How to counter white scrolls and cs being a tax free currency

Firstly I feel like this is way too difficult to implement and would require a whole new system and tracking of data on an item individually which I don't think will ever happen.

Secondly, the only reason these items are used as currency is because they're high ticket items. If a different item has a decent quantity in market with a high value, it would also be used.

I don't think the fact that these are being used as currency is the reason the price is going up. I think there are more end game users using the scrolls than number of new users or non-end game users selling the scrolls.

 

There are lots of people who hold lots of white scrolls as currency because the price is going up (among other reasons). I think people buying them for scrolling is still one factor for the rising price, but I wouldn't discount the demand from people just looking to hold them. Mesos have been deflating while white scrolls rise, it's a lot more convenient to hold scrolls than having meso mules, and like Toon said, they aren't subject to taxes.
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If we want WS to be less valuable then we can either directly try to decrease its value, or try to increase its value. Having a tax on them would be a good idea to make them less valuable, but it would be hard to implement since you would need the market price available and correct at all times.

 

The difference is that 3% of 1b will always be 30m and this isn't any way as hard to implement as a dynamic price tracking for specific items, which although probably doable, can even cause other problems beyond what we can see now to the market.
I don't think the game should punish players who want to, for example, speculate with values of assets. Probably people tend to hold this specific items mostly because of the populational boom reaching end game, making these items more desirable, increasing its price, so it's a nice thing to protect your money. I already did that with other items I was supposing would have a price increase and profited!, and it can be done with any item to be honest, but cs/ws were the items that people saw with the highest potential to deflate instead of inflate recently, so what's the deal with that?

Edit 1:
Also, remember the 1b coin was made to make it possible for wealthy people to store higher amounts of mesos properly, which I'm not sure if Legends have some other work around that because I'm broke af. So without it people can either:
1 - Store max meso * 6(?) per account (6 being the max number of chars per account, but I'm not sure if its 5 or 6)
2 - Buy CS/WS and HODL!!!

Not saying we should have 1b coin though

 

Putting in a 1bil coin exchange is much easier and makes more sense to me personally. I also played a game in my past that had a similar exchange so you could hold more money and trade them as items instead of having a limit.

But adding all the trade locks and tracking onto a white scroll so it can be taxes, not to mention (as previous user stated) taking into account current market value, that this would just not be feasible.

Also again agree with Nise's point.

With the addition of PB and new end-game equipment, a new target for the rich end game users to min/max the gear was created. This caused an increase in the demand for white scrolls in order to make new perfect gear from timeless/reverse equipments. Each item would take up to 100 white scrolls to perfect, and this is just for 1 item for 1 player. The amount of white scrolls actually coming into the market aren't as high as the demand is. The more they are purchased, the more the cost goes up. The more the cost goes up and they are still being purchased, the more the cost goes up.

 

If white scrolls expired, we'd see a clearer picture of their utility value.

 

This brings me so many memories of my beloved Venezuela...

There 10 years ago the exact same thing happened with the foreign currency market (dollars), since it was extremely difficult to get (due to government measures) to travel the value of this (dollars) was inflated, so that a market was created parallel of buying and selling dollars that increased week after week until a moment came when it was unstoppable.
Mesos = Bolivar and WS = Dollar

The problem obviously increased due to the country's lack of production and its rentier dependence on oil. But it all started with that nefarious idea of preventing regular access to foreign currency and therefore by creating less supply and having so much demand the price went to hell.
Most of this has nothing to do with Maple, but it brought me sad memories hahaha

PS: you shouldn't have wasted your time reading this

 

That’s true, mesos haven’t been deflating anymore. My bad, I still have my head stuck in the past on that one

I can't fully get behind your explanation for the price rising being caused by limited supply, and I don’t think the graphs provide sufficient evidence for that. Two reasons for that:

1. The notion that prices depend on quantities and quantities depend on prices, making it difficult to discern which one is causing the other to change.

Their interdependence comes from the idea they are determined simultaneously by buyers and sellers wanting to make a trade at a given price + quantity, i.e. by a supply curve intersecting a demand curve. So we don't observe anything about the supply and demand curves' movements or shapes, simply that they have intersected. When market price and quantity change, the data can't show us whether it was because supply changed, demand changed, or both (this issue is formally referred to as simultaneity bias).

To illustrate, if y = 2x and we see (x,y) move from (1,2) to (2,4), we can't claim that x caused y to change because y = 2x also implies x = 0.5y. ​

2. Data quality

Prices listed in owls might not accurately depict market prices. I would guess at least half, maybe 3/4 of all white scrolls listed don’t reflect the actual price. There’s a significant amount coming from people with multiple white scrolls listed at crazy high prices, who seem to have no intention of selling. Based on this, if I'm in the market for white scrolls, I'd buy up all the reasonably priced ones and then on the next owl you'd see the median price jump up and the quantity go down.​

Plus, the quantities listed also depend on whether people take the time to list. Yesterday there was someone with 9 white scrolls up at 200m each, and maybe 20 ish up at 180~190. If that person’s store closes, quantity is reduced by a third while median price barely changes.​

Also, since a lot of these owl snapshots are taken far apart from each other (looks like ~1 week apart usually), any correlation could simply be detecting random variation.​

If we ignore data quality issues for a moment, we can consider methods use to tease out causal relationships from data and mitigate the issue in #1. In a nutshell, you need some kind of shock to supply that is random and independent of demand, or vice versa. The hard part is finding a truly random + independent event, because for the same reason in #1, you can't prove that it would be independent of supply/demand because we can't observe either of those.

The best scenario I can think of would be the v-day event, which caused a positive increase in supply--but keep in mind that even then it's not a great pick, because buyers might have been anticipating price reductions and changed their behaviour accordingly. Based on prices from my own purchases and others' purchases/sales, WS prices were around 165m at the beginning of the event and 185m as of yesterday. I think this is a decently strong argument that limited supply is not the driving factor of prices going up.

Of course, I can't prove that the event had no effect on demand, which my argument above hinges on, and I can't claim that what happened in the past month is illustrative of everyone's market behaviour over the past year. All I can do is give some evidence of my argument and remind everyone that humans are not machines or particles in a lab, meaning that we behave irrationally and it's very difficult to use data to explain why we do the things we do. We can talk about what factors are important and maybe bring in fancy econometric tools to investigate, but at the end of the day it's impossible to "prove" anything about human behaviour the way you can "prove" things in physics or math. BTW This commentary isn't directed at Nise, it's just a message I want to get across in general

 

Quality post.

While this is generally true in real life, but with so much logging that ML have, I think we can predict such movements really easily in ML's controlled environment. Since I believe every ws creation/trade/usage is being tracked in the server. The data can be easily filtered out to see, % of ws being hoarded, % of ws being actually used, % of ws being traded, $ of ws being traded, over different period of time wrt to ws creation rate. You can see why is the price change due to whatever reason. With this, you can even effectively peg the price of white scroll to something something, through adjusting the demand or supply.

Of course, these would take a lot of work and some specialty to really analysis though those data.