1. There is nothing wrong with the economy; 2. To change it you must control the exchange rate

[Balameb]

 

1 hour ago, remylion said:

...

You have to participate in the player economy to afford anything in the player economy.

Do you gather resources and sell them to players? Do you check out the auction house and find items you can resell for more? Do you play end game and sell your RPMs and OEMs for credits? Or do you sit on fleet begging people to give you platinum sets because "it's not fair I have to grind to afford things in an MMO!"

Funny.

I could swear i read about someone that considered the game asking for 60cc to speed something up a 'mobile game tactic' even when the game already gives you more than that for free.

Go figures, i think i saw that same someone defending BW on the horrible state of the economy and the awful implemented changes.

It seems like 'BW is bad' if it affects me, 'BW knows better' if it does not affects me.

5 minutes ago, remylion said:

I wish I was around 5 years ago when everyone could afford hypercrates off the auction house by completing daily Heroics and not participating in the player economy by selling gathered resources to players or selling gear they find to players.

That sounds great, play Heroics for a week, maybe two and buy a hypercrate off the GTN.

It was probably doable 5 years ago if played too many hours/toons. Still, too boring for my taste, i actually crafted my way to purchase my firsts hypercrates around that time.

While crafting end game augments was way easier than now (and competition was fierce because of it), lots of people still purchased it.

It worked realitevely fine for years, even with some (slowish) inflation from exactly those many easy credits in herocis and a huge credit exploit (that BW failed to address properly, go figure). But even with that headsup BW with 6.0 decided to makes things worse by giving even more easy credits and turning the crafting system in a bot heaven. How could they do that? Well, they never lack the ignorant white knights without arguments that attacks people that think first, post later.

[remylion]

2 hours ago, DWho said:

It took a bit more than that and you know it so I'll assume that is sarcasm, the missions rewarded a lot less than they do now and there were more players in the game so the credits were spread around much more (fewer people had enough credits to buy out the entire supply of anything much less CM items). Bioware made a couple of mistakes that put the economy in the position it is in now and all the credit sinks in the world won't change that. The only really effective credit sink was the GTN tax (which at the time really did pull out almost as many credits as went into the economy). It was once off GTN trades took off that the economy went wild. Each off-GTN trade avoided the best credit removal tool in the game.

1) Too many credit rewards for Conquest Objectives. This dumped a ton of credits into the economy at a time when there was really nothing to spend it on except CM items on the GTN (which drove their prices through the roof)

2) Allowing max level players to get max level rewards regardless of the planet they were on. You got basically the same rewards for doing a mission on Coruscant as you did on Corellia if you were max level. Again pumped massive amounts of credits into the game.

3) Allowing off-GTN trades for credits. This bypassed the best credit removal tool in the game (and it still is even though it is much less effective with all the off-GTN trades going on).

4) Allowing credit sellers to operate freely for so long. Over time people leave the game and their "credits" go with them but with credit sellers, they could sell those credits and get real world money and the credits didn't leave the game (during the greatest efflux of players from the game, the economy was more or less stable even though rewards were increasing because credits were passively leaving the game). Credit sellers are becoming a new problem because some people (and guilds) have accumulated enough credits to hit the in game caps and instead of losing them, they are selling them to credit sellers that pump them back into the game further increasing the supply of credits.

People talk all the time about the credit sinks Bioware removed (like training, etc) but these were all small potatoes compared to the GTN tax. Much like the QT tax, they made no real difference in keeping the economy under control.

I don't know what the game was like 5 years ago, I've only been playing about 6 weeks.

so are we talking 4-5 weeks of dailies to buy a hypercrate 5 years ago?

Edited April 12, 2023 by remylion

[FlatTax]

On 4/10/2023 at 10:23 PM, StrikePrice said:

You tell me ... what in game things are there to buy that would cost over 300,000,000 except for cosmetics?

Endgame Augments.

The Crafting system that creates them is hideously monetized, and so are the Credits that buy them.

Endgame gearing is pay-to-win.

[remylion]

6 minutes ago, FlatTax said:

Endgame Augments.

The Crafting system that creates them is hideously monetized, and so are the Credits that buy them.

Endgame gearing is pay-to-win.

you know you can gather all the materials and craft them yourself right?

[FlatTax]

1 hour ago, remylion said:

you know you can gather all the materials and craft them yourself right?

Again, Crafting is hideously monetized.

[LD_Little_Dragon]

1 hour ago, FlatTax said:

Again, Crafting is hideously monetized.

It doesn't matter how often you repeat a statement, it won't make it true.

You can craft your own augments as a preferred player. 

