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Ultima server's economy is really really bad.


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Why our economy is bad

 

I'd like to preface a few things before I get started on my large rant.

 

First off, I do not hate Ultima server.

Second, I do not hate trading.

Third, I do not hate the people who try to make a profit whilst trading.

Fourth, the only thing I hate is the state of the economy and the people creating the problem.

 

As a quick disclaimer: Please do not take this post as hate or shit posting. That's not what this is meant to be, this post is a collection of my thoughts about the state of the economy and the reason why it is the way it is. Please don't flame me because I'm pointing out what everybody else knows is true. Thanks.

 

Now that the brief introduction disclaimers are out of the way, allow me to introduce myself. My name is Wyatt, I go by the alias Varista in most of the games I play, though my screen name on Ultima server is Auroboro. I joined the server for real In 2014. I've had more than 2 years playing here so I think I know a little bit on what I'm talking about. I've had my time to fully understand the mechanics of DT's and PD's here.

 

I'm wanting to discuss the blatant white elephant in the room on this server that I know doesn't just bother me, but a whole lot of other people as well. This white elephant is the economy. I don't mean the real world economy, no, I mean our in game economy. The act of trading items or selling them for PD's and DT's. Let me just get right to the point.

 

Our economy sucks. Really really bad.

It didn't take long for me to realize how suck our economy was. At first I originally thought that DT's were a good thing but over time I slowly realized how bad they are for this game. Our rate for DT's to PD's are ~6.66 PD's for ~1 DT. So, usually, people end up selling about 5 DT's for 30 PD's or 35 PD's for some people thanks to rounding up. Regardless of this, the norm has been set in stone. 6.66 PD's for 1 DT and that doesn't really fluctuate or change. It was a good start creating that unchanging minimum I admit. Ultimately though it just ends up not really mattering.

 

Call me predictable, but I'm going to use a pretty good example in this case. When you can look at all the other PSO servers; Argo, Crystal-Argo, Schthack, Jupiter, Genocide, Legits, Nova, Ephinea, Eden; all of these with the exception of Eden all have one single thing in common: You cannot donate to the server for in game currency that is worth more than PD's. And yes, you're probably going:

Well yeah, duh idiot, but we aren't every other server, this is Ultima, this is how we operate!”

That excuse is old and played out.

Telling me that “This is Ultima, we operate differently, so deal with it” is not a good excuse to have an economy primarily run by paying real world money. That, in it's entirety, is half of my point. This server's economy is primarily run by paying real world money. DT's are real world money. You want a good example of how this is? Go to any trade. Go find out what any real event item is worth in both DT's and PD's, and then try and buy that item for PD's. You might be able to sell or buy event items for PD's, but most items people won't even accept PD's. PD's are the game's currency and we don't even use it that much. Most of the items we buy are gotten through paying real money.

 

And I get it, if it's your choice to pay real money to get your stuff then I can't stop you but that doesn't not contribute to the problem. I'm going to use this as an example:

Dark weapons. I know that's a very extreme example, but it's a pretty common one. People don't even bother trying to trade dark weapon for other items anymore. If they do happen, they most likely happen in PM's where nobody else can see but the two participating. The majority of trading in this game or selling happens with DT's. Rarely ever do you find a B>DM or B>DF or a B>PB topic where it says “I will trade all these X items for a DF/DM/PB, post here”. Almost always you will see “I'm buying DM/DF/PB for 500 DT's, PM me for more details, don't ever post here or else I will report you.” and nobody ever hears of it.

 

People don't even offer PD's as sweeteners anymore. You go to schthack right now into the trade section and auctioning section and you see topics littered with people offering PD's as both sweeteners and real primary offers to things, you wanna know why that is? Because their economy isn't littered with an item that's worth 6x the worth of 1 PD that you can buy for 1 dollar; they also don't have a hundred people buying those currencies.

