Insane taxes

[NorthernNephilim]

Hello. 

So, i have 3 months in this game and i wanted to help a new guildie by sending him a few Critical Augments 73 and a few augment kits. Had a very nasty surprise, the mail taxes are huge, i have to pay a lot even if i'm not making any profit from a DONATION and the newbie guildie doesn't either, they can only use the items once. 

Why is this game discriminating against new players and players with limited resources?? 

Plus the avalanche of insults in the General Chat, from " moaning like a b***h" , "beggar", " idiot" to " don't PM me you Untermensch". 

This is getting out of hand and i'd like someone from game staff to explain HOW exactly is taking ALL my money going to help the game economy, we are talking here about a few million credits, a huge amount for me. 

Yes i am very very angry and planning to submit a complaint to Anti-Corruption European authorities, if this game discriminates certain categories of players, then we have a problem. 

[NorthernNephilim]

And, for the Vintage Republic Military armor set, which is purchased from the GTN for 2 million credits, a mail tax of 57 million credits??? What justifies it??? This is SCAM ! This is against the law and I will not stop until someone will come and tell me WHY a 2 million armor set has such a huge mail tax ! 

Does this game want only players with certain financial means? THAN SAY SO ! 

I feel cheated, ripped off and i want my subscription money back! 

I play for fun, not to be insanely taxed like in real life! 

By the way, i unsubscribed and i will testify in a Court of Law if required, i was NEVER informed about these taxes when i registered to this game, that is a dishonest practice and there are laws against it. 

 

 

[Otowi]

What you're seeing is the developers trying to combat the insane inflation in the game. It's a pretty new thing that you have to pay tax when mailing stuff to some one else that's not in your own legacy. I think the game calculates the price on player to player trade by taking the prices it sees the item go for on the GTN, and then calculates the tax from that somehow.

Is this unfair? Yes, it is. I've seen some pretty insane prices from gen chat on fleet from p2p trades. 

The devs didn't get this right. Some tax on player trade is good, but not the way they went about it.

[SteveTheCynic]

2 hours ago, NorthernNephilim said:

Hello. 

So, i have 3 months in this game and i wanted to help a new guildie by sending him a few Critical Augments 73 and a few augment kits. Had a very nasty surprise, the mail taxes are huge, i have to pay a lot even if i'm not making any profit from a DONATION and the newbie guildie doesn't either, they can only use the items once. 

Use the guild bank.  Moving things via the guild bank is not subject this cost.  (I believe it requires both participants to have been in the guild at least 30 days.)

2 hours ago, NorthernNephilim said:

Why is this game discriminating against new players and players with limited resources?? 

A side effect of the true goal of these costs.

2 hours ago, NorthernNephilim said:

Plus the avalanche of insults in the General Chat, from " moaning like a b***h" , "beggar", " idiot" to " don't PM me you Untermensch". 

/report is your friend.

2 hours ago, NorthernNephilim said:

This is getting out of hand and i'd like someone from game staff to explain HOW exactly is taking ALL my money going to help the game economy, we are talking here about a few million credits, a huge amount for me. 

Because it happens to everyone, and helps deflate the economy.  It had reached the point where stuff wasn't trading on the GTN because there was so much money in the in-game economy was so inflated.  (The price people wanted for many things was beyond the one billion credit limit of the GTN.)

2 hours ago, NorthernNephilim said:

Yes i am very very angry and planning to submit a complaint to Anti-Corruption European authorities, if this game discriminates certain categories of players, then we have a problem. 

Good luck with that.  You'll need it.

[StrikePrice]

BW's way to fix the complaining about the economy was to destroy it for everyone. 

[Darkestmonty]

the taxes are broken for the lower inflation. I don't know if anyone outside of BW/BS knows how the tax formula is calculated, but it seems to based on older much higher inflation prices for many items and no taxes for newer items.

I hope the devs are using data from items sold and not items posted while also eliminating outliers. There are people who will post miscellaneous items at 1 billion in the hopes of catching people off guard and it works. People will buy 1 billion credit stims by accident or 1 piece of armor by accident instead of the full set.

There was a poster on the SWTOR Discord trade room who used to brag about doing this a lot to "test markets". They would post dyes at 1 billion credits just to catch people who weren't paying attention and apparently it worked all too often.

Anyway, I hope Bioware learns to ignore sales and posts like this when manually updating the taxes.

 

[Shayddow]

Quote

Yes i am very very angry and planning to submit a complaint to Anti-Corruption European authorities

It is credits in a game. It isn't real money. I doubt you would get very far in a court of law.

Unfair? Yes.  Against the law? No. But you can vote with your RL wallet if you don't like it.  Or make your voice heard in these forums like the rest of us. Whether they will listen - that is the question.

