When you say "it's pretty much at the max price," do you mean it's more or less fixed at the ceiling of 500 AD to the Zen?

Segev wrote:

When you say "it's pretty much at the max price," do you mean it's more or less fixed at the ceiling of 500 AD to the Zen?

Yup, I've not seen it at less than 481 for more than a year, and has been stuck at 500 for most of the year

And to be clear, there have been several exploits that for a short period made ADs almost worthless, and only during those periods would the real exchange rate have been ridiculous, I suspect with nothing to back this up that the real rate would fluctuate at 550-800 most of the time if it wasn't capped.

At one stage they cleared $130K worth of "have AD want zen" requests as the queue was just getting bigger and bigger.

That's not a bad idea ... especially if inside the game there's never any attempt to explain what IGC is an acronym of.

Of course, every time I see IGC, for some reason I think of [url=http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/IDIC]IDIC[/url] instead ...
[img]http://vignette3.wikia.nocookie.net/memoryalpha/images/1/12/VulcanIDIC.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20050306030400&path-prefix=en[/img]

I Got Cash

Ichthyological Goldfish Crabs?

Intentionally Generic Currency?

Be Well!
Fireheart

Lin Chiao Feng wrote:

Tannim222 wrote:
Lin Chiao Feng wrote:
I Got Cash

Well at least it's not I Got Crabs.

... yet.

Another example of [b]You Get What You Paid For[/b].

They're not going to mess with the sale price of Zen, since that's constant across several games (and is about $0.01/Zen). So their only choice is to remove the caps or soak up the AD. With NPC agents in the market, they could create an amount of artificial demand that would soak up the AD supply; basically, the store will always sell Zen at 1 Zen per 500 AD, and the bought AD are eliminated. Congratulations, you've just reinvented stock buybacks.

Segev wrote:

Oh, that would be a dreadful idea. That would be creating Zen for which nobody paid real money. And doing so "on demand." It would very much be impacting the price of Zen - they'd be giving it away for free as long as ADs were common enough that people weren't selling Zen for less than 500 ADs. They'd see a massive hit to their bottom line.
They should just remove the ceiling and floor. Let them sell for as many or as few ADs as players will part with them.

That's another thing that works fine when there are no exploits, the cap limits the effect of catastophes to large tonnages of conventional explosives, without it the nukes go off.

Segev wrote:

Perhaps I should ask, instead: what problems do you see the cap actually preventing?

The Bottom prevents players from doing secret timed deals on the market that act as trades. (One player tells the other "I'm about to post my 10,000 Stars for 1bronze, buy it in 13 seconds when it appears). This happens alot at low population times on the server in other games.

The Ceiling prevents exploiters from posting for exorbitant Amounts of Money and taking advantage of un-knowledgable players beyond the expected Limit.

Both Prevent players hacking the UI so that all the offers you see are actually for their sale and they optimize the Search Engine to block out fair trade.

So, now that those exploits have existed, are there just permanently umpteen bazillion worthless ADs out there?

Segev wrote:

So, now that those exploits have existed, are there just permanently umpteen bazillion worthless ADs out there?

No, there were a lot of bans, a rollback (look up Caturday) and eventually they fixed the second major exploit and nuked the exchange queue and some accounts.

JayBezz wrote:

Their monetization model is exploiting those who have $ and then taking the value back out of what they just sold you. Something I expect MWM will never have the gall to do. MWM's model, as I understand it, is less Whale (Trickle Down Economics) based, and much more centered around the idea that everyone gives a little. Not that MWM is going to limit a whale player from buying to their hearts content, but the system is not built around it.

I believe the term you're looking for is [b]Trickle *ON* Economics[/b] ... with all of the urinary implications made clear right up front.

"I'm telling you, that ain't rain!"

oOStaticOo wrote:

Again, I'll repeat, I'm really not sure I'm all in favor of using Stars at all. I'd really rather MWM just take my actual money instead of me having to buy MWM money. I like the idea of having multiple ways to get things, just not a big fan of having multiple currencies to do it.

There are many things MWM as a company can offer you for a fictional currency that they cannot with real world currency.

The COULD charge you for services directly for "cash" but then there are many functions that it would have compliance issues dealing with not the least of which is customer service.

- -

I am going to point out that in another thread you didn't want re-stating of ideals that the devs have already decided against and yet in this thread you are doing as such. I say this not to start an argument but to simply state that, in any forum, trying to censor and cut off the conversation when it doesn't suit your argument is immature.

