7.3 Credit Economy Initiative: Updates and the GTN

[phalczen]

2 hours ago, JoeStramaglia said:

Secure Trade, Mail, and Collect on Deposit will now have an associated transaction fee based on the value of the transaction. The fee is aligned to the Galactic Trade Network Commission Fee at 8%.

• Some items will adjust the value of a transaction when transferred via Trade, Mail, and COD and will be subject to the same fee.

 

Will this "highest bracket flat tax" fee apply to items with a bind timer that are emailed to another character within your legacy?  For example, there are often items that I purchase on one toon, like the item modifications from Hyde and Zeek, which have a bind timer in case they need to be sold back for a refund.  These items are very clearly intended to be, and function perfectly as, bound to legacy, but generally it is a nuisance to wait out the bind timer if I am purchasing the mods on one character who has unlocked the vendor to use on another character within my legacy.  I am, of course, aware that I could place the individual customizable shells into legacy storage and pull them out on the character with the purchased mods, install them, and place them back into legacy storage to be retrieved by the destination character.  However, I am more than willing to pay the mere one hundred credits to skip that step and email them directly to my other legacy toon.  It's a quality of life feature that I would very much prefer not to see penalized in this economy correction.  I would point out that historically there have been many such quality of life oversights when developers tried to "fix" something ... see the "Rakghoul Anti-viral Kit" relic as an example of collateral damage when a years-long standing system is "fixed" by developers with good intentions.

[Amodin]

2 hours ago, JoeStramaglia said:

Secure Trade, Mail, and Collect on Deposit will now have an associated transaction fee based on the value of the transaction. The fee is aligned to the Galactic Trade Network Commission Fee at 8%.

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.

 

[jedimasterjac]

3 minutes ago, 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.

 

It seems like taxing most credit exchanges is a good idea with rampant inflation, even if those exchanges are one-sided or generous. Such a transfer would not only distribute credits to players with less, it would also remove some of those credits from the economy entirely. A win-win.

It also hampers the efforts of credit sellers, as all of their exchanges are now being taxed, reducing a lot of credits that were obtained illicitly. 

Edited May 1, 2023 by jedimasterjac

[Amodin]

2 minutes ago, jedimasterjac said:

It seems like taxing most credit exchanges is a good idea with rampant inflation, even if those exchanges are one-sided or generous. 

Most - sure, not all.  This is zero involvement of any 'system' in play here, i.e., vaults or GTN.  None.   You can always look at this already dumb tax on top of adjustments as a 'convenience fee' of sorts for using the GTN.

There's no such fee that should be utilized nor justified if it's a direct trade.  That's just borderline stupid.  No, it is stupid.

It doesn't matter - they take zero feedback from players and apply it - they just do what management says, it goes.

Edited May 1, 2023 by Amodin

[JGHopkins]

So kind of an odd suggestion, and it may not make any sense.

 

But what if we lowered the amount you can sell things on the GTN and find a way to tax transactions outside the GTN for a much higher tax, or after a certain price in the GTN massively raise the amount of taxes so that the total received is way lower...

[PallyHk]

Charging people to make a trade is the only thing they can do at this point, other than listing everything for a lower price from a vendor.

The whole inflation started because of reselling and charging more than 1B per item. They need to combat these issues.

Perhaps they can code in that the tax would not activate like below 1 million. People should have just gotten the cue that listing for 1b or more is just too greedy, but they did not.


Setting the maximum tradable amount to lets say 50 million would also work, since it would be too bothersome to trade a lot of times for 1 item.

[jedimasterjac]

1 minute ago, PallyHk said:

Setting the maximum tradable amount to lets say 50 million would also work, since it would be too bothersome to trade a lot of times for 1 item.

I wouldn’t put it past players to do it, though. I had a guildie who was F2P but had a crap-ton of credits saved in his legacy bank.

 

I would often buy items for him. He’d then trade me the credits, one F2P credit cap at a time. 
 

I would not recommend. 

[DewyMossEmpire]

Glad to see they're finally rebuilding the GTN. There are games 10 years older than swtor with better market systems.

I would like to see the ability to purchase parts of a stack again. I have no idea why this was removed. 

If there is a stack of 100 items, allow me to purchase any amount of them. The seller should be able to specify whether this is an option or not prior to listing. 

And also, let us post orders! 

If I'm looking to buy something for a specific price, let us post it to the GTN under a separate category page. If someone has the item(s) and agrees with the price, allow them to fulfill the orders.

Graphs to see price history would be neat too!

[Chryptyk]

i'd recommend that when stacks of items are traded, tax the stacks as well (reduce the stack to the receiver by 8%).  that would discourage people from using crates and packs as a means of currency as well.

[jedimasterjac]

Wouldn’t that just completely annihilate gathering professions? You’d be removing 8% of everything gathered. 

