@lowjohn If I understand, your suggested solution is that NW change the Auction House to use gold rather than AD, correct? That would, of course, make a lot of people very upset... As a Lifer in STO (though I haven't played it in a meaningful way in several years), I agree that using AD as the market currency has always struck me as sort of wrong. However, again, the AH doesn't generate AD (aside from bonus AD due to VIP when people salvage their purchases). The AD used to buy the items was refined by someone, at some point, so while this would certainly change the value of AD in the game by making it much more difficult to obtain, I'm not sure the overall effects would be positive given how many player would likely quit over it....
@lowjohn If I understand, your suggested solution is that NW change the Auction House to use gold rather than AD, correct? That would, of course, make a lot of people very upset... As a Lifer in STO (though I haven't played it in a meaningful way in several years), I agree that using AD as the market currency has always struck me as sort of wrong. However, again, the AH doesn't generate AD (aside from bonus AD due to VIP when people salvage their purchases). The AD used to buy the items was refined by someone, at some point, so while this would certainly change the value of AD in the game by making it much more difficult to obtain, I'm not sure the overall effects would be positive given how many player would likely quit over it....
No, my "suggestion" is that they jump in a time machine and go back 5 years and fix this mistake in beta, before release day. Now, I think it's way too late.[1]
The issue isn't that the AH "generates" AD, its that it allows phenomenal concentration of it. One lockbox jackpot and you can expect 10-12 million AD on a sale, or 100-120 days of a single account refining the maximum every single day. You get 4 months worth of farming and AD refinement, straight into your inventory. Whereas in STO, if you want more "AD" than you can refine on your characters, you *must* trade Zen for it on the exchange. There's no other way.
One of the more fundamental issues with ZAX is that spending Zen to buy AD isn't just unpopular, it's INEFFICIENT. People buy stacks and stacks of coal wards during sales (so, 500-600 zen each), then sell them for regular Zen price in AD (500,000) when the sale is over. Then they trade the AD back for more Zen and wait for the next sale. If I want AD right now and I have Zen, I *could* trade 800 Zen for 400,000 AD, or I could open prayer rewards until I find a 20% off coupon, buy a Coal Ward for 800 Zen, undercut the market by ~10% for a super-fast sale, eat the 10% AH cut, and STILL take home ~410,000 and it would take at most 3-5 minutes longer than the ZAX. If I'm willing to wait a few hours I should be able to make ~450,000.
(This only works as well as it does because the ZAX is pegged, of course: if it was floating freely, then the AH price of a Coal ward would naturally tend to be the current exchange rate times 1000 (the Zen cost of a Coal ward), but you'd still have people buying during the Zen sales and selling once the Zen price goes back up. Still, the issue would be smaller.)
A more practical suggestion than "make the AH stop using AD as currency" is to remove valuable sellable items from the Zen store: take Coal and Pres Wards out, or bind them to account on purchase. Remove the items that sell for more AD than the Zen they cost to purchase. That's going to inspire a lot of player rage, but it might be more survivable than "the AH doesn't use AD any more". In STO, which, again, doesn't have most of the problems we're discussing, there's almost nothing in the Zen store that you can buy to sell on the AH except lockbox keys - and when you sell lockbox keys, you're making Gold, not AD. The Zen store is full of account unlocks and services and skins, all kinds of things that people want, but nothing unbound on a desirability scale like Coal Wards in Neverwinter.
The core idea is to set it up so that if you have Zen and want AD, the only option is to trade Zen for AD, not go adventuring and hope for a lucky drop, not buy stuff like Wards and sell them above their Zen cost, nothing. STO has this and it works. Neverwinter does not have this, and I have *no idea* how to get there from where Neverwinter is without trashing everything. And I don't think trashing everything is a good solution.
[1]: I mean, I could be wrong, but I think the most immediate effect would be to crash the value of ADs even harder relative to Zen: Suddenly there's people with tens and hundreds of millions of AD and it's not the AH currency any more. The ONLY things you can do with it are trade it for Zen and buy Marks Of Potency, and a dude with 10 million AD probably already has plenty of those, let alone a dude with a billion. There's also the obvious problem of "what about all the worthless gold that people have been stacking up since beta? How do we balance people like me (If I count it up and have less than 100,000 Gold I'm shocked, and I give it away to new players regularly) with newer players?". I suppose adding a one-way tool to convert AD to gold would help: people who want "Auction House Currency" could convert their millions of AD to it?
Unpopular suggestion time: #1: Wipe out all Gold in the game. Eliminate it all. Set EVERYONE'S stockpiles, every toon, every account bank, every guild bank, all of them, to zero. Gold is currently worthless, but I'm about to make it valuable, so let's level the playing field and eliminate the 5+ years of casual accumulation first. #2: Change the AH to use Gold, not AD, as currency. #3: Provide a limited-time way to convert AD to Gold, so that people who currently have massive supplies of "Auction House Currency" can convert those stockpiles into the new AH currency if they want to. And during this time, they can also turn Zen into AD into Gold, if they want to. You make this conversion irreversible and one-way: No turning gold back into AD. After a time (a nice long time - like, 2 months? 3? 4?) the vendor goes away forever.
You'll still be able to "turn AD into Gold" - spend AD on a Mark Of Potency, sell it on the AH for gold. Or turn it to Zen and buy a lockbox key and sell the contents.
This eliminates any way of making AD other than refining it yourself. It's no longer possible to skip 4 months of gameplay by selling a Legendary mount, no longer possible to concentrate a hundred people's daily efforts onto one character in under a minute. AH prices will become decoupled from realmoney value.
The next thing you do is start putting valuable but not sellable things in the AD store. Move account-bound wards there for cheaper than (unbound) Zen store price. Stick things like Rename Tokens and Retrain Tokens and Power Points and Bags and Bank Space, in the AD store instead of the Zen store. Move dyes to the AD store from the T-Bar store. Provide people with a strong incentive to turn Zen into AD.
So, with this suggestion, I have: #1: Removed any way to earn AD other than refining it or selling Zen for it. #2: Decoupled the AH from AD #3: Provided current AH-currency-rich players with a way to remain AH-currency-rich #4: Provided increased useful things to spend AD on that aren't AH-fodder.
I think if you implement this suggestion, there will be MASSIVE rage from players, and when the dust clears six months later the economy will be greatly improved AND the ZAX will drop from 500 and start floating lower again. Oh, and gold will have a use so there will finally be a reason to pick it up.
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plasticbatMember, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 12,417Arc User
Gold is not worthless. People (probably limited people) has been converting gold to AD since the beginning.
*** 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. ***
@lowjohn An interesting suggestion - and one I actually wouldn't rage about. The thing is that I still go out of my way to pick up gold. Granted, I have 1300g sitting in my bank, and another 1k on my warlock, ranger, and paladin, each. I sometimes use it to donate to the guild if I'm not in the mood to create crates of gold using alchemy. Mostly I use it to buy brimstone from the professions vendor because I don't care to bring the Bloomery to the SH because brimstone is about the only thing I need from that vendor.
I would not appreciate having all my gold wiped out, but if they gave me some advance notice that they were going to do this, then I would have time to buy tens of thousands of brimstone beforehand. And if I had that notice, then I wouldn't mind having my gold wiped out so much.
