Tradeable item 1-year subscription

[Contra]

Infinite bumpage for a great ideea!

[Yamahaha]

An already tested and proven method for thwarting cred sellers, A fair likelihood of increased revenue generation from AO, a beneficial step towards stabilizing the in game economy, the potential for an increase in the playerbase with a new payment option. What more could you ask for?






(Answer: Shoulder mounted auto-cannons for soldiers).

[ilengineeru]

I was just about to say that EVE has PLEX. Pay ingame creds for a tradeable subscription time item. It seems to work well in that game.

I wonder what one month of AO is worth in Credits?!

I was just about to say that EVE has PLEX. Pay ingame creds for a tradeable subscription time item. It seems to work well in that game.

I wonder what one month of AO is worth in Credits?!

$12 = ~ 1 Bill.

The thing is that without being a super star high powered player in Eve you can earn about 100 million credits an hour mining. In Eve you need a little mining ship and a hauler. I also had a 3rd war ship to protect the miner and hauler. All very low tech, took about 3-6 months to train the pilots skills and very little cash.

On the contrary - unless you are an NT with an OST selling power leveling or twinked 220 or team with one to sell various Db or LE LR there is not a viable way to earn 100 million credits an hour. In AO you need a billion credits + to afford the gear to earn the money. You are certainly not going to generate that money selling vendor trash for 2000 credits a pop.

The GMI or whatever it is called now is filled with over priced stuff both from a selling and buying perspective.

Eve also has one or more economists on staff to manage its economy. I would guess the economists are at the PhD level. AO has programmers that program exploits which a few guys can take advantage of while the others miss out. Then they "fix" the exploit after the damage is already done. AO has become Zimbabwe (Zimbabwe has experienced an inflation rate of over 7600% per annum.)

There is a game called Path of Exhile that does not have any currency. The economy is all barter. You buy gear from the vendors based upon the loot you sell which is exchanged for various upgrade scrolls and items.

Sad to say but FC has let the economy run into hyper inflation and any fix must be very painful to all.

FC must do one of the following (or something else I have left out) to restore the economy:

Eliminate the currency and go to a barter system.

Recall the currency by adjusting the value of the currency by removing about 9 zeros such that something that costs 1,000,000,000 now costs 1 credit - "hyper de-inflate".

Wipe out everyone's cash with a reset to 0 and return all the items to inventory on the GMI.

Issue a new currency with an exchange rate of 100,000 new to 1,000,000,000 old.

There are other solutions but these are a few ideas to control the run away inflation.

[orochi3]

its true that whatever lower lvl peoples farm, is of very little use to end game people. Trading credits for gametime would probly be used by the people that somehow managed to get real money in the first place, and managed to ding 220 because of it. People that have already been "lured in" so to speak, just like drug dealers do.

[Trypha]

There's also the problem that the tradeable item may be duplicated by some exploit to be found in the future, and unless FC had some way to determine which of the items were duped, revenue from accounts would disappear quickly.

[Contra]

On the contrary - unless you are an NT with an OST selling power leveling or twinked 220 or team with one to sell various Db or LE LR there is not a viable way to earn 100 million credits an hour. In AO you need a billion credits + to afford the gear to earn the money. You are certainly not going to generate that money selling vendor trash for 2000 credits a pop.

Sorry for the double post, I needed to correct you a little bit.
You deffinetly CAN make 100m/h and more with a lvl150 martial artist in a full predator suit and gimpy symbs. Before completely retwinking my MA, before FC fixed sector10, I went there to test the droprate on relays and wanted to equipp that toon with the cheapest and easy to find stuff possible. It's entire setup cost me 50m.
Slow, squishy, low damage, low HP, very little nano, but aliens still died, relays still dropped, money was still made. So no, you don't necessarily need an NT+OST or a twinked 220 to make money. All you need is a little game knowledge and lots and lots of patience.

[User1337]

Recall the currency by adjusting the value of the currency by removing about 9 zeros such that something that costs 1,000,000,000 now costs 1 credit - "hyper de-inflate".

Issue a new currency with an exchange rate of 100,000 new to 1,000,000,000 old.

I don't see this working.

The only way to fix AO economy, in my humble Venezuelan journalistic opinion, is injecting the economy with far more supply than the current demand.

As long as there are limited amounts of high-end items in game, prices will remain. Of course I'm not talking about long gone items such as Pioneer Backpacks or Low Light Targetting Scopes or whatever else you could think about; those prices will always be the highest, I'm talking about Supple, RBP, IGoC, etc.

