Foundry authors are a really, really small minority of players. The only way that a Foundry rep would work is if it rewarded players for playing the stories. The learning curve for the tool is just too high.
I'd favour a foundry rep that, at each tier, added a small extra reward for running any foundry mission.
Perhaps a mark box, extra dilithium, that sort of thing.
Make it a daily thing perhaps, but that would give a stronger incentive to actually run foundry missions.
People will stand around and watch a jumper on a ledge until the end happens (either they jump or get rescued). That's pretty much what is happening here. Again, human nature.
As for "non-invasive" exploiters not hurting the game.... they sure are hurting it...and YOU...in indirect ways. It may not be as obvious and direct an impact on you as a PVP hack, but cheating the system, whether it's for items or currency (Zen/Dilithium), is bad for everyone in the game.
It makes Cryptic lose money...and what do they have to do to make it back?....raise the prices on everything - to legitimate players - in order to compensate.
And quite frankly, I for one don't want to pay for these "non-invasive" exploiters. :mad:
I have to agree with you here. If non-invasive exploiters are permitted to continue their exploits, then more and more will follow suit, creating an epidemic as more and more ;non-invasive exploits are sought and discovered. Just because they break the rules but it doesnt directly affect you is no excuse to allow such a precedent to be set.
To continue with the car analogy can you imagine the disaster of setting a precedence of you dont drink and drive so whats the problem with those who do, as long as the person they are impacting isnt you?
If you choose to take no action against exploiters that is your choice. Others may not share your sentiment and decide to take action. That is their choice and right to do so, no?
Foundry authors are a really, really small minority of players. The only way that a Foundry rep would work is if it rewarded players for playing the stories. The learning curve for the tool is just too high.
You could however give authors rewards for having their mission played, as long as it was just the same marks that players got for playing the mission.
And I have a two tier system with loot and rep.
Eliminate all standard loot from the loot tables of Foundry mobs. Have them drop boxes with a random item from the rep in it, the same boxes you'd get for doing hourly and daily projects. All items in these boxes have a 0 EC vendor value. Maybe hard mobs would drop better boxes.
New items could periodically be added to the Tier 5 Foundry rep store and project list.
You get Foundry Marks for playing a mission (at a rate of around 30 per fifteen minutes) and a reward box when doing a project. Authors get a reward box T1-5 depending on the star rating and 10 marks every time anyone plays their mission.
Rewards could be a mix of odd functional things (it's still 0 EC vendor value) and Lobi-like items and maybe for an annual Foundry month, a ship like the Summer/Winter event. If it was especially clever the rewards could be tied into things at the fringes of Trek lore the way Foundry missions tend to be.
After watching the Academy Exploiters again, I decided to run some numbers.
It appears there is roughly 4-5 characters spawning per minute, which means 300 character per hour. And assuming they are merely completing the Investigative Reports wrapper, that's 288000 Dilithum per hour.
Now assuming they are bots and its on a 24 hour cycle, that's going to end up 6912000 Dilithum per day, and who knows how long this exploit has been going on. So Cryptic could be losing some series money with this exploit, not to mention it's probably why the Dilithum Market hasn't recovered since the ship sale.
All I can say is hope the team's been busy watching.
After watching the Academy Exploiters again, I decided to run some numbers.
It appears there is roughly 4-5 characters spawning per minute, which means 300 character per hour. And assuming they are merely completing the Investigative Reports wrapper, that's 288000 Dilithum per hour.
Now assuming they are bots and its on a 24 hour cycle, that's going to end up 6912000 Dilithum per day, and who knows how long this exploit has been going on. So Cryptic could be losing some series money with this exploit, not to mention it's probably why the Dilithum Market hasn't recovered since the ship sale.
All I can say is hope the team's been busy watching.
Actually calculating how much money Cryptic is losing could be tricky since it's all indirect.
Thinking this through, if it's an EC cartel, it devalues dilithium on the exchange. This devalues playtime and weakens the value of dilithium, which may result in fewer people playing going off the subconscious value gap since their playtime is at a distorted market value.
At current rates, this would potentially account for around $450 a day in bogus Zen transactions. That's around 400 master key sales. Which probably convert to 1 billion EC per day at current rates (and allow for enough resources to form a cartel that is artificially inflating Master Key prices, which could account for that).
Interestingly enough, illicit sellers seem split between selling master keys at a discount from what Cryptic sells them at and selling EC directly. But you're looking at between $280 and $600 a day for an outfit that does this in illicit sales.
Let's go with the $280 figure. This assumes selling 10 master keys for $7 which is what I'm seeing. They're actually buying $11.25 worth of keys and selling them for $7, which they can afford to do because they're botting dilithium and never spending their own money, obviously, but converted botted dilithium into ZEN for keys.
This basically at a high volume would account for around a 38% overvaluation of ZEN to dilithium.
