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Gach hoarders are ruining your ws prices!

Discussion in 'Suggestions' started by mjk, Nov 25, 2021.

  1. mjk
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    mjk Master Chronos

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    Over the past months, there has become an increasing area of concern and discussion due to the rise in price (and the rate at which these prices are rising) of many highly desired items. There have been lots of discussions, arguments, and disagreements about why this is happening and how this may be fixed but I think all sides can agree that the legends economy isn’t in a great place right now.

    The majority of these items are either completely gach locked or have the vast vast majority of their supply come from gach (ie WS from gach vs WS from cwk exchange).

    I was talking to my good buddy KobeBean8KobeBean8 the other night and he reminded me of a change that was made a little over 1 year ago. (Link)

    Previously gach were not stackable and this change made them stack up to 100 as we have now. While I cannot speak for the exact intentions of staff I believe this was a simple quality of life change and at the time it was very well received. That being said I think this may have had some unintended economic consequences that are contributing to the current economic situation.

    Long story short: It is bad to stack / hoard hundreds of gach tickets.

    "Why is this bad? Why should we revert the gach stack change?"
    Essentially before the change, you could hold at most 96 gach tickets per character. This means that people would collect some and then use them on a more frequent basis. This ultimately led to a consistent, steady stream of gach locked items into the server and it was very rare for people to save 100+ tickets. Because of the convenience, many players are now stacking 100+ gach.
    A significant number of these held gach will never be used as some players will get banned and some players will quit without having ever pulled. Furthermore players that save up for a long time for a huge gach run also hurt the economy in that they are slowing down the supply of these sought after items.
    "If people save a bunch but then eventually use them then why is that a problem?"
    This is a logical (economic?) fallacy. Consider the following over-exaggerated hypothetical:

    Imagine if all the leech sellers and meso farmers collectively decided to hoard gach for a few months and not use any. The supply of gach exclusive items would decrease and if the demand stayed constant the price would increase (s/o high school econ). To simplify things we will focus on WS but this logic applies to any gach exclusive or heavily gach impacted item. So now white scroll prices are increasing. Then assume they all decide to use their gach all at once. Would this sudden influx of WS and other gach impacted items “undo” the price increase?
    The short answer is no. We have seen empirically that a server-wide gach run and influx of items does little to nothing to the prices of these items. Recently staff announced a buff to WS and CS rates (Link). Shortly after this announcement a lot of people unloaded their gach, and because of this there were a lot of legendary pulls. The amount of yellow lines made people believe the new rates were very good which led more people to go use all of their gach creating a snowball effect and an insane amount of WS/CS pulled from the server that day. While as I player I do not have access to the numbers I’m sure someone in staff could easily verify that the number of gach used that day far exceeded the avg gach used daily, likely by over an order of magnitude. While the price of white scrolls briefly dropped that day due to people panic selling, within 24 hours it was back to its original price before the buffed rate announcement. All that to say people holding gach leads to price increases due to a restricted supply and even if they do pull eventually the prices will not fall accordingly. If the gach were used sooner there would be a more consistent stream of items into the server causing the price rise to be much more gradual.
    "What happens to my 5 100 stacks of gach I have? Are they going to poof?! How can this be implemented?"
    No, your stacks and stacks of gach will not poof. Relatively recently when cider stacks got reduced from 5 to 3 if you had a 5 stack in your inventory it was still there as a 5 stack after the patch but future ciders could only be stacked up to 3. I would imagine this would work the same way, current stacks would remain unchanged and all future tickets looted would not stack. If there are some bugs related to reorganizing your inventory, staff could also make a new gach with a different item id (think old piece of time pre-PB patch vs new PoT) that is functionally exactly the same as the current gach but would not stack. Either of these options seems relatively straightforward to implement.
    "Well, people can still hoard by putting them in CS and then having mules on the same account to hold the tickets."
    I think a significant proportion of the people that end up stacking/hoarding gach do it out of convenience. It’s much easier to have a few slots fill up in your cash tab as opposed to having to clear out your entire inventory and bring a few storage mules over if you’re going to pull 100+ tickets. Of course if people really really wanted to hoard tickets they could but the effort to move each individual ticket into and out of the cash shop is significant enough to discourage most people from doing this. Also right now people like to flex their tickets (hey look at my 3 full stacks of gach! Would turned into hey look at my 3 mules full of gach *please wait while I relog over and over and scroll through my cash inv over and over*)
    "But my cash tab in my inventory will be so ugly and not organized!"
    I acknowledge that reverting this change will cause a quality of life inconvenience
    but it only affects the cash tab which is generally not where people have inventory space problems. Besides this small quality of life in change, I really don’t see any downsides to reverting this change and making gach not stack anymore.

