Eredan's World

Rathedan · 19-01-2011 01:19:19

How much is gas where you're from? Here, its 1.10 a litre. And 3 months ago it was under a buck per litre. A few years ago, we were luck to see it at under 1.40 a litre.

People get up in arms and blame the corporations that supply the oil as the big problem, and yes, while they're at fault, its not their problem alone.

How so you may ask?

Assume it's Labor day weekend. People tend to take vacations this particular long weekend, and its well known. People dealing on the commodities market (sell raw materials, like oil) have a job to the people paying thier wages to turn a profit on commodity stocks, basically, to make money out of thin air by manipulating demand of a product.

They predict that gas will go up for a holiday weekend. They buy high and force corporations to buy higher crude. Then these fund brokers take their profit, and distribute as earnings among their investors who are all so happy to see cash come into their dividends.

So a few people earn more money from in this scenario. More money now has gone into circulation in whatever economy the profiteering commodity brokers are a part of. These same people have more money to spend, and they do so on more goods. If you won 1000$, what would you do with it? Save it? Probably not. Sales go up on goods, those salespeople earn more, more people are happy because they are making more money than they did before from the increased sales. And then they go spend some of their money, and so forth.

Flip side:

The company buying crude has taken a hit. They have profiteering investors and stockholders that like to make money too, so they need to hike up the price of gas to cover their crude oil purchases.

So gas goes up. All those people that made extra money, now have to in exchange spend all that same extra money to buy the same amount of gas they did last week.

And there's crying and screaming that goes on. People organize "Don'y buy gas" days to hurt the companies, but in the end, people still have to buy gas, and have the money to do so, because they earned it buy selling oil to the big companies to begin with at a higher price.

It becomes a big, giant, zero sum equation. If prices had stayed constant for crude, and people didn't try to squeak out extra cash from the original sales, prices wouldn't have gone up on gas. The only people being hurt, are the people that didn't get a piece of the original profiteering, or the subsequent sales.

Now this, granted, is really simple. AND, it doesn't consider that theres any more money being given to people from an outside source, like the government, or, say eredan. That exponentially makes the same situation worse.

But even still, I think you can get the picture about why and how prices spiral out of control. The example pretty much touches base on every part of the current problem facing eredan.

Blaming the fact that certain cards have skyrocketed and getting mad at the sellers isn't treating the disease, but rather the symptoms of the disease. If the cards are constantly being posted at that price, and being sold, obviously, the economy can support it, the demand is there for the supply.

The question is, rather, is it a healthy economy, and if not, what can you do to fix it.

Dracatis · 19-01-2011 02:51:12

Well part of the problem is scarcity.

Yes people have to pay the crazy prices to get stuff but that is because if their to play they have to get the stuff.

The issue is not in the Market, it's in the Store.

I have a good example here. I needed to get pirates for the achievement. Unfortunately due to a slow e-check I missed the sale when they came out so I had no pirate cards. I said, what the heck I've got some Feez, I'll buy a couple packs and hope to luck out. I bought two packs. That is $14.99 US in Feez. This gives me 6 pirate cards and 18 cards that may or may not help my pirates. Unluckily I only got 2 pirates characters, both commons. (I ended up getting another pack and one more copy of a character I had and the last other common pirate but that has little to do with this example) And I had to fill the rest of the deck with stuff I stole from my normal decks, I doubt I could have ran just off those two packs for anything.

I now have 2 rare cards, they may be Cursed Sorcerer's Books, they might be Living daggers or even Foam Giants, but most likely not. It quite obvious some rares are more rare then others.

Now take a popular competitor, like ***biiiiipppp*** bip. Admitably a more simple game. But for $12.90 US I can get 250 credits, so that is about $15.22 for 295 credits. This gets me a Titianium pack (probably one of the worst deals in packs but good for the example). I get 30 characters in 4 clans, at least 4 cards are rare. I need 8 cards, typically 4 in two clans to make a deck. Discounting selling the extra rares I should be able to easily make a decent deck. This leaves me with 22 cards left over to TRADE(private sales) and sell.

