Why bother opening up a crown sink or regulating the energy market when you can just remove all of the excess crowns and energy in one fell swoop by banning merchants for no factual reason? The terms of service clearly state that you can ban people for any reason at all, and many of these players don't even value the efforts put into prize boxes. That alone should be grounds for a ban.
Developer effort: Zero
GM effort: Negative, as they would gain enjoyment from banning these players.
I'd say to do that but that might be too many players and then we'd be out of luck. So instead you just erase the wealthier players, KGB style.
While normally I would be all for this sort of idea, Fehzor, and I do usually like your ideas, I feel this one needs more depth.
we would need to define "wealthy" first of all. Is the a cap to the amount of crowns or energy one has to have in their inventory? Do they have to have sold a certain amount of items in AH over a period of time? Value of items in inventory?
And then what? Totally ban? Being unable to use AH for a certain period of time to sell things? How do we even out the playing field?
Wealthy merchants (and I can name a few but I won't [YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE]) only goal is shave up a profit. Why sell for less when I can make more?
Nothing sizzles my circuits more than seeing a merchant try to sell a Mixmaster for 30KE plus, have the audacity to say "No it's cheap!"
The mixmaster is totally new and original content to many people (notice how nobody plays with it?), and merchants don't value it's intrinsic play value as much as they could scalp profit for other endeavors.
I think rather this game is just too easy to abuse considering how limited some items are and are simply good at what they do.
I think the game needs to change itself on how it releases new premium content.
Why by random lotto boxes for real money when you can charge all the content in a box on SD for energy prices that force more energy purchases instead. At least we would all have the purchase power to buy what we want at reasonable prices that can't bubble.
It would hurt the F2P a little bit, but that's why rarities drop now.
So I just got myself Wings so I'm gonna sell them and-
BANNED.
Reason: You have more than 100k crowns.
Aw s-
They do have a point. Define "wealthy", please. If it means along the lines of "you're banned for being very rich" as first glance implies, it frankly sounds a little unfair and rather paranoia-inducing, especially for people who just casually accumulate loot. Then I lost my track of thought there... Oopsie.
But yeah, the idea of being punished for something that minor and in no way shape or form wrong is making me nervous.
Yea! Let's ban of the rich people!
It should be that if you have over a certain amount of crowns, say 1 million, you will receive a warning telling you to buy a prize box or energy. If you fail to purchase something in a week, you will be banned because you are not a contributing member to OOO. If you continue to do this then you will have a indefinite ban, random players that spend money on the game will receive portions of your crowns in their mail for being a good person. Once you have zero crowns left, you will have the ban lifted. You will also be reset (rank, gear clearance) unless you buy something for 10 dollars or more.
Umm yea, this will totally make this game better.
But seriously, I don't really know if Fehzor is joking or not (I think he is), but I think this will be suicide for the game if this was implemented. A better idea is to give all of the wealthy players crowns to me and I'll just keep them safe... Really safe...
Occasional troll topic is okay, and I'd be lying if I said I don't enjoy reading yours Fehzor, but my answer to these kinds of threads is pretty much the same;
Don't post threads in the suggestions forum with the sole intent to not be taken seriously. It can push potentially good ideas off the front page and make threads die that shouldn't.
@Fangel What are you talking about....This isn't a troll thread, I genuinely believe we need to get rid of the rich people around here, they are corrupting SK.
Gentlemen, guilds and their patriarchs would, in the most part cease to exist and because everyone is poor nobody can be generous. This is why communism failed.
@People that think 1 million/100K is the problem
Wealthy = 50 if not 100 million+ crowns, at a minimum.
But really it would be up to the GMs to look into their account and watch them for a bit. That's really the only way to tell what they're up to, and if it involves selling tons of rarities on the auction house, buying up all of the high tier cosmetics (the 1% items) or attempting to raise the price of energy then that's no good and there really isn't much reason to keep them around when instead they could just be banned.
Another aspect of banning these players would be watching them rant about it, which would fuel the existing playerbase for several weeks.
