Someone I know has picture proof of one of the three Barons of Teva admitting to purposely messing up Teva's economy and making as hard as possible to gt rare items.

Blackmail? /report it

Thankies, Narnia~! (Not the real name of who gave me the pic.)

lie im fine with the holepaying thing but like alot off ppl
mom's and dads wont pay for chash shop stuff like my mom
and like yes id like the stuff but if they make it free wut
r they going to get out of making this game there not gonig
to make any money

Analysis - A more IN-DEPTH continuation
 

Okay, I have a few further points to make, in particular regarding the discussion on the economic situation since that seems to be the hot topic. :D



Firstly I'd like to start with a response from Ralath who I think made some very valid points, and is a large part of the contribution that is my continuation of my analysis of the economy of Fiesta. :)

Actually this is a very good point. What I was looking at was exclusively the natural inflation that is created by Outspark within game through questing, and this was not intended to say that this is the only source, rather I was simply analyzing one apparent source of inflation to assess whether I could find an apparent fault on the Gold Seller's behalf or not in what people are observing as inflation in the game.

And specifically yes, I failed to recognize the NPCs as truly limitless source of inflation due to an increase in currency. :o

I really appreciate your comments, and from that I have decided to look more closely at what are apparent effects of inflation. In particular the one that bothers me which I did mention before is the shift from buying-shops to selling-shops. There are a ton of items waiting to be sold that just aren't doing it fast enough, and so there must be reasoning behind it.



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This analysis is intended to get the MUCH LARGER SCOPE of why Inflation is apparent in the economy of Fiesta :cool:



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Direct Inflation from Questing

If you already agreed with me before about Quest-Money related Inflation, then this section is nothing new to you

Firstly, I am correct in saying that the Gold Sellers are slowing the process of inflation. What I did say, and what I failed to stress enough is that the game itself causes all of the inflation. Gold Sellers are taking money from Questing and instead of putting the Gold directly into the economy for their own character's benefit, they are instead keeping the money from going into the economy until the get a buyer.

The point made here is that while Gold Sellers certainly can't PREVENT inflation, they're certainly not the cause. What they are doing is taking advantage of the natural course of MMORPG game-market inflation for personal, real-life financial benefit.

Essentially the best way to look at it is this: every time a person creates a new character in Fiesta, the economy has to inflate. The game naturally creates inflation to accomodate for every character. There is a fixed amount of money that a player's character can add to the economy (that is money not acquired through trades, but rather the amounts given from quests). This is the only form of inflation that I noted in particular in my post as being the point of interest.

As I say, there is a fixed amount of gold a single player's character can put straight into the economy simply by collecting and then utilizing. This inflation that would occur as it does with every other character is being held back by the gold sellers until they get someone who will pay real money for Fiesta Gold. So yes they are reducing the rate at which currency is being added to the economy so they are reducing inflation - the thing to note as some of you are aware, the inflation related to the Gold Sellers is inevitable, but this is a game mechanic, not a Gold Selling mechanic, every character helps Outspark deliver new currency straight into the economy. So very quickly, Gold Sellers do this too, but they don't dump it into the economy as soon as they get it like everybody else.



Gold Sellers Farming Drops and Circulating them into the Economy

Some of you were looking at Farming Drops as adding money to the Economy, so I'm going to have to clear up this misconception.

For those of you who understand Supply Curves as functions relating Quantity to Price (technically the Economic format dictates Quantity as a function of Price which is backwards of what you would think for those familiar with Cartesian Functions and Coordinates), I'm going to make this very easy for the people who are not familiar with these concepts. Firstly as is standard, set Price to be your verticle axis, and set Quantity to be your horizontal axis.

The really REALLY basic BASICS:

Okay there are two opposite ends of the spectrum here. The first is a system in which for a particular good (I won't actually look at individual goods) there are few suppliers who essentially control the pricing without injuring the quantity in which they sell by much. The second is a system in which there are many many suppliers who have hardly any control in the pricing, and should any individual supplier make a change up in price might no longer be able to sell, and if they make a change down in price will sell out almost instantly.

Okay, so very obviously, as we add more suppliers to the system and as our demand does not change, we see a shift from supplier price-control to a fairly constant pricing scheme.

