Fixing the Economy

[Phatkeep]

The main problem was always that demand was so much higher than supply for certain items.

240+ supple bots
Gocs
Certain intel symbs

As for credit sploits. Idk anything about it so I won't speculate. But here is how we could fix things.

1. Limit froobs to 50m 1-49, 100m 50-100, 200m 101-150, 500m 150-189, 1 bil 190-200.
This really messes up cred Sellers. Start banning their mules and it will be very tedious for them to level up to be able to keep creds (same thing for sploiters). At the very least this will raise prices A LOT ig. Which means the amt of credits ending up ig is less.
It also nerfs those who may have 12736131 sploited froob accs probably with level 2 toons to keep all that cash.
This way you can give some notice also, so that real players don't get so much affected. Real players can move their creds off the mules to paid toons and GMI. The cred sploiters and Sellers have nowhere to go, unless they wanna get paid accs. Which would be very risky and expensive for them.

2. Add loot or increase droprate on the follow instances/mobs:

APF 13/28/35 - Add 1-2 240+ leadbots per boss. Also add a small World buff that adds 50 dmg and buffs some weird stuff such as tradeskills, and maybe 5 to abilities. :> This will get these instances running A LOT!

TNH - Make it drop symbs who doesn't drop off other pb's ONLY. This will increase the chance of phatz hugely.

Tara - Increase drops on igocs and rbp's as well as the phat nodrops. Now it's not uncommon to have 3-4 raids with just crap loot dropping. Also add a small World buff that gives yet another glow, but not really any phat skills. Maybe green. :>

Sector 7 - Increase loot chance a bit for all bossese to revive this instance.

There, I fixed it all for ya!

Also.. This is a bonus.. but..Make a HUGE monthly pvp AND pvm event in 4 holes a la gauntlet with the main reward being the winning side gets to rule 4 holes for a month and some phatz such as ELLTS and pionner bp, dillon armour :> It wouldn't have to be anything super fancy looks wise. Just a few bosses a la gauntlet and then you get transported to a waiting area IF you make it inside a certain ammount of time. Then the gas changes from 100% to 25%. And when there is only one faction left standing, a main superboss spawns. Either to congratulate the defending side or to kill for the side on the off. Both get loot.

[nat3s]

Not sure where I stand posting this, but I really want people to be aware of just how significant the exploits were in leading to the current state of the economy. This is what the community has had to suffer:

• For over 5 years there was an item that could be crafted and sold for more creds than the parts to make it cost (the parts being shop term buyable).

• Creative use of negative numbers in the new GMI allowed trillions of creds to be generated in seconds.

• Creative use of German giro payment (whilst using a VPN) allowed people to acquire free Funcom store points.

Were it not for the above we would still be buying items for amounts below the credit cap in my mind. It's a real shame.

Just to be clear at no point have I exploited AO

[Esssch]

Were it not for the above we would still be buying items for amounts below the credit cap in my mind. It's a real shame.

RBP has been worth more than 1b for quite a few years, long before Funcom Points even existed. I believe before the first incarnation of the GMI as well.

[Kuyt]

RBP has been worth more than 1b for quite a few years, long before Funcom Points even existed. I believe before the first incarnation of the GMI as well.

1 item tho, not every single high rated endgame item. big diff

[Hell]

The easiest way to fix the economy is not to participate in it.

Period.

End of story.

There is nothing in game forcing anyone to buy from GMI.

If you choose, you can outfit your entire toon/account/brigade with stuff that DROPS. DROPS do not involve any transfer of credits, except for the paltry sum needed to outfit your toons with stims/FM's/sitkits.

The "Economy" is opt in. Not opt out. So anyone complaining about it should just stick to default and utilise the tried and true methods of equipping:

1. get to the right level
2. do quests/clicksaver your nanos
3. equip armour that will allow you to complete content
4. build teams to complete content faster
5. learn who you like to play with and trust
6. work hard, dedicate time to your pursuit
7. achieve what setup you want after putting in the hard yards.

That's what EVERY SINGLE person did before you, before the cred sploits, before the duping BP's, before the whatever other crap, people actually had to farm their first CC set. It took me about 8 months and AI 25-AI29.

Thank you for making this post! Someone pin it to the top
All the other suggestions are just as useless as a will to actually get the item wanted.

Go farm your stuff like everyone else did and do not cry on a blank spot...
The nowadays opportunity is even greater and easier to obtain than it used to be the years ago

[Tyfowler]

Always been broke and always will be, I don't have the time to farm anymore, that's pretty much why I don't make alts anymore, just kinda hang out on my sold and crat.


It's not hard folks, you wanna know the severity of the reasonings behind the issues just google it. Found pictures of people having 10000 igocs/stims/combined pieces and creds with way too many zeros.

