Galactic Market rise

[jerumis]

Ok, so I know I haven't played in a while. But WTF happened to the economy in this game? Things that were 30k are now 200mil. Is there some new way to make billions or something? Cause the market is  insane with their pricing. Any reason why it took such an extreme hike?

[Nee-Elder]

10 minutes ago, jerumis said:

Ok, so I know I haven't played in a while. But WTF happened to the economy in this game?

This  sticky thread might interest you--> https://forums.swtor.com/topic/927608-credit-economy-initiative-beginning-with-721/

11 minutes ago, jerumis said:

 Any reason why it took such an extreme hike?

11+ year old game , combined with 'Cartel Market'  game $ystem.

[jerumis]

thanks for the reply. Now, I wasn't "rich' by any means when I left. I feel pretty damn poor now. kinda feels like it did when the game first started and we were fighting to get a decent amount of credits. It honestly doesn't seem like their plan is going to do anything.

[DawnAskham]

On 3/21/2023 at 6:19 PM, jerumis said:

Ok, so I know I haven't played in a while. But WTF happened to the economy in this game? Things that were 30k are now 200mil. Is there some new way to make billions or something? Cause the market is  insane with their pricing. Any reason why it took such an extreme hike?

Because Bioware has failed in managing the economy, allowing exploits / bots to provide RMT sellers with such an ample supply of credits, the price of credits through RMT has been driven down to the point one US dollar buys almost a billion credits, which absent CM items, would allow a player to fully unlock all strongholds and every legacy perk and still have credits left over (versus spending $100s buying CC to unlock the same items).

The good thing about the current economy is that if you ignore CM items, it is stupidly easy to generate hundreds of millions to a few billion just by selling stuff to others through crafting and converting tech fragments, which will provide more credits than a player will ever need.

The bad thing about the current economy is that if you want any CM items and wish to purchase them with credits, having a billion or two isn't going to be anywhere near enough.

And no, the changes they have tested on the PTS won't make a dent, nor are they implementing changes that could actually help - such as increasing the GTN selling price cap to accommodate all the off-GTN sales occurring today due to the limit (and picking up the 8% tax) or adding more in-game sinks that players would utilize such as allowing credits for appearance changes or allowing credits to unlock items in collections (not even CM items, just in-game items and stuff like seasons). 

Edited March 23, 2023 by DawnAskham

[Stradlin]

30 minutes ago, DawnAskham said:

Because Bioware has failed in managing the economy, allowing exploits / bots to provide RMT sellers with such an ample supply of credits, the price of credits through RMT has been driven down to the point one US dollar buys almost a billion credits, which absent CM items, would allow a player to fully unlock all strongholds and every legacy perk and still have credits left over (versus spending $100s buying CC to unlock the same items).

The good thing about the current economy is that if you ignore CM items, it is stupidly easy to generate hundreds of millions to a few billion just by selling stuff to others through crafting and converting tech fragments, which will provide more credits than a player will ever need.

The bad thing about the current economy is that if you want any CM items and wish to purchase them with credits, having a billion or two isn't going to be anywhere near enough.

And no, the changes they have tested on the PTS won't make a dent, nor are they implementing changes that could actually help - such as increasing the GTN selling price cap to accommodate all the off-GTN sales occurring today due to the limit (and picking up the 8% tax) or adding more in-game sinks that players would utilize such as allowing credits for appearance changes or allowing credits to unlock items in collections (not even CM items, just in-game items and stuff like seasons). 

In gerenal, everybody just creates so much more credits now than they used to. Steadily worsening inflation is a given in all MMOs I guess, but it went completely  out of control for TOR  only around 2019 or so.

In spring of 2019, BW released a pretty misguided conquest update that wrought lots of dysfunction to the way TOR works as an MMO.  Before this, reaching conquest target on a single character  was typically a pretty busy evening for a typical player. Rewards for this were quite generous.. iirc you created..what, 120k credits or so to the game, assuming you were in a guild. Fair enough for full nights work. 

 After spring of 2019, what used to take one evening would take few minutes. You could  reach conquest target in  2-3 minutes.  Despite this, it amazingly took BW well  over a year to nerf the rewards. People who cared nothing of conquest and never reached target in past would get 5 or so characters to the target now. People who used to be quite hardcore, and brought like 5 characters to the target weekly pre 2019 would now bring 15. 30, even 40 characters to target.  Each of them creating  bit over 100k credits to the game each time they dinged conquest.

