The Economist ~ Notes on the bot price changes

Day 1,595, 09:21 • Published in United Kingdom United Kingdom • by Spite313


Dear friends,


In an economy which is increasingly reliant on the admin bot, the change of the buy price of that bot is incredibly important. Slight changes might have a small effect on you personally, but on a macro scale it makes a huge difference. The most important change of course is the marginal tip in favour of WRM buyers- namely people who own Q6 weapons companies but don’t self supply WRM. These people are for the most part tanks, since the marginal cost of working as a manager is nevertheless far more expensive in terms of damage potential than any fiscal benefit gained from working. In other words, it costs half a gold to gain ten health more for tanking, and even working in a Q6 doesn’t make you that much.


Until recently the bot price was fixed at 0.33 in the minor economies and somewhat lower – probably around 0.16 (though it’s unconfirmed) in the major economies. This was based on the variable exchange rate- PLN and RSD were twice as valuable as-for example-SEK or SIT. Since the unification of the money markets, we’ve seen a gradual fall in the buy price from the bot. This has been matched with an upward trend in the cost of gold. It gets a little ridiculous after a while- the admin push towards devaluing currency has got so extreme that it’s not ridiculous to imagine a future where gold training is actually impossible without buying gold. At the minute it costs around 6000 currency a day to do so. Once the value of currency-gold gets below 2800-1g then you’re looking at normal players – no matter how talented- being put out of the market. I’ll be honest and say that although I can afford to gold train normally, my financial support for the UK whilst it was wiped effectively barred me from taking that path, and I’ve spent several hundred gold training over the past 3 months that I effectively paid for.


The catch 22 situation we find ourselves in here is that the production and use of raw materials- which is the best mode of profit for 95% of players- is also the main cause of the collapse of the value of currency. Lowering the bot price does have the effect of marginally decreasing the rate of currency value inflation, but it doesn’t really help in the long term. What that admins need to do is address their own future head on, and ask themselves one very simple question:


Do you want to create a realistic economy, in the sense of a simulator, or do you want to create character progression, like you would get in an RPG?





If you’re aiming for a realistic economy, then the whole thing needs binning and starting again. Reimburse people the capital value of what they have, change the formulas, change the nature of purchasing, remove WAM and create player-driven demand. This system would have a few big winners, a bunch of smaller wealthy players and the vast teeming multitude of the poor- basically like the real world.


If you’re looking for character progression, which from observation is what the admins have been aiming for the past year or so, then it’s a different story. Each individual player develops themselves by investing and saving, but since they’re not selling to anyone real 90% of the time there is no economy- you’re rewarded by your accomplishments by the game, not by other players. If this is the case, a half-baked job won’t do. At the minute we still have a huge amount of detritus in the game from when it was a rubbish sim, now making it a rubbish RPG. Stuff like the money market, the markets themselves, are very good for when you have such things as supply and demand, and a stable economy. What we have now is a continuous downhill slide.


The admins did recognise this when they introduced the bot and fixed the global money market, but they didn’t go far enough. Although the currency side of the market was fixed, the gold side wasn’t. The admins need to go one step further and delete the money market altogether. It needs to be replaced by a currency exchange. In this exchange you can buy currency and gold directly from the admins, not from third parties. If the rate for currency was 0.01, it’s reasonable to say “make the gold cost 1500 CC” or something, to encourage people to buy gold. But fix the price, because the idea of an actual market is a costly illusion, and the bot is doing nothing except constantly devaluing all the money anyone has ever spent. When I bought my first Q4 company it was worth around 10 gold. Now it’s worth around 5. That’s how far the markets have collapsed. In addition, although the concept of markets is fine and can be left alone, messing around with the bot, or the bot price, is as unacceptable as messing around with the battle timer, the counter or people’s money. It’s changing the rules of the game halfway through, and is as bad as deleting people’s strength or rank. You’re cutting people’s character progression for no good reason and it is killing interest. Finally, the admins need to openly come out and acknowledge the price the bot buys at.


I don’t expect everyone to agree with my solutions, but everyone agrees with the problem. Please vote and shout, and more importantly use the “contact” facility at the bottom of the page to send this article to the admins so they can actually read it. I’ll be emailing them myself, but it’s important they see as many names as possible saying the same thing- from all backgrounds, gold buyers and free players.



Best wishes,


Iain