Bonding runestones refund and the zax

xenocide

We all know the zax backlog is too long, the refund of the runestones is going to completely break the zax, every player getting 7,000,000 ad should easily push the backlog over 60,000,000.

Any thoughts or plans to help with this problem and over inflation of Zen market items like mount/companion upgrade packs and wards?

It feels like we are pushing out the free to play players, although, maybe that's the plan?

evemj

Fairly sure they'll remove the bondings AD exchange as it goes against the whole "too much AD in the game, gotta fight the oligarchy" guideline.
There are people with tens of thousands of tradebars/PVP rewards who are just waiting to cash in and skew the market further.

plasticbat

evemj said:

Fairly sure they'll remove the bondings AD exchange as it goes against the whole "too much AD in the game, gotta fight the oligarchy" guideline.
There are people with tens of thousands of tradebars/PVP rewards who are just waiting to cash in and skew the market further.

Such guide line does not exist or they don't care anymore. In the past year, they have been adding AD supplies 'aggressively'. They even add AD to the supply directly and not just rough AD.

hotfrostworm

This would assume everyone who gets a "refund" in AD, from what I read here in other threads, the better value is to exchange the bonding for another enchantment of the same rank. For the sake of argument, let's assume all +10,000 players at level 80 exchange for AD. Many of those do not use the exchange, I know I don't, never have used it. Again the better value for the AD is to buy the items you want through the auction to get immediate action on your trade.

I freely admit, my wife follows your auction and knows the prices better than I do. But from what she has told me in the past, the Zen market prices are much higher than the auction prices on the same items. Even if the exchange takes a hit from the AD added to the system, the exchange is not a critical system. You can still play the game.

carloswartune

hotfrostworm said:

I freely admit, my wife follows your auction and knows the prices better than I do. But from what she has told me in the past, the Zen market prices are much higher than the auction prices on the same items. Even if the exchange takes a hit from the AD added to the system, the exchange is not a critical system. You can still play the game.

Many essential items (wards, mount tokens, companion tokens) in the Zen Store cost less than half the price you would pay in AH.

And the exchange is an extremely critical system. It's currently the system that determines the value of AD. Any change in how it works will essentially have a big effect in how much AD things cost. And, again, we're talking about essential things like wards.

plasticbat

Any unbound item that has Zen store to be the single source would be cheaper to buy that from Zen store.
Any unbound item that has multiple sources usually would be cheaper to buy from AH.

Note that: the keyword is "unbound". I don't buy ward from anywhere because I have enough bound wards.

tgwolf

This only becomes an issue if you exchange for AD, which is not a good exchange for value and further if you then want to turn that AD into ZEN.

So it really isn't much worse than currently.

People who need Enchants/Runestones will trade for what they need and the AD whales; who have once again avoided being dealt with will take the AD and not have to spend any since their stocks of resources are massive.

greywynd

Try something original, like spending money if you need zen instead of waiting on the zax.

callumf

greywynd said:

Try something original, like spending money if you need zen instead of waiting on the zax.

Yep - its what I used to do to help support the game. Sadly the recent changes to mounts, companions and now bondings, means I am unlikely to spend any real life money on the game. Beign honest I would pack up and leave if I hadnt spent so much time on my toons.

And is the Zen Exchange time delay of any commercial interest to Cryptic?

What does it matter to them if players grind out AD to sell for Zen to buy stuff for nothing from the Zen store?

greywynd

Once they sell zen I wouldn't think they'd bother. They got their money from the transaction.

arieswytch

Since you can currently upgrade companions with AD in lieu of companion upgrade tokens, I would expect this to continue to be available. My guess is that they expect much of the AD received from the sale of bondings will be spent upgrading companions to mythic. If this happens, the market shouldn't be affected too much.

micky1p00

The assumption that everyone who get refund for the bondings suddenly, by some magic, add that AD to the ZAX is just baseless.

How many people already have 5 listings and no matter how much more AD they get they can't list more?
How many already have spare AD and can't list?
How many will use the AD to upgrade companions in the new system?

Especially people who have R15..

There is a wide gap between all the various assumptions and lack of data to the "the refund will break the zax".

micky1p00

hotfrostworm said:

I freely admit, my wife follows your auction and knows the prices better than I do. But from what she has told me in the past, the Zen market prices are much higher than the auction prices on the same items. Even if the exchange takes a hit from the AD added to the system, the exchange is not a critical system. You can still play the game.

1. In the vast majority (if not all) the relevant items, the AH price is significantly higher. Hence the backlog, and the profit from it.

2. I would reserve judgment about what is needed or not needed to play until I've actually went into the game content aka end-game group content.

reg1981

My opinion is they don't want the zax better, more are impatient and will spend money. You probably don't want it fixed either because to do so I would expect many sellable items require an account bound status. Pres wards, coal wards, comp/mount token packs, etc. If people can't flip these items for profit and only for personal use then I would expect less strain on the zax.

