134 replies to this topic

[ckatg]

Lab maps are inflating like crazy right now. Full sets are up like 300k from a couple months ago, and that one really expensive piece is up 50k despite the fact there are a million of them on the TP

Why!? It's so frustrating.

 

If members a quitting then shouldn't less people be buying them and thus the price goes down?!

[Tailwind]

Why!? It's so frustrating.

 

If members a quitting then shouldn't less people be buying them and thus the price goes down?!

 

It's a balancing act. Less people around mean less REs and other methods of generating the maps are being triggered.

 

In addition to that, you'll also have the current sellers trying to drive up the price even more because there's no competition to lower it back down.

[danibanani]

With every other item, the price has gone down because of exactly that, people leaving and less demand for items. Kind of enjoyed that, being a stamp collector and those things aren't cheap! BUT if someone wants the lab map bad enough, they'll pay whatever someone is asking because you either buy it, or wait to get it in an RE. It's not something you can restock like almost every other item out there.

[SnowWhite]

It's a balancing act. Less people around mean less REs and other methods of generating the maps are being triggered.

 

In addition to that, you'll also have the current sellers trying to drive up the price even more because there's no competition to lower it back down.

 

It's absolutely the current sellers driving up the price. I keep hoping and praying key quest will come back and normalize the prices. I'm sure I'll be waiting forever haha

[ckatg]

I have lab on my main account but I seriously LOVE the thrill of zapping pets every day. I'd love to get my my accounts zapping too but the price is just ridiculous.

 

It's seriously like everything I WANT to buy is still expensive and everything I used to AB and sell is cheap now. Much frustrate wow.

 

I feel like Key Quest is probably not coming back, but I'm a negative nancy. I'm also really bummed that the Random Contest is gone too..

[crazybus]

Ooh, somewhere on the internet there's a very long article about this.

 

In short, the more a currency is generated, the more stuff inflates. Think post-WWI germany, when money was constantly being produced and people would bring a wheelbarrow of coins to buy a loaf of bread.

 

The more people play games the worse this gets (the only notable cure is buying from npc shops which doesn't do enough, unfortunately). 

[psieks]

This also happened in the RuneScape economy, though the deflation of prices was caused by bots rather than lack of an audience to sell to. I noticed it largely in fishing. Bots do the clicks and get massive inventory, which they convert to banknotes with an NPC named Stiles. The same happened in Timber and other resources as the bots flooded the market, which is how it relates to Neopets. Unfortunately, RS couldn't fix that by simply reducing availability. Resources are harvested through skill. In Neopets, TNT has the ability to reduce availability of items until the prices finally reach something that is a) reasonable and b) stable.

Thing is, JS doesn't seem to care. Dubloons are the most deflated, and I doubt they'll make a comeback. TNT is perfectly capable of reducing the odds of obtaining them, but they won't. Players can take matters into their own hands as well, though this is more difficult as it would require the recruitment of a HUGE number of players to the site. With more players, demand and competition to purchase certain items on auctions or TP will increase and drive prices up.

At this point, the economy really is screwed unless there are more site events outside of the NC Mall or Altador Cup. We need another war plot, preferably on the same scale as the Lost Desert, Meridell, or Tyrannia, to mobilize the economy and facilitate spending and revive the community while attracting new players to the game. Personally? I'd like the Kreludan Mining Corp to get an access code. Doctor Sloth will return with his legions of minions and, ironically enough, save Neopia!

[Eggie]

I now have the sudden urge to neglect everything I have to do today and go play old school RS instead. Dammit.

 

My mom briefly got back into Neo the other day and was astounded at the fact that dubloons are now worthless. She was once a more active and dedicated member on the site than I was and the deflation in part is what drove her away. It seems to be a vicious cycle - excessive deflation/inflation is one of many things that is driving people away and yet the less people, the more items seem to deflate/inflate. I think the site has too many types of items for the amount of players it has. If you get an item that's so obscure and HTS that there's virtually no demand, good luck selling it for anything higher than 99k without waiting a year.

 

With JS's track record on the site so far (Topsi, some of the awful new items, etc), they don't seem to really excel at the creative end of things. Deep down I hope the new staff will eventually spark an incredibly creative idea like the original team usually did when it comes to plots and storylines, but realistically I don't see that happening. It would be nice to move the storyline along and possibly accumulate a new player base.

[psieks]

There are a lot of items that could be retired entirely. Food and consumables are fine, but there are certain reusable items that can go. Tons of Battledome items (mostly the Faerie weapons) can go.

[crazybus]

I love comparisons to other virtual communities! This happened on Gaia Online too, where the site sold "gold generators" and everything hyperinflated. 5mil is the new 5k. 

[Legitboi]

why so worry about whether it is bad or good...... we still got program to access to earn easy NPS.

[Cyo]

Probably because you can generate money out of thin air.

[aritsumiki]

As new dailies are added, prices fluctuate wildly.

[psieks]

As new dailies are added, prices fluctuate wildly.

