Feedback about being so dang poor on allods

[alds3gameoftroll]

I'll tell you how this happened :
Before 3.00 there where varius zones for gold farming at endgame which now I think that they where turned into leveling ones. Anyway those days a player could say : I will farm x hours and get x amount of gold. After thet he would probably spend most of his gold on buying cc directly from other players, while the rest was used to buy Myhrr. This led into a large amount of gold to be kept in-game and the overall amount of gold was increased. Over the course of time most of the gold available was in the hands of CS players.
Now with the currency exchange NPC most ppl buy CS currency directly from him instead of giving their money to other players. Thus, the overall amount of gold would stay the same. However this was a great chance of old CS users to recharge their large amounts of gold into gem shards. And finally this led to that great amount of gold that was produced over the past years to be <<vaporised >>.

Wrong. The currency exchanger does not generate gem shards (need confirmation), as far as I know. It has a pool of shards that is filled up by players who buy gold, then players can fill up the gold pool by buying gem shards. That is why it is more expensive to buy gemshards than to sell them - so that gold masses up because it is currency that just spawns, and gem shards are finite, so they are more valuable. I am not particularly sure why they aren't the same price, but whatever.

The price of gem shards goes up for a bunch of reasons - first of all, now there are 5 mounts in the itemshop, that are absolutely amazing and everyone wants them. That is about 2000-3000 gem shards a mount. Do you know how many people bought 2-3 of these with gold? We are many.

Then you have Pat5, which everyone seems to want. Even if they don't have their set of 777/555 (or 666) runes yet. Before that, Pat5 IS NOT cheaper than that of runes and people should not go after it. But they do. With their gold.

Then you have the amalgam concentrates. Which I have zero doubt people buy gem shards from the NPC to afford these. This actually makes sense a bit.

Now you have that replicator thing as well, and people are going to buy that with gold.

The "problem" is that the itemshop now offers much more convenience for people with money, which is fine. I absolutely love the idea of concentrates. But you have people who for whatever reason don't spend money on the game still want this convenience or some derpy shiny new item. That is the problem - the itemshop now has much more to offer and everyone wants that.

He never said that the gem merchant generates GS itself.
The solution is to remove the GS npc cuz b4 it was introduced ppl would laugh at anyone selling GS 1:8.3 and price would remain roughly constant. Those with ridiculous prices wouldnt sell and there would be temporary unavailability.
The GS vendor provides unlimited availability by raising the ratio. Thus, the prices keep on rising.

[deaderaco]

Gem shard vendor is also a gold sink, so it takes gold out of the economy. It does this by using differences in the buy and sell rates.

I don't think removing the gem shard NPC will help people earn more money.

[arisenpanda]

Gem shard vendor is also a gold sink, so it takes gold out of the economy. It does this by using differences in the buy and sell rates.

I don't think removing the gem shard NPC will help people earn more money.

With a few tweaks to the CURRENT itemshop, they can restrict some items to be ONLY available for gpots and nothing else. Concentrates and replicators come to mind. I thought about buying concentrates with gold, then when I found out how they worked, I realized it's just not worth it. Same with replicators. And astral servants. All these convenience items should remain trade-able, yes, but only available for gpots, so people don't ruin the overall economy by buying them. There's a bunch more I can think of, but nevermind that. The mere fact that we have two trade-able currencies, one of which is finite and the other is infinite, means that the infinite will never be enough. Remember when farming 100g/day was decent enough? Now you can farm 1k/hour and still won't be enough. Just because there is much more things in the itemshop that one wants, and that's why they're driving the price up.

[billyth3kid]

Gem shard vendor is also a gold sink, so it takes gold out of the economy. It does this by using differences in the buy and sell rates.

I don't think removing the gem shard NPC will help people earn more money.

Exacly. Lets say that sell price is 8g and buyout is 8.25. So a guy comes and sells 100 gs and gets 800g. After that another guy comes and buys 100gs with 8.25g/each, thus paying 825 gold. 25 gold are lost in the process. Now imagine this happening in a much larger scale with thousands of gs being sold and re-purchased every day.

