7.3 Credit Economy Initiative: Updates and the GTN

[Balameb]

10 hours ago, Nee-Elder said:

( i personally believe a better---or rather, an additional--way would be to encourage a more player CRAFTED player created/looted type economy, as opposed to the domination of Cartel Market coins to credit conversion system )

In terms of gear, definitely. We have been too long with 6.X system. I know that because of it we experenced some temporary deflation (probably helped if what people said about banning many credit sellers is true); but for crafters, it is becoming boring to just make aug kits and little more.

In terms of cosmetics. Well, BW could certainly not afford full competition of CM vs crafted. I mean, we are allowed to craft some decent dyes and crystals, but we will never be allowed to compete on their cash cows. And that is required so the game can profit. There is no universe were swtor could get enough subs to not only survive bit also keep shareholders happy and not require microtransactions (with open market exchange to credits).

A middle ground could be something like creating a premium mat that could be extreamly rare and/or sold for CCs that could allow master crafters to make really cool stuff.

Since we are there, make it so it requires some work to be able to craft them. Not insanely like requiring Nim Ops; it should be something anyone can do, but that it takes time and maybe a little grind as we had for some dyes like Oricon/Yavin/CZ/GSI (that late one was brutaly painful, but felt good finishing).

[DWho]

17 minutes ago, TrixxieTriss said:

You maybe right. But I don’t like to assume anything with BioWare. 

They did "fix" it. That was what resulted in the big credit exploit that undercut the "economy initiative". It now only takes out of the mail as much as you can hold and leaves the rest.

[AdsAillard]

19 hours ago, Kromgar said:

Late to the overall conversation, but here goes...

The GTN and the "economy" is fine as it is right now. Yep, I said it and yes I'll be flamed out, but here's why. There is not a single item on the GTN that ANYONE in the game needs. Not a single item.

So this discussion should really separate out Need from Want.

No, you got it wrong. There's not a single item on Cartel Market that anyone needs.

There's plenty of stuff in GTN that people need - and, sure, almost all of it is crafted stuff, but it doesn't change that they're, currently, among the most expensive stuff in the game. 
 

[Cidjin]

To join in here, just a few points I personally would like to see changed in the GTN (at least some points have already been mentioned by others here, so count me in on those):

• possibility to filter for items I don't have in my collection yet (atm it takes 30+ mins to skim through all available armor items to see which ones I already own and which ones I don't - it's especially cumbersome, since I have to hover over the tooltip of each item to see if its already in my collection - the same goes for pets and transporters)
• don't flag players as AFK, while they are browsing the GTN (consider interactions with the GTN to flag them as still active)
• raise the max cap to the same cap amount of player credits
• consider introducing a non-refunable small GTN fee to post items (or replace the current deposit fee non-refundable, even after the trade expired) - this would at least introduces a small cost to repetitively post the ame items over and over again (atm its a no brainer to just keep reposting the same item for months)

Edited May 8, 2023 by Cidjin

[commanderwar]

For anyone who wants to know what the tax will be when just trading items (no credits involved) here it is by swtorista/ Lady Admiral found, from testing some items (not trading credits) individually on pts and seeing the taxing cost. So if you want to give players advance augment 74, you better have 5 million on hand.