 

Exactly. The deflation of dubloons isn't as bad as people say it is. I anticipate that within the next year, we'll get another consumable item complete with early hyperinflation and sustained high price, at least for awhile. It'll likely be a gambling item comparable to Neocola Tokens and Nerkmids. The economy actually isn't "bad." What's happened is that as demand shifted to items such as avatar items (SuAP, BGC, Chokato (TCG), etc) for items that have either become very rare over time for any reason. Items that used to be coveted have now often been obtained by the older player base that makes up the majority of the site, hence why prices on dubloons and morphing potions have tanked so severely. People are looking into completing collections or competing to see who has read the most books, eaten the most gourmet food, and has the most complete stamp album.

[crazybus]

As new dailies are added, prices fluctuate wildly.

 

This is so true! The economy is sooo heavily linked to demand. Like that one site event where junk from dailies suddenly inflated to like 35k+

[psieks]

Yeah dailies do that. The hype causes new items to inflate (as mentioned before) even if they're not really rare. Existing items tend to deflate as there are other methods of getting them already. This is where the dubloon thing came from (they're a huge example that have been brought up repeatedly in this thread.)  One thing people don't realize is that Key Quest was horrible for the game's economy. It was one of the key (geddit?) contributors to the deflation of the price of the lab map. It was horrible for those prices. It also caused the paint brushes obtainable through KQ to go down in price. Speckled PB still hasn't recovered to pre-KQ prices even though KQ has been broken for over a year. Then again, it wasn't a hugely popular color to begin with.

 

Which daily where you talking about specifically with the junk items? I think Forgotten Shore had quite a few hyperinflated items that didn't deserve it in its early days.

[Ka1]

Which daily where you talking about specifically with the junk items? I think Forgotten Shore had quite a few hyperinflated items that didn't deserve it in its early days.

 

I would think it is the RE machine and the charity corner that got junk up in price

the items of the RE machine still remain high for a junk

[DarthGreed]

So from reading this all..I guess I should be AB'ing in food shop instead of all shops? Especially since I'm not an adv member

[psieks]

Anything useful for avatars or trophies. That would be food and book (gourmet and intelligent pets), and then items useful in customization of either pets and Neohome (for spotlight trophies.) Another strategy I recently started using is selling items that have a lower selling price. The lower price means that there are more people who can afford the item.

Using that method, I was able to go from AB high tier items for 8M+ projected profit and struggling to sell to restocking 300K or more and selling it all from my shops within a few days. Note that these figures are per account. I have three shells that do the majority of my high-end ABing and my main sets profit to 15K to 500K depending on what I feel like.

[Shane]

It's becoming extremely hard to sell super high end items, even stamps and such, because no one has that much capital to spend.

That's for sure. I've basically stopped trying to sell my R99 Stamps. It's discouraging me from playing NP anymore also. What's the use of getting items that you just can't sell?

[psieks]

I can't remember if it was in this thread or another, but someone mentioned giving items in the 100K+ profit range to people who you wish to gain favor with. This could be resellers, other restockers, etc. Networking is as important as ever. I previously had a connection in goodie bags who would pay median TP price for any gambling items (goodie bags and stockings mostly) that I restocked based on the fact that I nearly always had them and I was FAST when it came to delivery. He was frozen about a week ago, so that led to a huge decrease in profit. I made about 500K on him alone on my good days. Most days it was about 100K to 300K.

[Shane]

I can't remember if it was in this thread or another, but someone mentioned giving items in the 100K+ profit range to people who you wish to gain favor with. This could be resellers, other restockers, etc. Networking is as important as ever. I previously had a connection in goodie bags who would pay median TP price for any gambling items (goodie bags and stockings mostly) that I restocked based on the fact that I nearly always had them and I was FAST when it came to delivery. He was frozen about a week ago, so that led to a huge decrease in profit. I made about 500K on him alone on my good days. Most days it was about 100K to 300K.

I have people that I did that with. It's still really hard to sell things to people like that now because the market is so saturated.

[sirvman]

It doesn't help that a lot of elite players don't play anymore. They were the ones with the pure to spend and helped the neopets economy more than people realize. Everyone is holding onto pure right now and saying that's the best "investment."

[SnowfaLL]

Couldn't the Smugglers Cove or other Krawk Island shops be used to drain dubloons out of the economy? 
That is, if JS cared enough to do it. Theoretically they could put all the inflated items on sale for dubloons, solving both problems at once.

 

But I'm probably oversimplifying the problem. To be honest, I'm enjoying the low dubloon prices... I've never had so many before hehe

[Hyori]

As one of the person previously pointed out, neopian economy is highly unrealistic with constantly more nps and items generating and not enough users to use them or a mechanisms to take the excess money and items out of circulations ("sink")

It really sucks that not only is this affecting the deflation of everything, it becomes increasingly hard for pet trading as all values of pets (looking at you, draiks and krawks) are decreasing accordingly to their monetary value deflation