[Ominovin]

On 7/22/2023 at 11:40 PM, Shayddow said:

It is credits in a game. It isn't real money. I doubt you would get very far in a court of law.

Unfair? Yes.  Against the law? No. But you can vote with your RL wallet if you don't like it.  Or make your voice heard in these forums like the rest of us. Whether they will listen - that is the question.

There's an even more basic issue here to keep in mind:

As a player, you actually own EXACTLY NOTHING in the game.

Everything in game is owned by Bioware/EA or Lucasfilm/Disney and you are merely permitted to play with them in a certain manner (which can change at any time without warning or recourse).

• Those augments?  They never legally belonged to you or your guildie.
• The credits spent on the fee?  They never actually belonged to either of you.

To the best of my knowledge, all online games work this way:  It's just not feasible to do it any other way.

[Spikanor]

On 7/22/2023 at 11:58 AM, NorthernNephilim said:

So, i have 3 months in this game and i wanted to help a new guildie by sending him a few Critical Augments 73 and a few augment kits. Had a very nasty surprise, the mail taxes are huge, i have to pay a lot even if i'm not making any profit from a DONATION and the newbie guildie doesn't either, they can only use the items once. 

use the guild bank or personal trade with him by doing that you not have to pay that much mail taxes at all.

and i think that nobody is useing the mail system anymore to trade stuff with each other anymore since there use the personal trade more or using the guild bank for it alot.

On 7/22/2023 at 11:58 AM, NorthernNephilim said:

Yes i am very very angry and planning to submit a complaint to Anti-Corruption European authorities, if this game discriminates certain categories of players, then we have a problem. 

i think if you do that you are making a fool about your self more by doing that.

 

On 7/22/2023 at 12:42 PM, NorthernNephilim said:

i was NEVER informed about these taxes when i registered to this game,

i think you need to read the update note's on the forum next time good since there have been post it for a long time what there are planing to do with the tax system to increase it what more.

[fabsus]

On 7/22/2023 at 11:58 AM, NorthernNephilim said:

[...]

Yes i am very very angry and planning to submit a complaint to Anti-Corruption European authorities, if this game discriminates certain categories of players, then we have a problem. 

OLAF home (europa.eu)
Have Fun.

[ReveredDead]

I've seen two posts on the forums from you complaining about stupid stuff. Thinking this game is such a big deal that people are going to care. Are you going to be offended by everything? You need a sheltered bubble for you to hide in? Names, the game economy? What's next? Gearing? Conquest? Touch some grass dude. 

[StrikePrice]

54 minutes ago, ReveredDead said:

I've seen two posts on the forums from you complaining about stupid stuff. Thinking this game is such a big deal that people are going to care. Are you going to be offended by everything? You need a sheltered bubble for you to hide in? Names, the game economy? What's next? Gearing? Conquest? Touch some grass dude. 

God forbid people should care about the game. 🙄

[Xina_LA]

I can understand applying a tax to COD mail messages, so that sellers can't avoid the GTN tax.

But having a tax on regular mail messages is insane, especially when the cost to mail the item is many times more than its value in the GTN.

It should never cost tens of millions of credits to send a message!

Edited July 30, 2023 by Xina_LA

[Darkestmonty]

23 minutes ago, Xina_LA said:

I can understand applying a tax to COD mail messages, so that sellers can't avoid the GTN tax.

But having a tax on regular mail messages is insane, especially when the cost to mail the item is many times more than its value in the GTN.

It should never cost tens of millions of credits to send a message!

I support trade taxes but I believe the trade tax on items is ad hoc until the GTN redesign. The bad part about taxing items right now is that the taxes do not reflect a servers value of a specific item and the taxes quickly become outdated as inflation changes. Maybe once the GTN is redesigned this will be automated and the taxes could be updated daily or weekly.

[Ominovin]

1 hour ago, Xina_LA said:

I can understand applying a tax to COD mail messages, so that sellers can't avoid the GTN tax.

But having a tax on regular mail messages is insane, especially when the cost to mail the item is many times more than its value in the GTN.

It should never cost tens of millions of credits to send a message!

Simply put, whenever a rule is made, people will immediately try to find a way around it somehow.

With a progressive sales tax, the typical workaround would be to pay in multiple smaller payments to keep the actual tax rate down:  If I'm selling an item for a billion credits, it's probably a much better deal to pay in 10 separate payments of 100 million credits each than a single payment of 1 billion credits.

Simply put, they can't just tax the actual payment because people will go to great lengths to avoid paying taxes by making the 'sales price' artificially low (in game and in real life), and that is why we can't have nice things...

[lEziol]

This was the lesser of the evil-natured decisions that would have likely have happened. 

