Why are Crowns Tradeable?

Discussion in 'General Discussion' started by Brian4, Sep 12, 2018.

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  1. Alleine Dragonfyre

    Alleine Dragonfyre Avatar

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    More play to win is definitely needed.
     
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  2. Lord Tachys al`Fahn

    Lord Tachys al`Fahn Avatar

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    No... it's a laziness factor... I never get to be around when the livestreams happen, so I sub to get the cotos and other "goodies", and to be included automatically for the stretch goals. $9 is 66% of the most I have paid to play a game, so not too worried about missing out on a value meal at McCrappies each month :p
     
  3. Nelzie

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    People buy $100k of gold for $9?

    That's bizarre. There's so many better things $9 can be spent on. Like a monthly subscription to the game that helps continue to support the game.
     
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  4. Nelzie

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    Nah, just more stuff to spend money on is needed. More skins and other goodies that aren't just pieces of furniture, with very little in game function.

    Like... I would love to see a Firearms skill tree added for Episode 2, since we already have a variety of Kobold Based "energy" weapons and Cannon and soon pirate ships, etc., etc.

    I'd gladly give up Swords and Plate for Firearms and Light Armor.
     
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  5. xadoor

    xadoor Avatar

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    YES, they do. And it was $16/100k when I first started playing.

    RMT might be keeping this game alive so careful what you wish for. And as gold plummets to zero we'll find out if it is or not as the folks that get off making money will all leave(like the family that made SNEEDS in the LORAX). I have to admit I found great satisfaction in selling gold to buy my village bundle so I totally understand them but I also jut plain enjoy playing the game and will continue to play even if I can't do that anymore. But there needs to be a REASON(s) to farm gold or the entire economy fails. Having gold worth real money is a reason. IF not that then what? And you better answer soon cause the value of gold is in free fall.
     
  6. Vladamir Begemot

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    For those who are interested, @Umuri has a very nice tool that you can look at COTO stats with.

    If you want to see the last 3 months of info, set it to 3 Months of Data starting 3 Months ago.

    With COTO's, you can see that we destroy about 16,000 per month on the Crown Merchant, 3,000 on repairs, and 7,000 on taxes (in the last 3 months, it does change over time).

    And since it was mentioned, we've had 206 Gold COTO's drop in loot in the last 3 months. I don't know how many of the other types, if they are all the same then that would be close to 2000?

    It's fun to look at.
     
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  7. SmokerKGB

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    I can only speak for myself as I deal with "Gold" crowns, which are only purchased from the store... I watch the "Live" streams after every release and need to purchase at least $5 to receive the stretch goals offered "only" during the stream, so along with my "voluntary" subscription of 9 crowns ($9/mo), I end up with a surplus of Gold crowns... So, I sell the balance to players for cheap, what this does is give me Ingame gold that has already been farmed by another player, so I don't need to farm my own gold... I then purchase supplies I need to craft things, this takes those resources off the market...

    The problems with games is that resources AND gold are farmed in endless amounts, in an economy this causes "inflation" AND reduces "rarity" of these commodities, very bad things for an economy...

    It's actually pretty smart for Port to do this because they never sell Gold directly to players, and its a gold sink at the same time, along with being a "Cash cow" too...

    And when my bank fills up with "rares", I can cash in for lots of ingame gold...
     
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  8. Elwyn

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    From what I've heard, there are two things.

    First, there is a global limit to their drop rate. If twice as many people are playing at a specific time, the same number will still drop, so individuals will see (on average) half of the coins drop as when less people are playing.

    Second, Chris has said he watches the public/player vendor sale prices of coins, and adjusts the global limit based on that. I recall that one benchmark he had back in the early days for turning up COTO drops was 2500g per. As you may know, we blew right through that around the time that the store item crown vendors came out, and for the past few months it's been in the 3600-4000 range.

    But why don't "I" see more of them drop? (not specifically me, but rhetorically anyone) I suspect that they naturally have a higher chance to drop in the highest-level areas, so the people who do The Rise all the time tend to get more of them than other people simply because they get more "pulls of the handle". So, because math.

    One thing has puzzled me, though. A few months ago there was a metric buttload of 250-value coins on the usual coin exchange vendors. The only way I know to get those is in drops, so either someone had been hoarding a lot of coin drops, or there was some other source for a while. I find this weird, and wouldn't mind knowing where they came from.

