Patch 2.0.2's Worst Feature

I can make a mod that will allow me to fly, others can just destroy their hands by constantly clicking spell cycles. mods don't ban me please, it is just an example

Of course I can do it the other way (which is cheaper btw), but that does not mean I should be forced to do it in order to have an equal playing field.

 

Wynncraft is primarily a single player game, and when there are multiplayer elements like for raids and quests, they are cooperative. Even for guilds, a reduced market tax isn’t going to give the edge to a guild over another. No one goes on the Trade Market to create a monopoly or buy up businesses. The Trade Market was never intended to be used like either. And absolutely no one is going to do the math to see how much they could lower their prices from using the reduced market tax because prices already fluctuate slightly between even the same items. So it’s not a competition.

And again, if you really want to make money, lootrunning would still be leagues ahead. You're not going to see a significant difference unless you're rich already and trade frequently for a long period of time. People will still have to lootrun a ton if they never have a mythic; any theoretical amount of emeralds they could save on the trade market to buy a whole mythic would be extremely inefficient compared to the time they could have spent just lootrunning.

That's literally how everyone did it before the trade market and people still do today. It is no way comparable to fly hacks.

 

If it is so useless, why bother adding it. I know it is probably literally one "if", but still.

In theory both give an advantage against non-paying/hacking players.

 

The advantages aren't anywhere close. Flying bypasses every parkour challenge and fully negates horses. It was and still is never intended to be used.

A reduced trade market tax isn't going to that... It doesn't give buffs or xp, nor makes challenges easier. It's literally just that a few high volume traders will save some emeralds. That's it, and that's probably why they are adding it for those people in particular. For a similar reason that they add cosmetics for people that are into those. Neither are practically pay-to-win, but it's just something a little nice for a particular group of people. And neither negatively impacts other people's experience.

 

To be completely honest, I don’t have many issues with the Silverbull subscription. Normally, I’m against p2w in any form, but in this specific case I find it to be actually agreeable to both the payers and non-payers.

As you said, the two biggest p2w features of the Silverbull subscription are the tax reduction and the Silverbull Shares. I’ll go over the tax reduction first.

The tax reduction, while clearly gives people an advantage… isn’t significant at all. Currently, the market tax is 5% of original value is added to the item on purchase. If that was reduced to 2%, it’s only a 3% original value reduction in price. 99% of trades would barely notice the difference, and in the 1% of cases where it does matter, people often attempt to locate the original seller so they can trade manually without the tax. Of course this isn’t a guaranteed thing, but it does happen in a significant portion of high-value trades which reduces the usefulness of the tax reduction.

You *could* say that the tax is 60% lower with the rank than without in this case, which seems significant. A 60% difference between paying and not is quite the advantage after all. However, this ignores the fact that the tax was so low to begin with: 60% of nothing is still nothing.

You also mentioned that allowing this could open a “Pandora’s box” into more pay-to-win features, but that’s fortunately not true. The Slippery Slope fallacy is very easy for people to fall into, and I don’t blame you for doing so, but in summary, the slippery slope is not really something to be worried about. The slope must stop somewhere, it can’t go down forever. Pay-to-win features have long been in the game, yet they haven’t really led to any slippery slopes: bombs haven’t led to personal boosts, bomb bell hasn’t led to anything, and merchant booths haven’t led to market favoring to name a few examples. The fact is, the slippery slope is a worrying thought, but rarely ever happens in practice.

Now, onto the Silverbull Shares. Personally, I actually see these as the *opposite* of pay-to-win. There are some MAJOR caveats to them which make them a good idea for monetization, but *benefits* to normal players that IMO would result in a net *loss* in the pay-to-win nature of Wynncraft.

First off, you can’t directly make the shares into ingame LE, their value is driven by the player market. This doesn’t seem too significant - what’s the difference, you’re getting paid either way - but it has major drawbacks to the share seller and benefits to the ingame buyer. Since the value is market-driven, the value of the shares can fluctuate significantly, and it’s now bound by supply and demand. Buying a ton of shares won’t get you nearly as much money per share since you’ll be inevitably driving up supply without increasing demand. It’s a significant efficiency loss that makes people think twice about doing so.

