Mature game economy

I’ve been back in the game for about a month now, and occasionally hear people ingame or on forums describe the economy as broken. I’ll claim this is false. You can sell things as long as it’s in demand, and you can buy things as long as you pay a price according to its supply. If you’re asking or offering an appropriate price, these trades are actually quite quick. The economy is working. It’s just the economy of a very mature game.

People have exploited and duped and gotten rich, you say? Well, maybe some have. Maybe some buy credits off goldsellers. But you know what, if you’re actually playing the game to aquire items, or finding your own way to make money, that doesn’t affect you. In mature games there will always be many with a lot of money, as playing for a long time means you acquire a lot of wealth. Saying cost of lootrights is indicative of exploiting is an exaggeration. As an example, I gave away items and credits with current value of 15-20 billion when I left the game early 2006, and I acquired all that through legit playing. (Although I’ll admit way too much playing). Those with money will pay for convenience, be it with real or virtual cash. I should also mention that many sell lootrights at very reasonable prices if no one bids huge. Can mention dread loot and beast weapons at 25-50mill, WU at 20-25m.

Yes, missionrewards and creds from selling pearls and loot to shops are of little value anymore. Still, the items you get while playing, is worth a lot more. Even many common items. As buy-prices go up, sell prices go up as well. In fact, with all the top-tier nodrop armor, symbs and items these days, many of the very good items are relatively cheaper than before.

Let’s look at prices 10 years ago vs now.

Rollable nanos: 2-5m vs 20m
Hardcore CPU upgrade: 1-2m vs 50m
Concrete Cushions: 1-200k vs 2m
Combined Commandos: 1bill+ vs 500m
Other combined: 500-750m vs 300-400m

If you make your money off rolling nanos as an example, you now need around 15-25 nanos for a combined piece, while you used to need a few hundred.

Couldn't agree more ... items are selling for very nice prices so if you play the game you get great creds for what you find.

Actually, combined armor is going upwards of 2b to 3b once again. Still better than a couple years ago where they were 7b-10b, but they seem to be moving in that direction.

People paying 1b+ for stuff from PoH.
There's many offers of 200m+ (and many sellers only wanting 200+) for dread stuff.

So yes... not broken at all?

200mill for a specific dread drop is hardly expensive, considering how much time you may spend farming for it yourself.

Anyway, you're not countering any argument by listing sell prices as long as buy prices are also high. Returning players who thought they had a fortone in creds hurt a bit, but current prices don't matter to anyone active.

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Originally Posted by Beornin

machi's cost 1b = economy1

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fixed it 4 u

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Originally Posted by Sleekyz

fixed it 4 u

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That really doesn't make any sense.

And your point is ...???

Economy is ****ed up beyond recovery and surprisingly the only one benefiting from this are:
1. Exploiters
2. Credit sellers
3. Funcom itself ...

Well, those of us playing the game have an active working economy, where things are bought and sold.

There's no point making any more arguments with forum warriors who are incapable of forming an argument beyond "waaah, there's an extra 0 behind all the buy and sell prices", and seem to lack the ability to understand that this doesn't really matter.

To anyone new, or wondering if they should come back. By any reasonable definition of economy, this one is working fine. :)

The economy works fine.

I hardly ever use GMI and am relatively out of touch of current prices of things. But if I want something, I'll either go try to get it, and if I find it to be too irritating to get I'll make do with something different, or borrow it for a while.

End game stuff like Machivelli's will certainly command a high price, but that's to be expected. The effect of massive cash injections from exploits don't actually do a lot, like, the dude who exploits can buy up a bunch of stuff and try to control the market, but it's not that simple. As soon as he buys up the stock and relists it, he'll most certainly be undercut by people who want to move things faster, but more importantly, if the exploiter sets a local high on say, some particular items he wants LR on rapidly, it's only going to be a local spike in prices, not affect long term prices.

I've never fussed over the economy. I never bought any of the 1000's of VB's that went into circulation, or did anything weird, hell I don't even really play a lot lately, but what I do know is that all the same stuff that dropped a few years ago can still be got in the same way if you have a decent team or some guys who want to help get stuff done/get stuff themselves.

The economy is fuelled by people doing content. And that will never change, so as long as people are doing content, the economy will adjust according to supply, demand and impatience.

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Originally Posted by McKnuckleSamwich

The economy works fine.

I hardly ever use GMI and am relatively out of touch of current prices of things. But if I want something, I'll either go try to get it, and if I find it to be too irritating to get I'll make do with something different, or borrow it for a while.

