I understand what you're saying, but we slightly differ on the definition of "being a must" unless you forgot about:
1. Respec tokens. Trust me, they are a must. Vague skill descriptions and low damage increase as one levels certain skills as well as skills becoming completely useless after lvl60 makes the availability of respec tokens a must. And by availability I don't mean waiting a month or spending real money. I mean on the spot, in the game, provided the player has the AD for it.
Not doing so is like giving new player the finger and say "that's your problem". A happy player continues after 60, while a player that gets the "not my problem" feeling will simply stop playing at that point. I would too.
2. CWards.. touchy subject to say the least. Personally I would have no objection if they became BoA from the CS store unless bought with real zen. Simple reason is, that people who are looking for AD through zen, can do so, or sell zen directly. At the same time, people cannot abuse the lack of zen supply to make money on it. As you said, the ZAx isn't here to trade AD for more AD.
I have no objection to people buying them for personal use and then sell the upgraded enchantments, but abusing the lack of "free" CWards is in my eyes an offense that deserves a ban, just like the abuse of a any other part of the game and it's system is. Better to prevent such behavior all together and promote fair play rather than letting things run wild as they do now.
A good argument. After thinking about it I must admit you changed my opinion. Respec tokens realy are the #1 item on the border of "required to play". But dont forget you can get all skills with the "power point" awards you get trough that cumulative XP reward system. Feats are respecable with AD. Only thing that is left is the paragon path and stats (str, dex etc). I actualy gave up on playing a GWF because I needed 2 completely different builds for PvE and PvP, and getting so many respec tokens wasn't an option. Well done sir.
I have to disagree on CWards. Like I said before, the 1% chance exists ingame. You can stock up on perservation wards and fire away. To add to this, CWards are available from praying and the gond pack. They realy are one of the endgame items, and most of them come from zen shop, but it doesn't change the fact that they are available ingame, and there is not a moment when there are no coal wards on AH. True, the price is outrageous atm, but it doesn't conflict the fact that they are available without spending any real money.
I read the rest, but it isn't important after this statement. If you did the same and completely read what I wrote, you would notice this little part:
"What you are aiming for is a f2p model that is 100% f2p. In other words, the company is going to invest without getting anything back because it's all free. I checked every item in zen shop. Most are cosmetic. NONE are essential to gameplay."
You wont find a game that is 100% free to play. It doesn't exist. Simply because it is a black hole that will bleed you dry. I will try to help you understand. Here is a little piece taken straight from the NW packs page:
Completely Free-to-Play
You don't have to pay to adventure. From level 1 to the level cap, all playable content in Neverwinter is free for everyone to experience.
free2PLAY. Not free2OWN. You dont have to pay anything to get into CN or IWD. So, let me ask again:what is this thing that prohibits any aspect of GAMEPLAY that has to be purchased with real money?
This is one of the few games that I have played that actually puts major limits on the in-game economy. Limiting the economy (by binding multiple items and capping the ZAX) is limiting to all players, paying and F2P as well. Let the people decide what the value of things are because in the end its us playing and we decide what are time and what are money is worth, not Cryptic. Remove the cap on ZAX completely (yes there will be multiple short-term repercussions) but players will eventually decide what zen is worth whether its 500 or 1200 and they will pay either as long as it is worth it to them. If its not worth it the price will eventually drop because no one will be getting revenue.
Market in my opinion screwed up because of three things:
The binding of most coal wards.
All keys bound.
Exploits, or AD influx or no good AD sink, call it what you want. Too much AD is what it boils down to.
Coal wards and keys are probably the two biggest sellers for Cryptic, I can understand binding them, but not all of them. The Coal wards can stay the same and Cryptic can keep making money off of them, that's ok, can still get account bound ones in time or buy them on AH because the ones you buy with zen are unbound, and that's good.
Just the same as Coal wards, make it to where you can get some (bound) keys in-game and unbind the zen ones. Could get one key per collection completed or something like that I think would be good. Maybe a 1% chance or less of getting out of epic dungeon chest.