The market trading also means that players - not wynncraft nor the IRL buyer of the share - set the price of a dollar store credit in LE. This allows both parties to come to an agreement over what the share is actually worth, which benefits the ingame buyer overall. Wynncraft also will surely not be making the Silverbull shares 100% efficient in the dollar in to dollar out ratio (ex: pay $8 per share, only buys $5 of bombs), meaning the IRL buyer is actually at a *disadvantage* in such trades since they’re paying one price, but their ingame buyer is paying for a different, lower price.

Secondly, you mentioned this in your original post, but the shares allow non-payers to get store items without paying IRL money. You glossed over this point a bit, so I’ll go into more detail and refute some of the points that I found disagreeable.

The Silverbull shares can - at least according to the update notes - be exchanged for bombs. Bombs, IMO, have been a pretty significant source of pay-to-win feeling to me: pay a certain amount, and you can double the XP you get, or double the amount of drops you get from mobs, etc. The saving grace of them that made it manageable is that the boost is given to *the entire server* instead of just the thrower. It still gives said thrower a LARGE advantage, just other people can also take advantage of it. With the shares being introduced, now *any* player can buy bombs without having to pay IRL money. Do a few lootruns, and you could potentially get yourself a DXP bomb or maybe even a few!

This is very significant, and I personally feel that this actually reduces the pay-to-win nature of bombs significantly, to the point where I feel it outweighs the pay-to-win scale of the shares. This is a personal view of course, not everyone may agree, but nonetheless I still feel it should be a major factor in deciding if the shares are pay-to-win.

You also mentioned in your original post that if wynncraft actually wanted to allow players to get bombs and cosmetics without paying, then they could make them earnable ingame. Unfortunately, there are a few reasons why this in reality can’t really happen.

Wynncraft’s entire business model currently revolves around bombs and crates. Ranks provide some income, but due to the single-time payment nature of them, the bombs bring in significantly more money long term. Allowing players to earn the bombs ingame would significantly hurt wynncraft’s sales on bombs, potentially to a catastrophic degree. While this may seem like more incentive to allow it - wynncraft is trying to grab cash obviously - I’d actually argue that wynncraft isn’t making nearly as much money as you think.

Bombs, being one of wynncraft’s main revenue stream, don’t actually generate that much money annually. Me and a friend decided to tally up the total bombs thrown in a year and the number was significant… but also lower than might be expected. According to our calculations, wynncraft only generates around $30,000 per year from thrown bombs. That seems significant, but in reality it highlights how little they’re actually making. Let’s say that all their revenue streams combined do ~$150,000/year, 5x what I estimate the bombs make them. They have multiple paid developers and also need to pay for server maintenance and hosting. Devs aren’t cheap, and a single dedicated developer can get paid as much as $150,000 per year alone. This means that already, any devs working for Wynncraft are being underpaid inevitably, since wynncraft simply can’t afford to pay them a full competitive salary. Wynncraft isn’t doing these transparent cash-grabs out of greed, but necessity. Fun fact, the transparent cash-grab cosmetic events also MASSIVELY increase the amount of bombs thrown, which is a major reason why they have been switching to doing them often to generate needed income.

Hurting a main source of income would be disastrous for wynncraft long term, but fortunately the Silverbull shares solve these problems in a very agreeable way. Due to the dollar-to-dollar ratio, Wynncraft makes additional profit on sales which could boost its income, allowing for higher paid salaries or potentially additional developers. The passes would also be likely very popular, since both the ingame buyer and the IRL buyer benefit significantly from trading them. This could be a massive revenue stream for Wynncraft that is quite frankly desperately needed.

So again, I generally don’t like pay-to-win features in games, but the Silverbull Subscription and Silverbull shares is one that I don’t actually mind much. The subscription itself provides a very marginal advantage, and the shares can actually benefit the people not paying in addition to the people paying.

 

This is outrageous!
This post, I mean.
I love pay-to-win mechanics. Daddy Salted, please add more. I want to see pay-to-enter regions (Fruma???), items (better crafting???), levels (107-121???), abilities (new spells???), bosses (Fruman Queen???), and dungeons (Dern dungeon???).

I LOVE PAY-TO-WIN!!!!!!!

 

I haven't checked the main forum in a while but I was thinking about this last night so I decided to check and what do you know, you've already pretty thoroughly went through the issues. Glad to see people are calling Wynn out on this stuff, champion was pretty bad, especially when it was a sub and this is somehow so much stupider.

