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Momma_Sophie

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  • Idk, it's about Mabi, but not just Mabi, so...

    Helsa wrote: »
    Helsa wrote: »
    Helsa wrote: »
    Was there a pattern to which users got favourable probabilities or which got the opposite?

    I don't know much other than what the article is saying. I can research more into it and post what I find, if there's relevant information.

    My thinking is, that if there was no pattern to it, then Nexon's actions would be better argued as negligent rather than malicious.

    It's possible that it was a matter of incompetence. But, the sudden restriction of my access to the page is making me doubt that to be the case.

    Hm? Maybe, but either way it's embarrassing for them. Being able to say, "No, no, no, we're not evil, we're just stupid." Is, at best, small comfort.

    Ah, I can't say what's worse, honestly.

    I'm tolerant of stupidity until criticism is banned or shut out, which it generally is via Nexon's ToS (in the context where it supposedly causes some sort of reputational damage or financial inhibition to Nexon). Criticism is how people provide solution to the stupidity, so closing it all out signifies a willful ignorance. Even that is forgivable to me, until the action turns into shutting up everyone else's mouths. At that point, you're evil. That's my guideline.

    I'm suspicious as to whether this censorious action imposed upon that webpage link in the OP (on basis of "administrative review") is due to some pressure from Nexon. I know how authoritarian this company can be, so I'm not writing it off as impossibility.

    Most Korean corporations (or E Asian corps in general) are very authoritarian.
    As regards to the article no longer being accessible, there are 2 options. One pressure from the company on Business KR forced them to remove it, and Two the allegations are completely false, and it has been removed. In the era of fake news, one little thing that is rumored to be true can spread like wildfire, and people who are fed off of them act on impulse, and thus we have groups acting with dissent on their discontent. And this is what's been happening over the past 5+ years, from top to bottom throughout the world people are being manipulated with info that is difficult to discern true or false.

    100% agreed and I also didn't see any evidence that this manipulation actually happened or happens. I didn't see any data reflecting this to be a real thing. I didn't see anything other than "Some people thought [x] happened, got angry about [x] happening, and are protesting about [x] and boycotting Nexon over [x]."

    Would I still ask the question as to whether [x] actually happened? 100%. Would I want information available that would allow me to see for myself if [x] happened? 100%. Would I like it if the claims of [x] happening were able to be investigated and also challenged and argued by the accused, rather than removed and "reviewed?" 100%. These patterns of activity simply strike me as similar to other kinds of activity I've seen involving this company, including the removal of the news article. I would like to be able to draw my own conclusions.
    Kensamaofmari
  • Real Money Trading Enforcement Update

    --To Greta--
    Greta wrote: »
    One of best Mabinogi gold sinks keep on getting removed by Master Plan Events. This last year alone probably had like 6 months of free weapon repairs. Makes me think this is the main issue why inflation skyrocket.

    This is a major factor. The constant uplifting of naturally occurring gold sinks is causing more issues than it normally would. They've seemingly halted the issuance of in-game stimulus checks (Lucky Check Boxes) that obviously saw continual exploitation by those with multiple accounts on hand and that is good. But, the counter-balance has to exist. I know people complain about repair fees interfering with their grinds and that's relatable. But, that comes down to personal decision: people are way too careless about handling their equipment repair fees and removing fees entirely isn't a solution to that -- it just enables it.
    --To Helsa--
    Helsa wrote: »
    Inflation will happen even if everyone is an honest actor. People make more over time; even playing the game honestly, so the money supply will ALWAYS increase. Therefore controlling inflation means more effective gold sinks. A very good way to do this is to have more of the things valued by players purchased via NPC's. That kills the private market and it's a gold sink; two birds one NPC.

    You're right. Inflation does naturally occur over time, but the natural progressive increase is so slow that it's barely noticeable. It's kept in check by the many "fees" that the game has, including repairs, taxes, and upgrades, while the highest difficulty missions and dungeons barely reward us with more than 50k raw gold per chest per run (unless you use a Shadow Crystal in Shadow Missions). Yet, I can't think of a time where dramatic inflation occurred and it did not directly follow something Nexon did: Server Merge, Free Repairs, Free Gold (Lucky Checks). But, we also have to accept that introduction of new content is always going to change public perception on a material's worth.

    I think your idea of creating even more gold sinks (more taxes on daily functioning) wouldn't solve anything, because it creates more monetary barriers for the average player to deal with. I don't think introducing developer-controlled prices for materials is going to curb inflation, because you'd have to do this for all materials in the game or all you're doing is shifting values around for what isn't NPC-controlled. Nexon can't quantify the value of a material or item; this cannot be dictated down by their decree, because players value things differently.

