Price Index Thread (NA/EN)

    Preface


    Commencing today, I will be keeping track of prices of common everyday items (median intraday prices) to track inflation levels, exclusive of buyouts. I will ignore smaller unit priced items since they have greater marginal utility (e.g. a specific costume piece - bunny ears, hair colors) since their fundamental value is also affected by scarcity.



    Legend


    Abbreviation Meaning Purpose
    WUC Weapon Upgrade Chips +7 or higher Weapon
    EC Energy Converters Reroll gear line stats
    SGVIP Silver and Gold VIP Farming potential increase
    Sol Refine Solace Refined Fragments GC Raiding / Rookie Raiding
    GC Frag Grand Citadel Fragments (Curiosity/Order Aggregate Average)
    Deprecated due to non-limiting factor    		 Primal Raid Preparation
    AKC Akashi Key Cards Raid Preparation
    HQ AC High Quality Armor Cores Primal Raid Preparation


    The index will be calibrated to ignore solace refineds and grand citadel fragments next month, with the inclusion of akashi key cards and high-quality armor cores as this is more representative of the purchasing power of DZ.


    ___________________________________________________________________________________________


    Example : Jon bought a +7 weapon, tagged with perfect rolls for 800 million on May 20.

    The same weapon today needs to go for 4 billion to be worth it, or around 60 WUCs; June 24.


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    Data

    Last Updated 9:55 PM EST

    NA - Tenebris

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    pubchart?oid=1440344002&format=image


    pubchart?oid=475911478&format=image



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    pubchart?oid=1817497231&format=image



    June

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    May

    57pDYBK.png


    EU - Candus


    June

    oMGSEBz.png


    May

    XfFEyI6.png


    Edited 67 times, last by Rin ().

    EN still holds the highest population unless there's a reliable chart that shows NA has more, never see NA green lately. Also the fact that the game is losing more players overtime and most are over-hyped by those new upcoming games. But look at those prices tho, 100% showing that NA has the most whale playerbase with those prices, I even refuse to buy 2m Weapon Upgrade Chips lol.

    Also no more gold spammers lately in Rucco town ch1-5 EN how about NA and other servers?

    Quote from Awoo4399

    EN still holds the highest population unless there's a reliable chart that shows NA has more, never see NA green lately. Also the fact that the game is losing more players overtime and most are over-hyped by those new upcoming games. But look at those prices tho, 100% showing that NA has the most whale playerbase with those prices, I even refuse to buy 2m Weapon Upgrade Chips lol.

    Also no more gold spammers lately in Rucco town ch1-5 EN how about NA and other servers?

    what does a server being green have anything to do with population

    Quote from Awoo4399

    EN still holds the highest population unless there's a reliable chart that shows NA has more, never see NA green lately. Also the fact that the game is losing more players overtime and most are over-hyped by those new upcoming games. But look at those prices tho, 100% showing that NA has the most whale playerbase with those prices, I even refuse to buy 2m Weapon Upgrade Chips lol.

    Also no more gold spammers lately in Rucco town ch1-5 EN how about NA and other servers?

    Personally, the population of the FR server is growing here! ^^


    Hm... Bots are still out there!

    ~ Le cœur peut être faible, parfois même il peut se soumettre. Mais j'ai appris qu'au fond de lui, il y a une lumière qui ne s'éteint jamais ! ~

    ~ The heart may be weak, sometimes even it may submit. But I learned that deep inside him, there's a light that never goes out ! ~

    We can't allow them to control our thoughts and memories forever.

    Nous ne pouvons pas leur permettre de contrôler nos pensées et nos souvenirs à vie.

    So, what exactly is the point of this thread? Prices are determined by population and the ones buying soulcash, the latter being an endangered species. Showing numbers will not change anything. Gameforge and people on the forums won't be able to do anything about it, either.


    It does look like NA server is not faring well at all - after all the server downtime with GF failing to compensate the players properly, it's only normal. That and... all the rest.


    If this is your idea of a hobby, then I hope you (and maybe others) can enjoy it. As for me, I only have one word for it: "Futile"

    Quote from Bumluffa
    Quote from Awoo4399

    EN still holds the highest population unless there's a reliable chart that shows NA has more, never see NA green lately. Also the fact that the game is losing more players overtime and most are over-hyped by those new upcoming games. But look at those prices tho, 100% showing that NA has the most whale playerbase with those prices, I even refuse to buy 2m Weapon Upgrade Chips lol.

