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[Op Ed] DoubleJ on the Economy (Again)


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38 minutes ago, Frenum said:

I don't think so. I mean, I believe the game is p2w (and not p2p as others have said), as having a lot of money can be one of the goals of the game - and you can just buy anything you want with it.

Sure it can be your personal goal, but it doesn't provide you an option to get an advantage in PvP, which would be otherwise unobtainable to other players who didn't spend their money on the game. I am using PvP as an example as it's the only way to 'win' in an MMO.

 

38 minutes ago, Frenum said:

Therefore I think making Giftshop items untradeable won't help he current situation, but it will certainly make it better in the future, since no more 'easy money' would be generated, and people wouldn't be able to sell the ones that they already have.

There would first have to be a good alternative to monetize the game.

 

38 minutes ago, Frenum said:

Besides, I do not think the staff would lose any credibility, since it used to be like that till 2016, and you are still keeping your items. It's not like releasing the old vanities again, they are just untradeable.

 

That's like buying a bicycle that was labeled as new&functional, only to later find out that it's actually old&kinda crappy and then getting told 'well but you still get to keep the bicycle'. Lying is unethical.

 

35 minutes ago, Goku said:

Well I mean I guess if you want to get the literal definition yeh you can play the game for free

Exactly, so the game is not P2P.

 

35 minutes ago, Goku said:

Also if you'd take your time to read I never said to make the current limiteds untradeable, I just said the future ones should be like the pumpkin backpack and hockey mask (untradeable) but you prob didn't understand cuz you weren't here that time when those vanities were released.

That part of my reply was meant to Frenum, whom I forgot to quote, that's my bad. 

Edited by Dazuzi
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8 minutes ago, Dazuzi said:

Sure it can be your personal goal, but it doesn't provide you an option to get an advantage in PvP, which would be otherwise unobtainable to other players who didn't spend their money on the game. I am using PvP as an example as it's the only way to 'win' in an MMO.

 

There would first have to be a good 

That's true, it doesn't provide any advantage in PvP. But I believe the game goes far beyond that, for instance, just gathering rare shinys is another way to 'win' in here. That's just my opinion though.

9 minutes ago, Dazuzi said:

There would first have to be a good alternative to monetize the game.

 

I'm sorry, I don't really know what you mean by that. There's already an ingame currency so the game would be monetized.

 

12 minutes ago, Dazuzi said:

That's like buying a bicycle that was labeled as new&functional, only to later find out that it's actually old&kinda crappy and then getting told 'well but you still get to keep the bicycle'. Lying is unethical.

Except that I do not consider that lying, but changing your opinion. And I might be wrong but I think you do not see right away that the item you are buying is tradeable in the Gift Shop.

Actually, back in 2013 the staff said that "allowing donate items to be tradeable will not occur as we do not want donators to greatly effect the ingame economy. Someone could theoretically purchase hundreds of hats and corner the market pretty easily". And well, that's what people actually do. Anyway, so by your lines, would you say they have lied then? I do not see it that way, they just somehow changed their opinion.

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Just now, Frenum said:

That's true, it doesn't provide any advantage in PvP. But I believe the game goes far beyond that, for instance, just gathering rare shinys is another way to 'win' in here. That's just my opinion though.

Once again that's a personal goal, but it has nothing to do with 'paying to win'.

 

2 minutes ago, Frenum said:

I'm sorry, I don't really know what you mean by that. There's already an ingame currency so the game would be monetized.

I meant that the game needs to produce revenue/actual money to be able to keep going, it's a business after all. If you decide to reduce cash flow from somewhere, you need another one to replace it.

 

3 minutes ago, Frenum said:

Except that I do not consider that lying, but changing your opinion.

I lol'd.

 

As for your other claim, I would like to see proof first before commenting on it.

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2 minutes ago, Dazuzi said:

I meant that the game needs to produce revenue/actual money to be able to keep going, it's a business after all. If you decide to reduce cash flow from somewhere, you need another one to replace it.

Oh ok I know what you mean now. Well, people would still buy them so there would still be cash flow because people still want vanities, donator status and things like that. Again, it used to be like that till 2016.

 

4 minutes ago, Dazuzi said:

As for your other claim, I would like to see proof first before commenting on it.

You can see it in the fourth page of the GiftShop thread, which is right above this one (squirtle said so).

