Lastly like a stated before. When a market becomes inflated very rarely is it only on the things new/casual players want. Low level runes/enchants, resources, wards and even higher level runes/enchants (through invocation/coins) are all available to low level players and will still be in demand. They too will rise in price so if low level players have a means of getting their hands on anything of value, they will be gaining just as much AD to ride the wave. Plus AD are a free currency anyway.
Chris Kramer (the then director of public relations for EQ2 publisher Sony Online Entertainment) said much the same thing during the initial inflation "bubble" after EQ2's launch. Wonder how that turned out
Well according to Chris the problem was discovered on Saturday and steps were taken to resolve the issue on Sunday. Also Plat had a few qualities that differed from AD. Namely it was the main currency in the game, unrestricted, tradable and the whole economy was based on it's use. Even the exchange system (plat-->cash-->items) used plat as a basis for it's system. And there were numerous sinks in place to remove it from circulation.
Neverwinter and AD different in a few ways:
Astral Diamonds are character bound thus cannot be traded
Astral Diamonds are 1 of 6 currencies in the game
Astral Diamonds are gathered by dailies or selling idols (40k a pop)
Astral Diamonds are used primarily on the AH
Astral Diamonds is a cumulative currency with a high circulation rate
That last point means that there are very little sinks to take AD out of circulation. Which inevitably mean that it was created to allow huge balances of it to cumulate on a single character. That in turn allows PWE to do a few charatcer bans/wipes to drastically bring down the amount in circulation without having to wipe an entire server.
Missing an attribute that makes duping it so worthwhile to risk and so damaging to the game:
Astral Diamonds can be directly exchanged for Zen.
The only activity AD have on AH is for duping the real use of AD is to get Zen without using cash from those that did spend cash for Zen. And hour on hour the value of the AD purchased with cash through Zen drops. Literally by the time someone bought Zen and acquired AD with it the item they wanted to buy on AH has gone up for more AD then they purchased due to rampant inflation. There is no way for a legitimate player to earn enough AD to buy the items on AH unless they buy Zen. That is the harm to the player base - the cheats exploit those that actually pay.
Just in case this game survives, PW and Cryptic need to be doing a lot more to protect and make whole those that will be their source of revenue.
The accumulation of the duped AD is throughout the system including with legitimate players that happened to benefit from inflated prices on AH.
Those who have not joined the game yet, or those that were just going through the environment and enjoying the game, are permanently disadvantaged to a large portion of the population with duped AD that those without it can never hope to catch up with.
Originally posted by Gable What am I missing here? Why would there be a wipe? Has something changed? Otherwise, beta>live was going to be no change at all, so what happened that people think it might be otherwise?
There's been a massive exploit that has practically destroyed the game's economy.
An exploit where players enter panic mode and scream end of the world, as most MMOs economies quickly balance out after stuff like this. There's no indication the economy is "destroyed." If people genuinely believe this is the end of the world and the server needs a restart then they should quit playing altogether because it means the economy is not stable enough to handle such issues.
Look at GW2, within the first month of release people found a recipe using a small amount of karma and the mystic forge to get a fairly high (I believe it was 1/4) chance at the Precursors Dusk and Dawn. This recipe was then exploited by a few people, and the precursors were sold on the AH fairly cheaply but the players made a fortune. The economy to this day is still reeling from this, as these players continually make more and more money buying off Precursors and raising the prices on the precursors. There are players in GW2 who have a ridiculous number of gold and control almost all the precursors being traded due to their rarity. Though I haven't played recently, before I stopped about 2 months ago the more expensive precursor prices were literally half the legendary costs in materials. Prices on the other materials of legendaries were similarly driven up to absurd amounts because certain people who took advantage of said exploit had so much gold on their characters. The only reason I was able to complete my legendary when I played was due to getting a precursor during the Southsun Karka event reward. Even that didn't manage to drive prices down for too long as these people who manipulated the economy managed to buy out all the precursors when the prices were down, and now control and even larger percentage of precursor sales. 2 months ago someone doing this was at 20,000 gold and continually getting richer because he continues to bully the economy with his massive amounts of currency he obtained through the exploit.
Why am I telling you this? Because it's going to be a similar, except on a much larger scale. We aren't talking about a handful of people manipulating.the economy, but possibly as many as several thousand and the quantity of the exploit wasn't limited by something like karma either, in fact it had no limitation at all except time. The economy will NEVER recover.