Item	Tax
Advanced Critical Augment 74	5 mill
Advanced Kyrprax Critical Adrenal	1 mill
Advanced Kyrprax Medpac	1 million
Advanced Kyrprax Medpac MK-2 (reuseable) 2.7 million	2.7 million
Advanced Kyrprax Versatile Stim	1 mill
Advanced Polybiotic Medpac (not level 80)	165,000
Advanced V-9 Seismic Grenade	4 mill
Ambassador's Meditation Hoverchair (gold mount)	192 mill
Alliance Consul's Dias (silver mount)	72 mill
Augmentation Kit MK-11	1.6 mill
Banner: Onderon	738k
Black and Black Dye Module	120 mill
Deep Pink and Deep Purple Dye Module	19 mill
Emote: Sweep	10 mill
Flagship Plans: Command Encryption	1.3 mill
Flair: Snowtacular	80 mill
Force Crystal Flair Bundle	128 mill
Frontline Gapillian (gold mount)	120 mill
Grassland Varactyl	120 mill
Hypercrate: Ultimate Cartel Pack	wasn't able to test due to bind timer
Iziz Courtyard Water Basin	0
Junkshop Decoration Bundle	129 mill
Mandalorian Pillar	0
Mission Discovery: Archaeology (Grade 5)
Nahut's Heavy Sniper Rifle	224 mill
Rakghoul Vaccine x4	300,000 Credits
Revan Holostatue	120m ill
Revan Reborn Breastplate	72 mill
Ruthless Scion's Armor Set	37.5 mil
Secondary White Dye Module	13 mill
Sensuous Dress Bottom	46 mill
Superior Critical Augment 77	52 mill
Planetary Display: Tatooine	0
Ultimate Cartel Pack x5	80 mill
Universal Prefab MK-3	900k
Warzone Adrenal x5	393,000 Credits
White and White Dye	80 mill
Warzone Adrenal x 1263	99 mill

 

 

Edited May 8, 2023 by commanderwar

[microstyles]

37 minutes ago, commanderwar said:

For anyone who wants to know what the tax will be when just trading items (no credits involved) here it is by swtorista/ Lady Admiral found, from testing some items (not trading credits) on pts and seeing the taxing cost.

Wow I did not expect them to go all the way down to prefabs. This change will pretty much kill person to person trading I think. Since the trades are taxed on both sides it'll be pretty much always better to use the GTN (as intended I guess). It'll be even worse once they set these types of trades to use the top end of the progressive tax.

[Nee-Elder]

18 minutes ago, microstyles said:

Wow I did not expect them to go all the way down to prefabs. This change will pretty much kill person to person trading I think. Since the trades are taxed on both sides it'll be pretty much always better to use the GTN (as intended I guess).

Here's the link to the actual thread--> https://forums.swtor.com/topic/929203-pts-economic-balance-changes/#comment-9756738

Also  @microstyles , just curious: how did you quote  that above @commanderwar  post without including the 'spreadsheet list box'  within your quote?

[Kpokitty]

This taxation is not fair to those of us who actually give an item to someone else. For example, when I log in and my husband doesn't for a week and an item is on sale on the Cartel market that I know he would like, I will pay real dollars for it and then give it to him later.  This is literally gifting and I don't expect him to pay me any credits for it. I would like to see a waiver of 'taxes' for the occasional gift. Maybe something like one free gifted item a month or every 3 months? It would still inhibit the crazy sellers/traders, yet still allow friends to gift things once in a while.

Just throwing that out there.

[HobbesToo]

On 5/1/2023 at 10:44 AM, JoeStramaglia said:

 

• Is there anything you wish you could do on the GTN that you cannot do currently? I wish there was a toggle so I could search for items that are not yet in my collection. 
• What kinds of information do you use to decide when to make a purchase? If you could have more information what would you want? I would like to have historical market data to know if the price is reasonable.

 

[TahliahCOH]

On 5/6/2023 at 8:36 PM, TziganeNZ said:

Bit confused about this - are you saying you paid to initially access Quick Travel?  I ask because Quick Travel is a default ability that EVERY character gets. The only thing that you pay for through legacy perks is to shorten the cool-down period.

I may be misremembering, but it seemed like I had to pay to unlock it for my legacy once I got to a certain legacy level (20ish?). Maybe not, though, I honestly don't recall at this point. But we do pay to unlock the upgrades. I wouldn't mind if they made those QT unlocks per toon rather than per legacy as a credit sink, though. I just want to use it when I've paid for it/upgraded it and not be charged ridiculous--or any--amounts for it (5k to travel across Coruscant? Ridiculous.).

