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Inflation Incoming!


ShadowUsagi

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Hello,

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[Inflation] is the constant rise in the general level of prices where a unit of currency buys less than it did in prior periods.

(source)

Since everyone now gets BFPoints, but it doesn't leave the market (it is only transferred from a player to another), everyone will have more and more, and so prices will keep going up. i.e. The currency will lose its value the more people have it.

BF (SLR) is a game about cards, not about merchanting. A problem in the economy will break the Card Gathering system, since the gap between new players and old players (who accumulated hordes of BFP) will keep getting bigger.

Since it is a small market as well, some people started monopolizing it: Buying all the -few- copies of a card in auction, then reselling all of them on their own price.

On the other hand, if people were getting cards instead of BFPs, demand will get low, and card prices will drop to the point where eveyone has all the cards they want.

Suggestions -Please-:

1- Reduce the amount of BFP we get from quests, and replace them with cards. Maybe add a new type of booster which has lower odds of getting rare cards.
So, the daily "play X minutes quest" gives a Normal booster, while each other quest gives 10-15 BFPs + Low booster.

The exact numbers need some thought (and data) to get right, but the idea is to increase the Cards entering the market (we play for cards after all), and reduce BFPs (which is an intermediate currency).

BFP were originally meant for a system were new sets of cards (twilights, amii, ..) were introduced periodically. And it was limited because it was bought for real Dollars. Now, when no new cards enter the market, prices of cards will snowball at this rate.

2- Add "sinks" to get some BFPs out of the market.
A sink system is something like upgrades, where players give gold to the game. The gold is bye-bye: no other player will use what you pay for upgrades. That's why the gold value remains stable.
A possible solution is making boosters easily purchasable. current daily quests could give a player a maximum of 150 BFP or so everyday. That could be the price of a booster. So the daily quests will give the player 1 guaranteed booster + 150 BFP which is an Option: spend in trades, OR, buy another booster.
But now, why would someone buy a RNG booster when they can directly buy the cards directly? Assuming they horded enough BFP already, of course.

 

Currently, the best way is not to buy/sell, but to trade; as BFP is losing its value, but cards value remains the same. It is similar to some cases of real life inflation where the currency became so irrelevant that people started going back to the old eggs-for-bread trade system.

In the couple of weeks I played, I noticed a dramatic change in prices (specially Shamans, Dreadchargers, ..etc). It is not that bad, but it will probably be bad soon, imo. At this early stage, there are two approaches:

1- Every few months, re-balance the whole economy, e.g. when players have lots of BFP, lower BFP income rates.. and when players have lots of cards, lower cards odds in boosters, ...etc.

2- Design a relatively balanced source/sink system. It might not be perfect, but it could be tweaked easily and improved in the long run.

 

Thanks for reading. The topic of economy is broad and I might have missed something, so please share your thoughts :)

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17 minutes ago, ShadowUsagi said:

1- Reduce the amount of BFP we get from quests, and replace them with cards.

you getting whole booster (8 cards) every day, and 150 BFP, which is worth ~1/3 of a booster

25 minutes ago, ShadowUsagi said:

A possible solution is making boosters easily purchasable.

isn't that contradiction to point 1-?

30 minutes ago, ShadowUsagi said:

Currently, the best way is not to buy/sell, but to trade

Are you selling or opening boosters?

33 minutes ago, ShadowUsagi said:

1- Every few months, re-balance the whole economy, e.g. when players have lots of BFP, lower BFP income rates.. and when players have lots of cards, lower cards odds in boosters, ...etc.

how that would help anything? I think it would only make players angry that their BFP/cards randomly change value

34 minutes ago, ShadowUsagi said:

2- Design a relatively balanced source/sink system. It might not be perfect, but it could be tweaked easily and improved in the long run.

easily tweakable system :thinking: that sounds almost perfect, do you know any example? @ShadowUsagi

Eirias likes this
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Thank you @Kubik

First, my suggestions are not perfect, they just start a discussion :) That said,

9 minutes ago, Kubik said:

you getting whole booster (8 cards) every day, and 150 BFP, which is worth ~1/3 of a booster

isn't that contradiction to point 1-?