Which suggests the real market value for dilithium is around 94 dil per ZEN (which is much closer to what it was before they re-enabled Foundry rewards). Each increase in Foundry rewards has been accompanied by a decrease in the value of dilithium and and increases in Master Key sales.
This probably generates $450 worth of C-Store purchases per day for Cryptic (in fact, looking for the sellers should be easy because it's doubtful legit players would be buying that many Master Keys) but it has several odd effects like the devaluation of dilithium (which discourages play) and some EC devaluation. This $450 in transactions per day doesn't actually benefit Cryptic though (because the people making the key purchases aren't buying the ZEN) because it's fairly reasonable to assume that without this bubble, dilithium would have around 38% more buying power and so you'd have more ZEN involved in puirchasing the same amount of dilithium (ignoring demand elasticity's effects since we can't guess those and social impact since that's also hard to guess).
So without the distortion, people looking to trade ZEN for dilithium would be spending $620 a day. But dilithium's devaluation has those same dilithium buyers only spending $450 a day.
So my very rough and potentially very inaccurate (but the best I've got) guesstimate is that the dilithium devaluation impact of this one group is costing Cryptic $170 a day or around $62,000 a year.
Again, I don't know the demand elasticities on the various markets or what illicit market this would be going into.
But you are looking at an operation that, if they did this, would probably be clearing them $100k a year and costing Cryptic $62k in fewer sales and diminished playtime all around (for people who buy dilithium on the exchange since they'd need to play less and for people who sell dilithium on the exchange since their time is undervalued) due to the undervaluation of dilithium. This latter bit ignores intrinsic reward of play or reputation/personal goals/etc. but lost playtime is also lost sales in Cryptics' internal analysis since we know that they have a rate at which they consider playtime to translate into sales.
So going off my admittedly very fuzzy guesstimate (due to lack of access to internal numbers), one group of Foundry exploiters at Starfleet Academy could probably (from all the various impacts) cost Cryptic the ability to hire one member to the dev team per year.
So my word to Geko or whoever is watching this:
If you ever find yourself in the position of having to lay someone off or turn away that one extra really amazing applicant who could add tremendous value to the game, it's because of groups like this.
For my fellow players, if just one group like this can cost us one dev's worth of revenue per year (and there is probably more than one group of dilithium exploiters), well... Doing another fuzzy guess... Each group of exploiters that is going 24-7 is probably costing Cryptic enough revenue to produce multiple feature episodes per year. Now, of course, it wouldn't be perfectly efficiently distributed into that. Money would go into dividends for PWE stockholders, game development, bonuses, etc. But if there are enough of these groups out there exploiting and devaluing dilithium, you could probably chalk up the difference between what we have now and what we have now plus a monthly Featured Episode, bugfixes, or quality of life improvements.
It's not direct theft but it reduces Cryptic's revenue which reduces what we can expect to get back.
If you ever find yourself in the position of having to lay someone off or turn away that one extra really amazing applicant who could add tremendous value to the game, it's because of groups like this.
For my fellow players, if just one group like this can cost us one dev's worth of revenue per year (and there is probably more than one group of dilithium exploiters), well... Doing another fuzzy guess... Each group of exploiters that is going 24-7 is probably costing Cryptic enough revenue to produce multiple feature episodes per year. Now, of course, it wouldn't be perfectly efficiently distributed into that. Money would go into dividends for PWE stockholders, game development, bonuses, etc. But if there are enough of these groups out there exploiting and devaluing dilithium, you could probably chalk up the difference between what we have now and what we have now plus a monthly Featured Episode, bugfixes, or quality of life improvements.
It's not direct theft but it reduces Cryptic's revenue which reduces what we can expect to get back.
This is one of the best thought out posts I have seen in a while.
I stopped by ESD #1 to do some doffing and saw they were still at it last night (GMT). Someone better at maths than I am will be able to work it out, but the minimum name length is 3 characters so assuming the name on these bots start at AAA and when I saw them was up to UUUUU and was climbing could show how long this has been going on for.
I would like to say this sort of activity really F@£&?s ME OFF because it does hurt me directly, I don't for personal reasons have RL money to put into the game, so any Zen I get I have to grind for, the daily limits, I have, mean I can only get around 47 zen a day IF I don't need the dill for something else like fleet item or holdings. Working it out I figured it would take me the best part of 2.5-3 months to get something like a Vesta pack.
Don't get me wrong I do fully expect to work my butt off for the things I want, and you don't get anything for nothing but it is another thing entirely to be a mug about it! That is just me personally, added to the fact the forums are filled with people say when is this going to be fixed, why can't we have that, isn't it about time this was overhauled but we don't get any of it because Cryptic don't have time because they may not be able to hire the people needed (I don't speak for Cryptic on this so this is just supposition but I think a fair(ish) one).