Cryptic punished the entire playerbase because goldspammers were selling their keys cheaper. That doesnt make sense to me. PermaBan the gold buyers, if 100 ppl report someone for advertising there ******* or whatever website permaban there account, if they paid for multiple leadership farming characters they will lose all that plus all the stuff all those characters have, after multiple losses they stop advertising and move to word of mouth of previous buyers or ppl that know of them or whatever, but it would cut back. Yes I know they ban some or whatever but there are still plenty to go around.
Create AD sink, my idea was to make all potency marks only available through the WB, no more drops or chests or events or anything, all WB. Mega Sink for each and every character. Easy solution.
In the end, the biggest thing is removing the cap. Like I said players should be able to decide and I think it will pan out in the end to a good equal medium. Though I will say im no economist and that's probably obvious. But still, this is what a lot of ppl want. And to say the ZAX backlog isn't a problem is ludicrous. Its almost a 2 week wait right now and that increases by one day every couple of days or so. Eventually this wont be a F2P game anymore, it will be P2W and nobody likes that. There are plenty of options for Cryptic to make, it will probably be some weird off the wall thing, but I don't care, do something.
I understand completely what is bothering you, and dont forget what happened to keys. PW is keeping a close eye on every aspect of the game, regardless of what players think. As soon as whalers go over the board with abusing it, it will get the same treatment that keys did. But that wont come soon, and whalers aren't nearly as big as you think. Here are some numbers. Current ZAX backlog, converted to AD, comes to 6.653.943.500. That's a long way over 6 billion AD. A few gold sellers I saw were bragging how they are a 100 mill AD stock. Lets say they have double that. You would need 30 gold sellers to commit ALL of their AD to ZAX and there would still be 600 mill over. I dont think there are 30 independent gold sellers here. Not on this scale.
I understand completely what is bothering you, and dont forget what happened to keys. PW is keeping a close eye on every aspect of the game, regardless of what players think. As soon as whalers go over the board with abusing it, it will get the same treatment that keys did. But that wont come soon, and whalers aren't nearly as big as you think. Here are some numbers. Current ZAX backlog, converted to AD, comes to 6.653.943.500. That's a long way over 6 billion AD. A few gold sellers I saw were bragging how they are a 100 mill AD stock. Lets say they have double that. You would need 30 gold sellers to commit ALL of their AD to ZAX and there would still be 600 mill over. I dont think there are 30 independent gold sellers here. Not on this scale.
Just want to take a moment and mention there are almost as many ADs in the ZAX backlog as there are people in the world.
Of course, not all the backlog is from gold sellers, etc. People legitimately just want Zen ... for many reasons. Which are numbered for you in the Zen store.
But, I have no doubt a significant portion of it is. How much? I can only guess, as I have no real facts backing me up in any case.
True. And considering their 100% success rate they should be rare in game and purchasable through the CS. That's all fine with me. I'm not objecting to people buying zen to sell them. That's their choice. Directly for Zen or buy something you can sell. I'm merely against the abuse of the lack of zen, or the excess of AD offers, whichever way you look at it, to raise their prices and put the AD back in the ZAx. That's not what the ZAx is meant for. Whales can easily put the ZAx out of reach for any new player, which I'm fairly sure is being done right now. I'm guessing it's at least 30% of the backlog, but possibly much higher. That's what I'm objecting to. And in this case it even takes out the "mandatory" respec token, which, once upon a time, was available for everyone. That only makes it worse in my eyes.
The high price of the CWard I can live with, if there was no reliable alternative. But there should be one: the ZAx.