[TahliahCOH]

3 hours ago, commanderwar said:

Rakghoul Vaccine x4 300,000 Credits

Um, can't you just buy these for like 5k? Why on earth would anyone pay this to gift them when every single vendor has them for a fraction of that?

And how would something like this apply to a guild bank? Guilds often give out gifts to players as rewards or in push giveaways, etc. Will they be able to avoid the tax by depositing the gift in the guild bank and letting the winner remove it from there?

[Bioelectricbarry]

From what I understand, the massive amount of credits that exist in the game right now is a result of an exploit, where you could buy 9999 of an item, and sell them each back individually for the price that you bought the whole stack for. This was exploited heavily by the gold sellers, who filled their barrels full, and when it was fixed, they then started selling the credits back in game for as little as 1$ per billion. (yes, I saw the prices the gold sellers were spamming).

Since this is not a player caused problem, it should not be the players who suffer, are punished and are penalized for it. It should be the gold sellers, for exploiting it, and EA/Bioware for creating it.

The gold seller holding accounts need to be hunted down and deleted. They must be holding hundreds of billions of credits on each one, and there are a lot of them. If this isnt done then the problem will not go away for a very very long time. As you remove money, they will just add more. EA/Bioware doesnt seem to have much incentive to remove the gold sellers, instead seem to be fully allowing it, even encouraging it. Why is that? The cozy relationship between EA/Bioware and the gold sellers will keep this problem going--but they will scream at the players, and hit them harder.

For EA/Bioware, the way would be to allow players to pay for their sub using credits. Eg 1 billion=5$ and a one month sub would be 3 billion credits, max one month at a time. Eventually when the money is finally removed, this feature would be removed. While operational, this would cost EA/Bioware revenue, yes. But they broke it, they need to pay for fixing it. Stop punishing the players, we didnt do it.

 

[microstyles]

4 hours ago, Nee-Elder said:

Also  @microstyles , just curious: how did you quote  that above @commanderwar  post without including the 'spreadsheet list box'  within your quote?

From my phone I can select text and am given a 'quote selection' option. Not sure if that's there in PC but I'd guess it would be.

Regarding Swotorista's post, she summed up the issues pretty well I think.

Edited May 9, 2023 by microstyles

[Ardrossan]

I wonder if any of the players who opposed me when I suggested nuking the economy still stand by that? You didn't want any 'radical' solutions then, well how do you like these apples? Because I think wiping out all credits everywhere would probably be less painful and less permanent than these changes. 

8 hours ago, commanderwar said:

For anyone who wants to know what the tax will be when just trading items (no credits involved) here it is by swtorista/ Lady Admiral found, from testing some items (not trading credits) individually on pts and seeing the taxing cost. So if you want to give players advance augment 74, you better have 5 million on hand.

Item	Tax
Advanced Critical Augment 74	5 mill
Advanced Kyrprax Critical Adrenal	1 mill
Advanced Kyrprax Medpac	1 million
Advanced Kyrprax Medpac MK-2 (reuseable) 2.7 million	2.7 million
Advanced Kyrprax Versatile Stim	1 mill
Advanced Polybiotic Medpac (not level 80)	165,000
Advanced V-9 Seismic Grenade	4 mill
Ambassador's Meditation Hoverchair (gold mount)	192 mill
Alliance Consul's Dias (silver mount)	72 mill
Augmentation Kit MK-11	1.6 mill
Banner: Onderon	738k
Black and Black Dye Module	120 mill
Deep Pink and Deep Purple Dye Module	19 mill
Emote: Sweep	10 mill
Flagship Plans: Command Encryption	1.3 mill
Flair: Snowtacular	80 mill
Force Crystal Flair Bundle	128 mill
Frontline Gapillian (gold mount)	120 mill
Grassland Varactyl	120 mill
Hypercrate: Ultimate Cartel Pack	wasn't able to test due to bind timer
Iziz Courtyard Water Basin	0
Junkshop Decoration Bundle	129 mill
Mandalorian Pillar	0
Mission Discovery: Archaeology (Grade 5)
Nahut's Heavy Sniper Rifle	224 mill
Rakghoul Vaccine x4	300,000 Credits
Revan Holostatue	120m ill
Revan Reborn Breastplate	72 mill
Ruthless Scion's Armor Set	37.5 mil
Secondary White Dye Module	13 mill
Sensuous Dress Bottom	46 mill
Superior Critical Augment 77	52 mill
Planetary Display: Tatooine	0
Ultimate Cartel Pack x5	80 mill
Universal Prefab MK-3	900k
Warzone Adrenal x5	393,000 Credits
White and White Dye	80 mill
Warzone Adrenal x 1263	99 mill

