Plat duping

Do you think they have real tools to find it IF it exists?

Or do they basically have to wait on a whistleblower?

Seems like there is a skyrocketing amount of plat available, but maybe it's just huge chests from raids or something.

Not sure how the last one was found.

 

As a database person, I feel like they should be able to track some of these transactions and know who sold what to whom or who got what reward. But I also know it can be beyond complicated when dealing with large amounts of data, plus you get into the "exploiter laundered bad plat through good people" situation...who do you punish and how?

Other than a few stealth changes like the damaged stones or the Loyalty token tweaks on Test, we've not really been given an indication that the current situation is being monitored or addressed, which means it keeps happening. Maybe there has been stuff going on behind the scenes that we aren't privy to. I hope so, but I have a feeling that our team is stretched really thin and is relying on whistleblowers (reactive versus proactive).

 

From what I can see the basic economy of the game is way out of balance. There is far too much value being added to the player economy compared to what is removed. As a result, inflation is occurring.

The value being added is in the form of things like MOB loot, harvested raw materials (by harvesting, pack pony, gatherer NPCs), quest rewards, anything that is rewarded as currency or that can ultimately be converted into currency.

The value being removed is in the form of things like room rent, broker fees, infusion paid by coin, anything where the payment removes the currency from the game.

As the game has progressed, we have seen higher and higher value rewards. But, we have not seen much in they way of an increase to the costs that remove currency. Even worse, one of the main currency removal systems (broker fees) was changed so it removes even less currency. Unless something new is added, similar to plat-based infusion, we won't be seeing much of an increase in the rate that currency leaves the economy in the future.

There are a couple of things that might appear to have an impact on currency entering or leaving the system but they really have no impact at all. The krono market does not affect the currency market at all. Kronos are traded and currency changes hands. But at no time does any of the currency enter or leave. It simply changes hands. Selling loot is the same. The loot enters the economy but it only creates the value of the loot itself. Selling it only moves the currency between players.

As a result of all this, regardless of any exploitation mechanisms, the currency system in the game is broken. The amount of currency in the game is increasing. Inflation is occurring. But ironically, this inflation only affects the game in some areas. The basic markets of the game (selling items to merchants, buying items from merchants) is mostly unaffected by this inflation. The real effect is in the markets of buying/selling loot and Krono. Prices on those items have skyrocketed in the past year. Prices on other items (crafted food/drink and other player usable items) have gone up, but not as dramatically.

The people who say this is broken are the people who buy/sell in these markets. Players who only buy/sell at the basic level are not seeing the same thing. Until those basic items are affected by the inflation, I don't see anyone working to hard to fix it. The simple answer is going to be "You don't have to buy loot and you don't have to buy Krono to play the game." It's not a palatable answer to most people, but it is an accurate one.

 

Easier than you think to keep track of the aggregate money supply, the time consuming part is chasing up all the individual transaction details if you need to drill down as you mentioned. I am a ex-database administrator as well and I used to support large data warehouses.

Really you are just after trend information initially as a sudden change in the graph/numbers will stand out over time. Easy to do in SQL if their DBMS supports that, just time consuming to run. Once you find something is not right that's when the real effort starts and as you mentioned resourcing is a big issue. Looking through database transaction logs is no fun at all.

 

All I know is when Krono's first came out they were selling for around 500 Plat each. Now they're going for 1+ million plat each. That's nearly a 200000% increase in 4 years. That's insane.

 

Wait for the whistle blower.

I know someone out there deserves a ****ing parade.

 

But look at stats too. 4 years ago we were on 9cb/pot and now we're on 2k+.

The devs can't seem to comtrol this game all round.

 

People got mad at people selling them for 500 plat lol

 

All I know is that as a new player, joining right as the expansion shipped I had no chance of getting to raid without buying several kronos.

At the time it costed me 120k just go get adornments. On top of that you need decent food and drinks and arrows/poison on some classes. On top of that put 80k platium to infuse each peace of gear, so thats what? Another 250k platium.

You get like 1.5 plat per daily? So thats over 500,000 daily quests you need to do unless you buy kronos and sell it.

Not to mention the deity grind you need to do for CB and POT.

Very unfriendly game to get started at. The economy is broken some how and I dont know how they can possible fix it.

Even on stormhold, which is now on the SF expansion, Kronos costs about 80k

 

I make around 400 - 500k a week just by selling KA keys and rares.

I don't need kronos though, I decided that a sub was a lot cheaper in the longer run.

 

Yes, yes good for you.

Where do people spending those 500k get their money from? The chain has to begin some where and someone is getting a lot of plat in ways that they arent supposed to be getting them.

 

No idea, I'm also not happy with the hyper inflation, but that horse left the barn when they didn't remove all the dirty plat from the ToT exploit.

My comment was, to let you know its not too hard to make a lot of plat without selling krono or SLR. You just have to work at it.

Since KA start I've pulled in around 5 million.

edit: which is more than I've ever needed so I bought some nice things for my toon in SLR channel and put most of the rest into helping my guildies out.