[Estelindis]

3 hours ago, JoeStramaglia said:

 

• Is there anything you wish you could do on the GTN that you cannot do currently?
• Are there any specific filters, searches, or ways of finding items you particularly like or that you wish existed?
• What kinds of information do you use to decide when to make a purchase? If you could have more information what would you want?

First off, these changes look much more promising than the quick travel fees (which I still think are needlessly punishing to new players).

Regarding suggestions, it would be great to be able to pay for items on the GTN directly from the legacy bank.  This is assuming that you intend to raise the GTN price cap, something it's hard to imagine not happening with these changes.  There are so many credits in the economy.  If the GTN is meant to be the main trading venue in the game, it needs to be able to trade items with prices above 1b.  If the personal credit limit is an impediment to that, and there are issues that discourage you from raising the personal credit limit, the ability to pay directly from the legacy bank might be a way to get around that.

I would love to be able to search for items I haven't unlocked legacy-wide in collections.  Way too much time can be wasted sifting through items that are of no use or interest to me (since I generally just want them for myself, not to resell).

Being able to see price trends on items would be cool.

Thanks for your efforts.  

Edited May 1, 2023 by Estelindis

[Estelindis]

18 minutes ago, 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.

 

Trade has been a way to avoid GTN tax for a long time.  In any serious effort to sort out the market, it would have to be addressed.  I think that any person nice enough to give a randomer a bunch of credits is also nice enough to cover an extra 10%. 

What I'm less sure about is how these changes will account for trades that don't involve any credits.

[DawnAskham]

Quick feedback:

As someone else already mentioned, if you ban exploiters, close their accounts, take every credit and item, and never let the account back AND make sure these ban waves are an ongoing activity, not a once-every-few-years thing if you want to keep inflation from soaring again.

In general, I don't have an issue applying the same GTN transaction fee to any transaction that occurs with credits, though as a few others have pointed out, people are exchanging CM packs and other items in lieu of credits (a lot of the Ops carry sales operate this way) - I don't know of a good solution here, but I would monitor this closely to ensure these transactions aren't involved in converting packs to credits, then offloading the credits to credit sellers.

GTN:

Add more filters and categories to match the current game structure, and update the existing ones.

Make sort by price actually work.

Add a filter for collected versus uncollected (known versus unknown).

Look at retail WoW's AH for other improvements, such as the way materials / consumables are handled or the way identical items are grouped (drop downs in groupings show prices, but otherwise the AH isn't cluttered with 20 pages of the exact same item when searching by keyword or category). 

Absent an API to extract GTN data, add something like FFXIV has that displays the last sales transactions (25 or so) for any given item (price / quantity data).

[davidfreddie]

The quick travel and vendor credits adjustments are silly because they just hurt new players a lot and don't significantly affect the real issues.

My suggestion to fixing the market is, to do what The FIFA Ultimate team did to fix their market. Which was making price ranges for specific items on the GTN so it for example Darth revans gear you can say this specific item can only be listed for 40.000.000-75.000.000 so you restrict the credits instead of letting the market explode into chaos. The counter argument would be people would just trade money and keep their rare items until a high enough price. But to fix this i would heavily consider removing trading or restrict what is being allowed on trading. 

[eabevella]

• What do you like about how the GTN currently functions?
  Everything except the 1B credits limit
• What do you dislike about how the GTN currently functions?
  The 1B credits limit
• Is there anything you wish you could do on the GTN that you cannot do currently?
  Sell things that's "worth" >1B credits.
• Are there any specific filters, searches, or ways of finding items you particularly like or that you wish existed?
  Not really.
• What kinds of information do you use to decide when to make a purchase? If you could have more information what would you want?
  Name search + price

Wow, some good news when I were stuck with Jedi Survivor? Neat.

Curious how you'll do about item Trade tax. Rarity? Or Their CC price? The former is probably the most simple, non-biased method even though not all platinum items are the same "valuable", for example. The later might be better.

Overall, if you remove that fast travel fees (that's a first step that goes nowhere), this is the biggest and only good system related news since 7.0.

Edited May 1, 2023 by eabevella

[Chryptyk]

10 minutes ago, jedimasterjac said:

Wouldn’t that just completely annihilate gathering professions? You’d be removing 8% of everything gathered. 

it would be an inconvenience maybe, but it would help close a bigger issue.  the amount of mats needed to craft things is ridiculous enough already, so needing a few more wouldn't really matter.

[Kurinana]

2 hours ago, JoeStramaglia said:

• What do you dislike about how the GTN currently functions?
• Is there anything you wish you could do on the GTN that you cannot do currently?
• Are there any specific filters, searches, or ways of finding items you particularly like or that you wish existed?

 

What I'd love to see:

Button to hide/show  stuff that originated from Cartel Marke
- There isn't really a way to search for Cartel Market items among weapons and armor without having to set the required level search to level 1.  This prevents us from seeing Cartel Market items that have higher requsted level than 1.

