Credit Economy Initiative beginning with 7.2.1

[DewyMossEmpire]

The only thing Quick Travel fees are going to do is harm new players, but the game needs new players. It doesn't need more rich veteran players, who will not be affected by this change whatsoever.

Honestly, at this point, it seems like the economy is beyond repair or salvation.

Unpopular hot take, but unless they are simply going to drain everyone's credits across all servers and put a hard cap of (for a random example) 10 million credits for all players, they may as well just leave it alone. There is no going back, they allowed it to get to the point of no return. Either leave it be or make a completely drastic change.

Quick Travel fees is not the change we need, not by a long shot.

[peterschlossersw]

3 hours ago, DewyMossEmpire said:

Quick Travel fees is not the change we need, not by a long shot.

I agree. This proposed changed seems poorly analyzed and weakens my confidence in BW's decision-making.  Who is accountable for approving such choices?

I found a recent change "no up/down arrow on inventory compact" to be really pointless. It means I must close and reopen my inventory to compact as I open the gear boxes from weeklies.  In my experience with software design, a change, just for the sake of change without really solving a problem, (potentially) creates more problems than it solves.  This one qualifies as a solution in seek of a problem.

We all want the inflation/economy issue solved.  But in my experience, controlling economies is not easy to do.  I vote no to knee-jerk reactional changes, please. 

Asking everyone to pay for the problems the elite impart has never been a sustainable solution.  Is this also apolitical issue? hell yea.

Edited March 28, 2023 by peterschlossersw

[recalcitrantIre]

2 hours ago, peterschlossersw said:

 I vote no knee-jerk reactional changes, please.

the game economy has been in such a poor state for such a long time that I doubt anything could really be considered a knee-jerk reaction, and even reverting some of the most critically influential changes wouldn't have much impact because the damage wrt legitimate generation of inordinate amounts of credits is already done

[peterschlossersw]

2 hours ago, recalcitrantIre said:

because the damage wrt legitimate generation of inordinate amounts of credits is already done

seriously? were does this jive come from? This is almost as disinformative as fleet shat. the "have nots" whining about what the "haves" have?  All this hearsay without any kind of evidentiary support bugs me. sorry.  stop this fear mongering, already. film a documentary or something.  I got my 104B legacy bank warning without any credit exploit, thank you. just wasteful lengthy tedious work.

[onidakken]

Who are these guys . the ones who think that this is going to change anything? I am not a hardcore grinding  player.. I play for fun.

I am not a very rich player..but at the end of the day i'd like to feel i made a profit. I spent millions on my legacy perks to allow me to use my qt to qt saving me some money. I wont go to pts server anymore..anything negative you say about the changes are ignored.

   Changes that they want to make make the game less enjoyable.  No one wants to play a game where all the hard work you do is penalized. Maxed out my sh..well sucks to be me..i will have to pay to go home. Maxed out my char perks..now i still have to pay to use them.  bad ideas all around. 24 plus pages of folks saying BAD IDEA..but ya still gonna do it anyway.  can take my 16 bux elsewhere. i call for a vote of no confidence in the devs leadership ability.

[arturgorohov]