Are you selling or opening boosters?

how that would help anything? I think it would only make players angry that their BFP/cards randomly change value

easily tweakable system :thinking: that sounds almost perfect, do you know any example? @ShadowUsagi

1- Making boosters cheaper will make them more favorable to buy, instead of buying Over priced card in auction. This will reduce BFP in the market and increase cards owned by players.

To explain: There is a price point where boosters become a less favorable option, which is the current case imo. Expensive boosters means BFP inflation, while Cheap boosters means card inflation. We need a middle spot, a wide enough sink to prevent too many BFP in the market, but not to make them irrelevant.

2- I open boosters, but I don't buy them.

3- Yes, it would made people angry. But it solves the problem, temporarily. Not an idea solution, but a solution nonetheless.

4- I meant a system that considers supply/demand and availability of the cards in game (how many players have each card), and balances the BFP/Card income rate accordingly. This is not an easy solution, "but a solution nonetheless."

Thanks a lot :)

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there is already too much cards in my opinion between players. there is more promos than players per month. and on average 1 promo per ~7 players total.

17 minutes ago, ShadowUsagi said:

3- Yes, it would made people angry. But it solves the problem, temporarily. Not an idea solution, but a solution nonetheless.

to be clear I do not think it would solve anything. people will still be gitting more and more cards, and BFP

19 minutes ago, ShadowUsagi said:

availability of the cards

this is the problem there is infinite suply of cards and BFP

1 hour ago, ShadowUsagi said:

That's why the gold value remains stable.

that depend on player some players have some players are really close to Hawk (and Hawk used his GM power to spawn 9 digit number), they have upgrades and charges for every card... so for them gold, BFP, and boosters have no value

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I lookup some data:

Shaman was suprisingly stable in last months: only 8.98% diference between average and median BFP in auction

Dreadcharger was bit less stable with 13,96% difference between average and median BFP in auction

and to be honest I think I see different trend than you, because there is infinite suply of cards cards getting cheaper and cheaper, because more players is oversuplied with these cards, so your suggestion to give even more cards would only make it worse.

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I'm a new player, so I'm not that familiar with the economy of this game at this point just yet.

I'm not sure how the current inflation compares to the beginning of the game. Eventually when numbers are high, percentual inflation drops but inflation will still rise linearly. I mean, if right now the price of shaman changes from 800 to 880 bfp, that's a 10% increase which doesn't sound like much. But if it increased from 90 to 170 at the beginning of the game, that's almost a 100% price increase even though it's the exact same price increase (80bfp). 

While right now people might indeed have too many cards, the ones that need cards don't have that much funds I imagine (newer players). I understand keeping the game free to play, but that does indeed mean that there will be an infinite supply of cards and eventually, given enough time, everyone will have every card including promo's (except newer players). So the auction market right now kind of sucks for newer players since they have a low amount of cards, but card packs ALSO aren't that enticing of an option due to a somewhat high price.

The only real solution I can see for this is constant updates with new cards, since that gives a new BFP sink to give money to. And I know this is not an easy option, but sustainability is quite hard in an environment that doesn't change much and continues "printing" it's own money. Like the OP said, in the old game influx of BFP was lower due to the barrier that it costs real money. Besides, 2 updates came out during the lifetime of Battleforge, creating 2 new money sinks.


But with all thats said, I'm also sure that this is what the open beta also tackles. Seeing how the economy evolves and perhaps making adjustments accordingly. I have full faith in the developers and I will start grinding away. This is just my 2 cents, take it as you will. Have a nice day!

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I think that the basic thought on economy are going in the right direction. There has to be some sort of sink for BFP. Like a tax for unplayed, but collected cards. (That would lead to a more fluctuating market (hopefully)) But this is a bad suggestion.

Also there is another effect. Some rare cards prices rise drastically, while other rares going downwards. This comes from saturation of (unwanted) cards, I think. In the end only a collector will buy unwanted rares. All other will try to sell. On the other side, everyone wants a Harvester. So, either some traders buy all copies of Harvester to put it back in AH for a high price or the demand for special cards (which are hyped) is unbrocken.