Thanks to that patch, everybody began crerating so much more credits to the game than they previously had. Includes bots, casual people, hardcore people. Those who love conquest, those who care nothing of it. Errybody. All began creating much more money much faster than ever before. There has been couple of nerfs to it since, but they took ages to happen, damage was already done and incredible amounts of credits created.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edited March 23, 2023 by Stradlin

[remylion]

  

On 1/19/2023 at 5:58 PM, BryantWood said:

One goal of Galactic Seasons is to provide an opportunity for players to earn some Cartel Coins for their efforts in game. This helps players obtain Galactic Season rewards on alternate characters via Collections and allows players to experience the Cartel Market and the awesome armors, weapons, and other items the team creates. For this reason we rewarded Cartel Coins directly from the Galactic Seasons reward track. After a couple seasons’ worth of data, some things came to our attention. The initial collections unlock prices were not set to our standard values, and players to a surprisingly large degree were using the system in an unintended way by completing Galactic Seasons across multiple servers to earn a large amount of Cartel Coins. The combination of this flood of Cartel Coins and low Collection unlock prices unfortunately contributed to worsening the economic inflation the community has been facing and the team has been fighting against.

It seems that the free Cartel Coins from Galactic Season is causing the inflation according to the dev

Edited March 23, 2023 by remylion

[DWho]

18 minutes ago, remylion said:

  

It seems that the free Cartel Coins from Galactic Season is causing the inflation according to the dev

I'm not sure I totally believe that. Lots of Cartel Coins should have lowered prices by lowering demand (with more CCs, people can buy items directly from the Cartel Market instead of the GTN which would normally drive down prices). It most certainly would have had an impact on Bioware Cartel Market sales as fewer people would have had to buy Cartel Coins with real money to buy things off the Cartel Market (and there were certainly people trying to maximize the CC gains through GS). I think this is a bit of obfuscation by the Devs (or maybe just an attempt at after the fact justification for the change).

[Ominovin]

40 minutes ago, DWho said:

I'm not sure I totally believe that. Lots of Cartel Coins should have lowered prices by lowering demand (with more CCs, people can buy items directly from the Cartel Market instead of the GTN which would normally drive down prices). It most certainly would have had an impact on Bioware Cartel Market sales as fewer people would have had to buy Cartel Coins with real money to buy things off the Cartel Market (and there were certainly people trying to maximize the CC gains through GS). I think this is a bit of obfuscation by the Devs (or maybe just an attempt at after the fact justification for the change).

Yeah, the 'too many free CCs' argument is largely nonsense:  It's a legitimate issue for Bioware, but not a real 'in game inflation' factor.

The fact that you can apparently purchase one billion credits for $1 points towards a huge 'credit generation' issue in game:  How you can generate 1B credits so easily that you can sell them for a dollar and turn a profit is beyond me...

Edited March 23, 2023 by Ominovin

[DawnAskham]

On 3/23/2023 at 9:35 AM, remylion said:

  

It seems that the free Cartel Coins from Galactic Season is causing the inflation according to the dev

Bioware may not be selling as much CC these days and hypothesize the decline is due to the CC provided in Seasons, but to say Seasons CC is driving inflation is just wrong.

Inflation is driven by too many credits chasing too few items. CC does not create credits, if anything, more CC would constrain or reduce inflation as it would increase the supply of items purchasable with credits.

 

 

[Ardrossan]

On 3/23/2023 at 10:35 AM, remylion said:

  It seems that the free Cartel Coins from Galactic Season is causing the inflation according to the dev

lmao yes they would say that. 

On 3/23/2023 at 11:40 AM, Ominovin said:

Yeah, the 'too many free CCs' argument is largely nonsense:  It's a legitimate issue for Bioware, but not a real 'in game inflation' factor.

Exactly. Players having CCs hurts BioWare, not players, whereas not being able to buy anything for less than a million credits hurts us, not BW.

On 3/23/2023 at 8:08 AM, DawnAskham said:

The bad thing about the current economy is that if you want any CM items and wish to purchase them with credits, having a billion or two isn't going to be anywhere near enough.

Not sure what CM items you might be referring to but if you want character slots, companions, CM tunings, most armors, account unlocks, flairs, etc, you can still find them on the GTN. The only items I have been unable to find that I used to be able to just a year ago are masters datacrons and insta-70 commander's tokens. 

[TrixxieTriss]

On 3/24/2023 at 3:35 AM, remylion said:

  

It seems that the free Cartel Coins from Galactic Season is causing the inflation according to the dev

😂🤣 sorry not laughing at you. I’m laughing at the devs thinking that’s what’s adding to inflation.

