Inflation: A Year in Review

This section will show you HOW inflated we are at this point, and it's... bad.

The following chart takes data from January last year, to a few days ago. It also shows the projection to January next year if we don't make any changes to curb inflation at it's current rate.

| | January 2021 | January 2022 | Percent Change | January 2023 (Projected) | |------------------------ |-------------------- |-------------------- |---------------- |-------------------------- | | User Count | 13,894,057 | 27,279,058 | +96.3% | 53,548,790 | | Coins | 343,945,182,718 | 12,916,050,206,137 | +3,655% | 484,997,685,240,440 | | Item Quantity | 1,341,275,232 | 83,869,771,624 | +6,153% | 5,244,376,819,648 | | Item Value | 11,312,514,807,662 | 65,418,604,666,044 | +478% | 378,119,534,969,730 | | Average Value Per User | ⏣ 838,953 | ⏣ 2,871,604 | +242% | ⏣ 9,820,885 | | Prestiges | 130,807 (0.94%) | 484,933 (1.78%) | +270% | 1,794,252 |

Some things on here look scary, but they're more reactionary to inflation than the cause. For example, more people are prestiging because it (for a while) became easier to do so as inflation happened. The item value doesn't scale with the item quantity because we've successfully reduced the net value of lots of items. This chart is bad, don't get me wrong, but this is more than salvageable.

From this chart you can take away a few key things:

• Coin growth is not growing even close to the rate users are growing, so this isn't just because more users are joining the economy
• The biggest issues we have are number of items being generated and amount of coins being generated

We've already had plenty of people asking why this needs to be fixed, or why it's even an issue. That's a fair question!

There are two major reasons this needs addressed and fixed. First, the sliding scale of the rich.

It's no secret, most people play this game to get rich. They want to gamble, grind, trade, right their way to the top. But what does being rich mean? Back in the day, being rich meant it was a flex to buy a pepe coin. In this day in age, you're considered poor if you don't have 50+. The more inflation occurs, the harder it is to truly get "rich". As people gain coins easier, everyone achieves what previously only rich people achieved. The new meaning of rich is an even higher goal. This continuously slides upwards at a fast rate. At this stage, we can either let this be or let there be a major gap between the new players and the medium-oldest players which prevents new users from finding their foothold within the bot and enjoying it. OR we can increase the base pay for basically everything so people just starting don't feel it's hopeless to be a "rich" player someday, which in turn fuels inflation more. Choosing between a dwindling player base and infinitely scaling inflation is not ideal.

Secondly, the buying power of a coin. While similar to the first point, the more things get inflated, the more worthless your coins truly are. It's no secret that at writing this blog, banknotes are becoming less and less valuable. This is two-fold; partially because more and more are being generated and hoarded each day, and partially because 25k isn't a lot of bank space when you can make 25k in like 3 minutes of playing the game. The more things inflate, the more worthless things like this get. But if we buff it to be more meaningful too many times, it just adds to inflation. The short of it is, 1 coin now is worth about 3600% less than it was a year ago, and it's getting worse. This makes your grinding feel more and more pointless.

Both of these together can keep inflating to a point where a wipe is inevitable. Players will continue to feel like their grind is pointless and never going to end, they'll never get "rich enough". People will drop off, new items will have starting prices in the billions, it will all mean so very little. It's wipe time. Therefore to avoid a wipe, we need to fix the root of the issues, and that's exactly what I plan on doing over the next few months.

There are a few ways to skin this cat, and none of them are fun in the short term, but they'll make everything much more fun and worthwhile in the long run. So here's an outline of our plan, and what to expect in the next few months of minor updates until the rewrite.

Stage One: Not stonks

The first step will be to slowly over the matter of a few weeks or months, we will decrease the payout of most sources of both coins and items. It won't be a sudden shock of lower values, but over time things will slowly start to shrink. This will allow us to start controlling where we want the economy to land after these stages are finished.

Stage Two: The Awkward Period

This part of deflation will be... hard. Once people have started earning less and less coins, a lot of people will feel like everything is too expensive for them to afford. Prestige won't be worth the price, shop items will once again be considered expensive, omega will be all but unheard of. But to be able to continue playing, people will need to keep spending money. By now, inflation should be slowing down majorly, but things are less fun during this stage.

We're aware that there will be people who quit during this stage. That's inevitable, and hopefully, once the process is done, they'll want to come back. This is normal, this is okay. We expect this, and it's not the end of the world. A necessary evil in the long term longevity and health of the economy.

Stage Three: Recouperation

Once we've reached a peak of the awkward period, we'll start balancing things out. We'll lower the cost of things such as shop items, prestige, etc to be closer to what people are now earning from grinding and gambling. The trick here to prevent this from happening again, however, is we'll lower it close but not quite to the level of what people are earning. It'll more closely resemble a year or two ago, where there were plenty of ways to earn and do things, BUT it was also a flex to be rich and continue to be rich. During this stage, things will stop feeling bad and people will stop being too tight on money. If all goes well, inflation is not only reversed a bit but almost certainly stopped for a long while. We've learned a lot over the last 5 years, and the updates after this stage will be a huge mixture of what we've learned to keep this currency balanced and fun.

These three stages will happen not all at once, it will likely be a period of 3-4 months. We want to avoid shocking the system and introducing it all slowly and carefully.

No, this is just the overall biggest picture plan. We'll be making smaller changes to other systems to better handle inflation. We have directly developed tools to give us regular updates on how inflation is going and what direction things are trending in, and if something isn't working, we aren't afraid to backtrack. But the court of public opinion won't sway us, the numbers will.

While I get that this all might sound intimidating or like it won't work, we've put a lot of thought and planning into this over the past year. Additionally, if you don't like being in any of the awkward periods of this transition to deflate the economy, we get it! Take a break, try the bot again in a few short months once this is under control. You'll come back and all the things you love will still be here, just with coins that are worth more.

Thank you for the great year, now lets keep expanding on all our great systems and improving the health of the economy to bring this year into the best the bot's ever had.