In various threads it has been mentioned that the price for blue marks is too high and that it is due to market manipulation.
I find it is a misconception on what is happening on the marketplace:
Demand drives prices much more than any manipulation. Sure, there may be people out there with a lot of AD, who are able to manipulate the market. I have done it at times as well, but generally you end up on the losing end if you work against the market. Manipulation in a sense can only happen to strengthen trends that are already there and people using the market to make AD recognize these trends early on.
The mentioned blue marks is one example. Why are the prices for marks so "expensive"? Beause the price for RP went down 90%-95%. Now everyone is using RP like mad and obviously the other source for upgrading artefakts (marks) is going up, as demand is skyrocketing. The only source for most blue marks are lockboxes and the drop rates arent even that good. In about 14 days from now you will wish for today's market conditions with cheap RP from farmers and expensive marks, because the overall cost to upgrade an artefakt will go up by an order of magnitude.
The only way to counter that, is for Cryptic to set market prices via the Bazaar, which in all honesty sucks. There are also those players in our community who have fun playing on the AH and making AD without the mindless need to run Dungeons 24/7...Even though the economy of this game is very small and way too regulated in my opinion.
I would also consider giving Cryptic their due: The last big market issue was with the Zen market. I was very sceptical at first about the changes implemented. When you look at the Zen market now, you have to admit that Cryptic solved the issue of AD/Zen transfers. Of course they did it in a way that totally devalued Zen to the average player. It would probably have been enough to stop the AD farming bugs, without taking tradeable keys out of the market.
Anyways, sorry for this "wall of text", thanks for reading through it
tl;dr
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— (The unwritten rule)
Even you said there was an existing thread on this topic. Why did you make another thread instead of replying to the original thread?
Anyway, Cryptic should make sure the prices are of the items are appropriate for the market. The blue marks, for instance, should in no way be so more expensive than the purple marks. It is not only what the sellers want to sell then the buyers will buy. 100k or $20 worth of zen for just one blue mark is not realistic for a newbie who just started the game a couple of days ago, especially in a game which its developer call f2p. At least, in all the other PWE games, two day old newbies are not asked to spend $20 to upgrade their items.
But I'm in agreement with the thread in general. The demand for the blue marks of power is high because they're used A LOT more than the other two marks, and most of the equipment they're used to upgrade is generally viewed as better than equipment that uses stability or union.
If you insist we might agree on getting a T3 mount, which is not necessary but certainly beneficial. I managed to play the game for 2 months without a T3 mount (ZEN, for account wide)
Of course I want a ferrary the 1st day I sign up to the game, but do I expect it to be handed to me on a golden platter?
I am convinced you can get quite acceptable without ever spending a dime on the game, but it will not be on day one or two of the game.
If you had BIS gear/item on day 10 without playing or spending what would there be to do for you in the game anyway?
This is most likely the reason for huge price increases. Nothing more, nothing less. The whales will pay the outrageous prices. Seems pretty obvious.
myles08807 said, "Back in my day, we didn't have any of this fancy Mulhorand gear while we were leveling . . . we walked uphill both ways while dying once every five seconds while leveling, and we liked it fine!" . . . Now, get off my lawn, you kids!"
pointsman said, "I don't rue the game. In fact I don't feel any regret for the game at all."
looomis said, "I don't like people changing to alts and then bragging about their mains like schizophrenic role players."
The problem is, 95%+ of the supply of Refinement Stones are being provided by the bots. If you take them out of the equation, there won't be anything for people to buy.
You can't just buy Zen and convert it to AD, because the supply itself will be too low.
I said it had been mentioned in several threads. I dont like Hijacking threads though since they were on a different topic. Therefore a new thread...
A newbie who just started doesnt have the wherewithals to buy any artefakt gear that requires the blue marks. Not quite sure if you need them on regular artefacts though. However, all first upgrades from green to blue are with green marks. Therefore the argument is kind of weak in my opinon. Also as stated in my post the total upgarde cost, aside from the marks has decreased dramatically. So I dont see the point of complaining about too hgh prices for the marks since you save way more with current RP prices.
