I think we all know there are some problems plaguing this game’s economy.
Very few items breach a street value of more than 200k nowadays. But, to anyone with even a super basic understanding of how inflation works, that’s rather bizarre. With how easily money can be generated from nothing (as opposed to traded between players) you’d expect wild inflation…
Problem 1: Overabundance
My proposal to solve this first problem is twofold; to start off, it is important valuable endgame items such as the Miracle Chest, Golden Mask, Exp. All etc are difficult to obtain or their value will take a nosedive eventually no matter what.
My first suggestion to help rectify the dwindling rarity of items such as the Miracle Chest and friends, is to crack down on “generalist” dungeons and make sure items intended to be sought-after endgame aren’t just picked up on the side during training, and require intentional investment to obtain.
While simply altering things like endbox drop rates will slow the creation of items, I think the most important thing to do is to remove overlap. What do I mean? Well, let’s look at Sky Fortress as an example. Running it yields several rewards to the player. It’s very easy to come out of the dungeon with a net gain of resources, sometimes an MC or golden mask, money (including items that exist solely to generate money from kecleon) AND it’s one of the best training dungeons in the game. If you frequently run, say, SF for experience, you will slowly amass raw, freshly-minted cash, miracle chests, and golden masks on the side. In fact, even if you’re there specifically to hunt one of the two major endbox items, you might wind up with the other while you’re at it. And this absolutely kills their value by flooding the market with unwanted, excess items.
As for a dungeon already in the game that doesn’t suffer from this problem nearly as badly, let’s look at Tanren Chambers. Sure, the variety of rewards available here is unrivaled, but their market value has stood the test of time much better than other items. Why? Because there’s an opportunity cost to picking a specific route. Want the Lens of Truth? You’re not going to be seeing any miracle chests, or vice-versa. This applies similarly to currency-based dungeons like DD and DS as well. Though DS in particular could benefit from having the Scavenger’s Charm, X-Ray Charm, and Treasure Specs available instead through Gabeedle and not the endboxes, as the amount of people running the dungeon for Gible or just exp have caused tons of these items to flood the market.
Overall, the point I’m trying to get across is that the more rewards (be they exp, money, or items) there are for running a specific dungeon, the less valuable each individual reward becomes.
Of course, reducing the influx of items into the game won’t help much if there’s a massive backlog of extra items already in the economy beforehand. And so we come to part two of my first proposal… “Collector’s” and “Vintage” item variants.
The obtaining of “Collector’s” tier items would be a new permanent addition. Simply trade in a number of items (my idea was something between 3-5) for a currency specific to that item, which can then be used to buy the collector’s variant of that item. (Perhaps also along with a hefty cash fee) Collector items become undroppable/untradeable, but also unlosable.
“Vintage” items would be similar, but with a few differences. Unlike their lesser counterparts, they would require significantly more of their base items to be sacrificed to create them (perhaps even as many as 10-20, with a higher poke cost as well if that’s included) and only be available for creation a limited time after their release. The trade-off, would be that while they keep the benefit of being unlosable like collector items, they can be traded between players, even after they’re no longer obtainable.
This would help fill the void of high-tier items in the economy for players with leaderboard-worthy nest eggs to actually buy, while also providing a motive for players to destroy items with an overabundance in the market today.
Problem 2: Inflation
Now let’s move onto the second issue plaguing the economy, and the disaster it will cause if not addressed around the same time as the item overabundance… Money. Or more specifically, the obscene rate at which cash currently just appears out of thin air.
All MMOs have to grapple with the problem of inflation, but in PMU it’s absolutely out of control.
By far, the best way to make money right now isn’t to trade with other players at all, but run certain dungeons repeatedly for cash and relic drops, dumping more and more cash into an already stagnant market. While money sinks do help, you can’t stop a flood using your bathtub’s drain. The rate at which money is injected into the economy needs to be reduced or the moment supply drops reasonably close to demand inflation is going to spiral rapidly out of control.
There are very few dungeons in the game that actually COST the player to run, and those that are actually light on resources like apples and ethers usually provide enough raw poke or items that can be sold to Kecleon in order to just pay for enough supplies to immediately run it again. If a dungeon can be run over and over again with resources found within itself, and provides an incentive such as a high exp yield to do so, it probably shouldn’t be spitting out fat stacks of cash on top of that. Or we run into the problem dungeons like MM, CCh, and MJ previously had. I know the changes to these dungeons’ payouts weren’t popular, but after some contemplation I can agree they were sorely needed.
To start, I think several dungeons’ poke and relic drops still need to be looked at, the iceberg dungeons and SF come to mind immediately, but they aren’t the only ones. However, individual dungeon payouts pale in comparison to the real elephant in the room…
Pay day. Oh no, pay day… 150P+ per KO is ludicrously overpowered. There’s not much else that needs to be said, just train a Persian or Liepard and you’ll be swimming in cash before long. Halving the payout might honestly still not be enough, if you ask me this move’s poke generation needs to be on the border of not being viable at all, but right now it’s probably the fastest way to amass wealth in the game, AND it can be stacked with existing high-payout dungeons! So if we’re going to see any improvement on the influx of cash being injected into the economy, it’s number 1 on the list of things that need adjustment.
Whew. I know that’s a mammoth of a read and I apologize, but I wanted to be as thorough as possible.
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