Hi all! I want to share my impressions after returning to the game after five years... I absolutely agree with everyone who said that there really is nothing to spend credits on in the game now. For example, earlier there was absolutely not enough experience for pumping and the complexity was such that without the required level it was difficult or impossible to go through the story, not to mention the heroic missions. I remember experience boosts were worth their weight in gold. I had to wait for the update of periodic missions, for example space missions, to get additional experience. I mean, boosters cost money on the market. What the hell have you done with  companions? You don't need to put them on anymore, pump them up... I just flew to the imperial fleet, bought a pack of gifts for 20 credits each, and my companion in shorts and a wooden stick kneads the Mandalorians without any help :))) Now the experience is heaped up, boosts are pouring in packs from everywhere. You can leave the starting planet of level 50! What the hell? I'm a new player, I just came into the game, I want to see the plot, immerse myself in the world. What is my incentive to go through it? For what? To get item 18 at level 50? Ok, you've made an interesting system in flashpoints where the level adjusts automatically and the player gets items of the corresponding level. Why not do the same in the story? For players to wipe their flashpoints to holes? Buying items in the cartel market has also become useless. I used to take them to more flexibly customize the character and companion for specific roles. Now this makes no sense at all. We do not influence the companion, and the hero does not need it, since there is nothing to modify these things with. Mods are sold only in green quality, and blue and purple are either not on the market, or level 10 costs 2 million. Who is this for?
- add blue and purple items to mod sellers. This will also put things in order with their prices on the market. Nothing will happen to craft. It should be possible to buy everything you need at any level. This will also bring back the point of buying items at the cartel market.
- return the system with paying coaches for abilities
- return the ability to customize the companion with items, but leave the ability to give any role to any companion. This is a great decision to take exactly the one I like.
- add items of a higher level (everywhere from 10 to 50) and blue quality to sellers on planets; now binding planets to the level does not work properly. Or return the old system to at least levels 1-50, so that it makes sense to visit them.
- Give items from Cartel Market not just a cosmetic value, but also a practical one. For example, a weapon with a scope has an additional boost in accuracy depending on the level of bronze-silver 5-10%. Really unique items with their own name get some ability boosts like level 70 orange relics. I want to pay for uniqueness.
- make really expensive, but the coolest things in the game that you want to own. The most accurate blaster, the fastest speeder, etc. There are different vehicles with weapons. Let it work. Let me not get experience for shooting mobs from the tank, but it's fun and will help to remove the negative when returning from the location when they are spawn again.

Now it looks like your product owners have never played themselves.
I am sorry for my English.

Edited March 28, 2023 by arturgorohov

[iamnotacrook]

All we gonna see now is the prices going up further on GTN, as if it wasn't pricey dicey enough already. 

 

[anonyhm]

I don't agree with hiking up most of the costs they propose (others' comments explain it well enough), and I agree with several comments that this will affect newer players the most.

I don't even like subscriptions to things like online games (or lots of other things), and the only reason I'm subbed to this game is because it's Star Wars. It's just a bunch of 1s and 0s, but it's Star Wars! I'll probably cave for a little while with these new changes to see how it affects me, but I'm already considering dropping down to Preferred and save my money by not playing as much, because I don't have the time to play a game that costs me more real money and just gets a little bit harder with a lot of seemingly mundane (I use the term VERY loosely) but ultra-convenient features.

It's bad enough that it's slow going starting off to build up enough credits to afford a whole lot of stuff that's on the GTN (yes, I know those are set by players, and from reading various posts, I'm understanding why a little better, but still; and yes, I know I can always spend real money, but I have a subscription, so I already do, and I have a family and a life, so "no"), but now what I acquire as a new character has added help being whittled down. You want "sinks?" Make it less expensive to craft stuff (if you want some sort of "difficulty" or "seniority," pick something besides credits), so that I can have a better chance to "sink" my credits (that you otherwise wouldn't be nickel-and-diming out of me) into cool gear, or even into crafting my own (right now crafting seems like a nebulous enigma to me, but I'm willing to learn). The storyline gear rewards are decent, but I also like some variety. Make the whole crafting-to-sell/use process more inclusive of the "consumers." Give players a reason to spend, not holes in their pockets! Today the GTN has gear posted at $millions that a year or more ago I could buy (the exact same gear) for under $1/2million easily, and that's a shame if you ask me (no one has yet, I know). Case in point, my wife teases me that I'm playing with Barbie dolls in this game, because I love "dressing up" my characters in cool gear (and I've seen others' characters with awesome outfits and very accurate sci-fi characters). Maybe she won't have to tease me about that much longer?

When I play, I try to help new guys out, because I like the game, and I want to help them see that they can succeed at it, and then go on to play the rest of the material. I'll still do that, because that's just the kind of person I try to be, but I want to play the game, and I want to enjoy it as much as possible, but I've had no problem dropping other games that just became cumbersome to progress without paying more real money, and that's what I feel like I'm seeing here. I'm no economist, so maybe I don't know what I'm talking about, but I'm inclined to agree with all of the other naysayers that have posted about how this will affect the "wealthy" vs the new/"poor" players in the game.

I don't claim to know the "silver bullet" that will work better/best, but I don't see this being very effective, or maybe the devs are focused on inflation somewhere besides where I see it being a problem? Read the posts! I see what these folks are posting about when I play!

