A serious suggestion on how to address the Pheon/Inflation problem

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1

As we can clearly see inflation and blue crystal prices is becoming a serious problem, the purchasing power of a new players is next to nothing and affording a new set of accesories for your alts or even main is becoming a very expansive issue before you even started buying any accesories.

Anyone can understand there is only 1 purpose to Pherons - to make AG and SG more $$$ and move royal crystals that spenders buy, because any purchase of a stone/tripod/acc requires Pherons which requires blue crystal which can ONLY (outside of a non-significat amount awarded by roster level) be aquired by spending real money (even if you purchase it with gold someone did spend real $$$ to get the royal crystals that will be exchanged for blue crystals when you buy them).
Anyone that thinks pheons are there to “stop evil flippers” need to take another look at the system to understand that claim is false (rocks cant be flipped to begin with and acc can be made untradeable upon purchase easily by the devs)

Therefore my suggestion to help solve the Inflation and rising blue crystal prices without the need to re-design the cash shop :

  1. Implement 1 NPC that sells desriable items for a fixed amount of gold - mainly 10 Pheons and also Yoz’s Jar gacha rolls (1k should be a decent starting point probably for 10 pherons / 1 yoz gacha roll).
  2. Remove chaos orbs as a reagent needed to reroll quality and up the reroll price slightly.

How will that help?

As players gold is siphoned away by this new “gold shop” the economey will start deflating.
As more gold is siphoned away by the game the price of blue crystals will start drop untill they match the gold shop (it will basically regulate the price of blue crystals since players will always be incentivized to spend gold in the “gold shop” to get desirable cosmetics and the never-ending need for Pheons).

Why would people keep buying blue crystals then?

Make blue crystals offer slightly better then gold ones (i.e - buy 11 yoz rolls for the price of 10 and 110 pheons for the same price of 100 from the gold shop etc…) - that means blue crystals will still remain desirable as players will want them to buy skins that are not avilable in the gold shop and Pherons for a slightly better rate, but the gold shop will help regulate crystal prices so they cant go much higher then gold shop standards.

Why remove chaos orbs as quality reroll reagent?

Removing them will allow people to spend more to try their luck and will help drain gold faster, atm people are limited to the amount of gold they can spend on rerolls by the weekly chaos orbs they get (and lets get real i dont think anyone is actually buying out the orbs in the shop due to the increasing price)

This should help deflate the economy, create a somewhat fixed price for blue crystals and help new players and requires no re-designing of the cash shop.

Wont it affect royal crystal sales right now?

It will probably reduce royal crystal sales for a couple of weeks untill the economey deflate and the prices stablizes but if the items in the gold shop are desirable enough it will invetiably reach equlibrium in a few weeks as it siphons out gold and the sales of royal crystals should go back to normal (as the idea is to make blue crystals a slightly better purchasing option while still regulating their price tag)

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You are completely right that pheons are a cash grab. Through pheons, SG gets a cut of every transaction made in the auction house, and quite often that cut is many times the value of the item you are buying. That is the reason pheons exist, and anything else they might do is incidental and could easily be replaced by another system that does not rely on real life money.

That said, I don’t think your suggestion is likely to get implemented. Gold inflation is generally a good thing for SG/AG as long as the inflation is not a result of gold becoming easier to attain through gameplay. So they have little incentive to change unless they believe it is causing a player drain.

Let’s suppose it takes on average 2 hours of gameplay to make 1k gold, and with this 1k gold you can purchase 100 crystals. The crystals, in turn, cost 5 dollars (let’s omit royal crystals). So we have:

2 hours of gameplay = 1k gold = 100 crystals = $5

If we cut the crap in the middle, we have: 2 hours of gameplay = $5

Now let’s suppose SG increases the amount of pheons needed to buy a relic accessory to 20. This will increase the demand for pheons, which in turn will make gold worth less relative to crystals. However, the time needed to make 1k gold in-game remains the same, and so does the price of crystals in dollars. Now, we have:

2.5 hours gameplay = 1.25k gold = 100 crystals = $5

If we cut the crap in the middle, we now have: 2.5 hours gameplay = 5$

This means that with the same 5 dollars, a player can now purchase 2.5 hours of gameplay instead of 2 like before. Of course, 5$ will still allow you to buy the same number of accessories as before, since this hypothetical inflation was caused by an increase in the number of pheons needed per transaction. But since the same 5 dollars will now save you 2.5 hours instead of 2, buying crystals with real money has just become more attractive, which increases the number of sales and thus the money SG makes out of the game.

