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Cryptic, for the love of everything that is holy, stop trying to fight bots!

jaysun1977jaysun1977 Member, NW M9 Playtest Posts: 177 Arc User
edited June 2016 in General Discussion (PC)
As it stands to date, your efforts to curb botting and RMT competition to your own sales is eerily reminiscent of the game industries as well as the recording industries attempt to stop piracy:
  1. It does not seem to work at all
  2. It hurts mainly honest customers
  3. It gets increasingly worse as your attempt get increasingly desperate
What am I talking about?
Removing AD from Leadership is the first example. With a leadership army it was easy to provide RP and AD to a progressing character. It was finicky, yes, but it was equally available to everyone and entirely within the game system. Did it get exploited by macro programs? Yes, but that is mostly the fault of the awfully boring way the entire profession system is implemented. People will always find a way to automate mindless tasks because mindless tasks are not fun.

And that’s the point, entirely: Fun! We play games for a variety of reason, but all of us play games to have fun. If we do boring mindless tasks, we expect to get paid for it, not the other way around. Trying to equip a character atm, beyond the 3K mark is simply not fun anymore. It’s boring, it’s mindless and it’s repetitive. It is a barrier of entry to new players that will scare them away faster than a fox in a henhouse while at the same time putting an undue burden on already existing players that “weren’t fast enough” to use the system while it was still implemented.
Now, there are some that will cite that the ZAX at the time was backed to all hell because of the massive amounts of ad in the market and the limited sale of ZEN on the ZAX and while that got better for a while, we are back right where we were before the AD changes, with less AD income, Didn’t quite work out, did it?

I don’t want to harp only on the AD changes, as that’s practically beating a dead horse by now, so let’s look at the other “countermeasures” you decided to hazard:
  • Dragon Hoard Enchantments – A Nerf to the income from these enchants had practically no effect on RMT botters, while reducing the effective RP income to honest players.

  • Feytouched Enchantments – Adding Account and Character bound Enchantments (or other RP for that matter) to the existing unbound ones, drastically reduced player inventory space. While that might sound great for your bag sales, it’s a slap in face for your honest gamers.

  • Quartermaster Enchantments – A way for players to get RP and surplus equipment, especially the latter, since your drop rates are beyond abysmal and your resource requirements for stronghold improvements ludicrous, you decided that the botters selling cheap stacks of R6s was a problem. And nerfed the droprate to a 20 min. gaming session. In your mind it seems that a stack of R5s for 25K is a reasonable price in relation to your RP insanity.

  • Foundry – basically shredded to avoid instanced botting. It’s apparently way more convenient for honest players to get lagged out in Icewind Dale and Dread ring than to have botters do their thing on their own. And who needs player created content anyway, right? It’s not like it was one of your major selling points or anything.
It seems that every time you try to curb botting, you fvck your customers over even more while not even putting a dent in the RMT market. So, here’s my plea: STOP TRYING!

And to not only be a negative Nancy, here are some solutions you might want to try out instead:
  1. Remove the auction house listing fee reduction from VIP – It only truly facilitates inflated prices. Take a look at the celestial Lion: 48M AD? No one would list them that High if it cost them 4.8M AD if the auction went uncalled. Same holds true for a lot of the other high price items. I enjoy having the fee waved, as my VIP is high enough and I make a hefty profit off of it, but I’d rather see it done away with and have lower AH prices overall.

  2. Increase the ZAX cap to 1.000 – It provides an additional incentive to buy Zen for honest players while crashing the RMT AD prices. It hits RMT companies where it hurts most: in their profit margins, while providing honest and paying customers with an alternative AD source.

  3. Add a permanent Zen sale at the highest cap (ZAX) – The current bottlenecking is only because you don’t have enough players selling Zen, a problem largely due to your bleeding of customers as a result of your indefensible business and balancing decisions as of late. If you would sell unlimited Zen at the ZAX cap players would at least still have a way to progress without buying Zen for hard cash. That might not seem like a profitable idea to you, seeing as you are anything but business majors, but without your large base of “freeloaders”, your whales will look for new feeding grounds. A game lives by its playerbase. If that gets too small, the exodus starts and your revenue tanks.

