7.3 Credit Economy Initiative: Updates and the GTN

[Bioelectricbarry]

On 5/12/2023 at 8:50 AM, jedimasterjac said:

But what does that look like?

Like, let’s set aside a historical account because it doesn’t even matter. We can even say it’s all BioWare’s fault!

The problems are still:

1. There is far too much currency in the economy

2. A relatively small amount of the playerbase possesses an exorbitant amount of credits

Because of these two problems, we have hyperinflation. 

No matter what, these credits have to be removed from the economy. There’s no way to fix it without, in some way, “punishing” players. 

No we cant set aside the historical account. It DOES matter. That is what created your #1, they created the stack flaws that made it possible to flood the game with money.

But even so, no it isnt all Bioware's fault, directly. Exploitation of those flaws by a few players were a big part of it, most of them have been banned but they got the credits in. And the gold sellers, that Bioware is so friendly with. They store the massive amount of gold that was created, and are selling it for as little as $1 per billion back into the game. All these tax actions will not remove the credits for a long time, because as credits are removed the gold sellers will just put more back in. And so Bioware is indirectly responsible for that too, by allowing it. 

I have already stated:

-find the gold seller accounts that are holding truly massive amounts of credits. Delete them. Gold sellers should not exist in the game, but Bioware does not seem to have any incentive to remove them, they have never taken any action against them, that I know of.

-make it possible for players who do have lots of money to buy a monthly sub with in game credits. Something like 3 billion (or more) for a month sub, until the money is removed. Buy Cartel Coins with credits too? It will cost Bioware revenue, yes. Bioware did it, they should be the one to pay for this massive screwup, not the players. It would remove a lot of credits fast, and the players will be very happy to do this, they wont consider it a punishment. 

[TrixxieTriss]

On 5/12/2023 at 4:26 AM, blakkwiddow said:

Yes, I know there are taxes there, I'm not a complete dolt lol.

To clarify: the GTN tax fee being applied to player-to-player trade is the majority of the whole GTN tax implementation... so... This whole mess is going to piss people off more than the QT thing did. 

I don’t understand why you think this is going to piss of heaps of people. 

As long as BioWare put in place a mechanism for people to still give gifts at no charge, ie making gifted items bound to legacy. It shouldn’t be a problem. This is what we should ALL be advocating for BioWare to do so we can still gift friends & guildies presents. 

Then the only people who are going to be negatively affected are those currently taking advantage of the loophole to avoid the GTN tax/fees. 

And if they’re pissed off, too bad because they’re tax avoidance is actually a large part of the problem contributing to inflationary pressures. 

[Balameb]

8 hours ago, TrixxieTriss said:

I don’t understand why you think this is going to piss of heaps of people. 

As long as BioWare put in place a mechanism for people to still give gifts at no charge, ie making gifted items bound to legacy. It shouldn’t be a problem. This is what we should ALL be advocating for BioWare to do so we can still gift friends & guildies presents. 

Then the only people who are going to be negatively affected are those currently taking advantage of the loophole to avoid the GTN tax/fees. 

And if they’re pissed off, too bad because they’re tax avoidance is actually a large part of the problem contributing to inflationary pressures. 

I agree. The bound to legacy for gifts is a good solution.

And something similar should be considered for in guild rewards in case BW sees abuse during their 'close monitoring' period. May require more programing, but would be a good feature, even considered QoL: I imagine something similar to the donate deco but in reverse that allows GMs to transfer reward items directly from the guild bank.

[ivanhedgehog]

On 5/1/2023 at 1:07 PM, Amodin said:

Wait a minute - you are now going to CHARGE people to make a trade?  Really?  So, someone nice out there who just wants to give someone a million is going to be charged almost 10% by being nice?  Are you guys seriously thinking about these changes?  There is ZERO reason to do this where GTN involvement is absent.  You're over-reaching your taxing on this.

 

Would you rather they make a  maximum credit limit per account of 1 billion credits? delete everything over? What is proposed is a much less painful method of addressing the problem.