You can't track down everyone who took advantage of this exploit. People are going to launder the diamonds similar to money laundering in real life. I'm sure plenty of people saw the reddit post of the guy bragging about the exploit and how none of his mules were banned. Not to mention anyway who bought or traded items under this false economy. It's not the end of the world because you can play Neverwinter without ever using the auction house, or diamonds, or zen, but I don't think calling for a wipe is out of line when a major feature of the game was harmed this much.
Lastly like a stated before. When a market becomes inflated very rarely is it only on the things new/casual players want. Low level runes/enchants, resources, wards and even higher level runes/enchants (through invocation/coins) are all available to low level players and will still be in demand. They too will rise in price so if low level players have a means of getting their hands on anything of value, they will be gaining just as much AD to ride the wave. Plus AD are a free currency anyway.
Chris Kramer (the then director of public relations for EQ2 publisher Sony Online Entertainment) said much the same thing during the initial inflation "bubble" after EQ2's launch. Wonder how that turned out
Well according to Chris the problem was discovered on Saturday and steps were taken to resolve the issue on Sunday. Also Plat had a few qualities that differed from AD. Namely it was the main currency in the game, unrestricted, tradable and the whole economy was based on it's use. Even the exchange system (plat-->cash-->items) used plat as a basis for it's system. And there were numerous sinks in place to remove it from circulation.
Neverwinter and AD different in a few ways:
Astral Diamonds are character bound thus cannot be traded
Astral Diamonds are 1 of 6 currencies in the game
Astral Diamonds are gathered by dailies or selling idols (40k a pop)
Astral Diamonds are used primarily on the AH
Astral Diamonds is a cumulative currency with a high circulation rate
That last point means that there are very little sinks to take AD out of circulation. Which inevitably mean that it was created to allow huge balances of it to cumulate on a single character. That in turn allows PWE to do a few charatcer bans/wipes to drastically bring down the amount in circulation without having to wipe an entire server.
Astral diamonds can be traded between alts or other characters by having the alt putting an item for sale for a very high amount of AD on the Auction. The main then "buys" it and voila a large amount of AD is transferred to your alt minus the auction fee.
Why are people asking for character wipes like THAT wouldn't completely destroy the game as well?
Here's a scenario from a person who purchased Zen, and played a character honestly to lvl 55 (if there was a complete wipe):
"Give me back my money... fuck you, fuck your game."
I'm not saying I'm the majority, but there will be other people who feel the same.
So basically what people are asking Perfect World to do is shoot themselves in the face to cure a life threatening disease.
There has got to be a better alternative.
yeah guy... NO WIPE IN BETA!!! So force everyone else to suffer a broken game that will surely 100% never recover and die because you want to whine. Actually no.. they better absolutely wipe the servers or make us honest players a new one... real fans of the game who will play again. I will not stand to play in a community where douche bags have unlimited money and can control every market.
THE ONLY LOGICAL OPTIONS
1. 100% wipe if they really plan on merging servers because a balanced game without a broken financial system will live on and build even after this open beta catastrophe
2. Make a new server that nothing from the old server can EVER!!!! Merge or transfer into.
There honestly is no other route for the company to take... either they want to give their game a second chance and wipe it or they want to give up and let the game die because most will leave if the economy stays broken. I will never support a product that allows exploiters to win.
1. They DON'T wipe and claim to have fixed/banned the AD people.
2. They DO wipe while refunding all Zen in game purchase through the store.
In both cases people will leave, it's a given.
In outcome 1 though it would be pretty hard to believe they actually tracked down and removed all dupped AD from the game. Furthermore this opens an infinite amount of questions regarding laundered items legitimate and illegitimate.
In outcome 2 it's 100% guarnteed the economy is clean.
The proper thing to do is what's right for the longevity of the game.Without a wipe the INTEGRITY of the game going forward is completly at stake and like anything once the integrity of the game is questioned it will never recover. The game would go but it's the people who wouldn't be playing you would never know about. At this early stage of the game to have the belief you're playing on an even playing field be shattered would severly impact it long term. To the people claiming to leave if they wipe I would ask do you want to play a game that would slowly be dying population wise even before it goes live? Without a wipe NW will be forever questioned as a game that has dupped money, exploited characters and a ruined economy.
I myself have a level 60 but even if they say they somehow 'fixed' it I would still believe I'm playing on an unfair playing field and thus feel somehow cheated.