"Ban reason: Too much money"
No, they don't do that they troll them. As I said in the OP the GMs should enjoy handing these players the ban, and so would assign them a random and bogus reason- something like... "Harassment". It would never actually be clear why they were banned.
@Fangel
If I post topics that don't bleed drama out of your monitor I don't get as much feedback and then I become lonely. The only way I'll not post things like this is if you accept more friend requests sent to you randomly in game and go on runs with people, especially outside of your guild. You could solve so many critical issues with the game, like my crippling inability to go on the danger mission twice and then farm DaN for 5 hours noob-free due to lack of friends that play the game and are capable of running those missions and I know you are so hah.
And this one is actually genuine. The game would be much nicer if we didn't have multi-billionaires ruining everything and literally plotting the downfall of the game with their virtual money.
"As I said in the OP the GMs should enjoy handing these players the ban, and so would assign them a random and bogus reason- something like ... "Harassment". It would never actually be clear why they were banned."
This is kinda unrelated but this statement intrigues me. It just so happens that the exact same thing happened to me about two years back, I was perma banned for no apparent reason, and then, when I tried to appeal my banned Aphrodite just stopped emailing me back.
I kind of want to know if this is quietly going on already.
Can we go over the myth that the Energy price is made higher by merches here for a second? I get tired of hearing it.
Let's say things for what they really are: yes, merches can increase the energy price, temporarily. It is entirely possible to create a scenario like this, but here's the kicker: it does NOT affect the general trend of energy price. Energy has always been abruptly increasing or decreasing according to game changing mechanics or tidal waves of quitting players, and certainly not by some black cloaked and hooded merches forming in circle chanting incantations to blow up the market. For reference, here are some events that market a permanent change in energy prices:
- The ability to unbind weapons and roll variants on equipment
- The appearance of missions
- The appearance of accessories and the introduction of the initial high end accessories (Twilight aura, Prismatic accessories, etc)
- The separation of Energy and Prize boxes as a purchase
- The introduction of the forge
And let's look at the more temporary changing events:
- Flash Sales (through Supply Depot)
- Flash Sales (through Auction house)
- Major seasonal events (Black Kat, Hallow, Christmas...)
Please do not serve me the argument of CE being bumped up to 100k cr a couple times; these were the result of exploiters that found infinite crown loops in the game, and made full use of the generated crowns. They're completely irrelevant.
What dictates the price of energy exactly? Supply and demand, it's that simple. Put aside the conspiracy theories please, or when you do at least have the courtesy to bring supporting evidence (convincing one!). The population of Spiral Knights is naturally in decline (because it is an aging game) and I'd like to point out that more and more often players are driven to engage in Prize boxes purchases rather than Energy purchases; that couldn't possibly be affecting the market, right? (wink)
Dare telling me that players like Hellohippo, Derpules or Lepreal were toxic to the community. They're the kind of people that initially took major risks to provide unboxes accessories and varianted items. Sure there's a few thrifty other ones as of lately, but they're not one bit representative of merchants as a whole. I'm still spending 50k ce a week (and have been since orbs where introduced) providing beginners with affordable low tier items and mid-high tier players with variants of the according tier. Yeah I make money over it, and that's just a fitting reward for the time and effort spent as well as the risks involved.
We keep items (new or old) rolling so that you don't have to, we make a reputation for ourselves so that you know where to find what you need.
PS: also you're welcome SK community for the free price checks we've been supplying over the years, doing the research so that you don't have to.
Gonna have to agree with thoran on this one. A player *may* push the price of CE/CR up or down, but it will only last temporarily. For example, a specific person quick bought 500ke off the energy market by x999'ing the buy offers at the sale offer price multiple times in August.
Guess what happened?
Sale offers temporarily went up 200cr for 3 months, but then after running over equilibrium for too long, the amount of crowns in the system normalized and the price went back below what said person x999'd it out for. The market is driven in the long term by company policy, not by marketer psychology or forces.