When Gold Sellers farm drops and sell them, they are shifting the overall economy from one in which prices can be easily shifted to one in which prices are fairly stationary (i.e. Dim Dusts tend to stay between 70c and 90c, if someone priced their Dims well outside of this, they will notice a drastic change in the amount of sales they're actually getting).

Inflation/Depression from the Supply Shift

So ultimately Gold Sellers who farm drops are helping to push the supply-side more quickly to a purely competitive economy.

What I am arriving at is this shift is natural regardless of who it is specifically who is starting to sell stuff, but the problem is this shift is supposed to occur with a balance in the shift of demand, that is for the system to stay stable and unchanging, an increase in quantity supplied must equate to an increase in quantity demanded.

Arriving at one of the other major problems noted is a reduction in the number of players joining Fiesta. If fewer players are joining, then the quantity demanded is increasing more slowly than the quantity supplied, so we're seeing a shift to a more purely competitive market.

The ultimate result of which is there are dozens upon dozens of shops sitting there trying to sell stuff to customers that don't even exist or are very few in number - thus transactions become more RARE (so the value of gold is going down, so inflation is occurring). For many of you who have studied the economic changes that occurred between World War I and World War II, "The Hyperinflation" in Germany is a paradigm that reflects rarity in currency flow to the supply-side (in the case of The Hyperinflation, an EXTREME rarity in currency flow to the supply-side).

Just so you all know, Macroeconomics thrives on the notion of Paradigms and comparing noticeable occurrences now to noticeable economic occurrences that have happened before.

As an increase in the ratio of quantity supplied over quantity demanded occurs, apparently drop-farming Gold Sellers are clearly pushing the economy of Fiesta into inactivity.

My Conclusion (this is much less simple than what I tried to explain above)

So on one hand we have inevitable inflation at reduced rates from Gold Sellers circulating Quest-based currency to buyers, and on the other hand we see a reduction in the supply-side of market activity. By closing the financial-gap between low-levels and high-levels, we see a normalization in prices. By flooding the markets with more drops, we see a normalization in prices. So everything is shifting to a purely competetive market that has a growing surplus supply to its current demand due to a reduction in incoming players. Ultimately the reduction in supply-side market activity is causing an inflation in Gold due to the lack of transactions occurring (which is cyclic).

So the players who buy gold from Gold Sellers get to a state of financial stability or better, and then those who work hard to get there, and then those who cannot earn enough money are struggling to make their way up.

Ultimately, we have serious inflation in currency, for which the only way to stay on top is to buy more money from Gold Sellers.

My personal opinion which I refrained from adding to the discussion before is that I think Gold Selling isn't so much the cause of inflation as much as it is the only means those at the bottom of the barrel have to survive ongoing inflation. I believe that through my analysis that it is the surplus of drops up for sale in the market and a decline in the amount of new players in Fiesta that is causing this strong inflation, and what's worse is that coming into the game you might feel like in the game it takes a long time to succeed financially, which IS the effect of inflation in the economy.



Conclusion: Reduction of Incoming Players and a Surplus in Goods Supplied are causing Inflation (which is reducing the number of incoming players and not solving our problem with surplus goods supplied) and Gold Sellers are the ones profiting from this

:eek::eek::eek:

Double-Post, sorry!
 

Unfortunately my post was pushing the maximum number of characters so I'm posting a double post (sorry!!! :( ) because there was another good response I got that I wanted to provide my feedback to.

This post definitely stood out to me, and was written by MaxOff:

Firstly, in my previous post I was making an observation of what I saw and not really giving my opinion on the matter. Yes I believe that Gold-Sellers are not really causing inflation by slowing the rate at which game-induced inflation actually occurs. As stated above this is the RESULT of ongoing inflation.

Note, my previous observation never included anything on the surplus-supply before, which is what I lacked in order to be able to state a clear opinion. Here because I have the ability to conclude what IS happening to the economy on Fiesta, I am able to state an opinion supported by reasonable analysis and observations.

Your last paragraph definitely supports the observation that inflation IS occurring, and I agree that players who are not buying gold from Gold Sellers are at a disadvantage, however I do not believe those buying Gold are alone in Fiesta, or at least not yet. Players whose characters already have plenty of money and items are right up there with Gold Buyers, not being affected by the chaos occurring in Elderine and the simple lack of activity in Roumen. Pretty soon Elderine will begin to look like Roumen if we don't draw more players in quickly, and then the players in Uruga will start feeling the results and will be scurrying to make ends meet financially.

