I just noticed, and a check of the Forum Warz twitter confirms this, that yesterday or so the prices for a lot of high end items went up significantly. Now this certainly isn’t an egregious nerf, though it’s a little annoying as a Hacker since I’ve just recently started to rake in reasonable flezz and suddenly good gear is a little further away, but I’m not sure how effective a measure this really is in terms of controlling inflation. I have it on good authority both that people out there have millions of flezz, and even with the recent deliveries changes that it’s possible to rake in 400k flezz a day, or so, if that’s what you’re trying to do.

Not only that, but most of the high end stuff is something you don’t need many copies of. Considering how cheap repairs are, no Hacker will ever need more than 4 Beast0r Cables and no Troll will ever want more than 1 Tumorous Kidney. So by raising the cost of one-time purchases, we’re effectively limiting access for newer accounts (which may well be a good thing), but are we really doing anything relevant to combat inflation? Since a player can get everything he or she needs to kit out a character optimally in only a few days of high end flezz grinding and then everything else is essentially profit.

So mostly what I’m saying, is that increasing the price of these goods might have been the right call, but it certainly seems incremental, at best, as an inflation fix. Realistically, to combat inflation, don’t we need some sort of flezz sink whereby people can sink arbitrary amounts of flezz with some minor gain for doing so? Like maybe an ePeen award for the most flezz sunk in a 24 hour period, or some sort of raffle where people can spend flezz on tickets for a chance to win a trophy, exclusive item, ePeen, or something?

Possibly the inclusion of a .moar file trading system will do something to get flezz moving in the economy, but I don’t know if it will really prevent “amount in” from exceeding “amount out” by a significant margin. Possibly something that EvilTrout might want to consider is having the game take a cut of any flezz exchanged when .moar files are traded (not much, just, say, 1%) and/or adding a listing fee for putting them up for sale.

Am I totally off base here?