  4. Remove Zen store sales and vouchers and simply drop the prices by 20-30% overall – Fave it: the prices are too high and thus your sales numbers too low. They are virtual items; they cost you nothing to produce, so every penny earned with them is profit. If you cut the prices by 30% and double your sales as a result of that you just increased your profit. As I said: not business majors.
So, for the love of everything that is holy, stop trying to “combat botters” before there is nothing left in your game BUT botters. You are driving away your honest customers, by making the entire experience with the game less fun with each “countermeasure” and you still do not provide content that is in any way, shape or form challenging to your paying customer base. If you need pointers on game design, feel free to drop me a mail, maybe I can help you out, setting up some encounters for your “new old” dungeons that are yet to come (content recycling at its finest), but for the love of life itself, stop fighting botters! Please!
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Comments

  • jiubiizeekkjiubiizeekk Member, NW M9 Playtest Posts: 144 Arc User
    Sad thing is. Only the community managers read this. if they tried to explain your points across to their higher ups it'd get waved away and thrown in the trash.
    Simply because the higher ups dont want to listen.
    I actually kinda think they want to bleed this game dry and start anew. Basically this game is built on a really old system and needs to be updated to a newer one and its not as simple as porting it over.
  • ironzerg79ironzerg79 Member, Neverwinter Moderator, NW M9 Playtest Posts: 4,942 Arc User
    edited June 2016
    You know, if players would stop buying AD and items from 3rd party websites, most of the botting would stop. I say most, because there would still be a lot of players out there who would continue to cheat with botting programs to get ahead...

    But I'm just saying...if you want to ask people to stop doing something, there's two sides to this equation...

    "Meanwhile in the moderator's lounge..."
    i7TZDZK.gif?1
  • silence1xsilence1x Member Posts: 1,503 Arc User

    You know, if players would stop buying AD and items from 3rd party websites, most of the botting would stop. I say most, because there would still be a lot of players out there who would continue to cheat with botting programs to get ahead...

    But I'm just saying...if you want to ask people to stop doing something, there's two sides to this equation...

    Very true ironzerg. Unfortunately, that's not really a viable solution currently. The game now has HUGE requirements for RP to level up artifact equipment which causes some players to use whatever means necessary to get that RP (or the items themselves) as well as AD. Bots may always be in this game in one form or another; legit players may not be :(

    The way that the game is currently trying to stop bots/gold spammers, to me, is akin to an automobile manufacturer making thier cars go much slower because some people drink and drive. They're trying to cure, or at least mitigate, one problem while causing many more problems for everyone else.

    Making things less attractive to bots in this game has had a seriously detrimental effect on legit players. I think it's time to come up with a new strategy.

    I aim to misbehave
  • jaysun1977jaysun1977 Member, NW M9 Playtest Posts: 177 Arc User

    You know, if players would stop buying AD and items from 3rd party websites, most of the botting would stop. I say most, because there would still be a lot of players out there who would continue to cheat with botting programs to get ahead...

    But I'm just saying...if you want to ask people to stop doing something, there's two sides to this equation...

    Those RMTs exist because of demand. Some people have time, some have money and both want to have fun. It's PWE's/Cryptic's responsibility to offer the better deal on a product that costs them virtually nothing (talking about the goods, not the cost of running the servers and paying personell).

    And even that is besides the point: Their attempts to thwart them have direct negative impact on honest players and RMT customers alike. It's just that the RMT customers are less affected by it. Does that sound like an attractive solution to you?

  • wildfiredewildfirede Member Posts: 886 Arc User
    I agree with ironzerg on this one, haven't bought gold from 3rd party in my life.

