See, here is the misconception that most people make when it comes to the ZAX.
Cryptic does not give 2 cents what you do with your zen once you've paid for it. If you buy zen and spend it only in the zen store...fine, if you buy zen and sell it on the exchange....fine. Why? because either way they already have your money. You have already bought and paid for that zen so if you want to be nice and offer it freebies who buy zen for ADs, why should they care?
If the ZAX didn't exist it would actually hurt them more. Let me explain,
With the ZAX, players can buy more zen then they actually need and sell the extra zen for AD which in turn they can use towards things like upgrading mounts and such. The free players that buy said zen with AD are only using the zen that you already paid for to buy zen store items, there is no money loss here for cryptic.
But without the ZAX, you would only buy enough zen to get the items you need since you'd have no use for a back log of zen. So in reality players would end up buying less zen over all without the zax.
Now you might think, what If I buy zen store items and sell them in the AH? Well we'd be pretty much where we are now since every other zen buyers would be doing the same thing and since theres only so many zen store items players really want and can be sold....the AD prices for those items would be super low thus giving you less incentive to bother doing that which brings us right back to you not buying more zen then you need.
So if you only buy 2500 zen for an epic mount and I only buy 2500 zen for and epic that's 5000 zen bought and paid for.
If you buy 5000 zen spend 2500 for an epic mount and sell the other 2500 on the ZAX and I buy that 2500 zen with ADs to get my epic mount....that's still 5000 zen bought and paid for.
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lantern22Member, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 1,111Arc User
OK you just hurt my brain, badly. Is that against the rules???
Why should Cryptic have to do anything about it? If players are holding onto their Zen for the supposed sale (and I am one of those), creating a shortage and if people want Zen so badly you can't wait for it, pay for it.
Its not unfair for Cryptic to expect people to spend some money on Zen
Zen sellers tend to purchase far more Zen than they can use. Why would they sit on it when the exchange rate is maxed? I'm guessing you're thinking they're going to cash in on tradable zen purchases and then slowly sell those off at greater profits. That would be plausible.
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klangeddinMember, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 882Arc User
edited June 2016
ZAX is affected by several factors, but if there's one objective factor that can be extrapolated by "hard data", it's the amount of refined rough AD pumped into the game. If we take a look at the past and see how they fixed the old ZAX 500++ with backlogs in the millions (they did it with leadership nerf) it's pretty clear what else they have to do to fix the problem again:
1) Remove AD from invocation 2) Set the AD refine limit to be account-wide rather than character wide. While it has to be higher than 36000 of course, it also has to be much lower than the actual 1,8 millions (or perhaps more? Can someone have more than 50 characters?). I'd put it around 72000 AD daily or 500k weekly.
Or you could just remove the ZAX cap and let the price fluctuate above 500. Considering the actual backlog it would probably stabilize around 550-580.
ZAX is affected by several factors, but if there's one objective factor that can be extrapolated by "hard data", it's the amount of refined rough AD pumped into the game. If we take a look at the past and see how they fixed the old ZAX 500++ with backlogs in the millions (they did it with leadership nerf) it's pretty clear what else they have to do to fix the problem again:
1) Remove AD from invocation 2) Set the AD refine limit to be account-wide rather than character wide. While it has to be higher than 36000 of course, it also has to be much lower than the actual 1,8 millions (or perhaps more? Can someone have more than 50 characters?). I'd put it around 72000 AD daily or 500k weekly.
Or you could just remove the ZAX cap and let the price fluctuate above 500. Considering the actual backlog it would probably stabilize around 550-580.
You can get up to 53 character slots I think, as a few packs give extra slots. And it's not really plausible to actually max out that many characters in a day. It takes too much time to run even quick dungeons and demonic HE's (for salvage). You can maybe max out 15-20 characters a day if you play/bot all day long. If you want to max out more you're actually buying +1 and +2 underdark rings on the AH for minor profits (they sell for nearly 3k most of the time), so net you're maxing out a few extra characters.
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klangeddinMember, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 882Arc User
edited June 2016
Never underestimate bots and their shaeningans. Especially if they somehow set this up with multiple accounts on different machines. And even if you could max out only 20 characters, that would still be 720k AD per account pumped every day into the game's economy. It may not seem much on its own, but if this is gets abused by a consistent number of "players" it becomes noticeable, really noticeable, and it gets worse with the passing of time if the amount of AD pumped in by rough refinement is higher than than amount taken out with sinks such as fixed AD bazaar prices, boons, AH cuts or other. But you could even not bother with maximizing all of them and instead go for the best TIME/AD activities like 2 levelling dungeons and 2 runs of Kessel of Retreat on top of invoking. All those activities are easily bottable too.