I predict they will go the short term gain route and just do a few day rollback or say they 'fixed the problem and all is well now. My hope is they would think long term and be willing to give up a few subs so everyone could be playing on the same field.
Here is what I would do:
1. Put new systems in place to better prevent any unexplained AD from entering the market. Track every single Zen and AD if you have to.
2. Wipe it all. Keep the characters as many people put time into the look but put everyone back on level 1 as if they just started the game.
3. Refund into your exchange ALL AD purchased through the store and of course the 2m & 600k for founders.
4. Communicate honestly with the community! Something like this:"Our #1 goal is an even playing field for everyone, we have failed to provide that. We have put into place new components which will better address this situation going forward. In conjunction with this we have made the difficult decision to reset everyone back to level 1 and refund all purchased Zen and founder AD. "
I believe this should be step 5, and going forward should become a basic principle for all games involving any form of advanced economics in the games build:
5:HIRE A BLOODY ECONOMIST TO ENSURE THE MARKET REMAINS STABLE!
If you look at the actual stock market, or the reserve banks of any nation around the world then you'll know that one of the reasons why this sort of money exploitation doesn't occur in finances is because there is someone keeping a close tab on how M1 through to M5 is properly handled and managed.
For example: recently there was a case in the USA where a former funds manager for G&S was found to have exceeded his 'risk license' and made approximately $6billion for his company. The reasons for this aside, the outcome of the investigation found him jailed for 30 years, and the money he raised consequently seized by the government.
There are checks and balances on real life money observed by economists. Why isn't this a principle in games where real life money can be exploited or abused?
Anyone with over 10 million AD gets the excess wiped .
2. Then they add up all the AD in circulation divide it by the number of characters .
This will give an average AD per character .
3. The High limit is then set to the Average and anyone with over the average gets the excess wiped .
Your dreaming or crazy, I cant tell which and server wipes with money/ zen refund is their best bet to keep most customers.
Lol are you crazy ? do you seriously think people wont play because of this ? A lot of people don't even use the auction house because they are playing the game .
Just wipe it! I have a level 60 and a 40 cleric and I'd be content wiping if it meant a nice clean slate without issues. Your bragging the open beta tag, so use it to fix the game breaking issues. Will I level a GWF again? Probably not, I'll wait till it doesn't suck massively, particularly at early levels. I still rather a clean slate.
Just give people their money back from what they did spend on in form of the items they got, give some "Thanks for playing" incentive (ideally worth money, come on, you know your Cash shop is ridiculously cheesy, do it) and I honestly feel the game would be better for it. Its not like a lot of others where progress is so massive. I'll wave good bye to my half mill astral diamonds I earned and happily earn it again in a fresh environment.
Hopefully there won't be a wipe but if there is Cryptic should give everyone's account free Starter Packs or something equivalent which include the XP boosters for each character rolled. I was playing this weekend & it was pretty crazy seeing insane prices for -AD on our AH. I also heard a lot of chatter about rollbacks but whatever happens I hope it works out for everyone except for the exploiters themselves.
No way will PWE give back the money that players already spent on the game.
No refunds. No wipe.
PWE are currently looking at ways to contain and minimise the damage to their profit margins. That means that the primary target will the "gold seller" accounts, those holding large balances of Zen and/or AD. That currency can be sold to players via third-party RMT transactions, thus undermining PWE's income from selling Zen.
The third-party RMT groups must love PWE, because PWE's games are so expensive that selling Zen to players can be done at quite a high price. All they have to do is undercut PWE's already high prices slightly...
Originally posted by SupportPlayerMM If they don't wipe i'll probably walk away and do a charge back on my 50.00$ explaining the situation on how I paid money for things others were allowed to exploit and get for free.
In layman's terms those people stole that currency, "allowed" is a bit of a stretch. You write as though they'll walk away with impunity as a certainty. At this point anything could happen.
As for the issue at hand, I'd call for a rollback if I thought it would change anything about the nature of F2P economies in general. A rollback would be important if balance was to be expected in such an economy. It's really not.
I'm not saying this to support PWE's stance on the matter, as I think it's rather low of them to not at least consider the feedback coming in. They shot it down rather quickly.
This may just be an example of why many simply detest PWE's practices.
For every minute you are angry , you lose 60 seconds of happiness."-Emerson
Comments
Missing an attribute that makes duping it so worthwhile to risk and so damaging to the game:
Astral Diamonds can be directly exchanged for Zen.
