Thierryu1 wrote: ↑Sat Feb 20, 2021 5:00 am
I think it has become the norm to buy the status because it's the progression of the game. I am sure that a lot of people don't wanna buy the things for 10b, but sadly they have no choice if they want to get their characters to max and comp. The removal of the Status' and instead using something different to decide when people get their donator and premium bonuses, be it your total level, your time played, objectives completed would for me work fine too. Though obviously, you will not agree with this seeing as it loses an iconic thing from PKH and from the donator shop.
I disagree with the premise that buyers don't have a choice. They do have a choice, and they're choosing to rather pay 10B than play without a status for a while. Playing with statuses may have become the norm but that's only because people insist on having every possible advantage. It's not as if you can't play without one. It's a want-to-have more than a must-have.
This makes it sound like sellers have all the power and buyers are powerless, but that's not true at all. There's no monopoly (or oligopoly) here that gives sellers all the power. Both sides have equal power.
Buyers have a sense of urgent necessity (I want my status ASAP)
Sellers have a sense of urgent necessity (I want my GP ASAP)
Buyers feel that they have to outbid each other (bid too low and no one will ever sell to you)
Sellers feel that they have to undercut each other (ask too much and no one will ever buy from you)
It's just a tug of war between the two sides, a contest of patience. How long do you think a donator will wait when they're trying to sell a status for 10B+ (or credits for 5B+) and no one is buying them? An hour? A day? Maybe a week? I doubt it'll take that long before they start lowering their asking price. They're just as desperate to get their money as you are to get that status. Buyers as a collective have just as much power to force the sellers to lower their prices as sellers have power to force buyers to pay more.
As for removing statuses... Looking at the donation figures for the past 2 years, I can tell you without any doubt that PkHonor would be done. Statuses are a major source of income. Without that we don't have enough to stay online. Not even close. Statuses are the cornerstone of PkHonor's funding strategy, and the reason why we're still here after almost 13 years (which is astounding). If you want to brainstorm for a solution to their current asking price I suggest you work on the assumption that statuses remain an item that can only enter the game through donations. At this point we can't even consider changing that.
This may be a radical idea but has anyone ever considered trying to solve the problem on the player-side instead of asking us to intervene with price-fixing? As in, for example, doing a serverwide campaign getting everyone on board with the idea that statuses are 5-6B each (and credits 2.5-3M each) and collectively refusing to pay more than that. We're not that big a community, it's not like you have to convince millions of people and considering the unanimous support this topic is getting it shouldn't be hard to do. If you get 100 people to join this extortion pricing boycott it's pretty much guaranteed that sellers will be forced to lower their asking prices back to normal (= what they were a year ago).
Thierryu1 wrote: ↑Sat Feb 20, 2021 5:00 am
About the rise in donator credits I think it might have to do with the following;
Since the last ultra rare sale it has become clear that people expect it to come again, maybe because the timeframes in between the two former ultra sales were quite identical, maybe because not all the oldschool rares have been put in the shop, or maybe even because people think Mike and You need the money for the server and yourself (Rumors I heard on the street, jokingly and seriously).
That's exactly why we're not doing another one. Consider it a counter to the people banking on the idea that it's been 6+ months so there's gotta be another one soon. These sales weren't meant to create some kind of predictable cyclic rhythm, the anticipation of which creates other problems (such as statuses becoming really expensive). As long as that's going on we have no intention of doing another sale. Those huge increases in credit value were supposed to be a temporary thing. If repeated sales are causing that to be a permanent thing, we might be better off not doing any more sales. So I guess we'll see if they come back down again.
The underdog wrote: ↑Sat Feb 20, 2021 12:34 pm
mboxes being the best source of statuses
Why do you consider them to be the best source of statuses? If statuses are what you're after mboxes are not a very good way to get them. You'd have to spend 18,182 credits on mboxes to get 1 status (on average). Sure you get other loot as well but spending 2,000 credits to just buy the status will be a lot more efficient. Of all the statuses that enter the game only a small percentage come from mboxes. Most of them are bought for credits directly.
Mboxes did become cheaper but so did everything else in the donator store. With alch values being somewhat lowered you'd think that mboxes would be less attractive now, since many of the items from mboxes just get alched.
The underdog wrote: ↑Sat Feb 20, 2021 12:34 pm
Why wouldn't a lower donator status price cause the price to drop? If you pay 5m a credit and you put it for 1000 credits in the shop. Why would you pay 10b for it from a donating person if you can buy 1000 credits for 5m each and have it for 5b?
That's one possibility, but I don't think that's what would happen. It could just as easily result in statuses staying at 10B and the credit price going up to 8-10M each. Apparently people are willing to pay upwards of 10B to get their status so I think most likely what would happen is: people start paying whatever high price GE sellers are asking to get credits immediately. Right now that's 6.5M each, but it wouldn't take long before sellers realize they can sell their credits for 7M each, and then 8M each, and then 10M each, and people would still buy them because they want a status that badly. Nothing is going to change as long as people are willing to pay that much to get a status. If anything it would take us further in the wrong direction.