If that’s what they think, they truely don’t understand the game economy at all 🤦‍♀️

If anything, adding those Cartel Coins should actually reduce inflation because there are more items for sale on the GTN. 

[MortenJessen]

Fun fact TrixxieTriss: The amount of free cartel coins from especially 2 sources is what caused the inflation. I DO laugh at you, because you are one of the culprits, and trying to cover your own mistakes by making fun of BW is just not a good enough cover.

The "Scam the System", aka the "Refer a Friend" exploit that BW for God knows what reason did not shut down after 3-4 months when it became clear that players exploited the hell out of it. Instead they let it run for 7 years, and THAT caused like 60% of the inflation, with some players getting as much as 10k (yes, it is a very real number) free coins a month for scamming the system, floating the GTN with cartel goods, essentially becoming whales. 

More recently this has been made worse by the second source of free coins: the Galactic Seasons. Some players made as much as 10k free (surplus) coins on exploiting the system by using transfer, during the first season (Luckily BW re-did the reward system, so no surplus could be made from season 2 and forward). Or just playing the game on all 5 servers, but if they "just" did that, even I say; Here, have them, you earned them.

The other major source, like 30%, of inflation is unfortunately caused by not so nice players/elements of the game society, who uses gold sellers. 

And then there is the rest, mostly exploits of in-game mechanisms where BW never cracked down on those who did it, and never removed the credits generated by it.

People confuse the influx of credits to the player base by doing content (a lot) over the years) with inflation. Inflation is the influx of credits from a 2nd party combined with the loss of value said credits suffers from.

Edited March 26, 2023 by MortenJessen

[ceryxp]

47 minutes ago, MortenJessen said:

The amount of free cartel coins from especially 2 sources is what caused the inflation.

In order for any of your post to be taken seriously you have to explain how Cartel Coins generate credits.  GTN sales do not generate credits (but they do remove them).  Player-to-player trades do not generate credits.  Both of those actions only move credits from one player to another; those credits have to already be in the game.  The removal of the RAF program removed a prime source of Cartel Coins, which in turn resulted in fewer hypercrates being purchased, which resulted in a reduction in supply of random Cartel Market items being unloaded on the GTN, which resulted in prices going up (generally called inflation).  Inflation due to reduced supply combined with the rampant influx of credits due to BW's 1) inability to create effective, repeatable credit sinks, 2) poor forethought when setting mission credit rewards, and 3) refusal to deal with credits generated by exploits, resulted in item values exceeding the GTN limit (the first such item being hypercrates themself), thus pushing sales off of the GTN and into direct trades, resulting in yet another lost credit sink as those sales were no long subject to the GTN tax, resulting in more inflation as fewer credits were being removed from circulation.

SWTOR economics 101.

 

  

48 minutes ago, MortenJessen said:

People confuse the influx of credits to the player base by doing content (a lot) over the years) with inflation. Inflation is the influx of credits from a 2nd party combined with the loss of value said credits suffers from.

You do know that all credits in the game were generated by the game, yes?  Credit sellers do not have some magical way of obtaining credits.  I mean, unless BW is actually supplying them.  Whether by mission rewards, Conquest, random kills and loot, or exploits, all credits were generated by the game.  Ever single one (barring BW shenanigans).

Edited March 26, 2023 by ceryxp
added second point

[SteveTheCynic]

1 hour ago, ceryxp said:

Inflation due to reduced supply combined with the rampant influx of credits due to BW's 1) inability to create effective, repeatable credit sinks, 2) poor forethought when setting mission credit rewards, and 3) refusal to deal with credits generated by exploits, resulted in item values exceeding the GTN limit (the first such item being hypercrates themself)

You forgot 4) BioWare yielding to the players' complaints about having to pay for X(1) and Y(2) and Z(3), thus removing or weakening credit sinks.(4)

(1) Example: reducing the cost of repairs

(2) Example: reducing the cost of removing mod-objects from shells

(3) Example: removing the cost of training abilities

(4) Yes, I'm saying that it's partially our fault.

[MortenJessen]

Lets skib the basic lessons in economics, and go right to the point of supply vs. demand. Low supply does NOT result in high prices. High prices come out of greed (in the real world, high prices comes from rising costs that can not be covered because of loss of value on the amount of money charged for a good or service). High supply of content from present selection on the cartel market shows this, because most of it still goes for amounts much higer than 1bil. Now, much desired items is a different beast, but that does not come out of supply nor demand, but vanity. That also drives up the prices, because sellers pretty soon spots these trends. That means, what matters is what players WANTS to pay for vanity. And unfortunately also some items needed to get BiS, but the fact that some crafting materiels are gated behind content is another discussion.

