Run dungeons/skirms quick and easy sources of ad. Run through many of them within 10/15mins, giving you 6 runs an hour. Which can net a potential 18K-30k AD with only salvaging 1 item. If you get two items, we are talking 36k-60k AD....in 1 hour. That seems to be plenty since all you can refine is 24k AD a day.
I get that meliboo and that's what my group does. I'm not saying for me, I'm saying for the average gamer. Not everyone has an ample amount of friends/guild to run constant dungeons with. So they have to either pug or find alternate ways to do so. Yeah a bit of research into finding ways to make ad can help anyone. But not all players of this game are that hardcore. And know one can even say that they shouldn't play them cause it's everyone's right to play whatever.
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ambisinisterrMember, Neverwinter ModeratorPosts: 10,462Community Moderator
As we have been saying for months and as I have said in this very thread: the changes are not done.
They are just doing things right by making small changes to the system to balance things out. Nobody ever said the AD gains were good. Only that making drastic changes are not the right approach as that would cause economic turmoil.
Consider economies akin to the butterfly effect particularly in MMO's. Small change cause large ripples over time so even the smallest change could cause a massive fluctuation. Making an extra thousand AD a day doesn't sound like a lot but if you say, for the sake of numbers alone, 50K players earn that then you are in fact adding 50M AD into the market in a day and 1.5 Billion AD into the market over a month.
As such they are doing small changes to get a good feel of the effect they are having on the economy before they cause even more issues. Removing AD from Leadership was a drastic measure but a required measure to create a new economic norm. Never did anybody other than doomsaying (shortsighted) players say that the system wouldn't require or be tweaked further. Only that it would not be done haphazardly.
Ok nice discussion Ambisinister. Hopefully this conversation can anewer some questions on where the market is heading. It might benefit the game more than you know.
Certain developers have a tendency of keeping the player base out of the loop. Questions asked and ignored. In this case I feel questions were answered.
To my mind I don't understand why they need Zen at all. The cost of upgrades in $$ is way to much if you think a mount can cost as much as a brand new game. When the AD / Zen price fluctuates you'd also see periods of buying/not buying.
Perhaps I'm missing something but to me it would make much more sense to have a fixed $$ price and fixed AD price for everything in the market, removing Zen altogether.
I'd pay $5 for a mount as to my mind that's what it's worth - I'm certainly not paying $35, that's ridiculous. I literally laughed out loud when I first saw how much real money they were asking for Zen.
On the subject of the trade bars - that's good news! I'd almost got 200 and would've spent them on a coal ward but now I'm going to save - even if it's months, means I get a bunch of them at once
Please Do Not Feed The Trolls
Xael De Armadeon: DC
Xane De Armadeon: CW
Zen De Armadeon: OP
Zohar De Armadeon: TR
Chrion De Armadeon: SW
Gosti Big Belly: GWF
Barney McRustbucket: GF
Lt. Thackeray: HR
Lucius De Armadeon: BD
Member of Casual Dailies - XBox
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ambisinisterrMember, Neverwinter ModeratorPosts: 10,462Community Moderator
Certain developers have a tendency of keeping the player base out of the loop. Questions asked and ignored. In this case I feel questions were answered.
To which I go back to my original statement regarding the whole 'I will do nothing until this change is made' statement.
How can they say they will make changes long in advance if any such statements will result in people locking down until changes are made even if they know changes may not come for months?
With Xbox we have a forced delay but this is the exact argument I had against players who got annoyed months ago when there was "no warning" for certain economic changes on the PC end. What difference does it make? If they change it today everybody who bought yesterday feels shafted. If they say they will change it in two weeks then people who bought it yesterday still feel shafted but now people refuse to buy for two weeks until the change goes live. Makes sense, right?
Now consider that they are making small changes little by little based on how the economy is functioning. Right now people have been told that all sinks will be re-evaluated but they do not know when or by how much. If they choose not to upgrade their Stronghold because they were "promised" a reduction in a few months after blank, blank and blank changes then people will lock down the fort and not spend money on their Stronghold thus artificially slanting the data on how various economic systems are functioning.
