Okay, so now everybody knows that the economy is a mess. CS and WS prices have inflated badly, and now it's a lot more obvious what happened. The story slowly unravelled. Firstly, we were told this hours after the abuse was finally detected (presumably it took awhile because they were busy working out how to down play it as much as possible). But then it was revealed that there was actually 30,000 p-slimes spawned and that those dropped the equips. And then last night a player involved in the abuse revealed this video, which says it all. If this is around 1/1000 of the slimes spawned, then that gives some idea of the magnitude of damage that was done. Yes, I know they threw a lot of items away, but a disproportionate number of the high stat ones will have been kept. So now it becomes obvious. CS and WS were bought out to fund the scrolling of a lot of this gear. How is it fair on the rest of us that the economy just got totally fucked with and now is a lot more like the GMS game that we no longer wanted to play? Additionally, this player claims to have made $500 of real money from the abuse. That can't be good for the economy. https://royals.ms/forum/threads/ban-appeal.108825/#post-608215 And the other question that this raises: If it took the admins as long as it did to detect Charlie's abuse, how many things are they still unaware of? How do they know that there's no more abuse that they don't know of? How can the community have faith that this game is at all fair? I've seen a number of botters, etc around in recent times. Additionally, the detection of RWT seems to leave a lot to be desired, given that so many people are caught from their chat logs instead of their item transactions, which really, should make it obvious if it's being monitored sensibly. Transactions involving a valuable item for nothing of value in return should be raising massive alarm bells and should be instantly detected and investigated. There's something not quite right with the management of this server, given that this was allowed to happen. In order to convince the player base why they should remain loyal to this server, I'd like to see the admins take responsibility for what has gone down, publicly apologise for it happening and for them not being honest about how severe the abuse was, and explain what they're going to do to put things right.
There's a lot of hate on the GMs & how they're handling it. I feel like people believe everything is super easy to fix and find out about. One of the only reasons we got away with what we did for the short period of time was because of the fact Charlie was a GM. It's completely different than botters & hackers, and tracking them. People are being a lot harder on the GMs than they should be, they have lives too... The economy may be a mess, but while everything was going on Charlie made sure to limit what we were selling and we agreed as a group to stop buying CS/WS so that the prices wouldn't go up (Which was when they were around 470-480m). I'm not here to say we didn't cause damage, because we did. Though the Staff handled it pretty quickly & well. This is coming from someone who took part in the exploit and I can honestly say we didn't throw as many items as people think into the economy. Majority of things we scrolled & made were equips to wear on our characters, not to sell & make mesos. With P-Slimes, mesos had no "meaning" to us, we weren't trying to hoard and buy millions of CS/WS purely just make our own gear. Also the RWT wasn't as big of thing as people think, we never went into this with our goal to RMT. Only once Charlie got banned and our time was thin, we (Stunk lul) decided to RMT. I never made a penny out of the items we created.
Lol, this makes me laugh so hard fam. My "3 cents": Those of us who play this service are the ones truly responsible for creating the "community". I really don't understand how even knowing so many things from the server we keep playing. There are thousands of servers that actually fight every day to have the number of players that Royals have, who really care about the "satisfaction" of those who are part of the community, who are concerned not to IGNORE them and explain when it is the case (like any large company that wants to position itself in the market). This is NOT the case with Royals. Here each one is actually a dollar. "If you already donated, and you do not like the server, you can leave". At the end, there will be another to continue donating and to invest the time that you do not want to invest. There will be new ones that will not know anything about how the server works and will always be the same vicious circle. So, I think it's better that you see this as "a game" and that if it bothers you, turn off your PC/laptop or change the game.
What does RMT have to do with the economy? RMT is very simply the changing hands of items. It doesn't have anything to do with the amount of money that is in the economy, nor the amount of scrolls/items, those stay exactly the same, the only thing that changes is who owns them. And as someone who was directly involved with the P Slimes, we actually bought very few Chaos/Whites from the FM, we specifically made it our goal not to do so, so that we wouldn't inflate the price, devaluing the items we own. Edit: Furthermore, you must be very confused because the only thing inflating is whites/chaos themselves, which is because they are the only (reliable) way to store money past 2.1b. Everything else has deflated since the summer. Once a new replacement for currency is released (which I believe has been public to the forums that it is being spoken about?) the value of WS/CS will simply be the service they provide, and not a means of storing currency. Also, yes that GIF is a little nutty, but for every inventory like that, we might've taken about 1-2 items, if that. The rest were NPC'd. So don't assume that THOUSANDS of items, though spawned, were then pumped into the economy. I would have to say at least 95% of the items were NPC'd.