The only activity AD have on AH is for duping the real use of AD is to get Zen without using cash from those that did spend cash for Zen. And hour on hour the value of the AD purchased with cash through Zen drops. Literally by the time someone bought Zen and acquired AD with it the item they wanted to buy on AH has gone up for more AD then they purchased due to rampant inflation. There is no way for a legitimate player to earn enough AD to buy the items on AH unless they buy Zen. That is the harm to the player base - the cheats exploit those that actually pay.
Just in case this game survives, PW and Cryptic need to be doing a lot more to protect and make whole those that will be their source of revenue.
The accumulation of the duped AD is throughout the system including with legitimate players that happened to benefit from inflated prices on AH.
Those who have not joined the game yet, or those that were just going through the environment and enjoying the game, are permanently disadvantaged to a large portion of the population with duped AD that those without it can never hope to catch up with.
Look at GW2, within the first month of release people found a recipe using a small amount of karma and the mystic forge to get a fairly high (I believe it was 1/4) chance at the Precursors Dusk and Dawn. This recipe was then exploited by a few people, and the precursors were sold on the AH fairly cheaply but the players made a fortune. The economy to this day is still reeling from this, as these players continually make more and more money buying off Precursors and raising the prices on the precursors. There are players in GW2 who have a ridiculous number of gold and control almost all the precursors being traded due to their rarity. Though I haven't played recently, before I stopped about 2 months ago the more expensive precursor prices were literally half the legendary costs in materials. Prices on the other materials of legendaries were similarly driven up to absurd amounts because certain people who took advantage of said exploit had so much gold on their characters. The only reason I was able to complete my legendary when I played was due to getting a precursor during the Southsun Karka event reward. Even that didn't manage to drive prices down for too long as these people who manipulated the economy managed to buy out all the precursors when the prices were down, and now control and even larger percentage of precursor sales. 2 months ago someone doing this was at 20,000 gold and continually getting richer because he continues to bully the economy with his massive amounts of currency he obtained through the exploit.
Why am I telling you this? Because it's going to be a similar, except on a much larger scale. We aren't talking about a handful of people manipulating.the economy, but possibly as many as several thousand and the quantity of the exploit wasn't limited by something like karma either, in fact it had no limitation at all except time. The economy will NEVER recover.
You can't track down everyone who took advantage of this exploit. People are going to launder the diamonds similar to money laundering in real life. I'm sure plenty of people saw the reddit post of the guy bragging about the exploit and how none of his mules were banned. Not to mention anyway who bought or traded items under this false economy. It's not the end of the world because you can play Neverwinter without ever using the auction house, or diamonds, or zen, but I don't think calling for a wipe is out of line when a major feature of the game was harmed this much.
Astral diamonds can be traded between alts or other characters by having the alt putting an item for sale for a very high amount of AD on the Auction. The main then "buys" it and voila a large amount of AD is transferred to your alt minus the auction fee.
yeah guy... NO WIPE IN BETA!!! So force everyone else to suffer a broken game that will surely 100% never recover and die because you want to whine. Actually no.. they better absolutely wipe the servers or make us honest players a new one... real fans of the game who will play again. I will not stand to play in a community where douche bags have unlimited money and can control every market.
THE ONLY LOGICAL OPTIONS
1. 100% wipe if they really plan on merging servers because a balanced game without a broken financial system will live on and build even after this open beta catastrophe
2. Make a new server that nothing from the old server can EVER!!!! Merge or transfer into.
There honestly is no other route for the company to take... either they want to give their game a second chance and wipe it or they want to give up and let the game die because most will leave if the economy stays broken. I will never support a product that allows exploiters to win.
There are only 2 likely outcomes:
1. They DON'T wipe and claim to have fixed/banned the AD people.
2. They DO wipe while refunding all Zen in game purchase through the store.
In both cases people will leave, it's a given.
In outcome 1 though it would be pretty hard to believe they actually tracked down and removed all dupped AD from the game. Furthermore this opens an infinite amount of questions regarding laundered items legitimate and illegitimate.
In outcome 2 it's 100% guarnteed the economy is clean.