Adding on to your last point, I don't even think pay to win is the most persistent trend. It's obviously a problem (maybe I'm a hypoctire, idk), but imo the fact that they keep trying to come up with ways to charge the player without actually needing to make anything on a consistent basis is a much bigger issue and never gets addressed. Every time this issue comes up, there's literally nothing being offered which would require consistent work from anyone to maintain. Sorry to the people working on this game, but you're actually mad if you think anyone should pay monthly for shit that takes you 30 seconds to do once and it's done forever. They tried that shit with champion, they're trying it again with silverbullshit and it's stupid every time. With champion I thought it was incompetence but at this point, it's clearly just malice because after all the feedback they got last time, they still want to do this again.

It's real easy to convince people to pay money regularly without being controversial, just make reoccurring stuff people actually want to pay for instead of trying to get people to regularly pay for something which takes no effort. If a feature is a one time implement, it should be priced with a one time payment, this shit isn't complicated guys.

We all want this server to stay up, and for that it obviously needs to have a consistent way to make money. If you support this on that premise alone, at least think critically about what you're actually paying for. If Wynn wants to charge you subscription prices, look at the value you get from anything else; Is a handful of features which are already developed and will never change worth a reoccurring payment? Is something like double event rewards actually a benefit when events aren't a regular or even frequent occurrence seemingly happening at random? Other games like Apex, Fortnite, Genshin and Overwatch can get away with that kind of payment scheme because they actually update on a regular schedule and carry some promise of new content with them which you buy into. Wynn has no regular updates, there's no guarantees about anything at all and we can go months between even hearing about updates. When Wynn was a passion project none of those things were issues but if they want to start charging players like a big league game they had better step the fuck up and start acting like one.

 

Silverbulls shares, incredibly pay to wynn lol. Just spent $100 on the wynncraft shop and the shares then sold instantly on the trade market for 11+ stacks. Literally directly paying irl cash for in game currency.

 

not directly, since the trade market was a middle man, but yeah

 

Just let me buy LE directly at this point

 

The difference between this and Shares is that this directly generates emeralds and adds it to the economy (inflation). Shares, on the other hand, only gets you emeralds that other players have already generated. The latter, therefore, will only be as valuable as the players decide it to be.

 

After a long period of time where Loot Running was the superior and meta way of earning money and mythics in Wynncraft, Salted introduces a new way of generating in game currency that is new player friendly: Mommy's Credit Card.

 

I think there are far more people who would get the subscription to just support Wynncraft and get a few small cosmetic things compared to people who actively would like the proposed changes...

I get that Salted and others want to incentivise donating to Wynncraft, but I think they forget that we genuinely love their game, and would literally rather donate and get something worthless than get something valuable that makes the game less fair.


Example: If the Silverbull Sub gave players a bomb bundle every week (maybe a few shout bombs, xp bombs, dungeon bombs etc.), plus a few of the fairer suggested perks, then I'd definitely get it every so often.
(Also, better cosmetic scrapping NEEDS to be a normal feature!!! It takes months or years to get 5 double-up black market items, then to get 10 epics back is just a slap in the face).

 

I mean, yeah fuck, I would pay for it.
The real slap in the face for me is that he apparently thinks it isn't even worth trying to make a none pay-to-win subscription service. Like seriously, at least give the shit a shot first.

 

Silverbull Shares don't generate emeralds. You can sell them to other players for emeralds, but those emeralds have already been generated via other methods.

 

while i can see a subscription rank is justifiable to help keep the server running. I think there are multiple other things they can provide for the rank that are NOT pay to win. Most games that become pay to win end up diving down the rabbit hole and then its pay to play even with free to play existing in the game (ie destiny 2). Change the rank to not have actual in game advantages over FTP players and it will be much better. some stuff given to bull could be update leaks, special cosmetics only achievable thru the rank. new class type skins, the ability to meet and greet with mods/devs/salted. more over an actual VIP pass. just my opinion

 

If you want to be overly technical about one word in my satirical post and split the hairs, yes the shares do not *generate* emeralds in the game. The shares will always hold in game value though, because someone initially has to spend real life money on the share for the subscription or other perks the share can be spent on. There will always be people who see paying fake in game money as worth spending on something that holds real monetary value. So no it is not a liquid emerald ATM machine, but it might as well be for the person who purchases the share and sells it on the trade market.

