Patch 2.0.2's Worst Feature

So I have to admit, I had a response ready for this rebuttal since I expected this to be another big argument that came up.

I actually did some research early on right before the update came out into what the “black market” price for LE was on sites like McMarket. I wasn’t considering actually buying any, purely just using the figures to estimate what shares would be worth in their release state.

The figure most common seemed to be 5$/1stx LE, which means that the shares selling for 10$/2 (5$ each, but each bought ~$4.25 bombs) would be around 45-55LE each as a stable price. Since, however, there are so many being bought currently, the price has dramatically dropped past what their value should be. Like you said, they’re currently worth only around 32LE each, a 29%-42% decrease in the expected price.

Now I originally wrote that argument before the update came out, naturally I can’t fully predict exactly what will happen, but it’s pretty clear based on supply and demand that if people are mass buying the shares like they are currently, the price per share decreases significantly.

Some people can, of course, afford the efficiency loss anyways though. Your friend who made 25stx (likely who paid ~200$ for share too) is probably one of those people. This is where the flip side of the coin comes in handy, how the efficiency loss for the IRL buyer benefits the ingame buyer. 32LE per share seems alright for IRL trading, but it’s even BETTER for people who grind. Each share can buy 3 dxp bombs (1h double xp grinding) or 5 dloot bombs (50m dloot iirc). This is amazing for them, since in both cases you’re likely to make more than 32LE in grinding worth of goods in the time the bombs are thrown, in which case you can sell your wares and buy another share to repeat the process. 10LE for double XP for 20m is a pretty good deal IMO, and as long as you can get >0.5LE/min from the dloot it’s worth buying as well.

Will the price fall much further? Probably not. The further the price goes from its equilibrium the harder it is to move further away, so the lowest I can possibly imagine the shares going is around 20LE each. They’re still very far from their equilibrium price of 50LE each though.

 

Something I feel like you're overlooking here:
The supply and demand of shares exist for both the players buying the shares in-game and the players purchasing them from Wynncraft. If prices of shares decrease then ultimately so does the demand on part of the people purchasing them from Wynncraft, meaning supply will go down and the price will once again rise.

These two factors sort of balance out, which means the price of Shares are actually fairly stable. Of course, there will be times when they increase and decrease in value, mainly when being flooded (Like currently) or when events come around, but I wouldn't expect the value to change horroribly, or at least for very long.

 

Even if the blackmarket IRL trading is more efficient, now players are encouraged to IRL trade by making it legal. People who would never IRL trade will now, because it's legal in the game and Wynncraft supports it because it makes them money this time. So while profitability for money may be lower for the people who buy the shares, what they do gain is security and the knowledge that what they are doing for money is not blackmarket. There are also likely people who never even thought about buying LE packages, but because of this ordeal they start doing so. If you hear that Wynncraft actually endorses buying liquid emeralds with real life money, you might as well just take it a step further and go on the blackmarket for a better conversion rate. The reason you would not do that is to support Wynncraft and for the safety of knowing that what you did in game is not a problem with the server so you won't get in trouble for doing so.

This really just seems like they created a mountain out of a molehill, the molehill being the tiny problem of an LE blackmarket that most players did not even know existed before now, and the mountain they created being that they made it seem like everyone and their uncle was buying LE with real money. Their solution, endorse buying LE with money, but in a way that they get money, and it goes through the TM in the form of shares so they can say it's not literally buying LE and profit. While IRL trading may have taken place before undoubtedly on this server, I cannot think of a single time I have even heard of it taking place before, and the solution to a serious issue like this is not to endorse it and make IRL trading accessible to everyone. It really would not have been that hard to look through all of the suggestions that people have made on forums, discord, or to post a suggestion thread asking for cosmetic and non pay to win features for a new subscription rank if the Wynncraft Content Team has ran out of ideas like this.