It also has further reaching implications for any company in this position, if your not making the profit you should be making it effects your bottom line, this effects on weather a parent company or outside investors would put money into the company which impacts on growth and employment, so it can't be stressed enough just how serious this can be.
So my very rough and potentially very inaccurate (but the best I've got) guesstimate is that the dilithium devaluation impact of this one group is costing Cryptic $170 a day or around $62,000 a year.
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So going off my admittedly very fuzzy guesstimate (due to lack of access to internal numbers), one group of Foundry exploiters at Starfleet Academy could probably (from all the various impacts) cost Cryptic the ability to hire one member to the dev team per year.
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For my fellow players, if just one group like this can cost us one dev's worth of revenue per year (and there is probably more than one group of dilithium exploiters), well... Doing another fuzzy guess... Each group of exploiters that is going 24-7 is probably costing Cryptic enough revenue to produce multiple feature episodes per year. Now, of course, it wouldn't be perfectly efficiently distributed into that. Money would go into dividends for PWE stockholders, game development, bonuses, etc. But if there are enough of these groups out there exploiting and devaluing dilithium, you could probably chalk up the difference between what we have now and what we have now plus a monthly Featured Episode, bugfixes, or quality of life improvements.
It's not direct theft but it reduces Cryptic's revenue which reduces what we can expect to get back.
First of all, my post isn't meant as an attack, just as a mere observation and my own ideas about this situation.
Grinding these bugs in an excessive manner for all to see is obviously not the way to go. But I don't believe that this group is costing anything like the numbers you've mentioned.
This group inadvertently causing a dilithium overflow (depending it'll be used on the D:Z market). It might sound strange, but having an excessive amount of dil can lift the D:Z price to new heights.
Knowing about the abundance of dil, the zen sellers heighten their price to get as much of it as possible. Any zen seller can tell you they prefer to get 153:1 above 143:1.
Hypothetically this abundance could be attracting more zen sellers, hence, more money in this game.
Once again; this situation is a double-edged sword, there are just too many variables to get a clear picture.
What a witch hunt, my goodness. Imagine if this level of "caring" could be used to go after bugs that HINDER peoples gameplay and rewards. If there wasn't an almost constant nerfing of all sorts of rewards going on I might feel differently.
Just look at the Dyson ground zone compared to space zone for example. The ground zone provides a fun way to run around completing missions for absolutely amazing rewards of dil and marks, so win-win. Now look at the new space zone that operates on the same principals, but the rewards have been cut back by an incredible amount when compared to the ground zone. If the rewards in the space zone were that of the ground zone, I would probably stick around longer than the five minutes needed to capture one point and get the daily mark box, but they aren't, so I leave and go off to do things that better reward me for my time spent in game.
First of all, my post isn't meant as an attack, just as a mere observation and my own ideas about this situation.
Grinding these bugs in an excessive manner for all to see is obviously not the way to go. But I don't believe that this group is costing anything like the numbers you've mentioned.
This group inadvertently causing a dilithium overflow (depending it'll be used on the D:Z market). It might sound strange, but having an excessive amount of dil can lift the D:Z price to new heights.
Knowing about the abundance of dil, the zen sellers heighten their price to get as much of it as possible. Any zen seller can tell you they prefer to get 153:1 above 143:1.
Hypothetically this abundance could be attracting more zen sellers, hence, more money in this game.
Once again; this situation is a double-edged sword, there are just too many variables to get a clear picture.
Oh. no. Not an attack. That is what I was getting at with demand elasticity. If I had Cryptic's internal numbers I could account for that. That would work to bring the number down at least some.
But what would bring it back up (and I can't calculate this either with public data) is that devalued dilithium reduces the value of time spent in game. It does for dilithium sellers (ie. they aren't getting enough ZEN for it to be worthwhile) and it does for ZEN sellers (because they're more likely to buy dilithium than earn it). Cryptic has a target for how much time they want us to spend in game because they can estimate that for, say, every 1,000 hours of playtime, someone is more likely to spend x dollars.
Beyond this is also the factor that if dilithium exploits exist and dilithium becomes devalued, players are less likely to think spending time in game is worthwhile and more likely to go for easy sources of dilithium (devaluing some content) and consider botting and exploiting themselves (which, sure, isn't ethical... but it's a "when in Rome" thing where if, say, dil to ZEN hits 500 per, people who wouldn't ordinarily bot are going to look at it more seriously).
I think one remedy is to look for people buying insane amounts of things to sell on the C-Store, investigating accounts that are spending $400-500 a day, particularly with ZEN they got on the exchange. It may seem like that kind of revenue is doing Cryptic a favor but it's probably coming at the expense of $800+ a day in revenue for a net loss.
Longer term, Foundry should be zero EC, zero dilithium (but a source of functional items with a 0 EC value).
Or... Well... Cryptic could also look at various ways of modifying how the C-Store works, implementing a daily purchase cap of around, say, $200. There's almost no reason a legit account would need to spend more than 20000 ZEN in a day and an account that does so is probably getting in the way of other purchases from other accounts.