The problem is even after getting well crap I got 5000 x 3, I don't want to think about how much I spent. I barely have anything extra I want to trade, especially as a collector and player of the stock market(yes this arguement looks to ruin my Eradan portfolio lol). Probably other players look at this the same and only sell when they have to, especially since were losing 5% each time we do. And we have all the free players buying up stuff on top of that.

I mean look at the crap cards. I know there are a bunch of people that play this, why are there only 120 or less of a common card on sale? Demand is greater then supply. You may think this makes people play more to get these but you'd be wrong, all this does is frustrate players into leaving the game(I've had quite a few I've gotten to play and they are gone because they hit dreaded level 13 and now all the sudden their decks can't compete. If your going to continue updates like this you shouldn't need to worry about not making sales, people will buy when you update with fun new stuff. You need to worry about keeping a player base to sell to. Rares will always be horded. In ***biiiiipppp*** bip, a clan leader, Dregn, also a rare, just came out. They have New Blood packs kinda like your release theme packs that give only the newest characters. People bought tons of these packs. There should be many copies out there. People are hording them so much that his price stayed over 25K while he was in New Bloods. He's now 35K. I can buy a really strong deck for 25K never mind 35K. So the Market still works with a huge supply.

But then you won't come across issues like Fireball, an uncommon that is 46K. Especially with these theme packs limiting what cards you can pull, how can an uncommon unaligned be 46K? Not enough supply. (Also way too much demand since they have to be used in other things...).

Highest ***biiiiipppp*** Rival Uncommon? Charlie 29,700. And most likely cause she is old and slightly OP before they knew what was good and not on a character. And Yes Crystals and Clintz are acquired at about the same rate. I did the math. (However I can get Credits in surveys, tournaments and ELO, but I can only get Feez from surveys)

You have the better game easily, but they have the better sustainable market. Learn from them and be more successful. I rather play this.

Rathedan · 19-01-2011 05:32:34

I never said the market is right, I merely wanted to make a point of looking somewhere else besides the current pricing. It's not the market's fault in of itself that the pricing is completely whacked, rather, its the underlying problems. Rather than complain about the prices, fix whats making them so high.

Part of the problem is scarcity

A lot of the problem is scarcity. And I'm sure it's not from a lack of demand for packs. The pack design, honestly, is counter intuitive. It promotes more and more rarity to the more commonly used cards by diluting the waters with every new weekly release.

Look at MtG. You have your core, Xth Edition cards, and subsequent packs come out as expansions. Many of the common cards played by all decks are the core cards, ones that were available at release. The act cards, or even the guilds themselves, if you want it that way, were more expansionary, adding flavor and options. But the core cards, they are still necessary for most every deck.

Most people have been asking for different packs for different acts, I really think there needs something even simpler than that:

Stick with the current guild and special caste packs, and make the vanilla 12-card booster limited to the core cards cards only. That way, there's a chance of getting fireball, assasinate, watchmaker, etc that isn't further diluted every single week. If you want a certain guild's cards, go for the guild pack, if you want general cards you can play without worrying about all the new cards, buy the core pack.

But even moreso than that, its the other big problem: The inflation of crystals itself.

Friends net you crystals, facebook wall posts net you 50 to 100 crystals, every fight earns you crystals. You can make 500-1000 crystals a day easily. In a week, thats at least a few thousand crystals. Let's say 3500 for now

If you're a pack purchaser, or even just a market player buying low selling high, the pool of available crystals out there increases every week. I buy a 12 pack, I figure all the commons, or all the uncommons, or the rare should be worth a weeks work to a non-payee. I sell each common for 500 (7x500=3500), 4 uncommons for 875 (4x875= almost 3500), and one rare for 3500.

Assume it all sells, so I net 10500, plus my own 3500 I earn from rewards means I have 14000 crystals in a week. And I do that every week.

What am I doing with the crystals? Buying other people's cards, of course. And that's the problem....

There is no crystal sink.

So as I slowly sell the cards each week for the same price, I want cards I'm not pulling. Why would someone sell a rare on the market for the 3500 I set above, knowing that I may want it, and knowing I save up 14000 crystals each week?

