Sadly, because end-game items never really get destroyed in any way their value will only ever go down. (Outside of fringe situations involving bans or someone dropping them into the oblivion) I propose admins purchase things from stores in the FM and then delete them from the game OR make it so that current best in slot items must be destroyed in order to create any new best in slot items that may come out in the future. Example: to craft the next tier of throwing star you must use a Balanced Fury + MTK as part of the crafting recipe. Thanks.
Economy is very hard to get right in MMO's. The only one consistently making an attempts in the right direction is OSRS. OSRS not only considers the values of previous BiS when creating new content. Also it is filled, same as you are propsosing, item sinks. Also they have someone wich job it is to be an economic advisor. Maplestory has very poor inflation control. Potions, the taxi and the 3% tax just don't work. WoW has another approach that kind of works. Just release a new expansion every once in a while that makes all previous gear worthless. Either way. As I see it, there is one big reason. The lack of new players. OSRS items remain, relatively to Royals, in decent value. Even if they are objectively like 9th best in slot. Beside the other points I mentioned, it's mostly because new players are looking for upgrades. New Royal players are either facing and empty world before level 135. Or give up after finding out the only end-game content their NL can do is Zakum, since they did not HP wash. Their mid-game items don't sell. Because only things most are looking for are the +6/7 lvl 110 weapon. Ofcourse it is a little more nuanced than I state here. Nonetheless, as long as there is not a healthy influx of new players that intend to stay, we can try what we want, this is just a natural cycle in any (slowly) dying MMO.
Yep, I agree new players are a crucial. But your solution is to what? just to let the economy crash? We have some of the smartest minds I know on the GM team I'm sure they can come up with something!
I haven't replied to you since I did know any constructive to add to my point beside adding more arguments to my point. Your point is valid and for sure well meant. Crashing Economies in MMO's are another reason for their exponential decay. Therefore I do want to join in a healthy discussion and not be the negative andy. I enjoy discussing these things, so here we go. I do not want to let the economy simply crash (even more). To start, I am just a casual in this game. Allthough, I have decent knowledge of game mechanics and balancing. The specific mechanic of item sinks you are proposing are VERY hard to get right and have MAJOR consequences. OSRS has been doing this quite right. However, they have 20+ years of experience designing these systems. Their game is made so these new systems can be integrated. The playerbase of OSRS is used to this. They are completely fine that their Abbysal Whip is used as charges for their Abbsysal Tentacle. Just a gut feeling, but I don't think Royals playerbase is really welcoming to massive changes like these. Yes, massive. My question to you is. What exactly would you propose? What items would get destroyed in what, meaningful and worthwhile, process? What would the expected effect on Royals economy be? If it's actually an improvement. How are the effects distributed on the player base? Would it be equally distributed from new to the end-game players? Or would it be, as with most economic updates, only really matter for the end-game player? How do you know this? I still stand with my main point. We can discuss and try what we want until the last players quit. They might have fun for however long it will take. Conservative MMO's die. If the reasons for no change are based on nostalgia. Then that MMO signed its own death sentence. Decay of MMO's is exponential. In Royals, we are now starting to feel the, natural, consequences of a dying MMO. MMO's start to decay within days of the last update. The only way to prolong the inevitable is to keep attracting new players. And make them stay. Royals have been going, quite succesfully, for while now. Things have been done right for sure. Anyway, my ride is almost at its location. Thank you for coming to my TedTalk. I might add something later if I think it adds something to the discussion.
To my knowledge, the price of end game equips has been increasing (not all, but a decent amount), due to the amount of end game items being locked behind banned accounts from RWTing... therefore lowering the amount of them available in the market, thus spiking their price. Just some information to consider.
Not at all. Just that this post is about combating deflation... when items are inflating... I'm simply trying to add to the discussion by providing additional information to be considered.
All the hacked-associated items, vote-abused gach items, and meso + the alternative efficient meso generating from 2013 until now probably create a huge corruption into game already. (I'm guessing most of the high end equips are related to rwter and hacker.) It's very difficult to backtrack all the hacked-associated or vote-abused gach items and meso. They can only catch rwter and hacker sooner to prevent further damage. Unless the game is reboot style (untradable) that cheaters won't affect the game mostly, there're no way to prevent corruption happens. If there're no alternative ways to play efficiently (leech, mage-farm, mules, vote-gach and apr), I think inflation wouldn't be that bad because it's harder to earn meso. Perhaps trying to change those efficient alternative ways would help, but it also changes the game that players might don't want to see. This is my opinon about it, please correct me if any of it might be wrong.
take end game gear off banned accounts who've been banned for longer than a year. host monthly auctions. you can only pay in b coins and cs ws and then delete the bcoins cs ws from the game. idk if it would work, yes lots of effort not enough staff. im sure this isnt the first time something like this has been suggested.
Which end game equips increased in price...? It's the other way around if anything, endgame weapons decreased in price, then had a small increase followed by another decrease. Att gear has been slowly but constantly decreasing in price. If I had to demonstrate, Perf weapons: Att gear: Just look for specific gear in forum by key word and scroll back in the pages... The reality is that the rate/effectivity of RWT bans is not catching up to the rate of the items being injected into the market, but I assume thats just one cause of the change in price. As for the topic of the thread - I'm not an expert in economy, but Royals economy is beyond fragile and I don't think any of these band-aid solutions will solve anything until the root cause is dealt with.
