Purpose of COTOs? (SOLVED by @spoon - thx to all just the same)

Discussion in 'General Discussion' started by Woodchuck, Apr 4, 2019.

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  1. oplek

    oplek Avatar

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    I don't think anyone expects that an MMO is completely RMT free, or require it. There's nuance here. There's a difference between not completely eliminating RMT, and *facilitating* it. We have dedicated sub forums for it, trusted traders, etc.

    So we have a spectrum,
    - Massive effort, eliminating most RMT
    - Minimum effort, eliminating some RMT
    - No effort, no facilitation, having more RMT
    - Facilitating RMT, with even more RMT

    Why try? So maybe you don't drive away hordes of prospective players? Shroud could hypothetically gain enough additional players from some minor policing of RMT, and not facilitating it, to more than pay for the effort. Of course, there's no guarantee without other aspects of the game being fixed first.

    We wouldn't be having this discussion if we were talking about the difference between the complete guaranteed elimination of botting, and not having fully allowed botting with instructions in the official forums on how to do it, as though those are the only two options.
     
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  2. Woodchuck

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    The existence of RMT is not my point. My point is, if all these measures were for the purpose of raising funds for Portalarium, it's a questionable strategy/approach since the prime beneficiary seems to be the RMT market. (which as everyone here knows goes into the pockets of individual players which are not in any way shape or form or to any degree whatsoever affiliated in present or past with Portalarium or is currently employed by or have been an employee of Portalarium or its subsidiaries or affiliates in any way shape or form)
     
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  3. canolia

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    You understand very well ...you are just looking for a bone to chew ...paint some doom and gloom image of the game that has no substance in reality ... Game is doing great .. alot of things improved and more on the way.
     
  4. Woodchuck

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    Honestly, no. I do not understand the purpose of COTOs. All the prescribed explanations did not make any sense to me.

    I am seeking to understand. All the explanations don’t add up except the legality explanation. That COTOs was and continues to serve as a legal indemnification vehicle.

    Who are you? Come out and play - I don’t bite (unless provoked!). i am sad that ppl have to hide. The pervasive multiplicity here is another dark aspect that i hate about this game.. you’d think a small community like this could be open and honest but ... apparently not.
     
    Last edited: Apr 5, 2019
  5. NamelessOne

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    COTO's allow players to buy pretty things. Those pretty things are no better than what you can get in game. You can't buy crafting materials with them, you can't buy any good armor or weapons. Can't buy crafting fuels.
    People buy art, people buy old stamps for their collection. They don't do anything useful but people buy them anyways.
     
    Last edited: Apr 5, 2019
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  6. Arkah EMPstrike

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    If you imagine killing monsters and not getting ANY currency or anything worth any currency most of the time (maybe 18 gold every couple of days?), thats what it would be like if the in-game currency and premium currency were the same thing. You would essentially turn it into entropia, because thats what entropia does.

    If you never heard of it, read about entropia, and youll see what having in-game and premium currency be the same thing is like.

    In short, COTOs are a revenue stream for portalarium, and gold is an in game currency to allow transactions to occur in-game without spending real money, and gold sinks are what gives gold its value. Cotos are a rare drop in game, which is what they meant when they said cotos “would be rare”
     
    Last edited: Apr 5, 2019
  7. Spoon

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    Welcome to the new millennia, the entertainment industry has changed quite a bit in the last 20 years.
    Your question is the equivalent of asking why Blockbuster went bust and saying that you don't get the purpose of film streaming services from HBO or Netflix instead of renting them.


    Here are the trends on why this is happening:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freemium
    "
    By September 2012, all but two of the 50 highest-grossing apps in the Games section of Apple's iTunes App Store supported in-app purchases, leading Wired to conclude that game developers were now required to choose between including such purchases or foregoing a very substantial revenue stream.[14] Beginning in 2013, the digital distribution platform Steam began to add numerous Free to play and Early Access games to its library, many of which utilized Freemium marketing for their in-game economies.
    "


    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microtransaction
    "
    Mobile web analytics company Flurry reported on July 7, 2011, that based on its research, the revenue from free-to-play games had overtaken revenue from premium games that earn revenue through traditional means in Apple's App Store, for the top 100 grossing games when comparing the results for the months of January and June 2011. It used data that it analyzed through 90,000 apps that installed the company's software in order to roughly determine the amount of revenue generated by other popular apps. They discovered that free games represented 39% of the total revenue from January, and that the number jumped to 65% by June, helped in part by the fact that over 75% of the 100 top grossing apps are games. This makes free-to-play the single most dominant business model in the mobile apps industry. They also learned that the number of people that spend money on in-game items in free-to-play games ranges from 0.5% to 6%, depending on a game's quality and mechanics. Even though this means that a large number of people will never spend money in a game, it also means that the people that do spend money could amount to a sizeable number because the game was given away for free.[8]

