Official Feedback Thread: Astral Diamonds

noworries · May 10

M14 brings about some changes to Rough AD. We monitor all of the AD earned, refined and spent on all platforms each day and have regular meetings to go over that data.

One thing that has been true for a while now is that the rate of AD entering the game is much higher than the AD being used up. The easiest place to see this is with the Astral Diamond Exchange ( ZAX ). For PC it has been a long time since the ZAX was not trading at 500 to 1, and the backlog has continued to hit higher levels each year during its big spikes. The console ZAX exchange is also higher than in the past, although it fortunately has not had to deal with being capped very often yet.

Overall, raising the cap is not a solution we believe would help in the long term or would be beneficial to the players. It would reduce the value of AD and would end up capped again as the overall AD wealth continued to grow.

We’ve been developing approaches to help address the problem and to get Astral Diamonds to a more stable place. M14 has the first significant steps toward that goal with additional changes coming in future modules.

At this point I’m sure you just want to get to the changes so here they are:

Rough Astral Diamond Refinement cap has been raised to 100,000 a day and is now an account wide limit. You can refine 100,000 on a single character or across multiple characters.
Astral Diamonds can now go into the shared bank.
Some uncommon (green) quality mounts and companions will be moving from the Zen store to the Wondrous Bazaar store.
The Bonus RP event has had multiple improvements but also has a boost that can be purchased in the Wondrous Bazaar to increase your Bonus RP earnings during the event. Part of our plan to start offering more items for AD.

Random Queues have also had a variety of changes which you can find out more information on in this thread: Official Feedback Thread: Changes to Random Queues

Below are the AD changes to the random queues:

Leveling Queue: 8,000 first run / 1,000 repeat
Intermediate Queue: 12,000 first run / 2,000 repeat / 2,400 role bonus
Advanced: 15,000 first run / 3,000 repeat / 3,000 role bonus
Expert: 5,000 role bonus

The first run bonuses are now account gated meaning that only one character can earn those first run bonuses per day.

The end goal of these changes, and future changes, is to get the AD markets into a better state for the players, allow the ZAX to work better and to make AD more meaningful and useful all around. We know these are big changes and all feedback and questions are welcome.

faredawg1 · May 10

DO NOT LIMIT AN ACCOUNT TO 100K REFINEMENT PER DAY. That is unacceptable. That is a DESTRUCTIVE NERF. I'm already refining 288,000K a day on my account. 8 toons times 36K a day equals 288,000 a day. DON'T DO IT, and please don't treat us like fools and advertise it like some kind of benefit to players. It is destructive. There is NO POINT in bringing down the Daily Account Refinement amounts like this. And its offensive that you would present this like a positive when it is a complete negative.

theog · May 10

Astral Diamond Refinement Changes
"Astral Diamonds are now more easily accessible across a player's entire account! The Shared Bank, accessible at the bank in Protector's Enclave, can now store Astral Diamonds. In addition, regardless of character, an account can refine up to 100,000 Astral Diamonds per day."

This is a terrible idea, there is a reason people salvage on alts this just limits the amount of AD people can make that are farming a good bit. Does not seem very helpful to limit people like this. The amount you can refine per day should change based on how many characters you have, 100k per day is easy to meet. During big events like 2x refining stones you get a massive amount of salvage running cradle and TONG. Makes no sense why you should have to wait to get through 4 million rough AD before you can get your AD from the even you just finished farming.

taskuhecate · May 10

I agree that the account cap on AD refinement is a very bad idea and might drive away quite a few players. Making the cap change depending on the amount of characters/character slots an account has might be slightly better, but honestly - why is the cap even needed?

Please come up with a better solution. The entire community is going to be upset by an account cap.

demolitioninc · May 10

100K per account, that's a huge blow to all botters. Love it.

ibz4ez · May 10

The feature trade off here is unacceptable this stage in the game. Sharing AD between toons was already implemented via the exchange, utilisation of the bank as a method for transferring AD between toons is no more than a cover up for the motive behind the 100k AD refinement limit.

This, as others have said and will continue to say, is utterly destructive to new and upcoming players and is not the sort of player-supporting behaviour this community would expect especially when the point of a new module is to attract old/retired players/new players back to the game.

I hope the inevitable revision of this comes soon.

nooneatza · May 10

I'm hyped as heck for Ravenloft.
But the 100k/account limit is a bad idea. Not bad, horrible.
Let me tell you why:
*****
If you're doing this because you fear inflation or economy stuff, let me tell you: Neverwinter's economy doesn't have any problems, NW has a few precautions in place(THAT YOU PUT THERE) so the economy never goes haywire.
I'm talking about:
-the auction house 10% cut
-the wondrous bazaar selling GMOP/SMOP/UMOPS/CUBES/KEYS
Just those two things alone are almost enough to nullify inflation. Also the AD for RP thing will add to this, so it's nice one !
IF YOU'RE DOING THIS BECAUSE OF THE BACKLOG IN ZEN EXCHANGE, DON'T ! The ad is not the problem. The problem comes from the lack on incentive to buy zen when there's no charge bonus. Also aside from vip/coal wards/runic bags there's not much reason to buy zen(haven't opened any other tab in a long while, i might be wrong).
It's always like this.
Summer sale comes around >>>backlog dissapears>>>
Summer sale is gone >>>Backlog increases up to black friday>>>
Black friday comes around >>>backlog dissapears>>>
Black friday sale is gone >>>Backlog increases up to christmas>>>
Christmas sale comes around >>>backlog dissapears>>>
Christmas sale is gone >>>Backlog increases>>>
blabla valentine's day you get the picture.
That's how it's been for the last year. No idea before as i did not keep track.
Backlog gets highest(15-20m) right around vday, summersale, black friday, christmas. Those are the 4 big sales you guys have.