I would upload a screenshot myself, but I'm on Android lol

 

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1 minute ago, Frenum said:

Well, people would still buy them so there would still be cash flow because people still want vanities, donator status and things like that. Again, it used to be like that till 2016.

Question is if it would be enough, considering the player base got bigger since 2016 and they obviously need more servers to handle the players. Also, I would argue that if this drastic change was to happen, many players would not buy RP, simply out of principle.

 

3 minutes ago, Frenum said:

You can see it in the fourth page of the GiftShop thread, which is right above this one (squirtle said so).

I would upload a screenshot myself, but I'm on Android lol

I see it, you are correct there. If this wasn't addressed somewhere already then an explanation would definitely be appropriate.

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1 hour ago, Kyu said:

(protip: we release free versions of limiteds literally every event, although they're not perfectly equatable to paid variants due to natural supply/demand of free vs paid users)

Darkshade mentioned a couple of months ago that event vanities might be re-released in the future, yet you just addressed them as a 'free version of limiteds', could you elaborate if you guys made a final decision, whether event vanities will, in fact, all be exclusive to the specific year when they were originally available or if they might possibly be re-released in the future? And if yes, could they actually get 'time-limited/exclusive to event20xx' label on them like event particles?

 

1 hour ago, Kyu said:

(Fun fact: There's one player who has the rarest hat in the game, the only one of its kind, which is completely worthless because he not only didn't sell it, but it looks terrible.)

Are there any plans to re-introduce the party hat? Personally, I think it doesn't look terrible. (The item is not labeled as seasonal or time-limited AFAIK)

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2 minutes ago, Dazuzi said:

Darkshade mentioned a couple of months ago that event vanities might be re-released in the future, yet you just addressed them as a 'free version of limiteds', could you elaborate if you guys made a final decision, whether event vanities will, in fact, all be exclusive to the specific year when they were originally available or if they might possibly be re-released in the future? And if yes, could they actually get 'time-limited/exclusive to event20xx' label on them like event particles? 

It's something which we're debating internally, iirc. The last time we talked about it was probably Christmas or Halloween 2018. We're considering re-releasing them after an extremely long period of time, e.g. a few years from now, but I'm not sure we ever will. Depends on if we get to the point of running out of ideas for events, or if we run too many (3x per year already feels like too many imo, but this was an exceptionally bad year due to how much work was required to make them work in NDS areas, so we'll see throughout 2019).

 

Good catch though, I completely forgot about that. That would push the debate of whether free users have the same opportunities as paid users.

 

2 minutes ago, Dazuzi said:

Are there any plans to re-introduce the party hat? Personally, I think it doesn't look terrible. (The item is not labeled as seasonal or time-limited AFAIK)

I don't know man, it's so bad. It's the worst hat we ever sold, it's a meme at this point. I don't think the guy even realizes he has one. Unless it's you, in which case, congrats. I guess someone already told everyone.

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2 hours ago, Kyu said:

The GMs aren't actually going to do anything in the short-term, unless there's something really dumb going on with prize distribution (1st vs 2nd vs 3rd is too different). They would want to see long-term trends of monetary inflation before considering the adjustment of prize pools against the current state of the economy (when they make a decision). You guys get really mad when they reduce prizes, so they don't want to overbuff then say "oh no we messed up" and nerf it again, so they're always going to be tepid about it. The fact that I'm posting this will tell them that, no, they really shouldn't be touching prizes, it's a really bad idea to do it during a volatile economy regardless of how many angry people there are.

There's clearly something wrong with the current system of tour prizes, so your solution is to ignore it? You say you wont change tour prizes which are gifts so they cannot be traded as if they have a gigantic influence on the economy, but then turn around and release limited vanities that are worth a crazy amount more and you don't see any hypocrisy there? You've created a system where those who work for and earn their money are immediately overshadowed by those who just merely horde vanities. I feel like this is just another way you are neglecting to competitive scene, I hope for our sake that you are at least working on a better prize systems and aren't actually ignoring this central part of your community. Anyways, you have peaked my curiosity, how exactly do gifted tour prizes cause inflation if they cannot be traded or sold to other players? Sure the argument might be said (at a push) that the comp players who win a  6x31 shiny bellsprout may not want to go and buy Timmy's shiny bellsprout, but the reality is competitive players wouldn't buy that bellsprout to begin with. Tour Prizes are something we can show off, but when you give us these shiny prizes with ivs worse than our current comps you are depriving us the opportunity to show them off in battle. Reading through your response  you mentioned something about reforming official events, I hope you have taken into consideration what the comp community is saying about prizes and types of events. 

