It’s certainly true that there probably won’t be as many (or any) spreadsheet/market warriors as on EVE 
EDIT: And of course I hope I’m wrong, but I feel my assumptions are reasonable and the data support my predictions. Time will tell!
Not if they are purely cosmetic / non pay to win items benefits that are still something players would be willing to pay for.
1 Like
Ah, sure purely cosmetic things every month would be a pretty good idea and would add some value to the tokens 
I would call that “end game prices”. I agree.
Maybe one thing we are missing here is that we are comparing prices now that we are all Lv0. I would imagine prices of commodities in demand will rice as players are able to buy them more easily as they rise in levels and being able to make money faster and more easily.
@chronosanct
I think you are right, we will see a quick increase in the price of tokens. No doubt about that. It will also be for the reason I mentioned above.
I also agree we need some money sinks so that the value of silver can stay somewhat stable. Repairing gear, upgrading and such are good methods, but there should be more.
I believe this to be a problem, but I’m not sure how much it can be done this early. I think game’s economy will need to get out of dippers before we can actually see some new features or adjustments to existing ones that address this topic.
Great topic btw, one of the most well-earned like I’ve given.
Cheers
3 Likes
I don’t know that it will be that quick an increase in the price. I’m just predicting that eventually tokens will be too expensive for many F2P players to want to buy. The time scale I think we will most likely see this happening on is over 3-4 months maybe longer, but I don’t have good data to support my hunch.
So I don’t quite think it will happen within 2 months of launch… but I think it will happen.
My main argument is against people who for whatever reason think that everyone will eventually get tokens. I just don’t see that happening with the way things are…
Thank you for the kind words though!
Oh definitely! Not that quick.
But I can imagine that the longer the game has been out, the higher the price it will have and therefore the more “unreachable” it will feel/be for new (lower level) players to buy Tokens in-game.
1 Like
Yup, that’s the trend I’m seeing… but we’ll have to see:
- how effective the gold sinks are,
- whether there will be a lot of token hoarding
- whether many 1 token users will also start buying tokens because they don’t want to pay $18 a month
- whether ~8% of the population will be consistently buying a whopping ~$90+ dollars in tokens every month…
EDIT: I see token flow going like:
5+ token buyers (sell to) --> 1 token users who don’t want to keep paying for tokens (and have built up wealth) (any remainder go to) --> F2P players
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.
3 Likes
Ah I forgot! Special shoutouts to:
I wouldn’t have been able to do this without your help and encouragement Thank you again!
Your welcome.
Oh, here’s another resource for your poll.
iTOS popularity by country (Steam stats):
You might note that if even 20% of those players actually play at the end of early access, then not one of your polls has a representative sample. Thus all are completely pointless, and all data/info you might pull from them baseless.
Keep up the good work, I know people appreciate it.
1 Like
Well yeah, this is the situation/scenario that scares the crap out of me. in-game currency inflation is a big problem in a lot of mmo’s. The fact that this game has a premium cash payment system linked to an economy with inflation tendencies makes it doubly worrisome.
I think imc would need to address details for how they plan to sell tokens.
- Will there be purchasing caps on tokens?
- Will there be caps on hoarding tokens?
- Will there be enough in-game gold sinks to make sure that some lvl 280 or lvl 600 player down the line doesn’t have billions and billions of silver?
- What exactly will the costs of tokens even be?!? Amazingly we still don’t even know!
These are all long term threats to the F2P viability of the game. At least in my opinion.
1 Like
Thank you so much for your feedback! I love educated critiques of my methodology!
Have you by chance seen?
According to it, even if I am trying to estimate the tendencies of a population of 150,000 (150,000 > 96,438) then if I want a 95% confidence interval (industry standard) and if I am okay with a +/- 6% margin of error, then I need a sample size of 267 responses…
And wouldn’t you know… 285 responses
Thank you for your support again, I look forward to future enlightening exchanges with you
1 Like
This is my biggest worry. Because over time, as new players join-in, tokens are guaranteed to become more and more P2W. They are only considered fair when all players are the same level, and have the same amount to spend in silver, which means they will be most fair at the initial release and right before the game closes. Everything in between is a trend that will only see prices for the tokens increase and further alienate new F2P players. I even worry that by the end of the early access, with players at cap, if new F2P players who join at launch will be able to even afford tokens prior to hitting lvl200, resulting in missing out on those benefits for a large portion of their experience in-game.
