The inflation in SA region is out of control, you probably seen already several posts trying to discuss this topic, but most of them lacked any context, so I’ll try to provide some context in this one, even though is likely to be ignored like every other lol
We’ve seen prices skyrocket for the past few weeks, blue crystals went from 630g~700g to 1500g~1700g, grudge books went from 7000g~8000g to 13000g, not to mention class engravings. For example, I bought my legendary First Intention books 3 months ago around 800g~1500g each now its up to 7500g each. Bought my Raid Captain books 4 months ago for 800g each now its 6000g.
I know its natural to have “some level” of inflation cause of the gold injected by legion raids in the economy but something feels off… Everything is going up in prices on a daily basis.
Since I’m Brazilian I’ll try to provide you a little bit of economical context. Currently in Brazil minimum wage is R$ 1212,00 wich is roughly 235,00 USD a month (1 BRL to 5,16 USD as today). Inflation went up from 2% to 13.75% since 2020 and we are currently in election year so this might even get worse. Other countries in South America are not so different from Brazil’s reality, so this issue can escalate from a server to a whole region at some point in the future…
Now, back to lost ark, these are the current crystal packs prices (image below), prices are even higher than NA prices in comparison with the current exchange rate, right ? Thats because even after 6 months we are still being charged by January exchange rate, which was around 1 BLR to 5,71 USD, cool right ?
(considering 1 BRL to 5,16 USD today)
1,000 - 9,99 USD - 56,99 BRL (should be around 51,54) around 5% of minimun wage
2,200 - 19,99 USD - 113,99 BRL (should be around 103,14) around 10% of minimun wage
5,750 - 49,99 USD - 278,99 BRL (should be around 257,94) around 23% of minimun wage
12,000 - 99,99 USD - 556,99 BRL (should be around 515,94) around 46% of minimun wage (lol)
We’re are paying more then we should even if they’re charging the equivalent value in USD. Some may argue that there is taxes involved, I call it “bullshit” since its a digital good with no manufacturing costs, distribuition cost and every other corpa stuff you may wanna factor in, so its not like they’re having loss if they had any sort of regional pricing, even if they get a less money for it (for instance they did it before in new world).
The cheapest pack is already nearly 5% of what majority of people earns in a month, and honestly with 1k royal crystals you can’t really buy anything lol. Why would they offer a “service” with nearly no support (not a single CM for the whole region) that people can’t afford in the frist place ?
Now with all that being said, the focus here isn’t pricing but the inflation, so back to the topic, I bet at this point many of you may be thinking “well you don’t need to spend to play, the game its f2p” and for those, we have this…
A f2p player would have to spend a little over 10k gold just for 30 days crystaline aura. If they were to play a specilization class for example, they would have to compete in “whale territory” to gear a character (image below of Specilization with grudge accesories) and on top of each accessory there is roughly 3.2k ~ 3.5k gold in pheons tax (your best friend to protect you from inflation and rmt lul), meaning almost 1 valtan normal run just to pay single item tax. If accesories weren’t hard enough, they’d still need at least a legendary engraving imprint (image of prices below) for a 5x3 build (but you don’t need a 5x3 build … I won’t even go there cause its just straight up hypocrisy, cause most people wouldn’t take 4x3 in their lobby) meaning that a f2p player would take months to build their character, I didn’t even factor in honing, gems, abillity stone cutting and quality upgrades into this equation, long enough for him to quit before he even get to experience the most recent raids.
I don’t even need to elaborate on why this is bad. I’m sure that, even though some had never experienced this before (myself included), you guys can figure the level of gate keeping when it comes down to content like vykas hard or new raids in the future, and how frustrating it can be to find a group. “Well if you don’t wanna get rejected, then just get a static group” as much as this sentence makes sense in a MMO RPG game, you all know is easier said than done, in the end of the day, for most people, its easier to just hop on another game than have to go through all this just to play the game.
For those wondering “prices in-game are this high because people are still buying stuff” so is the player’s fault ? What are we suposed to do ? Not play the game ? Well, in fact a lot of players are just doing that, not playing the game and anyone with 1 or more braincells can figure out why this is a problem…
We’re facing a very simmilar scenario NA was in like 2 months ago with all the inflation caused by botting and rmt, the difference is that we don’t have a “voice” no matter how loud we scream. I’m not sure if the inflation in Kazeros is being cause by the same reasons, but we need AGS help to figure why it is happening and fix it before is too late. Since we don’t get much attention, cause no one cares about SA other than SA players, we don’t have much option other than “spam” posts in hope that one day someone will notice. As I said before, there was already several posts trying to address this issue, but most of them just make it seems we wanna buy stuff cheaper, cause they’re all about regional pricing exclusively, when in reality is a much bigger problem.
I’m not f2p and I’m not facing all the hardships a f2p player might be but still I wanted to try to provide some context and bring this up, cause I don’t really like the idea to be playing on a “dead” server with a super inflated/unhealthy economy.
After all this if you still think there isn’t a problem, there is a Korean player/streammer currently playing on SA and even she thinks our economy is shit, don’t believe me ? Try asking her yourself, its not hard to find her channel, its the only channel with [KR/SA] in the title. When even a KR loawa ranker whale thinks an server economy is really bad, something is off (take this as a joke… or not… Despairge)
Edit: as many suggested changed the title to extend this post to whole region instead of Kazeros only.
TL:DR
We currently have 2 situations:
Royal crystals are too expensive making it very difficult for most people to buy anything from in-game shop either because they can’t afford it or because the value for the money is so bad they don’t wanna spend in a bad deal.
Inflation is only getting worse on a daily basis and will probably make f2p players quit the game really soon.
Some of the posts already made, most of them ignored likely how this one will:
@Roxx@Seawolf@Shadow_Fox please stop ignoring us
SG always took measures regarding the state of the economy in KR, such as reducing legion raid golds and imposing the 6 character gold limit in order to stop gold inflation
If Royal Crystal prices aren’t regionalized SA economy is gonna be ruined
Yeah, but if most people at required ilvl can’t afford to buy 3x3 or 4x3 then you can just make a lobby for people with 2x3 (that is basically free with argos acc) or 3x3 (that you can still manage without buying anything if a bit lucky) and people will come. Unless of course everyone expects to get carried and lobby ends up empty even tho all those people won’t get into 4x3/5x3 lobby anyway.
well try telling ppl gate keeping pugs that lol, as I said, I’ve never had problems with this personally, but I do know casual players that are still struggling to do content weekly, some of them already quit some are considering quitting. This is not a personal rant, I’m just trying to bring this up for people that aren’t in a “confortable” spot as I am today, but if this inflation continues, soon the game will be unplayable in SA either being f2p or not.
We receive in real, but crystals are charged in converted dollars and with an old quote to make matters worse, blue crystal inflation will only increase.They don’t even have a CM that speaks Portuguese, there are no plans to regionalize price, language, etc., that’s the truth, we are one of the countries that consumes video games the most with the potential to be much bigger, we are a continental country with more than 200 million inhabitants and companies don’t give a damn about Brazil.
I know we are going to be ignored again but the situation is really getting out of hand, it’s getting absurd. 95 Blue Crystals costs around 700 gold on NA East while on our server it costs 1700 gold and it’s rising fast.
And everybody needs these Crystals to buy Pheons, to buy equipment and other stuff.
The engravings are also ridiculously expensive and people, especially new players, are going to stop playing the game because of it soon.
I hope they read this… Amazon has regional prices for services like prime video and twitch subscriptions so why don’t they do that to the game? It’s crearly becoming a big problem…