*****
If you're doing this to combat bots, it would be so much better to just nerf/remove the amount of rough ad the random queues give. It's still a destructive change, but hey, choose the lesser bad.
That way the only way to get rough ad for your alts would be salvage items, which to be completely fair, bots don't get that many.

The 100k/account will hurt active players and will make the game feel unrewarding. Because frankly, when you burn 50 legendary keys in a day doing tong and you only get salvage, that's all the satisfaction you're getting. But taking two weeks to refine it all...you can see where i'm going.
You always take feedback, take our feedback !

TL;Dr
It's gonna be frustrating for actual players, bots will still refine 100k/account.

mentinmindmaker · May 10

faredawg1 said:
DO NOT LIMIT AN ACCOUNT TO 100K REFINEMENT PER DAY. That is unacceptable. That is a DESTRUCTIVE NERF. I'm already refining 288,000K a day on my account. 8 toons times 36K a day equals 288,000 a day. DON'T DO IT, and please don't treat us like fools and advertise it like some kind of benefit to players. It is destructive. There is NO POINT in bringing down the Daily Account Refinement amounts like this. And its offensive that you would present this like a positive when it is a complete negative.

This of course is a major nerf, and they are foolish if they think the playerbase will not immediately see it as such.

However, the AD influx in game seems to be a tad too high. This certainly is one way to deal with that, and it will only hurt the most hardcore players. The huge majority of NWs players seems to be fairly casual.

This change really seems to hit fairly precisely where they want it to hit. There will be noise of course.

The one point where this will have little or no effect will be on the botters, as they will just create and play the number of accounts they need. Accounts are disposable for the botter factories anyways.

fester69troll · May 10

100k/account - excellent, wonderful, elegant idea!!!!! It is high time.

faredawg1 · May 10

If your doing this AD change to effect Botters, perhaps you should put more concern in for the players and how it will negatively effect us to hurt Botters. Why should we suffer because you can't control Botters?

minotaur2857 · May 10

demolitioninc#2453 said:
100K per account, that's a huge blow to all botters. Love it.

Won't affect botters AT ALL, they have loads of free accounts, now they'll just have more with less characters. Yet again, Cryptic having NO UNDERSTANDING OF THEIR PLAYERS and killing people who do it right in a misguided attempt to affect botters who will be completely unaffected.

momof31978 · May 10

If the cap is going to be an account wide cap, i think it should be on a sliding scale based on the number of active toons a person has on their account. It is fine for someone with only a few toons, but for someone who plays with more toons on a regular basis, it is not a fair cap.

heraldfayez · May 10

while i agree totally that hyperinflation is a problem and that the ZAX backlog is an issue that needs to have attention from the devs but the changed being implemented only serve to kill mid level players who are aiming to reach end game and makes thier grind very hard because of the following reasons
1) we cannot make progress with playing content : you can argue only content that brings AD to players is MSP and tong/cradle MSP is very buggy right now almost to point of being unplayble by regular teams so that leaves cradle / tong with the very low drop rate and the content being latest none of mid gear players will have access to these

2)players who play should not be punished because of botters
as mentioned above i only see this as punishement to players who do play the game and not simply have an alt army for mini dung this happened before with things like gateway and all so i please call devs to reconsider raising this cap at least to 200K a day because some players really do spend time playing the game to get AD rather than bot

3)props on AD on shared bank that was a very requested feature so thank you for that

azaylin · May 10

"Astral Diamond Refinement Changes
Astral Diamonds are now more easily accessible across a player's entire account! The Shared Bank, accessible at the bank in Protector's Enclave, can now store Astral Diamonds. In addition, regardless of character, an account can refine up to 100,000 Astral Diamonds per day."

Love this idea!

However cap seems low... double it. Or allow cap to be influenced by the amount of Char slots on the account.

thefabricant · May 10

I think masterworks is a missed opportunity as a massive AD sink, if for example, some of the reagents were purchased from the wondrous bazaar. For example, if Terebinth was fixed at 20000 Astral Diamonds, then every time a player crafted Lakh varnish, 100k AD would be removed from the economy (less with VIP discounts, but you get the point). Just by having 1 or 2 key items that are crafted cost Astral Diamonds instead of guild marks, could massively help with the removal of AD from the economy, due to the sheer volume of AD which is processed by the professions in general.

ravenskya · May 10

I do have a question - since most people bought extra character slots in order to be capable of earning extra AD - and now we are limited to earning 4 characters worth of AD...