    I say all this, because the primary reason that people grind content is exactly because individual perception of value: The Misty Red Gem and Kraken Heart sells for so much that it draws in dedicated grinders, who ensure that the materials exist in the game for those who cannot/will not grind that content. The price of those materials being so high incentivizes other less-powerful players to grind other content; they can sell off enough materials from that lesser content and buy the Gem and Heart for themselves. The materials they sell off to afford the Gem and Heart are bought by people who pursue things like Erg and/or Soluna, who put gold into the pockets of people who farm consumables and provide high-quality crafting/blacksmithing services. And in turn, those people who pursue Erg likely are the people farming the Misty Gems and Kraken Hearts in the first place. There's also the people who buy items from the Cash shop specifically to sell them off to people and rack up in-game funds needed to buy the thing they want, so this level of player-based valuing even benefits Nexon to a degree.

    This is a very, very delicate chain of marketing that we cannot simply break on a whim by shifting some of its control into the hands of Nexon, a body of people that many of us already find to lack the insight necessary to handle these types of issues. The market will simply adapt and unforeseen consequences will occur, guaranteeing price shifts in items no one could have suspected. If they were to do something like, for example, shift Ruptured Black Metals into an NPC shop and price them at, say, 7m gold each, that price ceiling has now destroyed the incentive to grind dungeons for Ruptured, because nobody can sell higher than 7m to compete with the NPC shop. They'll instead grind for rarer things and sell those off (like, Subtle Marks and Broken Magic Essence), which will gain more value because they're all now even more rarely found than Ruptured Black Metals easily found at an NPC shop.

    But, please know that I do agree with your fundamental idea of creating a new way to obtain the items; I just disagree on the options that include having Nexon directly determine an item's gold value.
    --To Kensa--
    One of the continuing problems one created by gold farmers is the never ending demand for gold, and thus the never ending cycle of gold inflation. The farmers created a market they could exploit and get real money from. There needs to be more methods to manage supply and demand of gold and possibly get that inflation under control. I think price caps under personal shops is effective (a shop license can only hold X max amount of gold), and this may not be a popular opinion, I think price caps should be applied to auction house too. A cap for a player's total sale slots on how much gold they can actually hold.

    I don't think that would help anything. Everyone gets a chunk of free Character creation cards, when starting up a new account. If you're a human, you get two more (one from each leader of the Iria Tribes). After that, Nexon allows creation of multiple account (within a time period) and people list their items on those alternate characters as well.
    CrimsọnHabimaruShakaya
  • Real Money Trading Enforcement Update

    Crimsọn wrote: »
    Well it's no secret that kraken hearts pay rent. Least that's what I heard. Perhaps increase the drop rate and that ~might~ curve that market. lol.

    It certainly would. The Red Flame Dragon Leather needed for the Red Flame Bugle from this past event was comically cheap, because pretty much anyone -- new or old -- can grind a Shadow Mission and it doesn't take very long to complete most of them. The Golden Yarn obtained from fishing was basically a question of patience and how many computers you have, so it obviously had much higher value by comparison. The Horn dropped more commonly from higher difficulty dungeons (which obviously would see less play by comparison to shadow missions due to length or time needed to farm passes for them and clear them), so those logically would cost even more to buy from other players.

    This event basically proved a basic tenet of markets, which is that ease of access has a direct (yet inverse) correlation to price value. If they could make certain materials more generally accessible and also strategically apply the adjustments across the entirety of content in general, it would reduce the general costs of the materials and thus remove incentive to pursue RMT trading (I've even suggested creating "Swap/Exchange Shops" as an idea of what could be done). If anyone has been watching the prices of Divine Mineral Fragments on Nao, they immediately lost a chunk of value when a large portion of the RMT traders lost interest in the game. When they came back to claim the free Erg 35 catalysts from G25's events, they skyrocketed even higher than their previous 250k threshold and have only risen since. Divine Minerals are only farmable in three precise locations, through other materials that can be fragmented to obtain them (one of which provides materials so rarely seen that you'd be better off selling them for 30m - 200m and just buying the Divine Minerals) and none of them are time-efficient or RNG-friendly (unless you own gear that supplies huge DPS and/or you also have many "friends" to help you farm Purification Missions). Divine Minerals have been a staple material for people to use in RMT profiting and that's a clear example of the ridiculous amount of RNG involved with the Erg process working directly to the benefit of the RMT traders.