Now, the basic lessons;

1) Inflation = The amount of credits in game going up at an alarming rate, making them lose value. Your deduction that prices going up being inflation is wrong. It is a symptom of said inflation, but symptoms does not equal the disease in economics, as much as a headache equates to brain cancer in medicine. What generally is called inflation as you write, is wrong. You would only be partially right, if an accepted fixed exchange rate between cc-numbers to credit value exist from official (BW) side, and it dont. Partially, because, still, vanity is a very strong force in human nature, that side steps existing economical behaviour and follows its own laws, and some of those makes its way to the surface from the deeps of depravity, so players openly uses illegal methods to get credits, whether it be in-game exploits or gold sellers. 

2) The moving of credits in game (sales, sinks) (): For accumulated credit amounts over the years of years of gameplay to have value, it needs to be exchangeable for same amount of value over time, like real world if our pay rises more quickly than consumer prices, then our real pay increases. In SWTOR that balance is way out the window, simply because the real world tools to control this mechanism simply does not have in-game equivalents. Meaning; those who makes a lot of credits keeps a lot of credits, because 1) they dont have to use them or 2) they can replace spent amounts at an alarming fast rate. That means their buying power goes up year by year. Or, at least it should do, but it dont, because the value of items keeps rising too, because more and more players get more credits. From what source is actually not relevant for this point, but it is a sign of an unhealthy economy when too many players gets too many credits too fast because of huge influx of cartel coins that makes them capable of exchanging goods for outside value source to in-game credits at an uncontrolled rate. Especially because the game has no real systems to take credits out of the game. 

And then we have the rinse repeat cycles that is fuelling the rampant inflation in SWTOR.

Oh, and to put a nail in your SWTOR economics 101: 

 

On 3/26/2023 at 3:20 PM, ceryxp said:

Inflation due to reduced supply

Thats not even a thing. Thats actually two opposites that cancels each other out. Reducing supply (and/or control supply) is but a (one of a few) tools to stagnate inflation, not a means to control it. Again, symptoms does not equal disease. Controlling inflation after stagnating it, is a wholly different battle.

 

Lastly. If credits actually LEFT the game, then all things might be easier, but since for example credits made from exploits, hacks, stealing accounts and emptying them (why players dont use security keys are beyond me) stays in the game, it wont matter to try and talk about influx as a sole problem. The source of the influx of illegal or ill made credits is laziness and a fear to push the guilty players away from the game. Until BW makes it impossible to be gold seller, players will keep using them to get the credits to buy vanity from GTN. And yes, gold sellers "play" both the game and the system to make easy and fast credits, as well as other far more serious methods. 

Edited March 27, 2023 by MortenJessen

[remylion]

6 hours ago, SteveTheCynic said:

You forgot 4) BioWare yielding to the players' complaints about having to pay for X(1) and Y(2) and Z(3), thus removing or weakening credit sinks.(4)

(1) Example: reducing the cost of repairs

(2) Example: reducing the cost of removing mod-objects from shells

(3) Example: removing the cost of training abilities

(4) Yes, I'm saying that it's partially our fault.

I can't remember a single MMO removing credit sinks. Maybe reducing the cost (repair costs in LoTRO) but removing them seems like a bad idea.

And we should not blame players for a company's decision to take out credit sinks. The company should be smart enough, because they are a business, to hire an economist to keep their game healthy.  I find that most players in tend to not have the best interest of the game in mind when they ask for changes.

Maybe Bioware has an economist on staff telling them to take out credit sinks and free CC from Galactic Season is the cause of inflation?

Edited March 26, 2023 by remylion

[SteveTheCynic]

3 minutes ago, remylion said:

I can't remember a single MMO removing credit sinks.

I can.  It is called Star Wars: the OId Republic.  Prior to 3.0, training abilities at ability trainers cost credits.  3.0 added a bunch of new abilities for levels 56-60, and the cost to train them was ... well, these days it wouldn't be enough to be called "chump change", but back then it was significant, a seven-digit sum.  Players complained, and the studio reacted by making all ability training free.  (One credit sink deleted.)  During a similar time period, the forums were alive with complaints about how much it cost to remove mod-objects from gear.  BioWare reduced the cost, diminishing the effectiveness of the credit sink.

3 minutes ago, remylion said:

Maybe reducing the cost (repair costs in LoTRO) but removing them seems like a bad idea.

Agreed, but BioWare did, indeed, remove some credit sinks.

3 minutes ago, remylion said:

And we should not blame players for a company's decision to take out credit sinks.

