Solution for the rampant Exploits to save the MG economy

Feedback and Suggestions
1

I do have some feedback I think would be useful. Mentioned in general chat on the official discord and a lot of people liked the idea.

Make gold the resource that is needed for posting items on the Bazaar. And the currency gained/used for purchases can be faction points. Then when the 1.2 gold dupe hits, it won’t be as significant because its only for stash tabs and listing fees. Of course this assumes there are not any ways to dupe Faction points (but honestly there shouldn’t be since we cannot trade faction points)

Edit: This is a proposal for next cycle. Obviously this would not work as a mid-cycle update.

1 Like
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On first look: A nice idea!

In detail though it can’t be done for a simple reason:
What does the seller get as a reward for selling? Gold or Favor?

In the case of gold: That’s worthless, it’s in that system only for selling, hence you can’t get equipment, so not useful.
In the case of Favor: That’s one major exploit. Get a friend, sell a item to him, he puts one up, buy it, set another up… the favor gets shifted around bypassing the progression.

So no, won’t work.

You’re right that we can’t dupe Favor but you can trivialize reputation completely like this early on. You’ve built it into your system after all :stuck_out_tongue:

3

We can already do this, but with gold. So I don’t see this as a problem. I can already post an item for gold and have my friend buy it. To stop people from abusing this to level up, they can simply remove the “spending faction gives rank” and increase the amount of XP that is converted to favour to keep progression similar

At least with this method things would be relatively the same, but without the chance of a gold exploit destroying the economy again

4

The difference between that and what Kulze said is that shifting gold back and forth ultimately gives you nothing and you both end up with the same amount.
Whereas shifting favor back and forth means you both get ranks while doing it.

Previous was before your edit.
To answer this one: they’d have to remove both “spending gives reputation” and “gaining gives reputation” because in that trade you’re both simultaneously spending and gaining favour.
Which means that then they have to find an alternative way to level your faction that isn’t actually linked to your faction.
At least currently you gain more ranks by engaging with it.

5

Fair enough. I agree it might not be perfect and they would have to change a few systems. But I do think it would be worth the development time to revamp the system to avoid economic catastrophes in the future. But even if MG progress was slower, I would be happier than I am now lol

I would love to be able to compare retention between cycles to see if the economy/gold dupes affected retention in a major way, but unfortunately every .9 1.0 and 1.1 have all seen gold dupes early in the cycle.

6

They already stated there will most likely be no rerolls on the servers (meaning they’re being conservative on this matter), now you want them to simply swap favor for gold? And calls this a solution?

I’m sorry, but what on earth? What makes you think this is even feasible, let alone a solution?

I’m failing really hard to even understand the reasoning behind this suggestion, as, to my understanding, this would be a much more extreme action to take than to just restart cycle as if it was released today.

7

Sorry I guess I should have stated that I do not see this as a solution THIS cycle. This is a solution for future cycles.

Lets be honest, EHG will likely do nothing to stabilize the economy in 1.1 which is exactly how they handled the economy after the dupes in 1.0.

8

Yeah, I’m all up for good willing suggestions, even the most creative ones…
But when I read “swap gold for favor” I just kept re-reading it thinking: “What? Why? How?”

9

What would be the usage of that? Nothing, it provides no upside at all outside of bybassing the group trading mechanic when both parties are MG.

Now Favor: Using 1 Favor grants 2 Reputation. Reputation unlocks Rank. Rank unlocks access to the market. Hence in the situation that you got 50k favor and you and your friend have a decent amount of gold on the side (which is easy since it’s not used up after all in your case) then you shove 50k Favor to him and get 100k Rep, immediate rank-up. Then return it, he gets immediate rank-ups.

What we currently need tens of hours to achieve is cut down to 5 minutes.

Nope, not doable, period. It’s a major flaw in the system.

Sure, then that would need to be implemented 1 to 1 into CoF as well since MG and CoF are based on the exact same premise and EHG wants to (I dislike it but that’s beside the point) uphold that for some odd reason which can’t be sensibly understood. But it is that way simply for now.

So… you solely level it up through experience, that’s it. Why have reputation then? Currently it had a distinct name because the function is intentionally kept separate. The earning of Favor being extra from spending of favor. This means that you have to actively choose between using favor for something reasonable which helps you out versus saving it up and holding your rank back through the progression but saving for something good.

This upholds in both MG and CoF actually. In CoF it relies on gear and which uniques you find, depending on that your prophecies will be changed relevant to lucky drops you might get along the way. For example a rare unique with 3 LP, a major find, hence only using it for the needed prophecies then.
With MG it’s obvious to save up for buying specific items or listing those which costs a decent amount of favor like legendaries.

So it would remove that whole aspect which removes the ‘reputation’ aspect completely, simply letting it level on the side like level would.

You know what also removes any gold exploit issue?
Scaling favor costs with your gold price. That ties play-time to buying items and hence de-values gold as it alone can’t be used.
Side-effect… it destroys RMT to a vast degree by design.

I’m suggesting that since 1.0 came out.

Agreed, but they need to do it properly. Not half-baked.
So functional systems which uphold the ‘market 101’ rules.
Which EHG fails to follow currently, but that’s beside the point.

Yes, for the MG part it did. It also affected the overall usage of MG. You can see it simply by the amount of listing and the players online. Especially in Legacy this is a vast difference. MG is basically non-functional there if it goes a bit further which then pushes more people to CoF and hence makes MG fail further.

Nah, sadly it’s not. A nice try though.

Yes, a major mistake from EHG’s side. Market systems need to be rock-solid before implementation as they have a long-lasting effect on how people perceive you in the future. They fail easily if not set up right and with proper mechanics in place to avoid pitfalls like the duping.
Not implemented, dupe happened, market collapsed. 1.0 in a nutshell.
1.1 started, dupe, market collapsed.
EHG needs to solve this - and I actively provided ways to do that already and nobody could say anything against them for now, so I guess they’re at least decently solid as a basis - or they’ll have the problem of their dual-system collapsing from failure to react accordingly.