Tl;Dr Give us tour prizes worth our time

Edited by Havsha
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1 hour ago, Kyu said:

It's something which we're debating internally, iirc. The last time we talked about it was probably Christmas or Halloween 2018. We're considering re-releasing them after an extremely long period of time, e.g. a few years from now, but I'm not sure we ever will. Depends on if we get to the point of running out of ideas for events, or if we run too many (3x per year already feels like too many imo, but this was an exceptionally bad year due to how much work was required to make them work in NDS areas, so we'll see throughout 2019).

 

Good catch though, I completely forgot about that. That would push the debate of whether free users have the same opportunities as paid users.

 

I don't know man, it's so bad. It's the worst hat we ever sold, it's a meme at this point. I don't think the guy even realizes he has one. Unless it's you, in which case, congrats. I guess someone already told everyone.

in my opinion you are releasing too many event vanity recently - just do 1 or 2 new ones and reintroduce some old ones together each event

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1 hour ago, Kyu said:

We're considering re-releasing them after an extremely long period of time, e.g. a few years from now, but I'm not sure we ever will.

Fair enough, but if this were to happen, I believe the proper way to do it would be to make them a little different, so people could still distinguish which one is from 201X and which one is from 202X.

 

1 hour ago, Kyu said:

3x per year already feels like too many imo

The main problem is how unevenly these 3 events are situated. Halloween/Christmas/Lunar all happen within several months apart, only to be followed by over 6 months of nothing basically.

 

1 hour ago, Kyu said:

That would push the debate of whether free users have the same opportunities as paid users.

The answer to that is simple, they do. There has been a fair amount of debate on the P2W subject in this thread and I believe the claim that you can 'pay to win' in this game has been dismissed, although it's true that a player can 'pay to skip grinding', whether that is a good thing is another subject.

 

1 hour ago, Kyu said:

Unless it's you, in which case, congrats. I guess someone already told everyone.

Am I?

giphy.gif?cid=3640f6095c7fa82830792e3359

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On 3/5/2019 at 1:35 AM, DoubleJ said:

 

So, about the PokeMMO economy...

 

 -

 

tl;dr Make PokeMMO Great Again (MAPA)

 

#changeweneed#des-obama#kyu-naldtrump#darkclinton#discuss

Agree 100% to all of this

Sadly this was also the reason i left the game and is still the reason why i can't bring myself to come back to it (although i would love to since i've been around since 2012)

If some of the stuff you mentioned was implemented I'd gladly return.

 

Thanks for posting, Likely to get lots of negative feedback as this subject always does...some people just don't take criticism well of a game where they spend most of there life, they feel as if you are attacking them personally :s

rip

 

Edited by Flareonn
commenting to this quote only, i have not read the thread o/
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18 minutes ago, JLxKaos said:

Mehh I'll clarify. The player's name is MrBeauRyan. That's all I will say.

Haha nope xD. He isn't even active.

Just so you know MrBeauRyan was in WOLF at the time you prob also didn't play. There is only 1 active guy with party hat. Guess you don't know who it is.

Edited by Goku
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 I made a simile with the hunting prizes vs tourney prizes(ignoring cc's and host players)

 

7ed651a8c2e495f7b02f2e93f9bea0ad.png

 

 I don't want to critique ''the value'' of the prizes cuz are gifts and someone can like most one than other, but well I'm actually saw  ''standard prizes'' on the tourneys meanwhile the hunting and the luck is most compensate and varied, We don't want normal comps we breed comps, the prizes must be rewards that we can show to the others that we won something and the ppl wants to get or at least think that it's valuable, repeat a steelix a kazam a gengar a joltik and others, just lost the hype on the tourneys.

 

 And the other point that I can see, how the inflation won't be fixed I propose to ''help'' the competitive players, decreasing the value of the braces, ability pill and tm's, can sound irrelevant but with this can be big change on the economy for us.