In small amounts almost not worth the time, by buying gold-vendor items and selling them on the AH. For what amounts to pennies.
If there's a way to turn gold into relevant amounts of AD in a reasonable time, I don't know anyone who's done it. I do know that sometimes (more on consoles than PC) people sell/trade stuff in PE for Gold, and I know there's weirdos who buy stacks of plates and stuff that's only good for turning into gold on the AH, but those are all small potatoes.
I don't see any reason to eliminate gold stocks in your scenario @lowjohn. Yes, a lot of people (myself included) have massive supplies of gold sitting around collecting dust from years and years of alt-army leadership, but flushing it all wouldn't be remotely fair unless you also flushed a sizable amount of AH too. Reason being, there are a lot of ultra-rich players with high 8-digit AD (or more) stockpiles that would still remain easily in control of the economy and still very very wealthy under your suggestion while the other, say 80% of players would see what wealth they do have dropped to 0.
As a matter of fact, it would probably be better to simply convert the AH and not convert AD to Gold at all, since AD will still be a valuable currency - but it's value in trade would be severly limited to buying refinement commodities and selling them for gold.
As far as turning gold into AD - it seems small potatoes but it works. A exalted healing potion goes for something like 2800 per 99 stack, which means using those it translates to 14 AD per gold peice. If you have 10K gold and want to convert it, that's a simple way to make 140,000 AD out of "worthless" currency. There are almost certianly more lucrative ways, this is just a very quick example.
Still, on the whole, I might be able to get behind a conversion from AD to Gold for the Auction House. It would really depend on the details though. It could easily turn into a scenario where the rich get richer while the poor get poorer and therefore nothing actually changes for the better at all... This is a game, we don't want it to reflect the real world economy
As far as turning gold into AD - it seems small potatoes but it works. A exalted healing potion goes for something like 2800 per 99 stack, which means using those it translates to 14 AD per gold peice. If you have 10K gold and want to convert it, that's a simple way to make 140,000 AD out of "worthless" currency. There are almost certianly more lucrative ways, this is just a very
Based on this conversion, I would have about 1 million AD worth of gold. And I sold higher than 2800 AD per stack.
*** 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. ***
I don't see any reason to eliminate gold stocks in your scenario @lowjohn. Yes, a lot of people (myself included) have massive supplies of gold sitting around collecting dust from years and years of alt-army leadership, but flushing it all wouldn't be remotely fair unless you also flushed a sizable amount of AH too. Reason being, there are a lot of ultra-rich players with high 8-digit AD (or more) stockpiles that would still remain easily in control of the economy and still very very wealthy under your suggestion while the other, say 80% of players would see what wealth they do have dropped to 0.
If you had no AD before, you had no AH currency before and you would still have no AH currency after. That's intended. Nobody's wealth would "drop to zero" - only people who have zero before would have zero after. And yes, the people with billions would still have billions.
The idea behind wiping out the gold stocks would be so the people like you and me with 5 years of gold stockpiled wouldn't distort the market, pricing out new players on items, or require that the ad->gold conversion be so huge that someone converting 15 million AD winds up with 1.5 million gold in order to stay "rich" above all us lazy farmers, and also so that new players, one way or the other, aren't left completely unable to purchase stuff on the AH.
As far as turning gold into AD - it seems small potatoes but it works. A exalted healing potion goes for something like 2800 per 99 stack, which means using those it translates to 14 AD per gold peice. If you have 10K gold and want to convert it, that's a simple way to make 140,000 AD out of "worthless" currency. There are almost certianly more lucrative ways, this is just a very quick example.
#1: 140,000 AD is small potatoes. #2: In the time it takes for you to buy 50 stacks, post 50 stacks, sell 50 stacks, and collect the AD, I'm pretty sure your AD/min would have been much higher just running eToS for salvage. The potion AD is unbounded by your daily refining, to be fair, but also that's a mind-numbing amount of work for a very small return.
(Also, that assumes adding 50 stacks of potions to the market doesn't depress the price/kill demand.)
I stand by my assertion that Gold is a largely worthless currency, but I accept that it's not 100% worthless if you don't jealously guard your time the way I do.
So... when there is a 10m backlog at 1000AD per zen you'll what? Come back here and wish for it to be at 2000? Then... 10K? There is a cap for a reason, and it's an important one. The problem is the vast majority of people value Zen more than AD and the AD supply in game is MASSIVE. Because AD isn't highly valued as compared to Zen, and because the supply of AD is huge and the supply of Zen is small (relative to each other), the market is pegged at max.
Solutions:
Let the market decide where the equilibrium point is. By removing the AD cap, the market price of Zen will rise until the values based on their supply and demand curves equalize. It's impossible to tell where that will be but you can bet your booty it's a lot higher than 1000 AD/Zen. This will, most likely, cause the barrier of entry for new players to acquire Zen without spending $$ to be too high, the game will be permanently branded NOT really free-to-play, and they will lose every player that cares about not spending money but also being able to acquire Zen market items. Also, the cost for any Zen market item will also rise in the AH commiserate with the value of Zen, making it likewise unobtainable to the vast majority of player. This is simple Econ 101 stuff and is among one of the things Cryptic has done right with regards to the economy over the years.
Reduce the supply of AD. Because the supply of AD in the game is so large (yes, really) the relative value of AD is very small. The simplest way to increase its value is to make it more scarce. There are several ways to do that, such as reducing the rate of generation OR they can create AD sinks to pull AD out of the game. They've done both methods over the years, with little clear success. The problem, as I see it, is while they have taken many steps to reduce generation (all of which are generally panned by players at the time), they have done very little to provide quality AD sinks. In other words, the stuff you can get with AD, aside from refinement stuff, is generally worthless to the majority of players. They need some new ideas on what players would dump AD into on a reoccurring basis besides buying Zen.
Increase the supply of Zen. This is the so-called quantitative easing method where they either inject Zen into the game by buying AD and effectively deleting it, or they devalue the Zen buy cutting it's price. The latter is not sustainable since that will actually reduce their profits in a direct way. The former could work as a one-time thing provided they fix the AD economy at the same time - if they don't, the problem will come back within weeks. Either way, injecting Zen into the game will reduce overall profits. Remember, buying Zen with AD is simply exchanging AD for something someone else as paid for. Every point of Zen equates to money a player spent money to purchase at some point.
Do Nothing. Always an option, if not necessarily a solution.
I suspect Cryptic will opt for #4 and a little bit of #2. It would be a huge mistake for them to change the ZAX cap, and it would likewise be a mistake for them to inject Zen. The solution here lives squarely in the manipulation of AD supply. The only real question I have is whether they'll go full tyrant-mode and again take drastic steps to reduce AD generation, will they take a player/customer-focused approach and give us AD sinks we'll actually find enjoyable, or will they take a middle approach? In the past, their middle approached involved reducing AD generation while giving us sinks most people found pointless and not a little bit annoying.... So... we'll see how it goes
Well you could say they already have done that. For people that had 4-10, or 20+ character's it used to be 36,000 diamonds a day per character. Now it's just 100,000 per account. So while that slightly increases it for those with 2 character's, it reduces the Astral Diamonds for those with 3 or more. There were just too many low level random dungeon each character could run for 10k; or a random skirmish for 7.5k, not to mention the higher Random Dungeon's. Each Daily bonus could be earned on multiple character's, and the refinement limit was higher at 36,000 diamonds. Now you only get the daily maximum bonus on the first character who does it; and repeat attempts payout far less means you have to work a little, if not a lot harder to earn astral diamonds or salvage.
