How did Photon Drops come to replace meseta as currency?

StarLord

StarLord

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Why are Photon Drops used in lieu of meseta for trade deals on Ephinea? Is it because meseta is so plentiful, and things rarely cost much meseta in the shops?

Is this phenomenon specific to Ephinea, or did it happen on Sega servers as well? I never reached endgame on Gamecube (and Dreamcast was rife with hacked items/money) so I don't know the history behind this transition.

It just seems like money would be the currency, and Photon Drops should have a meseta-to-PD conversion rate established by the community -- unless meseta is so worthless in comparison to the PD.

PD has uses, correct? It's used for something besides currency or we would simply use meseta, right?
 
meseta is basically fuel for charge weapons. has very little use otherwise. You will get so much meseta that buying out all 3 shops would barely make a dent. PD's are in constant demand though, due to ES (Srank) weapon specials and adding % to weapons.
 
The going rate seems to be 500k Meseta for 1 PD.

I suppose if PD's could be bought in shops with Meseta it would then have a use. In my mind I'd have set the shop price at 999,999 Meseta per PD. I use 999,999 since that is the max a player could hold in the official release. How that would effect the economy, I do not know. Would it make PDs more common than they are now? Maybe.

Interesting this topic shows up now since I just watched these videos yesterday thinking about PSO.


 
It is a good question to ask why PD's are used for trade instead of meseta. As a veteran I have a good feeling why and knowing at least a few things about economics I can try to explain since it is not so obvious if you are just starting out in PSO.

First and foremost as some have already pointed out. Meseta does not really have a big use besides being ammo for charge weapons and buying di/trimates and di/trifluids. So the value of meseta is pretty low because of this already.

The second argument I can come up with is that meseta, compared to PD's, is not very scarce. Scarcity matters in terms of what is valuable and what is not. Everyone with at least a basic understanding of economics know this.

Minsc said:
I suppose if PD's could be bought in shops with Meseta it would then have a use. In my mind I'd have set the shop price at 999,999 Meseta per PD. I use 999,999 since that is the max a player could hold in the official release. How that would effect the economy, I do not know. Would it make PDs more common than they are now? Maybe.
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First of all, it could have a big effect on a lot of the meta-game. Charge weapons are actually the weapons to go and even the strongest non-sacrificial weapons have a hard time dealing as much damage as say charge vulcans. Maybe zerk and spirit will become more common but I don't know. The prices of items will rise enormously in terms of PD cost since PDs will become less scarce which would mean a huge inflation. Meseta would become more scarce and more valuable as well and s-rank weapons would be way easier to get (well, at least the added special). Weapon sphering would get out of control though. A lot of people will also just pick up everything from the ground to just sell to vendors ingame for more meseta and buy more PDs (this would be terrible in my view because this means the focus of the game would shift from hunting rares to gathering items to sell for meseta) and I hate slow games.

I might have missed something but I might add it later on. Curious where this topic leads to though.
 
The problem is that Sega doesn't allow you to buy anything useful with Meseta, so there's no reason to trade good items for a worthless currency. Once you've bought Charge weapons from the shop, you only need a little Meseta here and there to buy mates and fluids, and that's it. Meseta was a complete joke on Dreamcast, because you could sell a single weapon for 400K.

Sega fixed this in Gamecube and made Meseta much harder to get, but they still didn't create any new Meseta sinks, so although it took a lot longer to get a stack of 999K, there wasn't any real reason to do so. GC also introduced Photon Drops, and since Paganini offers better services than the shop, people started using PDs as a currency in trades, instead of Meseta. Even so, unless you want to add % to your weapons, buy a Photon Booster, or add a special to an S-Rank, Paganini can also be kind of useless, so some people won't accept PDs, thus reducing PSO's economy to a bartering system.
 
From all the online games I've ever played the only ones that have ever managed to maintain the in-game currency as the actual medium for business have been Asian games, specifically South Korean ones (see: Maplestory, DFO, Flyff, etc.). What they all have in common is the ability to make cash transactions to gain some sort of competitive edge over others. That being said, the developers in F2P models have to maintain a more active role in balancing the economy and can do so because the product is never 'finished', just continually patched.