We are limited to 8000 refined dil per day, plus 500 more daily from a fleet mine, plus another 1000 every other day from the Academy refining quest, so we'll call that 9000 refined dil per day total.
Given that limited rate, and the slow observable buildup of dil on my own toons, I had always wondered where the heck people got the literally millions of refined dil in the Dilithium Exchange. I guess now I know... *sigh*
We are limited to 8000 refined dil per day, plus 500 more daily from a fleet mine, plus another 1000 every other day from the Academy refining quest, so we'll call that 9000 refined dil per day total.
Given that limited rate, and the slow observable buildup of dil on my own toons, I had always wondered where the heck people got the literally millions of refined dil in the Dilithium Exchange. I guess now I know... *sigh*
Not always, there are legitimate ways of ammassing those resources.
Takes a bit of organisation, time and effort, but its totally...and legally....doable.
And for every rich toon someone has legitimately like that, they prolly have a bunch of very poor ones supporting the rich one.
We are limited to 8000 refined dil per day, plus 500 more daily from a fleet mine, plus another 1000 every other day from the Academy refining quest, so we'll call that 9000 refined dil per day total.
Given that limited rate, and the slow observable buildup of dil on my own toons, I had always wondered where the heck people got the literally millions of refined dil in the Dilithium Exchange. I guess now I know... *sigh*
called use real money dont need a exploit to get mills of dilithium
On second thought, the C-Store cap wouldn't work because the scammers would only be getting 53 EC per day at current rates per account. That is the insidious part of this that it's probably a large number of accounts buying a 10 pack of keys every 22 days.
So spending profiling and C-Store caps wouldn't work although maybe profiling accounts by, say, a ratio of key purchases to other activities (time spent in sector space, time spent moving) would.
Given that limited rate, and the slow observable buildup of dil on my own toons, I had always wondered where the heck people got the literally millions of refined dil in the Dilithium Exchange. I guess now I know... *sigh*
Given that the exchange potentially has several thousand players using it at once, it's no wonder that the dil exchange has millions of dil on it. It is, after all, a pool of all the dil thrown in there. It's not individuals putting massive amounts of dil in, it's a bunch of players putting in what they want (usually in the order of several 10k dil at a time, because otherwise you get jack in terms of zen).
The dil exchange doesn't work like the ec exchange. You can put your dil (or zen) on a shelf until it gets to the price you want, but you can't undercut to change the price at all. The only thing that determines the exchange rate is how much dil there is in the exchange, and how much zen there is. That's it. Players don't actively affect the dil price at all, although it does depend entirely on the player base and its spending habits.
called use real money dont need a exploit to get mills of dilithium
Well, that's what exploiters would be competing against. The people who use real money are getting dilithium created by exploiters.
I've thought for awhile that maybe the refinement cap should actually be lower but should be raised every time we complete certain tasks. I don't necessarily expect this to be popular but a workaround would be:
Gold - Gets an 8000 dil a day base cap.
Silver - Gets a 1000 dil a day base cap. Gets 1000 added for each queued mission they complete or the option to spend EC for a refinement cap increase each day, at a rate of maybe 500k EC per 500 refinement cap increase up to 8k.
Maybe allow the EC to be spent for refinement cap increase beyond 8k at a higher rate.
It's always funny to read about PWI is loosing money thru this or that bug or exploit - just for information: they have a market capitalization of $885.64 million, a revenue per employee of $110,099 and $152 million in net income. To think that some bugs in their games will noticeably hurt their income is simply naive.
Well, that's what exploiters would be competing against. The people who use real money are getting dilithium created by exploiters.
I've thought for awhile that maybe the refinement cap should actually be lower but should be raised every time we complete certain tasks. I don't necessarily expect this to be popular but a workaround would be:
Gold - Gets an 8000 dil a day base cap.
Silver - Gets a 1000 dil a day base cap. Gets 1000 added for each queued mission they complete or the option to spend EC for a refinement cap increase each day, at a rate of maybe 500k EC per 500 refinement cap increase up to 8k.
Maybe allow the EC to be spent for refinement cap increase beyond 8k at a higher rate.
Well, that's what exploiters would be competing against. The people who use real money are getting dilithium created by exploiters.
I've thought for awhile that maybe the refinement cap should actually be lower but should be raised every time we complete certain tasks. I don't necessarily expect this to be popular but a workaround would be:
Gold - Gets an 8000 dil a day base cap.
Silver - Gets a 1000 dil a day base cap. Gets 1000 added for each queued mission they complete or the option to spend EC for a refinement cap increase each day, at a rate of maybe 500k EC per 500 refinement cap increase up to 8k.
Maybe allow the EC to be spent for refinement cap increase beyond 8k at a higher rate.
