Raising TP Cap to 20,000 gold

This has probably been asked before, but has ANET commented on whether or not they would consider raising the cap to like 20,000 gold?

There are some items that are past 10k gold already and have been for quite some time. I would like to buy a chak egg sac one day but I would have to do so outside of the Trade Post that Anet set up for the game, which means I would be opening myself up to being scammed.

When the game came out ANet stated that they created the trade post so that we wouldn't have to resort to 1-on-1 trades or use middle men and things like that, but the cap is forcing players to do just that. I'm sure when the game came out they never imagined an item would cost more than 10,000 gold and yet here we are.

The transactions that take place off the TP also avoid the fees associated with listing/exchanging an item.

Not only that, but if someone is lucky enough to find one of these items and they don't want it, they too are forced to sell it outside of the TP in order to get the full value.

The other option would be to increase the drop rates of these items so they were worth less than 10K gold - or make it so they can be obtained by a lot of grinding (e.g. 250 chak eggs + 10,000 ley line crystals + 1000 gold).

At current state of chack sack price Anet indirectly gives green light to RMT.

Players are not forced to use middlemen, they choose to do so.

But, I think that raising the cap, if simple to do, would be reasonable.

They are only worth more becouse people want to pay more, if you make a 10k listing you will get it eventualy I would guess since there is people who dont want to take the extra hassle to find a buyer and a middleman.

@Linken.6345 said:They are only worth more becouse people want to pay more, if you make a 10k listing you will get it eventualy I would guess since there is people who dont want to take the extra hassle to find a buyer and a middleman.

There are dozens of orders on the TP already that are not being filled. The chances of getting one at the current cap are basically nill. Chak egg sac is currently worth 18k-20k gold. Trust me, if someone wants to sell they WILL go through a middleman because they can get more than double the money when you factor in the TP fees.

Literally not a large enough problem to consider.

@Will.9785 said:

@Linken.6345 said:They are only worth more becouse people want to pay more, if you make a 10k listing you will get it eventualy I would guess since there is people who dont want to take the extra hassle to find a buyer and a middleman.

If I got one and wanted to sell it to someone other than a real life friend, I would use the TP. I don't know others well enough to not risk being scammed. Because while the scammer will be punished, I won't get either the Chak egg sac back nor the gold I was promised.

@Rauderi.8706 said:Literally not a large enough problem to consider.

I'm not the only person asking for this. And it would likely (or should be) a literally 1 digit change in the game's source code to fix.

@Seera.5916 said:If I got one and wanted to sell it to someone other than a real life friend, I would use the TP. I don't know others well enough to not risk being scammed. Because while the scammer will be punished, I won't get either the Chak egg sac back nor the gold I was promised.

And even if you did get a large enough gold transfer from a player, it's either in materials of a given value (which still gets filtered through the TP) or 500g/week for several months. And then it'll look like a RMT and possibly get you banned.

The cap should remain at 10k, that is more than enough gold for any one item, the problem here is that Chak egg sack should not be so rare that it's vavlue is over 10k, simple solution is make it less rare.

@Will.9785 said:

@Rauderi.8706 said:Literally not a large enough problem to consider.

It's only 1 items, and it's based on supply and demandat 20k listing price, TP will take a 1000g cut upfrontwould like to see anet make the change for you, then significantly buff the drop rate a week later to drive down the price :lol:

I wonder how many players have 20k gold who didnt spend money to buy it from the TP... Ludicrous. Also its the first time I heard of that item, hard to believe players would spend that much gold for it when it does absolutely nothing but visual effects.

@eldrjth.7384 said:hard to believe players would spend that much gold for it when it does absolutely nothing but visual effects.

Some people would wear a bin bag if it was valued at 10k gold, they only care about the prestige value (I am not one of those people)

Raising the cap is going to have all sorts of other consequences. The coding might (or might not) be easy; that's largely not going to be the issue. Raising the cap changes people's perception of the markets and will push the asking prices higher. Given how rare these items are and how little there is for the richest players to spend on, it's entirely possible that they'd hit a new cap in a few months. That is likely a worse situation than we have now.

It's also tricky to tweak the drop rates or provide alternative sources. The first can lead to the item being so common it's not longer "interesting" for people to chase, which affects some people's enjoyment of the game. The second can lead to people feeling it's too grindy and/or the item is no longer special.

For example, when the fractal tonic drop rate was sort of bugged and there was no way to purchase it, I thought it was really interesting and always had a little bit of hope it would drop for me. By the time I saw one drop, people were using it all over the place and it lost all its charm for me. When it did drop for me, I converted it to relics after a few weeks, because those had more uses that were more valuable to me than a tonic. Obviously, my personal experience shouldn't be used to set game policy. I use it only to illustrate that there are consequences to tweaking things.

And finally, implicit in the discussion is the idea that there's something bad about having items that can't be easily purchased. I think it's awkward, but I think it also adds spice & novelty to the items. I don't think there should be a lot of such items, but we literally have only 2: the chak egg sac and the confetti infusion (and all their stat variants, which are made from one of those originals). I think the game can handle that without raising the cap.

@eldrjth.7384 said:I wonder how many players have 20k gold who didnt spend money to buy it from the TP... Ludicrous. Also its the first time I heard of that item, hard to believe players would spend that much gold for it when it does absolutely nothing but visual effects.

Many people buy it for real money :)

@eldrjth.7384 said:I wonder how many players have 20k gold who didnt spend money to buy it from the TP... Ludicrous. Also its the first time I heard of that item, hard to believe players would spend that much gold for it when it does absolutely nothing but visual effects.