[microstyles]

11 hours ago, TrixxieTriss said:

And if they’re pissed off, too bad because they’re tax avoidance is actually a large part of the problem contributing to inflationary pressures. 

Well since this change is coming before the GTN limit increase, they don't really have a choice if the items are worth over 1b. The proposed changes charge a fee to both sides of the transaction. I don't do any off-GTN trading but if I did I'd be pretty irritated.

[kjarnage]

 

 

Thank you for considering changes to the GTN. I think you should do two. First implement ease of use and programming options fast. Two implement economic changes tax rates, increase costs... in increments to gage effects, and third address supply not discussed herein.

• What do you like about how the GTN currently functions?

Ability to sort lowest to highest in price and unit price

ability to sort out by level and item type

ability to cancel sale

• What do you dislike about how the GTN currently functions?

Inability to increase font size

I have to resort by unit type too frequently

Multiple item sales such as meds, augments, mats, decorations, stims., grenades, gifts... should have a lower tax rate if the grouping cost is under 500,000 seeing how preferred and Free to play are limited to 1 million in inventory. 

Limit the number sold in a group to 999 again to discourage bot sellers. and vendor resellers. 

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

increase font size

buy higher value up to 2 Billion even if at a higher tax rate. Value added service

set to automatically sort by unit price or overall price

ability to not show items being sold by ignored/guild banned people (this is least of my wishes)

better/more easily seen decorations 

If you allow longer than 3 days on the GTN increase the tax on items on the market over 3 days. Value added service

• Are there any specific filters, searches, or ways of finding items you particularly like or that you wish existed?

set to automatically sort by unit price and price

be able to limit number of units I do not need to see mats quantities of 9999.... 

• What kinds of information do you use to decide when to make a purchase? If you could have more information what would you want?

To see vendor prices especially this would help stop new players from being ripped off.

Unit price.

Since the GTN price reflects demand maybe in some cases as you did with the guardsmen you should increase vendor prices. The vendor price takes 100% of the cost out of circulation not just 8% of the GTN cost on top of the cost they expended from the vendor. In the case of vendor items there is an infinite supply so removing resales on the GTN does not effect the supply as discouraging bot sellers will.  

 

 

[TrixxieTriss]

7 hours ago, microstyles said:

Well since this change is coming before the GTN limit increase, they don't really have a choice if the items are worth over 1b. The proposed changes charge a fee to both sides of the transaction. I don't do any off-GTN trading but if I did I'd be pretty irritated.

I don’t think BioWare should implement any of these changes before increasing the GTN sales cap or it will tank the game’s economy. They should be concentrating on fixing the GTN first because it’s the actual credit sink. If it doesn’t work, then no one is going to use it & it’s not going to remove the credits. 

[DawnAskham]

17 hours ago, TrixxieTriss said:

I don’t think BioWare should implement any of these changes before increasing the GTN sales cap or it will tank the game’s economy. They should be concentrating on fixing the GTN first because it’s the actual credit sink. If it doesn’t work, then no one is going to use it & it’s not going to remove the credits. 

I can't come up with a good reason for why Bioware is going about this the way they are.

It just seems really hard to believe a rational development staff would pursue so many changes with far more potential negative unintended consequences than just increasing the GTN limit.

Is their legacy code really that bad that altering the GTN limit presents some sort of existential threat to the game as a whole?

Edited May 15, 2023 by DawnAskham

[Balameb]

20 minutes ago, DawnAskham said:

Is their legacy code really that bad that altering the GTN limit presents some sort of existential threat to the game as a whole?

I can't say for sure as i have not seen the code or database schema.

But i would think that the GTN cap should not be that complex to change. I can understand character cap (tho the new 64 bit should could help), but 1 billion cap for GTN sounds more as a arbitrary number that was chosen at some point just to put a limit and not architecture limitations/complexities.

[TrixxieTriss]

3 hours ago, DawnAskham said:

I can't come up with a good reason for why Bioware is going about this the way they are.