My goodness there are some day's I'm lucky if I'm making even 50,000 despite having 8 level 70 character's. Though it's possible I was focused on INF, advancing campaigns, or something else? So my Diamond potential has cut down from 288k to 100k but still I'm perfectly fine with it; as rarely was able to earn over 125,000-150,000 in the past. But some had a lot more time so their potential cut far more, cause at 56 characters x 36,000 diamonds, in theory some had the potential, to refine almost 2 million diamonds a day! Still with a little salvage from some low level Skirmish which used to also give 7500 rad if we very easy to get 20k refinement on most character's far too easily.
Astral Diamonds have definitely been greatly limited at least for most. Still I think the vast majority of those with huge surplus of Diamonds is those in Mastercraft. While people can only request 5000 ZEN at a time, they can easily put up one of those offer's every 9-13 days.
I think it would be GOOD if they limited everyone to 5000 ZEN purchased thru diamond sales each a month regardless if one large transaction or 5 or 10 smaller ones. I mean it wouldn't prevent people from buying more than Diamonds if they wanted them, as those all encourage people to buy ZEN which is what they want.
Post edited by strathkin on
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adinosiiMember, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 4,294Arc User
Some of you are forgetting one thing.
Any change which would reduce how much Zen is bought for real $$$ will not get implemented.
Some of the suggestions posted here would probably reduce the amount of Zen that people actually buy, and discussing those is just a waste of time.
Another thing they could add to an AD store "VIP-Lite" sub: One click option to teleport directly to quest giver when a quest is ready to turn in or instead, perhaps unlock the ability to just turn in quests anywhere.
Any change which would reduce how much Zen is bought for real $$$ will not get implemented.
Some of the suggestions posted here would probably reduce the amount of Zen that people actually buy, and discussing those is just a waste of time.
Perhaps - but I think there is a way for them to make AD more valuable without effecting the purchase of Zen. Clearly, the devalued AD isn't increasing sales, or the backlog wouldn't be growing ever larger (nearly 11 million as of right now). So, there's an equilibrium point between AD value and Zen sales that still has yet to be found where AD is more valuable that it is today without reducing either the supply or demand of Zen.
Any change which would reduce how much Zen is bought for real $$$ will not get implemented.
Some of the suggestions posted here would probably reduce the amount of Zen that people actually buy, and discussing those is just a waste of time.
Perhaps - but I think there is a way for them to make AD more valuable without effecting the purchase of Zen. Clearly, the devalued AD isn't increasing sales, or the backlog wouldn't be growing ever larger (nearly 11 million as of right now). So, there's an equilibrium point between AD value and Zen sales that still has yet to be found where AD is more valuable that it is today without reducing either the supply or demand of Zen.
If backlog gets below 500/1 then you get more Zen per AD, less AD per Zen. I dont think this is devalued. Cutting AD supplies makes AD more valuable no?
The Zax being at 500/1 means this is the most AD players will get per Zen unless the cap is raised. If players don't need to spend their AD why not get Zen for it? They can always sell it for max amount AD anyways. If not it will just take players longer to get each day because there is lots of AD in circulation. Changes will take time to fully come into effect.
This behaviour of backlog has been happening for years. But for some reason some people on these forums act like its something new. I don't get it. Yes it might of increased over time with yearly comparisons but that is due to numerous things. We have black Friday coming up. This is usually big sales time no?
At this rate if the Devs nerfed everything every time some complained about the back log I don't even want to think what the experience would be like.
In the official feedback thread for AD changes etc Devs said they have and are going to implement more things with new mods. Hopefully these will be useful to players and not just AD sink for the sake of AD sinks.
If I am wrong on the AD is now devalued or will be at under 500/1 please tell me, I cant see it.
If I am wrong on the AD is now devalued or will be at under 500/1 please tell me, I cant see it.
You're not understanding how AD value works. Let me try to clear it up a little. When you get more AD per one Zen, then AD is worth less. When you get fewer AD per one Zen, AD is worth more. That's been the whole point of this discussion. I'm uncertain how you missed that point in three pages of posts on the topic.
If I am wrong on the AD is now devalued or will be at under 500/1 please tell me, I cant see it.
You're not understanding how AD value works. Let me try to clear it up a little. When you get more AD per one Zen, then AD is worth less. When you get fewer AD per one Zen, AD is worth more. That's been the whole point of this discussion. I'm uncertain how you missed that point in three pages of posts on the topic.
500/1 is said to not be increasing. Devs said they want it to go below 500/1. This means AD per Zen is at its max value atm. Even with the changes this is the best time to sell Zen for AD according to devs intentions no? It has been this way for years as I understand it. AD has not changed to being devalued atm.
The person I replied to said devalued AD isn't increasing sales. I still cant see it. What devalued AD? As a Zen seller players will want more AD per Zen, AD sellers more Zen per AD. What has been devalued and how? I can only think that someone selling Zen thinks they should get more AD then 500 so to them AD at present is considered devalued compared to what they could get if cap was raised which was said wont be happening.
To someone who played many years and saw the few times it was below 500/1 it may be considered devalued atm but going by a previous post the total amount of days that was even a thing is less then 100? give or take. 500/1 has been the norm for ages apparently. I do not consider this devalued AD. It can be better and Devs say they want it for some reason to go below 500/1 but it can also be a lot worse if cap was raised.
Having the ability to buy Zen items and sell them in the AH for more AD then what the Zax would otherwise generate doesn't help things. Why post Zen on Zax for AD unless you need AD right now? You can get more by not doing so...... Still I think AD is not devalued atm, just there are ways to get more bang for your buck.
The person who needs AD right now will get 500 per (max value), the person who can wait will get more through other means, both AD and Zen with time. Is this what is considered as devaluing AD atm? The ability to get more AD through other means? The fact its at 500/1 and has been for quite some time? Or from a Zen sellers perspective of being too cheap? None? I'm still not understanding how this works after 3 pages?
If I am wrong on the AD is now devalued or will be at under 500/1 please tell me, I cant see it.
You're not understanding how AD value works. Let me try to clear it up a little. When you get more AD per one Zen, then AD is worth less. When you get fewer AD per one Zen, AD is worth more. That's been the whole point of this discussion. I'm uncertain how you missed that point in three pages of posts on the topic.
500/1 is said to not be increasing. Devs said they want it to go below 500/1. This means AD per Zen is at its max value atm. Even with the changes this is the best time to sell Zen for AD according to devs intentions no? It has been this way for years as I understand it. AD has not changed to being devalued atm.
The person I replied to said devalued AD isn't increasing sales. I still cant see it. What devalued AD? As a Zen seller players will want more AD per Zen, AD sellers more Zen per AD. What has been devalued and how? I can only think that someone selling Zen thinks they should get more AD then 500 so to them AD at present is considered devalued compared to what they could get if cap was raised which was said wont be happening.