    On a sidenote please make harsher punishments for goldbuyers if it's still only a 3 day ban change it to permaban and publish number of banned gold buyers.

    If the gold sellers aren't actually a subdivision of pve that is.
    Please fix Zhentarim Warlock companion's skill "Arcane Warping" to the originally intended "Arcane Boost"
    zhentarim-warlock-companion

    Pure -> Transcendent Plague Fire weapon enchantment giving 80damge/20 seconds for 500k+ AD is a joke.
    plague-fire-weapon-enchant-r11-vs-r12
  • plasticbatplasticbat Member, NW M9 Playtest Posts: 12,183 Arc User

    I agree with ironzerg on this one, haven't bought gold from 3rd party in my life.



    On a sidenote please make harsher punishments for goldbuyers if it's still only a 3 day ban change it to permaban and publish number of banned gold buyers.



    If the gold sellers aren't actually a subdivision of pve that is.

    I thought it is perm ban already or may be perm ban when one is caught the second time.
    *** The game can read your mind. If you want it, you won't get it. If you don't expect to get it, you will. ***
  • ironzerg79ironzerg79 Member, Neverwinter Moderator, NW M9 Playtest Posts: 4,942 Arc User
    silence1x said:

    Very true ironzerg. Unfortunately, that's not really a viable solution currently. The game now has HUGE requirements for RP to level up artifact equipment which causes some players to use whatever means necessary to get that RP (or the items themselves) as well as AD. Bots may always be in this game in one form or another; legit players may not be :(

    I agree with this. Bots are more of a symptom than a problem. I've spent thousands and thousands of words suggesting ways to improve on the gear refining system, with ways that reward people for playing, not collecting millions of tiny gemstones.

    RP and the entire refinement system in general needs a serious "Fun-verhaul" in my personal opinion.

    "Meanwhile in the moderator's lounge..."
    i7TZDZK.gif?1
  • snottysnotty Member, NW M9 Playtest Posts: 476 Arc User
    My god, will the whole "removal of AD from leadership" argument ever die? For the love of god, yes, for those with multiple alts and an automated program, it was a good source of AD. For the rest of us who have only 2 toons, it was hardly anything. I make at least 4 times as much ADs now then I did then.

    And the only reason that the ZAX is where its at now is because cryptic removed the wards from the T-bar store under the lie that they're policy is to not have the sane items in the zen store and the T-bar store.....nevermind the fact that Stone of health and scroll of mass life are still in both stores.
  • grimalken#1370 grimalken Member Posts: 6 Arc User

    {snip}

    Remove Zen store sales and vouchers and simply drop the prices by 20-30% overall – Fave it: the prices are too high and thus your sales numbers too low. They are virtual items; they cost you nothing to produce, so every penny earned with them is profit. If you cut the prices by 30% and double your sales as a result of that you just increased your profit. As I said: not business majors.


    So, for the love of everything that is holy, stop trying to “combat botters” before there is nothing left in your game BUT botters. You are driving away your honest customers, by making the entire experience with the game less fun with each “countermeasure” and you still do not provide content that is in any way, shape or form challenging to your paying customer base. If you need pointers on game design, feel free to drop me a mail, maybe I can help you out, setting up some encounters for your “new old” dungeons that are yet to come (content recycling at its finest), but for the love of life itself, stop fighting botters! Please!
    I agree. I balk at the prices they ask, so i refuse to pay cash money for some trivial thing that they want me to shell out $10 for. If an item was $5 I'd be much more likely to buy it.

    LoTRO was smart, they were charging $1 for some items, and found myself buying $10 to1$5 of them before i knew it. But if they had wanted $30 for the stuff I'd have refused.
  • arabaturarabatur Member, NW M9 Playtest Posts: 778 Arc User
    Our concerns are irrelevant due to the inevitable cash pool the consoles will generate. Until they've been bled dry expect the status quo to remain. Or PWE pull the plug.
    Definitely not an Arc User.
  • jugger71jugger71 Member, NW M9 Playtest Posts: 252 Arc User
    You wanna bring players back? Increase the drop rate and unbind everything.
  • solbergxsolbergx Member Posts: 654 Arc User
    I only support lowering the price of items sold on zen shop and sell the components of a pack!