Even though I myself wall ce buy offers, I'd rather buy ce dirt cheap for 7kcr or less. It's a race with other people, and it's limited by the in game global crown spawn rates and sinks, as well as the corresponding spawn rates and energy sinks for energy. I intentionally made sure I didn't wind up with more ce than I started with while the CE prices were above 9kcr. It's all about the equilibrium.
In fact, if you start banning the people with money, you'll regularly ce swing between 8k and 100k more often, due to less quantity existing on the market on both ends (ce and cr).
I've proposed a fix for this, and that is place the promo boxes on auction house featured. They can adjust prices on a per-box basis, as well as make them bid only, or do limited quantity releases, for finer grained control than what it currently is. If OOO does this, they could make CE prices lower WHILE giving less value in return to pay to winners, due to said crash of crowns per energy rate on the market. Take off promos from direct buy and make it go through energy+crown transactions to acquire.
What if all vendors (NPC's, AH, Supply Depot, ect..) closed down for a month? What would happen then?
See but placing the promo boxes on the auction house featured would just serve to drain crowns out of the market while inflating the number of promo items in game. What I'm suggesting is much easier, doesn't compromise the promo boxes (which are for OOO's sake, so that they can hope to eat those poor developers all starving over there while we ask for free boxes) and drains a lot more crowns out of the system. Maybe they'll sell a couple hundred promo boxes over the course of a year at 200K cr each for 40,000,000 but why bother with that when you can just kill off a few "players" that don't even join runs when I invite them and get rid of billions?
It's a win win for everyone- the people actually playing the game and the developers. Plus I see a lot of those merchants talking trash about the devs in Haven. A victory PR-wise as well.
> while inflating the number of promo items in game
If the price of the boxes is high enough, there can be less sold than what it was like prior with direct buying.
> would just serve to drain crowns out of the market
And if crowns don't drain out of ce market, ce will be over 9k again. You guys need to make up your mind. Either you want CE cheap or not. You all asked for an AH sale to force cheap ce to occur and OOO gave you one last week.
@Hippo
How do you know that people don't play with the energy market? I see them at it all the time they brag and send me pictures dog like look at this wall the other weird energy market people gonna be so mad omg I have too much crowns, and that's all I've ever heard from them. If they are being good merchants and buying stuff with actual cash from the developers then of course they can stay if they aren't hurting anything but if this isn't the case then why keep them?
@Petater
Yea and the best way to drain crowns out of the energy market is to just let players accumulate all of the crowns and then ban them. It's like they go out of their way to collect all of the crowns and then bada boom bada bang they're gone and all of the excess crowns are gone with them. The GM can take all of their hoarded energy and slowly put that on the market as well so that it keeps it in circulation even. Basically no more forcing the price up, only down until everything that they were is forgotten.
Slight misunderstanding there, I certainly don't deny that some merches "play" with the market; my point is just that it has no sustained influence on it.
I mean they wouldn't have a sustained influence on it but they sit there every day doing their shenanigans and that seems pretty sustained to me.
The profit margins on CE fiddling are very low, they're almost entirely based on the gap between Buy and Sell offers; sure, some people branch into selling rarities on AH for slightly higher margins, but it's still pretty low. My entire observation is based on the fact that there's constantly been a gap between Buy and Sell offers anyways, so making profit off them is a very very mild "offence" to the market. It's easy to do (with appropriate funds), perhaps a bit time consuming but some will argue it's a constant, relatively stable profit it is a form of merching; feels to me like it's just surfing on the CE market waves, it's not very productive and not very profitable relative to the investment.
I think considering this a threat to market is giving to much credits to market fiddlers, I'd feel much more concerned about a merch that say hoarded all instances of one rare item to dictate its price.
While it would be an effective method, it's not that great in the long run. Word will get out that Three Rings is banning players for no reason, probably without mentioning financial status of those banned, and it'll bring in a lynch mob that'll absolutely destroy OOO's reputation.
"The suggestion rocks, and the rich stink!" - Cyphereau (11-09-2015)
While you're at it, why not ban everybody who complains about prize boxes? Don't want them in Spiral Knights? Well too bad, because its either boxes or no game.