I particularly like this one:

On 5/5/2023 at 8:42 AM, JoeStramaglia said:

Exceptions to Trades Under a Certain Value

Unfortunately, any exceptions leave room for abuse. Even if most folks would use it for altruistic means such as gifts, it creates a loophole for those looking to dodge the system. We’ll be keeping a close eye on how folks behave under this system with the existing exceptions to see if we need to make further changes.

i.e 'no exceptions'. And we're keeping the QT tax. Maybe they'll adjust it in six months or a year and lower the prices a bit, but probably not much and not change to a more rational model like progressive tax by legacy level or planet level. This is the system we'll be stuck with and as you can see it will extend well beyond not being able to buy orange shells cheap on the GTN, hope it was worth it   

[recalcitrantIre]

3 hours ago, Bioelectricbarry said:

From what I understand, [nonsense]

the overwhelming majority of credits in circulation are legitimate and the reason there's so many is because bioware have spent the better part of the decade either accelerating credit generation or removing credit sinks, and their refusal to even consider certain avenues for de-circulating credits is just going to drive more and more people away from the game

  

2 minutes ago, Ardrossan said:

nuking the economy

doesn't fix the core issues of imbalanced generation, which is probably why people thought you were a clown

Edited May 9, 2023 by recalcitrantIre

[Ardrossan]

56 minutes ago, recalcitrantIre said:

the overwhelming majority of credits in circulation are legitimate and the reason there's so many is because bioware have spent the better part of the decade either accelerating credit generation or removing credit sinks, and their refusal to even consider certain avenues for de-circulating credits is just going to drive more and more people away from the game

  

doesn't fix the core issues of imbalanced generation, which is probably why people thought you were a clown

Doesn't need to fix them, just kick them down the road a bit longer. If you want a finely tailored solution, this thread is what you get: a lot of heavy handed, permanent taxes that may not fix the core issues anyway. As you say, bioware is not interested in those 'certain avenues', like viable credit sinks, so in the absence of that, these are the two options we got. My solution would have kept the game more or less unchanged besides the wipe. Seems preferable to the alternative.  

[Bioelectricbarry]

4 hours ago, recalcitrantIre said:

the overwhelming majority of credits in circulation are legitimate and the reason there's so many is because bioware have spent the better part of the decade either accelerating credit generation or removing credit sinks, and their refusal to even consider certain avenues for de-circulating credits is just going to drive more and more people away from the game

I throw [Nonsense] right back at you. I have been playing this game for a long time, and there wasnt any massive flooding of credits until just recently. I wasnt at the start when credits were supposed to be very hard to get, but for the longest time I was running 25-50 million credits, and considered that to be more than adequate (even a lot) till maybe 2 years ago, when I saw things going crazy on the GTN. I started buying low and selling high, and made 18 billion in about 6 months. It was insane, and it was recent. Things dont go up a thousand fold in a year or two just because they stopped charging for skills from the trainer. Swtorista even did a video on the topic of that credit exploit. All of the exploits that caused the inflation were variations of this stack exploit.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WjW01gmgN9Y&t=3s The storage that gold sellers have, and time it takes for gold sellers to move the credits (there are only so many people who will buy from them), spreads the flood over time, and you have what we see now

Edited May 9, 2023 by Bioelectricbarry

[Darcmoon]

9 hours ago, Ardrossan said:

 

I wonder if any of the players who opposed me when I suggested nuking the economy still stand by that?

