Looking at ZAX the game is in need of some new AD sinks.
The AD sink should not hit new players.
So for example the keys for next end game dungeon.
You can buy 1 key per week for whatever currency.
If you want to buy more than one you have to pay that currency + HAMSTER amount of AD.
Remove that AD costs once the next end game dungeon gets released.
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In the end of the day, Zax will not be lower because of that. Not even a dent.
If the reward is worth even a bit more than the cost of the key it's not a sink, it's just a marginally slower way of gaining AD... a way that would be generally ignored by most people who would rather use more convenient methods of gaining AD.
Potential sinks could be a bank vault for shared Professions, or something similar to the charts available from R5 Guild Marketplace, and... of course... the elusive "Player Housing" notion that has been occasionally hinted at by players since... oh... pretty much day 1.
In other words, when the Devs or the Management make bad decissions, players stop spending money.
And as mentioned before in all those other AD sink threads, they should simply improve the Wondrous Bazaar and give us something worth spending AD on.
Btw. why would the Devs even want a faster working ZAX, when it's driving at least some players to buy ZEN with real money at some point?
count or Char bound u do. And 100 K AD is nothing for end game players.
Even if there are people do that, that won't be many especially there is a free key every week. That won't make a dent.
I was thinking of something else that might or might not be a good sink.
What about some kind of lottery or raffle? 1,000 AD to enter - buy up to ten or something. At the end of the week, someone wins the pool. Neverember skims 35%, and the winner gets the rest.
They don't affect game balance, fulfills a very requested need, and are consumed upon use as a transmute (forcing players to drop, aka, removing more AD from the economy).
There was a good start with the unique hairstyles, but I think placing them in the Zen market was not very bright move. Will it drive some players to drop some cash and make some revenue to keep the lights on? Sure.
But keep in mind that there is also the f2p populace that would want these Zen exclusive hairstyles ... which means there's more demand for Zen on the Zen AD exchange. Then you consider the fact that the people that got Zen already bought the item directly and have no need to use the exchange...
I would hope future unique transmutes/hairstyle options will be placed in the Wonderous Bazaar or a similar AD only vendors as a way to help combat inflation and expand our options of playing dress up.
Personally, I still do not consider the current stage of Zax is an issue at all. Sure, you need to wait but you will get the Zen you want. It is only one month wait at the moment. I used to wait for 3 months to half a year.
But before that, it seems it was growing at a rate of just over 1,300,000 every month (I believe November 2017 saw a backlog of 12 million. May 2018 saw 20 million).
So at least last year's changes have slowed its growth somewhat. That's 150 million less AD getting dumped into the exchange every month.
Waiting a month to convert, though... geez...
By contrast, the PS4 exchange has less than 1 million zen available atm, and trading's currently in the mid 490s.
Also, if the coffer is pretty empty, dumping gems to it is easy. Gem is cheap.
It is about if it worthwhile to run the map.
I have tons of map because of Guild Mark overflow before mod 15. i.e I have stockpile of maps.
I just never bother to run them before the new profession.
Now, I personally run just enough to get stuff to level up MW instead of selling. Others may sell.
For 1000 Guild mark, it will cost 150K AD (if you buy gold bar from AH and dump to coffer).
It is hardly cheap to get 1000 Guild mark for me.
Most MW resources are used mainly for the BiS MW items or good alternatives, compared to other sources. So after the MW IL changes, we saw a surge in demand, since the new IL meant MW5 stuff was now BiS and MW3 at IL540/550 was still better than most other endgame stuff (CR, marks, events). This also meant that MW resources spiked.
Now after several months the market is saturated with MW items and everyone that could afford such items have bought them. At this point only new, uninformed, impatient or rich players buy MW items, everyone else waits for mod16. Its not clear if mod16 adds new MW stuff or just level 80 blue items. We also don't know how many and which of the old MW resources might be used and in demand. So the MW prices will crush even more, since its just too risky to sit on them atm.
The only old MW resources that might be more stable are resources used in MW potions and MW unlock related stuff.
PS: You can also speculate and assume new BiS MW items will be added or +2/3 variants, so we will see a huge demand again in mod16. At this point its everyone's guess.
The price of those over the last months followed a normal supply/demand curve, they spiked at 35-44k ad after MW patch, than there was the GM event and prices dropped to 12-16. Than they recovered to 22-25 and now at the end of this mod they are around 16-20.
The only "whale" i noticed was around the GM event by "Apollo", he/she is a big resource player and from time to time seem to drop mats worth millions AD, but does it in big piles. I have not seen any MW material dumping so far outside of events, the mats follow my tracked demand curve.
PS: So those "abusers" must be a very disciplined cabal of business players, if they managed to drop millions GM worth of MW mats, without actually crashing the market.