My 2 Cents. In my honest opinion, I feel like there was some work that needed to be done with the server before the transition to the "new source" , this included working log checks that would prevent some forms of RMTing as well as an accurate Autobanning system (That the server apparently doesn't have at the moment?) as well as other 'core' features of the game that should've been implemented from the beginning such as working Guild Options (BBS, Alliances etc). With that said, this is a prime example of a wrongfully hired staff member. He caused irreparable damage to the community as a whole and left the community questioning the hiring process and verification process of a staff member as well as the overall judgement of the staff as a whole. This is never a good mentality to have. I personally do think some assertion is needed to put the minds of many at ease. While yes, MapleRoyals has always been a "don't like it? leave" type of server, one can only have such a mentality for so long before they realize that people WILL leave, especially with the number 2 server on GTOP being a server that's vaguely similar to the services that MapleRoyals provides. While I don't personally think there's anything to "fix" as again, this is damage that is actually somewhat hard to fix (That would require the illegitimate items to be deleted, and players who unknowingly bought these items to be punished) as the server (from what i'm understanding so far from reading forum posts) doesn't currently have any sort of logs to track such items (I can be totally wrong though). I do think there needs to be a statement that is posted in light of recent events with staff members willing to give Dimitri a pass, the spawning of items by Charlie, and whatever other problems that have plagued the server recently. At the end of day, yes this is a game but at the same time it's a place for many to vent their frustrations , relieve stress, and enjoy themselves after a longs day worth of studying, work, or stress. It shouldn't be a place where people come to get even more angry because of the actions of past staff members that might have ruined their mapleroyals-experience. It's time for the administrators to step up, post an official statement, and ridding people of negative thoughts (within their power).
RWT encourage hacking and botting to make mesos at a rate that's multiple magnitudes faster than a typical player can make mesos. Hacker/botter bought out ws/cs, either sell them for money through RWT or scroll godly items and sell them for money. When normal player get discouraged feel like they have no option to get the gear that they want because ws/cs were inflated by the hacker/bitter/RWTer they either joined them or leave the game. The cycle repeat. Just look at Diablo 2 from years ago. Botter run boss run and farm 24/7, farm HRs and equipment selling for forum gold or real money. RWT is directly related and responsible for it.
What you're saying makes no logical sense. RWT encourages the ability to pay real money for items in game. Someone who has the ability to bot or hack doesn't need to spend money because as you said, they have an expedited way to receive wealth. And you're right, botters/hackers probably do buy ws/cs to sell it for real money, but whether they do that or use it fund their own characters, the entire problem is solved by stopping it at the roots, which is botting and hacking. Don't try and link two very separate issues together when they frankly have nothing to do with each other.
it is linked, but how causal the effect rwt has on botting or hacking is a different issue the economic definition of demand is the ability and willingness to pay. when rwt comes into the picture, the ability to pay is increased as most of these rwts clearly can afford therefore, rwt creates demand for strong gear, and botters/hackers are there to supply these gears. i would not go as far to say that every 1 rwter results in 1 botter/hacker, this goes back to my point where the causal relationship between rwt and botting/hacking is a different issue altogether, but if you want to minimise botting/hacking, one way to go around doing it is to reduce demand by preventing rwt. a simple analogy - blackmarket for human organs. this is prohibited where i come from (similar to rwt in royals), but people who can afford it are the rwters (differentiated from the poor who cant afford 6 figures for a kidney), and because there is demand, the black market opens up (these are the botters who exploit the underprivileged to harvest organs) to meet this demand with their supply.
RWT goes both ways. Selling AND buying. I know there are people out there making a living purely doing RWT on online game. If someone wants to make a living on RWT playing it normally without botting and hacking, he or she will be starved to death. The only way to make RWT to generate a lot of real world $$$ consistently for them is botting or hacking, generate a lot of mesos, buy out market, inflate the price, and sell them for $$$. How is this not making logical sense?
