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Astral Diamond Exchange - Dodgy economics
maroucat
Member, Neverwinter Beta Users, Neverwinter Guardian Users Posts: 0 Arc User
The hard cap on Astral diamonds for zen trading is why there is gold-farmer spam all over the zone chat in protectors enclave, and random friend requests from spam bots. The zen cap attempts to put price controls and artificial scarcity on AD. Gold farmer spam tells us 1M AD is worth between 6 and 7 dollars. Zen exchange tells us 7 dollars is worth 350k AD.
Eg, the real value of zen is about 1450 AD per. I was going to buy zen with AD for a respec token and saw on the exchange that it was backordered by 1.5M Zen. Think about that, people have to put at least $150,000 DOLLARS US into astral diamonds from zen at a craptastic exchange rate before your order is going to fill. It's just broken.
If the cap was removed more people would buy zen so they could exchange for AD. At some point the price would stabilize somewhere. As it stands right now, the only reason to buy zen is for cash shop purchases (cosmetic, respec tokens). If PWE wants to make more money and eliminate the spammers all over the game lift the **** cap already.
The economy right now is stuck in banana republic mode, where a loaf of bread costs $.60, but nobody can buy one cause they are sold out.
Price controls don't work. Don't think just because it's a video game the laws of supply and demand can be ignored.
Eg, the real value of zen is about 1450 AD per. I was going to buy zen with AD for a respec token and saw on the exchange that it was backordered by 1.5M Zen. Think about that, people have to put at least $150,000 DOLLARS US into astral diamonds from zen at a craptastic exchange rate before your order is going to fill. It's just broken.
If the cap was removed more people would buy zen so they could exchange for AD. At some point the price would stabilize somewhere. As it stands right now, the only reason to buy zen is for cash shop purchases (cosmetic, respec tokens). If PWE wants to make more money and eliminate the spammers all over the game lift the **** cap already.
The economy right now is stuck in banana republic mode, where a loaf of bread costs $.60, but nobody can buy one cause they are sold out.
Price controls don't work. Don't think just because it's a video game the laws of supply and demand can be ignored.
Post edited by maroucat on
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To state that the cap is the reason for the spam chat and invites is absolutely rediculous.
Also PWE has stated that the cap is there for a reason. It is to protect the free play users who do not want to or are not able to spend real money for Zen.
Another would be to greatly reduce or eliminate the amount of AD that leadership and invoking gives, and increase the amount that dailies give. While this would hurt players a lot, thee fact that 'gold' sellers can't farm AD efficiently would mean that anyone actually playing the game would be better off.
1 zen isn't worth $1 dollar O_o ,if it was that would mean a respec is $300 dollars? . The exchange isn't broken , the game needs ways to spend AD on in game services that aren't idiotically priced like mount upgrades , companion upgrades , transmutation , all these services at a realistic price would drain hundreds of millions of AD out of the economy.
Fixed, point remains.
Well, since you can't buy zen at all right now for AD, it's having the opposite effect.
Free to play users just don't have access to zen stuff. I've stuck plenty of money in the game, I have the guardian of the north pack, and I tend to drop about what I would on a sub game per month averaged out (about $15). It's a one way street right now though. You'll be waiting days or longer for 500AD/1Zen orders to fill. The price cap, rather than protecting F2P players, is making it impossible for them to get Zen.
Without a price cap there is no economic incentive for anyone to ever buy AD from farmers (which would drive most operations away), and exchange rate would reflect true market value.
Lets say the cap is removed and Zen evens out at your 1450 per value. that means that for a person to buy a resepc using the exchange they would need 435K AD compared to 150K at cap.
Unless it is a new module or massive update to powers/class the people most likely in need of a respec is the brand new level 60. How likely is it that a new level 60 is going to have 435K AD? 150 is pushing it already for most characters. If they are not using Leadership as a profession while levelling than they likely would have less than 30K. the grind to 150K would be intimidating let alone having to grind almost 3 times that amount.
