Nerf Veetron Drop Rate

I'm of the belief we throw around the word "deflation" or "deflate" far too easily. The idea of deflation is generally associated with overall market trends and a decrease in price, when you're income remains the same (or even increases). An example would be:

• [Baseline] In February, Shivering used to make 30 mil per hour. He could buy 15x Onyx Apples (lets assume 2 mil per piece)
• [Deflation] Assume there has been no changes to APQ or the number of people running APQ or any new bosses that require apples. But apple prices decreased to 1 mil per piece. Shivering can now afford 30x Onyx Apples.
  • Since Shivering is still making the same amount of money, the fact that he can afford more of the same item even though nothing has changed = deflation
  • Indicative of macroeconomic issues or poor market confidence (believing that tomorrow, the apple prices would be even less).
• [NOT deflation] Assume there was a APQ buff and the number of people running APQ has now increased. Apple prices have also decreased to 1 mil per piece. Shivering can now afford 30x Onyx Apples.
  • Shivering is making the same amount of money, BUT what is different is that surrounding factors has changed.
  • Price DECREASE is due to excessive supply. NOT indicative of macroeconomic issues or poor market confidence.
• [NOT deflation] It is 2030, due to nerfs Shivering has killed all meso making methods and the best he can do is 15 mil per hour. All other players suffered a similar 50% cut in their hourly income. Apple prices decreased to 1 mil per piece. Shivering can still afford 15x Onyx Apples.
  • Shivering is making LESS money, but the market has adjusted and what he can purchase with his new income has adjusted.
  • Relatively, nothing has changed.

Back to the topic, based on the market trends for some common items I don't really see any worrying levels of deflation. See https://owlrepo.com/charts for reference. So throwing around the term "deflation" doesn't seem appropriate here. This just seems to be a textbook case of the market balancing itself based on supply vs demand.

If so many people are farming in one place, the prices are bound to go down. At which point, some people will stop farming there and move somewhere else, and prices will eventually climb back up again. The only times that I personally see for things to be adjusted is if they affect things at a larger scale.

• Not a niche sector (like one leech spot), but one that affects majority of players & wider market (eg. horntail)
  • It affects those who are Horntailing currently
  • It affects those who are currently making attackers, as their end-game goal is to Horntail often times
  • It affects leechers, whose main clientele are future attackers
• Widely disrupts economic balance, such as by generating an overwhelming amount of raw mesos (eg. gobies)
  • It affects market prices across the board, by increasing every single price.
  • It actually DEFLATES people's currently existing mesos.
  • It causes severe wealth disparity, because those who are able to farm those raw mesos can keep up with the market change vs. those who are not able to farm those raw mesos, keep their current amount of mesos, which will have less relative value as the raw mesos keep getting farmed.
• Widely disrupts game progression, such as accelerating leveling beyond a reasonable pace (eg. shaolin on release & double leecher two hit dukus)
  • The faster the people level, the faster the population balance (end-game vs early-game) gets affected.
  • The more aforementioned balance is affected, higher chance of disproportionate supply vs demand. More people doing end-game things in such a short period of time, means more end-game supply and not enough demand to balance it out.
  • Leads to wider market repercussions.

NOTE: The three examples above, are changes we have ALREADY done in the past.

 

I was talking about just the general rise in the use of the term deflation on forums, in game, and discord. While I understand that the people on this post probably didn't mean it as wider deflation, there are people that read this and could infer the wrong meaning/phenomenon from it. I apologize if it seemed targeted, but it honestly wasn't.

(Think of my post more like a PSA rather than a targeted reply)

Thanks for raising the issue about how income traditionally has nothing to do with deflation ^^ In hindsight, I should've probably listed all my assumptions and basis of reasoning in the original post, since it was already quite wordy, but you live and you learn xD

1. Distinction of IRL economics vs. game economics
   • Its true that in irl economics income has absolutely nothing to do with inflation/deflation, since we as individuals just deal with money thats already printed. We as individuals can't possibly affect inflation/deflation, and responsibility for that falls entirely on the central bank with the adjustment of interest rates and printing more money.
   • Game economics differs in the sense that a large portion of our income is us printing our own money. Therefore, the amount of raw mesos that is generated per hour by a player can have wider repercussions to the health of the economy.
   • (Eg) As mentioned by Hiyo Gobies generated 13-15mil RAW mesos per hour. Like how Skeles is now, all channels of gobies were full at pretty much all times of the day. A lot of people were fearful of more rampant inflation on our server, rightfully so because the way MapleStory was designed, there's bound to be inflation, it was just a question of "is it a manageable amount of inflation?" Traditional meso making like passive meso generation while training was still manageable, but gobies (along with mannequins later down the line) pushed things to their limits.
2. Specifying my assumptions about hourly profits
   • I should've probably specified the underlying assumptions there. When I cited Shivering's hourly profits as an example, I meant RAW meso profits.
   • It was also an assumption that whatever Shivering was doing would be the highest amount of raw mesos that can be generated on the server (because, if not why would he be there look how quickly he ditched harps). Since it's the highest amount of raw mesos, then it would soon become the primary source of raw mesos for our player base (look at how quickly people flooded into gobies once it became meta).
   • Note: these were also hypothetical numbers just to make maths easy. Shivering isn't making 30 mil raw mesos on one account, it's a combination of multiple accounts and multiple channels, so I can't really just easily adopt his numbers. I just made up a nice to use number in relation to apple prices

Combining the two things above is how I got to my conclusions, and hopefully that elaborates a bit more. I also agree a lot with your second point, it's really important to discuss underlying assumptions, but sometimes its hard to get all that out in the beginning without overwhelming most people. But that's why collaborative discussion is so important, because we can direct our conversation towards these important matters down the line.

I mean this genuinely but thanks for your reply ^^