7.3 Credit Economy Initiative: Updates and the GTN

[TrixxieTriss]

13 hours ago, Stellarcrusade said:

I'll have to close both my guilds because I cannot send prizes to winners of guild contests anymore.

There is a simple work around for that.

Make one of your GB tabs the rewards tab.

Only give the winners access to that tab & only let them have access to remove 1 item. Then tell them which item is theirs.

This way they can remove it from the GB & not incur any fees (as long as they’ve been in the guild for 4 weeks). 

[WHTJunior]

On 7/14/2023 at 11:28 AM, AndMusicForAll said:

• Allow people to customize their character with credits, big credit sink.
• Run events like Nightlife that have big credit sink incentives.
• Stop implementing new token currencies and allow people to use credits. Revert some to credits.
• Give some method of exchanging big credits into the tokens that we have to keep around for some reason.
• Actually bring crafting to level 80 and give people something worthwhile to craft and buy for credits.
• Offer some of the Cartel Market items for big credits instead of tokens.
• Allow an option for Collection items to account unlock for big credits.
• Tax only trades where items/credits are exchanged from both sides.
• Exempt subscribers from the person-to-person trade tax if your bottom line is more important than breaking the economy's inflation but you still don't want to push away monthly subscription fees.

So much win in these. If the current options are kept, and these are added, for additional options, I could see myself using CC some of the time, and credits some of the time. I don't always have disposable CC, but now I have two legacies that are over 8b in Legacy Storage.

[AbsolutGrndZero]

On 7/14/2023 at 11:28 AM, AndMusicForAll said:

Please stop punishing me for transferring items to wife while we play the game together. I don't care what you do to the market or the fees for quick travel or anything else. Handing over a piece of loot or something I bought from your bloated, over-priced store for Actual Earth Currency should not then be 'taxed' and every day it pushes us further away for no apparent reason. 

There is such a thing as collateral damage and maybe not everything currently implemented is the best idea. Trading items is a fundamental aspect of every mmorpg from the dawn of the industry and this overreaction needs to stop, please. Trying to break the people who might be abusing something doesn't mean you need to break my back in the process. You do understand the majority of people aren't out there trying to manipulate markets, right?

• Tax only trades where items/credits are exchanged from both sides.
• Exempt subscribers from the person-to-person trade tax if your bottom line is more important than breaking the economy's inflation but you still don't want to push away monthly subscription fees.

While I agree with you these taxes are BS, the problem with your ideas is that it would create an issue where one of two things would happen.

1. I trade you the 2 billion item for free.  You then trade me the 2 billion in a separate transaction.  Tax circumvented.

2. We agree to the above exchange, but after your give me the 2 billion item, I cancel your second trade, refusing to give you the credits, or vice versa, I give you the 2 billion first, then you refuse to give me the actual item.   Sure, you could maybe report them for fraud, but I'm sure customer support doesn't care about such things.

Instead, what I think would be a much better scenario to alleviate the worst problems is to allow trade and mail between guildmates to be untaxed (the 4 week membership limit is fine and understandable) and also have a system similar to how WOW  does trades in dungeons.  In WOW, if an item that I cannot use or don't want (though if the item is a higher item level than the item in your current slot, you can't trade it.  That can still be annoying on those items where the actual stats exceed the item level) drops, I can trade it to someone in the current dungeon with a window of a few hours before it becomes bound.  I still can't give it to someone else who wasn't in that dungeon with me.   Something similar would be great, and would make it so if a Holocron of Fear drops, I can give it to the guy standing right beside me without having to pay a 745,000 tax.

[AndMusicForAll]

12 hours ago, AbsolutGrndZero said:

While I agree with you these taxes are BS, the problem with your ideas is that it would create an issue where one of two things would happen.

1. I trade you the 2 billion item for free.  You then trade me the 2 billion in a separate transaction.  Tax circumvented.

2. We agree to the above exchange, but after your give me the 2 billion item, I cancel your second trade, refusing to give you the credits, or vice versa, I give you the 2 billion first, then you refuse to give me the actual item.   Sure, you could maybe report them for fraud, but I'm sure customer support doesn't care about such things.