Not quite. Spider Assault, and the King Kong Phino are two of the highest paying KQ's. These KQ's run every hour.

Reward: a box full of T3 materials that can be NPC'ed.

Spider Assault: Up to 9 stacks of T3 items (30 per stack, 10 T3 potion buffs)
King Kong Phino: Up to 9 stacks of T3 items (50 per stack, 15 T3 potion buffs)


Unfortunately, Fiesta's economy doesn't quite work as one would expect it to.

The higher-levelled and lower-levelled area's can be completely independant of eachother. The only need for low-level assistance is in the production of scrolls which often require T2 or T1 mats when producing a T3 or T2 scroll.

uhm, quests do not cause inflation in the end :P

I mean, they actually give extra money to the econ, but NPCable drops don't give you THAT much money since you'll be using a lot of those on prod skills which will result in consumables, and skills/stones are more than enough to burn money out of econ in a reasonable rate.

as for the supply stuff, well, as much as I hate to say it, bots selling low tier mats make life easier for lots of people since not everyone wants to spend their strict amount of time available to play on gathering such stuff, and most of the legit players who actually gather stuff do it for using not selling x;
there IS a portion of the new incoming players that will sell those, but that doesn't cover all the demand. and even if the need for low level assistance is low, it's still needed to be given in a reasonable amount.

Miles_Glorioso , im really glad for your last posts, but there is some important error in your thoughts:
-Every Players that joins the game, will leave it someday too.
-GoldSellers do not sell the drops they farmed to the community, but to the npc's
-If my overvation is correct: GoldSeller mainly generate there money by selling enchantment services.
---they resell money, not generate
---are the mayor buyer for dusts
---are buying from the cashshop

So sorry if I misunderstand something. My understanding of economics is limited to supply-demand, what I read in the paper, and common sense.. xD

Hmm... How does that differentiate between a person who, say, farms a lot of sap in the the sap farms in AEW and someone who only farms and only gets money from quests? Obviously, the person who has farmed a lot of Sap and then NPC'ed it has a lot more money to add than someone who has simply gotten money from the quests. The game has a near limitless supply of ways to earn money, simply by NPCing mushrooms, ore, petals, starfish, clam meat, whatever.

The thing with this is Gold Sellers don't... affect the economy otherwise in any other way. That is, they aren't spending money for skills, or equips, or HP/SP stones like real players do--that money "disappears" into the game forever (and I'm going to go out on a limb and say that is good for keeping down inflation since it is removing money from the economy). Also I'm assuming they aren't getting their money from quests since the money that is earned through quests is actually not a lot compared to the same amount of time spent farming. Not to mention it's hard for bots to figure out quests and what to kill and to turn in quests. @.@

I dunno about this one but I don't think Gold Sellers actually sell (vend) the drops they farm. I've always been under the assumption that Gold Sellers are using bots that can farm or mine and they will later sell these drops to an NPC and since they aren't limited by time, this is highly profitable for them. (I wouldn't be surprised if one gold-selling company could be run by just a couple people.)

Also, another thing to note is that unlike the real world, there isn't a certain amount of money that players have to earn in order to "play." Yes, it's nice to have HP/SP stones, but those aren't necessary in the sense that IRL, food and other expenses are necessary. So for many people (like me), vending stuff that I don't want is a bonus. I would still do fine whether I sold/bought stuff or not. I know that whenever I cannot sell my equips, I will continually lower my price until I can sell them. However (and correct me on this if I'm wrong), retailers feel like they have to keep raising the price of everything to keep up with the expenses. A character's most basic expense in Fiesta is from the NPC, which do not ever change prices.

Basically, I don't consider Fiesta to be dependent on currency flow from one player to another.

I dont see why all these People are Complaining, If the Game did give you all the special things that you have to buy with SparkCash, they would mostlikly have to charge people to play. It would be like Final Fantasy 11. But they are at least letting Everyone play for Free, or would you like a bill of $29.99 a month to play Fiesta.

Re-hashed and re-tried argument =/


The Cash-Shop thing was only one facet of the whole thread. Thing is, while what Rokaraged posted a long time ago isn't even the main focus of this thread anymore, it is something that we're playing with right now, months after he posted.