The possibility is for Stars to be sold on the auction house but can only be used for purchases in the cash shop not for anything in-game.
If this is the intent then the AH must be the only place Stars for IGC transactions can occur otherwise we run the danger of Stars overtaking the player economy.
With WoW looking to implement this very similar set up we will have some time to observe how well it operates before we try it.

So ... flood control problems on account creation as well. Wonderful. :P

Stars are no different than Zen or Paragon Points or Riot Points or any other c-store currency, at their core. There are a number of reasons c-store currencies are used in games with c-stores. Amongst them is a much easier time reimbursing for disputed purchases, and the ability to give "discounts" in the form of bonus c-store points, etc. In the end, it smooths a lot of issues that could arise from trying to price things strictly for cash.

We WILL be using a c-store currency of some sort. It is a tried and proven mechanism, and we would be foolish not to. It is probable we'll call it "Stars," but obviously, names can change in development.

Oh, we'll take your real money. It's how Stars are created! Somebody exchanges real money for them. :)

To me, the reason for having it always only be IGC <-> thing, so if you want to use Stars to buy a thing, you have to go Stars <-> IGC, then IGC <-> thing, is not to prevent exploits or anything. It's to simplify the market code.

If you could do IGC <-> thing or Stars <-> thing or thing <-> thing, it adds a huge layer of complication to setting buy and sell prices for things. Do you list your thing in IGC [i]and[/i] Stars? Just put it up for IGC [i]or[/i] put it up for Stars? How do you even do a bid when you price your thing in other things?

Segev wrote:

To me, the reason for having it always only be IGC <-> thing, so if you want to use Stars to buy a thing, you have to go Stars <-> IGC, then IGC <-> thing, is not to prevent exploits or anything. It's to simplify the market code.
If you could do IGC <-> thing or Stars <-> thing or thing <-> thing, it adds a huge layer of complication to setting buy and sell prices for things. Do you list your thing in IGC and Stars? Just put it up for IGC or put it up for Stars? How do you even do a bid when you price your thing in other things?

This also has the advantage of only one item (the Star) that needs to be priced in various rl currencies.

1. seems ok. it would provide another IGC sink.
2. depending on what was in said lockboxes, I could see people farming them. otherwise, I don't really have an issue with this as long as combined with 1.

in general, I would avoid lockboxes. the temptation will be there to monetize them at some point.

Dramatic Reinactment:
[i]"see, we already have them coded into the system...all we have to do is change over the method of payment for the keys! woohoo...big bucks here we come!"[/i]

:p

In addition to going down this road. I brought it up before, you have DCUO doing a hybrid style lockbox. Subs get to open for free (no key just click to open), F2P has to buy a key. What they also do is make the boxes dam near the ultra rare style loot drop.

1) Lockboxes operate normally, but keys cost IGC.

This would allow people to spend Stars to get them by buying IGC, but I was picturing keys either being fixed in price or being regularly auctioned (for IGC). All the arguments about gold farmers et al apply to anything being dropped in the game that could be bought on the market, I think.

2) Lockboxes operate normally, but are dropped only in UGC.

This IS farmable, but it means getting the farmed contents cost something extra and in proportion to how much you've farmed.

2a) Lockbox keys cost Stars.

There's a certain amount of "pay to win" in this, because now it is directly charging for in-game item access. However, if the items in the lockboxes are not inherently better than those won in non-UGC content, the "pay to win" becomes combined with a need to farm. I'm still not liking that there is a nutshell of "pay to win" with suitably efficient farms, but combine that with the random nature of what's in a lockbox...maybe it would work? I'm not sure.

2b) Lockbox keys cost IGC.

Essentialy, this would allow farms to produce a lot of random items, at the expense of sinking a lot of IGC out of the system. Could flood the market with lockbox items, but doing so also flushes IGC, which could lead to massive deflation - supply of IGC is dropping simultaneously with supply of "goods" increasing.

3) Superpacks.

These are functionally equivalent, to my mind, to lockboxes as they're done in other games; the lockbox is just an "ad" for the superpack, while the key IS the superpack. (There are some differences, but the end result is the same: spend real money for a random in-game item.)

3) could work similarly to lockboxes for 1)'s purpose, as an IGC flush: if you can buy superpacks for IGC, that's one more vendor, effectively. I think, in this case, where we want it to serve as an IGC sink, we're better off utilizing the psychological "push" of the lockbox. I feel little guilt about persuading people to sink IGC out of the system, whereas playing psychological games to talk them out of real money is shadier. (Not illegal and maybe not even unethical, but I prefer we aren't ever "gotcha"ing people with real money. Even on accident.)

