Someone called it, the exact same threads are being recreated from 3 months agos lol.
Use search fuction Please :D

@shrinkshootr: What you described isn't a crown sink, except for the 2% taken off for transfers. A crown sink removes crowns from the playerbase. Buying energy with crowns merely transfers the crowns to another player (except, again, for the 2% fee).

I've found perfect solution - don't know what to do with your money? You have too much energy to spend your crowns for it? It's easy - GIVE YOUR CROWNS TO ME!
:D

Nah, but seriously. How the hell can people complain about coins being "devalued"? Crafting a single 3* item cost at least 15 K cr with current prices. And you are telling me there is TOO MUCH CROWNS in the game? Nonsence.

Yeah, those complains come from players that have pretty much everything they wanted, which means they don't have anything to spend their cr on.
You should consider that newer players don't sit on pile of crowns, though... you know, there aren't 5* players only in this game ;)

Noctuelle, you are misunderstanding the meaning of the term devalued. The reason things cost such a high number of crowns (for example, 15k like you said) is because the value of each individual crown is low. The reason that the value of each individual crown is low is that so many crowns exist. If crowns had a higher value (the opposite of being devalued) , it might only take half as many crowns to pay for whatever you want.

NO! Especially with the high crafting prices.

I had a big post typed out explaining this and that, and I have it saved if anyone is interested, but I feel a have a much more direct point to make to this debate.

SK is designed in such a way that what it all comes down to is that the economy is making or breaking player retention. I don't care if CE used to be 7k and you all got along fine. The problem here is that it's high enough that people play for a bit, hit the wall with energy, and quit. After all it is effectively OOO telling them they either need to wait for a day to play again or start shelling out the real money. When you all talk of fixing the economy, you're also talking indirectly about making the game more appealing to players, either by getting new players or keeping the old ones happy. I don't believe you or I or any player has the ability to "fix" the economy as it currently is. I believe all values are set by OOO internally and therefore, they are the only ones with enough control to make any real changes.

If prices are rising back to 7k crowns per 100 CE, that tells me the game is returning back to pre steam levels of user base. I won't say this is good or bad, so don't try to read in to that statement. I will say that it means OOO is losing players over their economy. I don't feel players are unable to fix the economy because they are inherently powerless. I feel that due to the way SK works, and how the economy is basically dictating player population, that players are not responsible for making the developers product attractive. It is entirely OOO job to make people want to start and keep playing SK. To my knowledge, no developer has commented on the issue, so I don't know where they stand. But the bottom line here is that while the economy is currently failing, so is their player base.

I actually think people are less likely to spend cash on CE if the price goes high enough.

Since people can't play when they want to with a high-enough CE price, they start playing a lot less and feel less emotionally invested in the game, and in-game goods have less value to them.

Everyone will keep buying CE with credits, but if almost nobody wants to buy CE with real money, I can easily see it climbing and climbing (possibly to 100k) until it's cheaper to just buy items from vendors. People will buy their 3-star equipment from the vendors for 35k, and repost it on the AH for 45k like people currently buy and repost recipes. CE will only be used to craft 4-star and 5-star items.

the 800 spike is from the patch. Anytime new content is released or items are reworked it will create a demand for energy. Things will settle down in a few days and return to a gradual inflation.

Well we also have to look at what OOO wants to get out of this game as well. Since no developers have commented on the issue at hand, we're left with speculation. A dangerous route to take on the internet, indeed. It could very well be they only wanted this game to have a shelf life of a year or two. I seldom hear that an MMO expects more than 5 years of sustained users, let alone growth. There may very well be some SK devs sitting back, watching this all take place, and saying, "All according to plan." For all I know. It's realistic that they wouldn't expect a game like this to last long.

I have to look at it from a consumer perspective, however, and it's two fold. First off, CE sellers need me, or else they're just paying for game time. Let's face it, both sides are trying to accomplish the same thing from different ends. I buy CE with crowns so I can buy more CE and make more crowns, hopefully gaining a few thousand crowns profit during this transaction. I do it this way because I love that this game harkens back to Zelda with some neat twists to game play that make it deceptively complicated. People who buy CE with money do so because they want crowns easy and now so they can make gear and go do the content faster. These mentalities are tightly woven here, and one falls without the other to support it.

Second however, is that if I cannot continually sustain my CE buying through crowns, I have to consider the alternative of becoming a CE buyer. The entire point of this game is gear. They advertise it as such. "Take these" is on a banner add I saw on Penny Arcade. "Dress for Success" is what I read sometimes on loading screens. If I only had to put down $5 to get 1600 energy dedicated towards play time, that would be fine. But you need upwards of 800 energy to craft the items to see the end game content. That means my $5 can literally be gone in the course of 5 minutes of crafting, and that's just for two items where I'll eventually need 5, if not more for alternate weapons and armor.