Increase the limit of credits players can sell item for
- Make the cap higher. Or better, make it so high it will seem like limitless. This will make more people use it again, as they trust it way more than personal trades.

Give more slots for preferred players
- I can imagine the reason why they have only limit of 5 trades/auctions at the same time is to prevent bots and such. However, in time when the need is to have as many items as possible go through GTN it would make sense to allow preferred players have option to list more trades at the same time without need to buy additional slots from CM.  Limit of 5 is so small that it makes preferred players list on gtn only high value items while throwing stuff that somebody might want right to the bin. If preferred players had higher limit (10 or 15) they would more likely list even armor they looted and have option to list even more pieces of armor they crafted, thus making it less likely for somebody to buy only to resell for higher cost. Forcing the price of many items to go down.

List for longer duration of time
- 3 day is OK. But 7 day would be better. Even if we had to pay more. The longer time we can set the better as it would make us more likely to list an item we wouldn't bother listing there only for 3 days. Because? the more items there is on GTN, the more likely the value of the items will drop; not to mention the amount of credits lost of the fee

Bought items should be bound for small period of time
- Same system works almost everywhere. By making it impossible to list again an item you just bought it's less likely that somebody will buy an item just to resell it. It also gives more time for people who eg. sell armor they craft to craft more pieces to place on GTN before the person with intention to buy cheap and resell for a lot could do it.

 

[Randigz]

It seems like this is going to negatively impact trade and mail of prizes between guild officers and to our guild members for all the guild events we have running every day of the week and all of the giveaways we do to benefit our guild members freely. 

I'd love to be misunderstanding that piece.

Edited May 1, 2023 by Randigz

[Amodin]

49 minutes ago, Estelindis said:

Trade has been a way to avoid GTN tax for a long time.  In any serious effort to sort out the market, it would have to be addressed.  I think that any person nice enough to give a randomer a bunch of credits is also nice enough to cover an extra 10%. 

What I'm less sure about is how these changes will account for trades that don't involve any credits.

This has always been the case, even told to us 10 years ago by them - now it's a problem? That was the point of direct sales - so you don't use a service like GTN and incur that 'convenience fee', AKA tax %.  You aren't using a service offered in game to justify direct sales taxes.  That's absurd.

I can certainly see them wanting to battle gold sellers, but you can't kill the flies mid-air with a baseball bat and that is exactly what's happening here.  If they would actually combat gold sellers instead of waiting months later to temp ban them, that alone would be putting a huge dent into inflation.  But, they don't do it.  It comes and goes in waves that are too few and far between to make any kind of difference.

[_Sinrai_]

Hey, I'm here to give some quick though of mine:

Is there anything you wish you could do on the GTN that you cannot do currently?
- I'm missing some sort of price history. Something that gives me a understanding if a current item listing is over/underpriced.
- I'd like to also be able to offer to buy items. In a sense like the real economy where you can have a bid/ask spread between selling & buying a item.

Are there any specific filters, searches, or ways of finding items you particularly like or that you wish existed?
- Partial word search
- Some sort of "unique" search list to browse and then being able to go into a detailed price listings per unique item.

[...] converting the GTN Commission Fee to a Progressive Tax [...]
I just want to note here that I see this being a new spot for Tax avoidance, so instead of trading a item for 1mil credits, trading it for 10x 100'000 credits bc you get lower taxes from that.

Also what might happen is that if you tax stuff too heavy is that players might come up with their own currency (eg Ultimate Cartel packs) that are not affected by credit taxes.

[Kolskeggur]

The one thing I really miss in the GTN is the ability to see some historical data. Having "Last listed for: [price]" and "Last sold for: [price]" info fields in a tooltip or so would help in breaking the ridiculous relist-cycles.

 

Because lets face it, most people who list something on GTN go solely by what's already listed, and won't remember what they listed it for if it expires. So when it's time to relist, if everything has dropped out, an item that was listed for 35m can suddenly sit on 900m and take three weeks to drop back to 35m... rinse and repeat every time there isn't a listing on the GTN. That kind of fluctuation in prices drives inflation as well, as it makes a lot of items appear more expensive than they really are (since no one is paying what they're listed for, but it's all a hamster-in-a-wheel trial-and-error system, with no historical data visible).

 

And yes, the ability to filter the GTN by Collection status would also be amazing (especially for armor sets and mounts).

[wonpilio]

• What do you like about how the GTN currently functions?
  • I like that I can sort by the price of the individual unit
  • I like that it is cross-faction
• What do you dislike about how the GTN currently functions?
  • I dislike that going to pages past 100 tends to glitch out the GUI
• Is there anything you wish you could do on the GTN that you cannot do currently?
  • I wish I could list/buy items for more than 1 billion
  • Some sort of estimated tax cost displayed would be very helpful if I am listing something, so I know what my profit would be if the item sells
• Are there any specific filters, searches, or ways of finding items you particularly like or that you wish existed?
  • I wish I could look for decorations based on hook-size rather than its type, ie. looking for small hook decorations rather than the broad range of civic
• 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 buy based on unit price. If there was some type of price history that would be very helpful information.