    Also no more gold spammers lately in Rucco town ch1-5 EN how about NA and other servers?

    what does a server being green have anything to do with population

    well ya make an interesting point. and people that dont know games well would probably be like "ohh yea hes right" but yea no. 1. gold sellers go where the money is. If your not seeing them then that means you guys are low on the gold buying list. which one might argue that means your population is lower.


    Cant run a business where there is no money to be made right? same for the gold sellers. The reason that the NA prices are higher is because of that. Lets be logical. If there are few players then who could pay the price? Well more specifically who could? That said Yea i think NA beats the EN as far a population. No charts needed. The prices are low there because no one can support it. Here people can grind 70-150 mil in one day (speaking for myself). It just depends on the day. So yea the prices seem crazy but ehh its about where it should be.


    Sadly it just sucks for newer players. But once they make some friends and figure out the system they will be big spending to haha.

    Quote from EnVysion

    So, what exactly is the point of this thread? Prices are determined by population and the ones buying soulcash, the latter being an endangered species. Showing numbers will not change anything. Gameforge and people on the forums won't be able to do anything about it, either.


    It does look like NA server is not faring well at all - after all the server downtime with GF failing to compensate the players properly, it's only normal. That and... all the rest.


    If this is your idea of a hobby, then I hope you (and maybe others) can enjoy it. As for me, I only have one word for it: "Futile"

    No, I just like to document changes in time. I never insinuated or complained about the state of the game. In fact, I pretty much got a costume for free today just from my marketing activities. There is nothing futile about it at all. I just like documenting and analyzing things. The purchasing power of geared level 55s is still within reasonable range; one or two days of farming for ECS/frags/BPs gives you an outfit. Five or six days, a decent +6 weapon.


    I could not care less if other people do not find it useful, it is not here for utility; it is just here as a relative comparison day-to-day wise between the two servers. I personally like data and statistics. An endangered species? Doubt it, I've been seeing low levels with idol outfits everyday now- and even more so with the maid outfit release. Nearly every competitive level 55 who raids probably spent some money on brooches or gear, or bought from SC sellers who themselves are likely to be level 55 and looking for tagged stat gear or +8 or something.


    The community already has a consensus and knows it; in spite of that, people will spend whenever they find enjoyment nevertheless.


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    Edited 2 times, last by Rin ().

    Quote from EnVysion

    So, what exactly is the point of this thread? Prices are determined by population and the ones buying soulcash, the latter being an endangered species. Showing numbers will not change anything. Gameforge and people on the forums won't be able to do anything about it, either.


    It does look like NA server is not faring well at all - after all the server downtime with GF failing to compensate the players properly, it's only normal. That and... all the rest.


    If this is your idea of a hobby, then I hope you (and maybe others) can enjoy it. As for me, I only have one word for it: "Futile"

    The point is "FYI".

    I dunno about you, but I find stats of almost any kind very interesting. Also knowing the trends of when prices fall and increase is actually quite helpful. Maybe there's a pattern that develops like chip prices increasing during weekend and falling during weekday (this is just an example, not true at all [at least at the moment it isn't.]) and you can take advantage of that knowledge. It can also help you gauge when's the best time to buy/sell items to maximize profits or savings.


    Recording and showing statistics is never "futile". It's just a matter of how you want to use that data.

    Quote from Bumluffa
    Quote from Awoo4399

    EN still holds the highest population unless there's a reliable chart that shows NA has more, never see NA green lately. Also the fact that the game is losing more players overtime and most are over-hyped by those new upcoming games. But look at those prices tho, 100% showing that NA has the most whale playerbase with those prices, I even refuse to buy 2m Weapon Upgrade Chips lol.

    Also no more gold spammers lately in Rucco town ch1-5 EN how about NA and other servers?

    what does a server being green have anything to do with population

    Duh... white means "Good" then green means "Normal" you usually see these difference on peek times, most games has this feature you should know.

    Yeah, bots determine how much population a game has, but it might be different case in this game since it's a dungeon crawler. NA never turns green on peek times lately assuming EU has more pop than NA, if it's true that NA still have bots spamming around rucco town channels and the fact that the server doesn't turn green that's pretty alarming, also if you think of it, how come NA market became so fudge up with lots of people playing on it, Population = Supplies unless 70% of that population are not progressing to endgame, resulting for the demand to increase and yeah the story goes on.