    I'ts easier for people to buy 1 component this month and then 1 component the next instead of saving 12 months to buy a pack!
  • xxmantaraxxxxmantaraxx Member Posts: 362 Arc User
    jugger71 said:

    You wanna bring players back? Increase the drop rate and unbind everything.

    The multi binding thing is a whole nother can of worms. I have a bag in each slot and still find myself fighting for space because I have 3 bind types on each form of RP. It should all be either account bound or unbound. Its my biggest pet peeve currently.

    Back on topick though; I have seen many many great ideas proposed in the forums (especially ones from ironzerg) that would be a much better path forward than the actions that cryptic has taken recently. It feels like the dedicated long term player base is just screaming into the void.

    Ara Atheanes GWF
    Traxus Atheanes GF
    Bastiel Atheanes DC
    Ellara Atheanes CW
    Keira Atheanes TR
    Sarasin Atheanes SW
    Jerkface McGee HR
    -MANTARA- OP

  • mrgiggles651mrgiggles651 Member Posts: 790 Arc User

    You know, if players would stop buying AD and items from 3rd party websites, most of the botting would stop.

    Then lower prices to what those sites charge, and there would be no reason to buy from them.
    I wasted five million AD promoting the Foundry.
  • seijidaseijida Member Posts: 28 Arc User
    +1
  • jaysun1977jaysun1977 Member, NW M9 Playtest Posts: 177 Arc User
    edited June 2016
    r000kie said:

    Good articulate post, unfortunately many of OP proposals are just going along the line, fight boting by nerfing things.

    - remove AD fee benefits for VIP players.. well... after Coalgate what is there to justify VIP? Just jumping back from some lame encounter the designers put at the end of a long map on purpose to sell legendary mounts? How many people in fact are selling legendary mounts and how many are glad selling an item for 20-40k without risking 2-4k, the price of a daily?

    Risk-free postings drive prices up. Risky posting drive prices down. That is a fact entirely independant of the game. Why should I lower my prices, if I carry no risk, using high ones?

    As an excemple: I keep selling black dye at 10K per stack of 3. Why? Because I sell them at that price. Do I sell every single stack withing 4 days? No, I have some trickle back, so I just go ahead and post them again. Eventually they will sell for that price. What incentive do I have to ever lower that price?

    Then there is the next issue: extremely low drop rates. Legendary mounts come to mind. they drop so rarely that only very few will ever get them and as such they can ask for ridiculous prices. The first lions went up for 48M AD. Now it dropped to 20M AD and it will likely keep dropping as low as 10M AD, but even 10M AD is a ridiculous amount of money and most won't sell for that amount before at least 3 listings. So, rather than to lower the asking price or face a potential 3M AD loss, you can simply keep posting it at 10M until it sells. It is inherently anti-consumer as well as fundamentally anti-capitalist. It makes for a HAMSTER poor economy.
    r000kie said:

    - increase ZAX cap to 1000 - will go there next week, will only hurt free players and increase the price of AD from bots, more money towards them.

    The RMT sites have to compete with zen prices as well. They can't simply raise their asking price at will. If it becomes cheaper for a player to convert zen into ad than it is for a player to buy AD off an RMT site, the latter will cease its business. Now, we could argue whether we as players want that to happen (seeing the impact on RP costs, once they do), but that's an entirely different topic. I am not asking for a solution to remove RMT sellers from the game, I am asking Cryptic to stop trying to fight the bots, hurting legitimate players in the process.
    r000kie said:

    The solution to this situation is not simple, but I can think of few:

    A. Decrease the refining costs, are crazy. Even a 50% reduction in cost, and is still way too much grinding legit.

    I entirely agree on this point, but it has nothing to do with RMT, botters or the negative impact of fighting RMT and botters on legitimate players.
    r000kie said:

    B. Take a genius to fix things now, but going R11 R12 created a huge power creep. Somehow even the most geared BIS R12 player, should not do insane damages. Bugs everywhere, only adding to the problem. At some point everything should be sorted out, 5% increase every step so a BIS would get a 25-30% advantage over R7s.... very unpopular, but the pressure to upgrade will subside.