    All of the above is evidence that the game's over-reliance on RNG created this problem; it's a direct consequence, created by the developers, that will persist until the concept of progression is reevaluated to not simply be a dozen RNG barriers.
    EdethaCrimsọnShakaya
  • Real Money Trading Enforcement Update

    To Edetha:
    Edetha wrote: »
    So basically, what I got from this:
    If you engage in any sort of commerce whatsoever with another player, you might be sanctioned. You may have been interacting with a RMTer, and didn't notice it.
    I saw that they said this only will apply to people who "knowingly" do something like this. Alright. Now, the question becomes: "How do you know who knows?" Nobody with a brain thinks Nexon somehow will acquire evidence to proof that someone knows what's going on when these transactions occur, so the only logical conclusion left is that they'll throw a dart and whomever it hits is just screwed.
    Also, hot take:

    RMT helps Mabi's economy more than it hurts it at this point. Mabi's economy has the upper eschelons earning SO MUCH GOLD, that the redistribution of currency to non high end players, helps the game more than the downsides from the farming bots (which mostly use instanced areas, so they don't directly encroach on others farming, like happens in other MMOs)

    I sincerely think you have this backwards. Nobody realistically (rather, "commonly") is sitting there everyday, farming up over one billion gold to buy a kraken heart. The price is obviously based upon real money value, approx. $500+. That's not to say that people aren't obtaining over one billion in liquid gold. Gachas are forever lucrative. That still requires Real Money Trading, but to Nexon instead of other players. The people who engage in RMT simply decided to cut out the middleman and RNG and give the funds straight to the source of the Kraken Heart, thereby also reducing overall cost by not having to reroll gacha 1000 times for that one rare item they'd need to afford the Kraken Heart.

    To Adeno:
    Adeno wrote: »

    I only want to address the "Multi-Clienting" part. This is a popular means that people like to use to attack the wealthy players on. The thing I want to ask is how you plan to prove who does and who does not Multiclient? You can't suggest Nexon invades someone's device to find the files. Additionally, you can't assume everyone who has alts around them is "Multiclienting." Nexon's ToS does not disallow creation of nor usage of alternate accounts alongside your own main account. It simply limits the amount you can create within a time frame. Now, I'm not going to sit here and act like a person owns eight whole computers dedicated to farming Purification Missions. It's barely believable that a person owns four laptop/desktop computers for farming dungeons/shadow missions (and I'm one of those people). Even so, we can't just assume things. This all sounds good until the gun is pointing at you, on basis of these same exact standards. It's already happening to newer players as they get restricted from literally playing the game because they were confused to be a bot or exploitative account (see Edetha's post regarding a player being restricted from dungeons).

    --General Commentary--
    The expansion of these rules is now so broad that I honestly don't see the point of having rules. I'm not stupid enough to believe that Nexon plans to go through objective reasoning methods to verify and prove that someone is indeed violating any such rule. I firmly believe this simply serves as a means to expand Nexon's justification in their actions against someone, as I've seen and read stories of innocent people claiming to be mistakenly punished for being involved with such things as RMT or botting. The ToS allows Nexon to terminate accounts at will, so I can only conclude that this is more of a PR stunt than anything else. In other words: they'll continue as they were, but now don't have to worry about backlash if they clamp down on an innocent person; they can simply justify it with "association," without disclosing whom the associate may actually be and people will simply nod their heads and praise them for their enforcement.

    Basically, nothing has been solved in doing this -- except the expansion of authoritarian reaches into our personal Mabi lives on basis of "eliminating illicit trades." You can't prove who "knows" what without mind-reading or explicit recognition of involvement and as always, the RMT market will adapt to this expansion and develop new rules of their own to protect themselves from this.

    I can't tell you what the solution is to this. There probably isn't one. I firmly believe that server merging is the root cause of all of this inflation by combining 3 servers worth of wealth into one server, RMT or not. But, that's hindsight and we can't undo it. Going forward, I'd suggest reconfiguring your own business structures in regards to item rarities and gameplay factors involving RNG and Gacha. It's a lot easier to reduce prices of items by making them more accessible to the average player (yes, this would logically curb your profits and revenue and yet I've seen enough of your financial statements over 2020 to know you'll all be fine), than to try and eliminate an underground ring of gold traffickers. You guys did a great job with Red Flame Dragon Event, which encouraged more people to do more content in exchange for more rewards from the event. It helped increase the availability of materials on the market and reduced some of the costs. It also helped people make money by supplying parts of the Bugle to the market for a ~1m profit per material instance.

    --Conclusion--
    Generally, I'm not saying not to go after the RMT traders when it's evident as to what's going on. But, realistically, this is like trying to eliminate "crime" by creating/expanding more rules that the criminals clearly will not follow (if they didn't stop 6 years ago, then they will not stop now); the rule-abiding citizens will have more to worry about, by comparison.
    SherriEdethaHabimaruShakaya
  • A Mysterious Land - Tech Duinn Keyword Responses

    The plot thiccens...
    IyasenuWolfsinger