End game stuff like Machivelli's will certainly command a high price, but that's to be expected. The effect of massive cash injections from exploits don't actually do a lot, like, the dude who exploits can buy up a bunch of stuff and try to control the market, but it's not that simple. As soon as he buys up the stock and relists it, he'll most certainly be undercut by people who want to move things faster, but more importantly, if the exploiter sets a local high on say, some particular items he wants LR on rapidly, it's only going to be a local spike in prices, not affect long term prices.

I've never fussed over the economy. I never bought any of the 1000's of VB's that went into circulation, or did anything weird, hell I don't even really play a lot lately, but what I do know is that all the same stuff that dropped a few years ago can still be got in the same way if you have a decent team or some guys who want to help get stuff done/get stuff themselves.

The economy is fuelled by people doing content. And that will never change, so as long as people are doing content, the economy will adjust according to supply, demand and impatience.

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While I agree with the logic there, last year a grace averaged 270-1bil this year has a very different story to tell, and it is down to item dupers selling stacks of ql 300 medkits etc to vendors; then buying out the market, if people undercut them, they just buy the lowballer out of the market and relist at their own price.

Exploiters are dominating the market at present.

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Originally Posted by Caloss2

While I agree with the logic there, last year a grace averaged 270-1bil this year has a very different story to tell, and it is down to item dupers selling stacks of ql 300 medkits etc to vendors; then buying out the market, if people undercut them, they just buy the lowballer out of the market and relist at their own price.

Exploiters are dominating the market at present.

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Fair point about the Grace. For people who need to buy Grace there is an issue. My general comments are regarding the ingame economy for regular items, and for people who are froobs or regular subscribers.

I've had a look at it, and I'm actually not sure if the GRACE price is a problem or a benefit. Afterall, 99% of all items do not have overly inflated prices.

If a new player buys a subscription and a GRACE, he currently ends up with around 4billion creds. That is enough for all nanos lvl 1-220, some useful armor and good weapons, and even buying lootrights for many Beast, APF, Dreads, Xan items. This means a new player can reasonably play and fit a character to a useful PvE 220 fit at the cost of 1 month subscripton. Compared to EVE for example, that is huge. 1 plex hardly gets you anywhere.

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Originally Posted by Beornin

I've had a look at it, and I'm actually not sure if the GRACE price is a problem or a benefit. Afterall, 99% of all items do not have overly inflated prices.

If a new player buys a subscription and a GRACE, he currently ends up with around 4billion creds. That is enough for all nanos lvl 1-220, some useful armor and good weapons, and even buying lootrights for many Beast, APF, Dreads, Xan items. This means a new player can reasonably play and fit a character to a useful PvE 220 fit at the cost of 1 month subscripton. Compared to EVE for example, that is huge. 1 plex hardly gets you anywhere.

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VTE is 100m
Lowbiz symb bumped up
12m items goes up (board 100 to 200, thigh up to 500)

But yes from one point you might be right 4b grace price can be nice.
But i remember when i started this game i never had to buy credz with irl cash. This might be the problem.

Well currently you don't have to buy anything with rl cash or buy any lootrights if you just play the game, just mentioning how much you actually get for your one GRACE if that's your playstyle.

As mentioned before, for anyone playing the game the economy works fine. Over the last week I made a few 100mill selling symbs after popping some pb's I had in the bank, and put up buy orders for nanos for my new chars at 9-20mill and had most filled within a day.

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Originally Posted by Beornin

As mentioned before, for anyone playing the game the economy works fine.

Over the last week I made a few 100mill selling symbs after popping some pb's I had in the bank, and put up buy orders for nanos for my new chars at 9-20mill and had most filled within a day.

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I'm playing the game currently and it's not working fine.


Sure, nanos are a good lucrative business currently as everyone needs them and there's few people actually doing the blitzing.
Symbs, I'm surprised to even see them have a market. I used to do PB popping and symb selling back in 2011/2012 as my main business. Now, I can't. There's too many people ready to undercut you or the symbs that are up at 500m each are some random symb i have 50 of, gets into a price war down to 10m each and then never sell.


I'll share this fun piece I've been recording for a bit of time, mainly when I would remember to write down prices:
https://i.imgur.com/nCMRGN3.png
I really wish that i had started recording earlier, even in 2013... when the S10 bonanza was still around.
(the viralbot prices are taken from ql 192~239, which means it doesn't include those people selling ql 1-191 nor sometimes 240+)

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Originally Posted by Legendfluf

I'm playing the game currently and it's not working fine.

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What is it that isn't working?

