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steamroler12
Member Posts: 0 Arc User
What is going on with the zen exchange?
There is absolutely no zen on the market whatsoever.
there is 400,000 Zen + worth of Offering's for 500 AD rate.........
There is absolutely no zen on the market whatsoever.
there is 400,000 Zen + worth of Offering's for 500 AD rate.........
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Basic supply and demand. There are more people willing to buy Zen at the moment then there are people willing to sell it. Part of it has to do with the new module. Other aspects have to do with some of the recent sales I am sure.
(A company would have to be staffed by wooden dummies not to pump up sales at a time when the only available currency is cold hard cash.)
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The CoalWard issue is related but possibly separate. It is very well possible that the change to the CoalWards is an attempt to drive down the demand of zen on the exchange due to AD farmers buying up keys and getting CoalWards and other high priced items. I have no idea one way or another if this is actually the case, it is simply speculation at a reason for the change. Though it does fit into the forever 1k zen cost in the store that CWards have always been priced at. Maybe someone saw this as their opportunity to create parity for that cost and bring in more money because of it. I certainly hope this wasn't the decision because if it was it was an extremely foolish one. CWards in the store should have historically been 500 zen for how cheap they used to be and even now should be reduced to 750 to combat the new high prices. I doubt that will happen, though one can hope. Maybe they are feeling enough backlash about it. I know I'm not buying anything else in the game or posting any more zen to the exchange for at least the time being because of the bad taste it's left in my mouth.
This is the 3rd Mod that has been released, Ive been playing Since beta realease, heavily.
Ive seen it all, ANd after 2 mods being released with same introductions such as mounts/keys/fashion/ sales/ etc....
It has been at 500 during mod 2. But never like this......
There is 400-500k ZEN being offered to buy at 500 a pop.....thats inpossible...
Solution would be to remove the 500 cap completely.
The cap is the immediate cause (but not the root) of the problem. When you artificially impose a cap like that, demand will far exceed supply, and drain all of the resource. In real life, this leads to long queues at the market for the item, like in Cold War Communist countries with strict price controls, or, more close to home, rent-control ordinances in big cities leading to very few apartments being available. In other words, when you cap the price for zen that is lower than its current true market value, there are too many buyers and not enough willing sellers.
If this scarcity of zen continues, you'll start to see black markets forming. Not only the AD spammers, but also alternate forms of currency exchange. In other words, why would I sell my 1000 zen for 500 AD each, when I can buy a Zen-store item and sell it at auction at a price far higher than 500:1. People keep saying coalescent wards will reach price cap at 500k. If the true value of zen exceeds the exchange cap for too long, it'll eventually go above 500k and then some.
If the cap is raise it would merely cause AD to be worth even less.
All this says is Zen is in high demand. AD is not.
And look at my join date. Yes this is more distinguished than in the past but the same principle applies. It's a very simple economic law and it comes down to there are a lot more people wanting to sell AD than buy it.
EDIT - And if you can sell Zen items for more in the AH than they cost at the exchange rate then go for it. That's not black market. Cryptic simply will not allow unlimited extortion of the free player base by the paying player base.
This will probably get me flamed, but I'd like to see more items available for purchase with other currencies: trade bars, gold, etc. (and those blasted Vanguard Scrips that I can't discard!!!!)
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Had you continued the thought a little differently you would have come right to it.
Why are more people willing to sell AD than to buy it?
Because more useful/worthwhile purchases come from Zen than AD.
The only thing players tend to purchase en mass with AD is items from the AH which is actually giving it to another player minus 10%. This is what happens in most games with gold which is why companies will put in Gold Sinks literally to flush currency out of the system to limit inflation.
I feel pretty confident in my belief that most AD that enters the game actually ends up following a path to the Zen Exchange at some point in it's lifetime.
Now there are AD sinks...
But what does every player seem to agree on? The AD sinks are way overpriced.
We said companion upgrades cost too much before companion prices were basically halved. We said mount upgrades cost too much when the prices were 10-15 dollars more on average. Every single AD sink in the game we constantly say is too much money.
So what happens? We, the players, do not take part in any AD sinks.
And the end result is that the amount of AD in the system increases to a point that the amount of people who want to sell their AD greatly exceeds those who wish to buy it. Module 3, a few good sales and a decent influx of players has temporarily tipped the scales...
It's nothing shady. It's supply and demand as usual.
The best we can hope for is for Cryptic to realize they need to address the lack of AD sinks being used by players to avoid having these situations persist for as long in the future.
Either drop the price for Zen, or drop the prices of zen market items.
For example...
If I could, I would have multiple characters, and since I can only play 1 character at a time what does the company lose if they were to charge a decent rate for the items in game?
People would be less likely to get sick of this game if they had a little more variety and face it, keeping up with more than 1 character with the current prices is just way more money than I would like to spend on game that I probably won't be playing next year, or the year after, or for however long I play. But you can be sure that I would play alot longer if I had the choice of multiple characters I could play.
I'm not saying they should make everything dirt cheap, but currently the prices for everything on the zen market is just crazy to me, or am I alone? $10 for a bag of holding? seriously? $16 for an asset pack that you are more than likely going to get 1 or 2 assets from, which will most likely be green quality. And lets face it, you "need" 4 purple quality assets to have a "chance" to make a tier 3 item? So lets see... You will need 64 green's to make 1 purple quality asset.
So after $500 or so you might get 1 or 2 purple quality assets IF you are lucky...
Does that seem a bit much or am I crazy?
When was the last time they released a dungeon with a meaningful and profitable drop to stimulate the value of diamonds?
Totally This a million times over.