    A later study found that over 92% of revenue generated on Android and iOS in 2013 came from free-to-play games such as Candy Crush.[9]
    "




    Why it works vs inflation, hard vs soft currency
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_currency

    why it is a massively successful trend throughout all of the gaming/entertainment industry:
    http://www.psychologyofgames.com/2011/05/the-psychology-of-microsoft-points-part-1-waste-aversion
    I would recommend reading up on skinner boxes and loss aversion as well but that is slightly out of scope.

    Discussion about the trend
    https://www.pocketgamer.biz/mobile-...-focused-in-game-currencies-confusing-player/


    The best example of the freemium business model with a non-invasive premium currency would be PokémonGo.
    https://niantic.helpshift.com/a/pok...-pokecoins-to-make-purchases-in-the-shop&l=en
    http://www.businessofapps.com/data/pokemon-go-statistics/#3


    Videos on point for those who dislike too much reading










    If you still have any questions after going through that material then please be a little more specific about what you don't get about it. Because trying to distill the trends of the gaming industry through the last 20 years and why this type of freemium plus premium hard vs soft currency is dominating the industry through its effectiveness would take a very loooooong time to explain. While instead a question in the format of
    I don't get it, if they say they want X result then why do they do this Y thing - I don't see the connection​
    would be easier to answer. This since I personally don't think that the implementation of the premium currency in this game is optimal and I have lots of opinions on how to make it better. But the trend itself is an obvious success.
     
    Last edited: Apr 5, 2019
  8. Alioth

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    Sorry I realize the thread has continued, but I had to say something about this before someone assumes it’s factual. Your math is off by a factor of 10 and your conclusion is therefore inaccurate. They increased 1 coto to equal 100 cotos, a 100x increase, not a 10x increase. A current single coto selling for 100-110 is equivalent of an old “pre split” coto selling for 10,000-11,000 (ie 100x) which is substantially more than the price was 6 months ago when they were selling for under 4K each. There is no “should” about the value since it’s player economy driven. I suspect they are probably over valued now since Portalarium ties the coto price to in game taxes, and “fixes” the Coto value to 60 igg tax equivalent, as well as increased the in game drop rate. The ability to upgrade deeds has been driving their currently perceived value, and when that settles down they will probably decrease down to somewhere above 60 per.
     
  9. Arkah EMPstrike

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    @Woodchuck in reference to non portalarium traders RMTing cotos:

    This is not taking money from port, and is the result of gold sellers mostly. Sometimes gold farmers get the price of gold to be less than the price of a coto (11000 gold cost less than 1$) and rmt traders buy that for real money, which allows them to buy the cotos from in game vendors and sell them for less real money than port does. But the cotos originated from portalarium so somewhere in the chain portalarium still got paid. So RMT traders selling cheaper cotos is not hurting portalarium. The only thing that hurts portalarium is mot having enough coto sinks in game.

    And yes to the anove that deed upgrades is a great new coto sink draining cotos from the economy
     
  10. Spinok

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    Btw increasing the drop rate it`s a fake, in the real, drop rate was lowered if compare it with what we had before, by the fact - if I actively gamed before the change I was able to get ~2 per day, now 200 Cotos on average as the drop in the day just impossible. - IMHO
     
  11. evillego6

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    It was. LB spoke about it with Markee Dragon in one of his two interviews back during the Kickstarter. They just didnt' talk about it much until it was announced.
     
  12. Alioth

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    If you say so. I have played about 1000 hours and before the change had gotten -0- cotos to actually drop for me. Since the change about 50-60 dropped over maybe 20-30h of play time, usually in increments of 10-15. The drop rate from my perspective is still abysmally small, but I have gotten them on multiple occasions now. I get that other people do a much more efficient job than I do at getting the loot, as I don’t grind monsters that often and am low level (AL 80s), so YMMV.
     
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  13. yinki2

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    why not let player vendor sell stuff for cotos?
     
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  14. Vladamir Begemot

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    There's some misinformation here earlier in the thread .

    Cotos are not a gold sink.

    Gold is not a crypto currency nor regulated by the government.

    Spoons post has enough information to make you an expert on premium currency.
     