Also lol’d at the above post because I read it with heavy sarcasm. I could have been mistaken though XD
1 Like
Thank you very much for adding Prinny to the title as it’s what really drove me to take interest in this topic 
Worth the read I must say, I’ll be looking forward to a better analysis of yours in the future.
I do hope IMC really takes this matter seriously as this sort of thing really does happen and I suffered from it heavily on PSO2 SEA.
Great job hardworking Prinny so keep it up! 
2 Likes
You could also see the new players buying tokens to sell being a good thing. For one it supports the game. Secondly it makes it easier for the newer player to catch up to the veterans because he wont have to worry about silver for a while. It might actually be more beneficial to actually use the coin IMO.
It wont give any advantage over the people who have been playing a while, but it would when being compared to other new players. I see it as just saving some time really. I don’t want to say if i consider it p2w or not since noone ever wins those battles. It is what it is.
Think of it this way, this new player has a ton of silver. What will he spend it on? Weapons he cant use? Attributes that arent expensive yet? Once he gets to a level where purchasing a weapon from the market is tempting, could he have bought it anyway with the silver he saved up til that point?
True, I didn’t think of it in that sense, it could be incentive to purchase which helps the company… and that’s a good thing.
But P2W refers to the advantages that a player can buy and it wouldn’t be at that point the inherent advantages tokens offer like move speed etc but would rather be the silver translation.
A foot race 2 years in is probably a poor example of the idea since, as you said, it wouldn’t really be winning, just a difference of pace. However the difference would be staggering. Attributes add up quickly, so, sure a F2P player could get the token sooner if he doesn’t buy any attributes, but the token seller will have all of them capped at 100 as soon as possible with no worry of cost, a true powerhouse in comparison. It would take the F2P user a very, very, long time if (as in the example) the token costs 20mil to even purchase one much less benefit from decent gear and other items that cost silver. I had almost 700 hours in icbt2 on one character and I don’t even know if I had in excess of 20 mil lol
I guess I don’t understand the point you are trying to make?
This discussion is talking about F2P players and how I’m predicting they will be shafted given current token implementation trends…
I see that you are saying that new players could buy tokens in order to sell them… but what does that have to do with the discussion at hand?
The polling data already suggests that even new players from this forum are unlikely to buy more than 1 token (which I assume they would use on themselves).
35% - 0 token players (F2P)
55% - 1 token players
1% - 2 token players
1% - 3 token players
0% - 4 token players
8% - 5+ token players
Maybe you are arguing that new players should be buying extra tokens? (let me know if I’m wrong?) The problem is if even the fans of the game for the most part won’t buy more than 1 (because they are likely expensive or don’t offer good value) why in the world would a new player want to buy more than one?
1 Like
I have no idea what are you talking about…but…
I will read it later dood~~~
ヽ(◕□◕)ﾉ ヽ(◕□◕)ﾉ ヽ(◕□◕)ﾉ
3 Likes
Seriously you “free to play” players need to get a damn part time job all this crying and moaning for weeks now is starting to grind on everyone who has an actual freaking job!! Seriously if its an MMO go play with your friends develop your own guilds/groups of friends and enjoy the actual JOURNEY instead of looking at people that want to reach the top the fastest or whatever!!!
Listen as most people SHOULD know life isnt fair!! nothing in the world is 100% fair!! thats just something people need or will learn in life!!!
SO PLEASE enough with these freaking token threads!!! if you cannot afford them thats fine just play grind enough silver until you can buy one and enjoy the month you get it for and dont worry about the people that have the actual money to pay for tokens.
You know what the trade off is when it comes to people with money? TIME!!! so people need to spend the little time they have after work with some sort of balance which is the token to keep them in line with the people with all the time in the freaking world after school!!
SO GET A FREAKING GRIP PEOPLE!!!
1 Like
<3 <3 <3
1 Like