So instead of there being a viable reason not to hoard away crystals, all thats happening is the rich keep getting richer, and the new and the poor fall further behind, untill theres a split market where the only poeple getting the good cards are the ones selling and collecting everyone elses weekly crystals.

The inflation in the system is horrible with absolutely no sink involved. Its quite honestly horrible, and unfair.

The solution? Start selling special packs for crystals. Hell, start selling anything that can be repeatedly bought -don't tell me those few special cards in the store are a sink, that's Bullcrap. You need a repeated sink that is of enough interest to players earning crystals to part ways with them.

The market cut on sales isn't ever enough, simply because the rest continually recirculates and grows at a faster rate than is taken out. Increase the cut, and people would never sell.

You need...absolutely need a sink. What you have here is a faucet-sink economy. The faucet is filling the bathtub, but theres no hole allowing escape, and the water is overflowing.

Free 12 packs for 30,000 crystals seems fair enough to me. It'd alleviate the system, it'd give non-buyers something to strive for, at a free pack a month or so if they save, and it'd convince hoarders to buy packs. It's also drop prices, since less money would be had by overall population.

Again, look at the problem itself, and not the symptoms it causes. Blaming poeple for having excessive amounts of crystals isn't thier fault when there is no where to use them.

steven_allen · 19-01-2011 15:18:42

An amazing write up, Rath. I think this is the first intuitive post on a very important topic. When it all boils down, the problem with the player-ran market is the players themselves. Like Rath said, the rich will stay rich, and the poor will struggle to keep their head above water. Its even getting to a point that people who were once moderately wealthy have hit a wall. The amount of crystals that would once buy you several decent cards is now not even enough to buy a single one. When I was just getting started in this game, Watchmaker of Destiny was a 20k card, which was a huge amount then. Similarly, Ergue was about 15k, and Wakizashi was the same. Using those 3 cards as an example, Ergue's average price is now 50k, same with Wakizashi. Watchmaker would be the extreme example here, as his price has increased 100 fold.

Poptolev · 19-01-2011 17:50:25

steven_allen a écrit :

Watchmaker would be the extreme example here, as his price has increased 100 fold.

My math may be wrong but 200/20 = 10 fold ... (not that this changes a lot)

Rathedan · 19-01-2011 19:00:41

A lot of the research I do for my economics studies is based purely in virtual communities and their economies. Most of it's MMO stuff, but the marketplace here actually operates on a similar basis. It's on a much grander and complex scale, but the basic idea still operates the same.

Take warcraft for example. The auction house operates the same way, the income of players, while varied, still magically appears from quests and monster kills. They have various sinks to counteract the constant inflow of monies, but in the end, the same predicament occurs. Their solution is simple, but still somewhat broken. Higher levels need to earn more, so every expansion makes the income from the last look pitiful, and the new sinks, like rare mounts and gear, cost even more. That way, new players catch up easier, but it's still a bandaged system. Granted it obviously works, but it's always a game of catchup.

Every, and I mean every game I've done any looking into, bad inflation still exists. It's inherent in the games itself and the need to reward players. It's really no different than the real world, money stores are always on the rise.

Hwoever, every game has thier fixes, and some work a lot better than others at addressing the problem. Right now, Eredan falls into the extremely badly managed category.

The setup here doesn't allow for that style of WoW catchup. You need a pure sink, one that'll create a zerosum system, like card packs. Otherwise, new players will never come close to being on even ground and the trickle of new gamers will cease, and like any game, attracting more and new players to invest into the game and grow is the M.O., otherwise things would have to shutdown.

Eredan's World

Annonce

#1 19-01-2011 01:19:19

A little perspective on Card prices...

#2 19-01-2011 02:51:12

Re : A little perspective on Card prices...

#3 19-01-2011 05:32:34

Re : A little perspective on Card prices...

#4 19-01-2011 15:18:42

Re : A little perspective on Card prices...

#5 19-01-2011 17:50:25

Re : A little perspective on Card prices...

#6 19-01-2011 19:00:41

Re : A little perspective on Card prices...

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