Oh Auroboro how predictable using schthack as an example how cringe can you get”

Yeah well here's the thing that really gets me: You say that, and you make fun of me for it, but no other server is stupid enough to create this kind of inflating garbage economy like we have and seem to be okay with it.

But no, lets not acknowledge that, on a server wide scale, we have a hundred people buying DT's for real world money and our economy doesn't even use PD's anymore. You, yes you, you may be the one outlying example of some one that doesn't do that but the vast majority of us do. I myself am guilty of it. But honestly, that's only half of the problem.

The other half is all those cheating scum bags that scam others by jacking up prices of items and profiting.

You know who profits from jacking up prices of items that are rare and powerful? Only those who are rich enough to buy them in mass quantities and sell them in those same quantities. The same people who are rich enough and spend thousands of dollars for the DT's to horde all of the best stuff and sell them for extortionate amounts. But what's even worse are the scum bags who come on every single day and over price hundred of items simply because 1 rich guy overpaid for a few items.

 

Let me break down Ultima's economy every month:

>New guy joins server and pays a few hundred dollars for DT's to gear up.

>New guy then makes sure he can get all the stuff he wants by overpaying for all the stuff he buys.

>Everybody sees him overpaying and decides they want to get in a piece of the pie as well.

>So then everybody that has those items (not literally everybody I'm just generalizing for the sake of speed) starts to massively overprice those items.

>The economy goes to even more shit and nobody benefits except the people that are already rich.

Do you see the trend here? A new player comes on the server every month and massively over pays for everything and these jerks come in and start to permanently sell these things for higher prices. What's even worse than that is that since our economy is revolved around real world money trading, it wouldn't be as big of a deal if they went up in price DT wise if you could buy them with PD's or other items, but you can't even do that; most people wont even accept PD's in big high end trades and that just defaults everybody to having to spend an extortionate amount of money to get anything they want.

 

You know when I first bought my Cent/battle I overpaid by about 40 DT's in stuff? I didn't trade just DT's, I traded specifically items but I completely regret it now, because the only item that can prove this argument kind of wrong is Cent battle and it was 100 DT's value when I bought mine and now my Cent battle that I paid 140 DT's for is now worth 100% less down to 40 DT's maximum. But most items don't even do this. As long as there are people wanting items like this people will continue to over price things and scam people out of their money. I can't really do anything against it or shame you for wanting to make a profit but this is getting ludicrous. 500 dollars for a dark weapon? Lol, really? Even more than that for a Dark Bridge and even more than that for an STA. I mean come on guys, 500 dollars for anything is ridiculous let alone 100.

 

The overall issue here is that you have a combination of both the economy being revolved around real world money, things being massively over priced all the time, and people taking advantage of this and being scummy by selling them for ridiculous prices. There's only a few people I can name off the top of my head that this kind of system benefits and that's SogeKing, Christian, Sabrina, and Night. I'm not even directly saying these people are the cause of this entire bull shit economic downfall but these four people are names I thought of off the top of my head that would benefit from this kind of system because they are stupidly rich.

 

Am I stupidly rich? Absolutely not. Is this just me complaining that I can't afford every high end item I want? Absolutely not. This is a complaint about why we continue to let these people dictate the entire server's economy and why we cant seem to admit to ourselves and everybody around us that letting DT's be the primary source of buying and selling items in this game is bad.

 

I love this game and I love this server, but I do not want to sit around for another year watching specific people manipulate new player ignorance and other such nonsense to profit by scamming people and creating an extremely inflated market. They're ruining trading for everybody.

 

There could be a lot of fixes. I have personally thought of fixes myself, one of them being specifically for dark weapons we could make PGF on the donation list for a week, or make them drop significantly more often this Christmas event. Either of these spit-balled ideas would most likely drop the price of this item down significantly. I can see the people that have dark weapons not liking this idea because the price of their weapon drops down significantly but nobody here really loses anyways. Those who are rich, can still get richer, but they wont be outright scamming people to get rich anymore, and people like me, and my friends who play, don't have to sit around in an inflated economy scoffing at the sight of the “Will buy Dark X for 600 DT's, PM me please” topics that come up every friggin week.