It just seems really hard to believe a rational development staff would pursue so many changes with far more potential negative unintended consequences than just increasing the GTN limit.

Is their legacy code really that bad that altering the GTN limit presents some sort of existential threat to the game as a whole?

I don’t know, it could be a much bigger job than we think 🤷🏻‍♀️

[blakkwiddow]

On 5/14/2023 at 1:01 AM, TrixxieTriss said:

Then the only people who are going to be negatively affected are those currently taking advantage of the loophole to avoid the GTN tax/fees. 

And if they’re pissed off, too bad because they’re tax avoidance is actually a large part of the problem contributing to inflationary pressures. 

First: "only going to negatively effect the exploiters" is false - It's being applied globally, so it effects everyone negatively in some way by creating a nothing credit sink that rewards players with absolutely nothing in return.... kind of like the QT tax... this is just on a much larger scale.

Second: Tax avoidance isn't the biggest part of the issue.... Honestly, it's that we have nothing to spend credits on that are useful to us. Yeah, we can buy legacy bound armor shells with credits, tacticals still cost 3k TFs and 1mil, and Hyde and Zeek sell us our 336 gear for credits. What else do we have to spend credits on? Nothing besides GTN trades and Hypercrates. 6.0's economy was inflated compared to 5.0's, but not to the extreme that 7.0's is when compared to 6.0's. In 6.0, end game PvEers and PvPers were dropping BILLIONS on rolling and re-rolling amplifiers. In 7.0... people are buying and selling Hypercrates just to see how many credits they can accumulate.

To reiterate what I have already said previously and clarify MORE:

The entire ideology behind adding another pointless tax to another area of the game is idiotic. The economy is broken and heavily inflated. We all know that. The QT tax pissed people off. This will inevitably piss even more people off. I don't care about the tax. I don't trade anything that often any way! When I do it's to craft augments for people, or give a guild reward. The whole thing is arbitrary, pointless, and empty. Players get nothing out of it other than credit loss. Vet players can take the hit. Newer players don't have the luxury of having billions of credits just sitting there waiting to be spent.

TLDR: Adding taxes to player-to-player trade is not going to fix anything at all. The issue is that the people with credits have NOTHING to spend credits on. We need something similar to the amplifier system or something. This empty "taxing" is not the way.

[denavin]

I equate the Quick Travel charge like putting a Pay Toilet in your home and you have to give the money to you neighbor just to use your own Toilet. It was free when you bought your home but now you have to pay to go.

Yes it is as stupid as it sounds.

[TrixxieTriss]

52 minutes ago, denavin said:

Like putting a Pay Toilet in your home and you have to give the money to you neighbor just to use your own Toilet. It was free when you bought your home but now you have to pay to go.

Yes it is as stupid as it sounds.

That doesn’t sound too far fetched when you consider all the other things that are gradually becoming subscription based. 

Ie, you have to subscribe to get access to things your car already has built into it when you buy it, like engine performance or driver safety features, but you gotta now pay extra subscription each month to access it 🤯

Or another example is Intel’s new server CPU’s that companies will have to pay a subscription to gain full access to the hardware features that they are already in the imbedded CPU hardware. 

These days, it seems the whole world has gone subscription crazy. It’s not like it costs the manufacturers anymore because the hardware already has those features built into it. 

But I digress. This isn’t the real world & paying a small QT fee wouldn’t be that bad if they adjusted it so it cost much less on early planets & we’re based more on your character lvl as you moved around the galaxy. 
 

[Immortalelf]

Basing a game on the stupidity of the world's greedy-ass companies for subscription-based models of giving us back what we already owned/had is dumb in the extreme.

[VegaMist]

On 5/14/2023 at 7:19 AM, Balameb said:

The bound to legacy for gifts is a good solution.

The bound to legacy for gifts is NOT a good solution considering all of the giveaways individuals and guilds are running. There is a very high potential a person may be gifted something they already have (unlocked account-wise), and, if it binds to legacy, it becomes immediately wasted.