To those that follow science you should be aware of Schrodinger's Cat in which observing the experiment effects the results. As a proof to concept there is the infamous double slit experiment. In this regard, letting the players know the developers are looking at specific economic patterns would directly effect the results and thus corrupt the data. Yes I know it's a bit of a stretch since the developers are in fact looking at the data regardless...but as proven on the previous page telling players they are observing specific information and planning on making changes does effect how players spnd their money and thus their observations on the entire system.
Hmmmm seems like someone is going to start to make this "discussion" into an argument... anyways I wasn't referring to PW. I was saying In general. I understand you can't give up info to early etc etc, I'm saying if their is an issue some developers won't acknowledge the sitaution until a few days later or even weeks later. It's nice to know if said issues are being addressed or they know about them.
Anyways I can continue this after my meeting...
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ambisinisterrMember, Neverwinter ModeratorPosts: 10,462Community Moderator
edited November 2015
All discussions in which people present differing opinions and evidence to support their views are "arguments." Slang polluted the term to mean hostility.
Argument:a reason or set of reasons given with the aim of persuading others that an action or idea is right or wrong. Latin Origin:Arguere - to make clear, prove, or accuse
Haha ok I guess I was not clear. Hostile minus slang ..maybe. it is whatever, you've made your point. Again, you have explained your and pw side of the ad market changes and lack of.
Food For Thought: Everyone assumes a 'bot' is some autonomous program running on its own. However, a 'bot' can be a real person or people. Those 3rd party sites selling AD may very well be real people "playing" the game. In countries where people make a handful of dollars PER MONTH, you can bet it is profitable for a 3rd party site to pay people to farm. This type of 'bot' is very very possible on XBOX.
Yes, since the cat is out of the bag, save those bars But as the mod said, it's probably not a good idea for game devs to let people know of these types of changes too far in advance. To use a real world example, what if a government told it's people that they would make it so when a person deposits money in to their bank account, they get an extra % of what they deposit but they didn't say when this rule would go in to affect. So, people stop depositing money in to their banks waitin for this change. What would happen to the banking institution? Bad things.
null null null It's tot saving what I am trying to quote properly but I am the original booster and to zman telling people to get back on topic.... Shush. Ad is way more interesting
Bagoats, that is probably true for a. Important currency like ad or zen but tarm bars are kind of a bonus currency. As far as I can tell ATM their ONLY use is co ward and iounvstone. You can't buy or trade tarma bars. The changes could only serve to making that currency a little useful. Holding on to them is pretty much all u can do anyway. The gear only goes to 60. It's useless. It's all win for the game to make the tarmalun bar meaningful again. People will want to buy more lockboxes to get more bars to buy the relevant things. I just hope they catch us up on all the boxes but if they don't at least we'd be able to obtain those rare mounts sign me up for an owlbear!
I was just curious on a couple things. I play with a good sized group and I'm in a large guild. I constantly here what I posted today by many. It wasn't to be a nob just wanted their input on the whole market situation and ad. It's logical but what I said about people constantly saying f it is right. I have seen it plenty and especially lately.
Xbox does not need to have the developers tell us whats coming. All we need to do is look to our pc bretheren. We get the bugs they had we get the unbalanced gameplay. We even recieved the wrong lockbox at the launch of mod 7 getting the one pc got for the first 10 minutes. Which incidentally allowed those lucky few who were on to profit handsomely.
Good to hear the ad sinks are being examined. The tradebar thing sounds great. Especially offering many hard to obtain items. Personally hoping for the cost of upgrading companions and mounts to come into more realistic amounts. Presently, both of these things feel untouchable, unless you were able to make a lot of AD in prior mods.
No argument there mahburg. But that's the difference between being hostile and being respectful.
There's any number of ways to say you want the changes without resorting to making it out as if the developers are just being greedy or trying to squeeze money out of you. Logically...if they did...they wouldn't be dropping the price now would they?
In any case, this isn't about wants. We don't know when Xbox will be getting the trade bar changes but it can't have any issues when it does. The changes to leadership were delayed too but I don't seem to recall people being upset about that. What they were upset about was that it came much earlier than even the Community Team expected they would.
Sadly, again this is a practical decision due to the fact Microsoft has a strict system for pushing updates out due partly because of their certification process. It's the same reason why PC has patches every single week and Xbox does not.
