@Nahiko-Road said in Beware of the Xbox mafia!:

Wow you are pretty butt hurt about people reselling items, which is a strategy in many MMO's to make money...

I can understand why you are mad about the exploiters but i think they are a very minor group and to claim they are the sole responsible reason for the prices is unfounded.

Once the number of items left available on the player shops reaches a critical mass they all get bought up to be sold one at a time for a much higher price. This has a direct and dramatic impact on prices, and through my tracking of various pre-PC items to decide which ones I need to buy first I have noticed this happen numerous times. I have also seen times when that reselling was immediately counteracted by undercutting from others who'd been holding onto those items for longer and decided that once the price had risen they wanted in.

Thank you for your understanding, and please be reassured that my knowledge of price escalation they cause comes from recorded observation.

I personally know of people in my alliance (myself included) that buy all the emotes as soon as a new scratch ticket hits because the prices are often sub 5m each and they almost always go up, that's the reason you see people selling 30+ of an item

For starters, do you not see this as exploitative and a significant impact on the accessibility of prices?

I agree with your described cause of an excess of meseta supply. This topic is about the effect the official RMT of first-version Game Pass Ultimate rewards had on kickstarting this situation, as it helped create the cycle of this market exploitation that gave that minority of players the extreme excess of funds to be able to do this in the first place.

Pragmatically, taking steps to curb rampant exploitative reselling would both reduce whatever damage caused by that meseta injection (regardless of our beliefs on its scale; I think it's a clue that they specifically removed it from the reward) and make the game's economy way healthier in general.

@GrandTickler87 said in Beware of the Xbox mafia!:

its a system that is begging to be abused

Bang on. I've avoided describing rates and such as that might be taken as unintentionally advertising disallowed RMT, but it's still baffling that Game Pass Ultimate continues to give 12 AC tickets for $1 the way it does, more or less punishing the majority of us whose principles are better than to exploit it.

@Miraglyth Yes it's extremely exploitative and that isn't a bad thing, personally i enjoy being able to resell things higher than i buy them and that's a function of the game (including all mmo's with any form of market). This crusade you are on to shame people who resell things is absurd. (and sorry to go off topic i was just replying to the message i quoted)

Regardless, i agree with your points on RMT and the game pass exploit, I've always assumed this as being a small group but if you have the evidence to support that it's a much larger issue please do share your recorded observations.

the GMs do fuck all in the game, except ocassionally yell at me for swearing on the forums. Cuz, you know thats more important then people exploiting.

can't really blame the people who resell scratch stuff...people exist who dont value their own real money - 500 USD for them is like 5 USD for "poor people" - i have seen aqua hair (as an example) for 500k meseta wich cost now about 8m-9m...i have seen ppl in block 1 bragging about using 1k USD on scratch stuff...so i wont feel bad buying their cheap stuff and reselling said stuff in a couple months for 10x the amount (especially if none xbox and windows player join the fray) it is not bad to understand and use the market for some profit

@JuggernautGTX said in Beware of the Xbox mafia!:

"poor people"

I am a poor person who lives in subsidized housing. My only income is SSI / SSDI. I am given about 800 USD a month, which is below the poverty line. Despite this, I still managed to spend a lot of money (mostly thanks to my stimulus check, but I would have done it anyway regardless over the 3 months following the PC launch.)

By calculations made elsewhere. Each time this exploit was done. SEGA lost 21 USD. No wonder SEGA will never make a Skies of Arcadia remake.

@Nahiko-Road said in Beware of the Xbox mafia!:

@Miraglyth Yes it's extremely exploitative and that isn't a bad thing

I'll just preserve that sentence. You cannot have exploitation without someone to be exploited. In this case there are two victims (the original seller who paid the real money to do the AC scratch and the overcharged buyer).

This crusade you are on to shame people who resell things is absurd.

Then apologies if you thought that was my primary intention. What I really want is for intervention to make reselling less disgustingly effective. Right now it's basically free money taken from players with less of it and while I fully agree that those players have the ability to play smarter to avoid this to an extent, thanks to the headstart and the Game Pass exploit they are not on a level playing field to have the means to do so.