    Finally, I am not so naive to believe that this (or any single change in isolation) will magically fix the economy. I think fixing the economy will be a process consisting of a collection of many changes and I firmly believe that making gach not stack will be a low downside, high upside step in the right direction.

    Overall I don’t see any reason why people should not be using their gach and I think the inconvenience of a messy / ugly cash tab in your inventory is a small price to pay for the economic benefits.

    TLDR: Hoarding gach artificially decreases the supply of gach locked items and items whose supply is heavily reliant on gach which drives prices up. The ability to hoard gach at this scale was unintentionally enabled by a quality of life change that allowed gach to stack up to 100. We should revert this to promote a more consistent, stable stream of gach items being injected into the economy which should slow the rate at which the price of these items are increasing.


     
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  2. OP
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    mjk
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    mjk Master Chronos

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    Oh yea I forgot to mention that I not only took 1 econ class in high school, I also took 1 in college :^)
     
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  3. -ovv
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    -ovv Horntail

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    Expiring gach when
     
    • Agree Agree x 6
  4. OP
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    mjk Master Chronos

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    For gach to expire they would have to first be not stackable right?
    How else could you keep track of expiration dates of each ticket in a stack?
     
  5. Dimez
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    Dimez Stone Golem

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    People should 100% be incentivized to use their gach tickets. Players have speculated for the past months why the white scrolls prices have skyrocketed , but never took a look at the one thing that mainly produces white scrolls/ chaos scrolls, the gachapon. It’s very plausible that the true hoarders who were responsible for shooting up the prices of white scrolls were not the ones hoarding the item itself, but the ones hoarding the gach tickets.(Although two things can be true at once) Nonetheless, this post is pin point accurate, players on a daily,weekly, monthly basis neglect the gachapon , for no reason really.. Out of laziness? Who knows. With the current way chaos scrolls and white scrolls are obtainable in legends, allowing a hoarding culture with gach to exist definitely creates economic issues.
    The only people who actually use gach tickets on a daily basis or after their training/leeching session are not really playing the game for it’s intended purposes,and those white scrolls/ chaos scrolls don’t ever touch the market.(if you know, you know). Honestly , above all else, people SHOULD be using their gach. You can’t force anyone to do anything, but their are ways to either incentivize people to use gach, or make it very hard to hoard thousands, and trust me , there are people who have thousands of gach that may never be used.
     
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  6. Selquin
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    Selquin Headless Horseman

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  7. jc123
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    jc123 Brown Teddy

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    Hoarding an expected value of over 1 billion mesos! A+ tactics.

    On a serious note, I agree with the OP even though I'm currently hoarding gachapons. Why am I hoarding? Out of laziness mostly because I can. And it's fun to sit at gachapon shrines for 15-20 minutes gaching nonstop.

    Another reason why I could see stackable gachapons being bad is the fact that players can hoard and predict certain levers such as gachapon change rates(see: what happened a few months ago when staff publicly announced that there was a rate change and the market was on fire for 1-3 days.) I reckon that it wouldn't have been so bad if people didn't have stackable gachs. I think the better way to discuss this issue is talk about any reasonable pro for having stackable gachpons.
     
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  8. jc123
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    jc123 Brown Teddy

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    Off topic, but there have been a good number of interesting threads from the end-game community to try to solve potential issues that they see in terms of gatekeeping. These are people who care enough about the game to voice their opinions on these forums and it helps a lot to get some sort of acknowledgement from staff from time to time about these issues. I'm not saying that every single thread needs to be hawk-eyed by staff, but there's good chance that staff is talking about some of these issues internally and I feel like they're missing out by not participating in these threads as well. So far, I've seen two replies from EdannEdann to "not lose hope" and NiseNise on playing devil's advocate in terms of sweeping being reverted, which I appreciate.. but it's very very hard not to be demoralized while we're all in the dark for months now.

    A lot of these threads are coming from players who are asking for changes that not only help them, but also help early-mid game players altogether. As much as people meme on these threads I see it as a signal that they care enough to show that they feel like they're in a rut for whatever reason. I'm thankful that people are willing to volunteer their time to support this game and keep it running and put their minds together to make balancing and quality of life changes to a 2003 mushroom game. I'm also thankful that not all of the end game community has given up on the forums and constantly challenge the way the game is today. Hopefully there's a way to meet in the middle somewhere...

    If you're tired of these "I took high school econ" memes maybe someone from balance team should actually respond on this end. We don't even know if you guys even play the game or chip in on ideas anymore.
     
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  9. OP
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    mjk
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    mjk Master Chronos

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    Thanks for taking the time and sharing your feedback, I appreciate it!

    That being said I do respectfully disagree with a lot of what you are saying.

    I think you may be wildly overestimating the amount of useful scrolls/items obtainable from gach. The vast majority is trash that can be dropped or npc'd.