Can I get my money back for my other characters?

kreatyve · May 10

I personally like the idea, and hope that it works to lower the ZAX. It's been climbing on all the platforms. It was just under 200 when I started playing on Xbox and is now usually just under 400, sometimes just over 400. I would hate for it to hit 500 and stay there like PC.

And from what I hear, PS4 is nearing the 500 mark.

pompeyjohn · May 10

100k a day per account is a total joke. Yet again punishing long term players how many more times are you going to nerf the players that have supported the game for a long time and expect us to stay.

rjc9000 · May 10

thefabricant said:
I think masterworks is a missed opportunity as a massive AD sink, if for example, some of the reagents were purchased from the wondrous bazaar. For example, if Terebinth was fixed at 20000 Astral Diamonds, then every time a player crafted Lakh varnish, 100k AD would be removed from the economy (less with VIP discounts, but you get the point). Just by having 1 or 2 key items that are crafted cost Astral Diamonds instead of guild marks, could massively help with the removal of AD from the economy, due to the sheer volume of AD which is processed by the professions in general.

I agree with Edgy here that we could use some more AD sinks, though maybe not necessarily related to Masterwork only.

Could we get some more cool transmutes added to the Wonderous Bazaar?

If the the transmutes are sufficiently cool enough and people buy a ton of them, that also might globally remove AD from the economy.

noworries · May 10

Additional AD sinks is also an area we are looking into and have some future plans already, but continue to investigate fun/rewarding ways to spend AD.

valsmigera · May 10

100 k/account it's a bad idea.

neidanman · May 10

Maybe there could be an option for people who made lots of accounts do do some kind of trade-in/salvaging of account slots since they probably won't use so many now.

agilesto · May 10

nooneatza said:
Neverwinter's economy doesn't have any problems

Are we even playing the same game?

100k/Account, not gonna impact me, will reduce the overall amount of AD generated, so that's good for me.
However stinky nerf for players that have a huge playing time and are already able to refine several hundreds k per day.

eion311 · May 10

Personally when I read that the daily RAD is going to be raised from 36k to 100k I was psyched! I have like 2M that needs to be refined that 36k was never putting a dent into.
But I have 1 main and 2 alts that don't really do much, I can see why someone with a ton of alts would be upset by having it be "account" and not "character" limited.

agilesto · May 10

"The first run bonuses are now account gated meaning that only one character can earn those first run bonuses per day."

Now this is quite a more impactful nerf than the 100k per account...

shazza53 · May 10

Real people run lots of content to get salvage. We run ToNG over and over. Heck, people still run EToS and Shores for salvage. Some even run the not-so-well-liked Random Que stuff. Limiting salvage to 100K per day is a blow to the people who spend lots of hours playing this game. I’d think you would want to keep those people happy, not discourage them from running content.

Please rethink the 100K per day cap for refining AD.

cdnbison · May 10

I'm at a point where 100k/day AD is more than enough for the time I have available to game, and when I do have some extra time, and ring up some extra RAD, I'm sure it'll get covered off by days I don't have time to do much of anything. And I don't think I'm alone in this situation. A previous poster mentioned "people who burn through 50 Legendary keys a day in ToNG" - and I'd suggest they are an extreme outlier as at a (very generous) 15min. / run, still puts them at 12+ hours in there. Most people can squeeze in 2-6 hours a night. Enough to cap to 36k without much problem, and I'm sure 100k at the high end of that time - but beyond that? I don't honestly think you'll be seeing masses of players noticing the change.

dreadvenemous · May 10

@shazza53 has been in this game longer than I have. There is no telling how many hundreds of YOUR players she's helped in the game over the years, players who might otherwise have gotten frustrated and left before you had a chance to nerf something they earned. You should value her opinion, even if you ignore mine.

meirami · May 10

Welp, better go salvage all purples that have been piling up on alts before it's too late.

king1slayer · May 10

Add some unique, cool, special transmutes to the Wondrous Bazaar store and I am sure the AD will sink.

undeparted · May 10

This right here is a game killer. If you follow through with this, I will for one stop playing. And I know several long term players who will do the same.

We don’t have bot issues on consoles.

You can’t progress this game without AD. It’s just not possible. In other mmos you get rewarded with gear and upgrades through dungeon and raid runs. But in Neverwinter it’s almost entirely done by upgrading your current equipment of various sorts.

Hitting us here is almost as bad as the coal wards / tradebar store stunt. Which I still can’t believe you did. To date the worst thing I’ve seen been done to a game community.

100.000 a day is not enough. And you even restrict the first run bonus to being account wide... meaning salvage is the only way to reach maximum AD per day.

I hope you at least consider to compensate the remaining players on the extra character slots they have purchased over the years. I can only speak for myself, but extra diamonds per day, was the incentive for me to get additional slots.

Those of us who grind several toons through dungeons each day, don’t do it for fun. Or to cheat you out of money from zen purchases. We do it to progress our character in the way that YOU have created. YOU introduced the game with multiple currency. And YOU made ad to zen an option. Not us.

Those who put in the time should be rewarded as such. At least that’s how other games work...

Good luck with your game.

Patrick

Official Feedback Thread: Astral Diamonds

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