This economic experiment went horribly wrong (GaiaOnline blather thread)

aka the Gaia thread that ISN'T for drama. Bitching about the economy is still absolutely welcome though.

@cryptoThelematrix but yeah I figure never-listed items tend to have their prices hellaciously inflated so I'm like. ugh. gonna get *everything else* off my wishlist first.

...Which I've actually been making really good progress at this week in spite of adding a handful of things again.

 

Oh dear. Bitching about the economy is likely to create drama because I am one of the people that Kiki and Coco warned you about.

I don't buy gold gens because they're not worth it; they have the same effect on the economy as someone winning the lotto jackpot every day in every town, BUT for the average user the payout is far inferior to what you'd get for buying items and selling them.

I don't buy gold gens--but I am absolutely a vendor. I'm just not one of the horrible ones.

I don't have time to play the games you can earn gold from except very casually or to post on the forums a lot or do any of the other things people with lots of free time do to "earn" gold. I buy stuff from the cash shop and sell it for gold. Usually limited items. I am also selling off a lot of my old inventory because when I first joined I liked to wear sets, like you do in lolita sometimes, so I'll buy RIGs in order to get people into my shop to buy the old stuff I'm trying to get rid of as well as the RIG drops I don't want.

I've been an adult the whole time Gaia existed and abandoned my first account from 05 or 06 long ago because I couldn't get anything. Back then there was no GC really and no way to get gold if you were not able to be on the site for hours and hours every day, and of course I had a job.

So I gave up and didn't come back until 2014 when a friend of mine invited me back to play on her side during an event and she taught me how to make gold.

GC made it actually possible for me to play on the site and have nice things there. If people who have to play with GC can't exchange it for gold we can't get anything that isn't in the cash shop. Instead of gold gens, what the site really needs is a set exchange rate. People who grind for gold are expensive for the site to support and cash users make that possible.

On one hand, yes, the inflation is ridiculous. A friend of mine has commented that a Gaia gold piece must essentially be the size of a grain of sand.

On the other hand, Gaia gives away a lot more gold than it used to in Daily Chance and the like. So essentially it seems to me like the number of zeroes keeps going up but the amount of time/cash you have to spend to get things is probably about the same.

And when people complain that items with no listings are "artificially inflated" because they don't conform to an out of date "ABP" (average buy price) it makes me want to cry like do you know how to business? A lot of times when an ABP is super low, it's because the item in question was once a fail drop or a low-rung tier prize, and therefore, when it first came out, you couldn't give it away. It was a perfectly fine item, but nobody on earth needed 8 of them. Coy Utsuri was one of those initially, I forget which tier it came off but at one time it was going for under 1B because people had loads of them.

When an item like that has no listings any more, the conditions under which the ABP was established no longer apply.

Average buy price has nothing to do with the actual value of an item. All items are pixels. It has little to do with the quality of the artwork, because if you check a frequently recoloured item that's just as intricate and detailed no matter what colour it's in, the highest prices will be the rarest drops and the lowest prices will be recent fail drops and low tier prizes.

All average buy price tells you is that X number of people bought the item and paid X amounts and this is the mean price. It doesn't take into account that 5000 of those 6000 purchases took place 8 months ago when people who bought the CI/RIG had 5-8 copies to get rid of and the market was flooded, but now, almost everyone who still has the item wants to keep it, so the supply is much lower compared to the demand.

That said I am like hahaha funny nice try when some jackrod decides to take an item that used to be 100M and try to sell it for 800B. That's a little stupid. But I also don't think of it as morally wrong because usually nobody buys it. If I'm the only listing and the ABP looks suspiciously faildroppy I will set a high (but not insanely so) price and wait to see if anyone buys the item or anyone undercuts me. If it doesn't sell or if I get undercut I will lower the price until it does sell.

But then, I do project tickets. So I am kind of like in the Gaia 1%, which is funny because I'm definitely not 1% anywhere else in my life.

 

http://www.gaiaonline.com/forum/pro...-elegant-couture-and-exotic-pets/t.101222827/

For shiggles, here's my ticket tracker thread.

 

Oh I don't blame the vendors at all for the prices, they're usually exercising supply and demand and so on. But those prices can definitely be murder on my wallet and when it's an item that's been on my wishlist for a year with no listings? Yeah I'm expecting that to be awful. I pin the blame on whoever thought the initial gold generators were a good idea because that's when the market went berserk.