    From what I am seeing here, NA seems to hold alot of golds but not the supplies which are the in game items, cause? gold spammers and players who avail it, resulting to overpriced supplies in the market which is really bad for new players, drop rate is so bad lately as well. Let's hope Gameforge consider this before they do a server merge or whatever they plan to do in the future. We are so lacking on communication with them seriously, we should have like Official Discord, or AMA here in the forums like other games do lately, just to clarify things etc. Good job OP for pointing this out, this is a major problem right now and needs attention.

    If I write a bot I just go wherever works. If I normally try to scam Americans, I will try to scam Americans. Don't care about population. Why would I? I have no data on that initially and sales will go up wherever I put the most effort in.


    Prices are also a cultural thing. Take KR for example. There can be a massiv amount of players, but prices are still low. That just because Koreans are way more wiling to spent money on the cash shop, creating more supply.


    The assumption made here is almost everybody buying gets his or her money from gold sellers. I highly doubt this is the case. Goldsellers only effect economy if some actually buys their gold.


    What I personally think is, that NA simply has more people willing to pay those prices while having less people providing the goods. Simply speaking, on EU those things don't sell for that price. That can be due to a lot of reasons. People more willing to cash for it instead, people less willing to grind money in general, more offers on the market compare to people interested, people simply won't buy at too high prices, people with large amounts of money not spending it and so on. We don't know.


    Long story short, I wouldn't just say everything is due to goldsellers. There is more then that. This isn't the only game I have seen NA prices being way higher then the EU ones. I wouldn't be surprised if it is like this in most games.

    Fraction of Concurrent Players Online / Server Capacity = n(X+u)

    where n is the integer ratio for determining server statuses and u is a dummy variable.


    So realistically, it could be the case that they upped server capacity for NA more than EU due to many weeks of crashes from overloading the login servers, However, since there are less players playing relative to the server capacity to EU, you would observe the server status being less full. Furthermore, steam statistics support the assertion of peak times being 1-3PM eastern time, meaning there are four or five combined servers for the EU region which would peak while NA users would be busy working, studying, sleeping in.


    Anecdotally, every time I login - I compare the number of users in Rucco town and channel bars at 12PM, 4 PM and 8 PM. Everyone knows that prime time to play is during or after dinner, and before midnight or bedtime for most people; likewise with weekends.


    Therefore, one can make the observation of server statuses showing a certain status that is misleading or non-indicative of the whole server population.


    We already know that NA users have a relatively higher level income than EU users, when all other aspects are equal due to the relatively more capitalistic economies. We also know NA pays higher premiums for things which EU enjoys at a discount, from telecom, online services, and various other things. We also know the propensity to spend is correlated with relative income levels, NA is likely to dominate EU in population if we combine the populations as whole for the english-speaking preferred populations (US+Canada+ rest of NA) vs (Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Republic of Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece,Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands,Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden and the UK) .


    Sure, there might be 510 million combined - but the likelihood is only a few countries out of these are prime markets to play this game, realistically, making it less than US+Canada+NA combined.


    We know that gold rates are related to quantity supplied and demand. I have noted observations of DZ rates being raised when supply was short, because it was way more lucrative to buy SC items at 1/4 or less of price to GameForge prices. Now that parity has been reached due to high DZ supply, and a lack of scaling of farming DZ - the only means of obtaining DZ efficiently are through market operations - which bots cannot specialize in. I observe DZ rates being dropped everyday, which entails a decreased demand for DZ at such rates, due to SC rates being more lucrative for selling in terms of value to per $ spent which ironically is a point of contention for inflation making farming DZ worthless.


    Generally, selling items such as soul fizz - or doing high DZ dungeons like ark ship or raids would be something bots would do, but it's likely they are farming weapon chips or star cards now.


    Anyhow, the estimation of NA vs EU population is not very difficult. The relationship of number of items listed in marketplace already tells you the entire story - just by soulcash items alone. One can make the argument that it's one individual seller who is putting all these listings- but that's a lot of VIPs stacked up that are wasted; one can also contend that the fraction of paying players in NA- or the total absolute SC expenditure of the fraction of spending players in NA is greater than EU. Even if we abstain from such measures- one can see the volume transaction history of purchases and listings for various other items and easily infer and conclude NA supersedes EU in population density.


