Holiday Packs, but...
CanItBeDone
The Universe; The Milky Way Galaxy; The Solar System; Earth; North AmericaMember
Ello,
For those of you who can recall when the prices for any typical Halloween hats, I'm sure you are pretty shocked at the quick turn of economy. In just a little bit over a year, the prices for hats like Robot Head peaked at 30k-ish to plummeting at around 100 cubits. I can't say how annoyed I am at the constant changing of prices in our small economy. One day a price for an item can jump from 30k to 50k. Or plummet. This is something that shouldn't really happen in an economy as small as Cubic Castle's. Of course certain items usually retain a fixed price, but they often drop and drop and drop. The items that have a wild price are usually from Holiday Packs. The current issue with packs is that there is not a limit. Of course, obtaining cubits is rather hard, so an infinite purchase of these packs is not possible; in practice. However, in theory, this is possible. Let's find ourselves an example.
"CanItBeDone has 500,000 cubits to spend! A Halloween Pack costs 2500 cubits! How many Halloween Packs can he purchase?"
If you got 200, you are a smart qbee! If not... Eh, you still have your chance. Anyways... With 200 packs, it is logical that CanItBeDone will obtain the more common drops than the rarer ones. Taking in this year's hull, it is more likely I'll get more Robot Heads than Spider Dens. This makes sense. But thats the issue. We can say that CanItBeDone only received two different vanities, Robot Heads and Spider Dens, and make the assumption that he received a ratio of 180:20 (Robot_Head:Spider_Den). This means that one player has 180 Robot Head and 20 Spider Den. In the first week of the packs being launched, the price of the Robot will slowly decline or rapidly, according the wants and needs of the consumer. The price of the vanities will then slowly inflate when the packs are pulled back, and continue a steady track upward. Then comes the second year of the Halloween pack. The pack is mostly the same, still containing Robot Heads and Spider Dens. If the results from the first year was to remain constant in the second year, the price for the vanities drop significantly lower. When the packs are again removed, the price will attempt to rise again, but with a much slower pace. This cycle will repeat itself, and the price will eventually come to a halt because of the sheer drop it has reached.
In a modern world economy, most goods have a shelf life. Your phones doesn't last forever, but a new and hopefully improved one is created. You ate all the cookies you bought, but there's more to buy. However, in a MMO game, this is not the case. In the game, we do have several ways to maintain the "shelf life" of goods. We can destroy them by trashing them, we can let it de spawn, we can let it sit in an abandoned account (never to be used again), and items can be discontinued. Yet, they are rather ineffective. Sure, they'll drive the price through the roof. But then you come across another issue, which no one wants to deal with: monopoly. Monopoly is pretty self explanatory, so I will not indulge into it.
So how do we fix this? Well the most simple, and probably the most disliked one is to simply removed the items completely. Or at least reduce the amount that exist. This is something that can stabilize the economy and allow it to fix itself. But, no one will agree with this. Everyone will want a compensation, and one some won't take. We can simply wait for some players to gain complete control over the item and discard it, but... it'll never happen. This won't stop the cycle at all, and is hard to replicate every time we wished to reset the economy. We can increase the prices of packs to a point where it is extremely hard to purchase one, .... and this will never work either. In truth, there is no way to stop the decline of the prices and surge of the discontinued items. This is simply because there is no shelf life, and never will be. Although, we can easily slow the decline. I have several proposals.
• Quest for packs
• Limited purchasable packs per day
• Increase growth of players
Quest for packs: A player will need to complete a quest (purchasable) to gain access to purchasing packs. Not exactly favorable, but it's better than most solution. However, this cannot slow the cycle by a lot.
Limited purchasable packs per day: A player is only able to purchase a fixed amount of packs per day. Or according to cool down. In the infinite theory, this will be a huge burden that will slow down the cycle. Only complaints players will find with this is their annoyance at the amount of packs they can purchase. And I say it's understandable, but no one cares. This will bolster our economy and interactions, and keep a regulated price. I would say a limit of 5 packs per day is the best choice.
Increase growth of players: By this I mean a sudden increase of players. This is something that developers can't magically make possible. So it's something the players will have to handle. The more players there are, the more new markets appear. More markets means more trading, more money, more stabilization.
TL;DR: The holidays packs require a blockade against the will of the cubit economy. (Read poll.)
Comments
This could be a good idea if it was only for regular, year round packs, but not for holiday packs that are limited to a few weeks.
