High Aurum is not good for the game

This is where it worries me @withoutscratch - because i ain’t ever heard of anyone buying aurum with cash to put it into the market for people so they can have mofs. We would see evidently the rounded figures of such i.e 500, 1000, etc. Instead we see small increments and larger pools. That has come from traders of Au/Mof/Au.

They buy aurum with cash direct from funcom and then spend it direct with funcom for the purpose they needed it for. It bypasses the AH altogether. The most frequent of users on the AH exchange are Alt traders and F2P players. They are the ones being hurt the most here by the ones with deep pockets.
As you can see, one needs at least 1.5mill mofs to start playing with the market like it’s the agent system.

Oh, where do they get mof from? Can we directly buy mof from funcom? :grin:

Say, there is a KSR in AH selling for 10 million.
How do someone directly buy it and bypasses AH altogether.
Please report any gold/item farmer you know to Andy. :grin:

That’s nonsense. If i want to buy 25 aurum to accelerate an agent mission, i will. If i want to sell the mof i get from dailies on an alt to get aurum on the whole account, i’ll do. I’d get something like 32 aurum from the first set of dailies. Increments of 500 or 1000? Haha.

What else would you like to spend aurum on? How are my needs of accelerating agent missions sometimes not “good” needs?

You threw a wrong statement as to why we don’t just see 500s or 1000s, i pointed it out, that’s all.

Also, i’d suggest you to calm down.

  1. Don’t throw things like “dear” to people, that’s just condescending. I wouldn’t usually mind but some people might and the thread would turn again into something not enjoyable.
  2. The situation is bad for F2P players ? So it’ll be like saying capitalism is bad for poor people and makes already rich people even more rich ? It’s not entirely wrong but you should just start to militate for communism IRL than for this. This situation is most likely temporary because of, as said, people panicking and messing out the market. Ever heard about stock market crashes ?
  3. Explain clearly your point AND what you’re expecting people or Funcom to do, instead of ranting. Do it in a calm manner, and then maybe this thread won’t turn into personal attack-fest.

As to my point, i’m totally opposed to any intervention from Funcom as this is supposed to be a player-driven economy since the beginning, and aurum spikes are here to stay. People gambling mof and aurum on the AH or in the Exchange was part of the deal since the beginning during beta when the Exchange system released.

I’d just like to address the whole title of the thread: “High Aurum is not good for the game”. I’d go as far as saying “lack of missing old content and fresh new content is even WORSE for the game”. As it has been seen at times, the introduction of new content (be it story or systems such as the agent system) drives the aurum’s price down since people come back and enjoy the game again, and end up buying some aurum in the process.

If Funcom keeps the game running and updating, people will remain active and the economy will get back to something dynamic again. Otherwise, enjoy the ghost town while waiting…

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If it’s too high, they need to stop buying. If they won’t stop buying, then it’s not too high.

The prices can not permanently go up without participation from the community. If players stop buying for 1 week it goes back to where it was a month ago. They won’t stop buying because they have enough MoF and not enough self-restraint.

There is no “ethical, ideal” price in such a model. It will keep rising as much as the players allow it.

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That solves demand part while we are also lack of supply.
People needs reason to sell their aurum in exchange. Something repeatedly consume large amount of MoF.

People like to argue supply and demand and free market capitalism for game markets but game markets are special. They are controlled monopolies and designed for the specific purpose of bringing in more money to the market owners.

The goal of a game market is not a free market. The goal is to keep new money pouring into the game.

This means prices can in fact be too high and too low. If prices are so high that people are discouraged earning game currency to exchange for premium currency, they will quit, bringing in no money for the market owners. If prices are so low that people don’t feel it’s worth buying premium currency to exchange for game currency, then they will quit, bringing in no money for the market owners. Because the market is controlled, the developers can influence the price in a variety of ways, such as creating more game or premium sinks (desirable things to spend each currency on), creating new content to increase activity, or adjusting how much game currency players can earn.

Currently it seems like prices have been rising. Maybe at this point in the game’s life, people have exhausted the game sinks and are just buying premium currency because they don’t want anything else. SWL could make more game sinks to counter this. Or maybe after the anniversary people are less active, and the lack of activity is allowing people to manipulate market prices by controlling smaller pockets of Aurum than they would usually need. Could be lots of things.

SWL has the data on transaction activity and whether people are hoarding or spending Aurum and MoF, so they are really the only ones who can address this. It’s nothing the players can fix, as SWL’s control over the market is much stronger than players’ influence.

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first%20300
Just a few minutes ago 300 showed up for the first time.
We have no time to argue those useless stuffs.
If it locked up cap, endless buy orders will eat up the remaining sell orders
and people will wait in a long queue of 300 waiting to get their aurum for days/weeks/months.
Maybe they will even beg to increase the cap.

For so long, people have ignored my warning. I told people to buy aurum via cash. I told you the sell order of aurum is so weak up there. I may even made people believe I am pushing up the price, hoping they may do something to stop it. (Now if you wonder if I really did that, ask people in funcom to get those data)

However, it may be too late,

Convincing people to NOT buy aurum in exchange will likely going to fail as it is a Prisoner’s dilemma.

Something you may try to prevent 300 gets hit from happening:
1, list your aurum to sell and build a defense line up there. (Yet, it may not hold for much longer as we can see the price increased dramatically as people’s fear is almost climax)
2, sell your items in AH encourage more people to exchange their aurum for mof to get your items.
3, organize more dungeon/regilon/lair runs to increase mof demand on keys.

However, the problem can hardly be fundamentally solved if there is nothing done by funcom. (Yeah, I told them that too. Nothing is **** happening so far.)