I plan to use my AD to upgrade my main's pets, I WILL be putting up 5 posts for 25k zen. That'll probably eat up a fair chunk of it. Currently I don't really use the zax, I didn't want to contribute to it's inflation by flipping zen store items.

the1truehunter

Why ZAX doesn`t affect company in any way other than giving them advantage? Because someone has to buy ZEN with real money and exchange it through ZAX so you can get that ZEN. Company it is not a supplier involved in ZAX. But if you don`t get your ZEN in time for a promotion, because the demand in ZAX is too high, you will be forced to pay from your own pocket if you really want to get that promotion. So you need to wake up and understand that their intention is not to fix ZAX backlog. It is our duty as a community to understand that if we will continue to push requests in ZAX and make a profitable bussines from that, we will be responsible for making Neverwinter pay to win. And again for those who pray for AD/ZEN ratio to be increased to 1000 AD per ZEN, this won`t fix the backlog, it will make it worse since we`ll have to spend more AD for ZEN.

arazith07

I am fairly sure that this will not affect the ZAX too much. Most players will just turn that AD around and put it into upgrading companions. 3 R15 bondings will upgrade 3-5 companions from Legendary to Mythic depending on what the upgrade cost is. (1.5m-2m is my guess).

tchefi

arieswytch#9832 said:

Since you can currently upgrade companions with AD in lieu of companion upgrade tokens, I would expect this to continue to be available. My guess is that they expect much of the AD received from the sale of bondings will be spent upgrading companions to mythic. If this happens, the market shouldn't be affected too much.

I don't see why i would spend my AD in upgrading comps when i can get plenty of free (cost time though) comp tokens in Sybella's shop.

Now that i have checked everything, and to give you an idea about how these changes will affecting me (usually I'm someone who sits over 40k-50k Zen every jubilee/black friday, at least during the last 3 of each) :

According to the exchange rate posted by the devs for the value of bonding in the antiquities shop, all my current (only current...) bonding stones will make me grab 30M AD in a snap.
After checking all my 18 more or less active toons (others are only invokers/mules), i have today already enough sybella's currency accross my account to get my hand on ~1000 comp token (i'm not looking at how many tradebars i have, those are way better for something else).
It seems I will have plenty of time to prepare these incoming changes on comp so : i'm going back to combo sybella's quest + 4,5k rAD weeklies + 4xQM r15 (as i have only 4) + wanderer's fortune + guildmarks from the campaign currencies on my 18 active toons. It's been something like 9 months i hadn't done that.
And business to do with the AH (be it the obvious, or the more indirect).

Morality, i feel like I will just come out richer with these comp changes.

But, there won't be more AD in the Zax from me than there are today : most of the time, since i adapted my activities and businesses after mod16 earthquake, i'm quite able to permantly roll 5 demands of 5k Zen. Especially since the backlog climbed to more than 45 waiting day. But i also toss 50€/year in the game, because you know, i like this game .



People like me are one of the Zax problem, Cryptic is either struggling to counter us or not trying.

I feel like the alt-army, even after the mod14 slight draw back (36kAD/toon => 100kAD/account) and the jump from 1z/500AD to 1z/750AD, are still really too much powerfull once set up.

With my 37 toons (i still have 16 slots available, and don't bother creating more toons) :
I don't need coalescent wards or preservation wards : the celestial tokens from the invokes produce enough celestial coffers to get those in a nicely enough quantity to keep up with the pace of new stuff.
I don't need refinement points, wanderer's fortune/QM-DH enchants produce enough to sustain the needs
I don't need marks or enchanting stones, what I get as low level ones from invokes or high level ones from dungeons and Sybella are enough.
I don't need comp tokens, Sybella was enough (and probably will still be when mythic comps arrive)
I don't need gold, everyday with VIP each of my 37 toons earn 1,75gold doing nothing but taking the green vip bag
I can produce roughly 50 black perls +1 /day, or 30 black opals +1 /day on 30 workshops (others would be devoted to row ressources), and even though the price crashed in 2020 (gradually with the frequency of x2 + a huge crash over some short weeks because of the favors farming in milestones), it's still profitable (though far less than before... but Imagine being able to daily sell 8x99 black opals+1 at 60kAD/stack : that was me from mod15 to the end of mod18)

And the list goes on (legendary insignas with rerolls in Avernus via the reforger's blessing, ability to have an almost infinite amount of tokens to reroll the end dungeon chests, etc, etc).

I do think Cryptic should tie down people like me... It's too easy to snowball and then keep rolling...

Maybe alt-army should be limited in "power", something like "you can create 53 toons, but can only get reward/production on 8 of them (= number of different classes in the game), and you can choose who are those 8 from the menu (and change every day if you want).

catson

Would increase of exchange rate price cap help or worsen situation?

malistaire

Raising the exchange rate will make things worse.

Looking back at when the cap was raised from 500 to 750 on PC, it didn't even take a full day before a new backlog of around 1 million had formed at 750:1. On the auction house, prices for almost everything increased by 30-50%. The most significant impact of the cap increase was that newer players who needed to upgrade stuff now had to pay more to get the same items that before had been significantly cheaper. This slowed down character progression and made it take much longer for new players to get their characters to endgame.

With the injection of the millions of AD from the bondings exchange, if we also the raise the cap of the ZAX, we will see the price of stuff in the auction house increase dramatically. That tends to be the effect when economies are suffering from inflation. The only things that won't increase in price are things that have a regulated/fixed AD value such as Marks of Potency.

xenocide

Looks like we have thousands of more bondings being flooded onto the market today lol