Good luck, BioWare!

Edited March 31, 2023 by anonyhm
more thoughts to share

[WilliamtheTiger]

This is so dumb, I am a newer player (only been playing for a like half a year) and it pains me to read this cause I really like the game. I agree that something should be done about the inflation cause a lot of the stuff that cost billions seems out of reach to me atm. However I am going through the feeling of not having a lot of creds (partly due to inflation and partly due to me spending my creds all the time) there have been times when I have had to stop sending my comps out on crew missions cause I spent more creds then I thought I did or should of. And knowing how it feels not to have a whole lot of money makes me hate this cause then I am spending more money on things that I worked for or already spent money on. Putting a fee on QT does nothing but kill your game as new players won't have the money to use it. So does putting a fee on going to SHs especially since we already spent millions on them.

If you don't want to read my whole post here is the short version:
These changes do nothing but hurt poor players like me, and new players, while the rich players can shrug it off cause 5k creds is nothing to them when they sell items that are worth billions of credits.

Edited March 28, 2023 by WilliamtheTiger
Changed STs to SHs

[StrikePrice]

I logged in yesterday and got 75,000 credits just for logging in. You're breaking things and fixing them at the same time. Makes no sense.  Don't do stupid things. Do this ...

New mount speed: 1,000,000,000 credits per toon
Lower cooldown on Jet boots: 1,000,000,000 credits per toon
Slot machine that takes 100,000,000 tokens and gives out unique cosmetics (1 in 10 chance or so to get one)

Economy fixed. You're welcome.

[Turiann]

I see the need to do something about the credit economy. 

I agree with many that the current changes penalizes new players and and is just another incentives for them to resort to buying credits somewhere.

As harsh as it sounds it see only one solution that might work, not even sure though:

•  lower the maximum cap of item prices in the GTM while AT THE SAME TIME lowering the crafting costs of such items as 377 augments. One must come with the other.
• in addition to that, as drastic as it may seem, either make it impossible or limit the amount of credits that can be directly traded or sent by mail. And by drastically, I mean really to the 100k or so, except for mailing received by from GTM revenues.  Alternatively simply have special terminals where players can retrieve their sales revenues from the GTM (as directly from the GTM interface).

I realize you could work around by sending 100 mails with 100k instead of 1 billion Credits, but you'd really think twice about it. Limiting the amount of mails you can send per day per character might also help, just up the mount of item slots sendable per mail for players who want to shift around large amount of items.

Frankly, anything else I can come up with would either penalize existing players, new ones, or be no more than a drop in the ocean.

Edited March 28, 2023 by Turiann

[Traceguy]

16 minutes ago, Turiann said:

• in addition to that, as drastic as it may seem, either make it impossible or limit the amount of credits that can be directly traded or sent by mail. And by drastically, I mean really to the 100k or so, except for mailing received by from

That's not a good idea. I've been in guilds that have paid up to 300m for Conquest points. Some now are still sending me 10s of millions.

Guilds pay their members for conquests. 100k isn't going to cut it.

Edited March 28, 2023 by Traceguy

[Xina_LA]

On 2/9/2023 at 10:29 AM, JackieKo said:

With the 7.2.1 PTS opening soon, players will be able to see the following adjustments:

• Quick Travel now has a credit cost associated, with a minimum cost of 100 credits and a maximum cost of 5000. The cost to travel is dependent on the distance traveled.
• Priority Transport Terminal now costs the original planet travel costs to transfer between daily areas.
• Travel to Strongholds now costs the original planet travel costs to transfer between planets.
• Repair cost formulas have been adjusted across the entirety of the game so that repair costs increase in relation to item level.
• Durability of equipment should now be lost at a LOWER rate on death, but a slightly HIGHER rate in normal gameplay. 

I'm sorry, but this seems like a terrible idea.

It's going to nickel-and-dime new players to death, making them feel poorer than they already are and frustrated when they try to save credits for things they like.

It won't even put a scratch in some of the massive amounts of credits floating around.

And it will make people feel punished for traveling from area to area to experience content.  It charges us credits to go back and experience old content, as well.

My solution would be to increase the number of credit sinks for OPTIONAL things, not travel.

For example, add more vendors with decorations, mounts, and armor that cost credits instead of Cartel Coins.