I did my part and posted a 400 AD to 1 zen order, lol. I doubt it will ever be filled.
It would never stabilize. Just look at Zimbabwe. 500 cap is there for a reason.
Gold spam was there way before we reached the cap. I had gold spam mails and stuff when the exchange rate was 300AD/Zen and Zen was readily available in hundreds of thousands in sell offers.
The hard cap needs to stay. We rather need more "AD sinks", nice things we can buy without Zen, something like the Chicken Event (but more "permanent").
Oh no, no, no! Don't do this!
It is not a bad idea for hard-core gamers who can devote several hours a day to the game, but casual gamers like myself can only spend 1-2 hours a day maximum on Neverwinter. Working Leadership and invoking is my biggest sources of AD - probably true for other casual gamers as well.
myles08807 said, "Back in my day, we didn't have any of this fancy Mulhorand gear while we were leveling . . . we walked uphill both ways while dying once every five seconds while leveling, and we liked it fine!" . . . Now, get off my lawn, you kids!"
pointsman said, "I don't rue the game. In fact I don't feel any regret for the game at all."
looomis said, "I don't like people changing to alts and then bragging about their mains like schizophrenic role players."
This won't work. Gold farmers are going to use leadership regardless because they use bots rather than man-hours.
It is for me as well
Remember also that a lot of the AD inflation in-game is likely due to gold farmers running countless AD and invoke-bots, so although you might get less AD after any changes, you might actually be able to buy more for it...
Which is why I suggested as an option removing the AD rewards. Be painful sure, but the AD players do earn (from dailies etc) will be worth a lot more...
If you're going to have price controls just get rid of the market, it's fake and serves no purpose. If they just let the market do it's own thing, they'd make more money, because the black market would lose sales. This isn't speculation, it's common sense, and historical fact.
http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/PriceControls.html
I know, I know, history is a lie and economists are stupid sauce. I'll just go back to my dailies now...
I have too many toons and not enough time in my life to complete all the available dailies for every toon. I mainly work Dread Ring as I can run all of my toons through the daily dungeon faily quickly and have a chance at salvageable drops for AD.
myles08807 said, "Back in my day, we didn't have any of this fancy Mulhorand gear while we were leveling . . . we walked uphill both ways while dying once every five seconds while leveling, and we liked it fine!" . . . Now, get off my lawn, you kids!"
pointsman said, "I don't rue the game. In fact I don't feel any regret for the game at all."
looomis said, "I don't like people changing to alts and then bragging about their mains like schizophrenic role players."
Gold farmers make their AD by botting, hacking, exploiting and highjacking accounts. They don't earn it via regular means, like the rest of the players. Hence they sell it at a much lower price because:
A) Their AD is obtained illicitly and
Illicit goods shouldn't be used to determine the fair market value of something.
Your entire premise is fatally flawed, and thus your conclusions are wrong. This is a bad argument.
At any rate, raising leadership to profitable levels takes a fairly significant time investment per character and I get the distinct impression that goldsellers prefer to operate with disposable accounts because any individual ban is then no big loss.
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Where do you people get your figures? Zen is capped at 500 and as others have noted, for reason. So how are people getting these hypothetical numbers? Why are people even considering that zen needs to have that kind of exchange? Do we have some housing bubble stock hustlers playing this game? Is it the spam un-official AD/zen sellters out there catering to this? If you can't sell zen for more than 500 how do you know people will pay 1400 AD (nearly 3 times what its at) for 1 single zen, Where do people get off thinking the "real" price is in the thousands? You can only refine 24k in AD per day unless you sell things in the AH, assuming you aren't doing that then it would take just over 72 days to refine enough AD to by a zen market item valued at 3500. That is just over 2 months of doing nothing but daily AD farming to reach the cap, why on earth are you people trying to suggest that spending that kind of time is acceptable?