Where in my original post did I say what you suggest? or even infer it. I posted that we would not be using the store until the price reductions, however as you raised the issue the pricing for zen in this game is extremely high and unless a small guild has a whale in there to help others out progress since mod six can be painful and slow. My complaints have always been about the impact on the average players, others have repeatedly highlighted perceived levels of greed, feel free to spin through my posts and find how many times I have posted in that vein. It wont be high numbers (if at all). Maybe sigmund might have an opinion on you going straight there.
We keep being told by those from PC, members and Mods how easy it is for them on PC may I ask do you play on Live, I noticed you joined the forum 12 days before me which is interesting, so we have been on here about the same time. If you are on Xbox hit me up and run through some content with our guild and show us where we are going wrong and where the game isnt broken Caveat no character over 2300 Il no pallies otherwise pick your classes (oh no health stones and a fixed supply of health ) Dungeons of choice will be ECC and Lostmauth.
If your up for it I would welcome the input.
are you kidding? the cost of zen high? right now we are back to 14000 k ad for 100 zen.. that is CHEAP.. Cheap cheap cheap.
to the mod, we didn't complain about the Ad being later because it was negative. excited about the tarmalune bar because it's positive. I don't believe it's happening because of a money squeeze though.
I was talking about the TRUE cost of zen in real money terms in the store not the AD exchange rate I thought it was pretty clear I meant that when I suggested folk were not selling Zen as much because of the price in AD terms.
As we have been saying for months and as I have said in this very thread: the changes are not done.
They are just doing things right by making small changes to the system to balance things out. Nobody ever said the AD gains were good. Only that making drastic changes are not the right approach as that would cause economic turmoil.
Consider economies akin to the butterfly effect particularly in MMO's. Small change cause large ripples over time so even the smallest change could cause a massive fluctuation. Making an extra thousand AD a day doesn't sound like a lot but if you say, for the sake of numbers alone, 50K players earn that then you are in fact adding 50M AD into the market in a day and 1.5 Billion AD into the market over a month.
As such they are doing small changes to get a good feel of the effect they are having on the economy before they cause even more issues. Removing AD from Leadership was a drastic measure but a required measure to create a new economic norm. Never did anybody other than doomsaying (shortsighted) players say that the system wouldn't require or be tweaked further. Only that it would not be done haphazardly.
No one least of all me felt there didn't need to be change, in fact many on here were bitching about the spammers repeatedly, where this went wrong was reducing revenue opportunities, without also reducing sinks correspondingly, if we are going to compare real world economic theory into this, doing this made the average player feel like they were in the Weimar republic (or Zimbabwe if you like) as the value of everything we had worked for fell by 50% (at least) but overhead (costs to run professions rank up etc) remained unchanged.
The topic on here is a good example of this, if the Devs want us to be timeline compatible with PC on revenue then they MUST make us the same on overhead imho!
i dont think we have any evidence one way or another as to how much zen is being sold. You can day trade to great profit. How much was ever actually being bought with real money and traded? How much is being fed into the markets by the makers of the game? How much is being bought and sold with ad converted. We have no solid numbers on any of this so to make definitive statements seems a little less than factual to me unless you have an inside look at the market. The one factual bit we do have is the exchange rate and that is undeniably cheap.
i dont think we have any evidence one way or another as to how much zen is being sold. You can day trade to great profit. How much was ever actually being bought with real money and traded? How much is being fed into the markets by the makers of the game? How much is being bought and sold with ad converted. We have no solid numbers on any of this so to make definitive statements seems a little less than factual to me unless you have an inside look at the market.
The one factual bit we do have is the exchange rate and that is undeniably cheap.
One can only go by qualitative information gained from those who buy zen (talking to them in chat) the Devs will never release their revenue stream data so as a criticism its a little moot, if there wasn't a serious market for trading zen for AD (bought with real money) then there would be no need for the exchange would there? And yes I see the fact that it allows those with AD to buy zen, but where do people think it comes from (unless you assume its Arc feeding the market but then they would run out of cash and we would have nothing to debate)
Speaking from personal experience the market pricing has in in game economy terms doubled the cost of purchasing Zen in the store if your intention was to use it for fast AD stocks for ranking up purposes. Now people can argue the wallet warrior versus I dont spend a dime issue as much as they like, the reality is every FTP game has this division and the software companies behind them depend on this for their revenue. Halving (or more) the returns from this aspect is imho, counterproductive.