There are just under 400 buy offers for 10k on the TP, across all variations of Chak Egg sac/infusion and confetti infusion.

@Ashen.2907 said:Players are not forced to use middlemen, they choose to do so.

But, I think that raising the cap, if simple to do, would be reasonable.

In that case why have a cap at all?

@Khisanth.2948 said:

@Ashen.2907 said:Players are not forced to use middlemen, they choose to do so.

But, I think that raising the cap, if simple to do, would be reasonable.

Gold sellers for one. Ever wonder why some really old items having a going rate in the 1-2k range, despite being white tier and has no apparent practical use? No item should be that substantially more expensive then a Legendary weapon..... and with the Eternity being worth around 4.5-5k because its made from 2 legendary weapons, that should act as a compass as to what item can justify a higher price. The 10k cap was ridiculously high to begin with; and I suspect Anet never once thought any legit transaction would hit that limit when they were planning it out.

But like it was mentioned above.... the problem is the Chak infusions are excessively rare, and their anomalous market value is running into problems with the entire system. Several items have had a similar problem in the past, but very few would even be in the running for what Chak infusions are doing.

This raises a second question of how extremely rare items should be handled. On one hand, there is the option to make them account bound, add a conversion recipe, and increase the drop rate. This makes the item only personally obtainable under normal circumstances, and as far as real prestige goes, should have the highest value in that area. On the other, you can make them tradeable so it can act as a gold sink..... but the current situation is way outside of reasonable parameters for the TP system to handle, and this actually IS a problem; just not directly. The TP is designed to do certain things.... and the value of infusions far exceeds this to the point where it can't properly function on the market system at all. Since players have to go outside to retain value, its pretty clear unless Anet intends to let gold inflate to the point where multiple items are worth more then 10k, they have to drag the value of these infusions down enough to be able to act as the gold sink they expect of it.

They added Pre-Cursor crafting for a reason..... they needed people to invest into these big projects, and Pre-cursor prices were visually too high and scaring players off. They used to have a huge amount of prestige value; but I'm suspecting Anet excepted people to make at least 1 precursor in their life time. With the need for sink by the time HOT came out, legendaries became part of a massive initiative to generate long term consumption of otherwise useless materials.

Contrary to popular belief, bring the price down below the 10k cap doesn't make it less valuable on the prestige side. 10k gold is way more then most people will have at any given time, and more then many of the less aggressive players will obtain in a life time. And its pretty obvious from a design stand point that these items were made as high end gold sinks in mind, because if it were targeted as truly personal prestige item, it would had been part of a convoluted collection and/or account bound. Something that can be made excessively and arbitrarily expensive by gating items of lesser value to create a bottle neck. (See Ascended Recycling).

@"Vavume.8065" said:The cap should remain at 10k, that is more than enough gold for any one item, the problem here is that Chak egg sack should not be so rare that it's vavlue is over 10k, simple solution is make it less rare.Yeah, that. The solution isn't what the OP wants, it's "increase the drop rate of the chak egg sac until the price drops back to the level of 'still really expensive but not that expensive'".

@Illconceived Was Na.9781 said:Raising the cap is going to have all sorts of other consequences. The coding might (or might not) be easy; that's largely not going to be the issue. Raising the cap changes people's perception of the markets and will push the asking prices higher. Given how rare these items are and how little there is for the richest players to spend on, it's entirely possible that they'd hit a new cap in a few months. That is likely a worse situation than we have now.

You're right about that. A new cap wouldn't take long to be reached.

@Hyper Cutter.9376 said:

@"Vavume.8065" said:The cap should remain at 10k, that is more than enough gold for any one item, the problem here is that Chak egg sack should not be so rare that it's vavlue is over 10k, simple solution is make it less rare.Yeah, that. The solution isn't what the OP wants, it's "increase the drop rate of the chak egg sac until the price drops back to the level of 'still really expensive but not

that

expensive'".

Why is 10k enough and not 5k? Or even less? In a way the cap is always an arbitrary number and when the game launched it was probably set at a level the devs were sure would remain practically irrelevant for the foreseeable future since not enough people would command that kind of wealth. As the game gets older that "soft cap" eventually becomes a "hard cap".So yes, there are two options, (a) generally increase drop rates of (all) rare items - since at a given scarcity people will be able to pay higher prices unless you give them more and more stuff to spend their gold on or (b) adjust the TP to be able to continue to work as a mechanism to sell rare items as the game gets older.Admittedly, the higher the absolute price, the more apparent the 15% TP "tax" becomes, and just as in real life, people have an incentive to evade that tax by using alternate means to settle the transaction.

I've never come close to 5K gold, let alone 20K. I didn't even know there was a cap on gold ... only mats in inventory and those can be increased through the TP up to 2000.

@Game of Bones.8975 said:I've never come close to 5K gold, let alone 20K. I didn't even know there was a cap on gold ... only mats in inventory and those can be increased through the TP up to 2000.

The cap on gow much gold you can have is a lot higher. This discussion is about the max price possible to set on the TP.

@eldrjth.7384 said:I wonder how many players have 20k gold who didnt spend money to buy it from the TP... Ludicrous. Also its the first time I heard of that item, hard to believe players would spend that much gold for it when it does absolutely nothing but visual effects.

Many people have that much gold or more who did not buy it. There are various ways to make a lot of gold over time in this game.

@"Will.9785" said:Chak egg sac is currently worth 18k-20k gold.There's something inherently wrong with that, I mean from a game design point of view. Making an item so "impossible" to obtain though normal gameplay means that it puts everything else (including all the legendaries) to shame is just stupid.