I for one was hoping that the Astral Diamond limit would help, but I have noticed that all it has done is hinder most people. The current 100k per acct for refining has not lowered the cost of anything. The developers and programmer's have not even lowered the in game cost for many items like, re-roll, campaign signets etc. etc.
Most of all ( I know almost all of you have noticed) the dramatic Rise in the auction house. With the limit that was imposed makes it very hard to "play catch up" for new players or our own new characters. For instance I recently noticed Legendary mounts in a week span some went from 5.5 million to now 11 million..... that is over a 100% increase , that is not what part of the Idea of the 100k limit was for.
Yes we understand most of this Idea was to stop people from grinding, stop the AD Farmers, outside Paypal market scams and to most of all have people play more content. Its not working do to the lack of content no one now has the drive to do anything else and it has affected this game dramatically. I am sure many of the guilds have felt the drop in attendance and player participation.
Maybe this is the what our developers wanted. I hope not.
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I sell all sort of low end stuff daily and I noticed the price of my items were dropped. I am not saying what I noticed has any relationship with rAD refinement cap. However, the price of legendary mount is even less related to the AD supplies.
I am also watching the price of various middle tier stuff. That also had slightly drop.
Again, what I noticed probably had no relationship with rAD refinement cap effect. Probably, just a simple supply and demand effect.
By the way, rAD refinement cap does not decrease rAD supply. It increases rAD supply from those who plays less than 3 characters. i.e. those who had 72000 or less cap before. That may be a bigger population than those who has more than 2 characters.
Right now you wait about 3 weeks for your Zen to get exchanged, which is just crazy.
And I think in general it would barely hurt to allow people to exchange a bit more and faster.
Sure, a few of the things the people could make money from but many would use the items themselves. THAT would help, if you could actually still earn an VIP from ingame witholut having to wait for ages to get it through. xD
another approach is to sell profestion items that are bound that cant be resold on ah this would set a presidence for amount of ad and stop back log of items trying to be sold at higher prices than they should thus getting the flow of items going on ah .
I also am one of those ppl that are (were) willing to spend a good amount of money each year. Not anymore. I will never spend another penny to play this game. I have several million rAD sitting between my toons that I am unable to use. That means lost ability to buy GMOP's and SMOP's during the sale to help upgrade my toons. Lost ability to buy pres wards during sales for the same purpose.
I get trying to limit AD armies and bots but when you are hurting actual regular players that contribute to this game the changes are nothing short of a failure.
It increases their potential.
If they were serious about helping those players earn more the cap would not have come hand in hand with an account wide restriction of one full reward per Random Queue.
How easy it it for one of those players (2 toons only...) to reach even the 72k they could previously?
That additional 28k may be worth the additional effort for some, but I think the devs knew that for most just the notion that they are getting a bump at the expense of "whales" then they wouldn't mind the reality that to earn that extra would mean a lot of extra effort.
If they really wanted to help those players they would have set the RQ earning limit at higher than 1 per account.
2. The problems with ZAX won't be fixed by the cap, only slowed. The true problem is the items bought with Zen that should have a 'in game' method of acquiring. This will leave the zen market with only the top items and a good size chunk of AD on the zax will be pulled to buy the items taken from zen to the 'bazaar' or something.
3. An alternate ZAX that does AD sink would benifit most of the 'rich' players and in my opinion would be beneficial. by this i mean, put up a 1 zen : 1000 AD exchange that doesn't pull from zen buyers. Keep the 1;500 as it is for those who can wait. But then again moving the items players most want to use zen on that doesn't need to be in Zen market to the bazaar or something would alleviate this need. (i.e. completion tokens, all of the mounts and pets, items like the SKT shovel, etc.)
In the high level, I guess they want to slow down rAD production produced by players who run many toon to overcome the character base refinement limit.
Personally, I don't really care because as always, I just do stuff my way to deal with their changes.
The higher rate alt ZAX is an interesting idea though. I hope I'm wrong about their concerns and priorities.
While I do think it has addressed a few things to certain degrees, others have not been touched as of yet. This was meant to be the first step in addressing some of those issues with other future "fixes" in mind and inc. As much as I or you may dislike what has happened it is best judged after they implement said features ect imo.
I do think it was approached very heavy handily and could of started with some decent AD sinks but w/e. Time will tell.
Why? I love running dungeons. I'm doing daily the random queues and some more dungeons I like to run. It didn't take a week that I was holding more then half a million rADs - meanwhile it's several millions. Since then, most things I did or were keen on before, like the weekly quests, seals, purple gear and so on, became worthless for me. I'm seeing me asking myself if it's still worth to buy vip, cause the keys have no more value and because I'm playing meanwhile only with one toon (before the cap I played and evolved all my 8 toons), I have hundreds of keys, hundreds of scrolls.
My main char is now on 16k iLvl. Whatever I like to enhance costs at least half a million. With 100k per day, that's about one item upgraded per week and it feels like I make no progress anymore.
Playing my other toons, doesn't help in any way to progress, cause there is almost nothing that would be worth to do, which I can't do better with my main.
One solution for that problem could be, if the weekly quests in the campaings not give rAD, but real AD, or something useful. But as I'm restricted to 100k now, and I can't expand it anymore with evolving toons, I don't want to put any more effort on these.
In my eyes this limiting factor for one toon is the main failure of this new system and I hope they find a solution for that soon.
After the rAD change on console, most of the people I play with have to the quick realization that there's no reason to farm salvage anymore. They have enough rough that it would take them months to burn through if they never played again. Now most of our guild logs in for an hour or two and moves on to play Madden, Forza, CoD, NBA19, etc.
NW went from a game we all spent hours upon hours enjoying together to a coffee house we stop at for an hour to catch up before moving along down the street.
I've never seen a game punish players for wanting to play more than the casual player would.
What has it done for the game? I have no idea what the macro impact is. I await a credible report of findings.
My current rAD surplus is around 3 million. I know people with over 10 million. It grows every day. MOD 14 hunt mechanism made access to salvage far easier than ever before. I used to struggle to get enough rAD for my characters to refine before Barovia. Now it flows like water except Cryptic has clogged the plumbing.
Taken as a whole I see this as a left hand / right hand thing. Different factions within Cryptic put forth contravening mechanics. Makes me wonder if there is a comprehensive product vision and if there is anyone in charge.
Log in, cycle through a handfull of invokes, run the levelling and intermediate randoms, and then I spend an hour or so farming the remainder of my 100k RaD in Barovia on 5/6 hp bar trash mobs.
Aside from that theres not much else for me to do since they ninja nerfed Superior Enchanting Stones in the Nightmare Tradebar/100k allowance patch.
They are making it painfully clear that they want you to farm extra AD with your Visa or Mastercard.
if they want an AD sink, put some more items people could use in the bazaar.
reduce the cost of basic game functions please.