[vanrottn]

Just a happy reminder: it was very possible to make 3 7ths and 3 6es or more from 10k gold when gipat launched and there was a time where chips went for 3g each.

Look at it now

[arisenpanda]

Gem shard vendor is also a gold sink, so it takes gold out of the economy. It does this by using differences in the buy and sell rates.

I don't think removing the gem shard NPC will help people earn more money.

Exacly. Lets say that sell price is 8g and buyout is 8.25. So a guy comes and sells 100 gs and gets 800g. After that another guy comes and buys 100gs with 8.25g/each, thus paying 825 gold. 25 gold are lost in the process. Now imagine this happening in a much larger scale with thousands of gs being sold and re-purchased every day.

This needs to exist. Because gold is infinite, unlike gem shards. It is YET ANOTHER gold sink, yes, and I would love some of the other gold sinks to be... lessened, namely the cost of upgrading items should be nerfed by nice 75%, but we need this system to be gold sinky.

[deaderaco]

Without the gold sink, gem shard prices will be even higher.

The gem shard NPC actually keeps prices of gpots down by consuming such a large amount of gold each day.

The reason the Gem Shard NPC causes 'inflation' is only because people can SEE the gem shard price and easily trade with gold. It used to be much more work to sell or buy gpots and no one was entirely certain how much they were worth. Perception is the real reason the prices are going up!

The gem shard gold sink is actually trying to work in the opposite direction by removing gold from the economy - thus making gold more valuable - thus prices of cash shop items are cheaper. Needless to say it's not working too well, since endgamers are making more and more gold each day while also having a clear understanding of the gold value of gem shards.

Arisen that is an interesting idea about making only required items available with gem shards, and limit the access of everything else. However I don't really believe that will help the gem shard economy. The main things that drive up gem shards are strongboxes and crystal chips, not the small convenience items. Besides the whole point of the gem shard NPC was to make the entire cash shop accessible in a 'free to play' setting.

[raiders34]

Yeah remove the gem shard npc and half the population will be permanently anchored on level 1 runes because crystal chips would be prohibitively expensive or unavailable.

[arisenpanda]

Arisen that is an interesting idea about making only required items available with gem shards, and limit the access of everything else. However I don't really believe that will help the gem shard economy. The main things that drive up gem shards are strongboxes and crystal chips, not the small convenience items. Besides the whole point of the gem shard NPC was to make the entire cash shop accessible in a 'free to play' setting.

Yeah, I actually love it the way it is and I wouldn't want to see it change to be honest. But if enough players complain, there is no other way gPot can enforce reduced prices than this. Leave all the "get there faster" items available (exp/rep/cg scrolls, concentrates, replicators and such) and maybe vanities for gPots only. I wouldn't really want to see it happen, because what Allods has is unique and I love it.

Before there was the communication factor, where us, cheapskates, could trashtalk the gpotato sellers until they drive the price down to whatever we're willing to buy. Now nobody has that backbone to say "I'm not buying gpots until the price goes down to an acceptable level", and even if someone does, it'll take much more people to have any impact... and because communication was taken out of the process, there is no way we can pressure people into bringing the price down, like we were able to do before*.

___________________
*Just to clarify, I say 'we', because I don't want to distance myself from the community. I didn't ever force anyone to bring down their gpots price, I just didn't buy gpots if they were more expensive than what I was willing to pay. But us, free players, had the power of GODDAMN CAPSLOCK to shout at people if we wanted, and with the NPC we can't make feel people bad about paying for our stuff anymore.

[deaderaco]

If they really wanted to prevent inflation, they have a few easier options rather than taking arisenpanda's extreme approach of removing convenience from the cash shop entirely. I would like to point these out since they are pretty simple..

They could:

A) Sell gem shards to NPC and drive prices down. No one would even know.
B) Create an NPC with consistent gem shard prices which do not inflate based on supply and demand.
C) Provide more gold sinks, so gold value increases.
D) Give less valuable loot (in terms of gold), so gold value increases.

All of these are readily available. The first option is completely do-able this very day, with all the tools the GMs have right now. The other options would require developer assistance. All options would impact the value of gold and make cash shop items more affordable.