    Balance issues have nothing to do with the topic or the negative effect of Cryptic policies on legitimate players.
    r000kie said:

    C. How the game will make money then? Well, better to have 50k paying 10 usd per month on mounts and fashion and enchants than 500 wales spending 2000 over an year

    The same way it does now: selling Zen. If any, it will be even more lucrative to actually purchase zen, if the ZAX cap is increased.
    Also, I am under the impression that your idea about whale spending is off by a magnitude:

    https://de.scribd.com/doc/245852483/EEDAR-2014-Deconstructing-Mobile-and-Tablet-Gaming-Free-Report
    http://www.businessinsider.com/super-whales-are-spending-over-10000-on-social-games-2010-6?IR=T
    http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/195806/chasing_the_whale_examining_the_.php?print=1
    http://venturebeat.com/2013/03/14/whales-and-why-social-gamers-are-just-gamers/
    http://de.slideshare.net/emily_greer/dont-call-them-whales-freetoplay-spenders-virtual-value-gdc-2015
    http://www.forbes.com/sites/insertcoin/2014/03/01/why-its-scary-when-0-15-mobile-gamers-bring-in-50-of-the-revenue/#6ef843411ad8
    http://kotaku.com/who-are-the-whales-driving-free-to-play-gaming-youd-1197333118

    Also, you seem to grossly overestimate the impact of non-whales on F2P revenue. From an ecenomic perspective the only truly interesting customer is the whale. The rest could leave in droves and you wouldn't notice a difference. You see whales leaving and the ship will sink. Now granted, too many non-whales leave and the whales will follow, so you will want to retain at least a modicum of non-whales but to listen to their pleas or opinions is basically a non-issue. They would be entirely irrelevant if it weren't for their whale-retaining factor
    r000kie said:

    D. Go after account creation procedures and scan for AD storages. How hard would be to follow bot activity, see where AD/items are aggregated, ban the storage point and the buyer. They could buy AD on purpose on sting operations costing them peanuts and slay the boting net in weeks while the news of buyer bans will spread too. Seems that will is lacking, wonder why.

    Automated systems are:
    1. Prone to error
    2. Prone to false positives
    3. unreliable
    4. easily circumvented
    5. easily exploited for malicious purposes
    Take "Punkbuster" for example: You can easily manipulate Punkbuster to get players banned that you disagree with, regardless of whether they are actually hacking or not:

    http://mp1st.com/2012/01/24/hackers-attack-punkbuster-at-the-expense-of-battlefield-3-players/#.V1wjhPmLS70

    Not to mention the sheer amount of false bans Punkbuster i known for:

    http://www.pcgamer.com/punkbuster-false-positives-leading-to-battlefield-3-bans-ea-is-investigating/
    http://bf4central.com/2013/11/punkbuster-bans-innocent-battlefield-4-players-violation-89265/

    And not to mention that one of the simplest things for Macro programmers is to bypass security measures:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hABj_mrP-no

    Automated solutions are the worst solutions and lead to exactly the kind of negative repercussions for legitimate player that I am talking about. It's best to not even try to combat them, especially in a non-competitive game like NWO (no, I don't consider PvP relevant, not in this game, not with this engine and certainly not with this netcode).
    Post edited by jaysun1977 on
  • wildfiredewildfirede Member Posts: 886 Arc User
    Actually removing the ah benefit of vip will blow the prices up immensely...


