Ely wrote: ↑Thu Nov 21, 2019 11:39 pm
Releasing rares was originally aimed at giving players the chance to obtain something that unless they win trills staking, was impossible. With this current set-up, we’re only giving items to players who have substantial amounts of wealth.
What exacrly are you referring to when you say it was originally aimed at giving regular players a chance to obtain something that would be impossible to get unless you win trills staking?
In my mind there are two era's of how new ultra-rares were released.
The old way: made available only to a selected few, in one of three ways:
- Given as random gifts by admins and supers (because items which weren't in the game were not thought of as having eco-value)
- Sold for a fraction of their value as a custom donation (because, again, they never predicted the ridiculous amounts of money other players would pay for them)
- Obtained through bugs by a lucky few (back then there were no logs or eco scans so there was no way to find and confiscate them)
Either way,, it's not like anyone else had a chance at them. Only the few that had friends in high places, good bargaining skills at custom donations or the luck to find them through a glitch and get away with it. For the record the vast majority fell into the laps of a few bug abusers. Everyone who obtained one of these golden eggs got it at little to no cost. Not exactly fair.
The new way: we sell them in the donator shop along with tradeable credits. This has also never been about giving anyone a chance at an out-of-their-league rare. Instead of just giving players massive chunks of wealth (regardless of how they are chosen) we decided to make the item's value work to our advantage. These items are always going to be the ultimate veteran money-sink. We can't really change that without destroying the whole concept of ultra-rares, but we can benefit from it. In a way it seems fitting that the strongest shoulders (or the richest players) help carry the load, and these items are the perfect tool for it, without taking anything away from what they always have been (as I think the aprons have proven).
In this way every new rare that gets released directly contributes towards our funding, which helps everyone by keeping the server alive. And it really does help a lot. I ran the sales figures on the donator shop earlier this week and despite looking at the past 5 months totalled, those 10 aprons were still the second best selling thing in terms of credits. They make a major contribution in keeping PkHonor going despite the shrinkage in playerbase (and with it, donations).
All in all, I think this new way is a lot more fair and socially responsible than the old one.
But in a way you are right, we also wanted to give people a chance at obtaining them. Specifically we wanted to avoid the situation where they are all hoarded and it is now impossible to get one. This is more our reason for releasing new ones at all, irrespective of how we ended up doing that.
If it does happen that someone instantly buys them all and then hoards them or sells them at extortion prices then we would take steps to counter that. Maybe instead of being stock-limited we'll change to time-limited sales. Either way, that's not what we're going for and while we're not going to make this illegal we're also not going to let it become the meta for these sales.
Now as for the rest of this discussion, yes more will come in the near future but I'm afraid I cannot say what or how much until the formal announcement. That being said this discussion is proving most useful in helping us decide that so please, by all means continue.