It is a little disingenuous when people bring up the fact that because it is put on the trade market, not directly printing liquid emeralds, it's only worth what the people deem it to be worth buying at. That ignores that fact that the only way the subscription can be obtained is with real life money, and there are kids who do not have access to a credit card, or adults who do not wish to spend real money on the game (or more money then they have spent) and will always see spending fake currency as worth it to buy something that costs real money. There is no way to effectively convince everyone that the shares are worthless because they are objectively worth real money for the initial purchaser. Someone will always want to buy the shares so they do not have to spend real money, creating the demand for the shares and maintaining their value in game. So yes, buying the shares effectively GeNeratEs liquid emeralds for the person buying the shares with real money. They will always sell at a certain price in game.

It really might as well be a way of purchasing liquid emeralds. The only difference is that it does not cause an inflation of emeralds, due to the fact that it is being paid with by already generated emeralds. This does not change the fact that for the person who pays the real life money to sell shares on the trade market, they are basically buying a liquid emerald package off the www.Wynncraft.com/store, taking from an already existing pool of emeralds. (Which is at the moment ~half a stack of le per share). Which I do not see it dropping much further in value anytime soon. Especially since they are consumables, not a one time use. They were worth more upon first launch and will likely also rise in ingame price again once a festival takes place, due to the double loot from crates during events.

The Wynncraft Liquid Emerald Store:
*$9.99 - 64 le
*$24.99 - 320 le
*$49.99 - 640 le
*$99.99 - 1,344 le

While these may seem pretty pricey at first glance, for some it may be more time efficient to just go to work and work a few hours overtime, versus to play the actual game to make the in game liquid emeralds. If you make $20 an hour you are effectively making 2 stacks of liquid emeralds or 128 le per hour at work. At this point why even play the actual game? The time it takes to make 2 stacks of le with an average party finder team running TNA or even with a competent team is nowhere near fast enough to consistently make 2 stacks of le running TNA per hour.

I would also like to point out that the idea of a slippery slope is not always a fallacy. For example first came bombs and totems, which allows for someone to privately grind mythics, or level up faster, with or without other people by buying a rank or purchasing them in the shop. These seem like less of an issue because they can potentially benefit anyone on that server. (Even though I am sure we have all experienced at least once being asked to leave so someone can grind privately with their xp bombs and totems). Then came champion with /switch, champion slots, champion trade market shops, the bomb bell, more class slots, pet tasks, and more trade market slots. Champion was the start of pay to win features moving from being beneficial to everyone, to being more self serving, really giving paying players an advantage over others. Now comes Silverbull shares and subscription with trade market tax reductions, and sellable shares, basically buying liquid emeralds with real money from people. Silverbull also doubles your existing rank totems, giving champions 16 totems which is a bit overkill. While each one of these alone may not seem like a big deal, Wynncraft's pay 2 win features have snowballed over the years. Maybe there will be some middle ground point that these features stop at, but you could argue that they have already gone too far by now.

Beyond all of this, the real issue is the precedent set by the shares, and the subscription. I can only imagine what is next to be implemented if they are willing to slip this into the update. In the changelog this was mostly brushed over. The shares offer a way for people to trade real life currency for in game wealth, and the subscription offers perks such as trade market tax write off for both selling and buying items. While this is not game breaking yet, it is more than a few steps in the wrong direction. Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed this update (assassin fix) and it is a shame for something that could have just been a cosmetic subscription to set such a negative precedent and bog down the update. My Minecraft engine is literally a Wynncraft Launcher and this is a game I cherish, having played it for around 9 years now. I hope that something is done or that no more steps are taken in the wrong direction here.

 

I went over this in my original argument (below) but I’ll add some additional points since people seem to especially hate this part

OG argument:

Like I said above, there’s a big difference between wynncraft selling LE directly and wynncraft giving you shares to trade away to other players. The money *has* to come from other players, and just making them into bombs isn’t worthwhile so you have to sell em off in order for them to be worthwhile. Doing so, however, might take considerable time once hype around them dies down a bit. If you decide to buy a ton of shares, it will either A) take a while to sell them all, or B) force you to reduce the price of them significantly so they sell faster. This is a part of the essence of supply and demand, and needs to be taken into account for buying and selling these shares on the market.