That makes silver players give up and go play something else (seriously, who would pay 500k EC for 500 dil?????) while the exploiters just pay 300 bucks for a LTS.
Also, since you seem to know what's going on, how exactly are these people exploiting to farm dil?
What a witch hunt, my goodness. Imagine if this level of "caring" could be used to go after bugs that HINDER peoples gameplay and rewards. If there wasn't an almost constant nerfing of all sorts of rewards going on I might feel differently.
Just look at the Dyson ground zone compared to space zone for example. The ground zone provides a fun way to run around completing missions for absolutely amazing rewards of dil and marks, so win-win. Now look at the new space zone that operates on the same principals, but the rewards have been cut back by an incredible amount when compared to the ground zone. If the rewards in the space zone were that of the ground zone, I would probably stick around longer than the five minutes needed to capture one point and get the daily mark box, but they aren't, so I leave and go off to do things that better reward me for my time spent in game.
First of all, most of the bugs described seem to be deliberate (ie. the action bar working off of ability queuing rather than button presses) or affect a limited number of players. Maybe you and every person you talk to have a certain bug but other people (and maybe most people) could play the same content while rarely or never experiencing the same bug. This seems to be especially true with how Cryptic's tech works from what I can glean and isn't likely to change. Large amounts of data are stored on the character and people's computers do some heavy lifting that might be done server side in a traditional monthly fee game. As a result, there may be a bug that 10 people get every time and 90 people never get.
Second, we're not devs so it isn't like we could be expending this energy on bugs, particularly bugs that don't exist for us. I suspect this makes it hard for Cryptic as well if the bugs you experience don't exist when they play the same content either.
That makes silver players give up and go play something else (seriously, who would pay 500k EC for 500 dil?????) while the exploiters just pay 300 bucks for a LTS.
Also, since you seem to know what's going on, how exactly are these people exploiting to farm dil?
Exploiters would be unlikely to pay $300 for an LTS because they're using multiple accounts for volume. As it stands now, the likely scenario would be that a group of exploiters makes around $10 per month, per account. With an LTS stipend, they'd make maybe another $3 a month. For their operations, I'd guess they're running 40 accounts at once and that a number of these are getting quietly banned. LTS would not be cost effective.
You make a fair point perhaps about silver but the principle seems to stand for me that if normal, non-exploitative activity is raising your refinement cap to 8000 (who doesn't primarily play missions or queued events?) and spending EC is an alternative to actively playing, the people driven off by the EC cost aren't actively playing anyway.
It's always funny to read about PWI is loosing money thru this or that bug or exploit - just for information: they have a market capitalization of $885.64 million, a revenue per employee of $110,099 and $152 million in net income. To think that some bugs in their games will noticeably hurt their income is simply naive.
PWE isn't doing the day to day management and $60k would matter more to Rivera or Emmert than PWE. Having a billion dollars also doesn't make $60k small. It makes it possible to write off if it's not cost effective to recover but you don't MAKE a billion dollars or meet earnings projections if you go around writing off expenses that you could cost-effectively control.
Exploiters would be unlikely to pay $300 for an LTS because they're using multiple accounts for volume. As it stands now, the likely scenario would be that a group of exploiters makes around $10 per month, per account. With an LTS stipend, they'd make maybe another $3 a month. For their operations, I'd guess they're running 40 accounts at once and that a number of these are getting quietly banned. LTS would not be cost effective.
You make a fair point perhaps about silver but the principle seems to stand for me that if normal, non-exploitative activity is raising your refinement cap to 8000 (who doesn't primarily play missions or queued events?) and spending EC is an alternative to actively playing, the people driven off by the EC cost aren't actively playing anyway.
That's a decent point, I guess, but it's a lot more complicated than the current version, which can also be fixed by just finding the exploit and plugging the leak somehow.
I'm still confused as to how the exploiters are getting dil; I was under the impression that the Admiral BoBo's Grindfest missions had been denied rewards permanently due to exploitation.
First of all, most of the bugs described seem to be deliberate (ie. the action bar working off of ability queuing rather than button presses) or affect a limited number of players. Maybe you and every person you talk to have a certain bug but other people (and maybe most people) could play the same content while rarely or never experiencing the same bug. This seems to be especially true with how Cryptic's tech works from what I can glean and isn't likely to change. Large amounts of data are stored on the character and people's computers do some heavy lifting that might be done server side in a traditional monthly fee game. As a result, there may be a bug that 10 people get every time and 90 people never get.
Have you been to Defera in say, the last two years? Or tried using the loadouts 'feature', WITHOUT using PLAYER-FOUND work arounds?
Second, we're not devs so it isn't like we could be expending this energy on bugs, particularly bugs that don't exist for us. I suspect this makes it hard for Cryptic as well if the bugs you experience don't exist when they play the same content either.
Refer to the first word of the following sentence, and read my first comment above again:
Comments
I'd favour a foundry rep that, at each tier, added a small extra reward for running any foundry mission.
