What or who is GR.A.C.E. ?

it isn't removed from the economy, just transferred to the person selling the GRACE. The person who was selling the GRACE still gets that 1b, they just paid the 15$ to buy the grace. Same idea as buying FC points, using them to buy breed/side changes, and selling them in the GMI. Credits not removed, just moved.

pissing on your eu/uk subscribers. obviously looking at subscription and billing and marketing getting involved. and yet, not one thing is being done to even out things to USD.

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Originally Posted by nat3s

Not sure I follow you, someone pays 1bil* for a GRACE, they use the GRACE to extend their game time. They are down 1bil on the transaction (traded creds for game time). Each GRACE used is 1bil less creds in the economy.

* assumed cost of 1bil.

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The chain of event :

1. Player A pays FC 15$ to buy a GRACE item
2. Player A set up his GRACE item for sale in the GMI
3. Player B buys GRACE from Player A thru the GMI with in game credits

Now, the price of GRACE should not and will not be fixed. It will fluctuate with ingame inflation/deflation.

One concern is about these rumors that a number of people have huge pile of cash laying around (10's of B), which I don't know if true or not. But if true, it could probably make the price of GRACE very high at the beginning. There better not be a capped price on it.

After a while it will adjust by itself and be good for the economy and serve as a reference point for many other things I believe. Of course this kind of things works better on a big scale like in EvE, while in AO we have a low playerbase…

Also, GRACE is brilliant.

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Originally Posted by Traderjill

If the price of credits on the black market went up or down (in USD) I'd think it would have a similar effect on the cost of GR.A.C.E. (in credits) to balance out.

I'm guessing there's some unknown variable here between the cost of credits from 'gold spammers' and the cost of GR.A.C.E. that you're taking into consideration. Care to explain?

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The price of GRACE would not be indexed on black market credit price ; it's rather that both the price of GRACE and the price of cred on the black market will follow other underlying variable. That is, if credit price on the black market were to go down or up, we could probably observe similar trend on the price of GRACE in game, but the latter would not be a consequence of the former, and instead both would be a consequence of other events happening in game.

As in all MMO the root of the economy are items accessibility, converted into time needed to farm them, which then convert into a credit value… Then various market supply/demand comes into play, as well as credits sploits, retired billionaires coming back in game and the like… But the root of all, what has the most impact is items accessibility.

If given the choice beetween buying legally for a bit more cash or illegally for a bit cheaper, a large number of player will still prefer to buy legally thru FC's system. Since it will drop the demand for black market credits, it will also be much harder to sell your credits and convert them into real life money, and people selling their credits will have less and less real life money for their credits, until the point that for many credit sellers it will not be worth the time. And so a number of them will stop engaging in such activities.

Even the GMI tax will be negligible. It's capped at something like 100m (sales tax capped at 20m, 80m creation fee on 4b price for 56 days). 110m for 4.5b, I'm not sure of cap on GMI, old shops were 4.5b. If they did a 14 day duration instead, it's only 40m for 4b and 42,5m for 4.5b. I think most people would do the 14 day duration, and it likely wouldn't go for GMI cred cap either.

1. will i be able to use grace to add 30 days playtime to a frozen not paid account?
2. will i be able to gift grace to a froob so they can turn into a paid account?

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Originally Posted by Genele

The simple answer to your question is: Because many of these exploits don't get reported with enough details for us to get them fixed.
If you are annoyed that other people break your game experience and you know how they do it, then say something in the Report an Exploit part of the forum instead of just assuming someone else has already reported it.
Reality is that few people actually report these things.
For me to talk to people and go like "Hi, I'm Genele. I think you are exploiting, would you mind telling me how you do it?" How many people do you think would actually tell me anything?
We have to rely on honest players to give us information, that is just how it goes. It is a lot easier for honest players to be able to infiltrate exploit communities to get information than it is for us developers. (True story, my play characters' organization got so paranoid that all their exploits got fixed that they stopped talking about them in the org channel...)

Also, the market exploit that everyone seem to talk about was fixed almost a year ago.
(I got called back from vacation at the time so I remember it clearly...) The reason why we found it that time was not because someone reported it, it was because one of the people who exploited went so far that the market system crashed. The biggest issue with cleaning up after that exploit was the fact that people who didn't intend to exploit were used passively by the exploiters. We did however go through all the market logs and all the money and items that had been exploited in the market system at the time was removed, many players were banned and anyone claiming something else is lying (After all I went through the logs with CS myself during my vacation, so its a bit hard to forget.)

If you know of any other issue that has not been fixed, again please let us know how it is done so we can fix it. We always prioritize fixing exploits when we have enough information to get it done in a timely manner.