Yes and no.  It's the company's decision to do so, so they bear the ultimate responsibility, but I firmly believe that they wouldn't have done it, especially the 56-60 ability training costs, if the players hadn't complained.

3 minutes ago, remylion said:

The company should be smart enough, because they are a business, to hire an economist to keep their game healthy.

They should certainly think about the impact of their decisions.

3 minutes ago, remylion said:

I find that most players in tend to not have the best interest of the game in mind when they ask for changes.

Of course.

3 minutes ago, remylion said:

Maybe Bioware has an economist on staff telling them to take out credit sinks and free CC from Galactic Season is the cause of inflation?

Unlikely, because both of those things are clearly *not* causes of in-game inflation.

[Ominovin]

12 hours ago, MortenJessen said:

Fun fact TrixxieTriss: The amount of free cartel coins from especially 2 sources is what caused the inflation. I DO laugh at you, because you are one of the culprits, and trying to cover your own mistakes by making fun of BW is just not a good enough cover.

The "Scam the System", aka the "Refer a Friend" exploit that BW for God knows what reason did not shut down after 3-4 months when it became clear that players exploited the hell out of it. Instead they let it run for 7 years, and THAT caused like 60% of the inflation, with some players getting as much as 10k (yes, it is a very real number) free coins a month for scamming the system, floating the GTN with cartel goods, essentially becoming whales. 

More recently this has been made worse by the second source of free coins: the Galactic Seasons. Some players made as much as 10k free (surplus) coins on exploiting the system by using transfer, during the first season (Luckily BW re-did the reward system, so no surplus could be made from season 2 and forward). Or just playing the game on all 5 servers, but if they "just" did that, even I say; Here, have them, you earned them.

The other major source, like 30%, of inflation is unfortunately caused by not so nice players/elements of the game society, who uses gold sellers. 

And then there is the rest, mostly exploits of in-game mechanisms where BW never cracked down on those who did it, and never removed the credits generated by it.

People confuse the influx of credits to the player base by doing content (a lot) over the years) with inflation. Inflation is the influx of credits from a 2nd party combined with the loss of value said credits suffers from.

In theory at least, 'free CCs' should actually reduce inflation:

1. Increased item supply as more players have the CCs to purchase and try to resell for credits, thus creating competition.
2. Reduced demand, as more players have the free CCs to purchase items directly from the Cartel Market rather than from resellers.

When you sell an item to another player, you are not actually adding any credits to the economy:  You are just moving already existing credits from one character to another (even removing a few credits from the economy completely if you used the GTN) and the overall economy is essentially exactly the same as it was before you sold the item.

[Amodin]

If you want to tone down the Cartel Market, you stop allowing players to buy items from the CM and reselling for credits.  Bioware's own fault for letting the GTN and economy get so far out of touch with reality.

And, as they make items more expensive on the CM, it's going to get more expensive for players for trade.  The issue is they are violating the supply/demand rules, so inflation is out of control. 

I don't even go near the GTN anymore, I can't afford it.  Pretty soon, Bioware's answer to inflation will be to charge your player every time you just open the GTN window.  They think it will help offset inflation by adding another credit sink.  SMH.

[CarpeSangrea]

13 hours ago, Amodin said:

If you want to tone down the Cartel Market, you stop allowing players to buy items from the CM and reselling for credits. 

They'll never do that because it's the only reason a lot of those people buy the things from the CM in the first place.

[Amodin]

8 hours ago, CarpeSangrea said:

They'll never do that because it's the only reason a lot of those people buy the things from the CM in the first place.

Well of course not, lol.  They need to nickel and dime users to death for the extra buck.  Economy be damned, but complain there's an issue, so they pass along the penalty for it to us.

[CarpeSangrea]

The easiest way by far to remove large amounts of credits from the economy en-masse is to remove the credit cap for GTN listings.  Every time someone buys/sells something you permanently remove a chunk of credits from the game.

[remylion]

1 hour ago, CarpeSangrea said:

The easiest way by far to remove large amounts of credits from the economy en-masse is to remove the credit cap for GTN listings.  Every time someone buys/sells something you permanently remove a chunk of credits from the game.

or tax any credit transfers between accounts 8% like the GTN. This way websites that sell credits will automatically lose 8% of the credits they transfer and people selling outside of the GTN, if the devs can't raise the limit due to technical difficulty, will still be taxed.

Part of the issue in SWTOR is there are dozens of different currencies in the game and the only tradable currency, credits, has been ignored for years.

Edited March 28, 2023 by remylion