Perhaps a mark box, extra dilithium, that sort of thing.
Make it a daily thing perhaps, but that would give a stronger incentive to actually run foundry missions.
I have to agree with you here. If non-invasive exploiters are permitted to continue their exploits, then more and more will follow suit, creating an epidemic as more and more ;non-invasive exploits are sought and discovered. Just because they break the rules but it doesnt directly affect you is no excuse to allow such a precedent to be set.
To continue with the car analogy can you imagine the disaster of setting a precedence of you dont drink and drive so whats the problem with those who do, as long as the person they are impacting isnt you?
If you choose to take no action against exploiters that is your choice. Others may not share your sentiment and decide to take action. That is their choice and right to do so, no?
You could however give authors rewards for having their mission played, as long as it was just the same marks that players got for playing the mission.
And I have a two tier system with loot and rep.
Eliminate all standard loot from the loot tables of Foundry mobs. Have them drop boxes with a random item from the rep in it, the same boxes you'd get for doing hourly and daily projects. All items in these boxes have a 0 EC vendor value. Maybe hard mobs would drop better boxes.
New items could periodically be added to the Tier 5 Foundry rep store and project list.
You get Foundry Marks for playing a mission (at a rate of around 30 per fifteen minutes) and a reward box when doing a project. Authors get a reward box T1-5 depending on the star rating and 10 marks every time anyone plays their mission.
Rewards could be a mix of odd functional things (it's still 0 EC vendor value) and Lobi-like items and maybe for an annual Foundry month, a ship like the Summer/Winter event. If it was especially clever the rewards could be tied into things at the fringes of Trek lore the way Foundry missions tend to be.
It appears there is roughly 4-5 characters spawning per minute, which means 300 character per hour. And assuming they are merely completing the Investigative Reports wrapper, that's 288000 Dilithum per hour.
Now assuming they are bots and its on a 24 hour cycle, that's going to end up 6912000 Dilithum per day, and who knows how long this exploit has been going on. So Cryptic could be losing some series money with this exploit, not to mention it's probably why the Dilithum Market hasn't recovered since the ship sale.
All I can say is hope the team's been busy watching.
Actually calculating how much money Cryptic is losing could be tricky since it's all indirect.
Thinking this through, if it's an EC cartel, it devalues dilithium on the exchange. This devalues playtime and weakens the value of dilithium, which may result in fewer people playing going off the subconscious value gap since their playtime is at a distorted market value.
At current rates, this would potentially account for around $450 a day in bogus Zen transactions. That's around 400 master key sales. Which probably convert to 1 billion EC per day at current rates (and allow for enough resources to form a cartel that is artificially inflating Master Key prices, which could account for that).
Interestingly enough, illicit sellers seem split between selling master keys at a discount from what Cryptic sells them at and selling EC directly. But you're looking at between $280 and $600 a day for an outfit that does this in illicit sales.
Let's go with the $280 figure. This assumes selling 10 master keys for $7 which is what I'm seeing. They're actually buying $11.25 worth of keys and selling them for $7, which they can afford to do because they're botting dilithium and never spending their own money, obviously, but converted botted dilithium into ZEN for keys.
This basically at a high volume would account for around a 38% overvaluation of ZEN to dilithium.
Which suggests the real market value for dilithium is around 94 dil per ZEN (which is much closer to what it was before they re-enabled Foundry rewards). Each increase in Foundry rewards has been accompanied by a decrease in the value of dilithium and and increases in Master Key sales.
This probably generates $450 worth of C-Store purchases per day for Cryptic (in fact, looking for the sellers should be easy because it's doubtful legit players would be buying that many Master Keys) but it has several odd effects like the devaluation of dilithium (which discourages play) and some EC devaluation. This $450 in transactions per day doesn't actually benefit Cryptic though (because the people making the key purchases aren't buying the ZEN) because it's fairly reasonable to assume that without this bubble, dilithium would have around 38% more buying power and so you'd have more ZEN involved in puirchasing the same amount of dilithium (ignoring demand elasticity's effects since we can't guess those and social impact since that's also hard to guess).
So without the distortion, people looking to trade ZEN for dilithium would be spending $620 a day. But dilithium's devaluation has those same dilithium buyers only spending $450 a day.
So my very rough and potentially very inaccurate (but the best I've got) guesstimate is that the dilithium devaluation impact of this one group is costing Cryptic $170 a day or around $62,000 a year.
Again, I don't know the demand elasticities on the various markets or what illicit market this would be going into.
But you are looking at an operation that, if they did this, would probably be clearing them $100k a year and costing Cryptic $62k in fewer sales and diminished playtime all around (for people who buy dilithium on the exchange since they'd need to play less and for people who sell dilithium on the exchange since their time is undervalued) due to the undervaluation of dilithium. This latter bit ignores intrinsic reward of play or reputation/personal goals/etc. but lost playtime is also lost sales in Cryptics' internal analysis since we know that they have a rate at which they consider playtime to translate into sales.