    Now, as for the non-gold coins, I'm not sure that they have been all that useful. All I see is that they ensure that most of the coin drops are mostly useless. There was once an method to exchange them for gold coins at 2:1, but that is gone. The only thing the other coins seem to be useful for is a specific boost potion... and as different-colored deco. I'd be happy if they went away like the control point gates.

    One of the main attractions of COTOs as an item from the "rewards" subscription is that you can sell them to someone else. I think that if they locked COTOs, it would have the exact opposite effect from what you suggest. They are a representation of game funding value that will eventually be used up on some item or service in game, but selling them to another player merely passes along that value without using it.

    If they were to sell COTO vendor items for IGG however, that would be a problem. IGG comes from nothing more than player effort, which does not keep the lights on. Instead they have provided a way for a player to trade grinding/farming effort to another player for an item that came from funding the game. Did you notice up there how I pointed out that their value jumped the moment you could use them to buy store items in-game?

    "Pay to win" properly means something about the game that forces you to get the credit card out in order to play the game in a reasonable way. COTOs/PLEX let someone else get their credit card out for you. Result, you do not have to pay real money to """win""".

    With enough IGG, and dedication, and enough people willing to sell COTOs to you, it should be possible to set up an exchange. There have been times over the past few months when both of them got wiped out of inventory, and they had to raise their buy price to get more people to sell coins to them. I am quite sure they get many of their coins by buying them from other players. In my limited experience, the hardest part of running a "clean" exchange (only getting inventory from other players) is getting people to sell them to you to build up an inventory, especially when the player base is not expanding.

    COTOs are not "turned into" IGG, they are exchanged. That is an important distinction in MMO economics. COTOs are turned into lot rent, store items, gear repairs, boost potions, and New You, because those are the only things that destroy them. You have to follow the life cycle of a currency. IGG and COTOs have different life cycles, which makes it useful for players to exchange them. It's sort of like how subatomic particles each have their own life cycles.

    You an have it now, or you can have it cheap. Choose one. (The usual third element of this saying is "quality", which is constant here.)

    Definitely confusing for items that you may want more than one of.

    If you use them for rent, you are losing money. Rent value is 3500, but you can get at least 3600 by selling them on the market. For what it's worth, this also has an effect on the COTO market, because rent is one of the few things can be paid either way. So not only do you come out a few hundred IGG ahead, your COTOs are now freed up for someone else to use on a store item.

    FYI, in case you hadn't heard, they're doing it every Friday now, so four or five times longer you can qualify.
     
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  9. Lum the Mad

    Lum the Mad Developer Emeritus Dev Emeritus

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    Hi! Someone sent me the link to this thread because they asked this exact question. I'll answer publicly (I'm quite busy elsewhere and have not paid a lot of attention to SOTA other than the progress on player-built dungeons)

    When I worked at Port, what employees did on the live servers was tracked constantly and consistently. We all had the power to destroy the in-game economy in the blink of an eye, thus we were watched to ensure we, you know, didn't actually do that (intentionally or unintentionally). Thus, say, when Community would give out COTOs for a promotion, it would trigger a report and they'd have to answer that yes, this was planned, they gave them out because of this contest.

    There isn't enough you can bribe a game developer to give you free stuff - because you'd not only have to pay their salary that year, but every year for the rest of their life because they'd never get another job on a live game (we talk). Suffice to say there's not enough COTOs to pay for that.

    "And that's all I gots to say abouts that"
     
  10. Lord Tachys al`Fahn

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    Right... but if I'm either on a plane, or driving across a couple of states, or simply driving home for most of it (usually all of it, depends on traffic)... well, that pretty much makes it so I can't be there ;)
     
  11. Nelzie

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    I would have to find a vendor to sell them on or set them up on a vendor, then wait for people to find the vendor and buy all of them.

    That's to much hassle, I just lack the time to do all of that. My playtime is between 3 to SOMETIMES 5 hours a week.
     
  12. Woodchuck

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    The quickest way is to sell them directly to any of the COTO merchants which always have buy orders for single COTOs or 10 at a time, and even more.
     
  13. Nelzie

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    For roughly $3600? If I was going to go through the hassle of selling them to merchants, I'd prefer to sell them for more than $4,000 each. Even with current travel time decreased, there are other things that I would rather be doing in game than trekking about for 15 to 30 minutes for an end result that would be putting about at equal or less than where I would be doing my regular 30 minutes of hunting and just chucking the COTAs at my rent.

    I do appreciate the suggestion though.
     
