Hi all,
I have read a lot of threads about people complaining about the bot situation and all the RMT, which is going on nowadays. I have also seen a lot of threads talking about assumptions how to solve the problem. The amount of bots is constantly rising (source: steam-charts) and we cannot do anything about it beside…
Reduce the amount of Royal Crystals you need for 1 Unit of Gold.
What do I mean by that?
You press F4, go to currency exchange and the first thing you see is that you need 238 Royal Crystals for x amount of gold - it is depending on the rate for blue crystals etc. etc. In the following I will say “1 unit of gold” if I want to tell that I only buy gold once for a total amount of 238 Royal Crystals.
So what will happen if you change the amount of Royal Crystals needed for 1 unit of gold?
To compete with the gold prices for bots, we need a feasible solution on how to consistently fight them. Instead of getting 1 unit of gold for 238 Royal Crystals we could also receive 2 units for the same amount if we decrease the amount of Royal Crystals we need by the half (119 Royal Crystals). I took these numbers to show how drastically it could be changed.
This would make the ingame shop more lucrative in comparison with the bot prices.
How is this approach even consistent enough?
Well, you might think that the overall inflation will rise and yeah that will of course be the case. But let’s pretend bots get their gold from Rapport, from Una’s Task, from Quests and not from market related stuff → They will not be able to compete with our gold prices and the prices for everything will rise, but in relation to the ingame shop. Of course the gold value will not remain the same, but the purchasing power will be the same and I would suggest that the purchasing power for F2P players will even rise since they have more options to gain gold ingame (all prices will adjust accordingly). Do not forget to adjust the amount of gold you receive from dungeons / raids.
The only option bots would have is to again increase the amount of bots they create/play. So a solution for this case will also be needed since none will want to be in a 20k queue.
If we do not act right now, we will have a much higher and not controllable inflation, which we can already see if we look at the blue crystal prices. F2P players may still have fun right now, but what will happen in the future? As soon as we need more then 3x3 engravings, as soon as we need relic accessories. Most of the F2P players will stop playing since they will be forced to buy RMT Gold (or gold ingame to a much higher price) to be able to get the amount of money they need in this inflation.
In my opinion a feasible option (and also the easiest) would be to reduce the amount of royal crystals needed for 1 unit of gold in the currency exchange.
Please note:
This option is only possible in case bots are not making money with anything market related.