    Now :

    i post a pet for 500k in the AH
    it does not sell,
    someone undercuts me at 480k
    with the vip benefit i can cancel my auction and put the pet at 460

    With a posting fee - I'll just wait till someone buys the 480k pet and leave mine standing at 500k


    So with fee - two pets 480k and 500k
    without fee two pets 460 and 480k
    and when the other guy has vip and decides to undercut me price drops down even more.
    Please fix Zhentarim Warlock companion's skill "Arcane Warping" to the originally intended "Arcane Boost"
    zhentarim-warlock-companion

    Pure -> Transcendent Plague Fire weapon enchantment giving 80damge/20 seconds for 500k+ AD is a joke.
    plague-fire-weapon-enchant-r11-vs-r12
  • maulwurfmann01maulwurfmann01 Member, NW M9 Playtest Posts: 27 Arc User

    Actually removing the ah benefit of vip will blow the prices up immensely...





    Now :



    i post a pet for 500k in the AH

    it does not sell,

    someone undercuts me at 480k

    with the vip benefit i can cancel my auction and put the pet at 460



    With a posting fee - I'll just wait till someone buys the 480k pet and leave mine standing at 500k





    So with fee - two pets 480k and 500k

    without fee two pets 460 and 480k

    and when the other guy has vip and decides to undercut me price drops down even more.

    This is such a fail...in so many different ways...wonder if Jaysun even conciders writing an answer to this...
  • superent666superent666 Member Posts: 133 Arc User



    Also, you seem to grossly overestimate the impact of non-whales on F2P revenue. From an ecenomic perspective the only truly interesting customer is the whale. The rest could leave in droves and you wouldn't notice a difference. You see whales leaving and the ship will sink. Now granted, too many non-whales leave and the whales will follow, so you will want to retain at least a modicum of non-whales but to listen to their pleas or opinions is basically a non-issue. They would be entirely irrelevant if it weren't for their whale-retaining factor

    Of course it has horrible consequences for game design if the customers keeping the game afloat are the whales.
    Looking at NWO it seems to me that in this game this is exactly the strategy: BIS players have an outstanding position that can not be achieved by non-whales. They seem to constantly reassure that progression from a certain IL on (the IL that is appropriate for the PVE content they offer...so about 2.5kIL (for a toon that does not have a hilariously nonsensical build) is unbelievably grindy and well, pointless. So for a player like me (non-whale) there is nothing to do - which is ok because as long as new players come along it does not matter whether I leave. So they improved things for new players (campaign rework, leveling dungeons etc.).
    Unfortunately, again, this economic concept has very negative consequences on game design. Good PVE design and even more so, good PVP design is just downright impossible.
    But I wonder, is it really not possible (why not?) to run a game on a different model, namely relying on many smaller transactions - I mean, there has to be a range of people between the freerider who refuses to spend anything and the whale who spends several thousand € per year?
    Better game design is obviously possible if you rely on many smaller and reliable transactions. Reliable because with this model you can far better bind regular players to the game over time/keep them interested in your well-designed game.
    Whereas the whale-based model with its negative consequences on game design seems to be far less likely to ensure a long life for a game? And when it hits rock bottom there is no revenue anymore at all?
    But I´m curious: although it seems to look like that...do you really think NWO is mainly financed by whales? And if so, it would still be possible to change course? Or not? Why not? Too late? I´m curious about these things...
  • jaysun1977jaysun1977 Member, NW M9 Playtest Posts: 177 Arc User

    Actually removing the ah benefit of vip will blow the prices up immensely...





    Now :



    i post a pet for 500k in the AH

    it does not sell,

    someone undercuts me at 480k

    with the vip benefit i can cancel my auction and put the pet at 460



    With a posting fee - I'll just wait till someone buys the 480k pet and leave mine standing at 500k





    So with fee - two pets 480k and 500k

    without fee two pets 460 and 480k

    and when the other guy has vip and decides to undercut me price drops down even more.