Because unlike you I have RWT expierence and the price of Whites/Chaos don't change based on the in game meso value. To use RWT as an argument as to why the economy is so fucked is baseless. Basic economics is supply and demand. Supply stays the same; RWT or not. If anything demand should go down if people are paying real money for them, which it isn't. This is also getting entirely off topic which is to explain why the "economy" is so messed. It's not the economy, it's chaos and whites. The price of gear hasn't shifted, simply the method of payment. Stop trying to make this seem like a much bigger problem than it is.
You're right Idk RWT pricing too well, but based on what you said above: If ws/cs real world currency value don't change even if the in game mesos value change on ws/cs, this will cause the RWT more attractive because people will need to spend more time to farm up mesos. If ws/cs are 300m, typical player can sell leech for 3 hours or less to get one ws/cs. If ws/cs are 550m each, people need to sell leech for 4 to 6 hours to get one ws/cs. If what you said is true, then the "stable/unaffected" real world currency to buy ws/cs will be more attractive than before, therefore the demand should go up. If the demand increase, but the supply stays the same, real world value for ws/cs should go up, but if it's not, could be because the number of RWT player base increase, competition drives the price down or "stable".
Holy shit I'm not talking in circles with you and you're clearly not smart enough to understand so I'm done lmao
I'm smart enough to understand the market to get to where I am without relying on free items from other people. But not smart enough of course.
LOL, I am new player that like you said. I dont know how market worked in old days before i joined in here.But in my two cent,if we cant stop RWT in this game,and make everyone gear himself/herself with fair fund,inflation will not stop.Overwhelmingly RWTing like puting a finger on the scale of demand by outside-game mesos(real world currency),but supply of ws/cs is almost constant in game.(BTW,we have no reason to fulfill RWTer's demand,so kicking them out is the only way we should do).If we cant cut it down from the root,instead, deducting some mesos in game,supply and demand will never get back to the balance point because the finger is still there.
RWT obviously doesn't encourage illegitimate behavior that negatively impacts the economy as spelled out here. Duh.
Obviously I'm not smart enough to click the link or smart enough to read it. Can you summarize it for me plz DD? <3 Jk I read it days ago.
Hmmm, am I the only one who thinks @stunk is right ? lol RWT in and of itself doesn't affect the economy, why? Because it simply results in an item travelling from one place to another in the same enclosed environment. RWT does not inject new items nor does it withdraw existing items from the economy. The economy remains the same. However, RWT is the end of many means including hacking and botting. It is hacking/botting that result in many problems that relate to the economy since it gives an astronomical economical advantage to the user. So the real threat to the economy here are hackers/botters.
You said stunk is right, but what you said contradicts what stunk said. You said RWT and botting goes together, but stunk is saying the two has nothing to do with each other.
The way I see it RWT, hacking, and the economy are all indirectly linked together. As stated above, RWT does not directly affect the economy. It does not introduce new items to the server. It is simply a transaction. The only difference is using dollars instead of mesos. No items are generated and the items traded stay within the server. However, RWT does encourage and incentivize people to hack/bot and abuse Royals. Because RWT is available, people choose to join Royals and decide to hack/bot which results in expedited mob killing that does generate new mesos and items to the server. Is it enough to notice and the root of all the recent inflation? Of course not. But it does play a part.
I don't see where I'm saying botting and RWT go together. I'm certainly not contradicting what stunk said: ^this is the essence of my argument. You have to look at RWT conceptually and objectively: internally, it is just a transfer of goods between 2 parties. Externally, it's the transfer of real-life currency between 2 parties. But we don't care what happens externally, so in reality, it's analogous to the result of a drop-game with the single difference that the "looter" is not randomly selected. It is for that very reason why RWT is forbidden => it's deterministic => pay2win. It doesn't affect the economy though because, again, there isn't any discrepancy. Example: You have 1 wallet, call it wallet A, it contains $10 You have 1 wallet, call it wallet B, it contains $20 Transfer $20 from B => A. The sum of the 2 wallets is still $30. One accepted to get poorer and the other accepted to get richer. All is balanced. Again, the real problem here is hacking/botting because that's what generates mesos and goods. Say you were to find a way to completely and absolutely stop RWT, what will that do? In practice you may deter some hackers aka mesos generators. In theory, nothing. You would still have the engines generating absurd amounts of mesos/item: the hackers/botters. Also you seem to think RWT is what drives inflation. RWT is probably the least influencing factor. Economy is good when the flow of goods/money is high. When stuff are too expensive, economical flow decreases so people turn to RWT which in turn helps the flow...