You're conflating the value of Zen and the value of AD. Prices are relative because the market is entirely player-driven. Right now, because the market is a the max AD / Zen exchange rate of 500 AD to 1 Zen, this means AD is (in terms of the ZAX) at its minimum point of value and Zen is at it's maximum. At the same time, prices for things in the AH are also quite high, which indicates the supply of AD in the game is still very high and therefore, based on normal supply and demand, is of low value.
Think of AD in real-world terms. Why are diamonds so valuable (relative to dollars) as opposed to, say, pine wood? Because it's rare. If you could grow real diamonds in your back yard, people wouldn't pay as much for it and if you figure out a way to do it, suddenly the supply of diamonds would explode and cause the market in diamonds to crash as the value declined to basically nothing. Wedding rings would be made of sapphires or rubies because... ugh, who wants a generic diamond you can grow anywhere? Something that is common (AD in game, pine wood in RL) is not as valuable as something that is scarce and you can manipulate a things value by increase or decreasing it's scarcity.
If you increase the value of AD (by reducing it's supply, aka introducing scarcity), AD will then be considered more valuable, prices of things in the AH will decline (because the market will no longer bear the current prices) and the value of Zen, as compared to AD will fall - causing the backlog to reduce and the value of AD per Zen to fall below 500 - primarily because less people will be posting their now-more-valuable AD for Zen as opposed to fewer people trying to sell their Zen for AD (an increased value of AD will actually cause more people to look to the ZAX as a way to get AD). When you see the market below 500/1 that indicates the value of AD has increased. Dramatically increased in fact, given the backlog is now stands at 11.3 million.
Further, because AD supply is so hi and therefore Zen is easy to obtain without paying - I would posit that it's actually depressing Zen sales. Yes... there's a long wait for Zen, but I would suggest that only the most impatient are buying Zen with cash for actual use as Zen, which hurts the game's bottom line. A more evenly distributed economy that sees a highly valued AD being an important commodity for the game will see people buying zen for use, perhaps then selling the Zen store item for AD because that's more profitable than exchanging in a market that see Zen slightly less valuable relative to AD, but I don't believe the ZAX should be the primary reason people buy Zen anyway.
At the end of the day, there is an equilibrium point in the ZAX around with a health market will fluctuate. I'd say that point is probably somewhere between 350 and 400 AD/Zen with heathly market peaks as low as 300 and as high as 450. Infrequently, in a healthy market, we'll see dips under 300 and peeks as high as 500 but nothing sustained. It used to be this way years ago, when the game's economy was in great shape (this was back when you could sell the BiS gear from CN on the AH.... which meant AD was very valuable, and before armies of alt-bots had completely ruined the AD supply).
I do not view this market as entirely player driven as I see it heavily influenced by Devs decisions in many forms, from Zax cap to useful Zen items prices. Yes AD per Zen is at max and yes Zen per AD is at its worse but the cap will not let it get out of control or find a real player driven equilibrium.
Do you have any examples of AH prices that increased due solely to the high supply of AD? You mentioned normal supply and demand which makes what we have sound abnormal but I do not think it is. If prices have increased on certain things couldn't that be due to their scarcity, the fact AD generation got nerfed for some and buffed for others etc? This is normal supply and demand no? Nothing we see here has suddenly changed over night but instead a gradual build up/amalgamation of things occurred.
Although the supply of AD in circulation is currently still high, hasn't the generation of AD been reduced with more AD sinks/changes on the horizon? Having a backlog of 11m and rising should not be a surprise to anyone except new players. This falls completely in line with the games history of events and sales. There has not even been time enough to really see how the recent changes have affected things and how the market will adjust once the dust settles.
Yes I like your vision but I don't hold on to nostalgia so closely. I do look forward to how this plays out and what they introduce in the near future. Again ty for your pov.
The thing is that this cap of refining 100k AD per account per day is really not going to have much impact on the value of AD or the prices for stuff on the auction house. The reason why is what the developers had already stated: There was a single digit percentage of players refining more than 100k AD per day. This means that >90% of players have had their rAD -> AD income either completely unaffected negatively, barely negatively affected, or positively affected by this cap.
My rAD -> AD income went down by about 8k per day because I was running one random dungeon per day on eight characters (and no skirmishes), but since the Ravenloft mod dropped I've still been refining 100k per day almost every day except for the first few days. My wife was refining about 45k to 50k per day because she was running only four characters through random dungeons per day. And now? Now she's refining 100k per day, as well. So this change effectively doubled the amount of AD she's generating per day.
So until the developers start introducing things to spend AD on, nothing is going to change with respect to the value of AD. (Personally, I don't need any more AD sinks. I'm spending basically everything I have on upgrading enchantments.)
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greywyndMember, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 7,153Arc User
(Personally, I don't need any more AD sinks. I'm spending basically everything I have on upgrading enchantments.)
Same, and there is no where near enough AD in my personal economy...
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.
@chivonica - I don’t have any ready examples, no. This isn’t a simple economy, as there are a lot more variables to control for than merely the AD supply. There are ceilings, there are currency drains, there’s malicious activity (bots and 3rd party sellers), there’s market manipulation by players... I think it’s unlikely Cryptic is injecting cash (aka Zen), but they do run auction events for the super-wealthy now and then to suck AD out of circulation.
I’m nostalgic for a working economy and having been playing the game since before closed beta (save a recent long hiatus), I happen to remember what that’s like. I don’t think the answer lies in recreating those conditions because the game has advanced and evolve a lot - but certianly there’s a solution that can ease the economy back into health without decimating Cryptic’s profit margin...
The thing is that this cap of refining 100k AD per account per day is really not going to have much impact on the value of AD or the prices for stuff on the auction house. The reason why is what the developers had already stated: There was a single digit percentage of players refining more than 100k AD per day. This means that >90% of players have had their rAD -> AD income either completely unaffected negatively, barely negatively affected, or positively affected by this cap.
On its own and in the short term no but in the long term and in combination with other things yes.
These players were enough for them to make an informed decision on implementing changes. I doubt these figures were plucked out from thin air for the sake of making some players disgruntled and having no effect. But who knows
These types of decisions make players just a number. If you fall into the undesired category that they're trying to stop or discourage, doesn't matter if your RP, hardcore, softcore, w/e your sol. Ideally an analysis etc of the change(s) and affect(s) would have been made with collateral damage taken into consideration.
The 90% positive/no effect take on this helps soften the blow of whats actually being done (Basically PR spin etc) and puts a positive light on it. Although some or most are making roughly the same or more this would of (again ideally) been taken into consideration. Although we might not be seeing the full effects of it atm this was a big change.
So until the developers start introducing things to spend AD on, nothing is going to change with respect to the value of AD. (Personally, I don't need any more AD sinks. I'm spending basically everything I have on upgrading enchantments.)
I am in the same boat as you atm but yeh the economy clearly needs changes if the value of AD is to be increased. Hopefully the planned changes they have wont be a death blow so to speak and eased in. I personally think that some of the monetisation items need to be re-looked at as well. If the key offenders are left in as they are now, not much will change imo. It will be the same thing but on a different scale.