(fwiw I'm a kindred rig vendor, I don't have the focus for extensive vending the way other folks do but I can make a decent profit off fafnir's peak in a relatively short amount of time so.)

 

Is there any means by which gold leaves circulation other than the tax on marketplace transactions? I left shortly after the tax was instated and even then the outrage was hilarious.

 

A small amount via gold shop items and a bunch of event sinks. Like, gold sinks are the primary form of event these days, but they're not constantly going for obvious reasons.

also ftr the tax went up from 2% to 5% and while I was gone at the time I can only imagine the hilarious fuckery that followed.

 

In addition to the stuff Starcrossedsky mentioned, there are games that cost gold to play. There's a payout if you win, but obviously only one person will win a tournament.

 

Grumbling about how trees are the best way to grind because I fucking hate trees.

Buying user recolors is always money hell, though, it's a good thing most of them are in color schemes I don't like. (here's looking at you the like, three seabreeze-focused threads in project custom.)

 

Succamortes suck.

Usermade items would be less expensive if they weren't so damn rare. I would argue that I would like my thylacines to be a fairly common drop but they wouldn't listen to me anyway because that's part of the cachet of usermades.

Never mind that I made thylacines because there weren't any and I want everyone who loves thylacines to have one. I get 25 and if you want one to keep and not to sell I will give you one. It has 6 poses so I'm only keeping 6. I will sell some and give some away. I will probably sell a few high because the ticket was hella expensive and after I've sold a few high I will deflate the shit out of it if I can because I made them for people who love thylacines.

The thylacine is going to be accepted, I just had to answer some questions on the initial email from Yuroppa. No word on anything else yet.

 

(Like srsly I'm going to tell the Project Winners Hub and the GCD you get one day to sell high and then I'm deflating the living shit out of this item because I want people who love it to have it.)

 

if they didn't still kill me one in three times with a level 50 pumperilla I would maybe hate them less, but.

On the bright side I've made approx 50b today. On the not bright side, the 105b overall I'm sitting on isn't even halfway to what I'm questing.

 

Wow. I have no idea how much a billion is worth. Um, calibration time: How much do the kitties go for on the marketplace? Which is not to say that I remember how much they cost when I left, but I could afford one of each (there were only two; are there more now?) at the time and I think my inventory was worth about a million or two.

 

whoo boy have you been gone for a while.

I didn't actually join and stay until 2014 so for me it has always been this way.

Which kitties do you mean?

The coco kitty plush which was an MC in 2005 is about 55B but it's far from even close to being seriously expensive, most new cash shop releases go for 50-150B in the MP the first day of sale.

 

I have never actually killed a succamorte but I don't have anything at level 50 yet either. I suppose I could get a bunch of ally plus potions.

 

Holy shitflation, Batman. That's at least a thousand-fold the prices when I left, possibly in the ten-thousand-fold range. I think I've been gone maybe five years at this point.

 

Five years ago... /mental gymnastics

One bil is probably about 25k from then? it's hard because the ranges are so variable now because of various limited items being expensive as hell. But estimating off the non-limited items that are in the "better items" range, they used to be 200-300k and are now 5-10b.

Again, rough estimate and based on what are now middle grade items, not limited or highly popular color schemes.

The most critical thing is your critter's heal, tbh, more than actually being level 50. I advise fafnir's peak for grinding, tbh, those rigs still sell steadily and several for over a bil a pop.

 

I'll keep that in mind, thanks!

 

I mean you can use healing potions, but those things cost money and fuck that. Depending on your critter you may be grumbling about antidotes, though.

#I have a pumperilla which doesn't have a status heal #so I'm in that grumblesquad

116b/240b [puts on shades and does the thing]

 

I already do, but the problem is when those assholes hit me with a poison attack and kill my hit points. Whether I unpoison myself or heal the damage...I am dead unless its next attack misses or I managed to kill it.

I usually use Tiamat the Tyrant for those guys. I have heard Cerpurrus, who I got for free out of a rig and adore, will kill trees, but he's too little right now.

I am also known to hang with a flock of Stagonys (all different types) because I am a dweeb who likes pretty kins.

 

Yeah, that's why I say a critter with a heal is critical, so that you can do both in one round. My Stagony Classic is pretty but she is not ever going to be up to the job for that reason.