by Kiinotasha » Mon Sep 23, 2024 4:43 pm
While I highly agree something needs to be done about this, I unfortunately don't think the staff can really do anything about it. (pardon if these points were brought up I only read the first 10 pages or so) The biggest issue I see with asking staff to step in is that staff hasn't been the one setting these prices, it's the user base that has. The only pets that Staff give a set value to are the store pets that they put out, other then that they don't control how much each pet is going for and really can't. There isn't a way to lock a pet at a certain value in a trade, and that wouldn't stop users from finding a work around if they wanted to. Staff have tried to fix things by getting rid of the older rares list that had crazy prices, but even then I have seen so many users still using prices based off that old thread instead of trying to change them. They have also tried to counter it by giving us the December 18th pulls as a way to get more of those old pets in circulation, staff had even had a whole discussion about making the 18th pulls with a set C$ price that you could then keep pulling from, but the user base didn't want the older rares to drop in prices so they compromised by having each user only being able to pull things once. Staff can't police how much each user is selling/buying things for, the only people that can really do that are the users themselves and since everyone has a different idea of how much a pet should/should not be worth there isn't really much to be done. We, as the userbase, would have to change as a whole and I, sadly, don't see that happening.
I am highly against any sort of gatcha game for this site, outside of the few it does have for events(which is pretty much what trading tokens in IS). While I understand wanting to make another thing for users to do to try and help make the economy stable I think adding a feature like that would only make things worse in the long run. If, let's say, playing on the site is how you earn tokens for a trade in, you are just adding something else to the site that is going to shoot up value, because, just like pets, its going to be something more rare then your generic items, and that rarity is what caused the pets to climb in prices. Even if the user base is split exactly 50/50 for people who long on everyday, and people who don't, the ones who get the items are going to be the ones that set the prices. They might start off reasonable, but as more items are added and it gets harder to get specific ones, those items are going to be more sought after, which means people are going to price them higher, and so on and so forth. (This isn't even taking into the fact that ANY type of C$ trading for those tokens could still be seen as gambling, which on a site aimed at younger kids is a huge problem)
The ONLY way I can see this working is if you get rid of C$ ENTIRELY. That way there isn't a false inflation related to real currency at all. No matter what, even if you could ONLY offer C$ for items/pets that were only available in the store, eventually, the prices are going to go up because once one person sees that they can get a bit higher back for that pet, the next person is going to try and get a bit higher and so on and so forth. Anything that has a rarity system, related to real currency or not, is eventually going to become off balance. It's just so obvious on CS because this site has been up for so long.

<3