@kvet Yeh I like that they tried with the companion AD sink. Its not something I would likely be getting or able to lol but I like the intention. I didn't keep up with how that went but got the impression that it heavily declined in effectiveness.
Nostalgia is fine. What I write can be seen as negative or obtuse at times but that's not my intention although I may achieve it Seriously @nunya#5309 if I could click all the buttons on that one liner post I would, it did make lol though and I will wear that with the conspiracy theorist badge you gave me before with pride
I try not to get involved with direct changes to games anymore and I find nostalgia often leads to disappointment in most cases but I do like your vision and remember in STO waaaay back where I was one of the biggest contributors to two of the biggest guilds at that time, one fed, one khg primarily through playing the market. It was great and added a whole other side to the game. But the journey getting back to something like that in this game could easily become unbearable and very dependant on the changes they make. It might not be worth it. We will see.
I personally value players ideas and pov and think too often they are an untapped free resource. So while I may rarely participate I appreciate the people that do, hopefully exploring different pov and giving constructive feedback not only here but in the official feedback threads.
@chivonica I've enjoyed this back-and-forth. You make some good points and your last post really made me laugh. Maybe you're right and the 100k account cap will have positive effects on the economy in the longer term. I don't believe the change was made capriciously or without thought. Certainly it will have an effect on those people who were refining millions of astral diamonds per day. (Not sure whether I'm envious of those people's ability to no-life the game or not...)
I agree that player suggestions are often overlooked. When they're not, the developers have a tendency to corrupt them during implementation. I try not to get too into making suggestions because of this.
> @adinosii said: > Some of you are forgetting one thing. Any change which would reduce how much Zen is bought for real $$$ will not get implemented. > > Some of the suggestions posted here would probably reduce the amount of Zen that people actually buy, and discussing those is just a waste of time.
Sure, some would (not that that stops the frequent “we should get more free coalescent wards” posts) but some might not. For example, say that next maintenance they closed all orders on the ZAX (returned the zen/AD to players who were offering it — well, just AD in this case) and raised the exchange cap. Or just left it uncapped entirely. Would that reduce the amount of Zen people buy? Short term effects at least would likely be:
— A massive initial increase in exchange rate, from anyone sitting on huge piles of AD who want large amounts of Zen. No idea what that might peak at — 2500? 5000? But within a few days...
—Some people will buy/offload Zen to keep up with the the initial wave of orders. Some people will do so because they want some gear or enchantment or other AH item, and couldn’t justify spending $10 or whatever on it but can justify getting it for $1.50.
— ... resulting in massive AD inflation. Because suddenly all that backlogged AD is free in the market...
— ... creating a market bubble at the peak or near peak exchange rate, which some people will fail to recognize (seeing the exchange only rise) and buy more Zen...
— ... and then the bubble pops. Non Zen-store AH items are still hyper inflated, but the enchantment that you could get for $1 of AD is now $20 of AD...
— ... and then finally equilibrium, eventually, where the exchange rate only swings a few percent most weeks. Bigger swings due to Bazaar sales (devaluation Zen) or Zen store sales (devaluing AD) which are entirely within Dev control. Potentially bubbles prior to new updates as well. Much like the pre-500 fixed exchange, arbitrage will keep the market relatively stable, since the people doing the most of it will necessarily have the majority of the resources.
End result is still Zen being worth more AD, increasing the value proposition of paying $ for Zen to exchange. The first week or several might be crazy, but would that actually discourage Zen purchases? It seems more likely to have the general effect of increasing Zen sales. As long as there are tradeable and/or desirable effectively Zen-store-only items (wards, character slots, bags, etc.) Zen will never drop in value significantly post equilibrium.
I think the only reason they keep the cap where it is is because of fear of exploits or increased use of outside RMT. If those weren’t barriers I think they would have uncapped it a long time ago.
> Some of you are forgetting one thing. Any change which would reduce how much Zen is bought for real $$$ will not get implemented.
>
> Some of the suggestions posted here would probably reduce the amount of Zen that people actually buy, and discussing those is just a waste of time.
Sure, some would (not that that stops the frequent “we should get more free coalescent wards” posts) but some might not. For example, say that next maintenance they closed all orders on the ZAX (returned the zen/AD to players who were offering it — well, just AD in this case) and raised the exchange cap. Or just left it uncapped entirely. Would that reduce the amount of Zen people buy? Short term effects at least would likely be:
— A massive initial increase in exchange rate, from anyone sitting on huge piles of AD who want large amounts of Zen. No idea what that might peak at — 2500? 5000? But within a few days...
—Some people will buy/offload Zen to keep up with the the initial wave of orders. Some people will do so because they want some gear or enchantment or other AH item, and couldn’t justify spending $10 or whatever on it but can justify getting it for $1.50.
— ... resulting in massive AD inflation. Because suddenly all that backlogged AD is free in the market...
— ... creating a market bubble at the peak or near peak exchange rate, which some people will fail to recognize (seeing the exchange only rise) and buy more Zen...
— ... and then the bubble pops. Non Zen-store AH items are still hyper inflated, but the enchantment that you could get for $1 of AD is now $20 of AD...
— ... and then finally equilibrium, eventually, where the exchange rate only swings a few percent most weeks. Bigger swings due to Bazaar sales (devaluation Zen) or Zen store sales (devaluing AD) which are entirely within Dev control. Potentially bubbles prior to new updates as well. Much like the pre-500 fixed exchange, arbitrage will keep the market relatively stable, since the people doing the most of it will necessarily have the majority of the resources.
End result is still Zen being worth more AD, increasing the value proposition of paying $ for Zen to exchange. The first week or several might be crazy, but would that actually discourage Zen purchases? It seems more likely to have the general effect of increasing Zen sales. As long as there are tradeable and/or desirable effectively Zen-store-only items (wards, character slots, bags, etc.) Zen will never drop in value significantly post equilibrium.
I think the only reason they keep the cap where it is is because of fear of exploits or increased use of outside RMT. If those weren’t barriers I think they would have uncapped it a long time ago.
We do know that the balance point would be larger than 1,000 AD/1 Zen. Don't believe me, ask a friend from the Russian server.
Due to exploits that were used in the first year of the game, there are some players with pockets deeper than the underdark. They would be able to capitalize on this & probably drive that even higher. Which would either drive players out of the game entirely, or (more likely in my opinion) force players to make the choice to stay... and ignore the ZAX altogether.
The end result is a game where the ZAX exists only for the use of the mega-whales. The devs do not appear to want that. Thank Ohgma !
@kvet Yeh I like that they tried with the companion AD sink. Its not something I would likely be getting or able to lol but I like the intention. I didn't keep up with how that went but got the impression that it heavily declined in effectiveness.
Nostalgia is fine. What I write can be seen as negative or obtuse at times but that's not my intention although I may achieve it Seriously @nunya#5309 if I could click all the buttons on that one liner post I would, it did make lol though and I will wear that with the conspiracy theorist badge you gave me before with pride
I try not to get involved with direct changes to games anymore and I find nostalgia often leads to disappointment in most cases but I do like your vision and remember in STO waaaay back where I was one of the biggest contributors to two of the biggest guilds at that time, one fed, one khg primarily through playing the market. It was great and added a whole other side to the game. But the journey getting back to something like that in this game could easily become unbearable and very dependant on the changes they make. It might not be worth it. We will see.