At the end here I just want to say that we can't just stop developing the game because a small group of our players have decided to make it their life's purpose to break the game for everyone else. You also have no idea how much time we actually spend on fixing exploits. Every time I write in the patch notes that we have fixed exploits, its because we have.

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Look. I'm not trying to instigate here, truly. There are a few things that irk'd me here though.

1- I would not expect you to introduce yourself as a GM and say "ohai, sploitz plax? kthnxbai". That said, i would expect both a pre-launch code review and an in-game QA with a security point of view; if this is happening, clearly the approach should be re-evaluated based on the games honest history. Will some issues get through? Of course, no software is perfect. Would it catch some of the larger items that have gotten through and caused damage? Yes. Beyond that, look at the forums. There's some noise in the signal, but stuff usually shows up until it's deleted; that could easily give you a cast of characters to inquire with as surely you can map forum ID to account (right?).

2- Your play character was in DI? :p (i kid, i kid). Seriously though, your play character was in an org that was openly talking about exploiting and (a) the exploits weren't fixed, plus (b) the players weren't banned after openly talking about exploiting? Something is very wrong with that.

3- All of the major items i'm aware of have also been demonstrated and reported long before a fix. Many of the credit and item duping items over the years have not had the clean-up effort you describe in your examples above, flooding the market with people that literally have tens of billions piled up on various bank toons (and usually items worth quite a few B more). The combination of a slow reaction time and a lack of clean-up have caused this scenario and it has caused lots of damage to the economy over the years. Unfortunate, but hardly debatable.

4- Did you really just separate exploit fixing from development of the game and imply a lower priority ("we can't just stop dev")? First, this is contrary to your earlier sentiment about fixing exploits with priority. Second, seriously? No software is perfect i'll grant again, but you always fix major issues before expanding and potential changing the situation and its impact.


I'm not trying to pick a scab here; heck, much of this wasn't even on your watch and is just the history of the game and company (which you, unfortunately, get to inherit as its leader). I trying to shed some reality and point out some of the playerbase's frustration when you make broad statements that do not jive with the reality of the past.



Oh, and i didn't read much about the IRC stuff but i did see a comment that people should know when you're kidding on IRC (or something along those lines). If you're on the name 'Genele', then you speak officially for FunCom, period. That's how it works. When i'm around town, I'm always me and so i always represent my company, my family, my home town, etc etc. The nice part for you, is that 'Genele' is just an internet handle and you can create a new handle. Please do so.

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Originally Posted by Bonghigs

2- Your play character was in DI? :p (i kid, i kid). Seriously though, your play character was in an org that was openly talking about exploiting and (a) the exploits weren't fixed, plus (b) the players weren't banned after openly talking about exploiting? Something is very wrong with that.

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Genele's in Paradise, you should know that by now. ;)
And talking about exploits does not mean that you are using said exploits, and without tangible proof there shouldn't be any bans.

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Originally Posted by Djiax

One concern is about these rumors that a number of people have huge pile of cash laying around (10's of B), which I don't know if true or not. But if true, it could probably make the price of GRACE very high at the beginning.

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I'm one of these peoples and sitting at 70bil of creds right now
- for 1.5bil I will buy few to test how it works
- for 800-1000mil I will use it to pay for my 2nd acc and maybe make 2-3 new ones
- for 4bil - I just say "GL on official cred sales attempt" and continue to pay for AO with RL money

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Originally Posted by Wakizaka

Genele's in Paradise, you should know that by now. ;)
And talking about exploits does not mean that you are using said exploits, and without tangible proof there shouldn't be any bans.

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From the context of his commentary (that they were scared they'd get fixed, primarily) I think it is safe to say that they were using them. Why would you be concerned an exploit is getting fixed if you aren't using it? :)

Imho one "issue" with the current economy are players who have many billions of credits. Although GRACE will not solve this entirely it could help to ease it.
I don't think that players who already have much more credits as they need will be the ones buying GRACE from FC. Players with few credits will mainly do this and then sell them to players who have much. That way some of the "hoarded" credits will flow to less wealthy players, closing the gap between those two "groups" at least a bit.

As for the QA we can only hope that the department is learning from past mistakes.
One of the most important tasks of said departments members is to proactively try to abuse every system they get to test to find exploits (and other bugs) before they go live. While I think they have found their (significant) share of those in the past, obviously some slipped through. But those things happen and hopefully they monitor their processes and improve them where needed.

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Originally Posted by Genele

I honestly think this is a bad idea. Evidently we do experience inflation in AO (even though it has been less severe over the years than in some other games I will not mention the name of). But keep in mind that inflation also happens in the real world. You can look at how much a house cost your grandparents and laugh at the price they paid because it was so low compared to what it would cost today.