[Asheris]

17 hours ago, StrikePrice said:

I don't want to grind in an MMO. You're playing the wrong type of game. If you don't want to grind in SWTOR, don't. You don't need anything above 324 gear to engage in 99% of the game. The only thing you can't do is Vet and MM operations. So give me a break with your BS. 

 

🤣I am grinding. I just spent 2 weeks worth of grind to buy a freaking hilt and a mod for my MH weapon. To be able to engage in anything after taking a break from the game. That's BS. Maybe in a year I will be able to decorate a room in my stronghold. Whoop, whoop! 

15 hours ago, remylion said:

I went on a raid and told everyone to kill the boss and let me have the loot while I sat at the entrance. They kicked me out!! They said I needed to "participate" in the boss kill to earn the gear! Greedy geared players have more gear than they need not wanting to share the loot!

It's not second work, I don't have to grind 8h/day to have a chance at fun because the devs chose to ignore problems with their product we already pay for.

Oh, so only in-game geared people can have fun? And accidentally it comes at the cost of lesser geared in-game people? Funny how fiction mimics life.

You have to participate in the player economy to afford anything in the player economy.

Do you gather resources and sell them to players? Do you check out the auction house and find items you can resell for more? Do you play end game and sell your RPMs and OEMs for credits? Or do you sit on fleet begging people to give you platinum sets because "it's not fair I have to grind to afford things in an MMO!"

 

What player economy? You mean those people who can afford 100 hypercrates for $$$ and then resell them for credits? No, I'm one of the bottom scrapers who does dailies, helps newbies on starter planets, gathers jawa junk and does an occasional flashpoint in hopes to buy a piece of furniture for my SH. 

Maybe it's fine if you play this game  for 10 years without pauses longer than a month, but new and returning players have nothing to really get into that economy.

The prices ain't pretty if you play 1-2h a day. Take a look on another MMO, Black Desert, with set maximum and minimum prices for everything. It works. You don't have people buying in-game currency for real money and disrupting the game economy. You have to play, any way you like, and you'll get anything.

Here? Not really, you need to work in a game. That's not what games are for.

[DWho]

17 hours ago, remylion said:

I don't know what the game was like 5 years ago, I've only been playing about 6 weeks.

so are we talking 4-5 weeks of dailies to buy a hypercrate 5 years ago?

Weeks to months depending on how dedicated you were to grinding the credits and how diverse your activities were. Prices were also more stable so you could have a certain number of credits as a goal and by the time you were done collecting, the item you were interested in was still available for about what you expected. There was a lot less flipping of items (why I'm not sure, could have been a lack of huge numbers of credits in the game) people bought the items to use them.

[StrikePrice]

7 hours ago, Asheris said:

🤣I am grinding. I just spent 2 weeks worth of grind to buy a freaking hilt and a mod for my MH weapon. To be able to engage in anything after taking a break from the game. That's BS. Maybe in a year I will be able to decorate a room in my stronghold. Whoop, whoop! 

What player economy? You mean those people who can afford 100 hypercrates for $$$ and then resell them for credits? No, I'm one of the bottom scrapers who does dailies, helps newbies on starter planets, gathers jawa junk and does an occasional flashpoint in hopes to buy a piece of furniture for my SH. 

Maybe it's fine if you play this game  for 10 years without pauses longer than a month, but new and returning players have nothing to really get into that economy.

The prices ain't pretty if you play 1-2h a day. Take a look on another MMO, Black Desert, with set maximum and minimum prices for everything. It works. You don't have people buying in-game currency for real money and disrupting the game economy. You have to play, any way you like, and you'll get anything.

Here? Not really, you need to work in a game. That's not what games are for.

What? You can buy a hilt for 100,000 credits. The most expensive mod in the game is 200,000 credits which you can earn at level 80 in less than an hour.  WTH are you talking about?

If you spent 2 weeks grinding for gear, you have no clue how to play the game. It took me exactly 1 day to grind from 306 to 336 when I came back to the game. 

7 hours ago, Asheris said:

Here? Not really, you need to work in a game. That's not what games are for.

Welcome to MMOs. You have to invest time to get things. Sorry. If you don't like it, play single player games with cheat codes. 

 

Edited April 13, 2023 by StrikePrice

[remylion]

7 hours ago, Asheris said:

What player economy? You mean those people who can afford 100 hypercrates for $$$ and then resell them for credits? No, I'm one of the bottom scrapers who does dailies, helps newbies on starter planets, gathers jawa junk and does an occasional flashpoint in hopes to buy a piece of furniture for my SH. 