Increase the credit rewards in the early game so new players can catch up, but keep the rewards level across the game instead of increasing them with each new expansion.

That's my two-credits worth.

[WHTJunior]

Again, we need to remember two things about this:

1. The inflation that is being addressed, is the introduction of credits into the system.
2. These are only the first steps towards addressing the inflation. There are more initiatives to come.

Credit farmers do not care about credit sinks. Any credit reduction initiative that targets normal gameplay will not affect those activities. The only way these credit sinks work to lower GTN prices, because the overall bank of player credits is reduced, leading to the lowering of GTN prices for high-end rare items.

GTN sales and credit transfers are not introducing credits into the system, but trades could be taxed in a way to remove some credits on each transaction, the same way the GTN sales are.

That being said, they can hopefully find a way to flag accounts that introduce large amounts of credits into the system, and figure out how to limit that activity, for those accounts.

[Ardrossan]

1 hour ago, StrikePrice said:

I logged in yesterday and got 75,000 credits just for logging in. You're breaking things and fixing them at the same time. Makes no sense.  Don't do stupid things. Do this ...

New mount speed: 1,000,000,000 credits per toon
Lower cooldown on Jet boots: 1,000,000,000 credits per toon
Slot machine that takes 100,000,000 tokens and gives out unique cosmetics (1 in 10 chance or so to get one)

Economy fixed. You're welcome.

I spent 3B credits yesterday just buying a few armors, rascal's toothpick, Revan's mask, etc. It cost about half my wealth, but i'm confident i can get most of those credits back in a week or so. For the whales who have been accumulating credits for years, I doubt 3B amounts to 1/10 of their wealth. 

And the problem of course with all these ideas of adding vendors and credit sinks is that BW has to MAKE them. We've never had a rep vendor for Seasons, why is that? Obviously, because BW can't afford the time to make decos and stuff for players to buy.  

[Silicon_Dragon]

On 2/9/2023 at 11:56 AM, Fenrir__ said:

People need things to spend their credit's on right now that seems to be cool Cartel Market Items which people have to pay real money for and doesn't take anything out of circulation. What's needed is to have some of these cool items purchasable in game with credits to start readjusting the market and giving players ways to spend their credits. Add some awesome blasters, color crystals, sabers and more that people can spend credits on you will see a large amount of credits come out of the economy. The QT costs is just going to be obnoxious.

Our inflation is having too much money, so reduce the money going INTO the system, don't penalize people for already having money.  Compare this to real life: do you think fixing inflation means increasing everyone's costs and introducing new costs?  How would you like your food costs to spike again while also being charged to use your dishes and flatware?

To me, restoring/increasing costs is insignificant and just adds an annoyance feature. (I'm a crafter & reseller so my legacy bank and all toons' credits are capped already.) As Fenrir said, give us something to spend our money on and stop with whacking everyone, rich & poor equally, with more fees & taxes.

As a crafter, restore balance to crafting materials costs so we don't have to charge 20,000,000 creds for something I used to sell for 1M or less. I used to craft gear for lowbies, but this has disappeared because of mat costs and free end-game gear. Further, replace most of the bind-on-acquire gear with bind-on-equip gear and reserve bind-to-legacy to special gear or a bonus people can earn. You've taken away the biggest cost in the game: gear. The ultra-rich can afford gold end-game gear, but nobody else can.

But everything starts with reducing cash inflow, not taxing the snot out the poor people.

[spcjasonlee]

Okay,  I just want to put out the truth. The game developers do not want to fix the economy. If they did, the crafting system would not be set up "for" players to be able to easily cheat. All crafting can be done safely from a personal stronghold. Where the only people who could catch someone running a script to play automatically is a game moderator, the very people who are making money off of currency farming(or are employed by the ones making money off of it.)  But even if they were not in their stronghold, to any other player the person running a script to play the game for them would only look like a person standing in 1 spot. 

   That is because of the way crafting is setup in this game. It is setup like one would do things on a mobile phone. While I understand that is convenient for many people playing from work, or cleaning their house, or taking care of the kids. Personally I don't believe this type of system has any place in an mmo. People should be incentivized to actually be at their pc while playing the game. And waiting for a "spam pop up" is Not incentive to be playing the game, nor is a timer.   

