Balancing the Economy: Bigger Train Tickets

[Juicyken]

Make bigger and longer train tickets!

 

Currently, a lot of new players feel nickel and dimed for things they necessarily must do, whereas veteran players are practically swimming in hundreds of millions of Pokedollars and have vans filled with coin capsules. We all want dev time to be used as wisely as possible, so any economic adjustment should be done in the simplest and quickest way possible, if possible! Plus, any implementation has to navigate the waters of player acceptability; Adding a tax to balance the money supply would be effective, but would be really depressing for everyone to deal with...

 

Right now, train tickets are already viewed as being necessary for veterans of the game: You play every day? Well then you need a train ticket to save money traveling, simple as that. 

 

Players will take breaks; Will a player log in every day for a year? Some will, true, but inevitably players will have days, even weeks, where they will not log on. When a player doesn't play, they are wasting the active train ticket they have for that day. Inevitably, there will be periods of time throughout the year when many players not only won't be playing but they also won't have an active ticket. 

 

 

My suggestion: Add larger train ticket sizes to the game! (at the same rate per-day as the current max duration ticket)

 

The main advantage of this idea is that it provides a way for the richest of the player-base to voluntarily spend their money while not affecting the new player experience.

 

My idea is explicitly NOT to increase the efficiency of the current max duration ticket!!! I cannot stress that enough: Veteran players will still buy the largest tickets purely for the convenience factor of the purchase and the perk.

 

Specifically, I suggest that you atleast add a 365-day train ticket to the vendor. This ticket, if held to the efficiency of the current max-duration train ticket available, will come out to cost $3,910,714. Obviously that's a pretty ugly number so I suggest something like $3,900,000, but the exact cost isn't really what this post about. In fact, for my idea to work properly, I recommend that the cost per-day remain approximately the same as the current 28 day ticket and not increase/decrease in efficiency.

 

Why not just increase the max ticket you can buy to something like 10 years? There does need to be a cut off of some sort, because inflation in the economy should be considered... but prices for items have not gone up 200%-400% in the past 4 years, while the overall money supply has. What I'm trying to say is that while there is a cutoff threshold, it's certainly not something to worry about with this implementation. Apply this suggestion and it'll target the richest players and avoid burdening new players with the cost!

 

Without knowing the development process, I don't know how easy it is to add or adjust things, and so I'm just assuming that adding 1-4 more options/items to the ticket masters won't be a debilitating project for the devs. This idea is just to help to balance things out in a minor and relatively easy to implement way.

[Xeenon]

-1 you can use as many sold ticket as u can as i know 

 

[Juicyken]

Thank you for the response! That's very true, you can absolutely do that! I'm suggesting something distinctly different from that, however.

1 hour ago, Xeenon said:

-1 you can use as many sold ticket as u can as i know 

 

 

[Codyful]

+1

[Lugario]

-1 , adding 1 year or 10 years tickets is not a sufficient way to balance the economy. I can only see it hurting the economy, not helping it. Prices sometimes change in the game, but if someone had an active service for such a large time, then won't be affected by that change while they should. It's an MMO and so it needs a way to decrease money on an active basis and a 1/10 year window won't do it.

[Juicyken]

56 minutes ago, Lugario said:

-1 , adding 1 year or 10 years tickets is not a sufficient way to balance the economy. I can only see it hurting the economy, not helping it. Prices sometimes change in the game, but if someone had an active service for such a large time, then won't be affected by that change while they should. It's an MMO and so it needs a way to decrease money on an active basis and a 1/10 year window won't do it.

Hey Lugario thanks for the response, I just wanna make it clear first off: I do not suggest actually adding a 10 year ticket. I extrapolated my idea to make a point about one possible implication of my plan. I do not endorse or suggest a 10 year ticket one way or the other.

 

Your point about prices changing is appreciated! I did talk about this in my post; I gave the example of the last 4 years as why there's no historical reason to believe that prices will explode any time soon for any clear reason. The devs have been pretty good about arresting inflation of item prices! Rare candies have even gone down over this period despite the dramatically increased money supply. Rare candies are a great example of the kind of powerful control the devs have over the price changes of items applying unobtrusive alterations in supply methods to maintain fun gameplay in the face of the increased money supply. The conclusion is clear from this: There is no reason to believe that inflation will increase dramatically any time soon for any clear reason. The imbalance of money supply is squarely because of the increasingly top-heavy presence of extremely rich players. Evidence of general inflation, i.e. the change you are suggesting, would result in these items costing more, and they do not. 

 

Another point to support this argument is the following: What we instead see is not an increase in the cost of items, but an increase in the cost of specific types of pokemon over the same period. Not an increase in the cost of story pokemon or basic sync pokemon, as you would expect if general inflation were relevant, but instead we've seen an increase in PvP mons and rare shiny mons. Why? Because the players with the money are the issue here: They are the ones holding and spending the enormous sums of money and that in turn causes relatively poorer players to be priced out. All price changes that have happened are only because of the very players whose money supply is the problem. Inadvertent price changes are occurring only in areas of the economy where the richest players have clearly singular transactional presence inside of. 

 

My suggestion will not be the economy's panacea, but it has the advantage of only targeting the richest players and not affecting the less affluent players whatsoever. Not to mention being a relatively simple addition to the game that will not take up too much time!

[Lugario]

You do not see evidence of general inflation, but inflation can happen at any time and it is not something you can predict. We live in an inflated economy the past few years irl and as expected that can also affected trade market in-game too. An example of that is the increase of some times in Coin Shop last year.

With your suggestion I personally do not see how that would help "poor" players, since it will just make it harder for them if they also want to obtain the larger ticket you mentioned.

 

In the past, there were staff pokemon auction to remove some money from the market, but I do not think they are gonna happen again since the amount of Pokedollars gained every day would outspeed the money removed, and just end up for rich players to have 5/6 IVs Pokemon to use against other players.

 

You are forgetting that if someone can not afford to buy a PvP Pokemon or some shiny, they could just hunt one for themselves and have their OT. Also there are shops with Pokemon you can lend for a cheap price, and if you are in some Guild, most of them they are willing to lend you Pokemon for free since it contributes to the overal guild ranking.

 

Also do note that most of the time, if a player has very good skills in PvP (let's say for example the #1 in ladder), if you give them bad IVs Pokemon and put them against someone that is not good at PvP, but give that player 5/6 IV Pokemon, the skilled player would always win no matter if they had "worse" Pokemon.

 

I do agrree that rich people need to somehow "loose" money, but I do not think that is the way to do it.

Edited 1 hour ago by Lugario