Zeb, take your time and go to Rothe valley and stand at the campfire for a few minutes (the same goes for Mount Hotenow). You will shortly come to the conclusion, that the majority of "characters" are bots. They all follow the same movement pattern (too hard for them, to script a new path it seems.).
---
They are the very people, who farm items on 20+ accounts 24/7, in order to sell them and effectively ruin what's left of the economy, even further.
---
Go see for yourself.
I've always had this unanswered question: How does one, exactly, create a stack of 99 Rank 5's; all with no refining points in them?
Surely they can track the objects that got stolen and the accounts they got transferred to?I was under the impression every object in MMO's has a unique id code associated to it , if not then color me surprised and slightly bewildered lol
I highly doubt that they invest that much time into it they just Roll back the char and that's probably it, i don't think they care enough about say a bag of holding to find and delete the specific item #.
I've always had this unanswered question: How does one, exactly, create a stack of 99 Rank 5's; all with no refining points in them?
There was a exploit that was being used until recently that allowed the old refinement table to be pulled up and used instead of the new RP based one, not saying every rank 5 with zero extra RP was due to this but I'd guess the majority were.
I highly doubt that they invest that much time into it they just Roll back the char and that's probably it, i don't think they care enough about say a bag of holding to find and delete the specific item #.
But what about something like:
4-5 Perfect weapon enchants
30 Bags of Holding
200 Adventurers
20 Heros
30 Rank 10 Enchantments
25 mil AD in cash
Not saying that's the inventory in question. Just on par in magnitude.
Which do you want? Do you want an example of rising costs or how an influx of a currency can devalue said currency and increase item costs? On the first I can give historical item cost rises in the AH. For the second real world examples. There is a reason why countries IRL tightly control the amount of currency they produce.
Besides, simple economics history shows that when a currency is removed or devalued, another will take its place and a rise in crime centered on the old and new currencies will happen.
Cryptic is unlikely to present any new currency to replace AD if that is what you are trying to say. Also, as a business major I would love to hear of one of these examples in history where one currency was replaced by another because the prior was devalued.
Cryptic is unlikely to present any new currency to replace AD if that is what you are trying to say. Also, as a business major I would love to hear of one of these examples in history where one currency was replaced by another because the prior was devalued.
5
Cryptic is unlikely to present any new currency to replace AD if that is what you are trying to say. Also, as a business major I would love to hear of one of these examples in history where one currency was replaced by another because the prior was devalued.
The Reichsbank Marks were replaced on November 16, 1923 by the Rentenmark because of the hyperinflation in the Weimar Republic after WWI.
Just wanted to toss out an easy answer to that history question.
We've had this "Nerf AD production in Leadership profession" discussion so many, many times.
For casual gamers, like myself, nerfing AD gained through the Leadership profession will seriously affect my AD earnings and also my interest in continuing playing the game. Other casual players feel the same way.
I think the whole "I need it now" mentality is affecting people the wrong way. If you need it now, spend the cash and buy Zen. If you still need it now but don't want to pay money for Zen (thereby supporting this "free" game), then you have to wait.
Things work in a very similar way in the real world, where you have to work to earn your keep . . .
2 months ago you could get more per AD in AH.
Now due to AH being flooded with AD you can't...real world inflation there.
Leadership is like having a money printer and then wondering why a loaf of bread costs 3 million dollars.
All it takes is one unscrupulous botter with a good system and a few hundred bot accts. to make endless AD.
I signed on to play D&D...not leadership.
If I can't be as competitive playing the game for a few hours as I can playing leadership for the same amount of time then the leadership profession is broken.
This is coming from a casual gamer...
...casual meaning I don't want to waste months grinding leadership on 20 characters to have enough AD to FINALLY compete in the game.
I'm sorry, but casual gamers usually just play the game, they don't do leadership scripts and have 20 toons just to grind resources.
The Euro was a currency to combine multiple economies in to one. In many countries, such as France and Germany, their current currency was perfectly fine for their economy.
The Reichsbank Marks were replaced on November 16, 1923 by the Rentenmark because of the hyperinflation in the Weimar Republic after WWI.