I personally value players ideas and pov and think too often they are an untapped free resource. So while I may rarely participate I appreciate the people that do, hopefully exploring different pov and giving constructive feedback not only here but in the official feedback threads.
The first Alphonse went for max cap. 97 million. 2nd went for half, 55 million, 3rd went for 33 million. Stopped paying attention after that.
Comments
Sekhmet@kvetchus_
Guilds: Greycloaks, Blackcloaks, Whitecloaks, Goldcloaks, Browncloaks, Spiritcloaks, Bluecloaks, Silvercloaks, Black Dawn
Tredecim: The Cloak Alliance
The issue isn't that the AH "generates" AD, its that it allows phenomenal concentration of it. One lockbox jackpot and you can expect 10-12 million AD on a sale, or 100-120 days of a single account refining the maximum every single day. You get 4 months worth of farming and AD refinement, straight into your inventory. Whereas in STO, if you want more "AD" than you can refine on your characters, you *must* trade Zen for it on the exchange. There's no other way.
One of the more fundamental issues with ZAX is that spending Zen to buy AD isn't just unpopular, it's INEFFICIENT. People buy stacks and stacks of coal wards during sales (so, 500-600 zen each), then sell them for regular Zen price in AD (500,000) when the sale is over. Then they trade the AD back for more Zen and wait for the next sale. If I want AD right now and I have Zen, I *could* trade 800 Zen for 400,000 AD, or I could open prayer rewards until I find a 20% off coupon, buy a Coal Ward for 800 Zen, undercut the market by ~10% for a super-fast sale, eat the 10% AH cut, and STILL take home ~410,000 and it would take at most 3-5 minutes longer than the ZAX. If I'm willing to wait a few hours I should be able to make ~450,000.
(This only works as well as it does because the ZAX is pegged, of course: if it was floating freely, then the AH price of a Coal ward would naturally tend to be the current exchange rate times 1000 (the Zen cost of a Coal ward), but you'd still have people buying during the Zen sales and selling once the Zen price goes back up. Still, the issue would be smaller.)
A more practical suggestion than "make the AH stop using AD as currency" is to remove valuable sellable items from the Zen store: take Coal and Pres Wards out, or bind them to account on purchase. Remove the items that sell for more AD than the Zen they cost to purchase. That's going to inspire a lot of player rage, but it might be more survivable than "the AH doesn't use AD any more". In STO, which, again, doesn't have most of the problems we're discussing, there's almost nothing in the Zen store that you can buy to sell on the AH except lockbox keys - and when you sell lockbox keys, you're making Gold, not AD. The Zen store is full of account unlocks and services and skins, all kinds of things that people want, but nothing unbound on a desirability scale like Coal Wards in Neverwinter.
The core idea is to set it up so that if you have Zen and want AD, the only option is to trade Zen for AD, not go adventuring and hope for a lucky drop, not buy stuff like Wards and sell them above their Zen cost, nothing. STO has this and it works. Neverwinter does not have this, and I have *no idea* how to get there from where Neverwinter is without trashing everything. And I don't think trashing everything is a good solution.
[1]: I mean, I could be wrong, but I think the most immediate effect would be to crash the value of ADs even harder relative to Zen: Suddenly there's people with tens and hundreds of millions of AD and it's not the AH currency any more. The ONLY things you can do with it are trade it for Zen and buy Marks Of Potency, and a dude with 10 million AD probably already has plenty of those, let alone a dude with a billion. There's also the obvious problem of "what about all the worthless gold that people have been stacking up since beta? How do we balance people like me (If I count it up and have less than 100,000 Gold I'm shocked, and I give it away to new players regularly) with newer players?". I suppose adding a one-way tool to convert AD to gold would help: people who want "Auction House Currency" could convert their millions of AD to it?
#1: Wipe out all Gold in the game. Eliminate it all. Set EVERYONE'S stockpiles, every toon, every account bank, every guild bank, all of them, to zero. Gold is currently worthless, but I'm about to make it valuable, so let's level the playing field and eliminate the 5+ years of casual accumulation first.
#2: Change the AH to use Gold, not AD, as currency.
#3: Provide a limited-time way to convert AD to Gold, so that people who currently have massive supplies of "Auction House Currency" can convert those stockpiles into the new AH currency if they want to. And during this time, they can also turn Zen into AD into Gold, if they want to. You make this conversion irreversible and one-way: No turning gold back into AD. After a time (a nice long time - like, 2 months? 3? 4?) the vendor goes away forever.
You'll still be able to "turn AD into Gold" - spend AD on a Mark Of Potency, sell it on the AH for gold. Or turn it to Zen and buy a lockbox key and sell the contents.
This eliminates any way of making AD other than refining it yourself. It's no longer possible to skip 4 months of gameplay by selling a Legendary mount, no longer possible to concentrate a hundred people's daily efforts onto one character in under a minute. AH prices will become decoupled from realmoney value.
The next thing you do is start putting valuable but not sellable things in the AD store. Move account-bound wards there for cheaper than (unbound) Zen store price. Stick things like Rename Tokens and Retrain Tokens and Power Points and Bags and Bank Space, in the AD store instead of the Zen store. Move dyes to the AD store from the T-Bar store. Provide people with a strong incentive to turn Zen into AD.
So, with this suggestion, I have:
#1: Removed any way to earn AD other than refining it or selling Zen for it.
#2: Decoupled the AH from AD
#3: Provided current AH-currency-rich players with a way to remain AH-currency-rich
#4: Provided increased useful things to spend AD on that aren't AH-fodder.
I think if you implement this suggestion, there will be MASSIVE rage from players, and when the dust clears six months later the economy will be greatly improved AND the ZAX will drop from 500 and start floating lower again. Oh, and gold will have a use so there will finally be a reason to pick it up.
I would not appreciate having all my gold wiped out, but if they gave me some advance notice that they were going to do this, then I would have time to buy tens of thousands of brimstone beforehand. And if I had that notice, then I wouldn't mind having my gold wiped out so much.
If there's a way to turn gold into relevant amounts of AD in a reasonable time, I don't know anyone who's done it. I do know that sometimes (more on consoles than PC) people sell/trade stuff in PE for Gold, and I know there's weirdos who buy stacks of plates and stuff that's only good for turning into gold on the AH, but those are all small potatoes.
As a matter of fact, it would probably be better to simply convert the AH and not convert AD to Gold at all, since AD will still be a valuable currency - but it's value in trade would be severly limited to buying refinement commodities and selling them for gold.
As far as turning gold into AD - it seems small potatoes but it works. A exalted healing potion goes for something like 2800 per 99 stack, which means using those it translates to 14 AD per gold peice. If you have 10K gold and want to convert it, that's a simple way to make 140,000 AD out of "worthless" currency. There are almost certianly more lucrative ways, this is just a very quick example.