Just my 2 cent. :D

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5 hours ago, Kubik said:

releasing 100s new cards yearly is just not an option, not even with team 10 times bigger that would work on it full time, instead of in their free time.

So if you have any solution feel free to offer it.

I understand this is not an option. I'm just trying to compare this game to similar games like digital card games and MMO's. This is the solution most card games go for.

 

MMO's usually go for a tactic to introduce a special currency tied to real-world money, but this is obviously also not an option.. The other tactic they use is money sinks in the form of fast travel, taxes on player owned property, auction house fee's, skill purchasing or vendors that sell high-end items. None of these are unfortunately a great option, but it gives us room to think about a money sink. We could think about tournaments with an entry fee, where winners can get promo cards (if we remove promo's from the boosters). Tournaments could be pvp but also to complete levels quickly with constraints. Perhaps promo's could be purchasable for high amounts of bfp and gold, if you own the regular version already with at least 2 upgrades (although this would again require new code, so could be optional to own the card). Maybe there could be a consumable that makes all your current units that have a promo version LOOK like the promo version for the next 3 games or something, just some cosmetic bonus. I know most of this stuff is focused on the promo's, but that's because I am trying to find a solution without affecting gameplay, but again this would require coding which we don't have the time for.

 

I think that for now, a "solution" could be to increase the amount of packs people get for quests, and reduce the amount of bfp. This is not a perfect solution as everyone will have every card eventually even this way, but it puts everyone on a more equal ground as well as make it more attractive for newer players to join and keep playing (as seeing how far behind you are can be very disheartening). It could maybe at least be worth looking into data when changing numbers around? We can theorise all we want but in practice it usually works out differently than we think. 

 

Also please don't take this post as criticism. I just think the OP makes a valid point and I think it is a good thing we think about this as a community. The game being back in itself is already incredibly awesome, so I would like to take this time to thank you for your efforts! :) 

Edited by RubySauce
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I was proposing action house fees, but MrXLink rejected it. best MMO imaginable would have no introduced coin currecy, but that is their source of real money, so it will probably never happen. Tournaments with entry fee are easily doable, but that is PvP only thing, and introducing limits to PvE would be even more limiting than PvP because even less players would be able to complete these "chalanges". Giving promo cards like that would only mean few players would get controll over all promos in the game. Purchasing promos if player own specific card would be easy to add, but I do not think we want that, it would mean end of free market and full price control, based on our prices of the card.

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Greetings

I'm a new player myself and I can't say anything about former prices.

But as far as I can tell, boosters already make for the best BFP-sink. The BFP used to buy them is completely out of the game.

If older players would receive less or no boosters from quests then they would be more incentivised to buy boosters again or buy cards from other players who in turn use the money to buy boosters.

This way increasing the amount of BFP leaving the came and reducing the rate at wich new cards enter the game. Effectively reducing the rate of devaluation for both.

 

In the end the amound of BFP entering the game should somewhat be equal to the amount leaviing the game through bought boosters.

This ist what their value is tied to after all since they have no other uses.

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Good morning everone.

 

Maybe it would be possible to change the dayli reward system a bit to interfere with the inflation. My idea would be to either give out only one dayli for just the one pack every player gets for playtime and scrap the bfp rewards completely or some kind of vice versa with way lower bfp gains (e.g. 2-10 bfp per quest, depends on how many daylis you will put out).

That would probably only lower the inflation, but it would nevertheless.

The second part to this idea would be a kind of "dusting" system like in Hearthstone. For example you could dust 5 or 10 or whatever number of commons for 1 bfp and the other rarities need less numbers of cards for 1 bfp or give you more than 1 bfp maybe in case of ultra rares.

That means if you go for the one dayli - one pack route (and still offer packs on the shop[maybe make packs boe]) it would create a much slower bfp generation for all players, but new players still receive an opportunity to get ultras and so it would be just depending on rng.