 

PS: I want to add more argument but I don't have an advanced english to get understand me better, ty for read

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2 minutes ago, Sebat said:

 I made a simile with the hunting prizes vs tourney prizes(ignoring cc's and host players)

 

7ed651a8c2e495f7b02f2e93f9bea0ad.png

 

 I don't want to critique ''the value'' of the prizes cuz are gifts and someone can like most one than other, but well I'm actually saw  ''standard prizes'' on the tourneys meanwhile the hunting and the luck is most compensate and varied, We don't want normal comps we breed comps, the prizes must be rewards that we can show to the others that we won something and the ppl wants to get or at least think that it's valuable, repeat a steelix a kazam a gengar a joltik and others, just lost the hype on the tourneys.

 

 And the other point that I can see, how the inflation won't be fixed I propose to ''help'' the competitive players, decreasing the value of the braces, ability pill and tm's, can sound irrelevant but with this can be big change on the economy for us.

 

PS: I want to add more argument but I don't have an advanced english to get understand me better, ty for read

If you need help regarding translating spanish:english, I can lend you an hand.

 

Only good thing about your list is that there isnt one more shiny gengar, like the countless prize shiny gengars they gifted previously.

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9 hours ago, Kyu said:

Hi, so, I see we have a bit of an inflammatory topic to bait me into posting, so here you go:

 

 

This has been covered several times by other posters so far, but I just want to note, this isn't Venezuela. Lopping zeroes off your currency doesn't solve your problems. We only did that once, and it was because we made an irreparable mistake at the time which forced a hard reset.

 

I think what you want is to try to address inflation, so I'm just going to give a brief overview of inflation in MMO economies real quick:

 

- Yen Inflation
When you build a berry or you explode a gym leader/NPC, you get gold. When you get gold, you spend gold, on players or on NPCs. When you spend gold on players, you're not actually destroying gold, you're just moving it around. If we made a mistake here, the proper way to address it is to either stop the gold flow or make you spend more.

 

- Item Inflation
When items are built, the supply of "built items" becomes inflated. You turn gold into items. The items don't degenerate in our game. That means we need to have planned obsolesence built into our game's release schedule, which is why your items "degenerate" whenever a new metagame develops by way of a major content update. That's why you get mad at us when you start thinking about HAs and Gen 4.

 

So, the way that we've historically managed this problem is by cutting money supplies, then forcing you all to build new items in some way. We have several major "reset buttons" left, with Sinnoh, HAs, Legendaries, etc. We just have to actually deploy them. While I'm always concerned over hitting a proper level of money flow within the game, I'm not overly concerned about oddities like these past few months, because we have leeway to make mistakes.

 

 

I would like to talk about those last 2 things item inflation and yen inflation it's because right now players can get at the most 400k spending about 3-4 even 5. item inflation came up as players started dropping the price of them just to sell faster and that went on and on. There is no more efficient way of farming right now than gym run with a huge cool down, yen Nerf and exp also Nerf, pick up is no viable since all the item you can get by this method are down in price it was my preferred method last gen. NPC run is just more of the gym run you will spend about 4 hours grinding money which was nerf and exp was also nerf. Now planting just got nerfed to the ground too as well as crafting items i mean i remember when a pp max was worth about 80k or 120k now this things are worth about 30k i think if the prices don't go down from that.

This is not Venezuela, but we are getting there every method is getting nerf to the ground and comp players are having a lot of struggle farming with the game methods. Feels like Mexico to be honest low income to buy expensive stuff is just not gonna happen. A gym run goes away with a move set not going into more detail of how expensive is breeding.

Thank you have a nice day.

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@Kyu get baited "lol rofl copter"

 

But in all serious, we've done this a few times and I continue to appreciate your responses. The economy bit was more so of an avenue to build a larger conversation about the tournament prizes. Yes, we competitive players get upset when we see non-Shiny prizes for a 3-4 hour event that we committed 3-4 days, or more, preparing for. We get even more upset when we realize that those non-Shiny prizes have IV's that are worse than what we could breed or even lack the customizable ability to be used effectively, for instance on Trick Room teams that require a Speed IV of 0-1 or a suicide lead that may require lower HP, Def, and SpDef IV's. Personally speaking, I don't think most of us really care what Pokemon it is so long as it has some viability in some tier. We know you can't (won't) give out the good stuff anymore like the customizable "Pick-Your-Own-Mon" or even something as great as a *gasp* Starter. What we simply ask for is that competitive "official" tournaments hosted by staff ALWAYS have a competitive Shiny Pokemon as a prize and we really, really would love to start seeing customizable IV's so I thank you for taking the time to look into it. 