In terms of 2), 3) is inapplicable.

The goal behind 2) is less sinking IGC (that's what 1) is about), and more about trying to reduce the efficacy of farms created via UGC. It can't be eliminated, but if it's a lockbox, it achieves two things:

A) The creator of the mission can't dictate specific items. At best, they can pick categories of lockboxes to drop.

B) It creates a cost aside from [i]just[/i] running the content to get the rewards. If we wanted to curb XP and IGC farming but still grant them, we could even have IGC and XP lockboxes drop in place of the usual IGC/XP rewards. The real cost, if measured in Stars, CAN lead to pay to win, as noted: run the farm, then pay Stars to get the items.

This still is a bit better than "farm to win;" at least the cap on rewards is set by how much somebody is willing to spend on it. Further, the random nature of the reward even after spending Stars on the key means that you're not guaranteed to get what you want. Moreover, if what you want is particularly rare, the trick of farming to get umpteen bazillion drops in a short time (and thus game the RNG to get teh ultra-rare 1-in-a-billion drop because you got far more than a billion drops, total) is barred by the fact that you'd have to pay Stars to unlock [i]each and every one[/i] of those lockboxes until you found what you were looking for.

Even if it's IGC-for-keys, you have to sink IGC out of the system prodigiously to open all those farmed lockboxes. As with crafting, sure, you could probably sell most of them for a net profit, but the IGC you gain in profit came from other players, not generation by the game; the game's IGC content is net lower from that transaction.

There are still issues with some of these. But that's my thought process behind what I think is desirable from them. Particularly 2), having the lockboxes be dropped in UGC and UGC being the only place they're used.

"Slippery Slope" is a fallacy if you ignore a bright line of "this far and no farther" to play "if you give a mouse a cookie."

It is not a fallacy, but is a valid warning, if you can demonstrate that there is no bright line or that the justifications for crossing what you're defining as the bright line are equally valid when applied to anybody else's bright line.

What do you believe is the case here which causes you to call this a slippery slope? What is the bottom of it you feel is bad to reach, and why is there no bright line that is valid to draw as where it stops short?

Segev wrote:

1) What if lockboxes dropped, but keys were bought with IGC rather than Stars? They otherwise function as per normal.
2) What if lockboxes were only dropped in user-generated content, and were the ONLY thing that dropped in user-generated content?

What if lockboxes were only bought using Tickets generated by purchasing them from the UGC Vendor NPC and the keys for them could be bought with IGC and both can be traded on the game's Market (meaning that Ebil Marketeer NPCs can also dwindle the supplies available to Players, as needed)?

Net result: lockboxes only enter the economy as a direct result of active Player choice(s), rather than being a random event (that happens A LOT) and now it's up to the Player to dispose of the "trash" drops. That way, rather than the onus being on the Player to get rid of the lockboxes (needlessly) clogging their inventory, instead the Player needs to go out of their way in order to affirmatively generate the lockbox(es) in the first place.

Half empty or half full?
It's not like I care. I've got a redundant glass over here.

Your move, Segev.

I don't care for tickets to buy lockboxes AND IGC to buy keys. That seems to be too many things to buy for the return. Even if the return is "good" for it, it's asking people to spend two different kinds of resources for a random drop.

What is probably niggling at me is the idea of the two-part item - the lockbox and the key - being both purchased. The reason "lockboxes" as they originally were conceived were a two-part item was to literally serve as an advertisement/incentive to spend money. The lockbox is something you got "for free" (or at least just through playing the game), while the key was actually purchasing the item. There seems little point to requiring both to be purchased. It's attempting to use the form without any of the useful function. It would be better to just have superpacks bought directly with tickets.

Idea 1) has the advantage of being an incentive to sink IGC out of the game. It is essentially an IGC tax for the drop you got. And, as with any crafting costs in IGC, even if you make a profit off of it, you do so by gaining IGC that already exists from other players, rather than by creating it ex nihilo.

Idea 2)'s advantage over tickets, to my mind, is that it retains the sense of "drops" from playing the content. Something just feels... off... to me about getting a specialized currency from UGC which is spent at a specialized vendor. Like UGC is more a visit to Chuck-E-Cheese's than participating in "real" plot arcs, and the process of trading tickets for generic items is too divorced from what the content is doing. An advantage of lockboxes - provided we did it this way - would be that you can have different kinds that represent different categories. This creates a more controlled nature of drops. Alternatively, lockboxes could literally just be wrappers put around what those enemies would drop normally, with varying numbers of keys to open them. In either event, lockboxes could be placed around IGC and exp in specific amounts.