"The victor nations in World War I decided to assess Germany for their costs of conducting the war against Germany. With no means of paying in gold or currency backed by reserves, Germany ran the presses, causing the value of the Mark to collapse. Many Germans literally carted wheelbarrows of cash to pay for groceries."
2 months ago you could get more per AD in AH.
Now due to AH being flooded with AD you can't...real world inflation there.
Leadership is like having a money printer and then wondering why a loaf of bread costs 3 million dollars.
All it takes is one unscrupulous botter with a good system and a few hundred bot accts. to make endless AD.
I signed on to play D&D...not leadership.
If I can't be as competitive playing the game for a few hours as I can playing leadership for the same amount of time then the leadership profession is broken.
This is coming from a casual gamer...
...casual meaning I don't want to waste months grinding leadership on 20 characters to have enough AD to FINALLY compete in the game.
I'm sorry, but casual gamers usually just play the game, they don't do leadership scripts and have 20 toons just to grind resources.
+1 to that but good luck their have been may threads about it and either people love leadership or hate it
So if your account is rolled back you lose anything in the mailbox too?
Umm yes i didn't consider that and just left it there figuring that i shouldn't be moving stuff around but, if it ever happened again i would move everything in my mail to another char, because most were expired auction house items, lost close to a mill AD.
The Euro was a currency to combine multiple economies in to one. In many countries, such as France and Germany, their current currency was perfectly fine for their economy.
In fact to join the Euro the country must have a stable currency. The basic requirements are:
Price stability, to show inflation is controlled;
Soundness and sustainability of public finances, through limits on government borrowing and national debt to avoid excessive deficit;
Exchange-rate stability, through participation in the Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM II) for at least two years without strong deviations from the ERM II central rate;
Long-term interest rates, to assess the durability of the convergence achieved by fulfilling the other criteria.
The Euro was a currency to combine multiple economies in to one. In many countries, such as France and Germany, their current currency was perfectly fine for their economy.
But many other countries currency was in heavy devaluation, and that was a big reason why some of them converted.
Which is no excuse to remove a system from the game because it is abused. If that were the case, we might as well shut down this game and every game ever made.
This sounds like an argument I would use to show how bad the limit is on the Auction House cap...
"No excuse to put a limit on AH just because it is abused"...
You can bring AD into the system by praying, dailies, skirmishes, and leadership. Grinding gear from dungeons generates no AD of its own, but takes AD out of the market at the 10% rate the AH takes. Same with selling zen items only removes AD from the game as someone spends existing AD to buy.
The only two ways that should be are skirmishes and dailies as the other two are easily and widely abused by botters however many casual players use it correctly.
If you are going to limit what can be spent in AH to try to combat gold spam bots yet completely ignore the fact that the spam bots run leadership scripts and prayer bots all day long and cause a massive influx of AD into the market raising prcies, then you will never even begin to address the real problem.
Until you've seen a couple million AD worth of items disappear from AH one sec and reappear a few minutes later at a higher price you might not see the problem.
The same people with millions of AD but all the lowest priced items of one kind. Corner the market. Then mark up what they bought, causing artificial inflation in prices to turn a profit.
You can have a fun gambling type market OR you can have a market that functions to buy and sell items.
Without regulating the supply of capital, you will only get inflation.
Thats real world 100% proven over and over again.
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zebularMember, Neverwinter Moderator, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 15,270Community Moderator
edited July 2014
. . . For an MMO with destructible currency, all that is needed is more Sinks that players want and are priced in such a way to encourage every player to use them more frequently. Having high prices on all the AD sinks we have now is, in my opinion, the real issue here that has caused too much AD to remain in game. All the things we have (except the AH) that permanently removes AD from the game are priced so outrageously high that only the super rich can afford to use them as much as they should be used by all players.
. . . If these things were priced more reasonably, they would be used more often. So, the way it is now, the rich get richer while the poor struggle to afford basic items. Sound familiar? If only it was this easy in the Real World... I don't understand why this isn't being taken into consideration in game.
. . . Removing a system that adds AD into the game will not help matters any in the long run. Eventually we'll be right back where we are. What is flawed are the plethora of over-priced AD sinks in the game and the abuse by exploiters -- not the Leadership profession itself.
