I don't know much about keeping the economy strong, just look at the roller-coaster that is pet prices. Can't sell a visible bird for 1k can't sell it for 1g. Can't sell a faelora at 2k, can't sell it for 1g.

I think the biggest help to stabilize any and all of the economies is getting more users to stay longer. The demand is not constant so there is no real stabilization. At some point the older players are going to have everything they need more or less, and stop buying things for diamonds outside of monthy updates and there will be just new users trying to make a quick buck overpricing to get stables and such then lower outrageously when they get discouraged by so few people with the disposable income willing to buy their real money items.

BUT, that is just how I personally see it.

That does seem pretty valid. I feel like after the game's been around for a while, enough people will have extra/unneeded pets with like 3 to 5 visible genes eventually over time and those will just circulate aroundfor quite cheap. With the current game mechanics, buying/selling pets w/ diff mutations doens't seem like it'll really drive/sustain an economy in the long run.

I'm kind of wondering what goals there are at endgame (post main storyline I guess) whenever that occurs. I mean, getting pets with the right mutations/colors will take a while but as more and more ppl have pets with more mutations circulating, that won't be a very hard goal in the end.

A lot of games keep people there with especially rare stuff...like maybe super rare avatar items/weapons. I don't know how people would like this but I think having extremely rare/hard to get species might give users more...unique/hard to get goals? Not sure.

Honestly, what I'm really seeing here is cash items = cheap in gold, but Diamonds themselves are allowed to be greatly exaggerated in price because there's certain things you can only get with Diamonds. Well yeah. That's the point? And with there being quite a few users with surplus putting them up in the exchange, I still don't quite understand the 5k+ gold per single Diamond.

Just to be practical here, yeah gold is easy to come by. Outside of Missions, though, it takes a long time to build that kind of money. And what's more is making that kind of gold with Missions requires several hours of waiting. Now let's level that out to $5 (that's 625 Diamonds with the current sale; it costs more outside of sales). Now if one were to calculate $5 worth of Diamonds at the current seller's exchange rate, that would equal to roughly 3.125 million gold. What takes someone a little less than an hour to make at a job now becomes a steady month worth of collecting, selling, hoarding, and doing missions for the average player.

That is just insane.

Now I'm not saying the exchange rate should be dropped so low that they should be practically free. Nor am I saying that buyers shouldn't have to work to get the money to afford the Diamonds. Buyers should expect to pay a little more for the Diamonds than they would for an item bought with Diamonds. I just feel that quintupling the amount is ridiculous. My biggest concern at this point is finding a medium. What's acceptable, what isn't, should items be increased in value? How do we fix this?

It's very hard to say "this is how it can be fixed."

Sure, current sellers can agree on a price to stay around for the diamond, but there will always be undercutting and that runs the risk of going TOO low in the long run.

The idea of people being able to say "You're over pricing that" with any sort of authority is a little cocky as well. :< It's very difficult unless a majority works together to keep something stabilized.

The thing is, games need people who pay cash to keep them running and if the diamond buyers deem that the price of diamonds aren't worth enough to continue buying, then the game has a problem with funding in the end. I'm not a diamond buyer myself either.

I have been offering to buy diamonds from between 220 gold to 500 gold per diamond and sometimes people take me up on that. Now, would I say I need diamonds to play this game? Hardly, there's not much in the diamond shop that you can't actually get from other means in the game. I feel like diamonds are actually more important to most people right now only because we have no other way of getting genetic testing kits/scanners. Once 3rd region is out, I'm not sure what there is in the diamond shop I'd actually want anymore.

Cash-features are mostly common in top-tier games that have been there awhile to accumulate an economy, a mature and reasonably sized player base, and more game features to expand on. Top-tier games at that point can exploit having items that are worth buying to give a reasonable advantage to people who spend cash currency, because at that point they have a safe player base to fall on that can be relied on to show loyal spending over time along with new players coming in to potentially replace those who don't use the cash currency.

It depends on the game's mechanics and features what's worthy of buying in the shop, like how permanent kits and scanners can pay off in the long run for players who stay for months/years. There's also clothes, since some people are superficial in fashion too lol.

Depends on game's aims in actuality, and how it decides to advance. Who knows, what if the new scanners are too expensive in the long run? At least there's some sort of guarantee that wise players would buy diamond scanners or kits lol.

I personally don't like pay2play or pay2win games, and sylestia's fairly young, so it doesn't necessarily have to fall into those two categories. And while I'm at it, it would be somewhat unfair if at the very beginning, one can buy themselves to endgame or cap goals (which most top-tier game companies make of their games once they open it), so I'm happy that for now, getting to the highest levels of what people wish to achieve as far as the game is capped is accessible without diamonds.

I'm not advocating for pay 2 win at all. I'm just saying if most things in cash shop are not that difficult to find outside of it, it makes it so there's less incentive to get stuff from it? I think exclusive costumes/outfits are definitely nice. Things that don't really affect your progression in the game. Okay, I guess if they did something like special outfits that increased drop rates in general by like 1% I don't think people would complain about not having that (I don't think I'd really care).