The proper thing to do is what's right for the longevity of the game.Without a wipe the INTEGRITY of the game going forward is completly at stake and like anything once the integrity of the game is questioned it will never recover. The game would go but it's the people who wouldn't be playing you would never know about. At this early stage of the game to have the belief you're playing on an even playing field be shattered would severly impact it long term. To the people claiming to leave if they wipe I would ask do you want to play a game that would slowly be dying population wise even before it goes live? Without a wipe NW will be forever questioned as a game that has dupped money, exploited characters and a ruined economy.
I myself have a level 60 but even if they say they somehow 'fixed' it I would still believe I'm playing on an unfair playing field and thus feel somehow cheated.
I predict they will go the short term gain route and just do a few day rollback or say they 'fixed the problem and all is well now. My hope is they would think long term and be willing to give up a few subs so everyone could be playing on the same field.
Here is what I would do:
1. Put new systems in place to better prevent any unexplained AD from entering the market. Track every single Zen and AD if you have to.
2. Wipe it all. Keep the characters as many people put time into the look but put everyone back on level 1 as if they just started the game.
3. Refund into your exchange ALL AD purchased through the store and of course the 2m & 600k for founders.
4. Communicate honestly with the community! Something like this:"Our #1 goal is an even playing field for everyone, we have failed to provide that. We have put into place new components which will better address this situation going forward. In conjunction with this we have made the difficult decision to reset everyone back to level 1 and refund all purchased Zen and founder AD. "
I believe this should be step 5, and going forward should become a basic principle for all games involving any form of advanced economics in the games build:
5: HIRE A BLOODY ECONOMIST TO ENSURE THE MARKET REMAINS STABLE!
If you look at the actual stock market, or the reserve banks of any nation around the world then you'll know that one of the reasons why this sort of money exploitation doesn't occur in finances is because there is someone keeping a close tab on how M1 through to M5 is properly handled and managed.
For example: recently there was a case in the USA where a former funds manager for G&S was found to have exceeded his 'risk license' and made approximately $6billion for his company. The reasons for this aside, the outcome of the investigation found him jailed for 30 years, and the money he raised consequently seized by the government.
There are checks and balances on real life money observed by economists. Why isn't this a principle in games where real life money can be exploited or abused?
LOL
Sz
To limit the damage they need to
1. Set a high limit for AD . Say 10 million AD .
Anyone with over 10 million AD gets the excess wiped .
2. Then they add up all the AD in circulation divide it by the number of characters .
This will give an average AD per character .
3. The High limit is then set to the Average and anyone with over the average gets the excess wiped .
Your dreaming or crazy, I cant tell which and server wipes with money/ zen refund is their best bet to keep most customers.
Lol are you crazy ? do you seriously think people wont play because of this ? A lot of people don't even use the auction house because they are playing the game .
Just wipe it! I have a level 60 and a 40 cleric and I'd be content wiping if it meant a nice clean slate without issues. Your bragging the open beta tag, so use it to fix the game breaking issues. Will I level a GWF again? Probably not, I'll wait till it doesn't suck massively, particularly at early levels. I still rather a clean slate.
Just give people their money back from what they did spend on in form of the items they got, give some "Thanks for playing" incentive (ideally worth money, come on, you know your Cash shop is ridiculously cheesy, do it) and I honestly feel the game would be better for it. Its not like a lot of others where progress is so massive. I'll wave good bye to my half mill astral diamonds I earned and happily earn it again in a fresh environment.
There won't be a wipe.
No way will PWE give back the money that players already spent on the game.
No refunds. No wipe.
PWE are currently looking at ways to contain and minimise the damage to their profit margins. That means that the primary target will the "gold seller" accounts, those holding large balances of Zen and/or AD. That currency can be sold to players via third-party RMT transactions, thus undermining PWE's income from selling Zen.
The third-party RMT groups must love PWE, because PWE's games are so expensive that selling Zen to players can be done at quite a high price. All they have to do is undercut PWE's already high prices slightly...
In layman's terms those people stole that currency, "allowed" is a bit of a stretch. You write as though they'll walk away with impunity as a certainty. At this point anything could happen.
As for the issue at hand, I'd call for a rollback if I thought it would change anything about the nature of F2P economies in general. A rollback would be important if balance was to be expected in such an economy. It's really not.
I'm not saying this to support PWE's stance on the matter, as I think it's rather low of them to not at least consider the feedback coming in. They shot it down rather quickly.
This may just be an example of why many simply detest PWE's practices.
For every minute you are angry , you lose 60 seconds of happiness."-Emerson