I don´t quite understand the reasoning for Pheons - other than a way for them to make money.
Why is it I have to pay Pheons to give my alts gear?
How am I to ever gear my alts besides at the very end (if I have enough Pheons) since it again requires Pheons which I can only obtain through RMT or monthly login rewards?
If Pheons were removed it would be much more alt friendly, but there is probably a downside to it too. AH-flipping?
Maybe a solution could be that any items with a gearscore lower than your mains would not cost Pheons?
OR
Let us place jewelery and ability stones in our roster
1 - The reason is to make people use more the AH.
2 - You can buy via blue crystals so it’s not only login events or ‘RMT’ as you said.
3 - Pheons exists for gold sinking I think.
4 - T1 doesn’t charge pheons, T2 is only 1 per item, T3 is the endgame so, the prices are fair too, maybe? And I wish I can throw items to my alts without costs too, but yeah, the market needs people buying items, so…
You have to waste your gold that you generate to buy shitty accessories so that your alts become borderline playable. (People will even tell you that you don’t need to gear your alts which is a joke)
It would be more player friendly for everyone. AH-Flipping already exists even with pheons. The trade limit of 3 on items mostly prevents gigaflipping. The downside is, AGS/SMG won’t make as much money.
There are some easy solutions which won’t be implemented because of suspected corporate greed.
Solution: Make 2 Buy options.
Option 1 = You buy items with pheons (nothing changes)
Option 2 = Make the item instantly character bound but you don’t have to pay pheons.
EZ Solution.
Pheons will remain the most player unfriendly implementation in this game. They are not needed in any capacity.
You must be new to the game then, because if you’re buying pheons with blue gems, you’re most likely buying those blue gems with gold (only some use real $ for royal crystals to convert them into blue crystals).
Thus, you spend gold.
Except it is. =)
Are there possible better ways? Sure. But for now this is the system we have.
You are misinterpreting the term “goldsink” because a goldsink is a mechanic that removes gold from the game economy, not from yourself. Therefore it isn’t a goldsink.
Pheons don’t combat inflation, they even boost it.
Example:
You sell an item for 21 gold with a 15 pheon cost (let’s say 600 gold)
You receive 19 gold, auction fee destroys 2 gold and a random whale receives 600 gold
If there wouldn’t be pheons and assuming you could ask for 321 gold for the item.
You receive 304 gold and the auction fee destroys 17 gold.
@Valdan
See you have already fallen into the convoluted exchange system because this shows me that you don’t know how Blue Chrystals really work.
There are some scenarios to this. Scenario 1: Player A buys Royal Crystals with $ and buys Blue Crystals with the Royal Crystals directly from the shop. This doesn’t affect us.
Now we are discussing Scenario 2:
Just for information you can see how the system works here below:
Let’s go with your example. I want to buy 100 Pheons with my ingame Gold. For that I need to trade 9 Quantities of “Gold” into 855 Blue Crystals which is enough to buy the 100 Pheon pack.
6345 of my gold to achieve that. So I understand that my gold goes away then. BUT here comes the CRUCIAL point.
Those crystals that I bought HAD to be created by someone who spend RL Money for ROYAL CRYSTALS and then exchanged the ROYAL CRYSTALS to GOLD!
This happens in a ratio of 238 Royal Crystals for 100 Blue Crystals.
For profits i reckon ,they aren’t doing charity and everything is free … they’re doing business~ money money money~~ kaching kaching.
For AH flipping they could easily control it any given time just like other games did, capped the price on almost every items that is tradeable plus the benefit by doing so would tremendously stop RMT transfer from seller to client, such as lv1 gem cost around 100K 200K etc.
But doing so would probably hurt their revenue or something related to their business etc … who knows, it’s part of business world mysteries, only they knew which good and bad for them.
In short they won’t … nothing we said ,we demand whatever will be changed. Soooo … just go with the flow
Adds a price floor for market manipulators but not average players to everything tagged with pheons. This is part of why ability stones and t2/early t3 gear has a pheon cost. The pheon cost is meant to protect from certain antisocial market behavior.
Prevents severe market manipulation in niche markets. The game has a ton of niche markets with very few new items entering them daily. Without pheons on these markets, you would simply have a few wealthy people buying all of a certain accessory type and then only listing one despite having a large stock.
Allows the team to give away “free gold” in the form of pheons without inflating the gold economy.
Allows items to be tradable, which benefits the average player or someone who wants to reroll, without having a completely open market that’s open to abuse. This also benefits people who like markets in games or making gold through the market.