What ambisinisterr is saying is spot on. As much as we would like to know the changes in advance it is honestly in our best interest that we dont.
The problem lies with the fact that the changes they are making should have never been needed in the first place. The fact that this game is f2p is what causes the problems. The developer still needs to generate a profit. I'm not sure which would generate a larger profit (f2p with micro transactions or a subscription service) but the current state of things is not the answer. The developer is losing revenue to third party vendors and the players are left overwhelmingly unsatisfied. It just seems like a very bad relationship.
If they would remove AD entirely, remove items from the zen market and limit it to strictly cosmetic item, switch the TH to work on gold, make the TH only available to players at level cap, all gear and companions BoP (you want it? Grind for it.), and add a subscription fee the game (I think) would resolve all current issues and prevent any further ones from developing. But no, they want to waste time, money, and resources on things like in game chat filters... even if they disable it entirely we would all just get spammed with xbox live messages from the same annoying vendors. And even if somehow xbox live messages were disabled, third party vendors are no secret in any MMO on any platform. If people want to buy, it takes less than a second to find a source online. Are you going to battle the Internet now? It's pointless and a waste.
People are upset, and rightfully so, over the changes made to leadership. It should have never been a profession to begin with. People had a source of AD so they could stay on a competitive level (against players who pay an arm and a leg to take shortcuts and avoid putting in time to aquire items/gear mostly speaking in regards to pvp) and aquire the items they want and the developer took that away. Players are upset because they lost something valuable. If they never had it to begin with, not one word would be said. The same will be true anytime players lose a source to make AD. The problem is that any time an AD source is created it has the potential to become an AD source for vendors via bots as well.
We all want to be the best. The only way to become the best should be to invest time and effort. Players should not be given a source of anything valuable (leadership as an example) if their is even the slightest doubt that it could become compromised in the future and thus severely nerfed or removed entirely. Doing so creates unnecessary turmoil that could have easily been avoided had someone sat down for even a second and thought about it. Ambisinisterr made the most logical statement I have heard in regards to the game. Players were making more AD for not playing then they were for actually playing. Leadership was a terrible idea to begin with and should have never made it to the live version.
I look at it like a medical issue, the aim should be to cure the ailment not treat the symptoms. You should not look to fix exploits, you should look for ways to prevent them from even being possible. The fact that you cannot drop items on the ground in game was a very wise decision. Based on exploits seen in Borderlands 2 and Diablo 3, having the ability to drop items on the ground is a terrible idea and I applaud PW and Cryptic for not allowing it.
Botting on console is a very real thing. Anything that is automated is considered a "bot". Putting rubber bands on your controller to prevent going afk is technically a bot. Instead of combating vendors and bots I wish they would just entirely remove any and all potential for botting to be a lucrative option on any level or scale.
Bots are not the problem, vendors are not the problem, players buying AD is not the problem. The problem is AD.
i dont think we have any evidence one way or another as to how much zen is being sold. You can day trade to great profit. How much was ever actually being bought with real money and traded? How much is being fed into the markets by the makers of the game? How much is being bought and sold with ad converted. We have no solid numbers on any of this so to make definitive statements seems a little less than factual to me unless you have an inside look at the market.
The one factual bit we do have is the exchange rate and that is undeniably cheap.
One can only go by qualitative information gained from those who buy zen (talking to them in chat) the Devs will never release their revenue stream data so as a criticism its a little moot, if there wasn't a serious market for trading zen for AD (bought with real money) then there would be no need for the exchange would there? And yes I see the fact that it allows those with AD to buy zen, but where do people think it comes from (unless you assume its Arc feeding the market but then they would run out of cash and we would have nothing to debate)
Speaking from personal experience the market pricing has in in game economy terms doubled the cost of purchasing Zen in the store if your intention was to use it for fast AD stocks for ranking up purposes. Now people can argue the wallet warrior versus I dont spend a dime issue as much as they like, the reality is every FTP game has this division and the software companies behind them depend on this for their revenue. Halving (or more) the returns from this aspect is imho, counterproductive.