Yes, I meant the AH.
I agree, the price for upgrading an artifact equip to legendary will very soon be beyond 10 mil for all those without Dragon's Horde Enchant or the time to invest for harvesting RP. Same goes for regular enchantments by the way. Rank 7+ enchantments will become very very expensive as will any special echantments beyond the lesser status. Basically everything that needs RP will take players without substantial AD basis along long time to upgrade. I daresay the impact on pvp and other competetive areas of the game will be noticable to say the least.
Mounts are not necessary in level 20-30 maps. You see a lot of people running on foot even though the free 50% speed mounts are free. Mount upgrades are also available to purchase in the AD store. In fact, mounts are not even necessary in some level 60 content, particularly the T1 and T2 dungeons.
The bottom line is Cryptic sell its and rightfully so because they make and run the game, and they sell it only for AD but please tell me why doesn't Cryptic also sell blue marks to keep the market stable? I even don't have a problem if they sell it for zen as long as it is a fixed and legitimate prices appropriate to the level.
Don't tell me you don't
This comment tells me some people come to NWO to dream, not to play.
You are talking about endgame content. If there is completely no need for mounts even at endgame content then they are cosmetic items. Should 110% speed mounts be 5 gold each? Absolutely not, because by the time when you need them you should be able to afford it either through playing or paying but for lowbie content, they should not be way out of their means to obtain, otherwise the game is not just pay-to-play but force-to-pay.
Been there done that. And I will tell you they're not even remotely *necessary* as engaging the brain pathing-wise will get you from spawn to Vilithrax or whatever without getting slowed down by mobs no problem.
Very convenient and time-saving though? Absolutely.
PWE User
Join Date
Aug 2014
you are just too young
This comment shows some players don't just come to this game to dream instead of playing, but are also incredibly naive that join date is in the forum is not the join date in the game.
BTW, please don't derail this topic. Most people know how much blue marks were 3 weeks ago.
they were for 2 months worth more than 200k, im not joking.
however this happened with the double refinement weekends, many of us bought whole stacks of blue mark of power for 6-7k each to speculate. it just seems it worked too well and now there is not enough supply to let the price go down again
ps. as far as i know the forum joining date is the same of the game joining one. you dont have to create a different forum account.
Without further derailing this topic, let me tell you once more people do know how much blue marks were weeks ago. 3-5k or 200k? They know, not need to argue. Cryptic knows too. They have back up of database. Cryptic DBA please check you database and brief your developers. The other fact is a player might have played since Beta but is still listed as "joined the forum a couple of months ago". There is no rule that a player must be posted from a specific account. I could have 2 or 3 accounts. A lot others even have 20, 30, or 100 accounts. I have dwarven masks. That should give you an idea I played this least this game more than a year ago.
Consider that weeks ago there weren't as many items to upgrade. Only artifacts required them, and I remember the peak being some 80k each when IwD (Mod3) released. Then for a long time you had no new readily available artifacts (only rare drops from lockboxes). ToD was released mid August. It was too hard to grind as a campaign, and the mass slowly crawled through dozens of quests for over a month (minimum time to get to artifacts was around 20 days IIRC, and that's if you didn't spend anything on boons, dungeons etc). Most players started getting their artifact weapons around early to mid October, and that's where MoP prices started to rise.
Only two months ago you paid for a stack of 99 Peridtos +100 K AD and for the marks little over 30 K (green and blue) plus the normal price for greater marks of potency. That made upgrading artifacts prohibitively expensive, even for wealthier players.
In my opinion players of all level should be happy about the develpment in it's current form...well until the patch happens anyways. Again, the cost of marks is completely negligible compared to the savings in RP cost.
Edit: typos
rank 4 used to be 60k
lesser resonance 800k
those are the priced some of us faced.
The rank 4s were like 30k from the bazaar or something, no-one actually bought it for that.
no, rank 4 were never sold in bazaar, i used to buy radiant rank 4 for 50-60k when a perfect vorpal was 10kk ( so not much time ago)
Apparently they were rank 3s I was thinking about.