Instead, what I think would be a much better scenario to alleviate the worst problems is to allow trade and mail between guildmates to be untaxed (the 4 week membership limit is fine and understandable) and also have a system similar to how WOW  does trades in dungeons.  In WOW, if an item that I cannot use or don't want (though if the item is a higher item level than the item in your current slot, you can't trade it.  That can still be annoying on those items where the actual stats exceed the item level) drops, I can trade it to someone in the current dungeon with a window of a few hours before it becomes bound.  I still can't give it to someone else who wasn't in that dungeon with me.   Something similar would be great, and would make it so if a Holocron of Fear drops, I can give it to the guy standing right beside me without having to pay a 745,000 tax.

No solution is going to address 100% of any problem while also avoiding unnecessary or unintended consequence, which is what makes problem-solving generally so tricky.

In your example scenario however, like you pointed out, I'm not so sure most people are willing to hand over that valuable of an item on a wing and a promise. The few that do will either do so successfully and 'game the system' or lose their item and profit. I feel pretty confident that we shouldn't be affecting every player in the entire database in order to address a fringe case.

The WoW loot thing works well enough in dungeons/content but might fall apart when it comes to actions such as gifting Cartel Market items. That is, unless our friends at Broadsword would prefer we don't drop $40 usd in their store without forking over a few million credits for the privlege to do so...

Like most markets, the real root cause of inflation is hard to pin down and almost impossible to mitigate - let alone course correct. I don't think that means 'don't try' but I think the current attempt is flawed in comparison to the list I posted earlier. Granted, even those solutions have something to balance. Correct inflation but risk some minor Cartel business? Correct inflation but accrue development costs? Correct inflation but crush your userbase with haphazard 'taxes'? Pick your poison and maybe spread them out evenly so it's more tolerable. Maybe even palatable!

[Fhuruv]

So just to highlight an issue being faced with the current changes by some Paying customers....

 

My Partner and I are both ( currently ) subscribers... we've created new characters so she can complete another class story...

Level 20 ( ish )...

I go to give her 4 Armourings this character has crafted...

Fee for 4 rating 62 purple Armourings...  990,000+ Creds....

what lvl 20 Character can afford to pay almost 1 million creds to Give someone 4 armourings???

 yeah get 'another character to give them the money' is a great answer...

how do new players do that? 

great way to kill the game.. cripple new players, or totally discourage helping new players... 

 

 

[Rujopetteri]

I have to agree that the way they did this tax frenzy is beyond insane. More credit sinks are needed to control inflation but this is the stupid and insane way to do it.

Tax the direct credit trades and credit and COD transactions through the mail system but leave the items alone. Let us gift stuff to newbs and friends again. (Let alone trade our own stuff from our main accounts to our alternate accounts. I can't be the only one playing the game with more than one account).

Sure, some people are going to use high value items as a currency to bypass taxes but i bet the overwhelming majority of players are too lazy to trade anything through the trade chat to actually have that as an actual issue. I know i am. In fact when all interesting items started to cost more than 1bil and vanished from the GTN, i completely stopped all trading all together. Buying and selling.

Ofc they need to increase the max price on GTN from 1 bil to maybe 3 - 4 bil.

Best way to make credit sinks is to INTRODUCE MORE ITEMS WORTH BUYING that can only be paid with credits. I know they're hesitant to do this because they think it might hurt CM sales, but i don't think it would affect it too much.

Maybe add some nice new mounts, maybe armors, or maybe additions to existing armors like let's say alternate chest piece for a cartel market set that has hood down instead of up or alternate chest piece without buttflaps and loincloths. That way people would still need the original CM set but could now have alternate look for said set from some pricey vendor with credits.

Punishing the majority of players who don't even abuse the system in any way is always a stupid way to introduce credit sinks. Try to cure the sickness without killing the patient in the process please.

The one month reguired guild membership before being able to use guild bank is another punch in the guts for people who have multiple accounts and private guilds for personal alts who used to use guild bank to store and trade items from one account to another when making new toons on your alt account for example. (I know, you can circumvent this to some extent by first trading stuff to older character on your alt account and then moving the items to the newly created character through legacy bank or mail but thats just another pointless hassle).

Edited August 2, 2023 by Rujopetteri
fixed abbreviations...

