The precarious vault that is mu

jetsina

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There is quite a lot of talk at the moment surrounding the values of good unl items in the game, plus the effects of adding more, or trying to shift the economy more towards (L).
This has got me thinking a little about the hidden investments that players have in tt terms, but are very real to them in perceived value/ what they paid out for real.

Currently, we not only have the mu contained within actual items in game, but also quite a lot in the perceived value of maybe millions of tokens, as yet unredeemed. How would being able to redeem these at the vendor affect players' estimations of the values of what they have tied up, and how much would it reduce the value of already existing items?
That is part one!
Part two is about other mus, some of which may be more realistically achievable than others, depending on circumstances. By this I mean mainly the various deeds and shares that are around, owned collectively by maybe thousands of us as CLDTs etc. or individually, such as LAs, hangers, shops, estates, motherships and the finders. Again, the mus are far far higher than the tt values, and are not accounted for anywhere officially as far as I can tell, but they exist as perceived and also real value to the seller if sold.
These values may fluctuate, just as share values do, but how much do we conservatively own altogether?
That is part two!
Part three is skills and their expression either as unconverted skill counts, the mu of the basic esi chips, and the mus of various specific skills converted through esis. MA takes a cut when we use esis, but aside from past events where people have chipped out to enter lower categories, I assume specific skills are more valuable than the blank esis, but often by not a great deal.
Do players across the board assume an avatar worth from skills, or do highly skilled players accept that they probably wouldn't be able to sell much to the current markets at speed, unlike a good item at a maybe reduced price or CLDTs etc, also depending on the price?

Together, we get a perceived value of what individual avatars hold. How many are in the >1 million peds of mu bracket, even without counting the actual tt of all their stocks? Let's not forget that many items and LAs etc. are in the >50k peds range, some well over 100k peds.
How many players have these sums of considerable assets that require this universe to continue to be economically viable? Would they even invest together in some way to save/change a failing/ailing universe if they could?

These are economy and economic questions that I accept my have a wide range of honest answers, but what is our ballpark?
Do we have, as a starting point, more or fewer than 50 players with perceived values of >1 million peds each that they would wish to protect? Do have more or fewer than 100 such players?
What is the spread of the 'tail' as we move down? How many have >500k-1 mil perceived peds in EU?

(I even hope this discussion can have relevance for the discussion on changes to events such as mayhems, whether or not MA is active about communicating their own thoughts. Maybe the playerbase info can help guide them, however.)
 
A short addendum to my thoughts:
MA apparently currently has a market cap of about 62 mil SEK, or 5.4 mil euro.
The half of Caly that players bought way back for 6 mil euros has a current internal value of 3.6x this (at 36 peds for a CLDT), so 21.6 million euros.
- and this is just the half of the planet that is free-float!
That is just one of the fields in my opening post about stuff with virtually no tt value officially, but high ped market values. It also pays out ped dividends that can maybe considererd reasonable, even at the current market value - and also for the other half of the ownership.

However, CLDT owners do not even have a share in the company itself as it stands. If something goes 'wrong' in the future, how many people would be willing to try and save things due to this 'internal position' - and how much would it cost/ people be prepared to pay to 'take control' of the servers and decision-making (and associated operating know-how)?

Is the EU economy actually much much bigger than in purely tt terms, that would make people maybe not keen to deposit peds, but they would want to save the universe and return it to functionality? Those thoughts haven't even considered what (still independent) pps have as well, nor land owners and other assets of the top 100?, 200?, 300? players?
 
The future of mayhems thread continues, mostly along the lines of what to do about the current tokens, let alone the future of the actual format.
In effect, this is about turning one perceived mu into various other forms that are usable and may affect the mus of items already used in our economy.

Given that the original expectation was to grind hard, get enough mtokens for a good pull, and the rare would come at some point for at least a one-rare pull, we are in quite a pickle.
Then there'd be the point about the vendor stocks, and maybe not having the best items available all the time, but at least something decent that could be used by the player or sold on at maybe slow value degradation similar to everything that continues to drop as unl, such as rings.

However, that didn't happen, and we already had a log jam even before the two RMs. I assume only MA knows the true amount of unconsumed tokens out there, but it is likely to be a huge expectation of turning inactive, merely perceived mu (valued in the mind as what it 'cost' to grind them) into active mu on something.

It surely has to be clear that MA won't credit the 'cost' from years of mayhems at the same level as the tons they allowed to enter the system via RMs. That's many many unhappy people already if MA don't separate the two token types, which I assume is actually still possible for unused ones, although it may be a lengthy process in the database to crawl through the two RM datasets. At least it's not worse than that I think.