I'm not gonna sit here and complain about it however.
I will say this though. The move to gmi away from gms might have been the worst thing to happen to the game and The integration of the in game browser that doesn't allow you to browse anything except the item shop is a pitifully implemented item. I remember hearing about how You would be able to go online with it to search for guides and such. Waste

[Tryptophy]

All this talk of limiting/wiping creds will never happen. Too many downsides, too much rage in places where there is now only grumbling. The player economy should be opt in, but it just can't be right now because of the way supply works in this game. If I want NS2 for example, I can't just go out and complete a hard encounter and expect to get it in a reasonable time. Same goes for combined armor and many other things. If I want something from a SL dyna, to some extent I can just farm it but most likely it will be a frustrating process. There's really no option for a sane individual except to hope that someone, somewhere hit a crazy jackpot and is willing to sell their prize. It's like, if I wanted a new car, to go around town all day entering all those "win a car" contests rather than simply working to earn enough money to buy a car from a dealer.

Make all desirable loot possible to earn in a predictable amount of time - through MODERATE to DIFFICULT encounters - and the economy becomes optional.

[Ciassene]

reinstall the compus with AO servers inside (and all those backup ones too!), and never give a birth to AO ever again, /fixed

[Mako]

poor people will always bitch and moan. rich people will always be rich. that's just how it is.

i do agree, however, that AO's economy is ****ed up to oblivion due to people duping and whatnot, but i don't see any viable way of fixing that (the economy, that is). plus, i don't think funcom really gives a **** about the game, they are just milking the dead cow. i mean, common, how long it took them to fix the perk queuing exploit back in the day ? like 4 years, or maybe more ? and that was in a period when people ware actually playing this game, not just five people logged onto 20 accounts.

This is the only post that matters in this thread.

Stop wasting your time trying to suggest ways to fix things because Funcom does not care. Just stop, it will not happen. Skyrocketing prices just means you have to farm more for what you want. Here's a tip: get a friend or two, low-man some xan/db, sell the LRs. I manage to make a lot of creds that way.

[Rosss]

Wrong, it was proven time and time again by forum whiners that the cred problems were a direct result of s10 nodrops, which was fixed years ago. Since that was fixed everything has been perfect!

/sarcasm off

I posted several times about why and how there are unlimited creds/inflation, but the threads always get deleted, as I'm sure this one will also.

Also, transferring creds between players doesn't add or remove any creds from economy, never understood why ppl think the item store issue and player cities, lootrights etc affects the overall economy at all.

People found ways to inject unfathomable numbers of creds into the game, and enough of them got away with it, sold to egpal, or xferred to mules etc, that it continues to trickle around over the years. It's as simple as that.

[Tsuniko]

credit wipe or riot.

[Unkfix]

If you're going to wipe credits and/or items, it should come with a full character wipe also. But then that would cause it's own problems. Based on what I know, wiping anything without wiping everything would solve precisely nothing. Also, FC needs to fix alot of flaws, not just bugs, before a wipe should ever be considered.

[Traderjill]

I've played the game for almost 10 years.. .I've never exploited and never had a complaint about the economy. Just do the content if the prices bother you enough. Yep, there's people out there that did things that make the GMI look retarded (think I saw buy orders for 300 CC @ like 1.6bil a couple days ago) but so what? I look at the GMI, say to myself "uh, no not paying that" and then go farm what I want.

I'm still not understanding why this is not a viable option?

You might say "hey, you multilog and do it" and you're right but... what's to stop 2-6 people who are all outraged by prices on X and working together to farm it themselves? That's what I did before i could solo farm stuff.. I worked with friends. This even applied (especially applied) to alien raids.. we used to do ground/ship for multiple cities with each person owning the loot from their city. You'd be surprised how much you can accomplish when you try.

[Encyros]

I don't actually agree with the premise of the thread (that the economy is broken). The inflated prices have seeped into all sectors of the player economy. This gives new players far more purchasing power than they have had before.

An opportune new player can sell his low-level wares to idle high level players for significant amounts of money. The period of her having to be at all concerned about the cost of a Yalmaha, or SL nanos, of Perk Resets, of the Clinique Plastique, is shorter than it has ever been, precisely because we buy and sell things for prices with a couple more zeroes than we used to.

At the upper end, the few veteran players gained their masses of credits by osmosis, just like the rest of us. I would be very skeptical of any impression that they somehow obtained their means in a dishonest way. Instead, they were far richer than everyone else before the exploits, and they are far richer than everyone else after the exploits. That's only fair, in a free economy.

It is easier and cheaper than ever before to gain combined armour. Single players can easily afford to buy and upkeep a City, and run raids with only a couple of friends.

Combined armour is not needed to obtain combined armour. The credits that CC/CSS is worth right now isn't needed to obtain combined armour either.

I don't know whether I'm alone in this but if I were a paid player starting out I'd think "Hey for only 700m I can run lots of alien raids with my friends and we can make billions in profit".

We musn't forget that just as it's much easier to spend vast quantities of credit now, it's also much easier to obtain it.