The price of an item in an mmo will always reflect the time/effort it would take to obtain it, the amount of time it takes to obtain credits and the demand on the item you wish to purchase. With GRACE it is fast to obtain the item, but the time measurement will reflect your personal economy too.
For the buyer the questions will be: "How much game time am I willing to spend on grinding credits to pay for my subscription? Maybe I should just pay my own subscription so I can do other things when I play?"
For the seller the questions will be "How much do I need these extra credits right now? How much do I think my real money is worth in credits?"

Even though we do have some exploited credits and some credits from times when our design was less good (cough... ingots cough...) people who sell GRACE today will sell it for a price that makes sense today. If GRACE is priced too high, no one will buy it.

With a scenario where we experience more inflation in the future and we have a cap on how much credits that players can make off of GRACE. Then players would get unhappy with the credit value of their real money and spend them on a credit sellers instead. Because credit sellers exist, there is a market for paying your way in to power in the game. And is it not better to invest that money in to getting future updates for the game you care about?

If we experience little inflation in the future, the price of GRACE will stabilize at a price that both sellers and buyers will be happy with.

These were just my personal thoughts on the subject. :)

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Originally Posted by Macrosun

Just wanted to point out plex in eve has afaik never been fixed price. it was 700m+ recently even.

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Thank you both for the replies, i'm now enlightened :)

Gold farmers, and credits exploiters will probably never going to pay Funcom anymore, now that they can buy GRACE with their exploited credits.

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Originally Posted by UNIDENTIFIED

Gold farmers, and credits exploiters will probably never going to pay Funcom anymore, now that they can buy GRACE with their exploited credits.

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It doesn't matter, because for them to buy a GRACE, somebody else has to buy it with IRL cash and sell it to them. Funcom gets $15 per month of subscription (or whatever the bulk deal price one pays may be), regardless of whether a given account is paid in GRACE or in money.

Even though the credits aren't removed from the system, what this means is that anybody can get a hold of those credits using IRL cash, and the exploit-generated credits will be eventually more evenly distributed across all hands. It could, therefore, potentially reduce the income-inequality impact of the inflation we're living with today.

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Originally Posted by vitriolic-v

Even though the credits aren't removed from the system, what this means is that anybody can get a hold of those credits using IRL cash, and the exploit-generated credits will be eventually more evenly distributed across all hands. It could, therefore, potentially reduce the income-inequality impact of the inflation we're living with today.

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Faulty premise. It is built on the idea that most every player will buy a GRACE and sell it on GMI. The problem with that is if every player bought the item then no one would need it. No the maximum viable buyers of GRACE with IRL money is limited to 50% give or take 5%. At best it is moving credits from one half to the other half. But there is no guarantee that it is evenly distributing credits earn/bought across everyone. This is where your premise falls a part as the number of grace on the GMI would indicate that far less than 50% of players bought and sold GRACE.

Do you really think that anywhere near 50% of the players spend money on the item store? I seriously doubt that. I would bet the item store only gets used by 30-35% of the population and that the part that spends IRL money to get credits in AO is more along the lines of 10-15%. Speculation of course but just look at the amount of GRACE, Token Packages and other item store items that get sold present on GMI and you will understand what I am basing off of.

However that reveals the truth behind FC actually implementing this. There is some number of players active in AO and that number times the percentage of players that use the item store times $15 equalled some number that the bean counters could not ignore. FC did not introduce it because it was a good idea that the players suggested. They introduced it because it was a viable revenue stream.

I feel GRACE, pricing and control of it is all happening from marketing/bean counter section of FC and that none of those folks have AO players best interest at heart. You can be sure someone asked: "Do you think we can get more than $15 for this item given the convenience factor it offers?" and that it was debated. So I count us lucky that it was just $15. Remember the heckler juice pricing and how they justified it? By pricing it to be just a tad cheaper than the at current time prices of leveling services. Now that leveling services have a much lower price has FC lowered their prices? Nope. Another good example of marketing/bean counters going look they will spend that much and then raping us for that much. Now the higher price is warranted because it is safe versus giving you account/password to some leveling service.

I Like the posting above ^_^ informative thought

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Originally Posted by Genele

This is another question I can't answer because it will be in the hands of the marketing/billing departments.
My guess though is that you have to buy it directly from the billing pages as this would limit the risks of exploitation.

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This would be my guess too. The procedure as my understanding of it so far:

• Buy item after logging in to your account at https://register.funcom.com/
• Item delivered to your AO mailbox
• Item can now be "used" by the buyer or traded (on GMI only)
• Once placed on GMI, the offer can't be cancelled or modified

This would be a good way to let "poor" players (game credits wise) who have RL money to spend, get better funded to buy ingame items. Correspondingly, players who have plenty ingame credits, but not much cash to spend on subscriptions, can have some "free" time to play.

Since the dishonest part of the credit farmers (read: spammers) are not much likely to use paid accounts, this would only benefit players who want to enjoy the game more.