Actually, I do think they feed the market. and no I don't think it costs them anything. Yes, some people I am sure do buy to get AD but I doubt that's the serious feeder of the market.
there are a lot of assumptions here but as far as what they are aiming for and manipulating the market to be at... we really don't know. But if they wanted the price of zen to be at 240 because it would be more profitable for them, or if they wanted it at 500 they could manipulate it to be that. AD is just as illusory as Zen. they can print as much of it as they want. it doesn't mean real money for them the way it does to someone buying zen.
I can't quote in these forums for some reason but @thefiresidecat I absolutely agree.
If they truly want to battle vendors and bots I think the easiest way would be to simply undercut them. People use vendors because they get more AD per dollar spent.
I assume that if they lowered their price of their illusionary currency to be more competitive with the vendors than not only would they capture the customers using third party but I think they would also bring in new customers as well.
Even if zen was slightly more expensive than a vendor I think people would buy zen for the piece of mind and not worry about being banned.
Knowing you can buy from a vendor and get so much more than what you could spending the same amount on zen seems like it would be an easy choice especially considering they are only issuing 3 day bans.
boatman are you on your phone? when I use my phone to access the forums (which is most of the time now due to that chick with the eye that constantly is staring you down when you try to read) I can't quote people
WOW.. lol So typically changes on PC we get within a week after if its a easy fix like the patch PC got last Thursday. Other fixes like the Leadership changes and GMOP and SMOP changes typically take a month, just to see how it takes on PC. So this is something you will see on Xbox in possibly a month. Everyone needs to realize that because of Microsofts policies that things will always be tested on PC first before released on Xbox because of processes. And you all know of course they will do this after a double RP weekend. LOL. Sorry that was a low blow.
XB One LGPG Alliance Reagents of Death - Leader CW - Phoenix lvl 70 4034 (Main) GF - Spectre lvl 70 4012 (Main) GWF - Ice lvl 70 4010 (Main) SW - Zor lvl 70 3230 (Main) OP - Box lvl 70 3002 (Retired)
PS4 Look Good Play Good GWF - Ice lvl 70 3875 (Main) GF - Spectre lvl 70 2669 (Alt)
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ambisinisterrMember, Neverwinter ModeratorPosts: 10,462Community Moderator
I assume that if they lowered their price of their illusionary currency to be more competitive with the vendors than not only would they capture the customers using third party but I think they would also bring in new customers as well.
Players are not bots. They aren't willing to be paid the salary for their time that the bots are willing to get paid. Nor should they.
Bots are slave labor. Sweat shops. Whatever. 500 AD per 1 Zen is already a pittance so dropping the rate to be competitive with them would drop it even further. How long does it take to earn 500 AD on overage? Let's say you make 24K AD per character every 4 hours (likely way higher than you make for a reason) That would be 12 Zen made per hour or the equivilent of 12 cents per hour... And that's over double the rate of pay bots accept.
Not reasonable. Buy the AD with Zen...or face the consequences. What the players should want is for the AD value to go UP (not down) and for players willing to buy their way to the top to use the legitimate method to purchase AD instead of selling their souls for a few cents.
The topic on here is a good example of this, if the Devs want us to be timeline compatible with PC on revenue then they MUST make us the same on overhead imho!
What they want is to not make the same mistakes they made on the PC and fix mistakes earlier.
Like I said the biggest mistake was making leadership grant AD... The second biggest mistake was waiting so long to change it.
Again, the PC side envies that you have a much more balanced economy than we ever had because leadership inflated the market. Again we had been sitting on the 500:1 AD per Zen minimum wage for nearly two years. Its not rainbows and butterflies over there. Never has been. It's been nonstop complaints about more than gold spammers being annoying...
However the solution to the problem is to make it so people don't earn hundreds of thousands of AD every day just from leadership....which is no exaggeration. I myself had a personal friend who made 300K AD a day just on his one account only from his leadership farm. It doesn't take much of an imagination to consider how much AD was being generated by bots who just farmed leadership 24/7 and didn't play after they finished their half hour farm run.
