For over a week now, users both on SOE's official Free Realms forum and our
Free Realms Insider forum have been crying "foul" over the extreme drop in resale values and coin drop rates in FreeRealms and their omission from the update notes.
Pex has posted the official Sony response, which goes as follows. Though most of you will still not agree with the policy shift, there is a possibility of a re-adjustment. Pex's statement may also help us to understanding the building of a "webconomy" in a new game like Free Realms.
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.
Free Realms Insider
It's kinda sad how they won't be reverting it now :I
The whole thing doesn't make sense. Why make the game so hard it is virtually unplayable? I challenge someone from SOE to start a new account and try to get up to level 20 in combat and then earn 12,000 coins!
Sorry, but I'm really disappointed here. At least they gave you a straight answer, which was good!