We had a community poll where it was voted by the majority to DESIRE inflation, in order to help stabilize the values of items and make them more competitive. This is a positive thing as voted by the community, our economy is 'broken' in the sense that the scale of prices is too low to be competitive in pricing. With everyone getting more money, and prices going up, the overall 'cost' of something is still the same! If 1 item goes for 100 rupees and your daily income is 100 rupees, if that item now costs 1000 rupees and your daily income is 1000 rupees, the value is still identical. If labor is hard to find, then you're likely not offering enough money. As with income going up, so should price offerings for labor. Quite the opposite. How could anyone compete with a shop selling an item for 1 rupee? Your only option is to then sell in bulk. Now, your potentially forcing buyers to buy more quantity than they even need, just to 'get a better deal'. In the ideal world, prices would be higher scale so that a single item never costs a mere 1 rupee (except dirt...), giving all items the ability to have their prices competitive. This gives the new shop owner the chance to sell their 1 or 8 stack item for 1r-2r less than others, which for MANY items today is not possible. Economics are not as simple as that. If you are spending your money, it will run out. You will need more. Then we have upcoming things to use rupees on, so they will be even more desired. We know there needs to be more ways to spend rupees, and its all in the pipeline. Buying Token Items: We can add Rupee costs WITH the Token cost. Claiming Land in the Frontier: This is not going to be restricted to rich players only, but will be costly, and many will want to claim land so their will be desire to keep earning to get enough to claim the land. Senior Staff Services: We have been adding features here left and right. These are great rupee sinks. Mail Sending: We added a cost to mail sending, and sending to/from the wild is planned (with major limitations), and we can ensure an extensive sink is on that too. Residence Transfers: A feature is in the works to allow a player to transfer a Residence WITHOUT unclaiming it to another player, which will have a 50k total fee. You have to remember you are playing the game from a different perspective from the majority. Most players are not super rich with more rupees than they can spend. I just ran some queries, and 91% of our active players (2 month range excluding people who abandoned EMC) have less than 20k rupees, and 80% have less than 5k. This shows that most players ARE Spending their rupees, and need more. These are players who can't even afford many senior staff services. So, currently the hard data shows there is not a problem, and things are going to plan. but we do agree there needs to be more sinks and we will add them as they make sense, but we will not sacrifice our quality just to add artificial sinks that serve no fundamental purpose or upsets the balance of things purely to act as a sink (max res/derelict vouchers for example will not be sold for rupees) Solving the problem for giving rich players something to spend on is a hard problem to resolve. EVERY Online Game has this issue. We have decent plans, but its not a problem that can ever be fully resolved as the rich keep getting richer, and you cant balance your game mechanics around the rich people.
Also in relation to the voting bonus, its important to remember it took near 50 DAYS to get that. 26k rupees could be made easily from a shop in just 1-3 days if you know what your doing, so it is a very fair amount.
yeah, ICC made a joke thread about how aikar "was going to get rid of rupees slowly so we wouldn't notice"
I had no idea that the numbers were like that with 80% of players having less than 5k. I do wonder why diamond prices are so high, and if they approach 100 rupees will the /shop raise prices?
If you are talking strictly about voting rewards, I agree they are probably overly high, but most of what you said. These two things contradict each other. If prices go up, then more money has to be used to buy things, so people definitely still need rupees. They balance each other out. This has nothing to do with inflation. It has everything to do with convenience. Shops on the Empire are inherently about convenience. Most things sold in a shop can be gotten with an hour of work and some tools. People go to shops because those Magical Internet Points they loose are worth saving time, and big shops can better afford to keep continuously stocked. Again, this doesn't make sense -- at all. Since the prices pretty much go in lockstep with increases in the money supply, the effects on the empire economy are small. The biggest effect would be for innovation. If the value of the rupees you have squirreled away loses it's value over time, you have an incentive to acquire more, and start new and creative businesses. The problem of boredom exists, and it is a big one, but inflation has nothing to do with it. A few other notes: We are so far from hyperinflation it is not even funny. If we were, Diamonds (assuming a cost of 70r/diamond) would be costing thousands by the end of this week. Slaps copy of Capital in the 21st Century out of azoundria's hands. Reasons inflation isn't a worry: Prices are less sticky on the Empire because of the casual, one-time deals through which most labor is bought. Most people seem to save their rupees -- a lot. This leads to a relatively small increase in the monetary supply compared to the amount of rupees entering the economy. Yes, there are econ nerds not named 72Volt.
/shop will never raise its prices, they have the prices strictly there for a reason. It is kind of like a rupees cap off. If a market is selling diamonds over 110 rupees, then nobody would shop there and would go to /shop, and that's not smart business.
Ignoring what everybody said: I think it would be interesting to have "taxes" on the Empire Wild Base.
I love the idea of property tax :S~ I dont know why others dont like the idea! It will add another dynamic to EMC that will change the game play. If you dont have the money to pay for your property then you should go into the wild and start crakin or ask a friend for some cash! That is my input~
/shop prices have been where they are at (except for a few items) since I joined. It would make sense to adjust /shop prices to match the current times.
Glad to be part of the 1% who had over 100k after 60 days lol. Rupees are easy for some and not easy for others. I've offered many people jobs at high prices and they don't want to. I don't even own a shop or a business and I can make 25 k in two days. It's all about how you play.
Aikar, you are a genius. It is true that rupees need to inflate. I've noticed this problem: if a stack of oak wood is worth 64r and a stack of darkoak is worth 75r, there is no way to price a single log other than making them the same price or one twice the other. If rupees inflate a fair amount, you could have 2r oak logs and 3r darkoak, but right now that would just be too expensive. I think that's what he's saying, anyway (the bit about forcing to buy/sell in bulk). Iron prices will be cured by 1.8 if it ever comes. Diamond prices could be helped by stopping giving me more diamonds than I can use just for voting every day Beacons look like the item to finally start closing that gap between vouchers and vanilla items, since apparently recent coding means we have to kill them with weapons.
Actually, something like this happened. The shop prices won't be raised. At one point, 2000 and 1112 were selling diamond ore for more than the shop, but the shop prices stayed the same.
This is the best idea presented so far on this thread. Personally I don't think we need the Empire Shop. I used it a few times when I was either new to EMC or feeling lazy, but I haven't been there in a long time. I think that Player supply and demand should dictate prices. And if the price of diamonds sky-rockets, so what? People will get off their behinds and go mining either because they want to capitalize on the increase in market price or because they don't want to pay the high prices. And if some items tend to have wild price swings, that will just make the game more interesting. I support having some sort of shop for new players, but it should only be available for a limited time, perhaps 30 days. If there is a way to have prices fluctuate, as jkjkjk182 suggested, I think that's great but I can see it being hard to balance. The one potential issue with getting rid of the Empire Shop altogether is that if inflation does occur, then rupee bonuses for voting would have to increase or the incentive to vote will decrease. To counteract this, I support voting bonuses switching to more items or other in-game benefits, like Tickets for special events such as games like Fire Floor or challenging Mob Arenas with special loot or prizes.
The economy is doing well...... It is going as it should in the real world prices keep rising up as the years go by.... azoundria I think you got outvoted
The main point of the post was that there is not enough backing the value of rupees and most people have agreed that they want more ways to spend rupees and Aikar even outlined many that they are implementing. So I think that's a win.
Ummm.... I am sorry I read this... And actually, I see people everyday that ask for jobs, so some people do need jobs...
