solution for zen backlog

j3ttruebow · October 2018

The solution for zen backlog is to limit the amount of zen account wide people can post to lets say 10000zen at a time.

This will solve zen backlog.

kvet · October 2018

No it won't, but then people aren't really selling 10000 zen at a time, which is one of the problems. AD is devalued and not enough people are selling zen.

That said, if you limited the amount of AD posted to one or two listings at a time (instead of whatever it is now 8? 10? I don't recall off-hand), with the current max of 5000 zen (so 2.5m AD), that would definitely bring the backlog down, but that's an artificial solution. The problem isn't the ZAX itself, the problem is how undervalued AD is. Between bots and massive AD-generating exploits, there's a glut of AD flooding the ZAX. On top of that, people are hoarding Zen for the black friday sale (by the way, if you haven't already posted AD for that... don't bother, you won't get your zen in time - you're only chance to capitalize on that sale is $$ now).

Too little need to hoard AD, plus heavy incentive to hoard Zen means the ZAX is in terrible shape.

tenetomb · October 2018

The biggest problem is people buying items on Zen during -40% and then selling it on ah.
Bind items on ah to account and we will be done.
Then, to avoid wards to be too rare to obtain, put them back to trade bars stores (to a price between the original one and the one it was before wards were deleted from this store)

plasticbat · October 2018

tenetomb said:
The biggest problem is people buying items on Zen during -40% and then selling it on ah.

Bind items on ah to account and we will be done.

Then, to avoid seals to be too rare to obtain, put them back to trade bars stores (to a price between the original one and the one it was before seals were deleted from this store)

Seals? Are you talking about wards instead?

tenetomb · October 2018

> Seals? Are you talking about wards instead?

Exactly, I was surely still drunk ahah, I updated, thanks !

nunya · October 2018

They need to stop the AD -> Zen -> Item -> AD loop. If Zen purchases mostly terminate with items or services you're going to use on your characters, then people won't be able to use items purchased with Zen to generate more AD in order to buy more Zen. That doesn't solve the problem of devalued AD, of course, but it will certainly interfere with bots and third-party sellers.

cherryman1 · October 2018

They need to stop this AD->Zen->Cash Shop Item->AD for more than the exchange rate. If they capped the amount you can post items on the exchange that you buy from the Auction house for you wouldn't see any backups on the exchange since the money isn't going into the exchange right now. It is going into items to sell in the auction house for a profit of AD.

If you can buy an item for 2 different prices which are you going to take? The lower costing of the same item will be purchased. Those that do the math know that the items are selling for more AD which is why we have a backlog.

Solution is to cap the items posting value on the Auction house to less than the exchange rate with discounts included into the math. The Zen items are still wanted and people will still buy for zen. They will just use what they need since the exchange will always be used to convert Zen to AD and people will still buy items out of the Zen market since wards are still needed. Right now there is an infinite loop to make AD. What needs to happen to fix the backlog is that you have to make it a loss 100% of the time to convert to zen and buy items to sell for AD even if the item is bought in a sale.

plasticbat · October 2018

cherryman1 said:
They need to stop this AD->Zen->Cash Shop Item->AD for more than the exchange rate. If they capped the amount you can post items on the exchange that you buy from the Auction house for you wouldn't see any backups on the exchange since the money isn't going into the exchange right now. It is going into items to sell in the auction house for a profit of AD.

If you can buy an item for 2 different prices which are you going to take? The lower costing of the same item will be purchased. Those that do the math know that the items are selling for more AD which is why we have a backlog.

Solution is to cap the items posting value on the Auction house to less than the exchange rate with discounts included into the math. The Zen items are still wanted and people will still buy for zen. They will just use what they need since the exchange will always be used to convert Zen to AD and people will still buy items out of the Zen market since wards are still needed. Right now there is an infinite loop to make AD. What needs to happen to fix the backlog is that you have to make it a loss 100% of the time to convert to zen and buy items to sell for AD even if the item is bought in a sale.

The easiest way is to make the Zen item account bound. Why bother to spend any effort to implement a cap at all because nobody would sell anything below cost? Putting an item specific cap in AH waste development time and does not stop anything because people will just move that to trade which has no cap. How many GMOP do you want?

Edit: wait! I think of something. It will probably not be GMOP but the currency that was used long time ago in trade, gold.

nunya · October 2018

cherryman1 said:
make it a loss 100% of the time to convert [AD] to zen and buy items to sell for AD even if the item is bought in a sale.

Added the "[AD]" just for clarity's sake. That said, I completely agree with you. They could do this by simply making wards available for purchase from the Wondrous Bazaar. By the math in your comment, this would make coalescent wards 300k in the WB. That doesn't factor in any discounts for VIP or the 15% sale on WB items. It's just assuming a Zen sale price of 40% off the price of coalescent wards (600 Zen) and the current AD:Zen exchange rate of 500 AD:1 Zen on PC.