Also, on a side note: Gold sellers exist in every MMO. I know MMO's are new to Xbox but as a long time PC gamer I promise I have played dozens of MMO's and every MMO in history has the exact same problem with bots....and the communities always seem to believe that their current MMO is the only one with the problem...and seem to forget when they move on to their next MMO that their previous one had bots due to nostalgia or...IDK...the complaints are always the same in every MMO Forum and the communities always seem to think that their previous MMO was better, their current MMO is the worst ever and the next MMO will kill their current MMO. Different people. Same complaints. And same explanation that the entire MMO industry spends millions of dollars combatting bots every year so if there was an easy solution it would have been fixed.
As I sent in a PM yesterday, Movie and Entertainment companies fight tooth and nail to prevent their movies from being pirated and yet we all know pirate sites still exist and they are around for years or even decades. Bots in MMO's are no different. So seriously I feel like I lose a bit of my sanity every time people say something akin to "well if Cryptic didn't want this to happen they would just stop them." It is not that simple. Period.
Comments
They are just doing things right by making small changes to the system to balance things out. Nobody ever said the AD gains were good. Only that making drastic changes are not the right approach as that would cause economic turmoil.
Consider economies akin to the butterfly effect particularly in MMO's. Small change cause large ripples over time so even the smallest change could cause a massive fluctuation. Making an extra thousand AD a day doesn't sound like a lot but if you say, for the sake of numbers alone, 50K players earn that then you are in fact adding 50M AD into the market in a day and 1.5 Billion AD into the market over a month.
As such they are doing small changes to get a good feel of the effect they are having on the economy before they cause even more issues. Removing AD from Leadership was a drastic measure but a required measure to create a new economic norm. Never did anybody other than doomsaying (shortsighted) players say that the system wouldn't require or be tweaked further. Only that it would not be done haphazardly.
Certain developers have a tendency of keeping the player base out of the loop. Questions asked and ignored. In this case I feel questions were answered.
Perhaps I'm missing something but to me it would make much more sense to have a fixed $$ price and fixed AD price for everything in the market, removing Zen altogether.
I'd pay $5 for a mount as to my mind that's what it's worth - I'm certainly not paying $35, that's ridiculous. I literally laughed out loud when I first saw how much real money they were asking for Zen.
On the subject of the trade bars - that's good news! I'd almost got 200 and would've spent them on a coal ward but now I'm going to save - even if it's months, means I get a bunch of them at once
Xael De Armadeon: DC
Xane De Armadeon: CW
Zen De Armadeon: OP
Zohar De Armadeon: TR
Chrion De Armadeon: SW
Gosti Big Belly: GWF
Barney McRustbucket: GF
Lt. Thackeray: HR
Lucius De Armadeon: BD
Member of Casual Dailies - XBox
How can they say they will make changes long in advance if any such statements will result in people locking down until changes are made even if they know changes may not come for months?
With Xbox we have a forced delay but this is the exact argument I had against players who got annoyed months ago when there was "no warning" for certain economic changes on the PC end. What difference does it make? If they change it today everybody who bought yesterday feels shafted. If they say they will change it in two weeks then people who bought it yesterday still feel shafted but now people refuse to buy for two weeks until the change goes live.
Makes sense, right?
Now consider that they are making small changes little by little based on how the economy is functioning. Right now people have been told that all sinks will be re-evaluated but they do not know when or by how much. If they choose not to upgrade their Stronghold because they were "promised" a reduction in a few months after blank, blank and blank changes then people will lock down the fort and not spend money on their Stronghold thus artificially slanting the data on how various economic systems are functioning.
To those that follow science you should be aware of Schrodinger's Cat in which observing the experiment effects the results. As a proof to concept there is the infamous double slit experiment.
In this regard, letting the players know the developers are looking at specific economic patterns would directly effect the results and thus corrupt the data. Yes I know it's a bit of a stretch since the developers are in fact looking at the data regardless...but as proven on the previous page telling players they are observing specific information and planning on making changes does effect how players spnd their money and thus their observations on the entire system.
Anyways I can continue this after my meeting...
Argument: a reason or set of reasons given with the aim of persuading others that an action or idea is right or wrong.
Latin Origin: Arguere - to make clear, prove, or accuse
Hence the Argumentative Essay.