Or if you go for a multi dayli bfp solution (no dayli pack[still shop packs are boe]) it would be almost the same, but maybe a better pacing(?)

For now that are my thoughts on it and i know the "dusting" system would require a lot of time in coding, but the game is till beta right? And there is no given "release" date yet right? So it would be a loooooong term solution. Anyhow i can't think of a solution that doesn't require any kind of coding (e.g. cosmetics in some way).

 

Thank you for reading, have a nice day, with regards

 

Saphy

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i never said my systems are perfect :-D

 

jokes aside. I thought that it would may be enough to get bfp from dusting. you could actually set booster prices to a level that it wouldn't feel too slow or unrewarding to only get bfp from dusting.

Another way could be that the dayli system remains like it is, but the bfp quests just reward way less bfp

 

For me personally i would prefer a pretty slow card gain like my first option over anything else, but i can see that it's just way to slow for the majority of players.

If you consider a "dusting" system as a base idea and say it's relatively easy to implement it would just be a matter of finding the right tuning for the bfp gain ratio per "dusting" and daylis.

But thankfully we are in beta and have plenty of time to test something new out :-)

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On 9/3/2019 at 4:01 PM, Kubik said:

.... but that is PvP only thing, and introducing limits to PvE would be even more limiting than PvP because even less players would be able to complete these "chalanges". ....

Just a quick thought on that PvE point:

What, if you make some sort of optional "bet on you style of play". Like, if you play a certain mission you can bet (a fixed amount of bfp) that you beat that mission in a certain time. If so, you gain a (maybe set/coosen) card as reward, if not the bfp is lost. The next time you want to set a bet, you either have to pay more bfp or the time you have to beat decreases. You could exchange the time restriction with "only up to t3" or such..

I guess this system is not easy to implement, though.

3 minutes ago, Kubik said:

I am not sure if it is testable without reset, just because of the amount of cards and BFP players already have.

At least, you could implenet the system and thest its functionality. ;-)

The balancing on prices/costs is, of course, not testable at the moment.

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2 hours ago, Kubik said:

the "dusting system" is actually easy to implement :)

 maybe I miss something, but your option with 1 daily booster contains no BFP, so how would players be able to buy anything without BFP? :thinking:

I'm guessing part of the system means that people only get cards through boosters and that the whole auction house system is thrown out the window. If you again look at Hearthstone, also a card collection game, you can't trade cards between players. Why I didn't really think about the Hearthstone system is because it has 1 important feature that this game simply cannot have: You can speed up your collecting by paying. You don't HAVE to, but you have the option.

The other system, the dusting system, means you can toss cards away to purchase SPECIFIC new cards. Right now, the auction house provides something similar. You can purchase specific cards you want. The problem with this, is that the money doesn't go away out of the system (the dust would dissapear in Hearthstone, removing it from the "economy"), but it goes to other players. Similarly, you can "dust" your cards by selling them on the auction house, but this also makes sure the "dust" comes from other players.

So I guess a possible solution could be to have auctions for every card at fixed prices, and people can either try their luck in boosters or just buy the specific cards they want. They could then in turn be able to "sell" their cards to the action for set prices as well. These cards would then exit the economy, just as how buying cards from this same auction would remove the bfp from the economy. The biggest problem with this system is that it removes the interactivity between players and trading/selling, which is a big part of this game.


I understand wanting to slow down bfp gain, or at least card gain. How I would implement this at least, is to give some "beginner quests", which grant new packs (NOT bfp) really quickly so you can open like 20 boosters within the first week, 10 in the second week (don't take these numbers exactly, it's just an example), and then you can open maybe 1-3 boosters a week after that, max. You at least want to make sure new players feel like they have a chance of playing multiple types of decks and farming upgrades, I think, to make sure they don't leave right away. You can still earn bfp besides this and have the whole auction house system, but I'd imagine it would be less prominent and this would in turn possibly keep prices down (this is pure speculation, I am just not sure).

Just my 2 cents.