[Gamer_Auto]

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

What do you like about how the GTN currently functions?

Uh...it gives me pocket change whenever I roll dupes from Cartel Packs? Imma be real, I don't use GTN. Everything that I'd want to buy is far too expensive; to the point that I'm not sure one individual character can even hold that many Credits.

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

What do you dislike about how the GTN currently functions?

My number 1 complaint is that people are allowed to put astronomically unrealistic prices on the most mundane of items. It's almost as bad as being forced to group with other people for content labeled as "Story Mode Difficulty". Searching for anything on the GTN without CopyPaste functionality is a close second.

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?

Find max rank Starship parts that aren't in the 100m price range.

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

Are there any specific filters, searches, or ways of finding items you particularly like or that you wish existed?

I'd like a button that lets me search the GTN directly from the Collection window. Open up an item preview, if the item is GTN compatible it should say "Find on the GTN", and it should auto-search that specific item.

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

What kinds of information do you use to decide when to make a purchase? If you could have more information what would you want?

On the rare occasion I use the GTN, this is my methodology: Is it over 1m Credits? If so, it's an automatic and emphatic no. Is it under 1m Credits? If so, then think about it. Is it under or near 100k Credits? If so, buy it.

[Balameb]

9 hours ago, VegaMist said:

The bound to legacy for gifts is NOT a good solution considering all of the giveaways individuals and guilds are running. There is a very high potential a person may be gifted something they already have (unlocked account-wise), and, if it binds to legacy, it becomes immediately wasted.

In player to Player: if the recieving end can't even bother to check if a piece is already in collections, then is that person problem.

In the case of guild: hypercrates/packs are not in collections. Other things could be previously chequed.

There could also be implemented a feature that given a time limit, the one reciving could choose to pay the tax to unbound. 

[jkjacks]

• What do you like about how the GTN currently functions?
  • The GTN is fairly robust and functional as it is.  It is relatively easy to find what you are looking for with a few exceptions.
• What do you dislike about how the GTN currently functions?
  • You cannot search for some things directly like black and black dye module.  You have to wade through many iterations of black and ______ dye module to find one if it is listed.
  • The cartel market designation of rarity (bronze, silver, gold, etc) is based on appearance in cartel market packs and not its prevalence in game.  
  • The GTN is currently nothing more than a cartel market cash crop.  Each month, I buy something selling for 1 billion and sell it on the GTN and have more money than i could ever use in game.
  • Current cap is 1 billion and not substantially lower.  There is undoubtably WAY to much money floating around in the economy.  Removing characters vast resources will help with this.  This is the same problem with the US economy today.  The rich need taxing at much higher percentages.  Things that new players do not do is where taxes need to exist.  Finding things to sell to older subscribers that cost a lot of in game money would do the trick faster than charging quick travel rates.  People complaining about not being able to use the GTN to sell items for more than 1 billion are greedy and want to horde/sell credits.
• Is there anything you wish you could do on the GTN that you cannot do currently?
  • I would like to find a better way to sog through outfits and looking at them to decide if you want to buy it or not.  Collections does not do a good job of it and not everything is in collections.
  • light/medium/heavy armor are ridiculous designators with the modification armors, any class should be able to wear any armor for appearance and probably for gear as well.  Remove them and find better ways to sort gear.  Perhaps cloth, plate, color?
  • find a way to search for "black and black" or "white and white" on the GTN
• Are there any specific filters, searches, or ways of finding items you particularly like or that you wish existed?
  • Change item modification searches to be by ratings and not level or by ilevel which would work as well.  Your naming conventions on items makes it difficult to search for without looking up online to ensure you have the highest level mod.  
• 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 find the cheapest priced item that i want and buy it.  

I find that most people wanting to know what items last sold for and wanting to sell things for > 1 billion are all just trying to farm credits off the GTN. Yes it would be nice to have that information but it should be tied to purchasing not selling.  The buyer should be able to see the current average sale price for an item before they buy it.  I think a good way to do it would be to force the cheapest items to be bought first.  

