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The LEAST painful way to fix the AD exchange.
fatherfungus
Member Posts: 20 Arc User
Let me state the best way to fix the AD exchange is a fair way that will keep the exchange functional.
15 mil coin backlog is not functional.
Step 1: Close off any NEW exchange offers, if you have AD listed, it stays but no more new listings.
Step 2: Wait for backlog to clear. If you get to a point where nobody is buying because the listings left are
way low, just refund those.
Step 3: Give everyone 24 hour notice when the exchange will reopen.
Step 4: REMOVE the price cap completely and reopen the exchange.
>>>>> Let the market set the price, it might be really high but it will at least be a true price
and there will be no backlog.
This is a real fix.
15 mil coin backlog is not functional.
Step 1: Close off any NEW exchange offers, if you have AD listed, it stays but no more new listings.
Step 2: Wait for backlog to clear. If you get to a point where nobody is buying because the listings left are
way low, just refund those.
Step 3: Give everyone 24 hour notice when the exchange will reopen.
Step 4: REMOVE the price cap completely and reopen the exchange.
>>>>> Let the market set the price, it might be really high but it will at least be a true price
and there will be no backlog.
This is a real fix.
7
Comments
When they see the ZAX cap increase they think they should raise prices on items in the AH. The assumption is that a player who drops Zen to get AD will have a nice pool to buy things on the AH. Other players will want to capitalize on this by trying to maximize their AH sales.
So players directly link high desired items to the ZAX. This however currently is in flux because the price for Pres Wards has gone up but their demand has dropped because you can get by without needing max enchantments. This isn't mod 15 where enchants give you a nice edge. So their incentive to upgrade gear is pretty much dwindled to nothing. In a true market when demand drops prices shouldn't increase.
However with all that said, a player willing to pay 6k or 7k for each pres ward when in mod 15 they were 5k it means there is still either some lack of information about the increase in price and reduction of demand. Its not a bad thing but also because of the dungeon increased difficulty AD will technically be a little harder to get or its gonna push more and more players into ONLY running Demo for their daily cap. This makes the game incredibly boring. How players run demo over and over baffles me.
Why not consider first why the cap is there to begin with.
If I had 1k ZEN for every time someone suggest removing the cap as a solution for all things, I would have enough to cover the backlog on PC.
But sorry, it's not a solution, it is just eliminating the f2p model, and moving to subscription model in practice or just terminating the economy.
Rising the cap as it is, without any viable plan to reduce / discourage the RAD farming was a mistake.
There is no point to allow the last run of capped exchange.
1. Those who are not happy with no cap will not be more happy just because you allow the last run.
2. Those who have Zen and know about the upcoming change will not be stupid to buy AD before the cap is removed. That means this backlog will stay for a long while as longer than the current wait time.
3. For those Zen holder who do not know the upcoming change and pay the cap price to buy AD and then find out the cap is coming off, they will not be happy. This group probably contains a big chuck of new players. Messing them up is not good.
4. For those who loves no cap will need to wait for no good reason for them.
So, what is the point to keep step 1 to 3? What is the up side?
If they want to do it, do that like many government did to their exchange. Just do it with no notification (like they raised the cap to 750).
1. The Devs have to clean up the massive mess they created with Undermountain before most players would even consider spending a single Penny here again.
2. ZEN Charge Promotions have to give players account-wide items that are actually usefull and desired, and those promotions have to work without any problems forcing players into fights with the support to get their promised rewards.
3. Improve and upgrade the Wondrous Bazaar with a collection of items at reasonable prices that are worth spending AD for.
And removing the cap from the ZAX is going to kill the game in the long run, while it will also attracked a shitload of "gold sellers" to the game, that can create limitless AD through thousands of bot accounts.
Besides, the daily rAD bonus for running random dungeons/skirmishes has been changed from account-wide (back?) to character-wide, which means players with several characters can now get rAD even easier.
There are only a handful of things worth spending AD on with pretty much zero sinks. Without a sink the total pool of astral diamonds in the game increases. Most players just end up trading AD around on the AH buying wards. So very very little of the AD is being destroyed (given to NPCs)
This steady increase in AD without any valid reasonable sinks makes the value of AD slowly drop every day.
That explains a long ZAX queue.
It will be harder to get VIP for free, but who cares if you can't play this game for fun anymore (I still have vip for several months, not sure if I'll stay after that).
Please take a look, outlining the issue you mentioned and a possible solution:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Neverwinter/comments/bh8g6e/thanks_cryptic_for_devaluing_my_astral_diamonds/elrgi7a/?context=3
And the linked post there, same thread, and conveniently same videos.
