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Coalescent Ward Price Inflation?
callumf
Member Posts: 1,710 Arc User
Saved up around 500k AD to buy a Coal Ward for 1% upgrade last night.
Went to AH and the cheapest single ward was 713,000 AD!
I am sure I bought one a few weeks ago for about 500,000AD - or was I dreaming this?
Is there a big lack of Coal Wards in game driving the price up?
Went to AH and the cheapest single ward was 713,000 AD!
I am sure I bought one a few weeks ago for about 500,000AD - or was I dreaming this?
Is there a big lack of Coal Wards in game driving the price up?
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Comments
- Only those selling Zen for AD will reduce the backlog. Players hoarding their Zen will mean longer wait times.
- Another way to reduce the backlog is to convert the AH to the gold standard.
- The best way to fix this economy is to remove the Zax altogether and make a better AD store to keep the AH prices in place.
- I don't use the Zax. Early on in the game I did trade some AD for Zen to purchase my extra character slots. Ever since, I trade in the AH.
- BoA Coalescent wards can be found on a regular basis in the Celestial Chests you get for invoking 2 coins per day. I find 1 or 2 per month across my 8 characters. This is 44 chests per month, so I am guessing the odds are 50 to 1?
Champions and Star Trek uses their currency (gold) for the Auction and not the Dilithium / Questionite. They also don't have the Dilithium and Questionite trading at 500 or a backlog in their Zax. Neverwinter is the only Cryptic game that uses uses the crystal based currency for the AH and the only one with a massive backlog. I can buy loot box keys for both games in AH but not this one. The loot box keys are bound on pickup. This one has the AH linked to the cash system. I have said, this was a bad move since the alpha testing.Please don't necro that thread I linked above, in fact, it might be a good idea for a moderator to close it.
(Disclaimer - This is based off Rainer's testing, which is in a controlled environment, but is not actually indicative of the actual drop rate, blah blah blah......)
This, here, is key (no pun intended.) There's nothing really of value in the Astral Diamond store and what is there is WAY over-priced. It's the same stuff back from Beta and the prices haven't changed. Why buy a green mount for 200k in AD, when you can get it on the AH for a tenth of that price. MoP R4s are only worth it, when they're on sale and if you have VIP. I got burned buying 3 stacks of MoP R4s on the last sale to upgrade a ton of triple stat enchants that are now worthless, thanks to the changes in stat pools from Mod 16.
The Zen store suffers from the same problem. There's not much you need and everything is over-priced. Once you buy a purple mount, you don't need to get another, unless your a collector an most purple mounts are the price of a new game. That's bad. 7 bucks for a rename token? 10 bucks for a re-roll token? A buck for a "Blue" retrain token that gives you one retrain, when the Winter Festival throws out Green ones that come with 3?
When people DO buy from the Zen store, they purchase during sales and/or with coupons. Even Companions aren't worth the investment, as they're not like mounts, you only get one. I'd much rather see it bound to account, but each toon can get one. Of course, then people lose an investment in AD from the AH.
I spend 100$ every year, during the Black Friday sale. I re-up my VIP and pick up a few stacks of pres ward, plus anything else I may want. I never convert the extra to AD. It's not cost effective for me and I can't hit weekly AD cap anyway, 'cos I don't like running dungeons. If I need Zen throughout the year, I buy it through the ZAX. There's no incentive for me to purchase anymore, due to pricing and lackluster items.
Personally, I'd like them to do a complete overhaul on ALL the stores, ASAP. There are a ton of vendors in PE that provide absolutely nothing. They're selling items for low level character they can't even afford and by the time they can, they've leveled up past their use. Even the Tramalamalan Store sucks. We have all this currency and nothing to spend it on.
Just my 2p.
There is inflation of astral diamonds in the game, sure but its NOT caused by the ZAX cap.
Coal wards are actually worth MORE than 750k ad, this price is actually lower than it should be.
One reason the ZAX hardly moves and its over 16 million zen backlog is because a player can easily figure out that exchanging their zen for ad is NOT worth it. This is because zen is worth more than 750 ad. So to use the exchange to get AD is not worth it, you lose your value. You are better off buying boxes with the zen and selling the stuff out of those boxes. You will get the true value of the AD that your zen was worth.
So no one uses the ZAX. The cap should be raised to around 1500. In fact I say they should remove the caps completely. The player market will find the actual true value of zen. Players will pay the amount of AD per zen they are willing to pay. So the market will find a balance of zen's true worth.
If they did this, the ZAX would move daily, there would be zero backlog.
It is a deflation if the currency used to calculate is Zen.
Using US and Canada as an example, an item made in US is US$1 would be Can$1.30 when it is imported to Canada (if the exchange rate is 1:1.30).
If the US$ vs Canada $ exchange rate becomes 1:1.40. For US, there is no price increase. For Canada, it is 10 cents different. That 10 cents difference will be calculated in Canadian inflation rate (assuming that item is in its list).
Coal ward does not worth more than 750K AD when it is sold in AH for 713K AD.
There is an inflation for that one item, Coal ward and anything that is 'imported' from Zen store.
Almost nobody buys stuff from Zen store without discount.