If it can’t be prevented, may it happen fast in a dramatic manner so that mof may have a chance to fight back as a common practice in stock market.

Well, I think I have done everything I can.
Much more unfortunately to that, if I can’t save the world, I will chose to profit from it to minimize the damage as I am very disappointed to many. I wonder why I even bothered to begin with. Ignorance shall be a bless to many people… I could totally leave them in dark.

Good luck, I no longer care about you. :grin:

The problem is that:

(1) Once a player’s gear reaches a certain level, then there is too little good stuff to buy with MoFs on the Auction House.

(2) There are too few new players, who might need the stuff which is buyable for MoFs.

(3) There is still lots of good stuff to buy with Aurums, even for players with yellow and red gear.

(4) It is too easy to earn MoFs, if someone has lots of alts.

There is no easy way for Funcom to ‘fix’ this:

(1) They could come up with new attractive & rare items that are sellable for MoFs. This will be hard & require Dev resources.

(2) Attracting new players will be even harder, unless they spend lots of money overhauling the game engine, adding new content etc.

(3) If they make caches & other Aurum items less expensive, then they also reduce their dollar cash revenue.

(4) The easiest ‘fix’, from Funcom’s point of view, would be to reduce the supply of MoFs, for example, by reducing the amounts awarded by challenges. This will hurt players who only earn MoFs for own use, that is, to open dungeon chests & upgrade gear.

The other fixes suggested, such as capping Aurum sale price, won’t work and will just distort the market.

For example, if Aurum’s value is actually 250, but Funcom forces people to sell them at 200, then they’ll just stop selling, and now there’ll be an Aurum shortage and a ‘queue’ to buy it.

Funcom could also devalue Aurum, by creating new Aurum and selling it at a low price. This will hurt people who buy Aurums and reduce Funcom’s revenue.

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Earning MoFs on alts basically requires you to convert to Aurum though, unless you are using it on those alts which then makes it irrelevant.

Or your an old TSW vet that got 2 alts for free.

Hell, I was an early adopter of part of the problem of running alts to buy aurum. I barely play now so I’ve more or less given it up.

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…huh? If I’m supposed to be able to transfer MoFs to my main for free without converting to Aurum, that’s news to me.

I wasn’t doing it to move MoF over. I was doing it to get Aurum with which to buy things like sprint 5-6 and imbuers.

My bit of contribution.

I’ve been playing for 2 or 3 months and subscribed as patron for that time. However, seeing the price of Aurum and that it’s the only currency accepted to unlock some of the features I’ve been wanting to get with the MoF/Aurum exchange, I cancelled my subscription. Because, for me, it’ll be a better option to just buy aurum for money once or twice and unlock everything I want than to expect reasonable exchange rates. The fact is that I didn’t care to grind as long as I could count on a stable MoF/Aurum ratio.

Here, in my country, 12.99 EUR (+ charges for international financial operations) is about 1/15 of a minimum wage. I make more than that (a privilege for few in my nation), but 12.99 EUR in my currency already are much more than the average cost of full priced games or other MMORPGs subscriptions.

To simplify my argument, I’ll spend less money on Funcom from now on not only because they can’t make a sustainable market model, but also because none of the actual alternatives for this model (subscriptions, pay walls and player driven economy for MoF) aren’t truly tolerable over time.

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I didn’t propose the response as a long-term solution; there is no player-side solution to eventually hitting the cap in this lopsided model. There is a player-side solution to sudden price hikes, but my point is that there’s so much MoF in the system that players just don’t care. I mentioned it on my first reply in this thread. It’s up to Funcom to make MoF feel more valuable so that players actually care.

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of course there is. Step 1: Tell everyone to dump all their aurum between 240 and 250, build a wall to stop the marching of aurum price. Hold this line till the story content update or even earlier. The aurum doesn’t need to be sold. What really need is just a number of massive sell order. A faith to counter fear.

On July.7 2015 I fought a war much harder during China stock market crash. It will work if we can get number.

The problem is there are less and less players purchasing aurum, the only way aurum can appear is when someone spends real money into the game.

There is nothing new to buy, there are barely any new players and old players are slowly leaving.

Another factor could be that some people are running auction bots, I’ve seen screenshots and discussions almost a year ago about working ah bots (I think I have old screenshots about that, I’ll try to find them).

Pro Trump supporter spotted. :laughing:

In all seriousness, why do you care so much ? F2P people won’t suddenly go from “hey, ok i’m fine aurum is at 210” to “derp, aurum is at 300, i’m done with this game i quit!”. If people quit, that’s because the game is not convenient for them for various reasons (lack of content, etc…), not for a freaking 2nd hand system, period.

So instead of telling everyone to dump their aurum or something, don’t tell anything, don’t tell what to do. Let people stabilize the system naturally with time, or let it break it if it is bound to be broken - so be it!

PS: Aurum’s price is already back to 232. It just fluctuates punctually because of the people panicking, but panic cannot be a permanent state.

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The only thing matters at cap is it will be a queue of buy order waiting for sell orders to appear. Thus, people can’t instantly get aurum any more, they will need to wait without knowing when they can get aurum. If the queue get longer, people will find it’s almost impossible to buy anything related to aurum any more unless they buy aurum via cashes. Further more, once this queue stabilized, there will be no more player-driven market, there will be only one price that is 300. And, people can also no longer be able to move mof from alts by exchange. Thus, my conclusion is, the price is not a problem, the cap is.

As for previous spike, my conspiracy theory wonders if it can be an organized resistance-detection tactic to check how many sell orders are above. The bad thing is 300 got exposed and people clearly saw there is nothing between 260 and 300.