EDIT: Changed 25% to 20% for collectibles and trinkets

Lets talk about the history of net worth, so you can better understand where we're going back to.

Before the market...

Net worth used to be based solely on internal values that us developers set. It was a bit silly, because some items would change enough that it didn't make sense.

But the issue is, we mistakenly tied the TRADE value and MARKET value of an item to net worth to fix this, which just doesn't always reflect reality in a system like this.

During the market...

Now, we tied net worth to what people were willing to pay. In a LOT of ways, this system makes sense. Unfortunately though as we'd learn over time, because of the unique setup of our game, it's too easy to abuse, causing hurt and confusion where there shouldn't have been any.

People would trade with friends or themselves on alts to increase the trade value of something to artificially inflate the value. Anyone who's been doing the market long term knows how common this was, and still is.

Even in the BEST case scenario, someone might just use their wealth to heavily and repeatedly over-pay for something they own a lot of to inflate the value, even though it's TECHNICALLY legit value because real people are being paid, it is temporary and causes massive swings and fluctuations that hurt newer players and help the people in charge of those items.

Think of little timmy who is grinding normally, and selling his babies to some random guy on the market who is paying more and more for seemingly no reason. For months, little timmy is getting richer and richer in both coins, and the value of the babies he's farming.

Suddenly, the person buying babies gets banned for unrelated reasons and NO ONE is paying even close to the same for those babies anymore. Now, little timmy lost his sole income AND the value of the babies he has is dropping dramatically so he's losing his "net worth", all because of one player manipulating the price of something.

Now, you've all been little timmy at one time or another, and some of these marketers purposely are pumping and dumping items on your backs. You'll spend your days grinding and see your net worth jump and little, then dump massively shortly after, and that feels like shit.

Naturally, you'll go into DMC and complain about the developers "ruining the item prices", not understanding that we're simply updating item values with a semi-hidden backend formula to try and balance out the average prices over time while factoring out abuse where we CAN.

Well this just isn't feasible long term and the OLD net worth system, while silly sometimes when the net worth value is 4x lower or higher than what people trade for, caused a lot less confusion and pain. So we're going back... mostly.

In PP18, we talked about our new item categories, so we'll use them here to explain things.

If the item is any of the following:

• Sellable
• Equipment
• Buff
• Debuff
• Lootbox

The value for your NET WORTH will be what we internally set the value to, which will VERY rarely change. This will be a "steady" net worth like it used to be.

If the item is any of the following:

• Collectible
• Trinket

The value for your NET WORTH will be 20% of the average market value. This does also include us unlocking the values of things such as blobs and keys, which will be 20% of their market value instead of capped at 5,000,000,000.

If the item is a PACK, the value will be the total value of the net worth of the coins and items included in the packs. This might somewhat change as values change, so it's slightly less steady than the default item categories. We also, unrelated to this, plan to add many more packs this year as they now will support all currency reward types, not just items.

The /item command will now also show both the net worth value and the market value an item gives, for full transparency to the end user.

I'll be frank, your net worth WILL tank in value, no matter who you are. All numbers across ALL player are going to be crunched much lower, after years of fake-flation.

IMPORTANT REMINDER

While seeing lower numbers is lame, you are losing ZERO actual value to your account.

This is an equal squish across all net worth, everyone is on the same playing field with the exception of things held that fall under collectible and trinket categories.

This allows us to finally get the market back to being for TRADING and not for enriching yourself via abusing a system meant for trading.

You were never going to get all the MARKET VALUE for all your items. The second people start selling them for value, the value goes down and everyone else loses value. Your net worth is high due to abuse and mis-use, not because you actually own that net worth.

Again, I understand this is LAME, but it's also necessary for long term health of the game. We haven't gotten to be a 7 year long live service game by not making drastic changes when needed, as our meme veteran's know.

Taxes

Taxes will continue being based on the MARKET value of items. But now that most items are losing a lot of net worth value, a lot of traders who are abusing the system have less incentive to do so, and so the market value of items will go down to reasonable numbers for buyers, which results in less tax over time.

We want to add content to this bot for years to come, but this fake-flation generated by market traders is a hindrance to us doing that. This gives us now more breathing room to add more items and features for people to interact with without worrying about what the market might do to people's "value".

Within the next month at the latest, but it's actively in development alongside some other changes we want to get out sooner than later.