Collector could've been a great way to fix the economy, as I explain here. Sadly, AO's population elite won that struggle against the low and middle classes and now we're all paying the price, with people having billions and billions of credits on their accounts and others of us that can't afford squat.

Funcom NEEDS to do something about the economy in the exact way as they're doing with rebalance and the new engine so that AO has the mere hope of attracting new people into the game or bringing back old players.

What do you think someone who quit five years ago would do if they came back and the "cool" stuff costs 1b+? Quit again. Oh, and yeah, of course there's always the option on using other items (replacing CC/CSS for, what? OFAB, Faitful/Chosen, Gloomfall?), but c'mon, let's not be silly, 1b creds vs 100m (I'm just throwing a price for either of those options) is ridiculous.

[solcv2]

I see a lot of gibberish about hacking.... and I seriously doubt there has been any 'real' hacking of accounts in this game. More likely just cases of 'social' hacking where someone gives or shares his login credentials for whatever reason. If you keep your login credentials to yourself and don't share any personal information you will never get 'hacked'. I've played asherons, eve, ao, lotro and a whole host of games.... and never in 20 some years have I ever seen someone get hacked.... the root cause was ALWAYS carelessness with ones personal private info. Keep it secret... trust no ONE !

PS: +1 to OP idea.

This made me laugh a little bit, as a few years ago I lost 3 accounts. FC then restored them, but refused to change usernames. I set passwords to max length random gibberish - which was stored on an encrypted USB stick - and copied pasted form that to the launcher.

6 weeks later, all 3 accounts gone again. . .

Mark

[BytEfLUSh2]

This made me laugh a little bit, as a few years ago I lost 3 accounts. FC then restored them, but refused to change usernames. I set passwords to max length random gibberish - which was stored on an encrypted USB stick - and copied pasted form that to the launcher.

6 weeks later, all 3 accounts gone again. . .

Mark

Probably malware on your computer.

Also, +1 for the OP's idea.

[solcv2]

Probably malware on your computer.

I can guarantee that wasnt the case I work in IT, and a big part of my job is network security.

After the first time, and Funcom refused to rename my accounts, I connected to works net connection via VPN. This is a whitelist connection, aka only traffic I allow is sent through. It was set up so that AO and teh AO chat client and AO patcher would pass through, but nothing else. This was the only internet connection that this PC had. It was a clean, non imaged, installation of win7 - fully up to date with windows patches and a few security gadgets form work.

All this, plus my aforementioned password security, means my accounts were not compromised from my end (not unless someone was EXTREMLY determined, and had an excess of computer power at their fingertips), and even then itd take more effort than what it was worth!

If you remember, a GM got hacked that week also, and caused havoc in Borealis . . . .

Either way, im past it now.

/Mark

[BytEfLUSh2]

Did you know that AO stores your username and password in plaintext within the memory that's fully accessible by other apps? Or at least that was the case 2-3 years ago, I can't say that's still a problem.

When I ran AO on Linux/Wine, ps -ax info for client.exe (or whatever it was called back then) had something like --u: username --p: password in process info. I remember that many people complained about it (not because of Linux, but since it was like that on Windows too - just more obscured).

Of course, that doesn't mean that account hacks were not of some other nature, but it is a thing that should be kept in mind.

[solcv2]

Did you know that AO stores your username and password in plaintext within the memory that's fully accessible by other apps? Or at least that was the case 2-3 years ago, I can't say that's still a problem.

When I ran AO on Linux/Wine, ps -ax info for client.exe (or whatever it was called back then) had something like --u: username --p: password in process info. I remember that many people complained about it (not because of Linux, but since it was like that on Windows too - just more obscured).

Of course, that doesn't mean that account hacks were not of some other nature, but it is a thing that should be kept in mind.

I do remeber that, and as far as I know they have fixed that, but I think it is still in plain text in the packets - allthough I havent pulled up wireshark to check in a while.

But, if this is the case, and people have been hacked by general packet sniffers not on their machines - then the hackings are FC's responsibility due to their poor ssecurity protocols. Thus, simply closing an account and not reopening it, after many years of subscription (in my case 3 accounts), without any form of reimbursement for money spent, is not right.

As I say though, im past it with my accounts, and settled to the fact that I shant be getting them back.