[Khaotik_Neutral]

this is wack af, my irl friend had 6k cartel coins on this game and i had 5.5k crowns on another game so we decided to trade, tell me why on ESO i was able to buy the item for him and send it straight to him but on this wack af game he had to get the titems wait for them to become unbound and then pay like almost 225 million credits just to trade me the items, that tax isn't helping to remove money from the games economy it is hurting the new players who are getting less help from the players that dont have all this money, for example in ESO we help new players all the time by giving money and items and the economy isnt bad at all, I don't even want to trade with other players bc of this stupid tax , tangent rant over 

[Darkestmonty]

11 minutes ago, Khaotik_Neutral said:

this is wack af, my irl friend had 6k cartel coins on this game and i had 5.5k crowns on another game so we decided to trade, tell me why on ESO i was able to buy the item for him and send it straight to him but on this wack af game he had to get the titems wait for them to become unbound and then pay like almost 225 million credits just to trade me the items, that tax isn't helping to remove money from the games economy it is hurting the new players who are getting less help from the players that dont have all this money, for example in ESO we help new players all the time by giving money and items and the economy isnt bad at all, I don't even want to trade with other players bc of this stupid tax , tangent rant over 

The tax is most definitely removing credits from the game. Hypercrates cost 259.500.000 credits just to trade. Bigger traders move 10-20 of these at a time. Then add in the 8% tax the people paying lose. One transaction of 10 hypercrates at 2b each will remove 4,195,000,000 credits. Where as before the trade taxes it would remove no credits.

Economy is utter garbage when it takes multiple billions to buy anything good and it was worse last December when hypercrates would sell for 6-8 billion each. At least now inflation has dropped them to around 1.5 billion to 2 billion and inflation will probably drop more if Broadsword keeps banning credit sellers.

As for the timer, I find it annoying but I know why it exists. The timer exists to slow down scamming, fraudulent purchases from flooding the markets, and more importantly to get impatient people to spend real life money to get items instead of waiting 36 hours.

Edited August 2, 2023 by Darkestmonty

[DeannaVoyager]

4 hours ago, Darkestmonty said:

The tax is most definitely removing credits from the game. Hypercrates cost 259.500.000 credits just to trade. Bigger traders move 10-20 of these at a time. Then add in the 8% tax the people paying lose. One transaction of 10 hypercrates at 2b each will remove 4,195,000,000 credits. Where as before the trade taxes it would remove no credits.

Economy is utter garbage when it takes multiple billions to buy anything good and it was worse last December when hypercrates would sell for 6-8 billion each. At least now inflation has dropped them to around 1.5 billion to 2 billion and inflation will probably drop more if Broadsword keeps banning credit sellers.

As for the timer, I find it annoying but I know why it exists. The timer exists to slow down scamming, fraudulent purchases from flooding the markets, and more importantly to get impatient people to spend real life money to get items instead of waiting 36 hours.

 

A lot of credits already got removed from the game when they banned a bunch of credit sellers. Someone else probably has the number of credits that got deleted, I'm not good with that many zeros. GTN prices came down immediately, sale run prices came down immediately, gold selling website credit prices skyrocketed. That all happened before these taxing changes, so they really didn't need to add them. I'm sure it will remove even more credits from game, but it can also cause accidents with people losing all their credits when they give items away. Gifting should be tax-free. Mail, trades and GTN should be the only target for taxing.

[TrixxieTriss]

16 hours ago, Fhuruv said:

So just to highlight an issue being faced with the current changes by some Paying customers....

 

My Partner and I are both ( currently ) subscribers... we've created new characters so she can complete another class story...

Level 20 ( ish )...

I go to give her 4 Armourings this character has crafted...

Fee for 4 rating 62 purple Armourings...  990,000+ Creds....

what lvl 20 Character can afford to pay almost 1 million creds to Give someone 4 armourings???

 yeah get 'another character to give them the money' is a great answer...

how do new players do that? 

great way to kill the game.. cripple new players, or totally discourage helping new players... 

 

 

@JoeStramaglia you guys really need to implement a system to gift items at no cost as it’s costing the game player numbers who are quitting. Ideas on how to do this are posted through this thread. 

Im sure you’ve got access to internal player numbers leaving the game since these changes & the Broadsword announcement. But I’m case you don’t, here is a link to the steam player numbers. Which are continuing to decline rapidly.

https://steamcharts.com/app/1286830#1m

If you guys don’t communicate that you are making some positive improvements to the games issues soon (like this one), I’m afraid you will continue to keep losing players. Which doesn’t bode well for the game continuing for long.

 

[Darkestmonty]

9 hours ago, DeannaVoyager said:

 

A lot of credits already got removed from the game when they banned a bunch of credit sellers. Someone else probably has the number of credits that got deleted, I'm not good with that many zeros. GTN prices came down immediately, sale run prices came down immediately, gold selling website credit prices skyrocketed. That all happened before these taxing changes, so they really didn't need to add them. I'm sure it will remove even more credits from game, but it can also cause accidents with people losing all their credits when they give items away. Gifting should be tax-free. Mail, trades and GTN should be the only target for taxing.