Spot on. This post points exactly what bothered me about Zax, but couldn't phrase it out without drowning in too much details. Well said sir, well said
This is one of the few games that I have played that actually puts major limits on the in-game economy. Limiting the economy (by binding multiple items and capping the ZAX) is limiting to all players, paying and F2P as well. Let the people decide what the value of things are because in the end its us playing and we decide what are time and what are money is worth, not Cryptic. Remove the cap on ZAX completely (yes there will be multiple short-term repercussions) but players will eventually decide what zen is worth whether its 500 or 1200 and they will pay either as long as it is worth it to them. If its not worth it the price will eventually drop because no one will be getting revenue.
Market in my opinion screwed up because of three things:
The binding of most coal wards.
All keys bound.
Exploits, or AD influx or no good AD sink, call it what you want. Too much AD is what it boils down to.
Coal wards and keys are probably the two biggest sellers for Cryptic, I can understand binding them, but not all of them. The Coal wards can stay the same and Cryptic can keep making money off of them, that's ok, can still get account bound ones in time or buy them on AH because the ones you buy with zen are unbound, and that's good.
Just the same as Coal wards, make it to where you can get some (bound) keys in-game and unbind the zen ones. Could get one key per collection completed or something like that I think would be good. Maybe a 1% chance or less of getting out of epic dungeon chest.
Cryptic punished the entire playerbase because goldspammers were selling their keys cheaper. That doesnt make sense to me. PermaBan the gold buyers, if 100 ppl report someone for advertising there ******* or whatever website permaban there account, if they paid for multiple leadership farming characters they will lose all that plus all the stuff all those characters have, after multiple losses they stop advertising and move to word of mouth of previous buyers or ppl that know of them or whatever, but it would cut back. Yes I know they ban some or whatever but there are still plenty to go around.
Create AD sink, my idea was to make all potency marks only available through the WB, no more drops or chests or events or anything, all WB. Mega Sink for each and every character. Easy solution.
In the end, the biggest thing is removing the cap. Like I said players should be able to decide and I think it will pan out in the end to a good equal medium. Though I will say im no economist and that's probably obvious. But still, this is what a lot of ppl want. And to say the ZAX backlog isn't a problem is ludicrous. Its almost a 2 week wait right now and that increases by one day every couple of days or so. Eventually this wont be a F2P game anymore, it will be P2W and nobody likes that. There are plenty of options for Cryptic to make, it will probably be some weird off the wall thing, but I don't care, do something.
I'll just tell you what will happen from the "economist" point of view. 90% of ZEN that is used in "sell ZEN" Is bought for the purpose of buying AD. A huge part of player base still doesn't understand that there are people that dont have time to farm AD and instead choose to buy it with real money. So, you remove the cap>Zen price goes up to 5000 (this is easymode, it would most likely go a lot higher)>instead of players offering AD, sellers would offer in "buy zen" tab> now you have real zen sellers> the game loses thousands every day> game shuts down.
Maybe it doesn't look that way to you, but what you want is to give power to whalers and gold sellers. The second that cap is removed whole community would get dominated by a few whalers that have been hoarding since this game was released from beta.
Another "fun fact" to the idea of whalers controling ZAX: you can have a maximum of 15 mil posted on ZAX from a single account. 6 offers, 5000 max zen offer, 500 max AD per zen. So, there are caps, people just dont see them because they haven't been reached yet.
Once again, ZAX isn't here for us, it's here for people that sell ZEN, and a 15 mil backlog will get eaten in 2 weeks tops. There has to a supply of AD in advance, and it might seen like a long time to you, but if AD flow stopped into ZAX for whatever reason, 2 weeks would pass like nothing. The only problem people have with ZAX issue is that there is a queue line that they dont want. Simply put, everyone wants to be first on the service list.
Economy issues like CWards and such are a different thing entirely. I apologise to you but I am totaly drained and cannot explain this in detail, but this is a fact: the CWards circulation and the "money circle" that is formed in ZAX is both in interest of the company and the players. It is shocking, but please remember that you people are fighting a system that was devised and is maintained by people that have big degrees in economy and it's their job. If they say it's solid, it's prety solid. I'll give you more info tomorow good night!
So each account can put a request for 30k zen..30. Thousand. Zen per account. Are you serious?
