Posted by Eltharyon 3 years ago (Source)

UPDATED 4.10.2019, see end of post!

Hello Albion Online Community,

Many of you will have noticed that the price of Gold in-game (measured in silver) has drastically increased over the past months. This makes it extremely hard to sustain premium status with in-game currency and is a massive problem for a significant number of players and hence, for the game as a whole.

Our analysis shows that the Gold price increase is due to substantial silver inflation.

Why is that? Since Albion’s release more than 2 years ago, the amount of silver that a player can generate per hour has massively increased as a result of new features - such as Randomized Dungeons - and buffs to silver income from various PvE activities and the black market. On the other hand, though, we have never actually adjusted the silver sinks to keep up with this.

This leads to a significant amount of excess silver that is injected into the game economy every day. A large share of that silver is invested into the Gold market by players seeking to benefit from the steady price increase. As a result of that, the price of Gold is driven up further and further.

To combat this development, we are going to adjust the main silver sinks in order to keep up with the various prior buffs to silver generation. We hope that this will stop the Gold price from rising further and hopefully bring it down to healthier levels.

As a guideline, we seek to increase the overall silver amount sunk per day by around 50%.

This is much less than the boost in silver generation that the game saw from release until today, however, we believe that it might be sufficient.

Here is a more detailed list of what this entails:

• Increased repair costs of all items by 100%, but halving knockdown damage, keeping repair cost of knockdowns the same (see update below)
  
• Increased Market Order Fee from 1% to 1.5%
  
• Increased Market Tax from 4% to 6% (from 2% to 3% with Premium) *
  
• Increased the cost of buying additional bank tabs by 50%
  
• Increased the cost of buying and upgrading islands by 50%
  
• Increased the cost of converting Fame to Fame credits by 50%
  
• Increased the cost of using the fast travel feature by 50%
  
• Increased the cost of re-rolling item quality by 50% (discarded this change, see update below)
  
• Reduced the rate at which silver is generated by the black market by 10%
  

In addition to that, we are going to rebalance the silver sink that has been specifically designed to combat silver inflation, but has so far been extremely ineffective due to not being viable: transmutation. What transmutation does is to allow players to upgrade a resource to a higher tier or level by spending a significant amount of silver. The idea behind this is that if there is too much silver, spending it on transmutation is an optional and scalable sink. Thus far, transmutation prices have been so expensive that it has hardly ever been used. Hence, we have adjusted transmutation prices** to make sure that it remains very expensive overall, however, will now be viable in certain situations for certain resources, based on supply and demand. If this change works well, transmutation should be viable if there is an oversupply of silver, and unviable if silver is not that plentiful, hence, acting as a self-balancing mechanism to keep the economy in check.

All of these changes are expected to arrive in Albion with its next patch on October 9th***.

We’ll closely monitor the impact of the above changes and make adjustments based on our findings. If we find that we have done too much, we’ll readjust, and the same holds true if we find that the changes have not been effective.

Also, going forward, we’ll make sure that we pay a lot more attention to the overall silver economy to prevent the runaway inflation that we saw in the past weeks from reoccurring.

Looking forward to your feedback and comments!

Sincerely,

Robin ‘Eltharyon’ Henkys
Game Director


* the new sales tax rate will apply to all sales happening after the release of this patch, including existing market orders

** To increase the enchantment level of a resource, you will need a same-tier resource one enchantment level below as well as the following amount of silver:




Additionally, in this patch we’re replacing the option to convert X lower Tier resources into a single higher Tier resource (which was barely ever used) with the option to increase the tier of a resource using silver. You will need a resource of the same enchantment level one Tier below as well as the following amount of silver




Due to the special nature of stone, tier transmutation of stone has its own price table:




*** subject to change


UPDATE 4.10.2019 - Changes to the above

Hey everyone,

thanks for the feedback! We've sifted through it and found lots of valuable input. In response to your suggestions, we'll be making two important changes:

1. We will not increase the price of re-rolling quality at this time, due to a risk of it sinking less silver than it currently is.
2. We're changing our stance on repair. We feel its very important to increase the cost of repair, but we don't want it to hurt the less experienced and beginning players. Our solution is to reduce equipment damage suffered on a knockdown by 50%, while doubling the base repair cost. As a result, costs for repairing damage from PvE knockdowns, the majority of repair costs for lower end players, should remain exactly as they are now.

Posted by Korn 3 years ago (Source)

That's correct. Repairing gear obtained from PvP kills will be more expensive, though in relationship to the overall value of the gear, the cost is still very small. As it's generally not beginning / new players who loot gear for others, this change will mostly affect more wealthy players.

PvE knockdowns however will not change at all now with the proposed changes. While repair cost will double, the durability loss from a PvE knockdown will be cut in half. Hence getting knocked down in PvE costs exactly the same as before. While the cost to repair the durability loss that comes from just using the gear will increases, that cost overall is extremely small so it will not have a significant impact.