What Defiance really needs...

[Elucidate]

As previously stated, I do agree. But how long till theres no more million/billionaires? What then?

[Ray8888]

Then we will have a normal economy.
That's the goal. Not having people with more scrip than stuff to spend it on.

[Dixie Cougar]

Every time you sell something for scrip, you are gambling that the next person will accept that scrip when you want to buy from them.

The direct cause of scrip being abundant and items being expensive is that scrip has minimal intrinsic value (keycodes don't really count because the return on elite boxes is so poor relative to the cost of the keycodes). Scrip is like the fiat currency of a banana republic, you can buy expensive stuff with it but you need a ridiculous amount. So it's mostly useful for buying useful but lower value items like mods.

This is why stable developing countries often peg their currency to the dollar or another global reserve currency (these are also fiat currencies, but ones that are respected because of the size and stability of the economies and governments that use them.) The Defiance economy simply isn't big enough to give scrip value--it's as if the lord of the manor started making coins out of base metals. Will they circulate? Sure, but mostly for loaves of bread and tankards of ale, not warhorses or staves of fireball.

Because scrip enters the economy via player activity instead of a central bank, games need scrip sinks to avoid massive inflation (which fubars the primitive barter economy we have even more than an AH based one). Killing woot loot went a long way to curbing inflation over the last few months but it is coming back slowly because scrip still has no respectable baseline value (which a sink provides). So keycodes drain a bit of scrip, and departures from the game may drain some as well, but that's about it. The rest circulates in ever-increasing numbers, and with t3/t4 mods dropping you have another significant source of vendor scrip (2k, 7k a pop) that wasn't really available when woot loot was in its heyday.

The difficulty for the developers is in providing a scrip sink that is revenue neutral, because the game has to make a profit to keep going. So allowing scrip to turn into AF or anything else available in the bit store is not a risk free proposition.

There are a number of ways I think the devs could fix this but that's beyond the scope of this post.

My easymode suggestion would be to decrease the scrip price of keycodes and increase the salvage price. Salvage is burning a hole in a lot of pockets, so cutting the price of codes might actually sink more scrip on a volume basis because people perceive a better value. Given that the cash shop elite lockbox is superior to the ingame one nowadays AND players have many better ways to spend their bits anyhow, that might be a safe thing to do.

[AngelRipper]

I think what this game needs to start with is the DC rate!

[David Irwin]

My easymode suggestion would be to decrease the scrip price of keycodes and increase the salvage price. Salvage is burning a hole in a lot of pockets, so cutting the price of codes might actually sink more scrip on a volume basis because people perceive a better value. Given that the cash shop elite lockbox is superior to the ingame one nowadays AND players have many better ways to spend their bits anyhow, that might be a safe thing to do.

this is the best and most simple idea I have seen yet to try to help balance the defiance market place and currencies.

[r1p]

Thanks for the follow-ups guys. I ran out of energy trying to explain how basic economics work.

[Fallen_Aingeal]

Where a loaf of bread costs Z$550 million.

Defiance economics are similar to 3rd world nations...

[konstantinov]

Where a loaf of bread costs Z$550 million.

Defiance economics are similar to 3rd world nations...

Priceless...

[tAsHiNkA]

Where a loaf of bread costs Z$550 million.

Defiance economics are similar to 3rd world nations...

this is so true

[Smokey Black]

How about a Varus Soleptor outfit for like 5m from the soleptor vender. Call it the new frontier baller I've always wanted that outfit.