 

I still stand by it.  I don’t t like some of these changes and others I don’t have a problem with.  Nuking the economy and wiping all the credits would have (and still would) make me quit fast.  These changes aren’t near as extreme as your suggestion. 

Edited May 9, 2023 by Darcmoon

[Ramalina]

Increasing caps on character and GTN transactions would be nice.   Since it will be a while before in game credit inflation moves much, removing the barriers to making large GTN-taxable transactions would be a nice quality of life change, and a good inflation fighting move.   Why make it hard for people to erase big chunks of credits from the in game economy?  Makes no sense if fighting inflation is a goal.

• Is there anything you wish you could do on the GTN that you cannot do currently?

For the Sell interface, it'd be nice to have the ability to do defaults for some settings.   For example, I just about always list for 3 days, and it would be a minor but nice convenience if it could remember that for a character so I don't have to change it for every item type sold every time I use the interface.

 

Smarter auto-pricing features.   The price field auto-fills, with a number that's usually not what you want to sell for.   It remembers for subsequent items of the same type, which is nice, but some auto-price settings would be nice.  For example: Minimum currently listed per item price, Maximum currently listed per item price, Last sold per item price, Mean or Median per item price.  Those would be handy tools to have.

 

Someone else mentioned the weird filter dependency hierarchy, where certain field have to be filled in order to search other fields.  That is a bit annoying, though I'm guessing it's also deeply baked into the code and not an easy fix, but a more open filter structure would be nice.

 

[Ahndri]

On 5/1/2023 at 11:44 AM, JoeStramaglia said:

Is there anything you wish you could do on the GTN that you cannot do currently?

Please make it possible to shift-click on items in the Materials inventory to copy the name into the GTN search box. You shouldn't have to drag items out to the main inventory to be able to look them up on the GTN.

It should also be possible to post items for sale directly from the Materials inventory.

Also, please add more functionality to the selling interface: we need to be able to input the sale price for one item and have the GTN do the math for the stack. Even better if players don't have to split the stack before dragging it to the selling interface, by adding an input with up/down arrows and also a way to type in the number of items you want to sell.

[BladedDingo]

19 hours ago, TahliahCOH said:

Um, can't you just buy these for like 5k? Why on earth would anyone pay this to gift them when every single vendor has them for a fraction of that?

And how would something like this apply to a guild bank? Guilds often give out gifts to players as rewards or in push giveaways, etc. Will they be able to avoid the tax by depositing the gift in the guild bank and letting the winner remove it from there?

I did the math based on Swotorisa's findings in that thread.

bioware has decided that 1 cartel coin = 80,000 credits.

That is why the prices for those items are so wacky, it's a direct corelation to their Cartel market Price.

The commanders hover chair is 2400 Cartel Coins, and 2400 x 80,000 equals 192,000,000.
The Crystal flair bundle costs 1600 Cartel Coins, and 1600 x 80,000 equals 128,000,000.
The Ultimate Cartel Pack costs 200 Cartel Coins, and 200 x 80,000 equals 16,000,000 x 5 = 80,000,000.

This pattern seems to hol true for the cartel items Swtorista listed.

What this also seems to mean is that Bioware thinks a Rakghoul vaccine should cost 0.9375 Cartel Coins and a Advanced Kyrprax Medpac should cost 12.50 Cartel Coins.

[Balameb]

6 minutes ago, BladedDingo said:

I did the math based on Swotorisa's findings in that thread.

bioware has decided that 1 cartel coin = 80,000 credits.

That is why the prices for those items are so wacky, it's a direct corelation to their Cartel market Price.

