Sat down this past week and made a bunch of changes to the economy that I think will really help us going forward.

Item Prices

1. Wrote a script that runs through all of the items on the site and accurately gives them a user price. Previously we relied on a lot of data (purchases, autopricer, etc) to put this together but now I have a script that runs through all of that data and just assigns a price. This has been WAY more accurate, and you should see your account worth page actually start to make sense.
2. That means, it's much easier for us to target quests based on the price of items. I've made some changes here, so that quests should start really getting the "junk" out of the economy now over the next few weeks. Medium-high rarity items that are currently low in price. That means for a temporary amount of time those quests will provide a higher sP prize, but it should equal out over time.

Quests

1. sP prizes among quests have been sort of equalized. Before they were written into each quest separately, but now each quest gives a range and the system takes care of it. That means all quests should be a lot better on their weekend now (some of them had really low weekend prizes, I have no idea why). The more that we can move pieces from the individual quests to an overall system makes it easier to increase prizes on those things.
2. We've seen good usage on the items that we've been giving out extra for the quest-a-thon. Some of the food/books have made it to shops but for the most part they've been read/eaten which keeps them from dropping price too much.

Restocking

1. The restocking formula has been rewritten. Previously items were split into "chunks" based on their rarities. This mean that there wasn't any difference between a r60 and r69 restocking, they were put in just as often, in the same amount. Now there is a difference between the two. This means that lower rarity items will restock a little more often, but those weird rarities that almost never popped up should be more frequent.
2. The restock system is now more aggressive about benching items. If the item is being sold for less in user shops than it is in the main shop when it restocks it'll be benched for a period of time. This should make it so that items that are seen less often get cycled in more often. It also means that rare items get more "shots" at being restocked!

Vending

1. Vending was limited to r60 items, except at ocean depths. My hope is that with the above changes these items become more valuable. I've got some more changes to make to make vending a little more profitible in those parameters.
2. It's official policy now that there are no more vending-only items being released. This was a terrible idea (and mine!) and we regret it very much. We're going to take a look at the vending exclusive items and figure out where they fit in the rest of the site, that will keep their rareness but also aren't in vending machines which just requires pumping loads of crap items into the site in order to get them.

Thank you Keith!!!

Thanks for having a really big think about this, and putting your thoughts into code. Hopefully nothing will break!

Looks great! Thank you! ❤️

Thank you Keith~ Especially that late bullet point on the vending machines. Thank you, that'll help stop the large amount of junk items being generated.

Excellent changes. Especially the vending only items. I look forward to seeing them in the crystal shop maybe ;)

Do you mean r60 max, or only r60 items?

Awesome changes-thanks Keith~!!! :)

Nice to hear about all of this! Hopefully it all ends up working out well. :D

Am interested in seeing how this works out. Sounds promising.

This seems like a great, consolidated step forward. I appreciate hearing about it!

Can the vending only Dapper set go to the SubQ so we can actually get at them now or what? :)

I'm so glad there will be no more vending-exclusive items. :)

I don't know exactly what you're doing, but I can tell solely based on the price of The Handbag Guide, a r64 book, that it's working in stabilising prices. That book used to cost like 100k easily in usershops, but now it's 10k, which is far more reasonable for an r64 item. And other prices and such too, it's clearly working. Though I hope it's not just to do with the quest-a-thon extra prizes and that it's just temporary.

Also these extra prizes being sold isn't a bad thing, is it? I mean, they're being used in quests as far as I can tell, which was the point. (I'd use them, but I only focus on one pet and he's got most of those items already.)

Anyway, it's working, whatever you're doing. =P

Love these changes :)

Whenever I got the urge to vend, it was almost always solely because I wanted to see if I could get the vending exclusive items. Or if a new item set came out. I really don't see myself personally vending any more (Again, not that I did it much) and my token hoard just growing

Looks great! Thanks!

Thank you for the informative post, Keith! Now some of the changes that have been made actually make sense!

Wow! You certainly have been busy! These changes sound great. :D Thank you so much! I'm guessing the old "vending only" items will probably pop up in the Token or Crystal shops. Probably about the only place to put them to control quantity while still giving everyone at least a chance at getting them. :)

r60 is the max on vended items for machines that comply.

Interesting changes. Thanks for the announcement. The site relies heavily on items and having a economy that can balance itself is really important. Good to see it being addressed!

Love the change with the vending-only items...thank you!