Regardless, i agree with your points on RMT and the game pass exploit, I've always assumed this as being a small group but if you have the evidence to support that it's a much larger issue please do share your recorded observations.

To be clear my data is of prices of items on the market being resold, not on the volume of Game Pass exploitation. I wouldn't want anyone (not least the GMs) to think I was sitting on the latter without passing it to GMs for the good of the game. Moreover we all know the GM team is already aware of Game Pass exploitation to an extent because they had the rewards remove the meseta already.

@Miraglyth The whole point of reselling is the risk that it drops in price; whereas i've wasted my time or it stays around the same where i have just wasted my time. To claim that exploiting the two "victims" is a crime and should be shamed is wrong. For one the original seller loses nothing as they simply make a sale of an item with an expected return (the price they posted the item at) and the overcharged buyer does pay more but that's their choice, they don't necessarily need the item to progress/havefun.

I feel like we are arguing ethics here and ethics don't come into a video game market no matter which way you slice it - this would be another story if we were talking about the sale of clean drinking water or something.. But enough talk about this and back to on topic, we can just agree to disagree here.

The issues of RMT and Game Pass exploit are real and should be looked at further by the Dev Team to either remove the problem or mitigate it as best as possible in the case of RMT. Even though your data is just on item resale, I'd still love to see that too as i assume that is what has you so worked up about reselling and I'm sure a GM would take more notice if you can post statistics to show the problem. To assume they are still aware of the problem might be wrong, my experience in the programming industry is that once a fix is made (for example remove meseta reward) the problem isn't looked at again (not until enough noise surfaces again).

Not sure... but my understanding of how the "Exploit" worked... Was they bought the game pass for $1... logged in collected the rewards... then charged back (or what ever) then bought it again for $1... repeated as many times as possible... Also if i remember that pack came with 30 days of premium too... so theyve got tons of that as well.

@Nahiko-Road said in Beware of the Xbox mafia!:

@Miraglyth The whole point of reselling is the risk that it drops in price

And I have seen that happen too, but only when the reselling prices an item above what someone else is willing to sell/resell theirs for, and even then the effect is temporary - and sometimes the reseller just buys up anyone who undercuts them because they can, and makes off with even more free money.

In short it's a seriously low risk when it involves content that cannot be generated anymore. One of my desires is to see the natural generation of tradable content revived. I believe that would put an actual fear of devaluation into some resellers, not some pretend risk that items with no supply might somehow permanently drop in price.

To claim that exploiting the two "victims" is a crime and should be shamed is wrong.

To claim I called it a crime is also wrong. I've said that my dislike for people doing it is secondary to my ambition to make it less effective in the first place. To some extent I don't blame people for taking advantage of a system I believe to be flawed to the point of practically inviting this exploitation.

I feel like we are arguing ethics here and ethics don't come into a video game market no matter which way you slice it

Can't say I agree with this at all. It's not okay to be unethical in any setting. Though I think abstracting the discussion to ethics is also over-dramatising matters somewhat.

The issues of RMT and Game Pass exploit are real and should be looked at further by the Dev Team to either remove the problem or mitigate it as best as possible in the case of RMT.

They did mitigate the RMT part - they removed the repeatable 1,000,000 meseta for $1 deal that Game Pass Ultimate's first-month bonus originally was. It sounds like they didn't also take action against the people who'd abused it (it might prove a hassle to do so given they essentially made a purchase?) though so the damage was done and this topic is about... warning others about them... or something...

...honestly this topic itself is strange. What can a warning do? No player can stop people with an excess of meseta (regardless of source) using it to control the market. That'd be for the developers to take measures against.

Even though your data is just on item resale, I'd still love to see that too as i assume that is what has you so worked up about reselling and I'm sure a GM would take more notice if you can post statistics to show the problem.