    The server existsed for over 5 years without stackable gach and everyone managed just fine. When I first started I did not feel the need to make mules to hold my gach items as I would just gach casually whenever I went to Mushshrine or walked through Ellinia. If you gach more regualarly you often get none or maybe 1 or 2 useful things which makes selling them very manageable.

    As a new player, I would also implore you to use your gach more frequently as the mesos earned from gach can be very impactful in speeding up your progression and quality of life through the early and mid game!

    The main point of this post was to show that hoarding gach (either as individuals or collectively as the playbase as a whole) has very real negative economic impacts which I think/hope I have illustrated relatively well.

    Finally regarding market manipulation. This is a bit off-topic and I don't want to shift the conversation away from the main point of the thread but generally, market manipulation in a free market is due to systematic failures. This is something the server saw with 30% scrolls before cwkpq was introduced and is something that may need to be addressed but is a topic for another thread.
     
    • Agree Agree x 1
  10. zeroxlr
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    zeroxlr Windraider

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    bruhhh... i'm not really in the mood right now... so... yeah.

    i deleted anyways... since it you disliked the whole 4-5 paragraphs of what i wrote.


    let's just say you know what you're talking about.

    OnionF4
     
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  11. damon182
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    damon182 Brown Teddy

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    I think gach not being able to stack at all would be fairly annoying. However, if the amount of a stack would be reduced from 100 to say 5 I think it would solve some of these problems but also not require people to go turn them in literally every day.
     
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  12. Selquin
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    Selquin Headless Horseman

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    Reminder that balance team actually has quite limited power in terms of decision making due to the fact that non-balance expertise staff essentially has the same amount of say during staff discussions. Indeed it is quite disappointing that balancing decisions are controlled by those with such limited game knowledge, but alas it is what it is. It is for this reason that we have to call out entire staff instead of just balance team!
     
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  13. yurain
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    yurain Windraider

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    Thinking back, I made the suggestion to make gacha stackable haha.
    Never thought this far, but i mean, it is a valid concern to revert it as long as the staffs backs up their decision with sufficient backend data.
     
  14. tunafish
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    tunafish Slime

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    Hmm, this is a very interesting approach, as i have not thought about it this way before. I loved this QoL change, because it just allows me to farm more gach before cashing them in. A possible way around this is maybe implementing an expiry date on these gach tickets(?)

    So instead of giving gach an expiry time based on when it's looted, could it be possible to implement an expiry date based on the day it was looted instead? And possibly it expires after a month or so?
     
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  15. Mageor
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    I'm pretty sure Gacha hoarders aren't ruining WS/CS prices. Gach doesn't guarantee WS or CS. The problem is WS and CS hoarders are ruining WS/CS prices...
     
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  16. -ovv
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    -ovv Horntail

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    Did you not read a single thing in the original post or did you just read the title and decide you wanted to say something?
     
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  17. Mageor
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    Mageor Mr. Anchor

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    So you and the OP are saying that because someone hoarded tons of Gacha tickets, it artificially increased the WS and CS demand of the market.

    This is my story. I held onto 1900 Gacha (rare & common) tickets at one point and I can give you some facts on what happened when I "cashed" out.

    Fact #1: I pulled total of 10 CS and 2 WS from ~1700 commons and ~200 rares.
    Fact #2: I did not see any price fluctuation on WS and CS when I pulled these scrolls out within the span of 4~5 hours that is remotely comparable to fluctation rates during MapleLegend Holiday Events.
    Fact #3: I did not have the intention of hoarding these gacha tickets to "inflate" the WS and CS market. I did it purely to reach a certain gacha count as one of my many maple goals.
    Fact #4: I have not sold these scrolls since I pulled them.

    To let you know more about how I feel. Lets say someone pulled a WS today, but decides to hoard it for 2 months. Will it matter if that WS was pulled today or 2 months from now? The only difference is when the yellow announcement.
     
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  18. akashsky
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    akashsky Horntail

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    I plead guilty.
    upload_2021-11-26_12-12-35.png
     
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  19. OP
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    mjk Master Chronos

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    No I am saying that holding gach affects the supply of all gach locked or gach impacted items. It does nothing to the demand.

    Fact 2 is an example of why there is a problem as explained in the spoiler under "If people save a bunch but then eventually use them then why is that a problem?"

    Furthermore, intentions have no effect on the economy. Hoarding to drive prices up, hoarding to hit a gach goal, and hoarding because you are too lazy to pull are all hoarding and will affect the economy the same way.

    Finally, this post is not only about WS and CS but rather all gach impacted items and it's unlikely that everyone who hoards gach would also hoard ws/cs/other gach locked items.
     
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  20. Caenyss
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    Caenyss Capt. Latanica

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    This is a very valid point that should be taken into consideration, imo.
     

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