  14. Arkah EMPstrike

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  15. Elwyn

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    There are vendors out there who will have buy orders every time, and they're near Brittany.

    But only today did I realize why I've seen people with buy orders for 9 crowns.
     
  16. CatweazleX

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    If you buy COTOs this way it is: one RMT has earned 9$ to give you the 100k and Port. has earned nearly 25$ to get the COTOs on the market that you can buy them.
    So you feeling cool because you know the trick, RMT feels cool because he/she has 9$ more and Port. is feeling cool because they have made two people feeling cool without earning less.
     
    Last edited: Sep 12, 2018
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  17. Crowell

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    Oh come on ! Please don't try to play with words when you are discussing something with someone like me. Well... you don't know who I am... Ok, that's fine, you can try.

    Pay to Win has a larger meaning than what you think by yourself. It means what it has always meant : you pay in order to win something in game aka you "pay to win". Of course, there are a lot of people who try to make great differentiations and create concepts like Pay to Progress or Pay to Play, just because they want more precise terms, but the initial idea is what it is nonetheless. Some people even go further actually, like with those definitions, which underlines the imbalance idea hidden behind the whole Pay to Win process. But it's funnier when some people just want to fabricate their own interpretation while the proper meaning don't go where they want it to go... or go against what they try to blindly protect. Because, you know, there is no official definition of this expression, just because there is no need for definition when the expression just speak for itself. I pay real money, because I want to win.

    Now, let's take my exemple again, will you ? The guy buy COTO with real money, then sell those COTO and get in game currency aka gold coins as a counter part. The shortcut here is, the guy paid for gold coins when gold coins allow you to buy or pay for almost everything in Shroud, including, but not limited to, crafted gear, artifacts, augmented artifacts, reagents, arrows, PvP ransom, etc... The guy can even buy in game cold coins on the marketplace, then buy some cabalist hoods in a second after that, when his character is only adv . level 1. And not only that, but the whole land deed thing with the size of the lot, agriculture and the limited bank vs container size turn all the housing system in this game to a Pay to Win mechanic. Now come again and tell me that this whole game is not related in any way to the Pay to Win concept in a credible way. You can't (which doesn't mean that you won't try, in a desperate tentative), because it's just plainly false.

    And, at last but not least, believe it or not, the whole economy in Shroud has been built on a Pay-to-Win idea as long as almost every form of RMT is unofficially allowed. I say unofficially, because we saw very recently that this option remained at the discretion of Portalarium.
     
    Last edited: Sep 13, 2018
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  18. Zapatos80

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    Except youre not buying the gold from Port. If millionaires come up and flood the market with millions of COTOs they become instantly worthless. Thus youre not buying gold from Port but from other players. COTOs are just a proxy to facilitate the exchange. Thats a huge difference. If you were buying gold from Port, that would be massive P2W.

    In short, its basically a RMT between players like it has always existed in MMOs but with the dev team profiting by acting as a middle man of sorts (on top of COTOs being used by players for cosmetics which is free money for devs). The player buying wins (the one who buys COTOs from Port), the player selling wins (the one buying COTOs in game for gold) and the dev team wins. Very well thought out system.

    Think of it this way: RMT between players will always happen. Given that, id much rather have a system where devs get free money in the process by simply having a middleman type currency to facilitate the exchange.
     
    Last edited: Sep 13, 2018
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  19. Gyzarus

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    Well, this is just one your aspect on the cotos System, this is a long run game, cotos are not only be bought from port, but during the hunt or harvest they do drop cotos as well, this will make the E-conomy to keep rolling, you put in the effort to get something and you do get paid for the effort, people can buy your stuff with cotos, if they wish not do the hard way, this will not only benefit both party on getting what they want in the game, this will create tons of possibilities within the community to have one thing or another with either effort or cotos, as long port does not sell improve performance equips or super potions, I still believe it's still a stable game and not really a PtW. What is your desire that makes you play the game? That's would be easier for you to stay focus on what you want from the game.
     
  20. Gyzarus

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    Not everyone is rich, not everyone is Grundy, not everyone is hunter, everyone is very much differ from one another, but they are "good" in their specialty, it's not their fault if they are rich, it's not their fault if they have plenty of time, if we keep thinking which is fair which is not, it will only end up with a non conclusional arguments. I would end this, is this game even worth your time to spend your precious time on? For me is a yes. I have my own reasons, and I will not impose it to anyone else to have to agree with me, because I know I choose my path, not the game chose my path.
     
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