I would like to see even some basic encryption though by the patcher with authentication. It isnt that hard to program in - hell, even just bitshifting each digit a 'rand(specificseed)' and then unbitshfting it 'rand(sameseed)' at the other end is preferable to nothing at all.

Mark

[orochi3]

i bit off topic, delete this post if u want.

Before you are allowed to log into your account from a different computer , you get a e-mail confirmation first. Same with changing important information on your steam account.

[Artyomis]

As far as I've said before - the only real way to fix economy - is to implement tax system that hits everything - banks, org banks, GMI.
That way we'll get into:
1. Cred holders will try to invest into items (but, actually, its pointless, see below)
2. Cred holders will lose more than anyone else (if tax is constant % - then the more you got - the more you lose)
3. Supply will be shortened (everyone wants to invest into items to do not lose wealth)
4. Prices will increase shortly, and after a while they'll start falling down (at start - most items will be bought from market to do not lose credits, peeps wont be selling much at the same price and will want more due to incoming tax tick, but after a while overall average cred amount will decrease and ability to pay as much as before will also decrease, which will lead to decreased prices)
5. Items will be harder to get, which will lead to increased content interest (few peeps will do more content to wait/pay less to obtain items of interest via commercial way)
6. Barter system will start working bit better (it'll be better to trade items for items, than for creds).

And, instead of making items yesdrop, - tons of items should get a nodrop tag without being able to get via bought lootrights.

[User1337]

So, I thought I'd bump this once more

And in the mean time, to all FC personel who'd care to read a quick and smart guide to do business, I leave you this: http://www.wildstar-online.com/en/th...usiness-model/

I was watching videos of that game tonight and man does it look good! Also they're smart about their business. FC, when are you paying attention to us?

[whitey]

Would love to see this.

I accumulated so much credz but just didn't have the RL funds to keep paying my sub. This would certainly give me the opportunity to come back to AO... I do miss it

Edit: although this does kinda make the item shop and hence AO a 'pay2win', something developers in the past have said would never happen

But then again they said the engine would happen like 7 years ago so who knows

[Trickey]

I find this suggestion interresting... In the sence that one pays INGAME creds for a new month sub... I also think one should be able to use ingame creds to shop in the ingame store. This will be a really good cred sink. I also think FC should sell a tradeable item on their webpage that one can sell for ingame cash in the game...

This will make the ones that have alot of time ingame, and the ability to farm creds easily, able to use the time ingame to pay for their sub, and the ones that have less time ingame, but perhaps a job, and maybe more RL money able to compete credwise with the ones that stay online all the time. PLUS FC can more easily regulate the economy... IF they choose to do so..

[Windguaerd]

I've been playing Wurm Online for a year (going to leave it to return to AO very soon) and there you use in-game currently to pay for sub as an alternative. It boosts the in-game economy because people want to play the game to earn enough to cover the sub.

[Chainfall]

As long as FC ultimately gets the RMT from it, I don't see a problem with it. It would likely boost their income by 20% or more.

EvE proved that those willing to pay are generally willing to pay big, and everybody wins.

[jorricane]

What do you think someone who quit five years ago would do if they came back and the "cool" stuff costs 1b+? Quit again. Oh, and yeah, of course there's always the option on using other items (replacing CC/CSS for, what? OFAB, Faitful/Chosen, Gloomfall?), but c'mon, let's not be silly, 1b creds vs 100m (I'm just throwing a price for either of those options) is ridiculous.

I just came back from a few years gone. Upon seeing the current prices, I spent what I had on a small city, and farmed bots for 2 weeks. That made me enough billions to come back in style. It really isn't hard, and on a toon without maxed AI levels, the dailies alone make it worthwhile.

As to supply vs. demand, I think there is enough supply that the prices should in theory be dropping. The problem is that most people sell to the GMI buy orders for bots. Those buy orders are put up by people who buy on spec with intent to make a profit. Therefore, the end result, i.e. armor, will always be priced at whatever they want it to be. That's money attracting money - happens in real life as well. Look at who makes the real money in the stock market (for instance, the pre sales in Twitter's IPO) and you will see the same principle at work.

Not saying that those are BAD things, but a simple supply increase, unless its something like every general dropping every bot, every ql, every time, would still get intercepted by the current buyers and still get sold as armor for exorbitant prices.

As to the focus of the thread, I side with those fearing a dupe exploit - even the possibility of such an event scares the heck out of me. Lets not tempt fate...... yet.