Dear Shaiya players,

We have been doing a lot since we took over Shaiya 6 months ago, such as sorting the client freezes, server stability, dozens of community requests or bug-fixing, more than ten content updates, including new maps, or unifying all the different servers into a single one to name some.

Avg. Daily Active Users (vs previous month)

The game population has been growing steadily since then, an amazing sign for us to believe we are going in the right direction, and we are grateful to have the opportunity to take care of Shaiya and its loyal community; however, with this growth coming from returning and new users, an inherited concern has been growing in terms of prioritization.

If you have the chance to be with us in Discord, you will probably know that we love chatting with the community, and one of the topics constantly brought up, is how difficult the experience is for a new player due to the in-game prices, for which we completely agree.

Since we took over, and especially since the final unification, we have been closely monitoring the game economy, we decided to apply very important decisions coming into place with today’s patch, and we wanted to give you some background to those.

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Share of Gold per User by Account Age

Players that play for a longer period of time, have an obviously higher amount of gold, with a small and over-time improvement which we can safely assume is related to the value of items they obtain or their game knowledge. No interesting surprises. Maybe something to optimize but nothing crazy or unhealthy. The craziness arrives when we start comparing those New with Old Players.

Share of Gold per User vs Migrated Accounts

To put the above in words, migrated accounts own more than 90% of the entire game gold used for trading items between players.

It doesn’t mean New Players can’t equip themselves by their own means as farming and selling, but they will always be a secondary type of player versus those with such amounts of gold having a very hard time progressing, especially towards the end-game, regardless of any band-aid we try to apply as reducing items prices or even giveaways – purchasing power from migrating accounts will always sunset it.

A New Player must farm for over five years to reach the same purchasing power as a migrated account, which is extremely unhealthy for the game since we all rely on New Players staying, and this is a clear hint of something else going wrong. The story doesn’t end here! We still need to dive into the sewers!

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Over the last months, we made some questionable decisions for which we answered with vague responses as to why we made some items non-stackable, non-tradeable, the Guild Storage changes, or some sporadic Auction House closures. This wasn’t because we didn’t want to tell you, but because we simply couldn’t.

We were detecting certain vulnerabilities abused by some malicious actors to their own benefit, scamming some players, and most importantly, heavily affecting the game economy and the main reason for some prices skyrocketing, and any public information on our actions could raise concerns within those Sewers’ dwellers, complicate our monitoring efforts and ultimately harm the game economy even more.

To put it in a very plain way; for many years, gold and certain items were being duplicated and sold for real money. This is also the main reason for the difference in gold between old and new users – as a reference, a comparison with those accounts flagged as offenders.

Share of Gold per User on each Categorization

As a reference for the magnitude of this, the top 15 accounts with the most Gold in-game (all of them banned today), had more than the other 985 combined (many of them also banned). More than 50% of the 1000 richest accounts in-game, were directly involved in exploiting game vulnerabilities.

Those vulnerabilities have been fixed or mitigated over time, and only gold remained, which is the last thing to be addressed with today’s Economy Update 1.0 – Rest assured that those monitored offenders have been permanently banned from the game, including some of their main accounts.

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First things first – this is not an easy decision to take, but a necessary one to secure the experience of those New Players. They are the game’s future, and it is our responsibility as a company and community to take care of them.

Purchase Power Disparity Reduction

Gold amounts went so far, that it takes ~5 years for a New Player to catch up in terms of purchase power against the average gold in an inactive migrated account. This is simply insane and creates a constant and unfixable loop of powerful and scarce items being always unachievable by New Players. Regardless of what we do, it’s an open economy, and that gold will always be there.

To fix this, we will remove 90% of the total gold inside the game, and to be clear, you will NOT lose economic power. All the players will be affected by the same, and prices will be adjusted accordingly. If you are the poorest player, you will still be the poorest one – if you are the richest, you will still be the richest, and item prices will adjust accordingly. The richest player will still be able to have the upper hand against the poorest.

⚠️ You will see a 90% reduction in your inventory’s gold, and Gold Bars will have a 90% lower selling price. Again, you won’t lose anything – the richest will remain the richest.

🎯 What we will achieve with this, is a direct reduction in the time New Players need to catch up against an inactive migrated account. We expect this number to go from ~5 years to between 6 and 12 months. If you are an active migrated account, you will still be at an advantage if you put in the same effort. Gold and drops in-game will gain value drastically.