Yes, banning credit sellers immediately dropped inflation but what is going to keep inflation down? This game needs credit sinks and for years before 2023 all Bioware did was remove credit sinks from the game.

The trade tax is a good thing for the games economy in keeping inflation down. Players can not rely on Broadsword banning credit sellers as a fix, even without credit sellers inflation will go up over time without functioning credit sinks.

Edited August 2, 2023 by Darkestmonty

[Rujopetteri]

1 hour ago, Darkestmonty said:

Yes, banning credit sellers immediately dropped inflation but what is going to keep inflation down? This game needs credit sinks and for years before 2023 all Bioware did was remove credit sinks from the game.

The trade tax is a good thing for the games economy in keeping inflation down. Players can not rely on Broadsword banning credit sellers as a fix, even without credit sellers inflation will go up over time without functioning credit sinks.

Yup, credit sinks are needed BUT they don't have to be punitive.

Just add stuff buyable with credits. Worthwhile stuff. Decos, cosmetic stuff, whatever the players actually want to buy. That won't punish new players but would still bleed credits out from the system.

At the moment there's almost nothing you can buy with credits (after you have your strongholds unlocked).

The amplifier system could have been an excellent credit sink, but instead of fixing the problems it had (like the stupid amount of random in it) they decided to just remove it.

Current iteration of punitive taxes everywhere only pisses people off.

Use carrot, not stick!

[Darkestmonty]

7 minutes ago, Rujopetteri said:

Yup, credit sinks are needed BUT they don't have to be punitive.

Just add stuff buyable with credits. Worthwhile stuff. Decos, cosmetic stuff, whatever the players actually want to buy. That won't punish new players but would still bleed credits out from the system.

At the moment there's almost nothing you can buy with credits (after you have your strongholds unlocked).

The amplifier system could have been an excellent credit sink, but instead of fixing the problems it had (like the stupid amount of random in it) they decided to just remove it.

Current iteration of punitive taxes everywhere only pisses people off.

Use carrot, not stick!

8% on credit trades makes a lot of sense. This also immediately deletes 8% of the credits credit sellers transfer between accounts.

The item tax needs improvement and I am hoping the devs plan for it to work in conjunction with the GTN overhaul.

The amplifier system was amazing and I wish it would come back.

[Rujopetteri]

3 hours ago, Darkestmonty said:

8% on credit trades makes a lot of sense. This also immediately deletes 8% of the credits credit sellers transfer between accounts.

The item tax needs improvement and I am hoping the devs plan for it to work in conjunction with the GTN overhaul.

The amplifier system was amazing and I wish it would come back.

Indeed. Like i said in my earlier message, taxing CREDIT transactions is perfectly ok. That way the tax is always the 8% and you can predict it accurately.

Taxing items based on an imaginary value that the devs seem to pull out of their backsides however is just moronic. Trade an item to a wad of cash = credits get taxed = good. Trade and item only = no tax please.

Just increase the GTN cap from 1 bil to 3-4 or something and most of us lazy folks will ignore the greedy idiots trying to circumvent taxes by posting their stuff on trade chat and want cm items as payment instead of creds.

Edited August 2, 2023 by Rujopetteri
fixed abbreviations...

[Skummy]

Have to buy 100 dollars worth of cartel coins to be able to afford gold augments just to do casual PVP SIK GAME PAY 2 WIN KOREAN MMO KEKW 🤡

Edited August 2, 2023 by Skummy

[Darkestmonty]

9 minutes ago, Skummy said:

Have to buy 100 dollars with of cartel coins to be able to afford gold augments just to do casual PVP SIK GAME PAY 2 WIN KOREAN MMO KEKW

I buy no Cartel Coins, have close to 80 billion credits and 3 full outfits of Aug 77 gear, and a weapons for every class.

But then again I buy and sell things on the GTN and enjoy playing the economy.

[Char_Ell]

1 hour ago, Rujopetteri said:

Just increase the GMS cap from 1 bil

The game itself calls SWTOR's trade system the Galactic Trade Network and players often refer to it as GTN.  I've no idea where you are getting GMS from.

[TrixxieTriss]

4 hours ago, Darkestmonty said:

Yes, banning credit sellers immediately dropped inflation but what is going to keep inflation down? This game needs credit sinks and for years before 2023 all Bioware did was remove credit sinks from the game.