Idea 2) can be combined with idea 1) (though at that point, IGC-boxes would be stupid), making it strictly serve as a sink.

The goal behind using idea 2) would primarily, from a gameplay and balance standpoint, be to put a cost on the stuff obtained from UGC that is directly related to the rewards it gives. So a "farm" for anything would still cost resources other than the vastly reduced time that makes it a farm. The random nature of the lockbox would also help curb the urge to transform a farm into an extra step on the way to "pay to win:" you can't be guaranteed the supercool item until you've already paid to open the box. XP lockboxes, if clearly marked as such, would not have this advantage, though, so an XP farm still could become a "pay to win" element. Farm the XP-boxes, then pay to open them, and you're "effectively" buying max level. That said, without the box around the XP, the XP farm is just farming to max level [i]anyway[/i].

I only played a little bit of AE content in CoX, and really didn't pay much attention to the rewards. How were tickets awarded? X per mission? X per time in mission? As drops from enemies in the missions? Were they something you could design an AE mission to "farm?"

Actually.

Tickets were dropped in AE missions in replacement of salvage drops from defeated mobs. So you earned tickets throughout the mission as you defeated enemies. There was also a large ticket reward upon mission completion, with a multiplier added to it the more you did. However, there was also a limit to how many tickets you could earn from the mission, which was 1500 tickets. And you could only hold a maximum of 9999 tickets total.

Yes, there were ticket farms and there were xp farms, which you could really do both pretty easily.

"I'm all for randomized lockboxes if they can be opened using just IGC, and if the odds are such that you're not going to turn a net profit off of the lockboxes in the long run."

There has to be some kind of net reward for doing this. The incentive is to use the money to open something and get something in return. If players don't feel like the net is worth the effort, then they won't do it. So there should be some kind of a net profit return, just not so big that it becomes the defacto way of gaining that profit. Again, you are trying to figure out ways to keep things from people instead of trying to reward people. If you keep trying to make the game punishing people will not play it. As I said in a different thread, inflation will happen and people will find a way to generate IGC as fast as they can. That is human nature. The best you can do is try to control that pace as much as you can without making it a negative experience on the player.

oOStaticOo wrote:

Which is why I keep going back to making UGC XP only. Yes, people will XP farm, but that is all they will get out of it. That, and the experience of a new story if they choose an actual story instead of a farm.

Yes. I'm with you.

oOStaticOo wrote:

UGC, in my opinion, should be treated as a holodeck simulation. I also am not in favor of lockboxes.

No, I rather have User Generated Content (Arc missions built using the Mission Builder) Extend/Continue from where the MWM Team left off with NPC Stories/Lore.

To me, this can really cement CoT for many years, even when MWM doesn't / can't make Updates to the game on a regular basis, because almost everyone left because of personal issues that happened to coincide all in the span of a month('ish). :{

We need this as a Life Preserver, Just In Case! :}

Actually, if your profit from the lockbox is on the market, but your cost to open it was IGC that is destroyed by buying the key, then it still combats inflation while allowing the player to make his profit. And regardless, you spent IGC for an item, so you did get something for it.

If the lockboxes were transparent, such that we could see what was in them before paying to unlock them, then making the price in IGC mitigates some of the problem I have with them.

However, if they were opaque, I wouldn't pay any type of currency to unlock them. I don't find gambling enjoyable, even with pretend currency.

The only reason to have lockboxes at all is to [s]needlessly clog up inventory[/s] act as an advertisement. It would simply be so much easier if the Random Reward was simply something you bought, rather than a "present" you either have to open or figure out some way to get it out of your (now clogged up) inventory.

I've been mulling this idea of lock boxes, the cost of IGC for the keys, pay going toward the UGC creator, and all and personally have several concerns.
UCG being made viable for all levels of play means that the costing for the what the player can spend at various levels in made within what is expected for a typical player character to have on hand to spend in the first place. However, it is not out of bounds to expect the typical player at earlier levels to not go out of their way to spend their currency on UCG for soemthing that might help them and instead play the game's main content to earn what they need for their build.

Further more, if creator's got paid a portion of the IGC and the costings are set up to be on par with what is expected to be available for the typical player it incentivizes players to make higher level content in order to get paid more. This may or may not be a bad thing per se simply due to players may naturally gravitate toward creating and playing higher end content, but the more the game encourages that through earning power, the less varied the type of UCG will exist. And of course play of higher UCG will also most likely have lockboxes in par with the type of rewards you would expect at that level and this again encourages "going for the good stuff" leaving the other stuff behind because it is simply better to always get toward the higher end content for the higher end stuff [i]especially if you as the player are paying to access it with your character's IGC[/i].