Never underestimate bots and their shaeningans. Especially if they somehow set this up with multiple accounts on different machines. And even if you could max out only 20 characters, that would still be 720k AD per account pumped every day into the game's economy. It may not seem much on its own, but if this is gets abused by a consistent number of "players" it becomes noticeable, really noticeable, and it gets worse with the passing of time if the amount of AD pumped in by rough refinement is higher than than amount taken out with sinks such as fixed AD bazaar prices, boons, AH cuts or other. But you could even not bother with maximizing all of them and instead go for the best TIME/AD activities like 2 levelling dungeons and 2 runs of Kessel of Retreat on top of invoking. All those activities are easily bottable too.
KR requires you to get to 70. And the more work they've done to amass multiple accounts with potentially multiple level 70 characters and 50+ character slots and geared them up enough that they can quickly and easily bot through endgame instances and get all of that organized and have enough computers and internet connection speed and reliability and....well, at some point I feel they've earned it.
For the record, I put up AD for ~1200 zen when the backlog was over 600k at the time, and I've since had that entire order filled. Current backlog is over a million. So, yes, lots of Zen is still being exchanged, it's just backing up faster than it's clearing.
This Always happens right before a new Mod comes out. And I think we have a small one for the Strong Holds coming up on the 7th.
That Zen prices spike? Yes, definitely. That Zen prices hit the cap? No.
There's a big difference between "I'm paying (a lot) more" and "I'm paying the maximum possible", because the latter has substantial economic consequences as one of the fundamental currencies loses fluidity.
I don't recall the ZAX maxing out during the Black Friday and Christmas 50% off sales. Or when we got stables and everyone was buying tons of zen mounts with 50% off coupons.
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beckylunaticMember, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 14,231Arc User
I don't recall the ZAX maxing out during the Black Friday and Christmas 50% off sales. Or when we got stables and everyone was buying tons of zen mounts with 50% off coupons.
Not sure about the prior sales. People weren't in a tizzy about coal wards in November though.
The mount coupons were known to be available for an entire month, so I don't think anyone panicked about having enough Zen to BUY ALL THE THINGS on a single day.
Comments
Cryptic does not give 2 cents what you do with your zen once you've paid for it. If you buy zen and spend it only in the zen store...fine, if you buy zen and sell it on the exchange....fine. Why? because either way they already have your money. You have already bought and paid for that zen so if you want to be nice and offer it freebies who buy zen for ADs, why should they care?
If the ZAX didn't exist it would actually hurt them more. Let me explain,
With the ZAX, players can buy more zen then they actually need and sell the extra zen for AD which in turn they can use towards things like upgrading mounts and such. The free players that buy said zen with AD are only using the zen that you already paid for to buy zen store items, there is no money loss here for cryptic.
But without the ZAX, you would only buy enough zen to get the items you need since you'd have no use for a back log of zen. So in reality players would end up buying less zen over all without the zax.
Now you might think, what If I buy zen store items and sell them in the AH? Well we'd be pretty much where we are now since every other zen buyers would be doing the same thing and since theres only so many zen store items players really want and can be sold....the AD prices for those items would be super low thus giving you less incentive to bother doing that which brings us right back to you not buying more zen then you need.
So if you only buy 2500 zen for an epic mount and I only buy 2500 zen for and epic that's 5000 zen bought and paid for.
If you buy 5000 zen spend 2500 for an epic mount and sell the other 2500 on the ZAX and I buy that 2500 zen with ADs to get my epic mount....that's still 5000 zen bought and paid for.
1) Remove AD from invocation
2) Set the AD refine limit to be account-wide rather than character wide. While it has to be higher than 36000 of course, it also has to be much lower than the actual 1,8 millions (or perhaps more? Can someone have more than 50 characters?). I'd put it around 72000 AD daily or 500k weekly.
Or you could just remove the ZAX cap and let the price fluctuate above 500. Considering the actual backlog it would probably stabilize around 550-580.
And even if you could max out only 20 characters, that would still be 720k AD per account pumped every day into the game's economy. It may not seem much on its own, but if this is gets abused by a consistent number of "players" it becomes noticeable, really noticeable, and it gets worse with the passing of time if the amount of AD pumped in by rough refinement is higher than than amount taken out with sinks such as fixed AD bazaar prices, boons, AH cuts or other.
But you could even not bother with maximizing all of them and instead go for the best TIME/AD activities like 2 levelling dungeons and 2 runs of Kessel of Retreat on top of invoking. All those activities are easily bottable too.
That Zen prices hit the cap? No.
There's a big difference between "I'm paying (a lot) more" and "I'm paying the maximum possible", because the latter has substantial economic consequences as one of the fundamental currencies loses fluidity.
I don't recall the ZAX maxing out during the Black Friday and Christmas 50% off sales. Or when we got stables and everyone was buying tons of zen mounts with 50% off coupons.
The mount coupons were known to be available for an entire month, so I don't think anyone panicked about having enough Zen to BUY ALL THE THINGS on a single day.
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