Which do you want? Do you want an example of rising costs or how an influx of a currency can devalue said currency and increase item costs? On the first I can give historical item cost rises in the AH. For the second real world examples. There is a reason why countries IRL tightly control the amount of currency they produce.
. . . That is all conjecture based upon observations of surroundings and real world history, none of which is actual proof that "Casual Players using Leadership is directly causing AD Inflation," (which was the argument, no? Don't change the terms of the argument to suit your opinion please) but is instead theory based upon past experience and/or personal opinion.
Cryptic is unlikely to present any new currency to replace AD if that is what you are trying to say. Also, as a business major I would love to hear of one of these examples in history where one currency was replaced by another because the prior was devalued.
. . . Uh... no. You're changing the subject again. I'm talking about players using another currency in place of AD, which we already see happening due to the AD Cap being hit.
For an MMO with destructable currency, all that is needed is more Sinks that players want and are prices in such a way to encourage every player to use them more frequently. Having high prices on all the AD sinks we have now is, in my opinion, the real issue here that has caused too much AD to remain in game. All the things we have (except the AH) that permanently removes AD from the game are priced so outrageously high that only the super rich can afford. If these things were prices more reasonably, they would be used more often. So, the way it is now, the rich get richer while the poor struggle to afford basic items. Sound familiar? If only it was this easy in the Real World... I don't understand why this isn't being taken into consideration in game.
I agree with the need for more AD sinks, which does counteract the whole inflation thing.
I would already have upgraded my companions/mount if the costs were half what they were (maybe 25% on mount upgrade).
It does seem like the AD sinks target the guys with millions of AD...who are then rewarded for hoarding by being given a chance at some wicked awesome thing like the Chicken.
I still think people would pay 250 k AD for the ability to switch and store a set of armor at a click.(Aimed at 60+ high gs with multi sets)
or 20k AD for temporary mount upgrade.
Make transmutes interchangeable and allow up to 3 per item. People would be more likely to pay 50k AD to transmute something if they could switch back and forth between different transmutes.
I won't get too far off topic with all my wonderful AD sink ideas ;P
But with the AD sinks available now, the influx of AD far outpaces the amount thats taken.
In the real world, there are many different economic theories, some of which contradict one another. I have seen countless battles about real world economic theory on political message boards. And they go on and on and on and on . . . Most of the time, the supporters of each opposing economic theory never give up or back down from their beliefs. And the threads accumulate a ridiculous number of pages of posts.
The same holds true in MMO economies - there are lots of theories about how to "improve" the gaming economy, but no one can predict with certainty whether their ideas for changes is going to really work in the long run. These are all "theories." There are too many variables to be able to predict a solid outcome - it is full of "best-guess" speculation and conjecture.
It is interesting to watch people be so certain that their ideas will change the game's economy.
It is even more interesting when well-exampled rebuttals are ignored completely in subsequent posts.
myles08807 said, "Back in my day, we didn't have any of this fancy Mulhorand gear while we were leveling . . . we walked uphill both ways while dying once every five seconds while leveling, and we liked it fine!" . . . Now, get off my lawn, you kids!" pointsman said, "I don't rue the game. In fact I don't feel any regret for the game at all." looomis said, "I don't like people changing to alts and then bragging about their mains like schizophrenic role players."
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isammaxMember, Neverwinter Beta Users, Neverwinter Knight of the Feywild UsersPosts: 121Bounty Hunter
2 months ago you could get more per AD in AH.
Now due to AH being flooded with AD you can't...real world inflation there.
Leadership is like having a money printer and then wondering why a loaf of bread costs 3 million dollars.
All it takes is one unscrupulous botter with a good system and a few hundred bot accts. to make endless AD.
I signed on to play D&D...not leadership.
If I can't be as competitive playing the game for a few hours as I can playing leadership for the same amount of time then the leadership profession is broken.
This is coming from a casual gamer...
...casual meaning I don't want to waste months grinding leadership on 20 characters to have enough AD to FINALLY compete in the game.
I'm sorry, but casual gamers usually just play the game, they don't do leadership scripts and have 20 toons just to grind resources.
jesus, would you stop already with this leadership? leadership is not the problem here. you think 2 months ago there were no bots and no people with many accounts? It all started with making coal wards from boxes BoA. This decision caused the chain of changes on the market and a massive inflation. Getting rid of leadership wont solve anything. The price of wards wont drop, the price of enchantments wont drop.