The fastest way to drive down prices on the GTN is to vastly increase the supply of items being sold.  Sell sets of Mandalorian armor for 10% of what it currently goes for on the GTN and suddenly you would have 1000 of them being sold on the GTN instead of 1 or 2 being sold off market.  The same goes for all items sold off market or at the 1 billion cap.  

The fastest way to accomplish what you want would be to simply wipe out all monies > 10 billion in legacies/guildbanks/characters combined.  I think people might quit over that though since some people simply play to amass wealth.

 

[PallyHk]

The game doesn't need more credit sinks. Too much credits, that is not the problem, just a symptom.

The problem have been gold sellers and GTN scalpers amassing truly massive amounts of money.

This is why I dislike the QT tax, it doesn't punish them, it punishes the poor/new players. So would reducing everyone's credits by a flat 25% amount for example.

What would need to happen is setting a maximum price for items, preferrably below 1 billion, that can't be overriden in trade or GTN.

And make GTN purchases bind for a long time to prevent the relisting problem.

And banning gold sellers. It isn't hard, just have  a bot monitor the yell channel and alert moderators if it detects "1 billion credits, for 5 dollars, go to TotheMoonNFT.com!" .

[jedimasterjac]

31 minutes ago, PallyHk said:

The problem have been gold sellers and GTN scalpers amassing truly massive amounts of money.

 

Which these taxes directly address. It removes a chunk of excess credits from the economy every time these individuals engage in high-value trades.
 

This means that, for example, credits sellers are no longer merely transferring credits from themselves to other players; the tax means that some of the gold seller’s credits now evaporate, and are removed from the economy. This eats into their supply, reducing their profit, and doesn’t stop gold selling but does inhibit it. 
 

33 minutes ago, PallyHk said:

And banning gold sellers. It isn't hard, just have  a bot monitor the yell channel and alert moderators if it detects "1 billion credits, for 5 dollars, go to TotheMoonNFT.com!" .

The vast majority of gold selling doesn’t happen through those bots, or even the websites they advertise. There are a number of websites that players use to engage in this behavior and it’s rarely the ones bots shout about in fleet chat. 

[jedimasterjac]

34 minutes ago, PallyHk said:

What would need to happen is setting a maximum price for items, preferrably below 1 billion, that can't be overriden in trade or GTN.

A maximum price just encourages players to engage in trade utilizing barter rather than credits, further worsening the economy and disempowering the GTN. 

[PallyHk]

The only way to stop barter that I see is to have stuff available for a fixed amount from vendors, but that would eat into the profits so I doubt it would ever be considered at all.

[microstyles]

4 hours ago, PallyHk said:

The only way to stop barter that I see is to have stuff available for a fixed amount from vendors, but that would eat into the profits so I doubt it would ever be considered at all.

I mean the proposed changes will almost certainly stop bartering. Even if you could get the community to agree to an alternate currency that doesn't have a fee associated with it, pretty much any item you'd trade for will still have a fee associated to it. 

The issue is the proposed changes are so heavy-handed that people probably won't be doing very much trading at all.

[TrixxieTriss]

On 5/16/2023 at 11:40 AM, VegaMist said:

The bound to legacy for gifts is NOT a good solution considering all of the giveaways individuals and guilds are running. There is a very high potential a person may be gifted something they already have (unlocked account-wise), and, if it binds to legacy, it becomes immediately wasted.

That’s an easy fix. They tell the person gifting that they already have that item & can they swap it for something else. 

It’s better than everybody in the game having to pay millions of credits in fees to accommodate a handle of people who may or may not already have something unlocked in their collections.

[TrixxieTriss]

On 5/16/2023 at 10:42 AM, Immortalelf said:

Basing a game on the stupidity of the world's greedy-ass companies for subscription-based models of giving us back what we already owned/had is dumb in the extreme.

You do realise it was the gaming sector that sparked the subscription based model the car & IT companies are trying to integrate into their business models 🤷🏻‍♀️