Allows flipping to still happen. Pheons do add risk for flippers and prevent petty arbitrage (can’t flip for a few percent gain on listing price unless you add pheon cost). Forcing an “honest” or “downward” or “natural” trend on pricing in games is ideal for everyone except a select few.
Creates another reason for gold to crystal to happen.
The negatives are:
If something isn’t very good it’s never going to sell because pheons limit the number of free transactions a given account can have in pheon regulated markets.
The pheon tax is heavy once markets stabilize. Especially if you are looking for a budget set. This will hit players with many alts or who blow through pheons without thinking especially.
Players need to weight using self-found, hobbled together stuff on alts or making a somewhat serious investment. This results in alts before certain breakpoints having trash gear usually.
The neutral is:
Provides incentive for players to swipe for crystals instead of using gold/etc. The gold cost is always affordable for f2p, but it does provide a way for the company to extract a bit of money from people who want their gold to go farther but who wouldn’t usually pay to progress.
Lower tier gear that people actually use can have a very flexible price. If someone is going to drop a few pheons on something then you can probably get a few hundred gold from it if the market isn’t saturated. We’re already seeing this in a number of markets.
The gold cost of pheons scales with gold inflation while the real money price is fixed. This is a clever design detail that’s not important either way, but it’s worth pointing out.
People are far too quick to slam pheons because they don’t understand what it protects them from. Everyone thinks “flipping” but flipping is degenerate gamblers and small time market stuff compared to what really runs unregulated video game markets.
I will admit they’ve been far too stingy with pheons lately. People who started in late march/april or later are pheon poor. I’d optimistically think this is because most players still have a few hundred free pheons after gearing their main and an alt and SG monitors that type of thing.
And to pre-empt the “but you can’t trade ability stones” thing that someone will say to #1:
Imagine there are 200 legendary t3 ability stones listed for 10g for some good enough engraving combo.
Without pheons it costs 2000g to buy them out. With pheons it costs an additional 1000 pheons which is no joke.
Now obviously you can’t trade them so why would you buy them out? Because you can shape them for content or because it’s fun. 2000g later and you’ve trashed the market for everyone else in the region.
Or, because you and a group of people on discord decided to keep all of that ability stone you’ve found for weeks and then you list yours to make more than a 2000g profit. People will buy these stones at 285g, so 10 stones later you’ve turned a profit by destroying a market of 200 stones at the cost of everyone else.
I don’t think the ability stone market is the best use of pheons they have. It’s one of the weakest due to the single trade limit. Along with t2 and very early t3 stuff. Yet, even there, it’s not hard to come up with examples where it stops people from harming the majority of players on a whim.
The market would regulate itself. Nobody would buy a 10 Gold Engraving Combo on a legendary stone for 2000 Gold just because pheons are gone.
Why is that? Engravings are weighted. The chance that you get a good combo is way less then getting a useless combo. Same with engaving books for example. No other online game has this and trading isn’t an issue there.
First of all, you are arguing that a system that can be entirely prevented with gold keeps people at bay that have an unreasonable amount of gold trough different means ( be it RMT or Lost Ark Shop or whatever). Doesnt make any sense. The only thing that keeps people from Flipping is that you have a trade limit of 3 times on accessories. This means that every time you flip they will get cheaper by default because the trade limit perishes until they’re not tradeable at all.
Gem market has no pheon cost. See even there the market regulates itself by demand and supply and they are not unreasonably expensive. The market manipulation already happens. Just in markets that you are not aware of.
Far fetched “positive”. They can also just give free honing attempts.
Why point 3 then. Either it protects us or it doesn’t.
Yep but it’s a shit reason. If they want my money then they should release products that are worth to buy. Skins, PowerPass, etc… there are enough possibilities here.
Anyway pheons are stupid because you can’t trade between roster. Not even items that you yourself found. Pretty ironic in a game that wants you to play alts.
The biggest issue I have is that a 20.000 gold accessory cost the same amount of pheons than a 20 gold accessory. This shows just how idiotic the system is and it prevents everyone from gearing alts which translates to everyone having less fun on alts because nobody wants to spend pheons to buy shitty accessories.
Current implementation of pheons is a predatory system. Exemplary with the convoluted exchange market which makes most people confused like you already saw in this thread.
if the goal was to limit flipping, they could have done that by making items only tradeable one time. Even that aside, there would be no reason to tie its cost to the gold/crystal exchange value.
Also your scenario basically is talking about an undervalued stone type. There is no real downside to something undervalued finding its true value. Also, your solution to the problem of a 10 gold item getting manipulated to be 290 gold, is to increase the cost of said item a percent of the gold exchange value. Right now, thats like 350 gold for a legendary.