[Screaming_Ziva]

3 hours ago, JoeStramaglia said:

We want the Galactic Trade Network to be the premier place for trade. Given we’re exploring the GTN as a place to improve the experience and make participating in our player market more enjoyable for everyone, we'd like to get your feedback on the current state of the GTN in terms of usability.

• What do you like about how the GTN currently functions?
• What do you dislike about how the GTN currently functions?
• Is there anything you wish you could do on the GTN that you cannot do currently?
• Are there any specific filters, searches, or ways of finding items you particularly like or that you wish existed?
• What kinds of information do you use to decide when to make a purchase? If you could have more information what would you want?

For CM items I would like to be able to filter for items that are locked in my collections.

For mounts and pets, I would like to be able to filter for ones my current character does not own.

For crafting schematics, I would like to filter for schematics my current character has not learned.

I would also like to see an Auto-Relist feature when selling.

For decorations, add a Group section as an option after selecting the Sub-Category (ie so I can search only Civic - Artwork decorations)

For crafting missions, add a Sub-Category for the Grade of the mission.

For armors, weapons, etc, add a filter for CM / Dropped / Crafted.

Saved searches.

 

[supertimtaf]

• What do you like about how the GTN currently functions?
  - It is a simple yet effective way of selling items to other players. Way better than what you can see on ESO for example.
   
• What do you dislike about how the GTN currently functions?
  - It isn't cross-server. Thinking about the inflation and how it's way harder to access items at a reasonable price on server with lower populations. Peoples should have ways to access cheaper "essential items" (like augments) without paying for a transfer. This would also help "flatten" the difference of money between each server. 
  - The selling period is too short, especially when you have a max of 50 items you can sell at the same time. Taking short of an hour every three days whenever you want to put back your items on sale is a pain.
  - It takes too long to get your money once you sell an item. Why isn't it instant, that I don't know.
   
• Is there anything you wish you could do on the GTN that you cannot do currently?
  - Seeing how much an item last sold for/is currently sold. The ideal way of selling an item would be to avoid the process of :
  Typing an item name to see how much peoples are selling it, if they're selling it at all
  Switching tab
  Placing your item at the price you want
  Making sure it's selling for the maximum amount of days.
  
  In the best of worlds, you should be able to see directly from the "sell" tab the first information, maybe by clicking on a button that opens a smaller windows displaying this information. And the selling period should be maxed out by default. 
  
  - When you're placing an item for sale, the ability to see the upcoming tax on a successfull sale would be good as well.
   
• Are there any specific filters, searches, or ways of finding items you particularly like or that you wish existed?
  - Thinking of our F2P players, having an option "display items sold only under the credit cap" would be good. I know you can just input the price range you want, but a checkbox is always easier to use.
  - Seeing how much an item sold for previously before buying it is a must have also, to see if someone is deliberately inflating prices for no reasons.
   
• What kinds of information do you use to decide when to make a purchase? If you could have more information what would you want?
  - Mainly "can I afford it with my very small credit reserve". The market is hyperinflated for nothing, I will never spend 1bil on a cartel market item, platinum or not. That should be a given, and you should definitely make sure that the GTN cap stays at 1Billion. No items should be sold on any game for that high anyway.
  - Another one is "how expensive was this the last time I checked". Helps me to see if I should buy because prices have dropped or if I should just refrain from buying.
  
  
  
  As for the new "credit economy initiative" : 
  - "Adjusted Vendors Values" -> Please *do not* tax anything related to gear progression or leveling. New players have already a hard time understanding how to gear up properly, don't make it inaccessible for them in the process. Any prices gearing-related *should be kept as is*. PLEASE.
  
  - "Fee on trade and mail" -> Please do not make me pay a fee if I want to give 1million to someone. Larger values *should* be taxed, but again, do not tax values under 1million. Think of the new players, and poor players who shouldn't be the target of said credit economy initiative.

 

[Jedi_Isaiah]

3 hours ago, PallyHk said:

Sounds good, but do you think you can remove the quick travel cost? Its not enough to take credits out of the system and just penalises new players and low level alts. This new method should be much better at combating the inflation anyway.

I have argued against this point in faction several times. Quick Travel is not a need by any standard in this game. If you recall, mounts and taxi points still exist. No new/returning players/alts NEED to use QT. You can get around any planet just fine without the use of QT. If you're complaining about your many alts having to spend credits to get around, it's just as easy to send credits to that alt to use QT. Leave the QT fees alone.