 

I also hear a lot of nonsense about why it's not on donation list is because Larva wants more money and stuff like that; imo that's all nonsense, I'm not going to pay attention to that or encourage that kind of talk but what I am encouraging is that we all look at our own server that we've built together here and recognize that we have a lot of cleaning up to do. There are ways we can fix out incredibly inflated economy without ruining everybody's experiences. I'm not asking for a witch hunt or a ban hunt, I want this to get better.

 

As it stands right now,

Our economy needs a lot of work.

The first step to solving any problem is recognizing that there is one.”

Thank you for reading.

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yeah 500 dt's + for a dark weapon/sta is ridiculous, but i have no idea how we would fix it. You cant really tell people not to charge a certain amount for shit, and nobody wants to sell a dark weapon for half the price just to feel like they are giving the little guys a chance. :onion-head70:

I remember last year when i started saving up DT's for a DM, the price went up faster than i could get DT's. it got to the point where i just said fudge it... last year after xmas was when dark weapons sky rocketed in price.

Edited by ultrajerky
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Mmm just question, I don't recall SogeKing or Sabrina being "rich and abuse by taking advantage of the system". If anything I thought SogeKing hunts for stuff and Sabrina is victim of the system too. Are there episodes that happened in the past or something? D:

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5 minutes ago, GoPikachu said:

Mmm just question, I don't recall SogeKing or Sabrina being "rich and abuse by taking advantage of the system". If anything I thought SogeKing hunts for stuff and Sabrina is victim of the system too. Are there episodes that happened in the past or something? D:

I specifically said I wasn't saying they did any of that but that those were just people I could think of off the top of my head that were rich.

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12 minutes ago, GoPikachu said:

Ah, understood. Thanksu for the reply :D (sorry, post so long that I missed bits here and there while skimming)

I implore you that when you can read the post in its entirety. I spent the last 4 months gathering these thoughts and constructing this.

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I think it sucks that people have to offer as much as they do for some weapons in this game, but I still don't really think that someone offering 300DTs for a dark weapon is the problem. Dark weapons are hard to get and not many people want to trade them off. The problem is when someone selling something is forcing others to overpay for things, that I really dislike, and it's kind of a hard thing to police. You can't really tell someone what to do with their money or the items they get in game. It's sad to see happen, but there is always the option of just not buying off these people.

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I don't think this is as big of a problem as you say.  At the very worst you can spend PDs sphering weapons, which makes them worth about 1/7.7 of a DT.  There's also special events throughout the year that you can only spend PDs on.  There is an issue with dark weapons, created by the fact that DM and DF are basically unrivaled and both are only available a small fraction of the year.  They should really be available all-year, albeit at a fairly difficult rate and maybe for a very limited number of IDs (viridia could really use a boost...)

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4 minutes ago, mcxvi said:

 and maybe for a very limited number of IDs (viridia could really use a boost...)

Pinkal too :onion-head34:

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I feel like this is the billionth time that someone has posted about prices. Here's my take.

 So long as people can donate for stuff, things will never change. 

Take it up with the big man and see if he'll eliminate donations. Good luck.

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17 minutes ago, rayblasterx said:

I feel like this is the billionth time that someone has posted about prices. Here's my take.

 So long as people can donate for stuff, things will never change. 

Take it up with the big man and see if he'll eliminate donations. Good luck.

lol basically thought process would be "stop accepting free money from players who choose to give it to me in exhange for in game stuff" or "make the game economy decent for a game i dont play". every single one of you will chose the former if you were server admin, hands down. nothing is going to change. we all know who was the cause of inflation in january, playing pretend that you dont know wont change it.

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Dudes on some servers where they have a black market you can buy PGF for like 20-30 bucks. When did this server turn out to be 300-500bucks. Also seen some TJS going for like 2bucks clean. Here they were 50. And that was only sjs. Luckily like some people will say "you aren't obligated to donate if you don't want to" well that is entirely true. You're not, but due to some enhacements in monsters stats you are pretty much forced to get dts to get hit on weapons. 