The commanders hover chair is 2400 Cartel Coins, and 2400 x 80,000 equals 192,000,000.
The Crystal flair bundle costs 1600 Cartel Coins, and 1600 x 80,000 equals 128,000,000.
The Ultimate Cartel Pack costs 200 Cartel Coins, and 200 x 80,000 equals 16,000,000 x 5 = 80,000,000.

This pattern seems to hol true for the cartel items Swtorista listed.

What this also seems to mean is that Bioware thinks a Rakghoul vaccine should cost 0.9375 Cartel Coins and a Advanced Kyrprax Medpac should cost 12.50 Cartel Coins.

Even worst. I think the value in swtorista table is the 'tax'/fee. So if the 8% fee for the medpack, then the value BW considers it has is 156.25 cc 😱

[VegaMist]

The gifts should not be taxed. Ever.

[JamieKirby]

On 5/1/2023 at 5:45 PM, tomius said:

Work orders would be a nice addition, for people to post items/gear they are looking for and then for crafters to be able to accept the workorder, make it and deliver the item for a fee.

I would back this, IF the players are realistic in their prices, nothing ticks me off more than players that charge 50% more than what it costs to get the materials...it is totally taking the Pee.

[TrixxieTriss]

On 5/9/2023 at 6:32 AM, commanderwar said:

For anyone who wants to know what the tax will be when just trading items (no credits involved) here it is by swtorista/ Lady Admiral found, from testing some items (not trading credits) individually on pts and seeing the taxing cost. So if you want to give players advance augment 74, you better have 5 million on hand.

Item	Tax
Advanced Critical Augment 74	5 mill
Advanced Kyrprax Critical Adrenal	1 mill
Advanced Kyrprax Medpac	1 million
Advanced Kyrprax Medpac MK-2 (reuseable) 2.7 million	2.7 million
Advanced Kyrprax Versatile Stim	1 mill
Advanced Polybiotic Medpac (not level 80)	165,000
Advanced V-9 Seismic Grenade	4 mill
Ambassador's Meditation Hoverchair (gold mount)	192 mill
Alliance Consul's Dias (silver mount)	72 mill
Augmentation Kit MK-11	1.6 mill
Banner: Onderon	738k
Black and Black Dye Module	120 mill
Deep Pink and Deep Purple Dye Module	19 mill
Emote: Sweep	10 mill
Flagship Plans: Command Encryption	1.3 mill
Flair: Snowtacular	80 mill
Force Crystal Flair Bundle	128 mill
Frontline Gapillian (gold mount)	120 mill
Grassland Varactyl	120 mill
Hypercrate: Ultimate Cartel Pack	wasn't able to test due to bind timer
Iziz Courtyard Water Basin	0
Junkshop Decoration Bundle	129 mill
Mandalorian Pillar	0
Mission Discovery: Archaeology (Grade 5)
Nahut's Heavy Sniper Rifle	224 mill
Rakghoul Vaccine x4	300,000 Credits
Revan Holostatue	120m ill
Revan Reborn Breastplate	72 mill
Ruthless Scion's Armor Set	37.5 mil
Secondary White Dye Module	13 mill
Sensuous Dress Bottom	46 mill
Superior Critical Augment 77	52 mill
Planetary Display: Tatooine	0
Ultimate Cartel Pack x5	80 mill
Universal Prefab MK-3	900k
Warzone Adrenal x5	393,000 Credits
White and White Dye	80 mill
Warzone Adrenal x 1263	99 mill

 

 

This is going too far & extreme & it’s not needed. I don’t agree with consumables like medpacs, stims & grenades being taxed at all. Let alone 1-5 million.

Some guilds have dedicated crafters that make things like this for members to use in guild led Raids, Flashpoints & PvP. This is going to make it impossible to keep supplying these in the long term. 

Bioware better add a mechanism to allow guilds to supply these to members for free & for guild members to be able to donate mats for free or it’s going to drive players from the game fast.