Still, on the whole, I might be able to get behind a conversion from AD to Gold for the Auction House. It would really depend on the details though. It could easily turn into a scenario where the rich get richer while the poor get poorer and therefore nothing actually changes for the better at all... This is a game, we don't want it to reflect the real world economy
Sekhmet@kvetchus_
Guilds: Greycloaks, Blackcloaks, Whitecloaks, Goldcloaks, Browncloaks, Spiritcloaks, Bluecloaks, Silvercloaks, Black Dawn
Tredecim: The Cloak Alliance
The idea behind wiping out the gold stocks would be so the people like you and me with 5 years of gold stockpiled wouldn't distort the market, pricing out new players on items, or require that the ad->gold conversion be so huge that someone converting 15 million AD winds up with 1.5 million gold in order to stay "rich" above all us lazy farmers, and also so that new players, one way or the other, aren't left completely unable to purchase stuff on the AH. #1: 140,000 AD is small potatoes.
#2: In the time it takes for you to buy 50 stacks, post 50 stacks, sell 50 stacks, and collect the AD, I'm pretty sure your AD/min would have been much higher just running eToS for salvage. The potion AD is unbounded by your daily refining, to be fair, but also that's a mind-numbing amount of work for a very small return.
(Also, that assumes adding 50 stacks of potions to the market doesn't depress the price/kill demand.)
I stand by my assertion that Gold is a largely worthless currency, but I accept that it's not 100% worthless if you don't jealously guard your time the way I do.
My goodness there are some day's I'm lucky if I'm making even 50,000 despite having 8 level 70 character's. Though it's possible I was focused on INF, advancing campaigns, or something else? So my Diamond potential has cut down from 288k to 100k but still I'm perfectly fine with it; as rarely was able to earn over 125,000-150,000 in the past. But some had a lot more time so their potential cut far more, cause at 56 characters x 36,000 diamonds, in theory some had the potential, to refine almost 2 million diamonds a day! Still with a little salvage from some low level Skirmish which used to also give 7500 rad if we very easy to get 20k refinement on most character's far too easily.
Astral Diamonds have definitely been greatly limited at least for most. Still I think the vast majority of those with huge surplus of Diamonds is those in Mastercraft. While people can only request 5000 ZEN at a time, they can easily put up one of those offer's every 9-13 days.
I think it would be GOOD if they limited everyone to 5000 ZEN purchased thru diamond sales each a month regardless if one large transaction or 5 or 10 smaller ones. I mean it wouldn't prevent people from buying more than Diamonds if they wanted them, as those all encourage people to buy ZEN which is what they want.
Any change which would reduce how much Zen is bought for real $$$ will not get implemented.
Some of the suggestions posted here would probably reduce the amount of Zen that people actually buy, and discussing those is just a waste of time.Sekhmet@kvetchus_
Guilds: Greycloaks, Blackcloaks, Whitecloaks, Goldcloaks, Browncloaks, Spiritcloaks, Bluecloaks, Silvercloaks, Black Dawn
Tredecim: The Cloak Alliance
Sekhmet@kvetchus_
Guilds: Greycloaks, Blackcloaks, Whitecloaks, Goldcloaks, Browncloaks, Spiritcloaks, Bluecloaks, Silvercloaks, Black Dawn
Tredecim: The Cloak Alliance
The Zax being at 500/1 means this is the most AD players will get per Zen unless the cap is raised. If players don't need to spend their AD why not get Zen for it? They can always sell it for max amount AD anyways. If not it will just take players longer to get each day because there is lots of AD in circulation. Changes will take time to fully come into effect.
This behaviour of backlog has been happening for years. But for some reason some people on these forums act like its something new. I don't get it. Yes it might of increased over time with yearly comparisons but that is due to numerous things. We have black Friday coming up. This is usually big sales time no?
At this rate if the Devs nerfed everything every time some complained about the back log I don't even want to think what the experience would be like.
In the official feedback thread for AD changes etc Devs said they have and are going to implement more things with new mods. Hopefully these will be useful to players and not just AD sink for the sake of AD sinks.
If I am wrong on the AD is now devalued or will be at under 500/1 please tell me, I cant see it.
The person I replied to said devalued AD isn't increasing sales. I still cant see it. What devalued AD? As a Zen seller players will want more AD per Zen, AD sellers more Zen per AD. What has been devalued and how? I can only think that someone selling Zen thinks they should get more AD then 500 so to them AD at present is considered devalued compared to what they could get if cap was raised which was said wont be happening.
To someone who played many years and saw the few times it was below 500/1 it may be considered devalued atm but going by a previous post the total amount of days that was even a thing is less then 100? give or take. 500/1 has been the norm for ages apparently. I do not consider this devalued AD. It can be better and Devs say they want it for some reason to go below 500/1 but it can also be a lot worse if cap was raised.
Having the ability to buy Zen items and sell them in the AH for more AD then what the Zax would otherwise generate doesn't help things. Why post Zen on Zax for AD unless you need AD right now? You can get more by not doing so...... Still I think AD is not devalued atm, just there are ways to get more bang for your buck.
The person who needs AD right now will get 500 per (max value), the person who can wait will get more through other means, both AD and Zen with time. Is this what is considered as devaluing AD atm? The ability to get more AD through other means? The fact its at 500/1 and has been for quite some time? Or from a Zen sellers perspective of being too cheap? None? I'm still not understanding how this works after 3 pages?
Think of AD in real-world terms. Why are diamonds so valuable (relative to dollars) as opposed to, say, pine wood? Because it's rare. If you could grow real diamonds in your back yard, people wouldn't pay as much for it and if you figure out a way to do it, suddenly the supply of diamonds would explode and cause the market in diamonds to crash as the value declined to basically nothing. Wedding rings would be made of sapphires or rubies because... ugh, who wants a generic diamond you can grow anywhere? Something that is common (AD in game, pine wood in RL) is not as valuable as something that is scarce and you can manipulate a things value by increase or decreasing it's scarcity.
If you increase the value of AD (by reducing it's supply, aka introducing scarcity), AD will then be considered more valuable, prices of things in the AH will decline (because the market will no longer bear the current prices) and the value of Zen, as compared to AD will fall - causing the backlog to reduce and the value of AD per Zen to fall below 500 - primarily because less people will be posting their now-more-valuable AD for Zen as opposed to fewer people trying to sell their Zen for AD (an increased value of AD will actually cause more people to look to the ZAX as a way to get AD). When you see the market below 500/1 that indicates the value of AD has increased. Dramatically increased in fact, given the backlog is now stands at 11.3 million.
Further, because AD supply is so hi and therefore Zen is easy to obtain without paying - I would posit that it's actually depressing Zen sales. Yes... there's a long wait for Zen, but I would suggest that only the most impatient are buying Zen with cash for actual use as Zen, which hurts the game's bottom line. A more evenly distributed economy that sees a highly valued AD being an important commodity for the game will see people buying zen for use, perhaps then selling the Zen store item for AD because that's more profitable than exchanging in a market that see Zen slightly less valuable relative to AD, but I don't believe the ZAX should be the primary reason people buy Zen anyway.
At the end of the day, there is an equilibrium point in the ZAX around with a health market will fluctuate. I'd say that point is probably somewhere between 350 and 400 AD/Zen with heathly market peaks as low as 300 and as high as 450. Infrequently, in a healthy market, we'll see dips under 300 and peeks as high as 500 but nothing sustained. It used to be this way years ago, when the game's economy was in great shape (this was back when you could sell the BiS gear from CN on the AH.... which meant AD was very valuable, and before armies of alt-bots had completely ruined the AD supply).