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A possible way to create a BFP sink within the AH would be not to have gold as auction fee, but BFP. This is basically what each real life AH (e.g. ebay) does. It also would slow down the inflation of cards, just because AH would not be frequented much by peoply who do only trade for the win of BFP.

Lets assume an auction fee is like 10% of the sold price (which the seller of the card has to pay, so he recives only 90%), then manyl ppl who really do want that card will buy it, because someone yould have to sell it for more than 110% of its original value to make profit. Such hugh profit margin will be not common. So, the frequency of which a single cards gets bought and gets re-sold drops down. This would lead to a emptier AH. Direct trade would become more interesting. To add more stability (price-wise) to the AH, and also to have more "worth" from an AH which then costs BFP, a AH should not run only for 24 hrs, but a week (or such) instead.

In the end: my bet would be that this idea will not be liked by the comunity. Because it feels like you lose BFP and do not get the whole worth of a card. But, the longer I write about a fee in AH, the more I do like the idea. It really could save the ecconomy of BF/Skylords Reborn.

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at least once a week someone buy a card and sell it for ~10x or more, so these would still profit significantly.

it can also be that the fee will be lower if the card will be sold... but MrXLink was strickly against that.

EA even plan to at that, or have it at some point because every mail have field for auction fee.

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Hello.

Another suggestion about a thing I completely forgot was in the original game:

Tome Decks

 

Those were paid for with BFP but removed from the game after some time and not useable with your normal collection.


These could reduce the amount of BFP in the game, prevent more cards from entering the game, and make for a challenging and exciting game mode, where even new players without large collections can participate.

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On 9/9/2019 at 9:05 PM, Kybo said:

Hello.

Another suggestion about a thing I completely forgot was in the original game:

Tome Decks

 

Those were paid for with BFP but removed from the game after some time and not useable with your normal collection.


These could reduce the amount of BFP in the game, prevent more cards from entering the game, and make for a challenging and exciting game mode, where even new players without large collections can participate.

The tome mode in PvP was really dead, even at peak times in the original game. In PvP it was simply unbalanced, because PvP revolves around some cards that are core to their respective factions and tome just makes it a rng-fest. Maybe though... a tome mode for pve might be a lot of fun.

But the real reason why tome was removed entirely was that we couldn’t get it to work coding wise, and since the PvP feature was not popular at all anyway...

But of course that was before @Ladadoos and @John’s Addition to the team. The prospect of temporary cards personally for me still sounds like a interesting concept, be at a sort of peer to peer card lending system which had some discussion a while back, or a partial or full reinstatement/tweak of the tome system that existed originally. So perhaps in the future we might be considering some aspects of the tome feature, depending on the availability of time and feasibility of that aspect development wise. However for now it’s not within our scope of current plans.

 

All that being said, please stay on topic for this thread and create additional threads for different topics/suggestions. Let me know if you would want to create this as a seperate topic then I could split it.

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On 9/5/2019 at 8:47 AM, Flrbb said:

A possible way to create a BFP sink within the AH would be not to have gold as auction fee, but BFP. This is basically what each real life AH (e.g. ebay) does. It also would slow down the inflation of cards, just because AH would not be frequented much by peoply who do only trade for the win of BFP.

Lets assume an auction fee is like 10% of the sold price (which the seller of the card has to pay, so he recives only 90%), then manyl ppl who really do want that card will buy it, because someone yould have to sell it for more than 110% of its original value to make profit. Such hugh profit margin will be not common. So, the frequency of which a single cards gets bought and gets re-sold drops down. This would lead to a emptier AH. Direct trade would become more interesting. To add more stability (price-wise) to the AH, and also to have more "worth" from an AH which then costs BFP, a AH should not run only for 24 hrs, but a week (or such) instead.

In the end: my bet would be that this idea will not be liked by the comunity. Because it feels like you lose BFP and do not get the whole worth of a card. But, the longer I write about a fee in AH, the more I do like the idea. It really could save the ecconomy of BF/Skylords Reborn.

Direct trade is already cheaper than AH? And since AH is so empty right now, direct trade is probably one of the bigger ways that cards get traded.

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