Maybe it's fine if you play this game  for 10 years without pauses longer than a month, but new and returning players have nothing to really get into that economy.

The prices ain't pretty if you play 1-2h a day. Take a look on another MMO, Black Desert, with set maximum and minimum prices for everything. It works. You don't have people buying in-game currency for real money and disrupting the game economy. You have to play, any way you like, and you'll get anything.

Here? Not really, you need to work in a game. That's not what games are for.

any time you buy or sell an item or service from a player, you are taking part in the player economy.

You trade a person crafting components to make you an item, you just took part in the player economy.

You pay someone to ERP with you, you just took part in the player economy (yes I am from Star Forge).

You sell resources on the GTN, you just took part in the player economy.

It's really that simple.

Edited April 13, 2023 by remylion

[FlatTax]

17 hours ago, LD_Little_Dragon said:

It doesn't matter how often you repeat a statement, it won't make it true.

You can craft your own augments as a preferred player. 

I'm not sure you understand what a monetized system is.

It's any system influenceable by cash microtransactions.

Crafting is, in fact, hideously monetized.

Again, a monetized system has one purpose: drive cash sales. Any 'free' path in a monetized system shares that purpose: frustrate players into cash sales.

That frustration-by-design reduces the existence of a 'free' path to a mere technicality. The deliberately awful grind functions, as intended, like a paywall.

That monetization is what makes endgame Augs pay-to-win, and subject to inflation.

 

[remylion]

7 minutes ago, FlatTax said:

I'm not sure you understand what a monetized system is.

It's any system influenceable by cash microtransactions.

Crafting is, in fact, hideously monetized.

Again, a monetized system has one purpose: drive cash sales. Any 'free' path in a monetized system shares that purpose: frustrate players into cash sales.

That frustration-by-design reduces the existence of a 'free' path to a mere technicality. The deliberately awful grind functions, as intended, like a paywall.

That monetization is what makes endgame Augs pay-to-win, and subject to inflation.

 

you know you can buy 336 armor mods from a vendor using credits.

you can also learn speeder training by paying credits from a trainer.

you can also quick travel and fly to different planets with credits.

Your definition fits anything that deals with credits. Do you sit on fleet refusing to do anything because it costs credits?

[FlatTax]

51 minutes ago, remylion said:

Your definition fits anything that deals with credits.

That's right. Credits are monetized.

It's to EA/BW's great shame that cash leaks into almost everything.

Edited April 13, 2023 by FlatTax
Clarity

[StrikePrice]

5 hours ago, FlatTax said:

That's right. Credits are monetized.

It's to EA/BW's great shame that cash leaks into almost everything.

You're right. But I disagree it's a shame. I want the game to make money. I want the game to make so much money EA keeps it going and invests in it.  The monitization of the game (which I gladly participate in) is the only thing keeping the servers up and the team working on new content.

There definitely is a cost / number of players curve, so they have to get that right. I want ftp and premium players to get a good value and have a good time. But, when they complain about not being able to afford a cosmetic that cost $50 US, with purely in game currency, I don't have much sympathy. 

[Advocatis]

On 4/13/2023 at 6:42 AM, Asheris said:

🤣I am grinding. I just spent 2 weeks worth of grind to buy a freaking hilt and a mod for my MH weapon. To be able to engage in anything after taking a break from the game. That's BS. Maybe in a year I will be able to decorate a room in my stronghold. Whoop, whoop! 

What player economy? You mean those people who can afford 100 hypercrates for $$$ and then resell them for credits? No, I'm one of the bottom scrapers who does dailies, helps newbies on starter planets, gathers jawa junk and does an occasional flashpoint in hopes to buy a piece of furniture for my SH. 

Maybe it's fine if you play this game  for 10 years without pauses longer than a month, but new and returning players have nothing to really get into that economy.

The prices ain't pretty if you play 1-2h a day. Take a look on another MMO, Black Desert, with set maximum and minimum prices for everything. It works. You don't have people buying in-game currency for real money and disrupting the game economy. You have to play, any way you like, and you'll get anything.

Here? Not really, you need to work in a game. That's not what games are for.

If you’re a subscriber getting CC each month, for 200 CC you can buy an Ultimate Cartel Pack.  That’s like 1 month CC.  After some hours (less than 48, but I don’t remember exact number), the bind unlocks and you can sell on GTN for 180 to 300 million credits, depending on your server market and who is selling low at that time.  One or two of those pretty much takes care of most needs.  Wants might be pricier.

[Toraak]

On 4/12/2023 at 8:06 PM, FlatTax said:

Endgame Augments.