 

EP2 Is the real problem here if you ask me 

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6 minutes ago, ryukin said:

lol basically thought process would be "stop accepting free money from players who choose to give it to me in exhange for in game stuff" or "make the game economy decent for a game i dont play". every single one of you will chose the former if you were server admin, hands down. nothing is going to change. we all know who was the cause of inflation in january, playing pretend that you dont know wont change it.

Someone needs to make a daily struggle meme with those 2 choices on it lol Also I must be the only one who doesn't know who this evil mysterious person(s) is. I feel like its just some conspiracy theory but if not let me know pls. I wanna know what all the cool kids know :c

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I wrote a lot more but deleted most of it. Here's my main thought:

PDs ARE WORTHLESS 9 DAYS OUT OF 10 AT THIS POINT. When I first came here only 4 months ago I saw tons of people selling DTs for PDs at 6.6:1. Now it is rare to have (maybe) 1 person that sells 15 DTs for 99 or 105 PDs every few days, but other than that the PDs just pile up and they serve either to buy you some very cheap items (extra V502 because you're too lazy to trade it back and forth, 3 Seals because you started a new FO and it will take a while to get to 130 for Hylian, etc) or, at this point bc it's so hard to trade PDs for DTs, to add attribute. It's 120 PDs to add 35% (well, 119), so basically this would be like an 8:1 conversion rate. Personally there's no chance I'd spend 15 hard earned DTs to add attribute right now bc I need to accumulate more DTs to trade for items I want, or to finish adding hit to some items I already have, and getting PDs to just add attribute selling lower end items is easy. If someone is selling something for 5 DTs or more, I can just about guarantee you that if you offer them PDs they will say no, unless you are offering like 10:1 value. Not saying that in a negative way, right now I literally wouldn't even sell something for 15 PDs, I'd sell it for 2 DTs or say no thanks. I just have absolutely no use for PDs atm, and the same is true for a lot of people. When you think about it, it really makes no sense for PDs to have much value, because they serve 0 purpose in-game aside from adding specials to S-Ranks (barely matters), the 1-50 PD items from Paganini (matters even less), and to buy PS to add attribute (and as stated if we say 15 DTs = 99 PDs, using DTs is objectively better since it gets you 5% more, and you can spread it however you want)

 

So this brings me to my conclusion about what I think is the most reasonable way to make PDs matter while still making it desirable for people to purchase DTs to get the server money.

 

Change it to 15 DTs = 25% attribute (or even 20%, just like hit), to make it so that it is generally preferable to use PDs to buy a PS so that a player who wants to add attribute with cash money has to buy 15 DTs (or whatever amount the community settles on...20% is 80 PDs and 30% is 99) to buy 99 PDs from a player (which helps the in-game economy) to get 30% hit instead of 20-25%, and suddenly there will be 1 very meaningful thing you can do with PDs in-game that you wouldn't always rather do with DTs.

 

I seriously think this is an absolute golden money idea.

 

As far as new players coming in and donating and "overpaying" and then the prices going up sometimes...I don't begrudge anyone for trying to make the most they can out of their items, and I don't begrudge anyone for wanting to just fork over cash for items instead of waiting months for the event to grind for something nonstop and maybe get it. I think the donation system is great overall and I'm glad that people can enjoy the game whatever way they like here. Items getting more expensive can be a problem, but I really feel that this is a result of  the economy being absolutely ruled by DTs while the original in-game currency has essentially no use. By giving players a reason to spend DTs on PDs I think you will see a lot more DTs spread around and PDs being consumed creating a much more lively economy where even new players that spend $0 can find things that both veterans or new players willing to donate will trade their DTs for. If you see that happen, I think there's a good chance you'll see the price of some items start to drop back down a bit too.

Edited by shong
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