Of course, there is a delicate balance here that they have to maintain. If things get too bad, players may just quit.

Your suggestion is good for us players, but it will decrease SG’s revenue.

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I cant say anything we suggest will get implemented but the least I can do is present ideas that might solve a problem, as for you suggesting that it will reduce sales - I agree that untill the prices stabilizies (which shouldnt take too long) sales will be reduces but in the long run, as the system is desgiend to make sure blue crystals are still more lucrative then buying with gold, sales should remain the same or even increase as crystal will be more affordable a larger volume of them should be moving.

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I mean, you are right in making these suggestions, because the only thing that can cause SG to alleviate their money-grabbing systems is if we protest enough. So I commend you on your post even if I don’t think they would do it at the moment.

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If that would be the case the KR players would already make them get rid of the pheons which are supposedly the best of the various options they have tried.

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Pheon is only “the best” for the developer/publisher. It rests completely on royal crystal sales with real money. There is absolutely no reason for that. This feels very much like a ftp cell phone game.

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I was being sarcastic, I agree it’s nothing more than elaborate cash grab. If it was truly about flipping they would make the items untradeable after you put them on, like in Maplestory. There, if you want to sell your worn acc - or move it between alters - you have to buy special item from Shop (expensive).

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I hope you still understand that price of blue crystals is high because ppl are still buying. if you are not from SEA servers where price is over 3k you should not complain. Right now its 1788 for EUC and thats actually good price. why? Im gonna explain. before honing update price was around 650 and average weekly income of good roster was 20k golds. now price is 1790 and average weekly income of good roster is 60k. percentage price is actually cheaper than 3 months ago.

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oh sorry I didn’t notice you were. And yeah, most games do exactly that - items bind upon equipping.

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That 60k is the raid gold only? And if yes then for what roster? Because for the casual player roster (1480, 2x1445, 3x1370) if they still collect Vykas’ wings it’s:
obraz

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selling leapstones is a must for casual player. thats another 6k a week I would say because you are good to go just with leapstones from dailies and chaos(I pushed all alts with bound ones).
and I still feel that every casual player who is playing for some time should be with every alt on 1400. at least my all casual friends are already so that should be close to 60k. Dont forget on gold islands, chaos gates and drops from maps to sell.

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I don’t have a problem with gold, I was just saying in general, casuals would probably call me hardcore ::slight_smile:

I have group of friends doing carry 4 carry on Argos/Oreha, so those 1370 earn same gold as if they were 1400, sometimes I am 800g loss if I have to buy carry.

Selling mats? Are you crazy?
obraz
Those are my precious!!!1111 :wink:

In all seriousness, tho, you’re right, selling mats is the way to go gold-wise, some time ago doing Pirate Coin islands just to sell ship mats was a good gold avenue, too. Nowadays I feel my gold income is good enough just from raiding so I sit on those mats and sell GHLs only when I am really in a pinch. I still have two paladins to yeet from 1370 to 1445, those mats gonna come in handy.

Aye to that! But my rng literally sucks! I picked only once 4k lucky mokoko, I dropped only 2 legendary maps from Chaos Gates and I got ONCE a relic acc worth more than 10k gold (and my main was Vykas ready since Valtan came out).

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Not all mats. sell just leapstones cause you will be okay without unbound ones :slight_smile:
ye the question about income depends on so many factors. player who is working just on one character probably dont need much golds anyway and player who wants decent setup on 6 characters is probably not casual.

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players are buying because they have to if they want to get accesories/rocks/tripods and amazon dosent even give us enough pheons monthly to buy 2 relic accesories, and how do you think those prices affect new player which dose not have a roster? you expect them to farm Yoho for 5 months to build their roster? if a game is not accomodating for new players it will die faster.

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new players definitely get enough free pheons to buy 4x3 setup on their main character tho. you need to understand they have mokoko event what we cant see or get.