The Crafting system that creates them is hideously monetized, and so are the Credits that buy them.

Endgame gearing is pay-to-win.

why buy endgame augments? Those are seriously overpriced. I paid nothing for mine. I went out did Operations and GSF weeklies for tech frags spent those tech frags on OEM's, and RPM's and crafted mine for FREE. No credits needed for those Gold Augments.

[WayOfTheWarriorx]

On 4/12/2023 at 8:06 PM, FlatTax said:

Endgame Augments.

The Crafting system that creates them is hideously monetized, and so are the Credits that buy them.

Endgame gearing is pay-to-win.

This is objectively wrong.

I have fully gold auged [300] my character, one of my brother's characters and half way a second one of his characters.

I have done this entirely in game without using one real life dollar. Totally by a combination selling Bio Chem crafted items and selling decos obtained by deco hunting.

It's taken me about 6 months and effort but I did it totally without spending one cent of real life money.

There is no way to use real life money to obtain any stat granting gear at all. Adaptive gear is empty.

I have spent most of the last ten years in this game as an end-game raider and PVPer.

Your statement that Endgame gearing is pay-to-win is an unmitigated lie.

 

[FlatTax]

29 minutes ago, WayOfTheWarriorx said:

There is no way to use real life money to obtain any stat granting gear at all. Adaptive gear is empty.

It's everywhere.

Crystals are direct-sale BiS gear.

Cash-to-Credits conversion of Cash Shop items buys endgame Augs and Kits.

Gear Upgrade Mats are for sale.

Crafting Mats are for direct sale.

Companion leveling is for sale.

Crafting Crit rate is for sale.

Cash is leaking into game mechanics almost everywhere you look.

 

[Toraak]

13 hours ago, FlatTax said:

It's everywhere.

Crystals are direct-sale BiS gear.

Cash-to-Credits conversion of Cash Shop items buys endgame Augs and Kits.

Gear Upgrade Mats are for sale.

Crafting Mats are for direct sale.

Companion leveling is for sale.

Crafting Crit rate is for sale.

Cash is leaking into game mechanics almost everywhere you look.

 

Crystals are free to craft. If your buying from CM your doing it not for the stats, but for the Cosmetic aspect.

 

Cash-to-credit conversion is only a speed up method for those skipping a grind. It's not P2W, because you can craft those items for free with a bit of work yourself. 

 

Gear Upgrade mats can not be sold for direct sale. They are all bound to legacy. Conquest commendations, Daily resource Matrix's, FP-1 mats, Op-1 mats, WZ-1, Tech Fragments mats all of these are bound to legacy only.

 

Crafting mats for sale doesn't matter. You can earn those in game for free. Makes this not P2W.

 

Companion level for sale: isn't P2W, you can do that for free with a little effort in game.

 

Craft Crit rate for sale: What? that only a 100k or so in your character perks. Go earn that from doing 5 dailies. It's FREE.

 

Cash is only leaking into some aspects of the game as a Pay to speed up the process. Nothing wrong with that for people that can only be in game for a few hours a week. Nothing you list is actually P2W according to any MMO community I have ever been in.

 

Edited April 16, 2023 by Toraak

[WayOfTheWarriorx]

21 hours ago, FlatTax said:

It's everywhere.

Crystals are direct-sale BiS gear.

Cash-to-Credits conversion of Cash Shop items buys endgame Augs and Kits.

Gear Upgrade Mats are for sale.

Crafting Mats are for direct sale.

Companion leveling is for sale.

Crafting Crit rate is for sale.

Cash is leaking into game mechanics almost everywhere you look.

 

Crystals are not gear and you can buy them with in-game credits. You can craft them and you can get them as drops for free.

Augs and Kits are craftable and can be bought with in-game credits as was the topic of my response to you previously. I have fully auged my character in full gold (300) augs, fully auged in gold (300) one of my brother's characters and half way thru a second character of his. I didn't spend one single cent of real money in doing so.

If you can do it for free it is by definition not pay-to-win. Learn the definitions of words before you try using them in a sentence.

Gear upgrade mats (crafting) can be bought with in game credits and can sometimes be drops or gained by crew skill missions, and if you are referring to Tech frags, FP-1 Stabilizers, OP-1 catalysts, WZ-1 Accelerants, Conquest commendations, Daily Resource matrixs, they can only be obtained through in game playing and cannot be bought with real life money.

Companion leveling can obtained totally for free through in game play, with gifts, and with in game credits. You can level a companion from 1 to 50 in one sitting in about 20 minutes for a few million credits which you can earn in a few hours.