You want competitive gaming and still to be casual gamer? Not gonna happen. In every MMO you either work hard or you pay. That's it.
I'm sorry, but casual gamers usually just play the game, they don't do leadership scripts and have 20 toons just to grind resources.
I disagree. I am a casual gamer, and I work Leadership because I want to earn AD. Leadership does not take long to "work" once a day, even across 16 toons (a whopping 15 minutes a day maybe). The rest of the time I spend working quests/role playing.
myles08807 said, "Back in my day, we didn't have any of this fancy Mulhorand gear while we were leveling . . . we walked uphill both ways while dying once every five seconds while leveling, and we liked it fine!" . . . Now, get off my lawn, you kids!" pointsman said, "I don't rue the game. In fact I don't feel any regret for the game at all." looomis said, "I don't like people changing to alts and then bragging about their mains like schizophrenic role players."
they obviously want ppl buying zen with real money.
of course this is the goal because they are a for profit company. but zen can be spent in so many games, having it be neverwinter specifically is not necessarily the focus.
but since this is a f2p game, i'm sure they are well aware of whatever percentage of players will be free players. if their f2p model didn't work, they would push a different model in their new games.
it'll be interesting to see how the high exchange rates work out over time.
I won't get too far off topic with all my wonderful AD sink ideas ;P
But with the AD sinks available now, the influx of AD far outpaces the amount thats taken.
This game has been broken in this way since day one; very little sold for AD of any value. I've always assumed this is because they want folks spending Zen. But now that the the AD/Zen exchange rate is hard capped at 500 (when it should obviously be much higher), there is also no value (meaning no incentive) in converting Zen to AD.
I mean, seriously, who in their right mind would buy Zen to convert to AD right now? Everyone realizes you can buy AD directly for $$ right?? Any Zen purchased with $$ is to get items, not to get AD.
If they let AD/Zen exchange rate float, it would absolutely kill the AD/$$ black market.
it'll be interesting to see how the high exchange rates work out over time.
This is the problem. It's NOT high. It should be MUCH MUCH higher. AD is a heavily inflated currency compared to a year ago, yet the cap is still 500 AD/Zen.
. . . For an MMO with destructible currency, all that is needed is more Sinks that players want and are priced in such a way to encourage every player to use them more frequently. Having high prices on all the AD sinks we have now is, in my opinion, the real issue here that has caused too much AD to remain in game. All the things we have (except the AH) that permanently removes AD from the game are priced so outrageously high that only the super rich can afford to use them as much as they should be used by all players.
Sinks won't work because the characters generating the majority of the AD have no real use for them.
And frankly, things like transmutes and mount/companion upgrades won't have a significant impact on the value of AD since the people who actually care about those things DO use them even at their current high prices, it just takes them longer to do so.
The only types of AD sinks that would give AD real value back would be ones that increase the rift in character effectiveness between those who spend more AD, and those who spend less. Which I can't imagine too many people would find that to be a better solution.
Also the egg sale which many people site as an example of AD sinks working, is actually an example of how to destroy the economy. While I have no doubt a good chunk of AD was consumed, in the end it made the AD "rich" even richer. Take a look at the value of cockatrice and chickens now, look how much higher than 1.2 million AD they are. While the AD spent on them is gone, egg sales are focusing an even larger percentage of the remaining AD on the few who could afford to buy a lot of them. And it's not like they stopped earning AD in the meantime, no one is "catching-up" to them.
The best solution is addressing the elephant in the room, the ONE thing that significantly differentiates Neverwinter's economy from other current Cryptic games. Leadership. Once some sort of balance is achieved with leadership that makes it so actually playing of the game is more valuable than playing a spreadsheet, THEN AD sinks could be implemented to quickly drain the excess AD from the economy. Until then you're just putting band-aids on a severed limb.
I'm not saying dump leadership all together. That may be too drastic. But you can tone it down by, for example, limiting each profession to be used on only 1-2 characters per account. In the case of the crafting jobs, this might even have a positive effect on the market since people with so many characters are forced to make stuff for everything in the market, which in turn keeps a good part of the economy stable.