But MA have never really cared about mu, people say. Is that really true, when so much of the economy and motivation runs on mu from a player perspective? That is what needs balance and longevity, and is not purely decided by the players on the market, as MA must well know.

As a slight aside, are UE shares still dropping? Do the ones in game now represent 1% ownership of all of the MA platform once UE5 goes live?
 
I got ones even from very low mobs on the lesser planets, so I assume they can drop from anything. I hadn't had one in a while, though. Thanks Graden for the info. Yes, I meant tokens ofc, as they haven't been converted yet.
 
How did those new L items even get that "perceived" MU?

No sooner did I see a new L weapon hit the calytrade than someone said oh it's got 1,250,000 shots so I want 3000 peds. It's a limited item for AF sakes. What did those calculations set you back, like 20 cents of slave labour? Did you pick some arbitrary number out of a hat and figure every shot must have a value? I mean that's just weirdness and even weirder that people are paying this. I suppose you calculated all their profit and then demanded it go into your ped card? People doing this have ruined the game.

Resellers are the bane of EU. You know what to do.
 
Dunno the stats of that one, but from your figures, the seller wants 0.25 pecs per shot. That's maths you have now had me calculate too, but it's done all the time to compare stuff in this economy. Is the efficiency better than another considered weap, or dps higher? It might be arbitrary, or maybe the seller has done some calcs of what he/she thinks it's worth over the 1000 hrs or whatever lifetime of quite a long (L).

But yes, it's another example of value that isn't actually a tt value to begin with. It may become that (comparatively) to the user over time: 300 dollars of difference may be justified, maybe not.
My point is that we have ever higher amounts of this 'value for the future', invest in your avatar stuff, and I was wondering that if that's even a medium player decision, what about at the high end? What do the big folks have 'invested' that cannot be withdrawn from the universe, because it's mu, and requires a buyer to use the cash equivalent that is peds to buy it before it could be withdrawn?
How much do big players actually have, not just in tt value, that they wish to see protected partially or completely by having the universe continue to run? Would they want to sell at a 'loss' to some other investing player and rescue some dollars, or continue with this 'perceived' value that I mentioned in order to get leverage on actual peds by playing on at a high turnover?

Even at a reduced rate, the mu totals for the universe must be staggering. It's why I have been thinking, as above, but without firm conclusions yet.
 
As of writing this new post, the new space system and its mining of space rocks have not yet been introduced.
The specs of the new ships, however, make it look like once again, an initial investment by the owners will require further investments to improve the ships of many ks each to give them any chance at all of surviving a fight.
I remember the upgrading of mostly motherships bit by bit to lofty heights, adding many ks of cost to the basic vehicle.
However, the increase in the universe overall of even 40k$ + dunno, 40k$ in upgrades (10 ships, well equipped) is peanuts I think in relation to the questions I have asked above about where we are in total by now on the EU platform.

If players were to wish to replace others, i.e. buy the comparatively low-value tt stuff by paying even currentish mus, then that's in the 2-digit millions of dollars just for cldts, plus loads of undefinedly 'more' in LAs and items etc.
And yet the market value of the whole platform stands at way less than that currently.

Is this like 2 black holes dating? Which is going to be consumed by which? In terms of protecting investments, might we soon see a takeover for the greater good from within the realm we currently hardly even see because it's just mu?
 
You're overthinking it. Your total tt value is the only "real" value you have. It can be found by logging into EU website, under Inventory items.
Any perceived MU can be wiped in one update, and MA has said numerous times they don't care about MU, this is entirely up to the market. Skills have no tt value, the ESI chip has.
 
Thanks for your post, but I think you've completely failed to get the point.
As time goes on, more and more of what people perceive they have is not tt, it's mu. This could be converted to peds by selling the asset, then withdrawn if that's what people wish to do, but those 'values' are precarious (see title) precisely because they are not tt. They are not stacks of a tt mat in storage, i.e. that which the item inventory shows an avatar owns.
Admittedly, some mus have gone up overall, such as for cldts, but my guess is that most are going down.

However, this 'chunk of mu' is still pretty huge I think. I was wondering just how big, though, by considering what people calculate as share value, token value, LA value, equipment value from spaceships down to carried gear, etc..
I was also wondering what some people might have in total these days of this 'precarious vault' - and what it would be 'worth' to them to somehow be willing to 'protect' these by making sure EU survives, even if there is more of a downturn.

Oh, and if MA truly doesn't care about mu, then maybe they should, as it may be a pretty big undercurrent. As they say, hope that helps :)
 
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