Edit: Also like to point out, making cubits is hard as it is. Spending 2500c on a pack that mostly offers a value of around 1/5 it's purchasing price pretty much denies you a chance of buying a lot more packs. Higher selling price are good, lower selling price bankrupts you.
I do agree with this suggestion because the drop rate of rare items is really high this year, umbrellas are around 30k right now compared to the few hundred k cubits for the other umbrellas. Each year, there's more and more of the common items, they will drop to the price of tophats in a few years while it costs 1.5-3.5k to buy a pack.
But yea, the situation is pretty much as you say. There will soon come a time when pretty much everything in this game has come to a very low value. A fix in the economy is what we need. Not a repeat.
Limited purchasable packs per day:Maybe.
Increase growth of players:i mean how could this be bad?
Anyways, I also want to ask: When does your example of discontinued item change the fact that it doesn't prevent other item price from dropping? Or balance others as you mentioned. Of all the discontinued items, most were already rare as it is. I enjoy building, but I don't see how suggestions can really change the fact that most people don't like building. Or as much as some of us do. We can introduce new blocks, but most will never use it because they couldn't care less about them than hats. Yea, for questing, I found it flawed. It doesn't really work out as well as limiting purchasable packs per day. Eyy, thanks Roo.
Anyways, I don't know if this is a good idea or not. I do know that the farming update changed a lot.
usually recubes were gained by putting clothes in recube bins. due to farming these bins are basically useless, because gaining recubes this way is not very clever.
This also means that there is no way that these items leave the game.
With the exception being players that leave and that don't re enter these items back into the economy before. and people that trash these wearable items.
There is no real sinkhole for wearable items anymore.
I suggest some kind of npc that takes items and give you like a roll to get other items or nothing. Most of the items you put in leave the game but there is also a chance for you to win items back, including new ones, only available through these NPC's.
Different NPC's for different wearables and for holiday wearables + an extra npc for items that came from the other npc's.
I've been away from the game for quite a while now, so I'm not exactly clear on the whole list of discontinued items. But to make it clear by what I mean, you can no longer obtain them through normal means (e.g. Not official contests). But here's why discontinuation is pretty flawed. Items such as Black Cats and Monster Graves were pretty rare when they were discontinued. This caused the prices to surge up often 100% of what they originally cost pre-discontinuation. This trend of growth will only increase as time passes. This is why the officials often host contests/events that offer them as prizes. But considering how little of these items actually get distributed, the price will not be subdued as much as we want.
Then there's the more common items, reindeer, elf, and snowman pet. Again, I don't know if these items are discontinued or are simply not obtainable because it's not Christmas. But like I mentioned in the thread, this is expected. The price will rise, usually in the first year of the item's release, because everyone hopes that the item will be unobtainable. This causes players to withdraw their goods from the market, and in turn, an increase in price.
As with the concern with players who can't afford to purchase the items. I've already mention in the thread that newer players shouldn't be concerned with things they can't obtain because they can't afford it. This is to be expected, who's to say we should lower the price of a plane ticket from a near $1,000 to a $20 just because everyone can't afford it. Should we lower the price of holiday packs to a mere 100 cubit because 2500 cubit is more than anyone can afford? Of course not, that would be ridiculous. If we want a virtual economy to work, we should model it like a real one.
Now say a company is making profit off of there product, but think they can do better if they lower the price and up production. This causes the store that buys their product, to resell it, lower their price on the product.
Now say a company made a toy in 2000 that was discontinued that was really cool. But, since the company couldn’t afford to make more the price raises in the collector market for it while the demand rises since more and more stop being sold. This raises the price.
Now say a company made a terrible product that nobody likes. So, they have to lower the price on it to get rid of it. Since there is such low demand.
The fourth example shows how low demand effects a item in the real world.
The third example shows how discontinued items work in the real word.
The second example shows how non-discontinued items work in the real world.
The first example just simply shows how High demand effect a item.
In your first example, variable Robot Head was peaking at around 30k. Demand for the hat was high a couple year as ago as it was in high demand, but in low quantities. Now this isn't the case anymore. In contrast, variable Robot Head is now on the second example. After the second year, the hat decreased in price because there was a higher quantity, and a lower demand. As of this year, the variable has reached the fourth example. It is in extremely high quantity, and a lower demand. So what can be done to stabilize the price? You say discontinuation is the solution. Sure, it works, but is it something that will really fix the stages every item goes through? Should we have a recipe page full of discontinued items, while new ones constantly is constantly introduced? Or is prolonging the effects of each stage a better choice? I think most people will agree that the second stage is more preferable than the succeeding stages, at least in terms of profit. Keeping a low circulation is better than having a suffocating one.