Quoting " The issue was not the cap nor ZEN, it was on the AD side of things, too much of it generated vs traded, and not enough insensitive for ZEN owners to buy AD":
https://www.reddit.com/r/Neverwinter/comments/bh8g6e/thanks_cryptic_for_devaluing_my_astral_diamonds/elrdlel/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x
Trade is important due to the AH being major AD sink with the 10% 'tax'.
So actually wards trading and other massive AH activity is extremely important sink. The other notables are marks of potency form WB, and MW was with with rush costs and the trade.
The biggest counter point is ... don't do that, it will go up forever then AH will go up forever etc.
It will not because there is a limit on how much AD can physically get in a day. It might be alot, but it is not infinite.
counter answer - just make stuff folks will buy with AD so other people will turn in ZEN (cash)
If they were willing to do that, they would have done that.
The reason they don't - Spend man/woman hours creating content that does NOT product cash flow,
would fix the exchange by SUPPLEMENTING the game economy with work (cost money) for the
soul benefit of the players...
We have their answer - NO
The honeymoon is over - all new content MUST lead to cash flow.
that is why it is backlogged into many millions.
Other answer - leave it.
I can live with a 2 month wait. How about 6 months, 1 year?
The back log is growing and in the current situation will keep growing until
it BREAKS. (as in the wait gets so long, all players stop using it, the backlog hits...50 mil) all the AD stays there
and nothing moves
There is a point on a F2P game where MOST players will ask? Will I even be playing this in 6 months?
Standing stone will not spend creative effort to fix it that could otherwise be making cash.
Letting it get worse ends with stagnation and end of use.
So make the call...
remove cap and let the exchange hit a natural equilibrium that players selling AD will not like OR
wait for the developers to put a bunch of creative effort into a financial sinkhole (never happen) OR
let it get worse until it stops functioning and you can't exchange AD.
Pick your poison.
If you need Zen and dont want to wait. Go buy Zen with real world money.
They increased the cap to 750, prices went up and backlog stays the same. But people who buy enchantments or wards from AH got HAMSTER because some entitled Y or Z generation twerps dont want to wait. I had to farm AD for 4 or 5 days to buy 99xpres wards before and after new mod it is 6 or 7 days.
I have a good suggestion If you want to decrease backlog. Make everything account bound on Zen store so it should stop working as an easy way to earn AD for people. Lets see how long will it take backlog to meltdown. I say 5 to 10 hours.
If the logic behind raising the cap to clear the backlog by simply pricing some people out of the market is the suggested solution, then I think the problem has been misunderstood.
The problem is, was, and will remain... not enough Zen being traded.
Making Astral Diamonds 10'000 to 1 "because the players made it so" won't make people buy Zen to trade for AD if they neither want or need Astral Diamonds.
There is no simple 4 or 5 step fix to mend the ADX and the exchange rate.
The things needed to properly fix it involve both creative thinking and doing things that players will not like.
There needs to be proper reasons for people to want/need a regular income of AD, to make Zen buyers want AD in the first place, and there need to be changes to what you can do with Zen in order to make trading on the ADX a better option than simply buying stuff with Zen using sales/vouchers and flipping it for more AD than trading on the ADX would make.
Binding Zen purchases, and removing discounts such as vouchers and sales would sort the issue of flipping, but it would be incredibly unpopular.
The more difficult part of the method is making AD more desirable. Instead of sinks that try to take what you have, they need to work on stuff that people WANT to spend their AD on, not stuff that they try to avoid having to lose AD on. It's part of the mindset..
I refuse to engage in the "Sink" of refilling morale on Professions, because it feels like a rip off. But on the odd occasion where I need to bump a companion from Blue to Purple, I'll spend AD on improving it's quality if I don;t have enough upgrade tokens. I feel like I'm getting something useful for my AD, rather than it being sucked away on something unimportant.
There needs to be more creative, clever, interesting, and importantly "Value For Money" things to spend AD on. Not just a new tier of HAMSTER refinement stone in the Wondrous Bazaar.
Put GOOD stuff in the WB, not just crappy Zen Market cast offs and stuff that never sold anywhere else.
If people wouldn't pay Zen for it, they wouldn't trade Zen to buy AD to pay for it...
Without a reason to want more AD, what reason do people have to trade Zen for it?
That's the question that needs addressing... not taxing, not HAMSTER about with caps... but making people eager to buy Zen to sell on the ADX by giving them a GOOD reason.
Yule (Barb): 72k : Siren (TR): 78k : Torun (DC): 73k : Siren OP (OP): 76k : Siren SW (SW): 78k : Modern (F): 80k : Cherry1 (CW) : 68k Siren HR (HR): 78k
I agree with you and it dawned on me too after looking over what I already had vs what they now want to make more important. Companions have a much bigger impact than enchantments do now.
I dropped cash to get mod 12 weapons when they were put on the Zen store. But I won't fall for that again if they try to put some nice companion on the Zen store. Because chances are 5 to 6 months later that same companion might be worthless.
