[Cash Shop Idea] Game Time Token

[RobbieH]

The trouble with this is that this is essentially printing money. Do you know what happens when you dump a whole load of additional money into an economy? The value of money becomes smaller. Quickly. It's called hyperinflation, and there are numerous, tragic real-life examples of why it's a terrible, terrible idea. Things that you used to be able to buy for a thousand gil now cost a million. The token solution folks are proposing in this thread does not work that way, because at no point along the way is money being created in an abnormal fashion. Players earn gil the same way they always have. Players who buy tokens with real life money then sell those tokens for in-game gil - but this does not generate new gil, it simply passes around the gil that already exists. Hyperinflation does not occur.

GW2 proves otherwise, the price of ingame items even went up, and keep going up.

[TaranTatsuuchi]

GW2 proves otherwise, the price of ingame items even went up, and keep going up.

That's not necesserilly due to the 'token' system.

There's many other factors to consider.
The amount of faucets vs the amount of sinks among those...


Adding straight money to gil would be adding a faucet without a coresponding sink.
Thus inflation.

Adding a token to trade with other players however just moves the gil around, and in the cases of market tax actually removes some from the system, making it a sink.

[HPDelron]

GW2 proves otherwise, the price of ingame items even went up, and keep going up.

These games always have inflation since the money generated by killing monsters, turning quests and selling loot to NPCs always outstrips money being removed from the system by things like transportation and repair fees. Unless you move to a zero-sum NPC economy prices go up quickly, period. In fact it's reasonable to expect that 3 years from now in order to have the same buying power of 100-gil today in 3 years you might need to have as much as 125 gil (inflation tends to be rather high in MMOs). However with a money printing system like this, the rate of inflation would be staggering. We're not talking about a given super-popular item going from 1mil-1.5mil over the course of year.

We're talking about common item like a Rank 5 Materia going from 100k->4 mil over the course of a month.

Tokens really wouldn't do this. You might see more price volatility since savers wouldn't be sitting on tons of gil. But nothing like 100k->4 mil in a month.

[RobbieH]

snip

If you people think Tokens are going to stop RMT and/or bots you're insane.

Also i know it's an example, but no way V materia will go from 100k to 4m (unless someone thinks that by buying every cheap materia can resell for 10 times more at this point), we're going for the next expansion, people who raid since Creator came out are maxed or almost there (mainly thanks to tokens), the price of the V materias won't go back to millions, VI materia will probably come with SB, V will be the IV of HW in SB, did IV cost millions anytime during HW? No.

The token system is bad because:

- People who have accumulated Gil over time and can't make much gil and buy a Token -> out of Gil, where do they turn? Are they going to buy a Token to sell in game? What was the point of buying it in game then to begin with? So they'll either have to deal with being out of gil or will turn to RMT.

- Rich people can play the game for free.

I also find funny people worried about inflation when there's people in the game who buy every single mat in the market at 100% and sell for 1000%+, especially when a new relic requires crafted stuff, or simply new Crafting recipes.

Let's create a scenario here:

Let's say Token conversion is 20€ for 10M, and i buy the token so i can make some in game gil.

Item X costs 10k per stack, new recipes come out, or new relic that requires those items, snipers already bought almost every stack unless very expensive after they read patch notes.

Item X stacks now costs 2m each, now please explain me how would i benefit from wanting to buy a Token so i could make Gil in-game? I'm curious.

I bet the Token price will also skyrocket to match the market prices.