American evening Race Event times updated

Awesome news! Looking forward to the races. Thanks for making an adjustment so quickly.

Chris, can you address the fact that the general consensus of the player population is that the rewards are rather... mediocre?

I thought you guys would care a bit more about players outside the us... Guess I was wrong, oh well looks like AUS/NZ players can get into about 18 races out of 107 in season 1.... Maybe we don't work?

It is flat out not true that orb prizes cause inflation of any sort.

Take into account how many manhours a given race is likely to draw based on past statistics, and how many orbs are likely to make it out of that race alive (in a race most orbs are generally used or lost on deaths aren't they?)... compare this with those same manhours and how many orbs those manhours usually tend to earn playing normally in normal leagues?

I think you'll find that players pay a cost in terms of their wealth to enter these races and redistributing that cost as prizes would have 0 impact on inflation.


Maybe CB prize payout rates were too high, but sure the inflation-free orb prize # is non-zero, and non-negative. I thought you gathered all these sorts of statistics? or do you not have access to all these sorts of stats?


Now if you think the collectors items are just a better idea, fine, that's a fine reason to do away with orb prizes, but protecting against inflation is just not a valid reason, as it's false. (if you need to make the prizes for off-peak races lower in terms of orbs go ahead? or just average the prizes against peek and off-peak timed races?)

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Chris wrote:

We can't give giant rewards for races because then we get the converse problem where the economy inflates away from you unless you somehow find time to race for 8 hours each day at obscure times.

Uh, Chris, what the hell are you smoking? The economy inflates away from you everytime you don't play because there is no sink for good items or gems in your game. This idea that you're going to preserve the economic "ecosystem" is completely retarded because it isn't built with checks and balances in the first place. I'm sure deep down you do realize that.

All you're doing is making races less appealing. Whether the economy bloats in 8, 10 or 12 weeks is pretty irrelevant. Not to mention you're perfectly capable of tuning orb rewards to not be overwhelmingly large. Whatever. Falling on deaf ears...

I'm just really worried that players will stop using orbs of alchemy during races and races won't be quite as competitive and serious as they used to be.

If you have a huge race where 3000orbs of transmutation 1000 orbs of alchemy and 2000 orbs of augmentation are used on useless throw away low level items in a 1-3hour race. why can't the winner have a chance to win 10-50random currency items? and the 7th place racer might win 1or2 alchs and 5-7alterations or some such?


In theory you could even limit the prize pool for the top finishers to the orbs wasted by those competing in the race itself? I just don't want to find myself racing and saying to myself, whelp I'm not going to use my orb of alchemy on this sledgehammer because I don't really care if I do well or not, this is just for fun!

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namad wrote:

It is flat out not true that orb prizes cause inflation of any sort.

Look, I'm not that excited about the new prizes either, but I have direct first-hand experience that shows that the old-old race rewards (back when exalteds had the same chance of being a prize as a fusing) DID have a pretty big impact on the economy. I ended up with over 30 exalteds at one point due to race prizes. I tried selling exalteds for 16 alchs and STILL had trouble finding buyers. And this was back when people were stockpiling alchs using the old vendor recipe.

Contrast that with my experience in Open Beta: I have found a grand total of 1 exalted so far, and I sold it for 24 alchs. The person who bought it was really happy to get it for that price.

So I think your statement that it's "flat out not true" is flat out not true.

Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!

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Noobshock wrote:

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Chris wrote:

We can't give giant rewards for races because then we get the converse problem where the economy inflates away from you unless you somehow find time to race for 8 hours each day at obscure times.

Uh, Chris, what the hell are you smoking? The economy inflates away from you everytime you don't play because there is no sink for good items or gems in your game. This idea that you're going to preserve the economic "ecosystem" is completely retarded because it isn't built with checks and balances in the first place. I'm sure deep down you do realize that.

All you're doing is making races less appealing. Whether the economy bloats in 8, 10 or 12 weeks is pretty irrelevant. Not to mention you're perfectly capable of tuning orb rewards to not be overwhelmingly large. Whatever. Falling on deaf ears...

You are right the only "sink" for gems is death itself (which happens with some frequency in HC).

You actually have the economics of the situation completely backwards, though :). The difference between inflation from races and the phenomenon with items is that, over the course of time, your current currency will *be more valuable* as more and more quality items become available in the game -- however, your current currency will *be less valuable* as more and more people stack massive amounts of currency from events.

This is because items becoming better over time represents an increase in supply to the economy, which corresponds to a drop in prices with fixed demand; An increase of orbs represents monetary inflation which is represented by an increase in demand, which corresponds to prices going up.

Given that the value of many orbs will inflate naturally, the economy is actually fairly well-balanced.

WHAT YOU SMOKIN' BRO

Edit: Not to mention, even when you have a massive amounts of amazing items in the game, there is always a baseline value for many orbs which is how useful they are to craft maps -- which are a sink you completely overlooked. If Chaos orbs become irrelevant to obtaining good items, they will still be relevant to rolling awesome maps!