The trade tax is a good thing for the games economy in keeping inflation down. Players can not rely on Broadsword banning credit sellers as a fix, even without credit sellers inflation will go up over time without functioning credit sinks.

The trade tax is a good thing. But the taxing of gifts is too much. There needs to be a mechanism that allows people to gift items without circumventing the reason for the tax. There have been a few suggestions made in this thread on how to do that. 

Edited August 2, 2023 by TrixxieTriss

[Rujopetteri]

1 hour ago, Char_Ell said:

The game itself calls SWTOR's trade system the Galactic Trade Network and players often refer to it as GTN.  I've no idea where you are getting GMS from.

My bad, it's from another game i used to play

[Rujopetteri]

45 minutes ago, TrixxieTriss said:

The trade tax is a good thing. But the taxing of gifts is too much. There needs to be a mechanism that allows people to gift items without circumventing the reason for the tax. There have been a few suggestions made in this thread on how to do that. 

Just remove the tax on item only trades. Sure some people will abuse the system, but the majority won't as long as the price cap on GTN is raised high enough so people can actually place their high value items there.

Trading for stuff via the trade chat and face to face transactions, which is pretty much the only way you can trade items to items, is a huge hassle and also a big risk to get scammed in the process. If you can buy and sell your high value stuff through the GTN, most people will. It's convenient and risk free. People tend to do what's convenient.

[TrixxieTriss]

1 minute ago, Rujopetteri said:

Just remove the tax on item only trades. Sure some people will abuse the system, but the majority won't as long as the price cap on GTN is raised high enough so people can actually place their high value items there

That’s not the answer. Removing it just opens it up to abuse. The solution is to make gifted items legacy bound so that they can not be resold. 

[Rujopetteri]

1 minute ago, TrixxieTriss said:

That’s not the answer. Removing it just opens it up to abuse. The solution is to make gifted items legacy bound so that they can not be resold. 

Well i'm sure more than 80% of transactions would still be taxed even if creditless item transactions were left outside of taxing and that would still be a lot better credit sink than what we had.

On top of that they should add more worthwhile stuff to actually use credits on instead of inventing new currencies each time they change the gearing system etc.

There's plenty of ways to do that without punishing people with the insanity that we have now. Items listed for a few mil in the GTN gets 10's of millions worth of tax when you try to gift them to a friend...

[TrixxieTriss]

Just now, Rujopetteri said:

Well i'm sure more than 80% of transactions would still be taxed even if creditless item transactions were left outside of taxing and that would still be a lot better credit sink than what we had.

Or they could just make gifts legacy bound & then it’s 100%

Honestly, it seems to me the only people happy to leave a loop hole like that are those wanting to exploit it.

[OlBuzzard]

9 minutes ago, TrixxieTriss said:

Or they could just make gifts legacy bound & then it’s 100%

Honestly, it seems to me the only people happy to leave a loop hole like that are those wanting to exploit it.

It's honestly amazing how many people think that others are just plain stupid.  You bet that some are looking for a loophole to exploit.

When it comes to taxes ... there is no real answer to make everyone happy.  Some people just want to be able to sell / trade / exchange (whatever) without any consequences.

Gift taxes?  Helping friends?  Helping noobies?  Transferring stuff to the Guild?  

A lot of stuff was affected with deep reaching implications when the new tax system was put into place.  Without covering all of the bases that were possible (as much as possible) ..  exploitations were inevitable.   IMO the team did the right thing as much as humanly possible (when it comes to implementing a thorough taxation system).

[Rujopetteri]

44 minutes ago, TrixxieTriss said:

Or they could just make gifts legacy bound & then it’s 100%

Honestly, it seems to me the only people happy to leave a loop hole like that are those wanting to exploit it.

Just to be clear, i'm not opposing your suggestion. The problem is, it requires actual work from the dev team. It requires changing stuff on the code side of things.

Increasing max prices in the GTN and having the majority of transactions under the tax that way shouldn't be more work than a few clicks and it's done (ok, might be a bit more, i only program PLC's not computer programs but i still really doubt it would be much more than changing a few parameters in the code).

Before the inflation pushed prices over the 1 bil cap i rarely even saw anyone trying to sell anything on the trade chat and the ones that did use that chat mostly just advertized what they had for sale in the GTN. So i really doubt there would suddenly be loads of people exploiting the system. Some for sure, but are those few people worth it to punish everybody? I think not.