[StrikePrice]

57 minutes ago, Ardrossan said:

I spent 3B credits yesterday just buying a few armors, rascal's toothpick, Revan's mask, etc. It cost about half my wealth, but i'm confident i can get most of those credits back in a week or so. For the whales who have been accumulating credits for years, I doubt 3B amounts to 1/10 of their wealth. 

And the problem of course with all these ideas of adding vendors and credit sinks is that BW has to MAKE them. We've never had a rep vendor for Seasons, why is that? Obviously, because BW can't afford the time to make decos and stuff for players to buy.  

Right, exactly. I'm sure you have 20+ toons. So do I. If you had to spend 2b to get the new mount speed and lower cooldown on rocket boots, even at a high wealth level, you'd have to be selective. You might do it for 1 or 2 toons, not all 20. Multiply that effect across the population and you would have massive deflation.

Meanwhile, at 5,000 a pop, I can do 10,000 transports for chump change. It does nothing. 

[athelan]

On 2/9/2023 at 4:29 PM, JackieKo said:

Quick Travel now has a credit cost associated, with a minimum cost of 100 credits and a maximum cost of 5000. The cost to travel is dependent on the distance traveled.

Really?

Ok, I'm not affected, but I know others who are. 
For the players it affects, a lot of things slow down when quick travel costs up to 5000 credits. This affects some planets with Hoth, Voss, Taris, Corellia. Casual players will, once again, be punished, while regular players will hardly itch. Above all, it will discourage newcomers.

Edited March 28, 2023 by athelan
missspelling

[Aaesith]

The best (and slowest because of needed development time) way to remove credits from the economy is to give people new desirable things to buy with their credits, mainly cosmetics and decorations.

The fastest way to remove credits from the economy is to tax every sale between players. The fastest/lazy way to achieve that is to remove character credit cap of 4.24 billion and instead make all characters use directly the legacy bank balance instead of an individual balance per character while raising the GTN credit cap from 1 billion to simply match that legacy bank credit cap of roughly 100 billion.

Then if you want to force GTN trading you could outright remove COD mail and the credit field in the normal inter-player trade window.

I for one hate waiting on the damn fleet for hours in order to either buy that 6 billion weapon I want or sell those 20ish 2-3 billion a piece armour sets and weapons filling up my legacy bank.

A side effect of this action would also be (if you think about it) lower overall prices because all the available supply for any specific item would be posted pretty much simultaneously on the GTN, while in trade channel not all sellers are online and on the fleet in trade channel at the same time. Also let us expand GTN posting past those 3 days to let's say 30 days with a one time non-refundable fee per day that's a small percentage of asking price (as in 0.001%).

I say this is fast but lazy because with minimal changes you will force a mandatory 8% VAT on each transaction by way of the GTN tax while maybe upsetting a bunch of trade focused players in the process.

As for the measures you are testing, they for now at least are laughable at best. The 5000 credit cost per trip will not affect players that have played from launch like me at all, with our many billions in the bank, almost fully unlocked collections, etc... They might have worked 7-8 years ago when the credit supply in the economy was about 10000 times lower then it currently is. 

The repair costs will probably somewhat meaningfully affect players actually playing the game and engaging in combat, but not people with huge credit balances that are mostly gathering mats and/or crafting to further expand those balances or simply sitting on the fleet selling/buying things in trade chat.

It won't even affect new players as much as people here seem to think.

Now for the part you will probably dismiss outright because it comes at a cost
If you also want to instantly remove huge amounts of credits from the economy, give players an opportunity to unlock collection items straight from the collection window with credits at let's say 1 million - 4 million credits per cartel coin and also legacy wide unlocks in the collection window for about the same rate. As credits leave the economy, this method of unlocking collection items will also become more and more prohibitive by default to where people will buy cartel coins again because raising a few billion for that single armour set you want will take many months compared to a few days of gathering materials or farming tech fragments that it does now.

You would of course still restrict purchase of new cartel market items to only cartel coins for at least as long as they stay in that "new cartel market items" tab in the collection so you get a guaranteed influx of cash after each new cartel market release. Only after a few months, maybe even 1 year, they would become available to unlock with credits in the collection window.

