Game Guides Archive
Thread: Friday Feature Economy Stats April 30th
Q-3PO wrote:
See the real state of the SWG economy - it may not be what you think...
OH MY GOD
You have no idea how much I love graphs and numbers and data etc etc. If I told you what I did and who I work for you would understand, then I would have to kill you 
Anyway
Raph rules
Looks like a glitch in the data collection for those days.
Most interesting tidbits:
1. No inflation. There may have been inflation from the earliest days of the game, but there doesn't appear to be any now (especially if we're running at a slight deficit to squeeze out the duped credits). Those of us screaming that the economic sky was falling were wrong. (And those of us who want price stability should be happy, not just that we're getting it but also that we now know that the tools are in place to enforce it.)
2. Vehicle maintenance costs have recently increased significantly... right about the time Publish 8 eliminated the "leave your flaming vehicle at the starport" repair exploit. Heh-heh-heh....
Great stuff! More! More!
--Flatfingers
The rest is completely up in the air.
Very neat! These are very interesting statistics.
I do think it's interesting to note that if you *strain* your eyes you can make out the dates on the graph and though it looks like it goes from 04/02/04 to 04/29/04... They DON'T. Right where the big dip in money flow is, it jumps from 04/08 to 04/14. I don't have why this is, but I was looking at the dates thinking "Hmm...nobody making money running missions.... maybe that date where the dip is aday that Coronet won't be so laggy" 
But overall...very very interesting.
Does this mean that we'll soon see higher mission payouts? or will it be reduced costs?
Ainwyn wrote:
It would be much more interesting to see a comparison of several different months of the economy and a break down by server. All this page shows is that the devs do some sort of tracking on the flow of money without giving any actual salient facts. As it is now... colourful pictures but no substance at all.
Also, the graph showing the flow of money in is missing one... duping. I know there have been measures taken to eliminate it and probably a lot of it has been eliminated and that it is not an official source of money, but it does affect the economy. I, for one, would love to see an official estimate of what duping has done to the economy and how it has been dwindled.
Did you read the whole thing? He addressed the duping issue... at least as well as I think you could do.
If you duped then of course you should be banned... I can see how a situation like this could cause problems though. That's pretty bad if they essentially banned someone who happened to move to a better location. I would think that they would have ways of knowing your transactions though... dunno, sucks if its true.
Barb-Wire wrote:
i love the part of large sums of money influxing being a sign of duping.
we recently moved a vendor from talus to dantooine and started selling vaserian brandy en-masse for a very good profit in the course of a day or two ammassed several millions of creds from sales. now that account is banned for "duping creds"
and soe wont even talk to us about it.
gotta love metrics.
One of the Four Horsemen of the Smuggler Apocalypse! 
- What was going on at around the time that created such a huge drop in the economy?
Not a clue. I'm not on the team day to day anymore, remember, so I don't know exactly.
- Also, can we get some larger images?
All of 'em are actually at the normal size I get them, except one. The last one I had to reduce hugely--normally, it's something that is ten or more screens wide and that you scroll across.
- What I would be really interested in seeing though is graphs like this for the different servers, to see how the ways people make and spend their money varies from server to server.
We're capable of getting that data, but generally, we track the economy as a whole across all servers, because by and large we can only make changes across all servers. We're not going to try adjusting the inflow of currency from missions on a server-by-server basis, for example. Obviously, if duping was prevalent on one server but not another, that would cause problems, but usually stuff like that happens on all the servers at once.
- how often does the dev team generate these reports and assess the economy?
These reports come off a webpage that is automatically updated every 24 hours. The "Fed" meetings, as I call them, were happening weekly when I was on the team... you'd have to ask the current folks how often they happen now.
- a breakdown by server would be very cool, as well as the resource breakdown by category (mineral, gemstone, gas, etc)
These reports only cover currency, as I mentioned. Tracking resources is actually a bit of a pain because there're literally hundreds of them, and they expire all the time. I keep waiting to find a commodities tracking and futures exchange on a fansite. 
- It would be much more interesting to see a comparison of several different months of the economy and a break down by server. All this page shows is that the devs do some sort of tracking on the flow of money without giving any actual salient facts. As it is now... colourful pictures but no substance at all.
Well, we have to work within the limits of a typical Friday Feature length. You could easily write a book's worth about virtual economies.
I am unsure what salient facts would really be of use to you, other than for curiosity. Does it help you to know that on 4/2 the economy shed 601,519,132 credits, but on 9/26/2003 it gained 840,324,091? Let me know.
- Also, the graph showing the flow of money in is missing one... duping. I know there have been measures taken to eliminate it and probably a lot of it has been eliminated and that it is not an official source of money, but it does affect the economy. I, for one, would love to see an official estimate of what duping has done to the economy and how it has been dwindled.
By its very nature, duping doesn't show up. We log each time currency is minted by a game system, and what game system did it, and we log each time currency is destroyed, and by what. You might notice that even that tracking has some holes in it--transaction fees on the bazaar, for example, don't show up in the graphs (though the amount is tiny). Since duping is happening without a game system knowing it, usually, it doesn't show up at all. That's why we were able to catch the problem by looking at data that didn't add up.
- I'm glad to see the cashflow problem was dupers and that the game is slowly bleeding thatfalse cashback out.
Not all that slowly--we went in and zapped the cash out of accounts that seemed to be totally ridiculous. But a lot of the duped cash is spread out at this point, since it was used in transactions. So probably everyone has SOME counterfeit credits in their possession at this point. That's why going the route of running at a deficit is a better way to go for now. The best way to track this, much as I hate to say it, is to watch the value of SWG credits on eBay. Since we closed the duping loophole, the price has more than tripled.
- a per capita breakout and a profession breakout of income/expenditures would be better to understand the real state of the economy....
There's a ton of characters who exist as "money holder mules" essentially, and distinguishing them from normal chars is hard. And it's alsovery hardto pin down what profession someone is algorithmically, given how the skill system works. Lastly, since these graphs are about tracking currency creation and destruction, they don't speak to how money sloshes around within "the sink." Even a pistoleer might make most of their money from bazaar transactions, for example. So a profession breakout is kinda tricky.
Very interesting, thanks for sharing the information from your Economy analysis reports. Glad to hear the duping bugs and the vehicle repair exploits are fixed and the SWG Economy is stabilizing.
Now I just have 999,950,000 credits to make to be right up there with those top players.... heh