So going off my admittedly very fuzzy guesstimate (due to lack of access to internal numbers), one group of Foundry exploiters at Starfleet Academy could probably (from all the various impacts) cost Cryptic the ability to hire one member to the dev team per year.
So my word to Geko or whoever is watching this:
If you ever find yourself in the position of having to lay someone off or turn away that one extra really amazing applicant who could add tremendous value to the game, it's because of groups like this.
For my fellow players, if just one group like this can cost us one dev's worth of revenue per year (and there is probably more than one group of dilithium exploiters), well... Doing another fuzzy guess... Each group of exploiters that is going 24-7 is probably costing Cryptic enough revenue to produce multiple feature episodes per year. Now, of course, it wouldn't be perfectly efficiently distributed into that. Money would go into dividends for PWE stockholders, game development, bonuses, etc. But if there are enough of these groups out there exploiting and devaluing dilithium, you could probably chalk up the difference between what we have now and what we have now plus a monthly Featured Episode, bugfixes, or quality of life improvements.
It's not direct theft but it reduces Cryptic's revenue which reduces what we can expect to get back.
This is one of the best thought out posts I have seen in a while.
I stopped by ESD #1 to do some doffing and saw they were still at it last night (GMT). Someone better at maths than I am will be able to work it out, but the minimum name length is 3 characters so assuming the name on these bots start at AAA and when I saw them was up to UUUUU and was climbing could show how long this has been going on for.
I would like to say this sort of activity really F@£&?s ME OFF because it does hurt me directly, I don't for personal reasons have RL money to put into the game, so any Zen I get I have to grind for, the daily limits, I have, mean I can only get around 47 zen a day IF I don't need the dill for something else like fleet item or holdings. Working it out I figured it would take me the best part of 2.5-3 months to get something like a Vesta pack.
Don't get me wrong I do fully expect to work my butt off for the things I want, and you don't get anything for nothing but it is another thing entirely to be a mug about it! That is just me personally, added to the fact the forums are filled with people say when is this going to be fixed, why can't we have that, isn't it about time this was overhauled but we don't get any of it because Cryptic don't have time because they may not be able to hire the people needed (I don't speak for Cryptic on this so this is just supposition but I think a fair(ish) one).
It also has further reaching implications for any company in this position, if your not making the profit you should be making it effects your bottom line, this effects on weather a parent company or outside investors would put money into the company which impacts on growth and employment, so it can't be stressed enough just how serious this can be.
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First of all, my post isn't meant as an attack, just as a mere observation and my own ideas about this situation.
Grinding these bugs in an excessive manner for all to see is obviously not the way to go. But I don't believe that this group is costing anything like the numbers you've mentioned.
This group inadvertently causing a dilithium overflow (depending it'll be used on the D:Z market). It might sound strange, but having an excessive amount of dil can lift the D:Z price to new heights.
Knowing about the abundance of dil, the zen sellers heighten their price to get as much of it as possible. Any zen seller can tell you they prefer to get 153:1 above 143:1.
Hypothetically this abundance could be attracting more zen sellers, hence, more money in this game.
Once again; this situation is a double-edged sword, there are just too many variables to get a clear picture.
Foundry Mission Database
Check out my Foundry missions:
Standalone - The Great Escape - The Galaxy's Fair - Purity I: Of Denial - Return to Oblivion
Untitled Series - Duritanium Man - The Improbable Bulk - Commander Rihan
Just look at the Dyson ground zone compared to space zone for example. The ground zone provides a fun way to run around completing missions for absolutely amazing rewards of dil and marks, so win-win. Now look at the new space zone that operates on the same principals, but the rewards have been cut back by an incredible amount when compared to the ground zone. If the rewards in the space zone were that of the ground zone, I would probably stick around longer than the five minutes needed to capture one point and get the daily mark box, but they aren't, so I leave and go off to do things that better reward me for my time spent in game.
Oh. no. Not an attack. That is what I was getting at with demand elasticity. If I had Cryptic's internal numbers I could account for that. That would work to bring the number down at least some.
But what would bring it back up (and I can't calculate this either with public data) is that devalued dilithium reduces the value of time spent in game. It does for dilithium sellers (ie. they aren't getting enough ZEN for it to be worthwhile) and it does for ZEN sellers (because they're more likely to buy dilithium than earn it). Cryptic has a target for how much time they want us to spend in game because they can estimate that for, say, every 1,000 hours of playtime, someone is more likely to spend x dollars.
Beyond this is also the factor that if dilithium exploits exist and dilithium becomes devalued, players are less likely to think spending time in game is worthwhile and more likely to go for easy sources of dilithium (devaluing some content) and consider botting and exploiting themselves (which, sure, isn't ethical... but it's a "when in Rome" thing where if, say, dil to ZEN hits 500 per, people who wouldn't ordinarily bot are going to look at it more seriously).