If they want to go that route, then they need to lower the AD necessary for the upgrade process, or people simply aren't going to do it, just like no one wanted to invest five *million* AD into their workshop just to get an extra row of profession supply storages...
In Summary: The game needs AD sinks, yes. But it needs *intelligent* AD sinks.
The real AD sink would be when you pay AD often, like for a really powerful consumable, but it shouldn't be mandatory. This way rich players would use consumables all the time, while others could play the game without it, but it would be a much slower game play for them.
A lottery would be another good way to make real AD sinks, but it would work only if there would be something very useful that you can't get from anywhere else, that means: you can't buy it from AH, can't buy it with Zen, it never drops from any lockboxes, and a promise that it will stay that way in the future (i. e. a lottery will always be the only way to get it).
I have a funny feeling that instead of fixing the problem your solution would be subject to an intense amount of exploitation by gold sellers, bot farmers and others.
The one ceiling raise for now is more than enough shock to the system. The market will find a new equilibrium point, which for PC is maxed, PS4 is near maxed, and Xbox is +80 +/-20. All this does is shift the point, not address the concern. One of the biggest problems is, aside from new players gearing up for the first time and older players purchasing items to flip later during the sales, and the occasional lock box opening spree (PITA with the new lockbox format btw), there is very little reason to acquire Zen for most players.
Better solutions off the top of my head:
1. Re-instate the tradehouse posting fee that was removed by VIP. Make each posting cost the poster 10% of the buyout or auction price, returned if the Item sells and forfeit if it doesn't. Why? Right now there is no penalty for posting outlandish prices, and thus no incentive to drive the price anywhere but up on any good. The tradehouse goods rarely need to find an equilibrium point for rarer goods and prices stagnate. VIP could cut the forfeit amount down by half or something, but it still needs to exist to control pricing.
2. Reduce the real world cost of Zen. 1k for 10 dollars is absurd given how little you can purchase for that amount. Cut it in half, 1k for 5 dollars, and more people will be willing to purchase Zen in general.
3. If cap is 750AD/1Zen, put an extra purchase option for purchasing directly from Cryptic for 1000AD/1Zen - Removes the AD from the economy permanently for players that are willing to sacrifice value in exchange for time. Likely won't be used much, but everything helps.
4. Impose a tax on the ADX - Player purchasing Zen pays offer amount +10% worth of ADX. On Xbox Zen flipping is a rampant way to create wealth out of nothing, there is a regular up/down cycle to the ADX (Literally every 24 hours) and you can easily purchase Zen and sell later the same day for +1-8AD/Zen, doing nothing more than risking currency to make currency.
5. Leave fashion/mounts/companions in the Tradebar store, but also offer them in the Wondrous Bazaar for slightly less than the cost of the tradebars (80%?). Right now the WB only works as an effective AD sink during discount weekends.
6. Make items purchased from the Zen Market account wide unlocks(where it makes sense to). Increase the price inversely proportional to the amount the price of Zen is lowered (only for Account wide unlocked items). Create a flag for Zen market items so that even when sold on the Tradehouse they still are account wide when unlocked, so that these items hold more value than the same item dropped from a dungeon (dungeon drops are character unlocked only).
7. This would likely take the most Dev resources, but I would really love to see this here. Make the Collections tab account wide. Add in functionality to permanently unlock items in collections for the entire account for Zen, or one character unlock an item for AD. Base the price on the price of a similar item in the Zen store, I.E. if you earn a dungeon or lockbox drop, say an epic mount, and decide after equipping it that you like it a lot, allow us to pay the Zen market Epic mount cost (3500 i think?) to unlock the mount for the account through the collections window. Put the Legendary tier at 5000 (Account wide Legendary mounts, only through owning one already and acquiring Zen, two birds one stone). Only works if you have unlocked the item by equipping and binding it.
One important aspect to economics to remember is that people make economic decisions on the margins, will the marginal benefit outweigh the marginal cost? 99% of the time in NWO, the answer is meh.
As an aside, the current tradehouse tax is a poor joke of an AD sink (although it is currently the best one the game offers). For instance, assuming the goods show up at a price I am willing to pay this weekend I will drop 30mil AD in the tradehouse in preparation for Mod 16. Of that 30 mil, only 3mil will be permanently removed. That's a drop in the bucket (I generated this 30mil by cashing out of professions after the redesign, and enchantments after Mod 16 was announced, not by grinding, so on the generous side of things the AD tradehouse tax was paid 2x but still) and doesn't effectively control the AD supply in the least.
new player, just hit level 25, have no astral diamonds, quests gave me none, people cant give me any.
So i'm screwed for the rest of my time playing?
It will give you AD to start with.