As it stands I don't think leadership itself is a problem. I find it hard to believe a player with a single character running leadership 20 would be a burden on the economy. It's that it multiples with each additional character and some people have lots. I have four characters running leadership 20 and I'm still short on AD. I'm also a fairly casual solo player so I am spending on purple gear from the AH since I can't readily obtain it through playing. Otherwise I'm also a little fusy when it comes to the asthetics of companions and mounts and I have upgraded a couple of green mounts to level 2, a several green and blue companions to purple.
I'm no longer opposed to limiting or ditching leadership all together, I think I've reached the point of indifference even though it's my only real form of AD income.
What do you mean when you say "In the case of the crafting jobs, this might even have a positive effect on the market since people with so many characters are forced to make stuff for everything in the market, which in turn keeps a good part of the economy stable."? Not a lot of craftable stuff has value outside of gemmed purple shirts/pants and crafting those is largely the domain of the rich due to the cost and rng nature of obtaining the tools. Have I missed you point?
Comments
I've always had this unanswered question: How does one, exactly, create a stack of 99 Rank 5's; all with no refining points in them?
I highly doubt that they invest that much time into it they just Roll back the char and that's probably it, i don't think they care enough about say a bag of holding to find and delete the specific item #.
There was a exploit that was being used until recently that allowed the old refinement table to be pulled up and used instead of the new RP based one, not saying every rank 5 with zero extra RP was due to this but I'd guess the majority were.
But what about something like:
4-5 Perfect weapon enchants
30 Bags of Holding
200 Adventurers
20 Heros
30 Rank 10 Enchantments
25 mil AD in cash
Not saying that's the inventory in question. Just on par in magnitude.
Which do you want? Do you want an example of rising costs or how an influx of a currency can devalue said currency and increase item costs? On the first I can give historical item cost rises in the AH. For the second real world examples. There is a reason why countries IRL tightly control the amount of currency they produce.
Cryptic is unlikely to present any new currency to replace AD if that is what you are trying to say. Also, as a business major I would love to hear of one of these examples in history where one currency was replaced by another because the prior was devalued.
Closing a means of exploitation does not automatically mean a new way is opened.
I never said anything about casuals being exploiters. The only thing I said about casuals is this:
"Casual gamers would benefit from Leadership farming being stopped as prices would drop."
I play rarely past an hour on any given day which would probably make me a casual. So I obviously want exploiters stopped.
Still highly doubt they care enough, even at those numbers thats just fractions of a percent in the game as a whole.
If that's the case, absolutely no point in nerfing leadership farming for AD.
The Reichsbank Marks were replaced on November 16, 1923 by the Rentenmark because of the hyperinflation in the Weimar Republic after WWI.
Just wanted to toss out an easy answer to that history question.
So if your account is rolled back you lose anything in the mailbox too?
Now due to AH being flooded with AD you can't...real world inflation there.
Leadership is like having a money printer and then wondering why a loaf of bread costs 3 million dollars.
All it takes is one unscrupulous botter with a good system and a few hundred bot accts. to make endless AD.
I signed on to play D&D...not leadership.
If I can't be as competitive playing the game for a few hours as I can playing leadership for the same amount of time then the leadership profession is broken.
This is coming from a casual gamer...
...casual meaning I don't want to waste months grinding leadership on 20 characters to have enough AD to FINALLY compete in the game.
I'm sorry, but casual gamers usually just play the game, they don't do leadership scripts and have 20 toons just to grind resources.
The Euro was a currency to combine multiple economies in to one. In many countries, such as France and Germany, their current currency was perfectly fine for their economy.
"The victor nations in World War I decided to assess Germany for their costs of conducting the war against Germany. With no means of paying in gold or currency backed by reserves, Germany ran the presses, causing the value of the Mark to collapse. Many Germans literally carted wheelbarrows of cash to pay for groceries."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papiermark
That is a good example of why control of new currency is important. Zimbabwe is a more current example.
+1 to that but good luck their have been may threads about it and either people love leadership or hate it
Umm yes i didn't consider that and just left it there figuring that i shouldn't be moving stuff around but, if it ever happened again i would move everything in my mail to another char, because most were expired auction house items, lost close to a mill AD.