Imagine what damage bots alone could do with all that AD, let alone players. 15mil AD isn't much to an average whaler or bot. 18 maxed out leadership characters gives you 2.1mil AD a week without even playing the game, 2 months and you've reached double maximum. If only 100 people do this and put their AD on the ZAx, the ZAx is unusable and would create something similar to the position we're in now. How come the devs don't see this? Maybe they thought people would never reach that amount of AD?
And people say leadership isn't an issue...
It's 5 open orders for 25,000 at any given time.
Leadership is not the issue, it takes months and months to get to 20 unless you have a lot of starting Capital.
Considering that folks were able to pull AD out of their a$$ for the last 4 months, I'd say that is the biggest cause of inflation.
LOL Leadership and praying is kinda like pulling AD out of your a$$, too.
I have to say I'm with magenubs on this, but I'm not so sure that the spammers are targeting the ZAX so much as they are going after the AH to multiply their spoils. It seems to me that the ZAX backlog is a side effect of rampant AH inflation as more and more people realize that the zen to AD ratio on ZAX is easily defeated by the inflated prices on AH.. why not get more AD for your zen than 500:1? Just use the AH for getting AD instead of ZAX after you buy zen with real money.
The spammers/exploiters already have enormous amounts of AD that they convert to cash WITHOUT the ZAX. They use out-of-game channels for that, and are probably not a big source of the backlog, per se.
LOL Leadership and praying is kinda like pulling AD out of your a$$, too.
Not even close. Leadership gives you rough AD which is limited to 24K per character per day. With the recent bug folks were getting 40-50K refined AD every few seconds. You do the math and tell me which generates more.
Even if you had 1000 characters doing leadership, which would take months and months and months to get there, and a lot of work to manage, that would only generate 24M AD per day. I'm fairly certain the "bots" are generating a lot more than that with far fewer than 1000 characters.
Anyway, the whole Zax backlog is the result of the bug which has been abused since Mod 2. Once the backlog exceeded 1M it kept feeding itself, due to the fact that holding Zen was preferable to AD and since if you had any, you could purchase AH items to sell for a profit. Right now with the recent drop in AH prices, that profit is not nearly as big as it used to be.
True, that recent exploit we're not supposed to talk about generated a lot more. But you're forgetting that bots get to 60 in less than a day. If it would take them much longer, they wouldn't be nearly the effective AD sellers they are. It would take way too long to create effective characters otherwise. Sure it'll take em 2months or so to get to lvl 20, but it's still free AD being generated in the meantime. It doesn't take them nearly as long as a player would to get that many characters ready and even with 50 chars per account, that's the maximum I think, that's still a LOT of AD.
They spend all day node farming. It's a lot quicker (and a lot more lucrative) to get to 60 and just start farming nodes than to train leadership to 20. Plus the stuff they sell on the AH is refine and not rough AD.
I read the rest, but it isn't important after this statement. If you did the same and completely read what I wrote, you would notice this little part:
"What you are aiming for is a f2p model that is 100% f2p. In other words, the company is going to invest without getting anything back because it's all free. I checked every item in zen shop. Most are cosmetic. NONE are essential to gameplay."
You wont find a game that is 100% free to play. It doesn't exist. Simply because it is a black hole that will bleed you dry. I will try to help you understand. Here is a little piece taken straight from the NW packs page:
Completely Free-to-Play
You don't have to pay to adventure. From level 1 to the level cap, all playable content in Neverwinter is free for everyone to experience.
free2PLAY. Not free2OWN. You dont have to pay anything to get into CN or IWD. So, let me ask again:what is this thing that prohibits any aspect of GAMEPLAY that has to be purchased with real money?
So you reduce everything to absurd levels (reductio ad absurdum) then toss on some ad hominem by trying to insult me, then add on some complete lies. Rift you can get everything for free with patience, same with DDO same with LotRO, So you insult me, engage in in multiple logical fallacies, and lie like mad.
