Kyu

network decided to suck today for about 15 minutes, it resolved itself. No ddos / etc.

Faster than last time, we'll have a proper Q&A around the first PTS

I'm not taking pot shots at the GMs, but it's not really their place to discuss things like inflation because it's not their expertise. Half this topic was devoted to the current state of the economy, half of it is tournament prizes and general PvP stuff which they don't really know our plans on. It was meant to be more of a joking comment because topics like these are tiring, but I'm not upset at our players for being mad at us or anything, and I know the GMs would handle it if it were a GM-y matter. I'd be mildly perturbed if someone who didn't know what they were doing showed up and tried to lecture you guys about the goings-on of the economy and all that, because it's misinformation from an authority figure, even if it's meant in good faith. Also, if you have to ask, the answer would probably be "Please do not."

It is being considered, yes.

It's not really because of "mean replies", it's just draining as hell to sit here and get yelled at. This is an all-day event, because I can't disengage halfway through without looking like a jerk. My initial reply took an hour to write, and the turbonerds who provide feedback spent a few hours debating the topic between themselves prior to me doing so, but it's not really a good use of anyone's time if we can help it. They do try to listen, though. Most of them just aren't very good at the economic details, and don't want to say something dumb, because that becomes "the staff response."

Yes. This is literally "not my department", I don't have any say in tournament prizes, and the only thing I can recommend (I can poke the GMs and say hey guys you're doing something dumb) is based on whether I believe the economy is stable, or whether the prize tiering is too uneven. None of the GMs wanted to touch this topic because of replies like yours, so I'm the best you get, sorry. That'd probably be a good way to recycle them, but I can't recall whether the motivation of it was purely for asset reasons (we are, eventually, going to run out of ideas), or whether there was some economic reason to it being brought up. If it were just for asset reasons, highly derivative stuff like that would be an ok way to manage it imo. What I was alluding to in my original post was whether free players have access to items which are immune to inflation without having to dump money into the game, and without having to trade with another player. Currently, within our current event model, they do. They still do even if we stop giving them away, it's not like we're tiering tradeability based on how much money you threw at us, but being able to access that class of inflation-immune item by themselves helps kind of bridge the divide between free/paid players, and probably helps players resent us less. But, maybe I'm overthinking it, and nobody really cares. I think this knowledge of inflation-immune items only recently became a topic of the public consciousness as the rest of the system showed cracks, so maybe they care now, though. When it comes to discussing economic issues, we usually don't want to comment on specifics like this, because if I said in this moment "We're nerfing berries into the ground", the market would probably hyper-inflate as everyone rushes to get as much money as they can out of it. I'll write you a book sometime later though. So, like I said above, this is literally not my department, but yeah, the IV stuff is just a technical issue which hasn't been addressed. We do want to dump a few months into PvP, it's a little bad atm, and the tournament prizes didn't change when the meta's IV importance did. It's literally impossible for them to assign anything other than 4x25,2x31 atm iirc, so that's really our fault. I'll ask one of the prize tier people to look at this topic, but I'm pretty sure that conversation is going to go like this: We are very concerned over whether staff-driven events cause issues in-game due to prize distribution, but I think those concerns may just be outdated as it's all a drop in the bucket compared to our playerbase now. So you might get a lecture about how staff event-driven inflation is bad for the game, or you might get silent changes, or maybe nothing will happen, because hey, making sweeping changes to a standardized system during times of economic volatility probably really is a bad idea.

It's something which we're debating internally, iirc. The last time we talked about it was probably Christmas or Halloween 2018. We're considering re-releasing them after an extremely long period of time, e.g. a few years from now, but I'm not sure we ever will. Depends on if we get to the point of running out of ideas for events, or if we run too many (3x per year already feels like too many imo, but this was an exceptionally bad year due to how much work was required to make them work in NDS areas, so we'll see throughout 2019). Good catch though, I completely forgot about that. That would push the debate of whether free users have the same opportunities as paid users. I don't know man, it's so bad. It's the worst hat we ever sold, it's a meme at this point. I don't think the guy even realizes he has one. Unless it's you, in which case, congrats. I guess someone already told everyone.