At this point I have to consider the value of my money and the play time I buy with it. Restricting myself to $15 a month, which is the average cost of a subscription MMO, There's really no way I could reasonably play for a month any time I feel like. Even if I take a loss and decide I just want to play the game for what it is, never crafting and relying completely on tokens to get 5* equipment (Fang of Vog+Ancient Armor which is a horrible combination) then I am still stuck paying for extremely limited content. For $15 a month I could revive my long dead WoW account where I have unlimited play time with literally hundreds of hours of different things I can accomplish, even at end game. You could say, "Yeah, and spend $60 for the game initially while you're at it," and I'd counter with, "How much would you spend just to keep playing this on nothing but money transactions?"

This would not be a problem if someone could reasonably expect to see end game content on SK using just their mist energy once a day with a little cash thrown in now and then. Basically if 5* equipment were such a horror to make as a free player, this game would hit right on the mark they seem to be aiming for. People could get in, drop a few bucks, see their content, and move on to the next game. But people don't see the label "MMO" and think oh boy! Something I can play for a few minutes a day! They see MMO and think of a more long term investment where they raise a character and invest time and emotions in to it.

Because of this I have to conclude either they weren't expecting the game to get as big as its potential allows, or their marketing was substantially off the mark for what they actually intended to offer. The bottom line is that people want to play their games when and how they choose to play them. If they cannot, they vote with their feet. Right now I think it's fair to say the feet are speaking pretty loudly.

edit: To clarify, I'm not saying the game should be just as fast for completely free users at it is for CE buyers. I'm saying I and most likely many others would be more inclined to buy CE if its inherent value went up as, for lack of a better term, game fuel. For the content offered and the like, I'd be more inclined to spend money on it if either my $5 got me a LOT more CE than it currently does, or if CE was less important/CE costs for dives and crafting went down.

I hate to cite LoL since it has just... just a god awful community. Truly horrible. But they are completely free and the only incentive people have to give Riot any money is to get characters faster and pay for skins. Me and my friends have put money down for that game because we enjoy it immensely, and it's just for small benefits. The character skins are useless as far as character power, and we could certainly afford new characters just as easily through playing the game naturally. I spent some money on this game back when CE was around 4k, not because I had to. I was easily self sustained on only crowns at that point. I payed that much because I wanted to get some crafting done, but mainly to express appreciation to the developers. The point of my entire rant above is that if I have to start considering paying money just to play, I will pay money towards a product that I can get continual and sustained fun from. Not for what can potentially be gone in a few hours of actual play.

Just as planned...

I do understand how older players may feel about the price drop of Crystal Energy

There's several sides to this.

1) Those who don't care.
2) Those who are set and therefore don't care.
3) Those who have so much CE, are bored, and feel like hiking the price up for poops and giggles.

If those players "want the game population to be healthy", then why don't they buy some CE from the market and sell it cheaper to lower Tier players?
Everyone is happy, problem solved.
(that was half joke and half meant seriously :D )

Well, still not quite so, since it means those players would be taking a loss for everyone else's sake. Market Principle #2 you need to learn: People Are Rational and Self-Interested! It's just a bad business decision, and only the most charitable of people would spring for it. I may have 5* Gear, but I'd also like to experiment with a Bomber set sometime. In short, well, markets are incentive-driven. It's the Tragedy of the Commons, look up that somewhere.

Besides, there's no guarantee that those lower tier players won't just relist that energy for market price and make a profit for themselves. And I doubt there are that many players with that sort of purchasing power that can make a lasting dent in the market's equilibrium prices, even if those players don't relist it for lower. Again, you're thinking microeconomics; I'm talking in macro terms. Large-scale demand shifts. You have to rely on the natural purchasing patterns of people, and the game's structure has to take that into account into its design. Yours is a noble thought, but it simply won't work.

The goal of crown sinks is along those lines. Sure, OOO would like buying CE to be an attractive option compared to paying for it with crowns, but I think we can all agree that player retention is the biggest factor in long-term CE purchases. Short term CE purchases occur with ... events like the Rose Regalia promotion or the Steam launch, spikes in the CE supply that eventually dwindle down. And long term CE purchases will only really occur if crown sinks are added, because the current system is as such: if you play the game long enough, you don't have any use for crowns other than trading them on the market for CE. However, with crown sinks, higher-level players have a reason to get crowns and sell their hoards of CE,. thereby increasing the supply available and lowering the equilibrium point on the Crowns-CE market.

Because, hey, if energy prices are gonna stay realy high, then it's time for my Scenario #2 I mentioned in some other Energy-related topic. Players won't be able to afford to buy CE and will eventually quit playing SK => we will have a slowly dying game without new players to bring it back to life.
Pretty much what Valkier said.

Yeah, and I said it too. We'll lose player retention because the price of energy keeps going up and turns off more recent players. The "cycle that feeds itself," bad stuff.

This thread was better when Nj did it.