Yeah, if we're talking about bots then it's a good idea to assume the "rules" for what's reasonable are different vs. a human player. A quick look on google will reveal that the macro software that botters use is now very elegant and packed with features that make the automation of account/character creation easy. Mouse movements and clicks and keypresses can be captured and replayed over and over without human intervention after the first "dry" run with a programmer. In other words, effectively managing 100 separate accounts to spam leadership tasks/prayers requires ZERO human intervention.
Just a head's up.
EDIT: But like ash mentoned above, the current practice seems to be node farming. If that gets closed off by the devs randomly moving the nodes around here and there after they get used each time, then expect the new breed of leadership/pray bots to start massing around campfires.
flambridgeMember, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 191Arc User
edited August 2014
Have you noticed that these things should not be problem for Neverwinter?
This type of problem is to MMO/RPG "ten years or more," not for an MMO "one year".
EVE have these problems, Starcraft have these problems , World of Warcraft have these problems. So why Neverwinter have ?
I slightly log in and saw the auction, Phoera already reached 1mil (and completely lost hope of having one), will soon be cheapest "make a white turn a purple, than buying a directly purple."
I do not know what f *** going on here, but something is very wrong.
And that is because WARS not yet been implemented. Imagine when.
I'll just tell you what will happen from the "economist" point of view. 90% of ZEN that is used in "sell ZEN" Is bought for the purpose of buying AD. A huge part of player base still doesn't understand that there are people that dont have time to farm AD and instead choose to buy it with real money. So, you remove the cap>Zen price goes up to 5000 (this is easymode, it would most likely go a lot higher)>instead of players offering AD, sellers would offer in "buy zen" tab> now you have real zen sellers> the game loses thousands every day> game shuts down.
Maybe it doesn't look that way to you, but what you want is to give power to whalers and gold sellers. The second that cap is removed whole community would get dominated by a few whalers that have been hoarding since this game was released from beta.
You're certainly no economist. If I'm wrong then you're an economist in a country that manages a non-floating currency and does business by massive government intervention in the market. Only two of those of any scale come to mind, and neither of them have a currency that is usable outside their borders.
You have no idea what it will float to, even though...if you have any economics training at all and you watch the market...you should. The adjusted Zen:AD ratio will peg itself, after some intial flutter and AD sales to whales who will spend out the wazoo to get their AD stock, at around the best AD prices for Zenitems. That guage is Coal Wards, Keys, and...recently...blueprints. Those indicators peg the ratio at a low of 700 to a high of 1500. A fair bet is around 1200. That's just about right, too...since a <$10/million AD price ppoint will also start cutting into the 3rd party business.
Please explain a bit better what you are trying to say I realy want to understand what you are saying, my english is not that advanced to understand you sorry
Have you noticed that these things should not be problem for Neverwinter?
This type of problem is to MMO/RPG "ten years or more," not for an MMO "one year".
EVE have these problems, Starcraft have these problems , World of Warcraft have these problems. So why Neverwinter have ?
I slightly log in and saw the auction, Phoera already reached 1mil (and completely lost hope of having one), will soon be cheapest "make a white turn a purple, than buying a directly purple."
I do not know what f *** going on here, but something is very wrong.
And that is because WARS not yet been implemented. Imagine when.
Because there was an infinite AD duplication exploit that went on for months in this game that did not get resolved as of now that World of Warcraft never had (that wasn't fixed)
You're certainly no economist. If I'm wrong then you're an economist in a country that manages a non-floating currency and does business by massive government intervention in the market. Only two of those of any scale come to mind, and neither of them have a currency that is usable outside their borders.
You have no idea what it will float to, even though...if you have any economics training at all and you watch the market...you should. The adjusted Zen:AD ratio will peg itself, after some intial flutter and AD sales to whales who will spend out the wazoo to get their AD stock, at around the best AD prices for Zenitems. That guage is Coal Wards, Keys, and...recently...blueprints. Those indicators peg the ratio at a low of 700 to a high of 1500. A fair bet is around 1200. That's just about right, too...since a <$10/million AD price ppoint will also start cutting into the 3rd party business.
