I agree with most of what you said, and I can appreciate the attempt to balance the economy without punishing wealthy players. XP I also apologize in advance for lack of formatting and quoting, again I’m posting from a phone.
The only problem I find with Collectors and Vintage tier items is the existence of escape ropes, which kinda voids the purpose of the “unlosable” aspect. If I have a rope basically everything in my inventory is already unlosable. Heck, if I have an escape orb, a full team, and I play it safe, the same applies provided none of them get sticky or I’m not an idiot and head to a dungeon without either. XP This isn’t a rag on escape items or careful play, as players should be rewarded for those things and punished for not doing those things.
I do like the concept of exchanging items for other items a la a raw materials system. That could be a way to help mitigate the inflation/economy in general. I think that in order to fix the issue, perhaps MCs and rare items of their ilk should just be undroppable/tradable by default, and you can spend them to to make a Miracle Chest EX or what have you, which could be a bag item instead of a team item. And you need 5 Miracle Chests and a hefty amount of money (maybe 150-250k?) to make it a Miracle Chest EX. The MC-EX would obviously also be undroppable/tradable/losable. This would also mean decreasing the drop rate of Miracle Chests.
Wonder Chests can still be tradable/sellable as they aren’t as rare and this lets new players have access to an exp boosting item from the player market. Perhaps the Wonder Chest EX (again untradable/undroppable/unlosable) could make it stack with MC? Maybe 5 Wonder Chests can be turned into a Miracle Chest as an alternative?
Of course, if we’re not careful, this could also make money nigh obselete. Again droprates and such will have to be put into consideration.
I like the concept of certain dungeons being ran for a certain dedicated resource (i.e, run this dungeon for money, run that dungeon if you want x reward, etc). I definitely think some min-maxing/opportunity cost dungeons in terms of resources would help.
However, I’m still on the fence about dungeons costing resources to run. SF for example is a 99 floor dungeon and that’s just if you beat it. If you haven’t beaten it that’s 396 (99 * 4) floors you have to go through. I don’t think a lot of players are gonna run a dungeon that long if they come out at a net loss. In theory, a more difficult dungeon should certainly carry more risk, but definitely carry a hefty reward that comes with it. If the reward is paltry, then the risk isn’t worth it, and no one’s gonna run it.
You could argue that 6* missions are definitely worth the risk, but that’s a one-time reward, along with Deino, Fletch, or any other rare pokemon in that dungeon. The rest of the dungeon is just great EXP and rewards.
I think in order to solve the Payday Problem, Payday’s money payout needs to be either nerfed to not be worth it, literally change the formula to be 5 Poke per KO regardless of level and damage inflicted, or not give out money at all. This will of course cause several people to shelve their Persians and Liepards, but they can still always run a dungeon with a high pay out of money, so I don’t think that’s a big deal. This coming from a player with more than a mill in the bank and a Meowth of his own.
I think that we should try and capitalize things that will virtually almost always be in demand, which are: Exp and Pokemon.
One of the money sink ideas I had was a stand that let you exchange a pokemon (or a certain amount of said pokemon) for the same pokemon of the opposite gender (say, 5 male combees for a female combee), on top of a 250-500k fee. The price could also be adjusted for how rare male/females are.
For those of you about to say that there’d be no reason to grind dungeons for a specific gender, well, the chance would still be there. So if you don’t have that much money there’s still a reason to hunt for a specific gender through the dungeon, that’s why it costs pokemon and money. People still have to go through the dungeon and grind to get the multiple recruits, so there’s still a grind/luck aspect to it. Not only that but it’s expensive enough to drain some pockets.
Admittedly this sink is kinda niche, but the name change money sink exists, so if that can exist, so can this one.
I also thought of a stand where players can give 500k to get a 20% exp boost for the week. You’d definitely have to work it out so people can’t profit from it, maybe make it a buff that boosts exp rate but lowers gold spawn rate? Or maybe you can put the stand in front of popular training dungeons and make it to where it only applies to those specific dungeons? Maybe it can take the form of a non-droppable, non-storable, non-tradable item that automatically deletes itself once a week has past? Attach an effect like “poke/gold items/relics will not appear whilst this item is held.” For memes you could have it turn into a plain seed at the end of the week.
An alternative would be to have a universal donation pool with a goal of 25 million poke or something. Players can donate however much they want, but the miniumum is 50k. If we reach the goal of 25 million poke within the month, then next month everyone who contributed gets an exp boost of 25% or something. Again we’d have to set it up so there’s no profit. Also, while you can make multiple donations and donate however much you want, donating more than 50k doesn’t net you a longer or extra boost, but it helps the community reach the goal, so there’s a bit of a community aspect to it. If we don’t reach the goal, then make the exp boost 5% for a month, that way people haven’t wasted their money.