There’s also this argument I’d like to address:

Anything with worth will always be worth something to someone, and they will be able to set a market price for it. Arguing that the passes will always be worth *something* in itself isn’t the best argument… I mean, mythics are also always worth something, but don’t require IRL money. The main advantage to trading them is that both sides of the trade must necessarily come to an agreement over what the passes are worth, or else they simply won’t sell. You can’t sell each share for 5stx each, nobody will ever buy that.

There isn’t a problem with something having inherent value due to an IRL price either. Since the shares are traded on the market, this allows players buying them off the market to decide how much they are willing to spend on 1$ of IRL money, rather than the IRL buyer deciding how much money they want to burn. If wynncraft simply said “9.99$ for 64LE”, then the clear issue is that the trade happens in a vacuum. They buyer doesn’t need to take almost anything into account before buying, so they can buy away to their heart’s content so long as they have money. If instead they need to get money from ingame players, it’s much more difficult and sets a limit on how much LE you can get even with infinite money.

Due to the trade not happening in a vacuum, it also means the price of the shares can fluctuate significantly. This is really bad for the IRL share buyer, but really good for the ingame share buyer: the shares will sell more when prices are lower, reducing the LE you get from them. It also means that if a lot of people are buying shares, their price will go down as demand goes down and supply rises. Reduced price, reduced profits.

Since the shares are publicly traded, that also means there will never be a solid minimum price of the shares; they now have a value which changes based on ingame players’ needs, which can significantly reduce their price over time. This is also assuming there will always even be a buyer for the shares. If no buyer exists, then the shares are effectively worth nothing despite what you want to sell them for. This is unlikely to happen of course, but just because something has inherent value doesn’t mean there will always be consistent demand for it.

Now to defend my argument:

(sorry to pick on you so much, it’s just the arguments you’re making are pretty universally felt and you also phrased em well and clearly)

This was honestly my main expected rebuttal of my OG argument: the slippery slope is true. The problem is, it’s nearly impossible to prove any of these things happened specifically due to a slippery slope, or if they happened completely independantly.

There’s really only 2 things that you can directly relate to a slippery slope that were mentioned here: bomb bell and double totems. It’s possible to argue that bomb bell directly came from bombs being a p2w feature, and that double totems came from totems respectively. Everything else is pretty much an independent feature that doesn’t stem from any p2w system, so the slippery slope can’t really apply to them.

You can argue that there’s one BIG slippery slope of p2w in general, and that’s difficult to disprove. I basically have to rely on my original argument that the slope must end somewhere in this case, because defining a slope that large makes it impossible to entirely refute. If you take each individual feature as it’s own slippery slope however, it’s clear that most things don’t have follow-up p2w features that make things worse, constituting a slippery slope. In that case, like I said before, most of the time slippery slopes are a worrying thought, but not something to worry about.

Personally, I feel a lot of the people who argue against the p2w nature of the shares are forgetting to see the other side of the issue: the perspective of the normal players buying shares off the TM. It’s easy to freak out when you see that you can pay IRL money for ingame items and wealth, but it’s also easy to forget that the opposite is true: you can pay LE and items for rewards that normally cost IRL money. I always try to see every side of issues, and I understand why people are angry at the shares. In fact, a not insignificant part of *me* is mad at them for making IRL trading a legal part of the game! However, seeing the overwhelmingly negative vocal opinions I felt the need to defend it a bit and tamper down some of the anger.

Sorry @Icy for picking on you so much during this, again it’s mostly because I felt you had a lot of good arguments and phrased things very well!

 