If you're trying to sell a symb you have 50 off at high prices, and people are undercutting you down to 10m and they never sell, it's simply because there are tons of that symb in cirulation. Say Active right hand artillery. Drops all the time, often 3-4, and people farm the PB for the rarer drops. It never sells at 10m because it was never in demand in the first place, it was just not on market because all the sell orders expired.

What I mean when I say the market is working is you can sell items in demand, and you can create demand by posting buy orders and have them filled.

I wonder how much money you made from selling credits made by exploiting, so far.

Saying the economy is fine is the most idiotic thing you could say. Did you even see the latest prices on GMI now ? How am i supposed to get 5bil credits to pay for a grace?

Not everyone is a multi-boxer, you know. Some people have only one paid account and actually enjoy playing the game and have fun with friends. They don't farm on 3+ accounts 24/7 like insane, in order to have billions of credits, to pay for something they can't get by themselves.

There are people who have hundreds of billions and 10 full end-game toons with acdc and full awakened/gauntlet stuff on them by multiboxing and exploiting and selling accounts/credits while some people playing for 10+ years don't have **** because they play normally.

If i was FC, i would have never allowed multiboxers. Also, if a person exploited once, banned him FOREVER.

You people who ruined this game are more toxic than League of legends players.

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Originally Posted by Fluxxxx

Saying the economy is fine is the most idiotic thing you could say.

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Not really. People are hard focused on the increase in prices and forget that with a price hike for services you buy also comes a price hike for services you sell. It's really not that difficult to make credits with an end game char. As someone mentioned, VTEs sell for around 100m so why don't you go farm some soul fragments and start selling? Or go solo an inferno mission and sell 5 afk spots, which any decent DDer can do in half an hour? Maybe start a DB3 or PoH raid and make it a sell run? Boring as hell in the long run? Yes. Will you ever want for credits? No. Is this how almost every MMO is designed? Pretty much.

I've been back since June last year and although prices have gone through the roof I have little difficulty keeping up even though I buy the occasional lootright. The only problem I can partly agree on is the ridiculous prices for GRACE.

The question you gotta ask yourself is whether you create value (raiding or farming) during the time you are online or you are just dicking around doing dailies and trying to buy your way through the game?

Do you really need a screenshot with ql75 clumps going for 100mil ?
VTE ( which you can farm with a froob ) is 100mil, but a safeguarded ncu ( which you would need 3 220's for ) is 10mil. Why? Because multiboxers and exploiters don't farm VTE's.
Because they overinflated the market in such a way it's beyond fixing now.

I stand by what i said. Doing dailies and dicking around was enough to be able to buy a VTE back in the day. This is not a farming simulator in which i have to keep up with an economy impacted by massive farming bots. This is a freaking video game whose main purpose is HAVING FUN.

The economy is dead, along with the brain cells of those who killed it and those who support them.

Go back to your multiboxing please, you're wasting precious farming time. Egpal needs more creds to sell.

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Originally Posted by Fluxxxx

Do you really need a screenshot with ql75 clumps going for 100mil ?

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It's a scarce item and the most optimal ql for alien armor at certain title levels. Why are you surprised it has a high price in the current market? How long do you think it would take to farm a ql 75 clump in city raids? On average you can farm something like 10 times the price on these in the time it would take to farm just one ql 75 clump.

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Originally Posted by Fluxxxx

VTE ( which you can farm with a froob ) is 100mil, but a safeguarded ncu ( which you would need 3 220's for ) is 10mil. Why?

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Because VTEs is one of the most traded items in the game and have a very high demand rate as opposed to safeguarded NCUs. Also, it takes forever to farm the right ql Soul Fragments so the market is mainly supported by people selling fragments found while doing something else. Combine that with an item that every active player will want atleast two of and you have the ingredients for high prices.

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Originally Posted by Fluxxxx

Because multiboxers and exploiters don't farm VTE's.

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You are talking about supply and demand here and not about inflation of prices.

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Originally Posted by Fluxxxx

Because they overinflated the market in such a way it's beyond fixing now.

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I'll give you a free economics lesson: Inflation is not bad in itself. Inflation is bad for those with a saving. If you trade in goods then inflation has no effect on you. I'll try with an example:

2016: Blitz five nanos and sell for 4 mill á piece to buy a VTE at 20m
2017: Blitz five nanos and sell for 20 mill á piece to buy a VTE at 100m

The only place you have problems in the market is if someone exploits enough credits to completely corner the market as some people say is happening with GRACE. On everything else it's a simple question of supply and demand.