    Except... that's not what happens.

    Several things to consider:

      Most players will simply use the proposed listing price and be done with it
      Most players will not check whether they have been undercut after they listed their item, even if they set their own price
      Undercutting is the least efficient economic strategy
      There is no incentive for you to undercut in the first place (I'll go into more detail below)
      The VIP waver of the posting fee encourages auction sniping
      The VIP waver of the posting fee encourages price gouging (more detail below)
    Why is undercutting the least efficient strategy? It lowers your potential revenue and you get nothign in return except a higher likelyhood of sale. That higher likelyhood is only relevant, if there is a risk to a failed auction. With the waver, there is not. Even with a posting fee, undercutting would still be an inferior strategy to "buy high, sell higher":

    http://www.investopedia.com/articles/trading/08/buy-strength-high.asp
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6rsgN4wXLjQ

    what that means for MMORPG economies is best explained by none other than Freelancer himself:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zxqviXuS1vY

    And that's not the half of it, either. There's still market and trend analysis, bottlenecking, supply and demand anticipation, etc. It's not exactly rocket science but it's not simply "undercut my competitor" either. The latter is actually eceonomic suicide for the most part. And brings us to the point of why undercut in the first place?

    As long as we are talking about bulk products, like RP stacks, it's not really individual prices that matter. Yeah, if you place a stack of R5s at 4K you will sell it immideatedly. The one selling it for 21K will still sell his, though. So all you actually achieved was lowering your own profits in the process. Had you kept your offer at the same 21K, you would have sold your stack at 21K as well. The sheer volume of sales will guarantee that. (That's why I can still sell my dyes at 3K a piece, even if the proposed lisiting price is currently at 2K a piece). What's more, if there are only a few listed at 21K it might even be wiser to simply buy those out and sell them for 23K a stack. Undercutting on a continuous demand product is rarely ever a lucrative bunsiness decision. But how about rare, high value items, like legendary mounts? To answer that question, let us look a bit into the history of the NWO market:

    Before the AD Leadership nerf, tenser's floating disk was the single highest priced Legendary mount at 10M AD. Since there was no VIP at that time, listing it at that value carried the risk of losing 1M AD if you didn't sell it within 4 days. Tenser's was exceedingly rare and as sch the only mount valued that highly. It was mostly a prestige item. Other legendary mount, like the emperor beetle were priced around 4-8M AD instead.
    Compare that to the current prices of legendary mounts (lowest - highest per listed item):

      Beholder Personal Tank [13M - 16.5M]
      Armored Griffon [16M - 25M]
      Swift Golden Lion [16.9M - 30M]
      Armored Axe Beak [23.5 - 45M]
      Champion's Armored Bullette [24M - 40M]
      Emperor Beetle [30M]
      Armored Giant Strider [34M - 39M]
      Coastal Flail Snail [48M - 62M]
      Tenser's Floating Disk [48.8M - 80M]
      Imperial Rage Drake [60M]
    Do you happen to notice a difference? Do you know what might be different since then, now that leadership armies can no longer produce 450K AD per day?
    Thereis simply no incentive for them to sell them for lower other than the fact that most players don't have the cash anymore and those who have might be unwilling to part with it, but such convictions can be eroded over time and as such it makes economic sense to wait for the sale rather than reducing the price. Sure, 80M is rather unlikely to be sold, but 20M is within economic feasibility atm.

    So not even on the rare goods market is undercutting a lucratvie stragety. Sure, ecessive gouging isn't either, but selling a legendary mount for 2M AD atm is idiotic! Why would anyone do that? Not when you can realistically expect it to be sold for at least 10M AD. Especially now that the ZAX is slow and backed up and 40% off voucher lose their attractiveness to most players. Fewer opened boxes = more lucrative legendary mount market.

    That's why price gouging is the logical consequence of waving the auction listing fee and I see myself vindicated simply looking at the market trend over the last 3 months.