    Another empirical observation can easily be done at peak times (12PM-2PM EST vs 6PM-10PM EST) time in party search listings, or twitch streams for NA vs EU; one would still come to the same confirmatory evidence of NA users outnumbering EU users.


    We also know there is a positive relationship between player base quantity and inflation; the more players, the more circulation of DZ into existence. This effect can be magnified by heightened demand for external DZ sources like bot farming- but the more likely case is that there are many players, and very few goods to go around- with 100 to 300 WUCs or 10-50 ECS necessary to get 'perfect' stat gear. And the more likely explanation is that the fraction of NA users in 'end' game are higher than EU users, and thus the quantity demanded exceeds the quantity supplied at X equilibrium. Furthermore, inflation levels have to start off high, for people to value DZ significantly - therefore this must presuppose a larger player base at hand who have high DZ farming capabilities. We know that DZ generation is relatively trivial for any game in most cases for low levels, and that all DZ is generally generated from dungeons or raids for high levels, and SW is no exception.


    In summary, we can conclude that while nominally, there are more zeroes for NA than EU; there are also more goods available in NA than EU, but less relative to the ratio of players. So while there is 1 good for 25 players in NA, there is 1 good for 10 players in EU- however the total amount of goods in NA can be 500 while in EU, 50.


    We can also conclude that NA's purchasing power is likely weaker than EU not on a per DZ-basis but per-hour averaged farming basis, making hardcoring more worth it in EU than NA - however NA remains easier to obtain DZ due to the maximization profit principle, whereby users will substitute goods to maximize profit, whether it be buying up all prerequisite materials to swap into next tier of materials, using BPs to get tagged stat items, reselling soul cash items, buying all rare items like specialty key cards, etc. So NA's market is more liquid, and the velocity of money is likely to be higher, whereas you barely see a single VIP sell in EU- meaning there's more 'desperate' buyers or people with more net worth to circulate their DZ than EU players, so we can further conclude NA is very likely a high-gini coefficient server (great wealth disparity distribution) with the top 1% owning 25% or more of the server's cumulative wealth.

    If your post is not here for utility, it's just to show the gap between EN and US. I take it back... it is not futile - it's just a post to piss off US players even more by showing how they get much worse prices than EN :)


    And you know... the players buying outfits and brooches, have nothing to do with your so called public analysis. However, players buying soulcash items to sell them on the market, DO! Have you noticed how instead of having 10+ of each type of VIP packs on the Market, now there's barely a few? How an average of 2 packs of each type are sold per day? How fashion items are extremely limited on the market?


    The part where you compare the players in Rucco town was rather amusing, though.

    Fashion items aren't being listed as much because you have to open them on alt characters, assume it's tradable, have a bad sales volume relative to utility items like akashi transmitters, and you don't even know if it sells. Not to mention you get more profit from selling utility items like premium brooch transmitters per soul cash than outfits, unless it's the latest one where people are willing to pay more. Secondly vips aren't being listed as often because you can only buy once per day. Nobody needs vips until the next month, you can see it's cyclicity in listings and purchases. Secondly people don't need infinite dz, they will only sell SC when they need dz. Selling a few costumes is more than sufficient for most people not looking for perfect rolls. Thirdly, the amount of costumes and items beingn listed were insane last month most likely due to a few big whale sellers, if you simply look at their similar listing times; most people no longer opt to sell hair colours and styles and cosmetics because it takes too long to sell, you don't know which will sell and the ratio that people are willing to pay is worse. This is pretty self-explanatory as I buy SC and sell SC. The elastity of items varies, individuals will overpay on scarcity but the majority wont, so it is better turnover to sell items that everyone needs like strength exp tickets. Furthermore people don't take unnecessary risks, items like name exp ticket and new costumes weren't sold until a price history showed sales at ratios of 16-22 to 1; you can see SC sellers testing the waters by only putting more listings when either their initial items sold or there's historical price evidence of a desire for such items, this enticing SC sellers entails a need for DZ, a valuation of time over farming and, players with sufficient time to farm dz or sell items for dz to purchase SC items, not withstanding. Any premise broken means decreased listings.

    Edited once, last by Rin ().