Everyone has time that is valuable but these MMO's seem to be taking the stance (which is encouraged by an apparently large number of people that play them) that you should spend nearly as much time playing these games to earn items in the game that have no "real value" in fact people are encouraging the game developers by accepting current pricing policies that this game is worth spending the same amount of money on a brand new game (that I can play as much as I want for as long as I want and enjoy every aspect of the game or get every item that can be found in the game if I take the time to explore, which is commonly less than 40 hours of play value now days but most old school RPGs had 60 - 200 playable hours not counting replay value) on a single item that is usable in the game. Can you imagine playing something like final fantasy and having to pay 35 dollars for each companion yo acquire in the game, or spending 10 dollars on the best sword in the game at the end, or being forced to spend several dollars just to fast travel from one location to another.
People are so screwbally that personally I think the exchange needs to be done away with totally. When I first started playing zen was spiralling slowly but surely downward, think it was near 200 ad per zen, I keep thinking that it will eventually go down again and that its just that MOD3 being out and new is keeping it high, but now i'm not so sure about that.
Honestly I wish this game would just go subscription based so we can play our game and not have to worry about any of this in general. Funny how people freak out over 10 - 15 per month when they end up spending several hundred in just a few weeks buying things like lockbox keys and other stuff.
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Not sure, but importantly I don't think they have anything like the Leadership profession there.
Demand of Zen for AD is high.
Demand of AD for Zen is low.
An extreme on either one of these can send the markets up to where they are at. If both hit(which is where I think we are now) then it hits this cap.
There can be many causes for each of these. Not as much money being spent on the game, generating lots of AD in game so no need to buy it, truly playing for free and generating lots of AD wanting to spend on keys or other items in Zen market.
Sometimes we forget that there is no way to generate Zen other than people spending real money. If those people spending real money choose not to spend on AD then there will be no Zen that can be bought. And once people get far enough along in the game, a few alts leveled to 20 in leadership and bam...no need to buy AD ever again. At least until they are given a good enough reason so that the current way of generating AD no longer generates enough to purchase what they want/must have. A chicken egg was not a must have.
No. The price did jump by about 20% a few weeks back though (Big sale on ships (Think mounts with equipment slots)) and has remained that high.
Not really.
But there are a couple important differences in Star Trek:
1. there's a lot more really useful stuff to spend Dilithium (their version of AD) on.... like crafting top-end gear from reputations, and upgrading your Fleet's (Guild's) starbase
2. the auction house runs on Credits (gold), not Dilithium. So the only way to get Dil is to exchange zen for it, or refine it (8k max per day) - even the Dil you get from lockboxes is unrefined.... instead of getting an item that hands you 40k AD, you get 6-10 "mine claims" that you can use once per day to get 5k unrefined Dil.
So, when I first played STO a year or two ago, the exchange was in the 90-120 range. Returning to the game now, it's at 150.
...I also wonder what effect the Lifetime Subscriptions has on the game, since each Lifetime member gets a stipend of zen (500?) each month. I'd bet that some amount of that ends up in the exchange.
Right now the turn around time is greater than 24 hours. As far as I know, that's a record. All orders since Module 3 have been filled within about 18 hours. I purchase around 25,000 ZEN per week from the ZAX.
I put in an order for 10,000 ZEN last night and it has yet to be filled. Most likely it will be filled overnight. Personally, I don't mind waiting a day or two (or three or four). It just means I put in larger orders earlier.
Ideally, Cryptic needs another AD dump to balance out the market. However, they're in a great place right now from a business standpoint: You either get your ZEN now by paying for it, or you wait and get ZEN later. If I were Cryptic, I wouldn't change a thing.
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This is actually a really good idea to help balance the ZAX.
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I really think this is partially the reason for what's happening right now.
So you think they are priced correctly at $10 per ward? I assume you didn't consider that and hence what the real solution would be to reduce the zen store prices.