Feel free to argue. I welcome it. Just don't become hostile.
[]Full Metal Witch[]
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Everyone assumes a 'bot' is some autonomous program running on its own. However, a 'bot' can be a real person or people. Those 3rd party sites selling AD may very well be real people "playing" the game. In countries where people make a handful of dollars PER MONTH, you can bet it is profitable for a 3rd party site to pay people to farm. This type of 'bot' is very very possible on XBOX.
But as the mod said, it's probably not a good idea for game devs to let people know of these types of changes too far in advance. To use a real world example, what if a government told it's people that they would make it so when a person deposits money in to their bank account, they get an extra % of what they deposit but they didn't say when this rule would go in to affect. So, people stop depositing money in to their banks waitin for this change. What would happen to the banking institution? Bad things.
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It's tot saving what I am trying to quote properly but I am the original booster and to zman telling people to get back on topic.... Shush. Ad is way more interesting
The topic on here is a good example of this, if the Devs want us to be timeline compatible with PC on revenue then they MUST make us the same on overhead imho!
The one factual bit we do have is the exchange rate and that is undeniably cheap.
Speaking from personal experience the market pricing has in in game economy terms doubled the cost of purchasing Zen in the store if your intention was to use it for fast AD stocks for ranking up purposes.
Now people can argue the wallet warrior versus I dont spend a dime issue as much as they like, the reality is every FTP game has this division and the software companies behind them depend on this for their revenue. Halving (or more) the returns from this aspect is imho, counterproductive.
The problem lies with the fact that the changes they are making should have never been needed in the first place. The fact that this game is f2p is what causes the problems. The developer still needs to generate a profit. I'm not sure which would generate a larger profit (f2p with micro transactions or a subscription service) but the current state of things is not the answer. The developer is losing revenue to third party vendors and the players are left overwhelmingly unsatisfied. It just seems like a very bad relationship.
If they would remove AD entirely, remove items from the zen market and limit it to strictly cosmetic item, switch the TH to work on gold, make the TH only available to players at level cap, all gear and companions BoP (you want it? Grind for it.), and add a subscription fee the game (I think) would resolve all current issues and prevent any further ones from developing. But no, they want to waste time, money, and resources on things like in game chat filters... even if they disable it entirely we would all just get spammed with xbox live messages from the same annoying vendors. And even if somehow xbox live messages were disabled, third party vendors are no secret in any MMO on any platform. If people want to buy, it takes less than a second to find a source online. Are you going to battle the Internet now? It's pointless and a waste.
People are upset, and rightfully so, over the changes made to leadership. It should have never been a profession to begin with. People had a source of AD so they could stay on a competitive level (against players who pay an arm and a leg to take shortcuts and avoid putting in time to aquire items/gear mostly speaking in regards to pvp) and aquire the items they want and the developer took that away. Players are upset because they lost something valuable. If they never had it to begin with, not one word would be said. The same will be true anytime players lose a source to make AD. The problem is that any time an AD source is created it has the potential to become an AD source for vendors via bots as well.
We all want to be the best. The only way to become the best should be to invest time and effort. Players should not be given a source of anything valuable (leadership as an example) if their is even the slightest doubt that it could become compromised in the future and thus severely nerfed or removed entirely. Doing so creates unnecessary turmoil that could have easily been avoided had someone sat down for even a second and thought about it. Ambisinisterr made the most logical statement I have heard in regards to the game. Players were making more AD for not playing then they were for actually playing. Leadership was a terrible idea to begin with and should have never made it to the live version.
I look at it like a medical issue, the aim should be to cure the ailment not treat the symptoms. You should not look to fix exploits, you should look for ways to prevent them from even being possible. The fact that you cannot drop items on the ground in game was a very wise decision. Based on exploits seen in Borderlands 2 and Diablo 3, having the ability to drop items on the ground is a terrible idea and I applaud PW and Cryptic for not allowing it.
Botting on console is a very real thing. Anything that is automated is considered a "bot". Putting rubber bands on your controller to prevent going afk is technically a bot. Instead of combating vendors and bots I wish they would just entirely remove any and all potential for botting to be a lucrative option on any level or scale.