You insist on applying real-world economic principles to a game economy. The major difference is that the real world does not have a handful of individuals with so great a proportion of the total money supply that they are able to manipulate market prices and currency values at a whim. Neverwinter does. And these individuals have proved time and time again that they want ALL the money they can lay hands on and have no concern whatsoever about the state of the game. So pinning the Zax limit to the highest cost of items on an easily manipulated AH is just plain bonkers.
And even if your best-case scenario panned out, a Zax rate of 1200:1 would kill this game in weeks as free players realised they had no realistic chance of access to Zen.
You insist on applying real-world economic principles to a game economy. The major difference is that the real world does not have a handful of individuals with so great a proportion of the total money supply that they are able to manipulate market prices and currency values at a whim. Neverwinter does. And these individuals have proved time and time again that they want ALL the money they can lay hands on and have no concern whatsoever about the state of the game. So pinning the Zax limit to the highest cost of items on an easily manipulated AH is just plain bonkers.
And even if your best-case scenario panned out, a Zax rate of 1200:1 would kill this game in weeks as free players realised they had no realistic chance of access to Zen.
This.
We can quibble over how long it would take for the freepers to fall off, but the fact that they would leave once the realization hit is undeniable. I would assume a 1200:1 ratio is a hopeful estimate at best -- wouldn't be surprised if it stayed higher than that.
Uncapping the ZAX is a step in the wrong direction, IMO... we need a tiny bit MORE regulation of this market, not less. The laissez-faire model still works, but we need to have realistic expectations of just how dirty certain people are willing to play to get an edge, and account for that variable a little better.
Not everyone is legit -- and the ones who aren't have made a mess of things for everyone else.
Comments
A good argument. After thinking about it I must admit you changed my opinion. Respec tokens realy are the #1 item on the border of "required to play". But dont forget you can get all skills with the "power point" awards you get trough that cumulative XP reward system. Feats are respecable with AD. Only thing that is left is the paragon path and stats (str, dex etc). I actualy gave up on playing a GWF because I needed 2 completely different builds for PvE and PvP, and getting so many respec tokens wasn't an option. Well done sir.
I have to disagree on CWards. Like I said before, the 1% chance exists ingame. You can stock up on perservation wards and fire away. To add to this, CWards are available from praying and the gond pack. They realy are one of the endgame items, and most of them come from zen shop, but it doesn't change the fact that they are available ingame, and there is not a moment when there are no coal wards on AH. True, the price is outrageous atm, but it doesn't conflict the fact that they are available without spending any real money.
I read the rest, but it isn't important after this statement. If you did the same and completely read what I wrote, you would notice this little part:
"What you are aiming for is a f2p model that is 100% f2p. In other words, the company is going to invest without getting anything back because it's all free. I checked every item in zen shop. Most are cosmetic. NONE are essential to gameplay."
You wont find a game that is 100% free to play. It doesn't exist. Simply because it is a black hole that will bleed you dry. I will try to help you understand. Here is a little piece taken straight from the NW packs page:
Completely Free-to-Play
You don't have to pay to adventure. From level 1 to the level cap, all playable content in Neverwinter is free for everyone to experience.
free2PLAY. Not free2OWN. You dont have to pay anything to get into CN or IWD. So, let me ask again:what is this thing that prohibits any aspect of GAMEPLAY that has to be purchased with real money?
Market in my opinion screwed up because of three things:
The binding of most coal wards.
All keys bound.
Exploits, or AD influx or no good AD sink, call it what you want. Too much AD is what it boils down to.
Coal wards and keys are probably the two biggest sellers for Cryptic, I can understand binding them, but not all of them. The Coal wards can stay the same and Cryptic can keep making money off of them, that's ok, can still get account bound ones in time or buy them on AH because the ones you buy with zen are unbound, and that's good.
