Poor and Rich, no middle?!

[Tecmos Deception]

You should be arguing that there is no poor, not that there is no middle class. You yourself have admitted that you already bought gear that would have been acceptable on live at 50+ on your first character who is merely 23.

[rollin5k]

It's not that there's no middle ground anymore, it's just that no one cares about the low level stuff anymore. It's just that ballin stuff is so cheap then to upgrade is really expensive.
There is no low class poor in this server. Only upper middle class and then top tier best possible class.

[Tecmos Deception]

You paladins should just be giving away your everything to follow your lord and savior quellious/prexus/rodcet/mithaniel/brell/tunare around anyways! Curing the blind and diseased, laying on hands, expelling evil spirits, etc. Don't need any fancy gear for that.

[myxomatosii]

I'll try to express this visually.

On EQ Live in 99 I think it used to be like this.

1 Poor
5 Poor
10 Poor
15 Poor
20 Poor
25 Poor
30 Poor
35 Decent
40 Decent
45 Decent
50 Decent
55 Decent
60 Decent
60 Decent
60 Good
60 Good
60 Good
60 Good
60 Good
60 Leet

On P99 its more like this. The jumps can vary but with handouts and cheap over-farmed gear I think this is a good estimate.

1 Poor
5 Poor
10 Decent
15 Decent
20 Decent
25 Decent
30 Good
35 Good
40 Good
45 Good
50 Good
55 Leet
60 Leet
60 Leet
60 Godleet
60 Godleet
60 Insanely Godleet Plat-rain
60 Insanely Godleet Plat-rain
60 Insanely Godleet Plat-rain
60 Insanely Godleet Plat-rain

So instead of being poor, you're actually middle class, and middle class before you would've been on EQ Live. Take for example my 54 monk on live, he never had a Wu's Trance Stick leveling up even in CoM. Now its rare to see a level 6 monk without a Wu's Trance Stick in FoB because you can pick them up for near nothing in EC. Also you are comparing yourself to people with nearly one of each class at 60. Its quite difficult to obtain various 60s without gaining quite a bit of money along the way in drops and such. So while your bar for yourself is higher, the bar you are trying to attain has also increased leading to the illusion of being poor.

My two coppers.

[Tecmos Deception]

Originally Posted by myxomatosii [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Take for example my 54 monk on live, he never had a Wu's Trance Stick leveling up even in CoM. Now its rare to see a level 6 monk without a Wu's Trance Stick in FoB because you can pick them up for near nothing in EC.

Lol. I remember "twinking" a level 20 ranger with a silver swiftblade on live and feeling like I was so god damn awesome killing beetles in the karanas.

[sulpher01]

Stembolt gets it!

[Gaffin 3.0]

platlord rustling jimmies

[Sarajo]

As the ease of acquiring a certain item goes up, the price that consumers are willing to pay for it goes down. The higher the price of an item, the more suppliers are willing to sell it. Eventually the two, the supply curve and the demand curve, meet together in a place called the "supply/demand equilibrium", which is that exact point between the price and the quantity of the item.

(Someone took economics last semester for the first time.)

Next question: What is money? Usually it's a representation of one portion of an entire country's wealth. The more of the money that's printed, the less it's worth, because whether there are 100 dollars in the entire country or 3 trillion, each dollar is just a reciprocal portion of the country's entire wealth. If you pictured stuffing all of these new dollars into a giant garbage bag that just keeps stretching, you see how the term "inflation" comes around. The more money there is in circulation, the bigger the garbage bag, the more it inflates, and the less each piece of money is worth. So how does that translate to platz?

Every time you kill A_Decaying_Skeleton_01 and get your 1 copper/1 bone chip drop, you just increased inflation and decreased the value of all of the money out there, including your 1 copper and the 5 gold you were hoping to get for that bone chip someday in EC /auc. Also, this is why petitioning for free plat doesn't work; "HEy rogean gimme 400k lol" is like saying "Please devalue all of the platinum ingame, and since you're giving me 400k give everyone 400k which would make plat even less valuable, meaning that people would want even more of it, so they're going to raise the prices on things even more"

Game developers have to put "money sinks" into the game, just like they have to put in time sinks to keep top-level players from feeling like there's nothing to do, getting bored, and moving on to the next "next-gen" MMO around the corner. Time sinks are things like fear drops, repeatable quests, Kael armor quests, and sometimes too true: corpse runs. Money sinks are food and drink, JBoots (The 3500g part), epic quests that require a few hundred plat, skills trainin, and spell scrolls.

The conflict starts when you have a maximum-level character. They don't need money anymore, yet they keep acquiring it. If you played your level 60 and farmed blackburrow all day, all you would do is loot and never die and make barbs and humans cry. You are the 1%. All of that money you're getting from selling rusty weapons, and only taking breaks to destroy those useless stacks of gnoll fangs, is just piling up and creating more inflation and raising prices(directly and indirectly) of the high-demand items.

Whose interest is it in to have such a gap? No one really, except for real money traders. This is the only exchange rate possible in our closed economic system; it's not like humans use one currency, Iksar another, and Elves another. We all use platinum. But then there are some rich assholes who are too entitled, even when playing a game like classic-era EQ, to go through the grind like all of the other peasants out there. Platinum now becomes the commodity sold by the gold farmer, and by increasing inflation in-game they create more of a demand for platinum which means they can sell it for more dollars. The higher the price, the more that suppliers are willing to supply it, right?

TL; DR: Inflation, which favors real-money trade. Supply/demand economics, which creates a strained middle-class. Do your duty to fight it all by not buying overpriced crap, and by undercutting all of those half-AFK half-bots in the tunnel.

[drktmplr12]

Originally Posted by Sarajo [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Ait's not like humans use one currency, Iksar another, and Elves another.

We should do this.

[KwwBall]

Ya so pretty much there isn't really anyone who is poor on p99. Thanks myxomatosii and Sarajo, as well as everyone else who has participated.

It seems to me that the amount of money that comes into the economy is vastly larger than the money that leaves via money sinks. Original EQ IMO didn't have a whole bunch of money sinks, compared to other MMO's now.

Do you think this is a problem for p99? Maybe the people in charge should invent new money sinks?