Gach hoarders are ruining your ws prices!

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 KobeBean8 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?"

Spoiler: It hurts the economy!

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?"

Spoiler

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?"

Spoiler: Technical Implementation

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."

Spoiler

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!"

Spoiler: Get over it

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.