I like your post mate, and the amount of effort and date behind it.
I do have to raise a point though and that is that as we progress through those months and years, regardless of any trends at all in the purchase of tokens with irl currencies, we’ll still see the prices go up dramatically due to the amount of silver we’ll have available as we level up. I wouldn’t want someone going into the game, who may only have read your post without this realization that prices are already bound to go up over time, thinking, “oh $@%!, he called it exactly, p2w, time to abandon ship!” lol
A level 1 player has much less means of gaining silver than a level 600 would, so as we get more and more silver our disposable silver will also be increased when compared to fairly static prices of commodities like consumables and attributes etc.
In a sense it is almost as though silver doesn’t exist. It’s more a trade of your time for X item. Silver is meant to reflect that time invested but, as we gain means to gain more and more silver, it starts to lose that initial value. If it takes you 50 hours at level 1 to buy a token for 50k then clearly tokens at lvl600 wouldn’t go for 50k because that could be ~10 minutes of your time. Rather the price would be adjusted to about 50 hours (example) of your play time at lvl600 which may translate into 20mil per token or something.
The constant is that we attribute value to our dollars with in-game standards, so if we want to sell something at level 600 it won’t be for the amount of silver we can farm in an hour or two because that only saves us an hour or two of farming. Prices for irl currency conversions to in-game currencies will always go up as the game expands because we need that trade-off in value. I won’t blow $20 to get 2mil at level 600 and nobody else would either. It would have to have the same value as my dollar and that translates back to time spent gaining the silver.
The big problem I see though is new players joining the game after market prices have been inflated to match our silver incomes. Imagine that new F2P player who joins 2 years from now to check out the game called ToS. He plays hardcore for a day or two and decides he wants a token since the game boasts its availability with in-game currency. He checks the market and sees them going for 20mil and he only has 50k. lel?
Wut do? Likewise a new player who spends some irl currency could, in the first few minutes of game play even, purchase a token and sell it for 20mil and, with that single purchase, shatter the entire guise that F2P players would ever stand on equal footing. At this point there will be no arguing it would be obscenely P2W for new players. I mean… when that new player buys his way through level 200-300 with that one token sale alone, purchasing anything and everything he needs during the climb, there would be no way to argue that he didn’t have an advantage over the new F2P player.
Thank you again!
