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Do not remove the double Vanguard Requests 06/02, PLEASE!
According to the topic Thursday's Maintenance 6/2 created by @Treeshark:
As our "friend" quoted in the topic created by him, on the maintenance of the day 06/02, "So the event is on to help with the supply feedstock" Wouldn't it be the opportunity to let it permanent? Like talismans.
Currently there are very few ways to farm in TERA, and yet people who do IOD bams are harmed when they try to make a group to kill them (due to the kills distribution).
I come through this topic give feedback on the continuation of double Vanguard Requests, I ask that if you have the same opinion as mine, to manifest here.
Edit:
Treeshark posted in Feedstock Update topic:
Thanks
Treeshark wrote:... TERA Rewards not being doubled in the Vanguard Requests - So the event is on to help with the feedstock supply, but it is not rewarding double TERA Rewards. It's quite confusing so we'll be ending the event this Thursday. ...
As our "friend" quoted in the topic created by him, on the maintenance of the day 06/02, "So the event is on to help with the supply feedstock" Wouldn't it be the opportunity to let it permanent? Like talismans.
Currently there are very few ways to farm in TERA, and yet people who do IOD bams are harmed when they try to make a group to kill them (due to the kills distribution).
I come through this topic give feedback on the continuation of double Vanguard Requests, I ask that if you have the same opinion as mine, to manifest here.
Edit:
Treeshark posted in Feedstock Update topic:
Treeshark wrote:... We will also keep the Vanguard Request Reward doubling event on, but the TERA Rewards issue is not fixed. We will only reward retroactively for the past week on the missing rewards. The basis is that this event is doing more good than bad, and we will just message that this event is not rewarding the double amount of TERA Rewards it says it is. After 6/2, we will not be compensating for this. ...
Thanks
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Comments
A little over a month, I and many people I know stopped playing for not having to get money in the game, many people do not have so much time available for it.
If return to old form , I and over 80 % of people who returned to play will stop again , and look for other games more accessible .
Please revisit this decision and listen to the appeal of the players.
Can you and the rest of the Tera community get this stupid notion out of your heads? An influx of (limited) liquid gold available from dailies does not hurt the economy. Having a resource to allocate gold may even do quite the contrary and stimulate the economy as the available rewards are so lackluster and time to catch up is severely limited. Vanguard rewards, at the current price, could give 5-8 more feedstock per completion and you and the rest of the game wouldn't bat an eye. There's nothing stopping someone from simply selling off a small portion of their earned valuables for gold and making a small profit while not breaking bank on consumables. It's being pumped back into the economy both ways. And with the current rates for just about everything in the game, 200-300 more gold each vanguard reward is entirely negligible in the face of inflation.
With less accessibility, the game's population dwindles, the EMP sellers die off, and the players with the most gold that play the broker are more inclined to jack prices up even harder. The gold could come from just about anywhere; gamers will always do what nets the most profit may it be Ghilleglade or TAR or Island of Dawn or making 65 reapers. There is no limit on how you make it or how much you make; only the amount of time one has in the day to spend working for it. Should we just never have events with good rewards? Should we just eliminate gold earnings altogether? The obvious answer is no, that would be entirely stupid. But for whatever reason, people seem to think easier access to gold is what's tearing this economy up when it's neither causing the problem nor exacerbating it. Daily quests were a thing for three gear patches with free gold; that didn't do anything to hurt the game. LoT was farmable and even bottable for ages when there was no easy way to get mwa. Gold farming in open world was always available until VM5. Tera's timesink is stable and it always has been. It's the reason why production point values or vanguard badges are a thing; they serve as limiters to earned profit and due to the amount of time needed to overcome those limits, there is no longer any way to become economy-breaking rich just by playing the game.
The only thing causing inflation is a trifecta of player population, new patches creating a need for consumables, and general greed. With less EMP sellers and people available to farm items, demand increases while supply declines rapidly - particularly due to the fact that RNG can limit a player's progress at any time. Awakened enchanting on any one item can cause a sharp increase in price on consumables for a period of time due to the large amount of consumables needed. With the introduction of the ninja patch, there are more people enchanting right now than weeks ago, which is simply an example of demand outstripping available supply (at a reasonable price). Moreover, more people are playing the broker more than ever. And worse, they're becoming less and less shameful about it. Turning a price on any item that comes and goes in the broker nets a massive profit and it's becoming common knowledge. Have a million in seed gold to start with? Congratulations; you can make 50k in a matter of hours just sitting in front of the trade broker and selling items for 5% more than you bought it for. Oh look; that extra 20k or so you made farming eighty IoD vanguard quests on ten different characters suddenly looks a lot smaller, doesn't it? I tried my hand at turning the broker last patch for about a week and the profit was just stupid. Those with the means to do so will most assuredly buy items when they become a lower price the instant they become available and raise the prices on them. It's just logical, and unfortunately it's causing a huge leap in broker prices and we can't do anything to stop the same players from buying items when they get cheaper. Unless there's a limit on how much one can sell in a day, there is no way to fix this issue. The richest players will get richer and the ones desperate to net a profit while enchanting their fresh 65's will be SoL. Having a negligible amount of extra gold from farming vanguard dailies until your soul is drained of any fun you might have had playing is not going to hurt the economy, and might even give new players that edge they need to fight an ever-inflated economy. Please, please stop spreading this misconception of liquid gold hurting the game.