The reason why it appears like coal wards don't move as fast as you think they should is because of the structure of the player base. The new players who need them either can't afford them because they haven't discovered ways to obtain AD fast enough or they take the better route of zen market boxes and sell the stuff from the boxes and make the choice to not even upgrade their enchants. Because its cheaper to buy the enchant than to upgrade them. So when you sell the zen store items, you make far more astral diamonds and those players buy the high rank enchants outright.
If it is sold at 713K, it is less than 750K. Hence, C-ward does not worth 750K.
The value can be changed. "True value" does not matter. Market value is what that matters. That is the amount you buy and sell stuff at that particular moment.
For those who bought a bunch during 30% off discount, selling any price above 584K AD is profit.
If one buys a c-ward from Zen without discount, he has to sell that at over 834K to be above breakeven.
However in this case, back in 2019, the players did not receive a 50% wage increase, so this is called inflation.
For the items I care, they were mostly deflated. I guess probably because i am a seller.
Certain items had price increased and certain items had price decreased.
There is no CPI in AH. Everyone can only trust their own "feeling" regarding inflation/deflation.
In addition, it also depends on how you get your rAD. Different people has different way.
Do I get more rAD since they change the exchange rate?
I actually do for doing the similar thing as before because of other change they made.
Wards dropped when there was the Zen sale on, now they will be going up again. I would expect to pay low 700's minimum although I have checked C-ward prices for a while
If you knew the total daily population of players you can figure out the portion that are meeting their daily cap. This would be the baseline of where inflation would start. When there are very very few AD sinks in the game that any player actually uses it means most players are probably spending their AD on.
But regardless of that since we don't actually know the real numbers. Imagine if one thousand players every day meet their daily refinement cap. That's 1000 x 100k which is a hundred million ad pumped into the game per day. The thing is, this only assumes a thousand players meet the cap, its probably much higher than that. But essentially every day a hundred million astral diamonds that didn't exist the prior day is now pumped into the economy. Unless you have any argument that there arent a thousand players refining a hundred thousand rough astral diamonds each day then this alone is where most inflation of astral diamonds comes from, not the ZAX.
What do players really spend their ad on? Do they honestly save 250k or 500k to upgrade companions? because if they do they are wasting their AD. Are they spending it on enchanting stones and marks? Because if they are they are wasting their AD. You save astral diamonds buying the next higher rank enchantment and selling your previous rank. That way you dont need marks or enchanting stones, or pres wards.
Anyways yeah every week seven hundred million more AD is pumped into the economy. The only way that AD is destroyed is if players spend it on companion upgrades, or transmutes, or a few items on the bazaar, or if they happen to want to replenish their morale for their workshop. Other than that, the AD is being traded around from player to player.
So if you get it at 700k, that actually is a bargain. Now those Coals most likely were bought with a 30% discount, which makes the break even price 584k, So basically the gains from the discount is split between the buyer and the seller.
There basically are no tradeable Coals available except from Zen store, so it is the Zen->Coals->AD supply chain that controls the price.
The demand for Coals has been low recently since it statistically is better to use Pwards even for 1% upgrades after they introduced the max tries limit. THat probably keeps the price fairly low.
Pwards mostly depends on the same supply chain, and for pwards the demand is much higher, (The free pwards from the Winter Festival upset pwards pricing somewhat). Pward prices are actually slipping up towards undiscounted break even now.
Thanks for posting your answers.
My response would be to remove the cap on ZAX immediately and let the market choose the value much as krumple01 says above
Backlog is a small price to pay.
This comes back repeatedly as a good idea, it is not.
Over the years, some people have built big Zen purchase power.
Though I do not consider myself to be one of those (I started to play in december 2016 and "only" gave a total of 100€ to the game) I'm still getting close to 100k Zen spent during promotionnal sales like black friday/jubilee (growing after each one).
I don't think it's a good idea for the game economy to let people like me able to speculate on a completely unregulated AD/Zen exchanger (and possibly manipulate it) on top of Zen market promotionnal sales to do some mark-up combined with ponctual AH speculations/manipulations...
There are two factors driving it, that I see:
* The availability of Zen
Many people do not have Zen available when they need it. Many people don't put Zen into game at all, or those that do might not have Zen available at the right time. So they end up buying the items off the AH even if they could have gotten them cheaper by buying them directly with Zen. They could of course join the ZAX queue, but that will take a long time and people are by nature impatient.
So those with money and time to systematically pull Zen off the ZAX is providing a service to the impatient people(Zen availability) for which they get paid.
If the ZAX queue was 0 this opportunity would not exist, and the service of providing Zen availability get more in demand the longer the ZAX queue is.
* The availability of discounts
The people with long-term operations on the AH always buy Zen goods at a discount. Since most people do not have those discounts available at the time they need to purchase a Zen item, the AH sellers are providing a service by giving people access to discounted goods even when the discounts are not running.
Hence, the c-wards you are looking for in AH will be priced way more than the 713K that you considered expensive.
Based on your posted info:
Exchange rate:
500:1, c-ward = 500K AD
750:1, c-ward = 713K AD
1000:1, c-ward = ???
It is the expected average that matters, and with the 150 cutoff limit the average number of tries is around 80 I think.
Since we do so many 1% runs, running with pwards all the way will pay off in the long run.