In fact to join the Euro the country must have a stable currency. The basic requirements are:
Price stability, to show inflation is controlled;
Soundness and sustainability of public finances, through limits on government borrowing and national debt to avoid excessive deficit;
Exchange-rate stability, through participation in the Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM II) for at least two years without strong deviations from the ERM II central rate;
Long-term interest rates, to assess the durability of the convergence achieved by fulfilling the other criteria.
This sounds like an argument I would use to show how bad the limit is on the Auction House cap...
"No excuse to put a limit on AH just because it is abused"...
You can bring AD into the system by praying, dailies, skirmishes, and leadership. Grinding gear from dungeons generates no AD of its own, but takes AD out of the market at the 10% rate the AH takes. Same with selling zen items only removes AD from the game as someone spends existing AD to buy.
The only two ways that should be are skirmishes and dailies as the other two are easily and widely abused by botters however many casual players use it correctly.
If you are going to limit what can be spent in AH to try to combat gold spam bots yet completely ignore the fact that the spam bots run leadership scripts and prayer bots all day long and cause a massive influx of AD into the market raising prcies, then you will never even begin to address the real problem.
Until you've seen a couple million AD worth of items disappear from AH one sec and reappear a few minutes later at a higher price you might not see the problem.
The same people with millions of AD but all the lowest priced items of one kind. Corner the market. Then mark up what they bought, causing artificial inflation in prices to turn a profit.
You can have a fun gambling type market OR you can have a market that functions to buy and sell items.
Without regulating the supply of capital, you will only get inflation.
Thats real world 100% proven over and over again.
. . . If these things were priced more reasonably, they would be used more often. So, the way it is now, the rich get richer while the poor struggle to afford basic items. Sound familiar? If only it was this easy in the Real World... I don't understand why this isn't being taken into consideration in game.
. . . Removing a system that adds AD into the game will not help matters any in the long run. Eventually we'll be right back where we are. What is flawed are the plethora of over-priced AD sinks in the game and the abuse by exploiters -- not the Leadership profession itself.
. . . That is all conjecture based upon observations of surroundings and real world history, none of which is actual proof that "Casual Players using Leadership is directly causing AD Inflation," (which was the argument, no? Don't change the terms of the argument to suit your opinion please) but is instead theory based upon past experience and/or personal opinion.
. . . Uh... no. You're changing the subject again. I'm talking about players using another currency in place of AD, which we already see happening due to the AD Cap being hit.
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I would already have upgraded my companions/mount if the costs were half what they were (maybe 25% on mount upgrade).
It does seem like the AD sinks target the guys with millions of AD...who are then rewarded for hoarding by being given a chance at some wicked awesome thing like the Chicken.
I still think people would pay 250 k AD for the ability to switch and store a set of armor at a click.(Aimed at 60+ high gs with multi sets)
or 20k AD for temporary mount upgrade.
Make transmutes interchangeable and allow up to 3 per item. People would be more likely to pay 50k AD to transmute something if they could switch back and forth between different transmutes.
I won't get too far off topic with all my wonderful AD sink ideas ;P
But with the AD sinks available now, the influx of AD far outpaces the amount thats taken.
The same holds true in MMO economies - there are lots of theories about how to "improve" the gaming economy, but no one can predict with certainty whether their ideas for changes is going to really work in the long run. These are all "theories." There are too many variables to be able to predict a solid outcome - it is full of "best-guess" speculation and conjecture.
It is interesting to watch people be so certain that their ideas will change the game's economy.
It is even more interesting when well-exampled rebuttals are ignored completely in subsequent posts.
myles08807 said, "Back in my day, we didn't have any of this fancy Mulhorand gear while we were leveling . . . we walked uphill both ways while dying once every five seconds while leveling, and we liked it fine!" . . . Now, get off my lawn, you kids!"
pointsman said, "I don't rue the game. In fact I don't feel any regret for the game at all."
looomis said, "I don't like people changing to alts and then bragging about their mains like schizophrenic role players."
jesus, would you stop already with this leadership? leadership is not the problem here. you think 2 months ago there were no bots and no people with many accounts? It all started with making coal wards from boxes BoA. This decision caused the chain of changes on the market and a massive inflation. Getting rid of leadership wont solve anything. The price of wards wont drop, the price of enchantments wont drop.
