NEWS: Wyrom digs into the Loot Cap discussion at the Discord Forum with some gems of his own! How’s YOUR Silvers Generation stacking up to the GS Cap and to the GS 1%? Here’s his candid thoughts:
Text of Discord Post follows:
PM Wyrom
Wyrom’s Words on Loot Cap
on 25 December 2022 2:18 PM
from the Official GemStoneIV Discord Forum
in the Mechanics/Loot Cap threadLike my other post in State of the Game, these sort of threads are hard to dig into because it always comes off as combative, which it really isn’t at all. I’m not really sure how the EG raffle thing got worked into this, but that wasn’t anything to do with loot cap or even my efforts with silver management this year.
The days before loot cap were not manageable. It was a losing battle when trying to plan out high end offerings with silvers. When single players were generating hundreds of millions of silvers each it just can’t be met with any form of demand to move them out in a meaningful way. We absolutely had to control the faucet. Personally, and I know this will be extremely unpopular, I think 30mil is too high of a cap. We have the raw data on every single account’s silver generation and really, anything over 10mil is just a small group of players. Obviously lower the cap to that extreme would upset quite a few people off, though most people aren’t impacted. Another unpopular opinion is adding more tedium. I’ve mentioned this in the past too. It would help give silvers more meaning, but not in a fun way.
We don’t want to make silver generation easier though for the bottom 95%, that is even more counterproductive than introducing a cap. If everyone is earning 10mil a month, we’re worse off at 20bil to 30bil silver a month. I realize that’s not realistic, but loot boosts that made making millions easier a week would not be a good solution for the game. As of the time of this post, no one is hard capped, still one account getting close though. Bottom 95% is still under 2mil on average and just over 1mil for the median.
Players who care about wealth still need to be able to accumulate wealth, and the numbers right now allow that to a degree we can manage. It was mentioned that we probably don’t have any staff that even see this side of the game. I don’t anymore, but I very much did as a player. And one of the GMs I was hired with was also a person that could generate a lot of wealth. While we don’t do that anymore, we know the ins and outs there. When the treasure penalties were introduced where you can’t make silver off things you can’t learn from, it impacted me in a major way. I went from making over 1mil a day to like 100k. Sucked a whole lot. And this was a single playing, no multi-accounting, no scripting person. I barely even use macros.
This year alone, we introduced the EVENT BOX which has pulled out billions and billions of silvers. Our median pay event spend is about $50 per event, and we’re essentially offering that each event now for silver plus extras. We’ve seen EVENT BOX redemptions of over $100,000 worth this year (not player valued secondary market, the value you’d buy from the SimuCoin Store for the event entries). We offered the Duskruin Dig this year that gave out prizes equal to or greater than the former Dig that could have generated a month’s worth of revenue for silver. We added a silver event to Rings of Lumnis that could have easily been a pay event currency. Dev has approved a lot more higher end services and gear that are either in the Legendary Feeder or were offered throughout the year for silvers. It’s definitely been a huge success by combining loot cap and a demand to spend silvers faster than you can earn them. The only issue as I see it is every off month from pay events has been difficult in keeping demand high. But if you want to talk about the most driven parts of the game in the last 8 years, it’s revenue from pay events, and we’re letting everyone buy in, with silvers, for the median buy-in level. It has impacted the bottom line a bit, but I still stand by it being super important for us to continue doing. It might not be as many entries in 2023, but we’ll see how it goes for EVENT BOX.
The auction would have been our icing on the cake here, and I’m sad I had to delay it, but that will be a big help. I do realize auctions don’t help that bottom 95% to get anything of note, but with everything else going on, it does help us get silver levels lower and stabilize the in-game economy. And we continue to add more new scripted items to the game at low prices. This EG, your silvers could walk away with a ton of cool new stuff. Couple that with your free SimuCoins every month, you really didn’t have to buy in for anything if you’re Premium. That’s a whole lot better than the box office situation from yesteryear.
As Estild mentioned though, if you have suggestions on what more we can do, let us know. We still have some big plans to use silvers in game with various new systems. I don’t know how much has already been discussed in channels over the past 12 months, but I at least know a few ideas were approved and I think talked about with players.
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