Beyond all of this, the biggest problem is not just the pay to win nature of a certain rank feature or just the fact that you can buy LE with real money effectively now right off Wynncraft's website, in fact it's now encouraged, but the stockpiling effect of all of these features being added to the game. Every time Wynncraft releases some mildly pay to win feature people bring up the slippery slope, and whether or not it is a fallacy and each decision on pay to win features by the CT directly led to the next directly is admittedly hard to prove. What is not hard to prove is that over time they have continued to snowball these features and it is arguably already too far. So rather than complaining about a hypothetical slippery slope that may continue to go downwards or not, I would like to just point out the fact that they have likely gone too far down the slope by continually acting outside of the community's best wishes, adding more and more pay to win features for ranks/subscriptions instead of thinking of creative cosmetic rank features. I am not sure if this is pure greed or just laziness on their part, but I do not really buy that IRL blackmarket trading was such a serious and expansive problem, or that the solution to the problem would be to make IRL trading accessible/legal/endorsed for everyone. They dumped gasoline over a small flame, creating a wildfire and do not care because it is to their benefit. Smokey Bear does not approve.

 

this is not just a Wynncraft issue. on the other major network, Hypixel has silently went into this path earlier 2021, and has been letting its white knights to rationalise it since they have removed its voluntary moderation team. this is increasingly ridiculous, because instead of allowing the whales to do this, normal players will more likely be impacted by this.

in reality, every single existing service is doing that, because this is all about removing the choice.

 

While normally this would be correct, there’s one catch: the laws of supply and demand only apply to a *free market*, not to a monopoly supplier.

Under a monopoly system, the seller is the sole determiner of price of a particular good or service. The buyer doesn’t have an alternative choice, so their only option is to take that price. In this case, Wynncraft has a monopoly on the IRL purchase of the shares, and as such is the sole decider of their price.

Instead, the supply and demand becomes the supply of people’s money and the demand of the item, something also determined by a single party. This typically leads to an unusual amount of an item being purchased compared to what it would be without a monopoly system; sometimes more, but sometimes less.

This is also neglecting the second part of the argument: how the demand of IRL buying balances out the demand of the ingame buying. At some point, they will balance out at which case you get a stable price, yes. However, this is neglecting the fact that both the demand of IRL buying and ingame buying can change significantly.

Currently, there is a VERY high IRL demand of the shares, since the update just came out and there’s still a lot of excitement around it. People are also taking this opportunity to sink a LOT of money into the shares all at once in order to quickly gain LE. However, this is bound to significantly decrease over time: the mass buyers will run out of money they’re willing to spend, and the hype buyers will run out of steam in a week or two. Meanwhile, the ingame buyers’ demand is likely to slowly increase over time: as people get more used to using them, they’ll use them more often. There will also be grinders who make profit off of using the shares, which will take some time to get running at first.

IRL demand decreasing but ingame demand increasing means an increase in price over time, and I predict it will be very similar to the “black market” price of $5 for 64LE. We already know that the “black market” price is stable since it has been able to stabilize itself over many years already, and both the potential buyers and potential sellers are increasing which means the stable price will likely remain close to the same over time.

I actually totally agree with this, that’s another reason why my predicted stable price is lower than $5/64LE on the IRL buyer’s side. There’s bound to be an increase in both the amount bought with IRL money and the amount bought with ingame money due to the legalization of the trade, which *likely* would favor the ingame buyer but probably only slightly.

This is also why I *don’t* agree with the “It reduces IRL trading” argument for allowing the shares; it actually likely will increase it, just it’s now legal and thus isn’t counted as “IRL trading” to the server. The source Wynn cited for this said that *3rd party* IRL trading was reduced by 61%-81%, but they never mentioned how much of that trading simply moved to the 1st party site.

Honestly I really don’t have anything else to add to this, it’s just correct. Wynn is actually *increasing* the amount of IRL trading due to this change, just now they get the revenue instead of a 3rd party.

 

Aren't the shares from the subscription not tradeable?

 

They are tradeable.

 

Shares from the subscription aren't, Shares you buy from the store are.