You want competitive gaming and still to be casual gamer? Not gonna happen. In every MMO you either work hard or you pay. That's it.
I disagree. I am a casual gamer, and I work Leadership because I want to earn AD. Leadership does not take long to "work" once a day, even across 16 toons (a whopping 15 minutes a day maybe). The rest of the time I spend working quests/role playing.
myles08807 said, "Back in my day, we didn't have any of this fancy Mulhorand gear while we were leveling . . . we walked uphill both ways while dying once every five seconds while leveling, and we liked it fine!" . . . Now, get off my lawn, you kids!"
pointsman said, "I don't rue the game. In fact I don't feel any regret for the game at all."
looomis said, "I don't like people changing to alts and then bragging about their mains like schizophrenic role players."
of course this is the goal because they are a for profit company. but zen can be spent in so many games, having it be neverwinter specifically is not necessarily the focus.
but since this is a f2p game, i'm sure they are well aware of whatever percentage of players will be free players. if their f2p model didn't work, they would push a different model in their new games.
it'll be interesting to see how the high exchange rates work out over time.
This game has been broken in this way since day one; very little sold for AD of any value. I've always assumed this is because they want folks spending Zen. But now that the the AD/Zen exchange rate is hard capped at 500 (when it should obviously be much higher), there is also no value (meaning no incentive) in converting Zen to AD.
I mean, seriously, who in their right mind would buy Zen to convert to AD right now? Everyone realizes you can buy AD directly for $$ right?? Any Zen purchased with $$ is to get items, not to get AD.
If they let AD/Zen exchange rate float, it would absolutely kill the AD/$$ black market.
This is the problem. It's NOT high. It should be MUCH MUCH higher. AD is a heavily inflated currency compared to a year ago, yet the cap is still 500 AD/Zen.
Sinks won't work because the characters generating the majority of the AD have no real use for them.
And frankly, things like transmutes and mount/companion upgrades won't have a significant impact on the value of AD since the people who actually care about those things DO use them even at their current high prices, it just takes them longer to do so.
The only types of AD sinks that would give AD real value back would be ones that increase the rift in character effectiveness between those who spend more AD, and those who spend less. Which I can't imagine too many people would find that to be a better solution.
Also the egg sale which many people site as an example of AD sinks working, is actually an example of how to destroy the economy. While I have no doubt a good chunk of AD was consumed, in the end it made the AD "rich" even richer. Take a look at the value of cockatrice and chickens now, look how much higher than 1.2 million AD they are. While the AD spent on them is gone, egg sales are focusing an even larger percentage of the remaining AD on the few who could afford to buy a lot of them. And it's not like they stopped earning AD in the meantime, no one is "catching-up" to them.
The best solution is addressing the elephant in the room, the ONE thing that significantly differentiates Neverwinter's economy from other current Cryptic games. Leadership. Once some sort of balance is achieved with leadership that makes it so actually playing of the game is more valuable than playing a spreadsheet, THEN AD sinks could be implemented to quickly drain the excess AD from the economy. Until then you're just putting band-aids on a severed limb.
Okay, Panic.
As it stands I don't think leadership itself is a problem. I find it hard to believe a player with a single character running leadership 20 would be a burden on the economy. It's that it multiples with each additional character and some people have lots. I have four characters running leadership 20 and I'm still short on AD. I'm also a fairly casual solo player so I am spending on purple gear from the AH since I can't readily obtain it through playing. Otherwise I'm also a little fusy when it comes to the asthetics of companions and mounts and I have upgraded a couple of green mounts to level 2, a several green and blue companions to purple.
I'm no longer opposed to limiting or ditching leadership all together, I think I've reached the point of indifference even though it's my only real form of AD income.
What do you mean when you say "In the case of the crafting jobs, this might even have a positive effect on the market since people with so many characters are forced to make stuff for everything in the market, which in turn keeps a good part of the economy stable."? Not a lot of craftable stuff has value outside of gemmed purple shirts/pants and crafting those is largely the domain of the rich due to the cost and rng nature of obtaining the tools. Have I missed you point?