Sorry, but... that just isn't correct, and you only have to look at all the times in TERA history to see the proof. Increasing gold rewards does not add any value at all when the entire economy is earning more gold equally. This is precisely because TERA does not have enough gold sinks, so there aren't enough items that have a fixed gold price that take gold out of the system. Therefore, it just means that the gold is less valuable relative to the items you are trading for. You can see this most directly by the continued increase of the EMP:Gold ratio -- it goes to show that the value of gold relative to an actual real world dollar is decreasing dramatically.
Again, increasing the gold rewards universally through vanguard doesn't make the game "more accessible". But this is not the same as a commodity like MWA being infinitely farmable, because there is a finite way that MWA is "sunk": enchanting. The need for MWA is finite and it disappears into the ether as people use it. So a lower Alkahest price (based on the expected rate of earning gold) actually does make the enchanting (and the game by proxy) more accessible. This is just like how all these events right now to increase feedstock rewards are making it more accessible. But gold is not like that because, again, most of the ways people spend their gold are trading with other players, and not at in-game gold merchants. Therefore, the value of gold is not tied to anything but what others consider it to be worth.
The reason the richest players will keep getting richer is because the game has no gold sinks -- there is absolutely nothing to spend the gold on that takes it out of the game. So as gold rewards increase from "the poor", they become more willing to spend higher amounts of gold for items on the broker, which in turn gets redistributed to people who are playing the broker via negotiation and Elite (to eliminate those gold sinks too). So, indeed, the rich keep getting richer, but it's off the back of everyday players who are using their increased gold earnings to feed this perpetual motion machine.
So, respectfully, it is not a misconception nor a stupid notion. This situation has played out countless times throughout TERA history ever since the gold sinks were removed. If the purpose is to make the game more accessible to casual or new players, increasing liquid gold will never help unless people are going to be spending a good part of that gold at in-game merchants and taking it completely off the table -- because then the value of the gold is tied to something concrete. Increasing gold in that scenario would actually make you richer. As it stands right now, the value of gold is tied only to supply, and supply is ever-increasing, so increasing gold doesn't help because everything costs more.
Imagine if, starting tomorrow, every single person in your country's salary doubled overnight. Everyone might think the next day that they're rich, but it would take absolutely no time at all until the prices of everything doubled as well, and the value of your currency re-adjusted relative the rest of the world. You can't make everyone richer just by printing more money.
(Yes, I am salty that I kept a lot of my assets in liquid gold when taking a break before the Brawler patch, only to come back and find my purchasing power cut by threefold due to TAR/GG)
I daresay the closest we've had to a gold sink that wasn't directly related to enchanting is the recent degradation in commodity acquisition (lower feedstock, etc.), which has only proven to give players grief over the amount of grind and inaccessibility to higher level gear. So I absolutely have no idea what you're implying when you say we've had a gold sink "removed" (unless of course you're talking about the removal of mwa from shops a looooong time ago), nor do I see evidence at all in the past of a spike in inflation due to the availability of gold. Enchanting is still around as it always has been. There's no less of an issue there than there ever was and it's become heavier than ever with the introduction of awakened enchanting.
If we're trying to draw real-world parallels, then the argument starts to become moot despite how often people attempt to compare. I think anyone with half a brain can see the consequences of raising the level of a population's income; everything becomes pricier. You don't have to be a major in economics to understand that. But there's a ton of reasons the comparison falls flat. For starters, production of commodities in real life is done by people on wages - placing value on the work they produce and stimulating economic growth. In any MMO, obtaining said commodities takes doing quests/grinding dailies - activities that by all means stimulate supply but are, in essence, produced from "nothing" other than playing the game - activities than have no "value" or "worth" to them. No matter what you obtain from these quests, you're getting "something from nothing"; or in other words, something free in the same vain of doubling the wages of a population (albeit this being such an extreme example).
