GP Skillcape?

[hohto]

If it was ONLY a skill cape, it would be more or less of a useless thing. That way merchers could, however, show out even more and attract people to "merchant". Anyways for showing off there are better things for around the same price: why would you buy a skill cape for looks when you could buy an AGS for stats and use another skill cape for looks? That's not comparable to things like phats as they are investments and they can always be turned into money again. Not to mention having a party hat at the moment equals for wealth rising steadily, whereas this cape would just reduce your wealth by 99m forever. If it was just a skill cape, it wouldn't have almost any rational reasons to have and thus its economical affect would be more or less useless as a money drain.

 

If it had some real special abilitities, such as level or stat boosts, it would encourage people to do anything for money and benefit only a small minority of the people. In other words it would help the ones who runs merch groups (=more people "merchanting"), already has the gear, stats and knowledge to do boss hunting or such. You could also say that it would benefit the rich ones and same time make the poor even poorer through "failed merching" or not being able to stay at the same speed with boss hunters who were already better without the extra boosts.

 

Not to mention a rapid flow of money out of the game would cause huge shocks to economy in a short run. Lets say this cape has a real reason to use and not speculate (at this section) what kind of reason. For tens of thousands of people investing 99m on something that helps is nothing: you could make it back from using it, either directly (aka it speeds up getting money, such as allowing you to kill more GW bosses per trip and thus making boss:hour and boss:resources ratios better) or indirectly (it helps you to get more people to your "investing" groups, saves time which can be used to make mon,ey etc). Now lets say that 2k people buy it, which in reality is a low number if it's worth buy. That means that immediately 198 BILLION gp is taken away from the game. That equals to 792 million oak logs being turned into planks. That would equal to 47,5 billion construction xp, in other words it would get 99 con to around 3600 people. This money is of course away from circulation and decreases investments for obvious reason: the ones with money tend to use it for materials, gear, etc. Same time people do their best to get the money and selling everything "unneeded". This means that there would be a huge drop in demand of multiple items and a huge increase of the supply of many expensive goods.

 

In a long run the affects are hard to predict. We could always speculate how it would turn out, but two things are obvious. That would cause the highest economical disaster (yes, in my opinion disaster) to the game so far and it would take ages for the situation to normalize. Finding some kind of an equilibrium with multiple items would take probably ages and the affects of benefits from the cape could cause even higher swings. In my opinion the most important thing is stability itself: instability causes panic and makes the markets work in a "wrong way". Instability benefits those who can take a good look at the situation and causes problems for those who don't either know how things work or can't be bothered to pay too much attention. In other words a handful of people would benefit from the chaos and majority of "normal" players would suffer.

 

Also if we are realistic, an item that costs 99M without a way to sell would require to be really good in order to take money out of game in masses. However with that price it would have to be so good it makes a difference. If it makes a difference, 2k people is far too low number. I'd personally multiply that number with 5 for the first 2 months. If it doesn't make a proper difference benefit wise, it would just end up being something like dragon square half (the bought one) is at the moment: more or less useless as a money drain, has no reason to be bought as there are cheaper alternatives and so on.

 

If you want to create a proper money drain, you need something that doesn't IMMEDIATELY take hundreds of billions out, it can be done in smaller scale too and there is a reason to use it. Shards for summoning or logs2planks for construction are perfect examples in my opinion. You can benefit from them (gilded altars, familiars, etc) and they take constantly money away from the game. However their affect is more or less constant as majority of the people don't immediately invest tens of millions in: they invest one sum, come back later on for more and so on. Not to mention every p2p member has the ability and in some cases the need to do these things in small scale. Of course we could speculate wether the "shard swap" is good or not economy wise, but in my opinion that' would get far too off topic.