Just the same as Coal wards, make it to where you can get some (bound) keys in-game and unbind the zen ones. Could get one key per collection completed or something like that I think would be good. Maybe a 1% chance or less of getting out of epic dungeon chest.
Cryptic punished the entire playerbase because goldspammers were selling their keys cheaper. That doesnt make sense to me. PermaBan the gold buyers, if 100 ppl report someone for advertising there ******* or whatever website permaban there account, if they paid for multiple leadership farming characters they will lose all that plus all the stuff all those characters have, after multiple losses they stop advertising and move to word of mouth of previous buyers or ppl that know of them or whatever, but it would cut back. Yes I know they ban some or whatever but there are still plenty to go around.
Create AD sink, my idea was to make all potency marks only available through the WB, no more drops or chests or events or anything, all WB. Mega Sink for each and every character. Easy solution.
In the end, the biggest thing is removing the cap. Like I said players should be able to decide and I think it will pan out in the end to a good equal medium. Though I will say im no economist and that's probably obvious. But still, this is what a lot of ppl want. And to say the ZAX backlog isn't a problem is ludicrous. Its almost a 2 week wait right now and that increases by one day every couple of days or so. Eventually this wont be a F2P game anymore, it will be P2W and nobody likes that. There are plenty of options for Cryptic to make, it will probably be some weird off the wall thing, but I don't care, do something.
Just want to take a moment and mention there are almost as many ADs in the ZAX backlog as there are people in the world.
Of course, not all the backlog is from gold sellers, etc. People legitimately just want Zen ... for many reasons. Which are numbered for you in the Zen store.
But, I have no doubt a significant portion of it is. How much? I can only guess, as I have no real facts backing me up in any case.
Spot on. This post points exactly what bothered me about Zax, but couldn't phrase it out without drowning in too much details. Well said sir, well said
I'll just tell you what will happen from the "economist" point of view. 90% of ZEN that is used in "sell ZEN" Is bought for the purpose of buying AD. A huge part of player base still doesn't understand that there are people that dont have time to farm AD and instead choose to buy it with real money. So, you remove the cap>Zen price goes up to 5000 (this is easymode, it would most likely go a lot higher)>instead of players offering AD, sellers would offer in "buy zen" tab> now you have real zen sellers> the game loses thousands every day> game shuts down.
Maybe it doesn't look that way to you, but what you want is to give power to whalers and gold sellers. The second that cap is removed whole community would get dominated by a few whalers that have been hoarding since this game was released from beta.
Once again, ZAX isn't here for us, it's here for people that sell ZEN, and a 15 mil backlog will get eaten in 2 weeks tops. There has to a supply of AD in advance, and it might seen like a long time to you, but if AD flow stopped into ZAX for whatever reason, 2 weeks would pass like nothing. The only problem people have with ZAX issue is that there is a queue line that they dont want. Simply put, everyone wants to be first on the service list.
Economy issues like CWards and such are a different thing entirely. I apologise to you but I am totaly drained and cannot explain this in detail, but this is a fact: the CWards circulation and the "money circle" that is formed in ZAX is both in interest of the company and the players. It is shocking, but please remember that you people are fighting a system that was devised and is maintained by people that have big degrees in economy and it's their job. If they say it's solid, it's prety solid. I'll give you more info tomorow
What makes you think they don't?
As long as people buy Zen they do not care.
It's 5 open orders for 25,000 at any given time.
Leadership is not the issue, it takes months and months to get to 20 unless you have a lot of starting Capital.
Considering that folks were able to pull AD out of their a$$ for the last 4 months, I'd say that is the biggest cause of inflation.
I have to say I'm with magenubs on this, but I'm not so sure that the spammers are targeting the ZAX so much as they are going after the AH to multiply their spoils. It seems to me that the ZAX backlog is a side effect of rampant AH inflation as more and more people realize that the zen to AD ratio on ZAX is easily defeated by the inflated prices on AH.. why not get more AD for your zen than 500:1? Just use the AH for getting AD instead of ZAX after you buy zen with real money.