Also let's consider the size of the game. If discontinuation is going to work, it will work best only in a large scale. Cubic Castle is a game that has barely 800-1000 players daily, and that is while a roundly sum, cannot compete with a game that attracts tens of thousands of players. The prolonging effect of this suggestion also offers more freedom for the developers. Instead of developing a whole new roster of vanities, they can focus on the non-economical properties of this game. Here is an example of someone who is probably sick of the threads all about cubits. The developers can instead focus on things like farming, new commands, GUIs, etc. That is, if the issue with prices is dealt with.
The robot head is like when a company makes more of their product then they can sell. Which forces them to lower the price, putting high quantities of it out there.
Also, not all items go through that “cycle” most items are just one of my examples, except a select few.
As for you saying they could focus on commands, Farming, etc. will never happen. How they make money to fund their game is a lot of the time from holiday packs. They truly will never be able to focus on those as they need the holiday pscks to make money to fund other stuff. They add holiday packs, and people buy cubits to buy them.
Also in one post, one of the devs talks about to make reare items more accesible for all.
By all, I mostly mean Holiday Pack Vanities. But yea, not all items go through the stages, but most do. Holiday Packs probably provide a good income for the devs, as the they are pretty much the epitome of this game. But that doesn't mean they can't work a way around it and maintain a healthy economy. I've recently thought a lot more about another suggestion I made. Sellback, which you are aware of. This could be another solution, but that's not what I want to focus on. A player in the discussion mentioned something about a gambling system. The details are on the thread, but the simple idea of raffles/gambling is pretty good. With creative minds in this community, I'm sure alternative and more profitable incomes can come this way. I have several ideas, but not sure if it will go against the forum rule if I suddenly change the topic.
Anyways, what I'm saying is, there are alternative income sources, and improving on other aspects of the game should one day surpass the need for new vanity. Several other games have already set a precedent, why can't Cubic Castle achieve the same goal?
I agree to some length how it is currently kinda.. ‘broken’ but also think it’s fine..
Now, your first solution is just, I don’t know I think it would’t work.
Your second solution wouldn’t work because they could just go to a alt and buy more packs. IP address based wouldn’t work because of vpn’s.
One solution would be the developers being more responsible with the items they bring back. Not trying to be mean to them by the way. o.o From what I understand is you want stable prices. I’ll use your robot example, if they would of left robots in the packs for just two years instead of putting them in this third year, they would of stayed stable after there second year since there would be enough items in the game to keep their price stable. But, they brought them back a third year which only causes them to keep dropping. Maybe a solution could be, keep items in holiday packs for two years, and then remove them.
But, I think the real solution is getting more players. There is stuff we can do to help with this. What we could as players do, is to get new players and teach them the beauty of Cubic Castles. If we started getting players to stay then they could grow as qbees to grow the game and help the ecomony. Of course this wouldn’t get a whole lot more, and solve everything. But, it would help the game and the ecomony.
I'm not sure if a complete discontinuation will really work, but I think rotations of hats could be a solution, too. More players is good either ways. So yea, that pretty much sums everything up.
Most people are focusing on hats and profit while we builders just want more blocks instead of more hats ;0;
#BringBuildingBack #BBB xd
I think the gambling system that epieownz suggested would be the best fix, as it would be used by exactly those people who rush to sell back holiday items (the people flooding the market and creating a hyperinflation for said items.)
e.g. npc The Mad Hatter will trade you a new Halloween pack for 3 Robot Heads.
There are lots of builder but I wouldn't say there are more builders than traders.
There's already ALOTTTTTTTT of stuff traders can make profit off and I don't disagree to add more. But I haven't seen suggestions about blocks. Maybe 1 or 2 but that isn't enough for a game that is all about building.
Items come and go in every game and prices change all the time. Devs shouldn't remove an item cause it's too cheap or too expensive. It's actually better for the items to be cheaper cause people without a lot of cubits can buy them and have an actual set.
I'm really happy a lot of hats came back in the Halloween pack cause they got cheaper and I saw lots of newbies wearing Halloween stuff like skulls and pumpkins.
Imo, discontinued items should be given away in events like the Ramm Week event. It was pretty nice.