My feeling is that 300k AD should be the regular price for a coalescent ward on the WB, meaning that VIP players can get it for 225k regularly or 180k if they wait for the WB sale. However, I could see Cryptic pricing it at 500k AD as a regular price, which means that VIP could get it for 300k during the WB sale. I think 300k is more appropriate because it can help make room for development of alts, which is something I would very much like to do. I hate having characters that suck, and right now 6 of my original 8 characters range from "ok" to "horrible and I hate to even pull them out for Sharandar and DR weeklies". It also frees me up to spend AD on wards instead of Zen. In turn, this means I get to spend Zen on bags and bank space for my alts. Eventually (and in no particular order), I'd even end up spending it on more mounts and companions, companion upgrade tokens, idle companion slots, insignia packs, profession packs (yes, even with the new profession system coming), and Stronghold Starter Packs. For me, there isn't a dearth of Zen-only items that I'm interested in buying; it's that I have to use my Zen to buy wards even though I'd rather be buying other things.

cherryman1 · October 2018

plasticbat said:

The easiest way is to make the Zen item account bound. Why bother to spend any effort to implement a cap at all because nobody would sell anything below cost? Putting an item specific cap in AH waste development time and does not stop anything because people will just move that to trade which has no cap. How many GMOP do you want?

Edit: wait! I think of something. It will probably not be GMOP but the currency that was used long time ago in trade, gold.

Gold would be hard to setup now without removing all of the previous gold in game. They're already are using gold in the next Mod for professions which makes it trickier to do this and probably not the right timing on this type of change.

If they did bound to account it would probably cause some more situations of buyer's remorse. We would start to see people who buy wards to upgrade something and don't use them all. Those people would be complaining about nothing to do with their wards.

plasticbat · October 2018

cherryman1 said:

plasticbat said:

The easiest way is to make the Zen item account bound. Why bother to spend any effort to implement a cap at all because nobody would sell anything below cost? Putting an item specific cap in AH waste development time and does not stop anything because people will just move that to trade which has no cap. How many GMOP do you want?

Edit: wait! I think of something. It will probably not be GMOP but the currency that was used long time ago in trade, gold.
Gold would be hard to setup now without removing all of the previous gold in game. They're already are using gold in the next Mod for professions which makes it trickier to do this and probably not the right timing on this type of change.

If they did bound to account it would probably cause some more situations of buyer's remorse. We would start to see people who buy wards to upgrade something and don't use them all. Those people would be complaining about nothing to do with their wards.

I bring up gold because gold will have value in mod 15. Hence, it has value to do trade. There is nothing to set up for trade. Gold has been available for trade since the game started. Gold was considered underground currency back then (before mod 6?). If there is a demand of gold, gold can be used for trading anything.

cherryman1 · October 2018

plasticbat said:
I bring up gold because gold will have value in mod 15. Hence, it has value to do trade. There is nothing to set up for trade. Gold has been available for trade since the game started. Gold was considered underground currency back then (before mod 6?).

I get where your coming from but gold is in the same position as AD is right now with some people having vast quantities of it. If they wiped the gold from the game I could see it being used for the auction house.

plasticbat · October 2018

cherryman1 said:

plasticbat said:
I bring up gold because gold will have value in mod 15. Hence, it has value to do trade. There is nothing to set up for trade. Gold has been available for trade since the game started. Gold was considered underground currency back then (before mod 6?).
I get where your coming from but gold is in the same position as AD is right now with some people having vast quantities of it. If they wiped the gold from the game I could see it being used for the auction house.

I was not talking about AH. I was talking about trade (the trade channel, you can trade stuff to another player without paying any commission except you can't trade using AD) and if there is a demand of gold, gold can be used for trading anything. You can trade using gold today if someone wants to trade with you.

If the Zen item is unbound and you cap its AH price to be lower than the lowest Zen store discount cost (as you proposed), you will not see any Zen item in AH. You will see them in trade channel.

athena · October 2018

simple solution: bind items sold though zen to account. Move items normally bought and sold for profit to the tradebar store or bazaar. This works because those who want items for themselves to use will be able to through zen, those that want to profit will have to go a different route rather than making the unbalance worse.

make keys and key bundles buyable with AD (at a ratio higher than if bought with zen) This will give a AD sink and still please the populace, while removing that chunk of AD from the ZAX that was meant for it.

kythelion · October 2018

Well, the zax is an exchange though. You either sell zen for ad or you sell ad for zen. This setup only works if people have a reason to exchange one currency for another. Partly to blame surely is the idea of making more profit by selling an item on the AH instead of just selling the zen on the exchange. But much more seriously to blame is the lack of large capacity need to exchange. How much do people really NEED to exchange zen for ad right now? There is so much ad/expensive items available to people that need is small. Thus the small trickle of zen in the exchange. Instead of purchasing zen to sell to fill an ad need, they already have the ad, can have the ad in a reasonable amount of time, or can simply trade an existing item. Until there is a reason for people to need ad enough to purchase zen to sell it on the exchange, this problem cannot truly be resolved.

Moving items from the zen store to wb or ttb would remove some backlog and make those items easier to obtain for people who play the game free (imo that's where they should always have been), but would it actually create enough demand for ad that people would need to use the zax to get ad again? Likely not.

solution for zen backlog

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