Because PSO is a game played on private servers now and is not in active development, the community itself is more directly in charge of the economy. If the original currency has limited uses it will transition to the next most valuable thing, here PDs. Even that has its limits so it transitions to the barter system like Ives illustrated above. So this combined with the knowledge that:
(Yuji) Naka was also more interested in working on new projects instead of continuously updating the same game for years, and doubted Sonic Team would be able to keep the game interesting.[11] The team therefore adopted Diablo as their main inspiration, determined to outclass it.
means that PSO is always going to be similar to D2, and if you've ever played that relic, you know that gold is worthless and people only want high runes, runewords, uniques, charms, crafted items and so on. Kinda how the community in PSO desires mainly ubers, high hit weapons (especially on sacrificial weapons), rare units and so on. It's typically something that occurs in every online game, is what I'm trying to say — the in-game currency becoming outclassed by what's actually needed for players to game at the highest levels.
 
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StevieWonderDownUnder said:
Usefulness aside, photon drops are rarer. So, they condense more value in a smaller place.

Can you imagine buying a Psycho Wand with 150 million meseta, and having to drop trade 999999 meseta 150 times? :eek:
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I'm sure someone would be crazy enough to do that. It'd be quite the sight!
 
StevieWonderDownUnder said:
Usefulness aside, photon drops are rarer. So, they condense more value in a smaller place.

Can you imagine buying a Psycho Wand with 150 million meseta, and having to drop trade 999999 meseta 150 times? :eek:
Click to expand...

Not to mention before Ephinea introduced the 1 billion bank limit + 32 character slot per account all banks were restricted to 1 million and accounts had 4 character slots only (at least for PSOBB, I know PSOPC had a lot more slots and unsure of GC). The Shared bank was a Schthack thing too, was never on original servers (using alt accounts or trusted friends to xfer items across the same account was an arduous and long process).

So an account used to only be able to hold 8 million (1 each bank + 1 each character) which would mean you'd need 19 accounts to fill 150 million meseta. And on Ephinea before the Billion bank limit but with 32 Slots, the Max was 65 Million per account.
 
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I bought my first Red Ring with PD's I got from selling players Meseta. Don't put For-Profit Rapacious Middle-Men like me out of business desu.
 
@Shichimiya Cool. In order to prevent hyperinflation I'll be happy to take peoples excess Meseta and dispose of it. :rolleyes:

Something I'm curious of now is the PD:time rate. Want help leveling or grinding loot? No problem. For a mere 10 PDs/hour my time can be yours.
 
Spuz said:
Not to mention before Ephinea introduced the 1 billion bank limit + 32 character slot per account all banks were restricted to 1 million and accounts had 4 character slots only (at least for PSOBB, I know PSOPC had a lot more slots and unsure of GC). The Shared bank was a Schthack thing too, was never on original servers (using alt accounts or trusted friends to xfer items across the same account was an arduous and long process).

So an account used to only be able to hold 8 million (1 each bank + 1 each character) which would mean you'd need 19 accounts to fill 150 million meseta. And on Ephinea before the Billion bank limit but with 32 Slots, the Max was 65 Million per account.
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I played on game cube back in the day never got to play online but offline the limit was 1m per char 4 chars per memory card know nothing of its online
 
I don't remember what it was called, but there was a program that allowed you to save backup copies of your memory cards to your PC. Doing this allowed you to duplicate items via transfering it to a character... backing up the card. trasftering everything back. then when you reloaded the card the items were there again. Unlimited PD/meseta this way. Also unlimited character slots, since you could have multiple different saves, each with different characters and just load the one you wanted to use. Was a decent way to not start from scratch when your save file became corrupted (happen to me several times.. which is why I bougth the backup program to begin with) I think might have actually been a gameshark product.
 
I'm reminded of some lost game mechanics from previous versions of PSO. Us snobs here at Ephinea would never stand for them.

- In the GameCube/Xbox versions, when you died and revived at the medical room all the Meseta in your inventory was taken as payment.

- In the Dreamcast versions, when you died and went back to the medic your character meseta and equiped weapon were left at your place of death.
 
hooty said:
And to elaborate further if you had 2 memory cards you could have 7 active characters giving a total of 7mil in all banks and 1400 item slots total in all those banks. (You had to have an open slot on the second memory card to be able to transfer your character.)
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No, each memory card holds 4 regular characters and 3 temporary characters for transfer from other memory cards. If you have two cards, you can have 8 regular characters, not 7.

GC also has a common bank now, anyway, so splitscreen is no longer needed to transfer items between characters on the same memory card. ;)
 
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