The items are also most likely created from illegit means. This would only really be helping the hyper end game players get dirty CGS's that are created maybe twice a year (gears worth like 50b+). Regarding normal WA gear and perf weapons, there's already enough in the game as is, you just have to wait a bit longer depending on what you are looking for (xbows, guns, 1h axe, etc.) We don't need more gear, we need more players. I think Donn1e's right. If we just inject more gear into the market like that (where the mesos basically go nowhere and can't recycle into the economy), I'm pretty sure it'd just make the economy worse.
Perfect weapons are much more expensive than before, things like craven or king cent cost 25b or so and used to cost 16b before.
just wanted to add something regarding "gm buying from FM shops". this is such a big backdoor for gm power exploitation that i can't even begin to mention all the stuff that can be done to give unfair advantages to players. the only fair way to do it would be public GM auction where they buy from the lowest bidder. and even then, you can argue that the mere selection of what goes for GM auction can provide advantages to those in the know.
While I wanted to return to the subject of creating Items Sinks as the initial intention of this thread. OSRS does this succesfully. I would need to update my memory. I am not sure how organise it exactly. However, they actively buy End-Game items from the GE (centralised Action House of OSRS). Then they destroy them. My memory tells me that they use the 'GE Tax', wich is 1% of all items sold to buy these. Obviously I have no idea how this can be implemented in Royals. If possible, a custom account with unique mechanics that is assigned an amount of Meso on a Character to buy these items. And as a soft-check to potential abuse. Each Item obtained would be automatically destroyed. Organising this for Royals Staff could be a solvable challende. Potential for abuse would always exist. When buying items from the GE in OSRS you do not choose your selling. A seller is assigned automatically. Therefore it could be difficult to gain this community's trust. Coding this might be possible or not. It is proven to work before. Expertise in the field of MMO Economics is very rare. Those with expertise in Ecomomics usually have something better to do than nerd about some game for free. I think Most MMO Developers, initially, do not spend much resources on their game's economy. Usually, it's only really looked into when things start falling apart. They learn from their mistakes and change what is needed. MMO's back in the day were designed for different players and not for Min-Maxers trying to optimize their group set-up and gear for whatever end-game content they want to do. Vanilla WoW and WoW Classic were played very differently. When WoW came out I did not even have internet at my house. My parents only joined the club when I was like 11-12 years old and it actually was usefull for me being in high school. Genarally speaking, "Band-Aid solutions" should be always be avoided when designing a game, if you keep stacking them you'll end up with a very fragile system. Systems with a lot Band-Aid tend to very hard to update due to the mess that usually follow. However sometimes it's that one Band-Aid solutions that solves a lot. Also sometimes we are far beyond the point of initial Game Design, as with a Nostalgia Private Server. This server will always be in a fight against those that want to conserve it's identity, that of a Nostalgia Server with no to minimal changes. As I am voicing quite a lot at the moment, no change is a death sentence for any MMO. Nonetheless, most of us here want to play an 'Old School' MMO'. We want the game to be like the good old days, for objective and subjective reasons. I think that we should be looking into these "Band-Aid Solutions". They minimally affect the overal Nostalgia-Experience that we all hold dear. Changes made should prioritise new players. The accesability to the end game community is one of the many reasons why new players quit. Economy is a definitly a contributor. In OSRS all items hold value. I have 5 accounts on OSRS, all of them want Green Dragon Hide and a Rune Scimitar at some point since it will make me progress faster. In this game your gear until end-game has little to no impact on progress, since 99% of us are leeching ourself to at least level 135. Beside some nieche items, basically all early to mid game gear is worthless. NPCing your items and selling APR to 2b is not the experience most of us are looking for when joining this server for the first time. An Economic-Band-Aid Solution I'd like to get more attention are the usefulness of many ores in this game. A lot of them are basically pointless. If there was better use for them, their prices would rise and give oppertunity to new players to increase their capitital and engage with other players. Sense of progresion in this game is very important to keep people playing any MMO. Any improvement to a new player's capital and social progression should be seriously considered in my opinion. In the current state of the game, just people dreaming of the good old days does not suffice for this server's durability. Instead of sinking End-Game items, I'd advocate for increasing value of Early-Game and/or Mid-Game items. I totally missed the RWT drama of not too long ago. Yes, ofcourse it has an impact. A strong system would easily recover, a fragile system will not. Nonetheless, I have said it before and will say it again. The lack of new players are the fundamental reason why MMO's die. It might be not as problematic as I might be making it seem. However, it's something all MMO's have to deal with. It's an issue whose impact exponentially increases and steadily start affecting more and more parts of any game.
This is not how you would adjust for deflation. There has already been some consideration to make certain items necessary for crafting "upgraded versions" (eg. ilbis required to make cilbis). I don't see a way to have that for end-game scrolled weapons anytime soon without either greatly devaluing the current items (with scrolls applied to them and all) or straight up introducing power creep.
