Meso inflation & trading

[Xalate]

Hello everyone!

As we all know, the economy tends to inflate in Maplestory. Most games create moneydumpers, to fight inflation. Some can be extremely expensive, relatively useless items (WoW usually does this, e.g Haris Pilton Gigantique bag).

Maplestory mostly does this via trading tax between players. As far as I remember, this works in brackets.

50k+ = 0.25%
100k+ = 0.5%
1m+ = 1%
5m+ = 1,5%
10m+ = 2%

This results in people trading 49.999, 99.999, 999.999, ...etc.
I propose to increase these tax numbers, and if possible just make it scale automatically so that you get taxed by the amount you trade, instead of working in brackets.
E.g 49.999 mesos isn't taxed 0%, but 0.24999% or something.

I feel this would help new players catch up economically. (Not that it's a problem on release, but it will matter later on).

I might be wrong on this, so feel free to correct me!

 

[VVhite]

Hey

Interesting thread.

I dont think this approach is necessary and I dont see how it would benefit newer players.

I think increased item prices would only make people even more reliant on Coolies/FoG to generate mesos, which is already an issue. It would also delay the transition to deep ludi for a lot of classes since they are not able to generate enough mesos there to buy items. This will lead to high level hermits/dits/dks/il mages clogging up Coolies/FoG which would hurt lower level players.

Also as people start generating more money in deep ludi all their previous gear is picked up by newer players which they can easily afford by doing lpq for sought after scrolls. At this stage you could argue that some classes have too much money, but since this server has an reworked experience curve Zakum will be possible much sooner which will act as an big meso dump.

I think inflation can become a big problem if leafre is not released though, when theres a ton of people around 100-150.

At the end of the day we can only hope that the server becomes popular enough that this will be an issue.

Btw i posted a thread regarding tp rocks if your interested in checking it out.

 

[Xalate]

What do you mean they don't have enough mesos to buy items? From where? You don't buy high lv equips from NPCs, but from other players. And if you tax all the players, then they're all collectively poorer. This makes it easier for newer players to buy scrolls & etc from other players. (Why? Because the server inflates slower, and meso drop doesn't inflate over time from drops). I remember if i stopped playing for a few months or years, and came back, my money wasn't worth much. It was better to buy items for all my mesos, quit, and then sell those items when i returned again for a higher price, since the economy was inflated.

Joining inflated games / servers makes it harder for newer players to catch up, to be able to afford scrolls, equipment, etc. We're all gonna need to buy armor/weps from other players (unless you're gonna grind to find all of your gear). So if an uncraftable weapon becomes overpriced, it's bad for the newer players. Just my opinion though.

 

[Martinho]

I think you're right about inflation. However, taxing won't help much because mesos are still generated much faster than they are leaving the game. A way has to be found to make sure more mesos leave the game at higher levels or find their way to low level players.
Solution: Make Slimes drop 60% glove atk scrolls!!!

Spoiler

Just kidding, of course...

 

[Halozy]

I've always thought the best way to deal with inflation would be to create a meso gachapon that rewards rare, exclusive chase collector items that aren't necessarily powerful or useful, just cool to wear or show off.

 

[Xalate]

I agree with you Halozy, it would be a good solution. However, it won't be very oldschool maple. Personally, i'm sorta fine with that. But i believe many people will have issues with this. My solution, isn't really a solution, but i believe it would slow down inflation by quite a lot, and it wont impact the illusion of oldschool maplestory too much. Another way, might be to decrease prices of vendoring stuff, but that could require too many changes in the code, depending on how it's written. I believe reducing the mesorate would impact the early levels too hard, since it's hard enough to afford your first weapon / sets. HOWEVER, seeing as dexless wont be a thing, people might spend some mesos on buying equipment, and that could slow down inflation even further (but not by too much i guess?).

Any solution is welcome, so feel free to post more ideas and thoughts around this!

 

[Knivingdude]

You could always make an event that involves mesos in some way. What's the harm of gambling with in-game currency?