Quote:
Originally Posted by Mafukie
Here is a good question for you, what is being done to prevent further saturation of Era's economy? The server seems to be locked down, much like Zodiac with people selling items for a ridiculous amount leaving newcomers and possible trial to pay clients torn between having a friend get them started to turning them away to another MMO.
I say this from personal experience since I have recently tried Era and Zodiac (extensively) since its been slow at work but :P I leveled to 60 in Zodiac in a week and ended up quitting since the economy is ran by seasoned players who charge an arm and a leg for gear, and lets face it there is no 'end-game' content for people to enjoy just get the best gear and create another character.
But back to Era, I can't imagine how many shells I'd have to dig up in order to be competitive on the server thanks to poor economy management.
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I'm assuming you're talking about the horrible prices "on the street", which are always ridiculous, anyway.
The only reason things are so expensive, these days, is the same reason for the reset - Thanks to some crazy pains in the butts finding and exploiting it, (then further-more making public how to do it) duping has been an issue. For about a month, now, there's been issues with players duping items, cash, anything they can think of (even Shells). With millions of dollars being duped, these money dupers were buying up all the "rare" weapons and demanding outrageous amounts of money to sell them back to the public. These are the types of people we were able to catch early, since they weren't exactly being discrete about advertising themselves.
Others weren't so easy to pick up on. Maybe they duped in small amounts (only duped what they needed at the time), who knows, but these 'slower dupers' are the type that started out this frenzy, which lead to the in-shop prices being increased in certain places. At the time, we didn't know where this cash was coming from, and figured "
Up the price on those powerful weapons, and those with the money will then no longer have that money", which obviously didn't take. They'd dupe the money, then spend it as if they lost nothing, yet gained the powerful weapon.
Cutting the long story off: We've implemented an annoying, yet so far effective way to stop duping. It's a drop confirm window type thing. As it was, you could only dupe while the server was lagging (
*cough* or while another server was lagging all the other Classic servers - which happens the most often *cough*). Thus, we added a feature to the already made, and optional at the time, drop confirm window where if the server didn't respond to the clientsided GUI that told you about the item you were dropping after 5 seconds - That item drop was unsuccessful and the information about your item was cleared from the screen. However, if the server is able to respond, you're then faced with confirm/deny buttons. Should the server start lagging AFTER these buttons appear, there's another check for about 1-1.5 seconds for that before the item is actually dropped. No response = no drop.
Basically - Duping: that's why our economy is horribly unbalanced right now, and if this system holds, the already planned reset will at least help us get a fresh and uncorrupted start without the worry of someone duping an AK47 or $1 over and over again and instantly put Era back in the hole we managed to fix ourselves from getting in. I'm just glad that this issue was discovered before the reset.