    You see, you might be feeling clever and cheekiny, undercutting your competitors, but you are actually the sucker in that tradeoff. Your competitor might as well have been the very one buying your companion and selling it with a profit in the process.

    P.S.: You can keep any and all typos you may find, too lazy to fix them right now. Maybe later.
  • wildfiredewildfirede Member Posts: 886 Arc User


    You see, you might be feeling clever and cheekiny, undercutting your competitors, but you are actually the sucker in that tradeoff.

    Exactly, and as more and more players are feeling clever - the price drops ;)

    You can visit a site that is not allowed to be named here, but i am sure you are familiar with - and check the AH data of the Tenser's disk price - dropped from 20 to 12 mil. AD in a month after the VIP was released, or the emperor beetle from 8m to 4.5m (before the patch making it 140% that is.) :)


    Please fix Zhentarim Warlock companion's skill "Arcane Warping" to the originally intended "Arcane Boost"
    zhentarim-warlock-companion

    Pure -> Transcendent Plague Fire weapon enchantment giving 80damge/20 seconds for 500k+ AD is a joke.
    plague-fire-weapon-enchant-r11-vs-r12
  • greywyndgreywynd Member, NW M9 Playtest Posts: 7,083 Arc User
    I'm just curious as to why the game company/devs have an aversion to making RP drops BtA rather than nerf the various enchants and skills nodes into uselessness.
    I'm not looking for forgiveness, and I'm way past asking permission. Earth just lost her best defender, so we're here to fight. And if you want to stand in our way, we'll fight you too.
  • namelesshero347namelesshero347 Member Posts: 2,109 Arc User
    edited June 2016
    greywynd said:

    I'm just curious as to why the game company/devs have an aversion to making RP drops BtA rather than nerf the various enchants and skills nodes into uselessness.

    Because making all RP BtA silos all RP to an account. There will be no market for RP. The problem with this is the amount of RP needed to upgrade your gear. There isn't enough waking hours, let alone playing hours, to upgrade all your equipment to a high level. Unless you maintain a leadership army, you will need to buy RP in the market. Would you like it if blood rubies from the zen store is your only option?
  • jaysun1977jaysun1977 Member, NW M9 Playtest Posts: 177 Arc User

    Exactly, and as more and more players are feeling clever - the price drops ;)

    You either did not read what I wrote or you did not understand it. Which is it?

    You can visit a site that is not allowed to be named here, but i am sure you are familiar with - and check the AH data of the Tenser's disk price - dropped from 20 to 12 mil. AD in a month after the VIP was released, or the emperor beetle from 8m to 4.5m (before the patch making it 140% that is.) :)

    Even risking the wrath of PWE's thought police, the data clearly shows a small decline in price, in conjunction with the loss of Leadership AD revenue and a massive surge in the price across the board for all rare items starting january, reaching prices 4 to 12 times the original value, while prices have been nearly steady for the entire year before that.

    Possible explanations for the delayed onset are incremental rather than bulk VIP purchases, seeing as the fee is waved only from VIP rank 8 onward as well as declining player rates, leading to fewer opened boxes and an increased scarcity of prestige goods.

    Either way, prices are nearly 10 times what they were before. Are you still denying this? If so, then I know to stop. I know better than to argue with quixotics.
  • wildfiredewildfirede Member Posts: 886 Arc User
    First make a difference between understanding and agreeing :)

    Second after your statement that prices rose ten fold and everyone playing since before vip knows that this is simply false i will just assume you are pretty bad at playing the AH and are simply jealous of the vip benefits and with that i wish you good luck in the game.
    Please fix Zhentarim Warlock companion's skill "Arcane Warping" to the originally intended "Arcane Boost"
    zhentarim-warlock-companion

    Pure -> Transcendent Plague Fire weapon enchantment giving 80damge/20 seconds for 500k+ AD is a joke.
    plague-fire-weapon-enchant-r11-vs-r12
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