Sekhmet@kvetchus_
Guilds: Greycloaks, Blackcloaks, Whitecloaks, Goldcloaks, Browncloaks, Spiritcloaks, Bluecloaks, Silvercloaks, Black Dawn
Tredecim: The Cloak Alliance
Thanks for taking the time to decently reply.
I do not view this market as entirely player driven as I see it heavily influenced by Devs decisions in many forms, from Zax cap to useful Zen items prices. Yes AD per Zen is at max and yes Zen per AD is at its worse but the cap will not let it get out of control or find a real player driven equilibrium.
Do you have any examples of AH prices that increased due solely to the high supply of AD? You mentioned normal supply and demand which makes what we have sound abnormal but I do not think it is. If prices have increased on certain things couldn't that be due to their scarcity, the fact AD generation got nerfed for some and buffed for others etc? This is normal supply and demand no? Nothing we see here has suddenly changed over night but instead a gradual build up/amalgamation of things occurred.
Although the supply of AD in circulation is currently still high, hasn't the generation of AD been reduced with more AD sinks/changes on the horizon? Having a backlog of 11m and rising should not be a surprise to anyone except new players. This falls completely in line with the games history of events and sales. There has not even been time enough to really see how the recent changes have affected things and how the market will adjust once the dust settles.
Yes I like your vision but I don't hold on to nostalgia so closely. I do look forward to how this plays out and what they introduce in the near future. Again ty for your pov.
My rAD -> AD income went down by about 8k per day because I was running one random dungeon per day on eight characters (and no skirmishes), but since the Ravenloft mod dropped I've still been refining 100k per day almost every day except for the first few days. My wife was refining about 45k to 50k per day because she was running only four characters through random dungeons per day. And now? Now she's refining 100k per day, as well. So this change effectively doubled the amount of AD she's generating per day.
So until the developers start introducing things to spend AD on, nothing is going to change with respect to the value of AD. (Personally, I don't need any more AD sinks. I'm spending basically everything I have on upgrading enchantments.)
I’m nostalgic for a working economy and having been playing the game since before closed beta (save a recent long hiatus), I happen to remember what that’s like. I don’t think the answer lies in recreating those conditions because the game has advanced and evolve a lot - but certianly there’s a solution that can ease the economy back into health without decimating Cryptic’s profit margin...
Sekhmet@kvetchus_
Guilds: Greycloaks, Blackcloaks, Whitecloaks, Goldcloaks, Browncloaks, Spiritcloaks, Bluecloaks, Silvercloaks, Black Dawn
Tredecim: The Cloak Alliance
These players were enough for them to make an informed decision on implementing changes. I doubt these figures were plucked out from thin air for the sake of making some players disgruntled and having no effect. But who knows
These types of decisions make players just a number. If you fall into the undesired category that they're trying to stop or discourage, doesn't matter if your RP, hardcore, softcore, w/e your sol. Ideally an analysis etc of the change(s) and affect(s) would have been made with collateral damage taken into consideration.
The 90% positive/no effect take on this helps soften the blow of whats actually being done (Basically PR spin etc) and puts a positive light on it. Although some or most are making roughly the same or more this would of (again ideally) been taken into consideration. Although we might not be seeing the full effects of it atm this was a big change. I am in the same boat as you atm but yeh the economy clearly needs changes if the value of AD is to be increased. Hopefully the planned changes they have wont be a death blow so to speak and eased in. I personally think that some of the monetisation items need to be re-looked at as well. If the key offenders are left in as they are now, not much will change imo. It will be the same thing but on a different scale.
Nostalgia is fine. What I write can be seen as negative or obtuse at times but that's not my intention although I may achieve it
I try not to get involved with direct changes to games anymore and I find nostalgia often leads to disappointment in most cases but I do like your vision and remember in STO waaaay back where I was one of the biggest contributors to two of the biggest guilds at that time, one fed, one khg primarily through playing the market. It was great and added a whole other side to the game. But the journey getting back to something like that in this game could easily become unbearable and very dependant on the changes they make. It might not be worth it. We will see.
I personally value players ideas and pov and think too often they are an untapped free resource. So while I may rarely participate I appreciate the people that do, hopefully exploring different pov and giving constructive feedback not only here but in the official feedback threads.
I agree that player suggestions are often overlooked. When they're not, the developers have a tendency to corrupt them during implementation. I try not to get too into making suggestions because of this.
> Some of you are forgetting one thing. Any change which would reduce how much Zen is bought for real $$$ will not get implemented.
>
> Some of the suggestions posted here would probably reduce the amount of Zen that people actually buy, and discussing those is just a waste of time.
Sure, some would (not that that stops the frequent “we should get more free coalescent wards” posts) but some might not. For example, say that next maintenance they closed all orders on the ZAX (returned the zen/AD to players who were offering it — well, just AD in this case) and raised the exchange cap. Or just left it uncapped entirely. Would that reduce the amount of Zen people buy? Short term effects at least would likely be:
— A massive initial increase in exchange rate, from anyone sitting on huge piles of AD who want large amounts of Zen. No idea what that might peak at — 2500? 5000? But within a few days...
—Some people will buy/offload Zen to keep up with the the initial wave of orders. Some people will do so because they want some gear or enchantment or other AH item, and couldn’t justify spending $10 or whatever on it but can justify getting it for $1.50.
— ... resulting in massive AD inflation. Because suddenly all that backlogged AD is free in the market...
— ... creating a market bubble at the peak or near peak exchange rate, which some people will fail to recognize (seeing the exchange only rise) and buy more Zen...
— ... and then the bubble pops. Non Zen-store AH items are still hyper inflated, but the enchantment that you could get for $1 of AD is now $20 of AD...
— ... and then finally equilibrium, eventually, where the exchange rate only swings a few percent most weeks. Bigger swings due to Bazaar sales (devaluation Zen) or Zen store sales (devaluing AD) which are entirely within Dev control. Potentially bubbles prior to new updates as well. Much like the pre-500 fixed exchange, arbitrage will keep the market relatively stable, since the people doing the most of it will necessarily have the majority of the resources.
End result is still Zen being worth more AD, increasing the value proposition of paying $ for Zen to exchange. The first week or several might be crazy, but would that actually discourage Zen purchases? It seems more likely to have the general effect of increasing Zen sales. As long as there are tradeable and/or desirable effectively Zen-store-only items (wards, character slots, bags, etc.) Zen will never drop in value significantly post equilibrium.
I think the only reason they keep the cap where it is is because of fear of exploits or increased use of outside RMT. If those weren’t barriers I think they would have uncapped it a long time ago.
Due to exploits that were used in the first year of the game, there are some players with pockets deeper than the underdark. They would be able to capitalize on this & probably drive that even higher. Which would either drive players out of the game entirely, or (more likely in my opinion) force players to make the choice to stay... and ignore the ZAX altogether.
The end result is a game where the ZAX exists only for the use of the mega-whales. The devs do not appear to want that. Thank Ohgma !