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Post by starcore on Oct 14, 2022 0:48:37 GMT
It appears when purchasing an augment form the aug shop it will increase the price of ALL augments on the same tier. This can be abused by purchasing cheap augments to boost the price of expensive ones. For example, assume I'm a malicious actor... First, the current aug prices...  Now lets assume I don't like someone who is making a cleric... and I happen to know they would like to buy a 7&8 aug... Or alternately, I have a stockpile of 7&8 augs, and am interested in keeping the prices high to maintain their trade value... I can purchase the 50mil battle wizard aug... and see what happens to the prices of all the other augs...  Take particular note of the Templar aug price... By spending only 50 mil, I have increased the price of the templar aug by almost 600mil By using this strategy, once an aug reaches an extreme price, I could keep it at an almost unaffordable level by bumping it with only cheap trash augs |
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Post by chirality on Oct 15, 2022 11:36:23 GMT
not sure if this is a bug or feature but it's worked that way since day 1
i think most people assumed it was a feature
the scenario where a malicious actor abuses the system in this fashion has probably happened since day 2
however, just as a general reminder, the system was in fact designed to suck gold out of the wallets of the richest players on the server. i don't mean to be preach-y here, but i like to bear this in mind whenever discussing issues of absurdly explosive costs regarding the aug shop. these complaints do come up frequently, and it's understandably-frustrating for people to see a system that doesn't appear to do much except produce unaffordable prices whenever recent purchases are made, ensuring that not only the most desirable augs, but the rest as well, often remain tantalizingly out-of-reach for all but the richest of the rich. of course, that is very much what the implementation was designed to achieve.
the aug shop has became a meaningful or even important aspect of most rich vets' experience. having it as a tool at one's disposal has become much akin to the player market itself (which has largely stopped functioning as activity sharply decreased), but again, this was not a system that was engineered to offer a way for us to get our hands on augs that we wanted to max out our kits.
this was a system that was engineered to give the richest players something to spend their gold on which was otherwise accumulating in enormous amounts and inflating the value of everything else to the point that most people were deemed to be suffering far more under the market conditions then, than they are without being able to afford handpicked super-rare augs to achieve build capabilities that otherwise were only previously available with an extreme amount of time played and/or luck.
unfortunately, malicious actors will generally always be able to find a way to manipulate any system in their favor until someone fixes it. i could be wrong about the pricing algorithm, and if so, this should probably be fixed, akin to other things that have been discovered that malicious actors have been able to exploit for their own benefit, often at the expense of others.
however, again, i believe the system was designed this way, and due to the high level of analysis by funky over the years in regards to the aug shop (as the result of many threads, conversations, bug reports, and so on), i would err on the side of thinking that if this was a bug, it would have been corrected about following past complaints. not to say that all reported bugs or problems that have been brought to dev attention get fixed quickly or even at all, but in this case i do believe that it's functioning as designed.
if it isn't intentional, of course, it's still performed an admirable job of pulling gold out of wallets for many years, and the richest players have been able to kit out their toons, so i'm not sure that someone manipulating the system to keep prices high on desirable augs is even a problem as far as the intent of the system goes. it's unfortunate, and i do believe that people have been doing it for years. sucks for everyone else, but at the end of the day it's a gold sink, not a counterpart market economy aimed at delivering goods at fair prices into people's hands.
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