Maximum Gold Cap Removal

You can now store an almost infinite amount of Gold in your character(s). There is still a limitation, but it is so big that not even all the current gold in-game could fill it.

🎯 Necessary to be able to remove the Gold Bars. It’s also a quality-of-life improvement.

💡 You can buy and sell items for much higher gold quantities now.

Gold Bars Deactivation

You won’t be able to purchase or trade Gold Bars anymore, only exchange them for gold. Start exchanging them as soon as possible – they will be removed from the game.

🎯 With the Gold Cap increase, Gold Bars will lose their meaning. The offenders also exploited them, and we are minimizing controlling points by their removal.

New currencies: Gold, Silver, and Copper coins

We are replacing the current Gold currency by a split into three different ones; Gold, Silver, and Copper. Its value will be essentially the same, but together with this new format more appealing for New Players, we are also integrating new monitoring measures.

🎯 Improve the User Experience while interacting with the game currency.

💡 For the game Veterans, We calculated 1 Gold Coin to be equal to the previously known “1B”. Taking into account the Purchase Power Disparity Reduction, 1B will be 1000 Silver Coins.

💡 You can make Transactions or Sell items in the board/own shop for more than 1000 new Gold Coins.

Security-related Changes

• The Auction House will remain closed until the Economy Update 2.0.
• A delay has been added to the Personal and Guild Warehouses item withdrawals and insertions.
• A delay has been added while selling Gold Bars.
• You won’t be able to drop items to the ground anymore.
• Personal Shops will be ONLY available in Boltagate.

And many more that we can’t publicly say.

🎯 All those systems had long-term vulnerabilities being exploited and had to be addressed. Some of them come from even early episodes and the game’s fundamental coding.

Banhammer applied.

Dozens of accounts were monitored in the last months and permanently banned today without prior warning, including the main accounts. We also applied temporary bans to certain accounts that were actively involved in buying gold or acting as small-size intermediaries with their main accounts.

⚠️Real Money Transactions are not allowed. We applied temporary bans, or simply turned a blind eye to small offenders. Moving forward, if we detect your account being involved in RMT, you could face gold removals (or items if you already spent them), temporary blocks, or even permanent ones.

Known Issues

• You won’t be able to increase your probabilities in the Chaotic Square; however, on the other hand, you will now see the probabilities of each of them, without having to add gold.

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Another update will follow shortly after, with more changes in the same direction.

Auction House Opening and Fees

The Auction House will remain closed for some more days/weeks until the Economy Update 1.0 settles down and we all get used to the new currencies, the disparity reduction, and the new dynamics brought by both. Once open, Expect Optimizations to both the Fees and Bidding times.

🎯 Organic gold generation and sinking have to be optimized. Players still receive more gold than they spend, and that balance has to be stable to secure a long-term future.

Player’s Shop fees

Personal Players’ Shops will have a 5% Fee. One-to-one trading will remain feeless.

🎯 Same goal as with the Auction House, organic gold generation and sinking have to be optimized. Players still receive more gold than they spend, and that balance has to be stable to secure a long-term future.

Gold Bars Removal

Together with the Economy Update 2.0, Gold Bars will be removed from the game. It’s an exploited vulnerability, and their functionality won’t longer be necessary with the Cap Increase.

⚠️ You have been warned; exchange them as soon as possible.

🎯 With the Gold Cap increase, Gold Bars will lose their meaning. The offenders also exploited them, and we are minimizing controlling points by their removal.

Gold Sinkers

As a reminder, gold accumulation in the accounts, as they age, is still slowly increasing. This is a sign that we still have an optimization problem – users get more gold than they need, ultimately generating, in the long run, and on a much smaller scale, the same difference between old and new players.

Share of Gold per User by Account Age

⚠️ Moving forward, we will introduce and adjust current gold sinking mechanics in-game, starting with the Auction House and the Players’ Shop. There will be more adjustments and new sinkers coming to balance this out.

Tokens: Silver, Gold Release, and Vendors Update

With the Economy Update 2.0, we will also include higher probability crates for the Silver and Gold tokens, and update the offering of items on their vendors.

🎯 Our goal with this system, is to have an alternative way for players, especially new ones, to have at their disposal basic consumables, equipment, and crafting materials independently from the user-based open economy, making sure we have a suitable way of providing users with the most necessary items.

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As usual, if you have any questions or feedback, we are approachable via Discord.

Sincerely,

🕹️❤️ Fawkes’ Team