The idea of lock boxes and keys also does not take into account how else we may set up earning rewards throughout the game as a whole, which could have incorporated the UCG which takes into account how to set up reward rates for a player economy, how to allow players to play toward the type of rewards they want which also includes the possibility of losing out on IGC for favored rolls on types of items (like what lockboxes represent).

Another thing about lockboxes being part of UGC is that it automatically distinguishes the UCG as a separate thing from the game world where as the concept for UGC is to allow players to incorporate their stories into the game world. What's worse to me, thus far it sounds as if paying to play UCG is still a gamble on earning what you could normally earn at any particular level of the game without the loss of IGC. Even more so, playing through the regular content not only can allow to earn the things you need but also possibly net you the ICG you want.

If there is even a chance that you effectively end up worse off for playing UGC than when you play through regular content, players will either set it up for their own personal use or not use it at all. Given that the system as a whole is most likely to be something that players will purchase with Stars or the (micro)subscription to access in the first place, if the player base on average won't use it, chances are players won't bother purchasing it either.

Its why I feel the reward system for UGC should mirror reward systems for the regular content, making the reward for play through as similar as possible for playing regular content, providing incentive for players to want to play UCG just as much as regular content.

Then the problem arises of will players play UGC more than regular game content? You don't want to take away from all the hard work the Devs themselves have put in to creating a game and it's environment. So rewards shouldn't be equal. Somewhat close, maybe.

oOStaticOo wrote:

Then the problem arises of will players play UGC more than regular game content? You don't want to take away from all the hard work the Devs themselves have put in to creating a game and it's environment. So rewards shouldn't be equal. Somewhat close, maybe.

True, but things like rare kinds of Rewards that TF's give, cant be given in a User Generated Content mission.

Then why bother making any content at all? Just make a mission creator and let the players have at it!

Having a simple fraction applied to UGC's rewards compared to what dev-made rewards will be doesn't actually change that the abuse lies in UGC designed to be farmed. If a farm would "normally" provide 200x the resources and rewards that developer content would due to its farm structure, multiplying that by 0.85 just means it's "merely" providing 170x as much as dev-built content.

Tannim's right in that having lockboxes be exclusive to UGC would mark it as distinct. So, though, would any other method of attempting to prevent farms from providing vastly more resources than anything else.

This does bring us around to the question, again, of: Do we care about farms?

Segev wrote:

Having a simple fraction applied to UGC's rewards compared to what dev-made rewards will be doesn't actually change that the abuse lies in UGC designed to be farmed. If a farm would "normally" provide 200x the resources and rewards that developer content would due to its farm structure, multiplying that by 0.85 just means it's "merely" providing 170x as much as dev-built content.
Tannim's right in that having lockboxes be exclusive to UGC would mark it as distinct. So, though, would any other method of attempting to prevent farms from providing vastly more resources than anything else.
This does bring us around to the question, again, of: Do we care about farms?

Personally?

I really don't care. I have used farms and I have used the Market to get whatever I needed to get. I also played the regular content and have leveled from regular content as well. It just depends on the mood I'm in. If I feel like Power Leveling my character with XP farms, then I will. If I feel like ticket farming to get some phat lewt to put up on the market real quick to make some quick money, then I will. If my teammates want to run regular missions and TF's to level up and I want to join them, then I will. So either way, I'm good.

Toward Segev's question "Do we care about farms?"

Yes we do, with the caveat that farming isn't considered a negative behavior. At least this is the attitude we have during our gameplay discussions.
Players will find ways to farm regardless. As long as its not an exploit we should design reward metrics in a way that encourages playing through and completing missions.
Weight rewards toward completion vs. the cumulative over time which encourages play through or at least can provide some parity of reward over time between speed efficiency and those that play for greater achievement and challenges. A top of this, put in place diminishing returns for mission reentry and completion.

None of this prevents farming itself and here will always be someway to do it, but when you take the entirety of the system it elevates those who play through content earning achievements more on an even playing field with farming.

More importantly is providing a wide variety of sinks which are in line with the type of gameplay and world building of the game so that those who are high earners have plenty to do with their IGC. Include the NPC marketeers, a way to earn rewards that affect how IGC is earned, and a way for players to earn their desired type of reward and I believe we will have a solid foundation for a healthy game economy.