Bots are not the problem, vendors are not the problem, players buying AD is not the problem. The problem is AD.
there are a lot of assumptions here but as far as what they are aiming for and manipulating the market to be at... we really don't know. But if they wanted the price of zen to be at 240 because it would be more profitable for them, or if they wanted it at 500 they could manipulate it to be that. AD is just as illusory as Zen. they can print as much of it as they want. it doesn't mean real money for them the way it does to someone buying zen.
If they truly want to battle vendors and bots I think the easiest way would be to simply undercut them. People use vendors because they get more AD per dollar spent.
I assume that if they lowered their price of their illusionary currency to be more competitive with the vendors than not only would they capture the customers using third party but I think they would also bring in new customers as well.
Even if zen was slightly more expensive than a vendor I think people would buy zen for the piece of mind and not worry about being banned.
Knowing you can buy from a vendor and get so much more than what you could spending the same amount on zen seems like it would be an easy choice especially considering they are only issuing 3 day bans.
So typically changes on PC we get within a week after if its a easy fix like the patch PC got last Thursday. Other fixes like the Leadership changes and GMOP and SMOP changes typically take a month, just to see how it takes on PC. So this is something you will see on Xbox in possibly a month. Everyone needs to realize that because of Microsofts policies that things will always be tested on PC first before released on Xbox because of processes. And you all know of course they will do this after a double RP weekend. LOL. Sorry that was a low blow.
LGPG Alliance
Reagents of Death - Leader
CW - Phoenix lvl 70 4034 (Main)
GF - Spectre lvl 70 4012 (Main)
GWF - Ice lvl 70 4010 (Main)
SW - Zor lvl 70 3230 (Main)
OP - Box lvl 70 3002 (Retired)
PS4
Look Good Play Good
GWF - Ice lvl 70 3875 (Main)
GF - Spectre lvl 70 2669 (Alt)
Bots are slave labor. Sweat shops. Whatever. 500 AD per 1 Zen is already a pittance so dropping the rate to be competitive with them would drop it even further.
How long does it take to earn 500 AD on overage? Let's say you make 24K AD per character every 4 hours (likely way higher than you make for a reason) That would be 12 Zen made per hour or the equivilent of 12 cents per hour...
And that's over double the rate of pay bots accept.
Not reasonable. Buy the AD with Zen...or face the consequences.
What the players should want is for the AD value to go UP (not down) and for players willing to buy their way to the top to use the legitimate method to purchase AD instead of selling their souls for a few cents.
Like I said the biggest mistake was making leadership grant AD...
The second biggest mistake was waiting so long to change it.
Again, the PC side envies that you have a much more balanced economy than we ever had because leadership inflated the market. Again we had been sitting on the 500:1 AD per Zen minimum wage for nearly two years. Its not rainbows and butterflies over there. Never has been. It's been nonstop complaints about more than gold spammers being annoying...
However the solution to the problem is to make it so people don't earn hundreds of thousands of AD every day just from leadership....which is no exaggeration. I myself had a personal friend who made 300K AD a day just on his one account only from his leadership farm. It doesn't take much of an imagination to consider how much AD was being generated by bots who just farmed leadership 24/7 and didn't play after they finished their half hour farm run.
Also, on a side note:
Gold sellers exist in every MMO. I know MMO's are new to Xbox but as a long time PC gamer I promise I have played dozens of MMO's and every MMO in history has the exact same problem with bots....and the communities always seem to believe that their current MMO is the only one with the problem...and seem to forget when they move on to their next MMO that their previous one had bots due to nostalgia or...IDK...the complaints are always the same in every MMO Forum and the communities always seem to think that their previous MMO was better, their current MMO is the worst ever and the next MMO will kill their current MMO. Different people. Same complaints. And same explanation that the entire MMO industry spends millions of dollars combatting bots every year so if there was an easy solution it would have been fixed.
As I sent in a PM yesterday, Movie and Entertainment companies fight tooth and nail to prevent their movies from being pirated and yet we all know pirate sites still exist and they are around for years or even decades. Bots in MMO's are no different. So seriously I feel like I lose a bit of my sanity every time people say something akin to "well if Cryptic didn't want this to happen they would just stop them." It is not that simple. Period.