons and missions.

    also, i'd like to add random info about the metallic arrows you can get from the jousting shop for only 2 points.
    they are missing an important fact about you get 10% aim bonus.
    (if the enemy running at you, if you have enough distance, you'll get 100% max aim if you wait. but you got to watch for the smoke animation under your feet to make sure you wont miss)

    i paired metallic arrows with my spirit bow with ultimate unlocked for it. and i dont need vision as much anymore.

    https://wiki.mabinogiworld.com/view/Stats_and_Skills#Strength
    https://wiki.mabinogiworld.com/view/Stats_and_Skills#Dexterity

    Giants have more of a dex deficit than elves do a str deficit (scroll down to see the totals). Elves definitely have a stat advantage for chainblades, and dex accounts for more of the damage than luck does. You can't say that giants are better off than elves because they have an advantage in hybrid talents that rely on str, and not acknowledge when elves have such an advantage.

    Although, you might argue that this makes up for it, if the part about chainblades is true.

    Also, that's a neat trick with the metallic arrows. I'd forgotten about those.
    justshowing
  • New Reforge Tool Idea

    Don't take me seriously; I'm just having fun. I think this thread is hilarious. If I were to give a more serious opinion, it would be similar to yours.

    Also, I'd say 3-4 out of 3-4 is overwhelmingly.
    Kensamaofmari