However, The way I see things progressing, PW seems determined to only add new features that we MUST pay cash monies to access or nerf current utility of non-zen currencies.
No good will come of it, I garuntee it. This is only the start.
That's basic economics, really. As I said earlier any sales on the AH, minus the 10% cut, go to another player. What do they do with it?
Well besides some odds and ends like marks the vast majority of AD which is generated by players ends up on the AD exchange.
The only problem anybody can really say is occuring is that not enough AD sinks are being used causing AD value to deflate over time. Other than that I am sorry but simple supply and demand is the cause. If you fewel ripped off it's not Cryptic/PWE setting the price. That's your fellow players.
Zen is added to the game by players. Cryptic does not tell them what they can sell it for. They only have some guidelines on what they can not sell it for in the terms of caps which are there to prevent the price from going completely one sided. If you think the price is bad now please start informing your fellow players who keep asking for cap increases so they can spend even more AD per Zen.
This should be the first post in the thread and everyone who does not understand this should not post in this, or any threads that have anything to do with economics in any system ever.
A problem is that there are too many pressures to buy Zen (with AD) at the moment. The current bonus for Profession Packs is a chance to get the (literally insane) Forgehammer of Gond artifact, which definitely has me putting every single AD on all my characters into trying to get. Devs just recently announced the Black Ice corruption things, all of which increases demand for Zen.
More needs to be done to reward people who buy Zen for $$$$. The First Time Buyers pack was great, and something else needs to be added. Failing that, raise the cap from 500 so we can bid a bit more for the Zen.
The Cost of Zen is set by the company. $10 for 1000 Zen aprox.
So the cost of 1 coalesent ward is $10. and how many wards does 1 character need to max?
a possible price of coal wards is 10$. You can also get them from trade bars, and there's a small chance you get them from 7/7 reward. I would go as far as to say that if you are paying 10$ for zen and you spend that 10$ directly on buying a coal ward, you are literally burning money.
This is a very classic argument for price controls. You'll often hear proponents for, say, price controls on consumer goods argue the same thing. It's to "protect" whoever the consumer side of the market from exploitative (or, in your words "extortion") prices. The problem is that a free market does not care for normative arguments. If you force your official market to price a good below what it's actually worth, you will always create scarcity -- that is, the consumer will eventually find that good is no longer available to buy. For example, in rental control cities, apartments are often hard to find. Here, zen is often no longer available to buy. Often sellers will take their goods to "alternative", the so-called "grey" or "black" markets instead. We haven't seen this yet, but there is still time if things don't change
Note that I didn't call for cap removal myself, but it is the quickest (albeit not the best) solution. Yes, this means a lot of people will not be able to buy what they want; that is the point of balancing supply and demand, as you say. How do you think markets balance supply/demand curves for goods in the first place? Again, just read your intro to econ textbook -- they do it by pricing certain things out of range. You can throw emotionally charged words like "extortion" around all you want; at the end of the day, all matters is do you have a healthy market with goods available to buy, or not.
Fixing the real underlying problem, though, requires that you lower the market value of whatever it is you're trying to keep available, and increasing the value of whatever you're using to make the exchange. You can discount zen, or make AD more desirable on its own. I can say what doesn't help: making zen the main tradeable source of coalescent wards, for one thing
Ahh i understand now...not too good at the whole market thing i just kill stuff
Sorry, this first sentence makes no sense. If someone wants to sell zen, and 500 is the absolute best price they can get for it, WHY would they not be interested in selling it? It's not like they can get a better price for it if they wait. No, what's more likely is that the (finite) supply has RUN OUT due to greater demand.
And a thought on sentence two: it wouldn't be the supply overcoming demand, it would be the price of the supply overcoming the demand. If the price skyrocketed, more people would decide that that price is "too much" and not buy. The supply (and demand) would still exist, things would just cease trading hands because buyers and sellers would not agree on the price.
Although your math was off, you're not alone in your thinking. I've bought a few things from the zen store but feel completely unrewarded for it. Using AD to buy stuff felt a little better as it felt closer to value it should be when zen was 300-400. Going the other way makes it feel like a rip off.
Just to add to this, what will eventually happen is that you will start to see Zen shop items go for sale for AD at higher and higher ratios above 500:1. Essentially since you can't sell Zen at it's current true value, people will instead buy items with Zen and sell them at higher and higher prices.
I really don't think this situation is good for anyone. It's certainly not good for the game long term. But if their goal is to cause more and more people to quit the game, then they are on the right track.
You may also have a point about the supply of Zen BTW. There are often multiple contributors to a situation like this.
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Good point, sir. I have not fully investigated what might be re-sellable from the ZM at a higher rate. It's definitely not c-wards (at the moment) though. Looks like it might be p-wards (over 6000/each (or 600:1 ad:zen) right now)
Your English is fine
I disagree with your premise though. I do not think that companion and mount upgrades are "basic" sinks; I think those are "luxury" sinks (I have never upgraded a single companion or mount). What I consider "basic" is stuff like Marks of Potency and wards.
But specific examples is distracting from the main point: people with zen feel it is worth more than 500:1 (because demand is crazy high) and are either looking for a way to get that higher value from it OR have already sold all their zen. Thus it is unavailable to be bought by AD for a couple of weeks now. Seems like what is needed is a drop in demand and/or an increase in supply (perhaps a zen sale).
Math:
1125 Zen =10 keys
1 key=67,000 AD (current AH price)
1125 Zen= 670,000 AD
1 Zen= 670,000/1125
1 Zen= 595.55
PS. I love neverwinter teaches me real economics
seriously fix this pls. or let me respecc some other way