These actions will solve the economy as long as you don't introduce anymore exploits while only being a temporary hit to your income from cartel coin purchases that will "FIX" itself naturally as the credit supply in the game economy goes down.
Only then can normal monetary policies such as your proposed changes to combat inflation begin to actually work, such as "printing" less free money in the form of loot and quest rewards while taking more money in the form of travel, repair, vendor costs and the like.

My sincere advice is to not hit new players, especially free or preferred players with very low credit caps and give a meaningful way for the older established credit rich players to spend their huge bank balances directly out of circulation.

[Aaesith]

Oh and as it was probably mentioned already, stop adding new currencies all the time.

If you want to gate access to rewards simply use the tried and true method of reputation tiers while allowing the rewards themselves to be purchasable with credits.

This can even be done for the galactic seasons and PVP seasons. Just add a new reputation track each season with a dedicated vendor that also sells the galactic seasons tokens for lots of credits when you reach maximum reputation. The first one per legacy would be free while each subsequent one would increase in cost, and the cost resets to 0 with the start of each new season.

[NayaruLovegood]

Just chiming in to say that I am here to play the game, not the GTN and I don't seem to make enough credits by playing the game to do very much with them on their own in terms of buying things from crafters or cosmetic sellers on GTN. Costs to travel will further impact this. I feel now required to play the GTN in order to pay for things. Which I've now done a little of out of necessity. I have half a billion which is an amazing number for legacy unlocks and such but if I want to say, augment one of my many characters or buy products or services from other players it feels like a really pitiful amount and was only possible by using my game time in a way that is not enjoyable for me. I'm still working on crafting which will take some time for me and I'm hoping this will benefit me greater for my goals but I'm disappointed that earning credits from saving the galaxy is no longer a viable avenue for very much. Logic dictates that the genuine reason for such lackluster attempts to address inflation is that someone doesn't want to piss off the credit hoarders of which I would assume many are people who regularly put cash into the game, being aggressive enough to affect their profits could negatively impact predictable cash flow. Which is understandable and would definitely need to be done carefully. Affecting poor and new players isn't going to change anything at all. I've now been in a few fleet conversations with billionaires complaining that their sales are being undercut by such steep values that these undercutters must be morons. Having many billions of credits and being annoyed at not getting billions more fast enough is moronic to me. I don't even know what the benefit of having billions and billions and billions is, except to make more billions. There's some effective solutions suggested in this thread and employed by other mmo's that could balance the economy and in a fair way, but given the response to this issue so far I don't have much faith in the devs to research or employ anything relevant any time soon - This is now proved given that their initial attempts to address inflation are costs that should exist to prevent inflation but won't solve inflation. It may also be relevant to point out that many studios under the EA banner are pushed into negative development choices due to lack of resources, unfair deadlines and an inability to apply systems that put long term benefits because they can or may affect short term revenue - but then very few companies tend to value losing out on short term profits to work on things that could positively affect regular profit in the long run, really only the smart ones can do this and pull it off. Here's hoping someone in the dev team is able to do turn things around seriously at some point.

Edited March 28, 2023 by NayaruLovegood

[Bolo_Yeung]

Okay... I see just added credits mosquito bites, irritating for new/f2p players. Now, how long will be 1B sinking in 5k travel costs? Fast travel 200k times just for fun?

Seriously, the work should be done at income level. Slowly nerf the biggest income sources (slowly - because fast deflation will result in players holding credits like hell and releasing them in bigger packs, disrupting the economy) - and it will heal.
Well, unless the point is to maximally coerce players for subbing then current changes are a step in 'good' direction.

[Asacledhae]

Sigh...

Once again, you didn't hear your community. It seems that whenever someone "important" decides something, you just "add" it, without question, damaging your game even further.

What a waste of opportunities here, people had suggested many good and impressive things for you in order actually fix the economy problem and not break it further, but instead, as usual, you ignored everyone. 

I've been with you guys since 2011, from early access (remember queues on 20+ servers?). You've made some good, and also some very bad choices in the years to come, and your stubbornness to go for this ridiculous credit "sink", is to my opinion one of the worst decisions you've ever made.

 

You need to start listening to your community. I have spoken.

[Deaconik]

Yo, guys, you do know there's a new credit exploit in the game, right?

Is this how you gonna fix the economy? Sad...