From what I have been told by a few people who "know" a few insiders in the team, of which I will not name them to protect their anonymity and jobs, have told me that the original topic of discussion to fix inflation was to 0(zero) the money in the game from everyone's profiles, guilds, GTN, legacy so on so forth. I am not 100% that this was/is true, however this would have created a huge backlash from the community. However, it would have been direct and swift to the point. Examining closely what the taxes have brought us, maybe this should have been the way to go since earning money in game is literally so very easy to do already. 

This overall action is a direct result of rampant exploiting and cheating. We are now all paying the costs to this. You can thank Sanctuary, Dark Sanctuary, Korn and several other "huge" guilds who absymally exploited these credit exploits to conduct rapid inflation along with anyone else who primarily focused on using the exploit.

[ronin_chi_lao]

On 7/30/2023 at 4:36 PM, Darkestmonty said:

I support trade taxes but I believe the trade tax on items is ad hoc until the GTN redesign.

Let's hope the redesign is soon like for 7.3.1 this fall. I'm very optimistic it will make using it so much better with everything else getting tweaked for taxes. 😊
There still needs to be a reduction at the very least for the quick travel on the starter planets.
 

[SteveTheCynic]

8 hours ago, lEziol said:

original topic of discussion to fix inflation was to 0(zero) the money in the game from everyone's profiles, guilds, GTN, legacy so on so forth.

AKA Punish the innocent in vast numbers to make sure the guilty get punished.  Nice.

8 hours ago, lEziol said:

I am not 100% that this was/is true

It seems highly unlikely outside of "Yeah, I know, let's just zero all the credits in everyone's bags...  But seriously, where do we start?".

8 hours ago, lEziol said:

it would have been direct and swift to the point.

It would, and two years later, we could have seen this discussion:

A: What ever happened to SWTOR?

B: SWTOR?  Isn't that the one that died after it stole all its players' gold?

[Darkestmonty]

8 hours ago, lEziol said:

This was the lesser of the evil-natured decisions that would have likely have happened. 

From what I have been told by a few people who "know" a few insiders in the team, of which I will not name them to protect their anonymity and jobs, have told me that the original topic of discussion to fix inflation was to 0(zero) the money in the game from everyone's profiles, guilds, GTN, legacy so on so forth. I am not 100% that this was/is true, however this would have created a huge backlash from the community. However, it would have been direct and swift to the point. Examining closely what the taxes have brought us, maybe this should have been the way to go since earning money in game is literally so very easy to do already. 

This overall action is a direct result of rampant exploiting and cheating. We are now all paying the costs to this. You can thank Sanctuary, Dark Sanctuary, Korn and several other "huge" guilds who absymally exploited these credit exploits to conduct rapid inflation along with anyone else who primarily focused on using the exploit.

That may have been on the white board but so far down the list that it was never a real option. If a game company changes the currency system so legitimate players lose what they earned in game, all trust in that games currency will be lost.

For SWTOR that means that their Cartel Market sales will take a hit because people will no longer be able to trust that items they buy and resell in game for credits. It would make no sense to zero out or reduce credits by deleting.

[Spikanor]

On 7/30/2023 at 10:11 PM, Xina_LA said:

I can understand applying a tax to COD mail messages, so that sellers can't avoid the GTN tax.

But having a tax on regular mail messages is insane, especially when the cost to mail the item is many times more than its value in the GTN.

It should never cost tens of millions of credits to send a message!

you know that people are going to bypass the mail and GTN tax now more by using personal trade more and shout for it on the trade channal's on the fleets since some things are not worth to sell on the GTN more since there is a high tax for it so people are going to buy and sell by using the basic trade system there is in any MMO game the personal trade option.

and there you not have to pay any type of tax for it the only down side is the scamm risk is only what higher with the personal trade way but i think a lot of players wane take that risk if there not have to pay any of the 2 tax.

 

15 hours ago, lEziol said:

From what I have been told by a few people who "know" a few insiders in the team, of which I will not name them to protect their anonymity and jobs, have told me that the original topic of discussion to fix inflation was to 0(zero) the money in the game from everyone's profiles, guilds, GTN, legacy so on so forth. I am not 100% that this was/is true, however this would have created a huge backlash from the community.

normal i never use this since its something what has been told a lot and never have become true but this is something diffrend since if there have done that then you can really call it since it was going to happing 100% sure.

if there have done that idea then it has killt the game for good then the game was becoming death for sure this time.

this idea was for sure a death killing blow for the game so its good there not have done it since if there have done it there have use a death killing idea to make the game become death for sure.

and not forget you piss off all the players for sure and the developers have to explane to EA ofcurse how the hell there have make sure all the players have left the game in a instant so there own jobs are also on the line by it if there have done it so it was a smart choose to not do it.

Edited August 2, 2023 by Spikanor