  15. Burzmali

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    Quite the contrary actually, COTOs inflate the economy as long as they are in play, with the inflation continuing if the COTOs are used to buy deco items instead of paying rent, etc.

    Limiting the amount of IGG in play at any given point will eventually create a liquidity problem as the size of the true economy grows. As it stands, some items are so expensive in IGG (Tax-free Castle, etc) that a straight IGG purchase of one would require a significant percent of the entire IGG supply.
     
  16. Katu

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    Premium currency is ok, but making it tradeable, was bad choice. RMT pushes players away and now players are eating part of ports profits, because of huge amounts of cotos in game and those are for sale, cheaper than what port offers.
     
  17. Spungwa

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    This is a common misconception. Buying COTOs is NOT a gold sink. No gold leaves the system. It is just moved from one character to another.

    The gold sinks in this game, I can think of off the top of my head are.

    1 Anything bought from an NPC - recipes, crafting fuels, crafting tools.
    2 Lot rent, if paid with gold rather than COTOs.

    That's it......
    Crafter's bear nearly all the gold sinks in the game.

    Gold faucets

    1 gold dropped by mobs
    2 Anything sold to a vendor - this is everything..... Though some things are worth more to players so the gold faucet for those items is not utilised.
    3 quest gold rewards.

    Can't think of anything more, every other transaction is just moving gold, not creating or destroying it.


    Regards
    Spung
     
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  18. Weins201

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    This thread is Hilarious - The Economy of this game was designed to be player generated - it has failed completely.

    First to do this players have to have something worth selling. There is ONLY ONE THING that really sells, crafting resources. Sure go ahead players are going to say things about how they sold a Gold House, or a Warlocks Chain, or one of the bugged Totems, or any of a cluster of "High End" items. Those do not create and maintain any economy.

    There are only honestly a very few items that are sold pretty consistently and those are the resources. Why is this a failure because it has nothing to do with player generated, it is just player gathered.

    CRAFTING - was supposed to be the cornerstone of the economy, it has fallen flat on its face. and is now sliding further and further down a road into a muddy bog at the bottom. A player can not even contemplate making a descent items and getting any value out of it, (remotely close to cost)

    Gold and Cotos are a joke especially since Coto's were sold in the store in unlimited quantities from their introduction. Player tried to use them to establish some semblance of economy however Port turned around and made them the actual currency for their store. Destroying any player control.

    The economy should have been created and establish within about 6 mounts of game play when crafter and such established sales and such.

    the only thing that exists is the sales from items that is FARMED. (use this term any way you want, but it is limited)

    Soo primarily a need to establish the Player generated economy has to be considered no longer an issue, if it is a serious need to refocus has to happen.

    As it is no it will take a few months of the Cotos in Game and what was sold before the store change to stabilize.

    Until that time expires and as long as no major changes are made some semblance of a stable economy can be achieved. This is already going to fail since they are already talking that their introduced prices are not what they should be, they are going to increase the costs making the ones out now, once more an issue, so after the next change another 6 months to balance is needed. They will of course see a need to change again and this failed system will persist.
     
    Last edited: Apr 5, 2019
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  19. Spungwa

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    In an MMO with a player driven economy, there are two economies within the system.

    First one, that needs Marco economics analysis by the Devs to maintain, is the NPC economy.
    This economy has unlimited funds, it's only function is to add and remove gold from the system.

    The second, that should be self regulating based on market forces (supply and demand) is the player economy. This economy can neither add nor remove gold from the system, it just moved gold from one place to another.

    What COTOs give is an exchange rate between real life currencies (dollars) and gold in the player economy.

    Note : thought of another, but rarely used gold sink, commission on vendor selling. But I imagine the amount of transactions going through non commission free vendors is tiny.

    Regards
    Spung
     
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  20. Spungwa

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    It fails due to a under demand from players.
    There is no mechanics that give a player a reason to demand those items.
    Supply scales higher than demand with player base, the more players that play the more over supply/under demand will happen.

    Crafting resources sell, because people will buy them to make stuff, that has worth less when a finished product, for the producer XP.

    Quickest way to get poor in that game is start grinding crafting.

    Go adventuring, every minute you spend gains gold or items you can turn into gold at the vendor. Using the NPC economy, completely bypassing the player economy.

    Start crafting, you can spend a little time making stuff that may make a small profit then market saturation. Then every minute after that you are lossing gold for your play time.

    Even things that do make gold crafting, the gold verses time sink compared to just farming a tier 5 in that same time and selling to the NPC makes it not worthwhile.

    Regards
    Spung
     
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