Thoby wrote: ↑Sat Feb 20, 2021 1:05 pm
I don't think that the ultra rares primarily dictate the 5m pricetag of Donator Credits, but I think the general demand has risen quite a lot. This likely has to do with the update that happened on the
20th of December. Keeping general economics theory in mind (supply versus demand), a few significant changes have been made to the Donator and Premium statuses:
Although these changes have no doubt contributed, I don't think it's as much as you might expect. The trend of statuses getting more expensive has been going on for much longer. To illustrate this: the current ::prices for the donator status (6-8M) were set in March 2020, and keep in mind we're always a bit conservative with those prices. They were already being traded for 8M+ long before that update. And while the ::prices for the premium status are still at 5-6M, those haven't been updated since October 2019. A similar increase has been happening for that item.
Thoby wrote: ↑Sat Feb 20, 2021 1:05 pm
With the removal of the purchasable statuses for ironmen, a heap of new demand has appeared. Lets say that our player base is 75% regular players, and 25% ironmen (rough estimate). This change alone would generate about 33% more demand for the statuses by our ironmen community.
Not a bad guess but here are the actual numbers (looking at 2021):
Going by accounts: 12.8% are irons (9.46% regular ironman, 2.39% HCIM, 0.95% UIM)
Going by time played: 19.7% is on irons (16.07% regular ironman, 2.56% HCIM, 1.07% UIM)
I'm not sure which is the better metric. Statuses are per-account, but time played helps weed out the trash accounts. The average of the two would be 16.25%.
Perhaps the best metric is to look at how many active accounts have 10h+ timeplayed (i.e. progressed far enough that they would probably want a status).
Answer: 15.39% (12.7% regular ironman, 1.74% HCIM, 0.95% UIM)
So their impact is a fair bit less than you calculated.
Thoby wrote: ↑Sat Feb 20, 2021 1:05 pm
Next, we also see the biggest change for the supply; statuses cannot be removed after they are applied. When they are 'removed' it now returns 5b in cash instead of an item. This has had a heavy impact on supply, since each new player/account that wants a status requires someone to donate for the credits. Before, it was possible that some statuses moved from owner to owner for 10+ years, but with this update its lifecycle ends when applied to a player. I cannot put an estimated decrease of supply alongside this, because I don't have the numbers, but statuses are removed quite often.
That is true, but it doesn't really explain the overall increase in price. Donators will sell whatever gets them the most GP for their credits. What you would expect from this is that statuses become a bit more expensive until they are the most efficient GP-per-credit item and then it caps out. What we're actually seeing is a continued increase in selling prices across the board, mostly because they can and people will still buy them. Again, that's a trend that has been going on for much longer than statuses have been destroyed on removal so I don't think that's to blame for it (but it does likely contribute a little).
On the flipside, you could argue that the change to statuses should've had the opposite effect. Not only has the one-time-use thing made statuses less useful (so presumably worth less), us putting a flat 5B cash return on them should've had a price-fixing effect. In the past the worth of a status wasn't so clearly defined, the prices were more free to vary since you always got the status back after removal (minus a flat fee).
Thoby wrote: ↑Sat Feb 20, 2021 1:05 pm
These changes, alongside the increased demand for more bank spaces and other items, has impacted the price of the Donator credits.
Actually almost no credits have been spent on bank space. The impact of this is very small.
Thoby wrote: ↑Sat Feb 20, 2021 1:05 pm
I sorta think this was intended with this update, to at least give the Donator credits more value (and thus more incentive to support the server). If we'd put the statuses into some kind of store, we might as well revert the update.
Not exactly. The intention of the update was to get more credits going into the game and being used (obviously). Increasing the pricetag of credits was never the intention and is in fact something we're not happy with. That is the main reason why we did a 20% price reduction on all donator store items, to counter the fact that credits were becoming more expensive. We could've also reduced the $$ pricetag for credits by 20% and hope this will bring the price down but in my experience our economy doesn't work that way. It seemed safer to reduce donator store credit prices to counteract the increase in credit value.
Doctor drop wrote: ↑Sat Feb 20, 2021 1:32 pm
i agree with thierry, if we are trying to increase our player base this 22b for donator and prem is pretty harshly high,
I also agree with that.
Doctor drop wrote: ↑Sat Feb 20, 2021 1:32 pm
is there maybe not a way they can buy prem and donator at a one time fee of 5b each on a new account but cant be redeemed?(if they were to redeem it they would get nothing back) to eliminate people from abusing the 5b each per status.
So people get a cheaperstatus for their own account and eliminates the (mass buy at 5b per account to resell).
I find by doing so it will keep our player base as people who usually take off statuses are gamblers.. lets be honest.
Assuming statuses still need to come from donations, how would we do that? Create a second unremovable version of both items and put them in the donator store for half the price? My guess is that sellers would still charge 10B for them, because they can.
The underdog wrote: ↑Sat Feb 20, 2021 4:56 pm
If the gap between ingame cost and what you donate for it becomes too big that's also not favorable. Say I have to donate 20eur for donator and premium. While if I were to buy gp at the 5neeth market and receive 20b to buy it for 10b ingame that's tempting rwt. Maybe @Nazuths has some accurate numbers on this.
How is that any more tempting than it was before? If you could RWT buy the 20B in the past, buy the statuses for 5B each and have 10B left over, wouldn't that have been even more tempting? If anything this makes it less tempting, doesn't it?
I think donation profitability is one of the main reasons why this is happening. Even with these "super high" status prices, you'd have to donate €128 (a lot of money) to get 100B (actually not THAT much money anymore). Or if you wanted to be as rich as The Underdog you'd need to donate like €3000, even selling statuses at 10B each. It's not surprising that donators are trying to get more GP. Comparatively speaking they're not getting all that much for their money.