Crafting crit rate can be obtained with in game credits. This will cost you 350,000 credits total to max out and will take you all of 15 seconds from start to finish.

Respectfully, I really have to question whether you even play this game at all.

Some (not all) of these things, can be purchased with cartel coins if someone wants to take that short cut, but, being as though subscribers get 500 CCs for free each month, even alot of this is obtained free.

If people want to spend real life money to obtain more CCs to buy some things with, what people spend their money on is their business and no one elses and I don't have a problem in the world with that option being available to players.

I get the impression that some people seem to think that Bioware is a church or a school and not a business.  Such people are quite mistaken. Bioware is a business, and businesses exist for one reason and one reason alone, to make as much money as possible. Getting upset over that is sheer folly.

None of this is pay-to-win. Anyone that thinks it is, doesn't know the definition of pay-to-win.

If you can do it for free,  it's  not   pay  -  to  -  win.

Edited April 16, 2023 by WayOfTheWarriorx

[SteveTheCynic]

21 hours ago, WayOfTheWarriorx said:

Adaptive gear is empty.

Actually, no.  "Adaptive" gear is, as the term is used by the game, merely gear that adapts its weight class to the maximum your character can wear, as opposed to fixed-weight gear ("Light", "Medium" or "Heavy").  The term has historically been mis-used by players to mean "moddable" because at one time all *adaptive* gear was moddable.  The reverse was *never* true - there was plenty of fixed-weight moddable gear, even as world drops(1) - and once 4.0 dropped, there was lots of fixed-stats adaptive-weight gear.

(1) In a prize moment, I once, prior to 4.0, killed a weenie mob (deranged Imp soldier near the Dark Temple) on Dromund Kaas who dropped a purple-quality Light moddable shirt for my Assassin that was better than the junk she was wearing.

[FlatTax]

1 hour ago, WayOfTheWarriorx said:

If you can do it for free,  it's  not   pay  -  to  -  win.

This is the greatest misconception of all.

A meaningful definition of pay-to-win is the existence of advantage-producing microtransactions.

Also, Tech Frags and Conquest Comms are for direct sale via Galactic Seasons, as are Legendary Ebers and Iokath Recombinators.

Edited April 16, 2023 by FlatTax
Clarity

[SteveTheCynic]

2 hours ago, FlatTax said:

This is the greatest misconception of all.

A meaningful definition of pay-to-win is the existence of advantage-producing microtransactions.

Except that there's no way in SWTOR to buy an overwhelming advantage that you can't get any other way.  At worst, SWTOR is Pay To Accelerate, nothing more.  Please try to understand the difference between an absolute Pay To Win and Pay To Accelerate.

2 hours ago, FlatTax said:

Also, Tech Frags and Conquest Comms are for direct sale via Galactic Seasons, as are Legendary Ebers and Iokath Recombinators.

*Indirect* sale, maybe.

Maybe.

[StrikePrice]

7 hours ago, FlatTax said:

This is the greatest misconception of all.

A meaningful definition of pay-to-win is the existence of advantage-producing microtransactions.

Also, Tech Frags and Conquest Comms are for direct sale via Galactic Seasons, as are Legendary Ebers and Iokath Recombinators.

Meaningful, but poor. SWTOR is not pay to win. You can pay to catch up a little bit or accelerate, but you can't get past newbie 80 gear with money.

Again, you can only buy acceleration in the seasons. It's not anything anyone else can't get by simply playing the game. It just takes a little longer.

[WayOfTheWarriorx]

7 hours ago, SteveTheCynic said:

Actually, no.  "Adaptive" gear is, as the term is used by the game, merely gear that adapts its weight class to the maximum your character can wear, as opposed to fixed-weight gear ("Light", "Medium" or "Heavy").  The term has historically been mis-used by players to mean "moddable" because at one time all *adaptive* gear was moddable.  The reverse was *never* true - there was plenty of fixed-weight moddable gear, even as world drops(1) - and once 4.0 dropped, there was lots of fixed-stats adaptive-weight gear.

(1) In a prize moment, I once, prior to 4.0, killed a weenie mob (deranged Imp soldier near the Dark Temple) on Dromund Kaas who dropped a purple-quality Light moddable shirt for my Assassin that was better than the junk she was wearing.

You are, of course, quite right. You are a walking Encyclopedia of SWTOR. =]

I should have perhaps been abit more descriptive to the context of my statement about adaptive gear. As the topic is about Pay-To-Win and the Cartel store, my statement was referring to the adaptive gear you can buy through the cartel store and that you can't buy BIS gear with real life money/CCs from Bioware.