Delving a bit deeper into the stockpiling of pay to win features and how they have snowballed into each other I really think that champion and silver bull together are the worst offenders. A great example being the fact that if you're champion you get more trade market slots so you can sell more items at once and you can set up a trade market shop so everyone sees your items/or place them in crucial areas like at a raid selling Tol runes at in increased price. You can also, with silver bull, sell items with a tax reduction, making all the items you sell cheaper, while remaining at the same amount you received as before, making your items more desirable, while earning more. You can also buy items with reduced tax saving money on the trade market. While I cannot prove that this is a direct result of a slippery slope, and I will not hold you responsible to disproving a general slippery slope in regards to all pay to win features, it gets harder to refute that over time as more features are added that provide benefits to the player outside of cosmetics, there will be a stockpiling effect of these features that provide a unique advantage for paying players. Another example of this coming into play, admittedly almost entirely due to the Champion rank benefits and other added purchases outside of silver bull, would have to be the access to champion slots on servers, bomb bells, totems/silver bull totems x2, bombs, and the /switch feature. If a person with the Champion rank is online they will be alerted anytime there is a bomb on another server and told what kind, they then have either 5-10 (I forget how many) slots on that server reserved for them and their fellow champions. They can either /switch or go to lobby and join the reserved slots for almost for sure access to that server with bombs going off. Then they have 8 totems which is already a ridiculous amount to grind xp or mythics if the server is double loot. Then to make matters worse someone said "You know what, Champions who drop more money on Silverbull should get 16 totems" doubling their already absurd amount of benefits. Now we have someone who gets told anytime someone else is pay to winning, has immediate and almost for sure access to their pay to win benefits, cutting off other players unfairly, and they can get even more out of another player paying as well with 16 totems, which is either 160 or 320 minutes of double mobs (I forget which again), but it is either way pretty gross. Something that gets left out a lot when people bring up the facts that bombs and totems are for everyone removing the pay to win aspect or outweighing the negative aspects of it, are the people who drop bombs and place totems intending to use them privately. I personally have experienced joining an xp world or someone mythic grinding either solo or with their guild with double loot or double xp and mob totems and them not being willing to share the benefits, which honestly makes sense as they are trying to get the most out of their money's worth. So looking past the slippery slope effect because it is difficult to prove, the real problem that is undeniable would have to be the snowballing effect of perks that give real unfair advantages to paying players. (I will probably touch on your other arguments again later, this is just the part that is more of a no brain topic for me to talk off the cuff about and I wanted to respond quickly). - I definitely didn't buy Champion for the yellow name tag and cosmetics, or in game buy a silver bull share to take my armor off. I do not think it would be that difficult for Wynncraft to just check the suggestions forums page and steal the likely hundreds of cosmetic and non pay to win rank feature ideas that are in there for a subscription based rank, or to scroll through the discord, or post a thread asking for ideas on cosmetic features to add. I really cannot think of a way to justify the addition of these features beyond getting a little too greedy with their consumers.

 

While this is a fair point, and a reason why it may not always be the best decision or at least right away to buy and sell shares in bulk for easy money, because the difference between buying in bulk ($100) and spending $10 on shares is like one hundredth of a quarter per share, there is no reason when the price is around half a stack of liquid emeralds or more someone could not just buy $10 worth at a time, sell them at an emerald lower than the lowest trade market price, let the two shares sell, then buy/sell them again, and they will almost certainly sell due to them being consumable/subscription based ranks or being used to buy bombs/crates in game. The seller will know around how much they can get for those shares and be nearly certain that they will sell. The cost/value of shares will likely rise in the players' eyes as well beyond 32 liquid emeralds during an event where chest rewards with silverbull are doubled. This means that while it is not literally just spend $100 USD - get 1,344 LE guaranteed, if shares are bought in smaller numbers after checking the trade market prices, the seller can pretty reliably/predictably sell shares for the amount they expect to get and quickly too. This is not exactly the high risk, high reward scenario that people are making it out to be, as long as the person buying the shares uses a similar thought process to this one. - Not to name names, but someone in my guild has already made 25 stx of le (and counting) from buying and selling these shares. (So this is not some imaginary or hypothetical problem, it is really happening). It may not always be worth it or as worth it for the people paying real life money to do so, but assuming they do so wisely they can make a pretty sizeable fortune without spending any time in the actual game itself. In many scenarios it is actually more time efficient to just work a few more hours irl than to grind the le in the actual game itself assuming you don't have a TNA party that clears the raid 43 times in an hour, you make $20 an hour, if TNA wins average around 3 le, and you sell the shares at around 32 le. (Last I checked today they were around 30-31 at the lowest, but they will likely shoot up in price during a festival and never fall much further than 25-30 le because someone paid real money for them and there are pay to win features and cosmetic features people want from them that expire once the sub is out or after they make a one time purchase of bombs or crates). (If they ever did dip much below the current prices due to too many people trying to get rich quick, it would just be best to wait until the current ones on the trademarket are bought out and that is why it is important if you are trying to profit from them to buy them 2 at a time or so, to ensure you don't end up stuck with a ton of them during an inflation of shares which might happen until they are bought up and the market price bounces back when the demand eclipses the supply once again). - This would still be a stack of le ~ of in game money earned for $9.99 at a time and if you did this over a longer period of time it would definitely add up at very little risk.