The spammers/exploiters already have enormous amounts of AD that they convert to cash WITHOUT the ZAX. They use out-of-game channels for that, and are probably not a big source of the backlog, per se.
Not even close. Leadership gives you rough AD which is limited to 24K per character per day. With the recent bug folks were getting 40-50K refined AD every few seconds. You do the math and tell me which generates more.
Even if you had 1000 characters doing leadership, which would take months and months and months to get there, and a lot of work to manage, that would only generate 24M AD per day. I'm fairly certain the "bots" are generating a lot more than that with far fewer than 1000 characters.
Anyway, the whole Zax backlog is the result of the bug which has been abused since Mod 2. Once the backlog exceeded 1M it kept feeding itself, due to the fact that holding Zen was preferable to AD and since if you had any, you could purchase AH items to sell for a profit. Right now with the recent drop in AH prices, that profit is not nearly as big as it used to be.
They spend all day node farming. It's a lot quicker (and a lot more lucrative) to get to 60 and just start farming nodes than to train leadership to 20. Plus the stuff they sell on the AH is refine and not rough AD.
So you reduce everything to absurd levels (reductio ad absurdum) then toss on some ad hominem by trying to insult me, then add on some complete lies. Rift you can get everything for free with patience, same with DDO same with LotRO, So you insult me, engage in in multiple logical fallacies, and lie like mad.
Just a head's up.
EDIT: But like ash mentoned above, the current practice seems to be node farming. If that gets closed off by the devs randomly moving the nodes around here and there after they get used each time, then expect the new breed of leadership/pray bots to start massing around campfires.
This type of problem is to MMO/RPG "ten years or more," not for an MMO "one year".
EVE have these problems, Starcraft have these problems , World of Warcraft have these problems. So why Neverwinter have ?
I slightly log in and saw the auction, Phoera already reached 1mil (and completely lost hope of having one), will soon be cheapest "make a white turn a purple, than buying a directly purple."
I do not know what f *** going on here, but something is very wrong.
And that is because WARS not yet been implemented. Imagine when.
You're certainly no economist. If I'm wrong then you're an economist in a country that manages a non-floating currency and does business by massive government intervention in the market. Only two of those of any scale come to mind, and neither of them have a currency that is usable outside their borders.
You have no idea what it will float to, even though...if you have any economics training at all and you watch the market...you should. The adjusted Zen:AD ratio will peg itself, after some intial flutter and AD sales to whales who will spend out the wazoo to get their AD stock, at around the best AD prices for Zenitems. That guage is Coal Wards, Keys, and...recently...blueprints. Those indicators peg the ratio at a low of 700 to a high of 1500. A fair bet is around 1200. That's just about right, too...since a <$10/million AD price ppoint will also start cutting into the 3rd party business.
Because there was an infinite AD duplication exploit that went on for months in this game that did not get resolved as of now that World of Warcraft never had (that wasn't fixed)
And even if your best-case scenario panned out, a Zax rate of 1200:1 would kill this game in weeks as free players realised they had no realistic chance of access to Zen.
Aelar Hawkwind - Archer
Karrin Feywinter - Mistress of Flame
Errin Duskwalker - Executioner
Darquess - Soulbinder
This.
We can quibble over how long it would take for the freepers to fall off, but the fact that they would leave once the realization hit is undeniable. I would assume a 1200:1 ratio is a hopeful estimate at best -- wouldn't be surprised if it stayed higher than that.
Uncapping the ZAX is a step in the wrong direction, IMO... we need a tiny bit MORE regulation of this market, not less. The laissez-faire model still works, but we need to have realistic expectations of just how dirty certain people are willing to play to get an edge, and account for that variable a little better.
Not everyone is legit -- and the ones who aren't have made a mess of things for everyone else.