It's literally because of this that concepts like "gold sinks" even exist to begin with. The solution shouldn't be to remove the free access to gold, but rather introduce more means of enchanting that involve spending it, so players at least have the option. Right now the only way to get from +10 to +15 involves mwa, ea, or pa; all of which are only obtainable through vanguard or the broker (tokens too, but no one in their right mind is going to use those for that). With that said, there are situations where wages need to be increased to adjust for inflation. Not because of any overlying economic reasons, but because there's a threshold where income becomes too unrealistically low to live with, due to the fact that there simply isn't enough money to pump back into the economy that don't involve base needs and the common man is no longer able-bodied and capable of living comfortably enough to eek a living out while producing something of value. What makes this scenario so different in an MMO is that fact that this is still a game, not something someone has to do. If there's no realistic means of farming, people will get bored and they will quit when they find they're not having fun any longer. There's nothing keeping them farming dailies in the same way one is forced to work to make a living. Unlike the real world where the population continues to grow without stopping, we're currently playing a game on the decline with less and less people available to farm. Having access to actual gold is no different than giving us more commodities; feedstock can become worthless when people stop enchanting and gold can become worthless when there's nothing to spend it on. I guess that's not only inevitable but expected - and yet I can't help but feel there's a better way to go about it than removing access to every possible means of making gold.
What I'm trying to make you understand is that the amount of gold we're getting from double vanguard is simply not enough to make a dent on the economy. Players getting gold from vanguard is just not significant to the point where it's perpetuating the buy-low-sell-high practice and I personally find it a little more irresponsible to rely on the flow of consumables (that could fall flat depending on events or progress into a patch) to make gold when there's other things people need gold for (i.e. purchasing EMP, buying lesser consumables, getting seed money to fund crafting or making less disastrous investments, actually enjoying themselves in the game, etc.) and having to rely on the biannual release of new content to restart the process all over again (which requires spending for one's own gear to begin with). After all, if we look at the current situation, we're getting plenty of feedstock through vanguard, the awakened enchanting event, and the upcoming strongbox event; what's bottlenecking us now is mwa. Give us access to that through something other than vanguard earnings? I don't know, I'm not the most creative player in the game. But "free" gold is only harmful when it's not being spent. The game could be giving us more consumables instead and it would still only go to one of two places; towards our pockets or enchanting it away, just as gold is. I guess I'm not saying anything different from you, except I feel like we need to have a way to spend the gold through the game instead of having it removed entirely.
Yes, this is really the point. When I talk about gold sinks being removed, I'm referring in particular to the one thing that's really at the crux of this whole issue: Masterwork Alkahest. Prior to F2P, this was available on a gold merchant. So the entire enchanting process relied on a) getting fodder gear from dungeons, and b) buying alkahest from the gold merchant (at least whatever you didn't get from drops). This created both the need for gold and the way to spend it in-game that removed said gold, creating a sort of barometer for what gold is "worth" -- it all helped to control inflation. But they removed this at the F2P transition to place it instead on the cash shop. This is really the start of this entire issue that has been going on for years.
In recent patches, they introduced tiered alkahest that gets you to +9, and by doing it this way they were able to ratchet up the merchant price of alkahest. But it doesn't solve the biggest area of demand, which is everything after +9, including the biggest demand they created: awakening.
So yes, even the double gold you get from Vanguard does put a dent on the economy because it's universal. It may not seem like very much on its own, but multiplied over the entire playerbase, the amount of new gold flowing into the economy just keeps going up endlessly. As Pixelator mentioned above, anyone in the "middle class" who leaves the game with a nest egg of gold and comes back will simply find their gold worth a lot less than it used to be. Simple direct-buy 995 EMP costumes that used to go for 10k gold now go for 30k+.
I'm not arguing at all that the "answer" is to make new/casual players poorer so they have to grind even longer to get anything. Actually, it's the opposite: we need to find a way to increase the value of time so that it feels more rewarding to play the game and less needlessly grindy. That's why I'm in favor of increasing the amount of feedstock and credits that are rewarded for Vanguard, but not the amount of gold. Obviously that won't solve all the problem (not by any means), but it creates more consumables relative to gold so that more gold can get redistributed in their direction through trade, rather than only going out to the already-rich. In other words, it increases the value of time/effort (at least to some degree, and for now).
Even though this problem has gone on for years, hopefully the staff will finally find a way to resolve it sooner or later, even if putting MWA on the merchant again isn't seen as being an option for business reasons.