Hi, so, I see we have a bit of an inflammatory topic to bait me into posting, so here you go: This has been covered several times by other posters so far, but I just want to note, this isn't Venezuela. Lopping zeroes off your currency doesn't solve your problems. We only did that once, and it was because we made an irreparable mistake at the time which forced a hard reset. I think what you want is to try to address inflation, so I'm just going to give a brief overview of inflation in MMO economies real quick: - Yen Inflation When you build a berry or you explode a gym leader/NPC, you get gold. When you get gold, you spend gold, on players or on NPCs. When you spend gold on players, you're not actually destroying gold, you're just moving it around. If we made a mistake here, the proper way to address it is to either stop the gold flow or make you spend more. - Item Inflation When items are built, the supply of "built items" becomes inflated. You turn gold into items. The items don't degenerate in our game. That means we need to have planned obsolesence built into our game's release schedule, which is why your items "degenerate" whenever a new metagame develops by way of a major content update. That's why you get mad at us when you start thinking about HAs and Gen 4. So, the way that we've historically managed this problem is by cutting money supplies, then forcing you all to build new items in some way. We have several major "reset buttons" left, with Sinnoh, HAs, Legendaries, etc. We just have to actually deploy them. While I'm always concerned over hitting a proper level of money flow within the game, I'm not overly concerned about oddities like these past few months, because we have leeway to make mistakes. You should note that I didn't mention any vanities in that paragraph. Those items don't expire. Infact, they're the only items which are immune to inflation by design, because they're released once. RuneScape also has this, although it's called the "party hat economy". Whether that makes the game better is debatable, because while it may seem "pay2win" (protip: we release free versions of limiteds literally every event, although they're not perfectly equatable to paid variants due to natural supply/demand of free vs paid users), it not only provides a store of wealth where it's otherwise impossible, but it ensures that goods traded between players for normal gameplay are able to be consistently inflated (HIGHLY AVAILABLE) by pegging peak wealth against something which is untouchable, which helps user adoption during the mature stages of a game's life by allowing us to make sure that gameplay-affecting items are inflated while retaining the prestige of having something valuable. Probably. Wealthy players don't play the same way that you do, anyway. They shift gold/items around for most of their gameplay. There are no inherent costs to doing this by design, because stifling trading by introducing taxation is pretty toxic for the game on a fundamental level. Wealth inequality within a game is not inherently bad imo, but taxing this type of player is not easy, because you either need to break the promise of wealth being stored in certain types of items (we're not going to do this), you need to deflate their assets, or you need to tax the process of trading. Alternatively, you can just try to convince everyone that a hat is worthless. All of this value is imaginary, and created by you. If I had to pick and choose what "the real problem" is, I would say that there's a disconnect between yen / item inflation which is making players mad because they're finding that it's faster to just throw $5 at us than actually play the game. That's an indicator of yen inflation, and I don't really like the level of inflation we're currently seeing, which you can see in our last patch notes, so we'll continue to make adjustments. (Fun fact: There's one player who has the rarest hat in the game, the only one of its kind, which is completely worthless because he not only didn't sell it, but it looks terrible.) The GMs aren't actually going to do anything in the short-term, unless there's something really dumb going on with prize distribution (1st vs 2nd vs 3rd is too different). They would want to see long-term trends of monetary inflation before considering the adjustment of prize pools against the current state of the economy (when they make a decision). You guys get really mad when they reduce prizes, so they don't want to overbuff then say "oh no we messed up" and nerf it again, so they're always going to be tepid about it. The fact that I'm posting this will tell them that, no, they really shouldn't be touching prizes, it's a really bad idea to do it during a volatile economy regardless of how many angry people there are. No. We made a promise that they would be released once. No. We have been looking at reforms for formatting of official PvP events for a few months now, although we haven't had the opportunity to realize them yet. You'll understand why fairly soon, but we're pretty busy behind the scenes atm. I'd like to dump about 2 months into the PvP system fairly soon, I think you'd be happy with it by the time we're done. I'll make sure to keep the IV request in mind. Sorry for the informal tone for all of this, this thread is long. This is a very complicated set of questions which requires a lot of thought, and is definitely not addressed by "just make em all poor lol." This probably doesn't have the answers you want, but hopefully it'll give you a bit of insight to the thought process behind it all. nerd