I mean, what would you like to know? About the time someone on Ship 3 bought out hundreds of Chinese Theme and priced them at 4 million apiece, only for them to quickly drop back to ~700k within a few days because they were still available in the ongoing FUN scratch? The recordings I've taken (entirely in text form so nothing provable) are somewhat specific to the things I was looking to buy or hearing about.

To assume they are still aware of the problem might be wrong, my experience in the programming industry is that once a fix is made (for example remove meseta reward) the problem isn't looked at again (not until enough noise surfaces again).

That is a good point. They could have identified that people were abusing the Game Pass Ultimate rewards specifically for the meseta and removed that, but not identified that they were (and potentially still are) also hoarding AC scratch tickets.

To any GMs reading this: I believe the Xbox Game Pass first-month extra bonus is still active (until early next year, if I remember the date of the reward on my own perks screen correctly) and it still allows people with multiple accounts to get multiple sets of 12 AC scratch tickets for $1 that they can then use and transfer the items to their main account. If this is so, you might wish to look into this.

On the other hand, the matter of ongoing market dominance using meseta from the previously-fixed abuse isn't something so easily addressed. Do you review everyone who did it and remove all the items they've bought with three months of profiteering kickstarted by that meseta injection? It'd be a nightmare, and surely the better solution would be a more permanent discouragement and nerfing of exploitative reselling.

Never seen an economy as bad as in this game really, neither any MMOs I know nor Path of Exile (where price fixing is also a common occurence) were this bad. Even JP players seem to constantly go "what the hell is wrong with NA economy?" I guess the answer is apparent, now.

Flipping and price fixing (even organized one) is kind of inevitable in any game but the Xbox early access advantage + exploit for which they only got a slap on the wrist pretty much let those people control the entire market from the get-go since they started with an insurmountably huge advantage at PC release. I'm not sure the market will ever find some kind of equilibrium in such conditions, it might still be the case that one mafia owns everything 3 years into NA.

F2P game so don't expect any serious GM moderation to take place. Why do you think WoW and FFXIV GMs are on point with handling gameplay abuse? Your mandatory subscription fee pays for their salary.

@Robo-Tradez123 said in Beware of the Xbox mafia!:

F2P game so don't expect any serious GM moderation to take place.

[ Laughs in Perfect World International and Aeria Games. ]

These two companies outright goomba stomp / ban hammer deadly combo anyone who even attempts to exploit game mechanics, especially ones that pertain to their cash shop. But they have really shitty monetization practices, some even worse than PSO2.

@Miraglyth I'm sorry if i thought your claims about ripping off players was an ethical discussion, clearly you feel morally obligated not to do it / abuse the system. (over-dramatize? you are the one who stated people are being "exploited" and are "victims") and here i thought we could agree to disagree on this.. It's clear we have differing opinions on the market system and there is more I'd like to say but I'll leave it at that as to not go in circles.

Oh i imagined a more extensive spreadsheet or something..

Right now Nemesis+35 is OP for current content even without a decent affix so I'll just continue to farm my millions - out

@Nahiko-Road said in Beware of the Xbox mafia!:

(over-dramatize? you are the one who stated people are being "exploited" and are "victims")

Those words can still be used without referring to extreme real-life matters like "the sale of clean drinking water". Obviously I along with any sane person agree that regional famine and poverty is more important than anything in any game, but I don't think we should be using that as a smokescreen to prevent or trivialise discussion about issues (and by extension the issues themselves) within a game.

@coldreactive said in Beware of the Xbox mafia!:

@JuggernautGTX said in Beware of the Xbox mafia!:

"poor people"

I am a poor person who lives in subsidized housing. My only income is SSI / SSDI. I am given about 800 USD a month, which is below the poverty line. Despite this, I still managed to spend a lot of money (mostly thanks to my stimulus check, but I would have done it anyway regardless over the 3 months following the PC launch.)

By calculations made elsewhere. Each time this exploit was done. SEGA lost 21 USD. No wonder SEGA will never make a Skies of Arcadia remake.

Breaks my heart we don't get that Skies of Arcadia remake. Hell if they needed the funding I'd more than happy to have a Kickstarter to fund it.