The Economy of Coin from Pex.

In response to all the recent outrage about the 6/22 coin nerf, Pex found it necessary to make a post about the reasoning behind the nerf to fan down the flames a little bit.
So with out further ado, here is the post over at the Free Realms message boards...


Hey there, everyone.
My apologies for the delay in getting back to you on this topic. We know that the sell-back prices and coin drop rates in battles is on a lot of people's minds.
The very basic answer to 'why' we made these changes is that the coin drops coupled with high sell-back prices were generating far more coin in the game than ever anticipated. On our side of the spreadsheet there was just a huge amount of coin in the world. A lot of it wasn't getting spent, just piling up and reducing the value. Free Realms doesn't have a lot of coin 'sinks' to remove this cash from the game. Pet upkeep and health potions are probably the most popular, but in the long run, those are fairly minor compared to the amount of in-game cash that can be earned.
The cuts made recently were drastic, but something we felt was needed to stem the flow of coin into the game and reduce the effect it would have on the economy. Changes are often needed when it comes to in-game economies and we will increase or reduce sell and drop rates as needed.
Someone (I think it was Stefferweffer) asked about how new players will be able to afford post-20 armor and weapons for each character. Excellent question. We will keep an eye on the numbers and see if we need to correct them in the opposite direction. We will also keep going through items and upkeep costs and tweak those as needed. Reducing the flow of coin into the game was just one step. We will take everything into account and find a good balance.
The biggest issue with these changes was lack of communication. We didn't accurately (or at all) detail out the changes that were being added to the game. We won't always explain why we do things, but something like this should at least be announced either in the update notes or on the forums. For those of you coming from some of our other titles, you're used to very, very long update notes. We don't intend to list every change (positive or negative) in our update notes, but big-ticket items like this should definately be included and that was our mistake for not doing so.

As always, we welcome your feedback, but remember to keep it constructive, polite and on-topic.


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