 

But to circle back to that economy for a bit, fuck those rich boys and nerf their cash. 

 

#kyunaldtrump#mapa#jindu'shorseisbetter

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8 hours ago, Havsha said:

There's clearly something wrong with the current system of tour prizes, so your solution is to ignore it?

Tl;Dr Give us tour prizes worth our time

Yes. This is literally "not my department", I don't have any say in tournament prizes, and the only thing I can recommend (I can poke the GMs and say hey guys you're doing something dumb) is based on whether I believe the economy is stable, or whether the prize tiering is too uneven. None of the GMs wanted to touch this topic because of replies like yours, so I'm the best you get, sorry.

 

6 hours ago, Dazuzi said:

Fair enough, but if this were to happen, I believe the proper way to do it would be to make them a little different, so people could still distinguish which one is from 201X and which one is from 202X. 

That'd probably be a good way to recycle them, but I can't recall whether the motivation of it was purely for asset reasons (we are, eventually, going to run out of ideas), or whether there was some economic reason to it being brought up. If it were just for asset reasons, highly derivative stuff like that would be an ok way to manage it imo.

 

6 hours ago, Dazuzi said:

The answer to that is simple, they do. There has been a fair amount of debate on the P2W subject in this thread and I believe the claim that you can 'pay to win' in this game has been dismissed, although it's true that a player can 'pay to skip grinding', whether that is a good thing is another subject.

What I was alluding to in my original post was whether free players have access to items which are immune to inflation without having to dump money into the game, and without having to trade with another player. Currently, within our current event model, they do. They still do even if we stop giving them away, it's not like we're tiering tradeability based on how much money you threw at us, but being able to access that class of inflation-immune item by themselves helps kind of bridge the divide between free/paid players, and probably helps players resent us less. But, maybe I'm overthinking it, and nobody really cares. I think this knowledge of inflation-immune items only recently became a topic of the public consciousness as the rest of the system showed cracks, so maybe they care now, though.

 

7 hours ago, razimove said:

@Kyu gimme your opinion on berry farming npc selling, and why its not nerfed to the ground like alt runs were.

When it comes to discussing economic issues, we usually don't want to comment on specifics like this, because if I said in this moment "We're nerfing berries into the ground", the market would probably hyper-inflate as everyone rushes to get as much money as they can out of it. I'll write you a book sometime later though.

 

1 hour ago, DoubleJ said:

But in all serious, we've done this a few times and I continue to appreciate your responses. The economy bit was more so of an avenue to build a larger conversation about the tournament prizes. Yes, we competitive players get upset when we see non-Shiny prizes for a 3-4 hour event that we committed 3-4 days, or more, preparing for. We get even more upset when we realize that those non-Shiny prizes have IV's that are worse than what we could breed or even lack the customizable ability to be used effectively, for instance on Trick Room teams that require a Speed IV of 0-1 or a suicide lead that may require lower HP, Def, and SpDef IV's.

 

Personally speaking, I don't think most of us really care what Pokemon it is so long as it has some viability in some tier. We know you can't (won't) give out the good stuff anymore like the customizable "Pick-Your-Own-Mon" or even something as great as a *gasp* Starter. What we simply ask for is that competitive "official" tournaments hosted by staff ALWAYS have a competitive Shiny Pokemon as a prize and we really, really would love to start seeing customizable IV's so I thank you for taking the time to look into it.

So, like I said above, this is literally not my department, but yeah, the IV stuff is just a technical issue which hasn't been addressed. We do want to dump a few months into PvP, it's a little bad atm, and the tournament prizes didn't change when the meta's IV importance did. It's literally impossible for them to assign anything other than 4x25,2x31 atm iirc, so that's really our fault.

 

I'll ask one of the prize tier people to look at this topic, but I'm pretty sure that conversation is going to go like this:

5xGDRgM.jpg

 

We are very concerned over whether staff-driven events cause issues in-game due to prize distribution, but I think those concerns may just be outdated as it's all a drop in the bucket compared to our playerbase now. So you might get a lecture about how staff event-driven inflation is bad for the game, or you might get silent changes, or maybe nothing will happen, because hey, making sweeping changes to a standardized system during times of economic volatility probably really is a bad idea.

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