 

i feel like this "supply and demand" discussion is overcomplicating the way a supply and demand model works for no real reason

players buying shares off the wynncraft store to sell them are the supply curve, and players buying shares off the trade market are the demand curve. if demand shifts, the in game price of shares will change, and suppliers will be incentivized to increase or decrease supply (buy more/fewer shares from the store)

wynncraft itself is irrelevant to the model - it is an inherent part of the market environment itself

 

Hey man he wanted it included so I included it lol

 

I can see your points but considering Hypixel did basically the same thing like 2 years ago and Skyblock is still perfectly fine I’d say this will cause basically no issues in the long run

 

it is terrifying that Hypixel could make it fine, same when Roblox went this way too. the similarity between them is that they are slowly removing certain community features and going through the corporate methods, and, as mentioned above, certain players are supporting it. even worse, you can no longer post anything without your microsoft account linked to the forum or you are banned from it. if you want to report anyone in-game? only in-game command and its category is very limited (no way you can explain it).

regarding the PTW, Hypixel has been crossing the red line further than it used to be. if you buy and use network boosters, you get instant network levelling without even playing anything. in its SkyBlock, we used to have no perks to buy with, until the speed cookies were introduced and the paid ranks could get a better convenience of operations. there are certain paid convenience do lead to explicit unfair advantage with otherwise, but people chose to "i don't believe it until i see it" even though that is right before their eyes.

 

You do realize that theres no way to report someone in forums right, that was removed years ago, they made account linking to forum necessary since there was lots of people who just made alt after alt after alt.

 

when i meant reporting on forums is about the reporting section of it, luckily you guys did keep this function because otherwise would assume the user would always have Discord accounts.

as a former victim of harassments, to some extent, that's true, but this is not always the case, the people otherwise would lose the forum access completely if he gets banned for any reason even if you could prove it false and appeals got rejected. as a former Hypixel player, i already know that you can only report them through commands, but that is exactly the problem i am talking about.

(i tested these similar measures when i was updating my Discord community, and they managed to bypass it.)

 

Skyblock’s p2w had to be added for the same reason as Wynncraft’s is, but there was an even worse “black market” for Skyblock coins that basically everyone knew about.
The ideal situation is obviously to not have p2w at all, but that just isn’t possible
And in the long run this will benefit Wynn, as people buy this new rank and such, it will provide a large boost in income towards the admins, allowing them to keep the server up

 

if this is happening, i think we need a new unit of emerald after a stack of liquid. other than that, what we can do to make sure free players will still be able to fairly participate in the game.

i also missed a point that Hypixel had once limited SkyBlock to paid users during maintenance, which is even worse.

 

Why do we need another unit of emerald? Stx works fine.

 

It has come to my understanding of how this share works.
So, the share can be used to exchange for bombs and shit but what's makes it different that you can trade it with other people.
That means those who are not able to buy bombs via transition can finally get bombs through the share exchange with emeralds
Imo tho i think this has more advantage for the server since the server will able to get more funds and non-rank/broke player can get bombs now.
Tho the tax reduction and etc is unnecessarily disadvantages the playerbase since we can get emeralds more easily now.
But the share still expensive for others countries with a significant exchange rate (like mine)

So I don't think the Silverbull subscription is that bad and instead of removing it, maybe make a tweak or two for some of the advantages

 

although it is going to be inappropriate to speak up, i have to show the light that New World Order (like the "you will own nothing" agenda where they want to turn everything into subscription entity) is actually also happening directly on the gaming communities. this is not a drill.

i just believe that there will be a need of, when people are trading in dozen of stacks.

but my main point is the possibility of certain censorship or exploiting free players' experience in order to profit from this practice. some goodies for everyone must be made in order to offset the unfairness.

by the way, wonder if you notice how many services are setting up their own paid subscriptions to access certain things supposedly free. you already have to pay certain utility bills and now this, and existing ones raising prices while the quality is rather worsening to a level that what you can do with your remaining money is very limited.