I think one remedy is to look for people buying insane amounts of things to sell on the C-Store, investigating accounts that are spending $400-500 a day, particularly with ZEN they got on the exchange. It may seem like that kind of revenue is doing Cryptic a favor but it's probably coming at the expense of $800+ a day in revenue for a net loss.
Longer term, Foundry should be zero EC, zero dilithium (but a source of functional items with a 0 EC value).
Or... Well... Cryptic could also look at various ways of modifying how the C-Store works, implementing a daily purchase cap of around, say, $200. There's almost no reason a legit account would need to spend more than 20000 ZEN in a day and an account that does so is probably getting in the way of other purchases from other accounts.
Given that limited rate, and the slow observable buildup of dil on my own toons, I had always wondered where the heck people got the literally millions of refined dil in the Dilithium Exchange. I guess now I know... *sigh*
Not always, there are legitimate ways of ammassing those resources.
Takes a bit of organisation, time and effort, but its totally...and legally....doable.
And for every rich toon someone has legitimately like that, they prolly have a bunch of very poor ones supporting the rich one.
called use real money dont need a exploit to get mills of dilithium
system Lord Baal is dead
So spending profiling and C-Store caps wouldn't work although maybe profiling accounts by, say, a ratio of key purchases to other activities (time spent in sector space, time spent moving) would.
Given that the exchange potentially has several thousand players using it at once, it's no wonder that the dil exchange has millions of dil on it. It is, after all, a pool of all the dil thrown in there. It's not individuals putting massive amounts of dil in, it's a bunch of players putting in what they want (usually in the order of several 10k dil at a time, because otherwise you get jack in terms of zen).
The dil exchange doesn't work like the ec exchange. You can put your dil (or zen) on a shelf until it gets to the price you want, but you can't undercut to change the price at all. The only thing that determines the exchange rate is how much dil there is in the exchange, and how much zen there is. That's it. Players don't actively affect the dil price at all, although it does depend entirely on the player base and its spending habits.
Well, that's what exploiters would be competing against. The people who use real money are getting dilithium created by exploiters.
I've thought for awhile that maybe the refinement cap should actually be lower but should be raised every time we complete certain tasks. I don't necessarily expect this to be popular but a workaround would be:
Gold - Gets an 8000 dil a day base cap.
Silver - Gets a 1000 dil a day base cap. Gets 1000 added for each queued mission they complete or the option to spend EC for a refinement cap increase each day, at a rate of maybe 500k EC per 500 refinement cap increase up to 8k.
Maybe allow the EC to be spent for refinement cap increase beyond 8k at a higher rate.
Link: Castra - a german Fleet.
i dont see PWE ever letting that happen
system Lord Baal is dead
That makes silver players give up and go play something else (seriously, who would pay 500k EC for 500 dil?????) while the exploiters just pay 300 bucks for a LTS.
Also, since you seem to know what's going on, how exactly are these people exploiting to farm dil?
First of all, most of the bugs described seem to be deliberate (ie. the action bar working off of ability queuing rather than button presses) or affect a limited number of players. Maybe you and every person you talk to have a certain bug but other people (and maybe most people) could play the same content while rarely or never experiencing the same bug. This seems to be especially true with how Cryptic's tech works from what I can glean and isn't likely to change. Large amounts of data are stored on the character and people's computers do some heavy lifting that might be done server side in a traditional monthly fee game. As a result, there may be a bug that 10 people get every time and 90 people never get.
Second, we're not devs so it isn't like we could be expending this energy on bugs, particularly bugs that don't exist for us. I suspect this makes it hard for Cryptic as well if the bugs you experience don't exist when they play the same content either.
Exploiters would be unlikely to pay $300 for an LTS because they're using multiple accounts for volume. As it stands now, the likely scenario would be that a group of exploiters makes around $10 per month, per account. With an LTS stipend, they'd make maybe another $3 a month. For their operations, I'd guess they're running 40 accounts at once and that a number of these are getting quietly banned. LTS would not be cost effective.
You make a fair point perhaps about silver but the principle seems to stand for me that if normal, non-exploitative activity is raising your refinement cap to 8000 (who doesn't primarily play missions or queued events?) and spending EC is an alternative to actively playing, the people driven off by the EC cost aren't actively playing anyway.
PWE isn't doing the day to day management and $60k would matter more to Rivera or Emmert than PWE. Having a billion dollars also doesn't make $60k small. It makes it possible to write off if it's not cost effective to recover but you don't MAKE a billion dollars or meet earnings projections if you go around writing off expenses that you could cost-effectively control.
That's a decent point, I guess, but it's a lot more complicated than the current version, which can also be fixed by just finding the exploit and plugging the leak somehow.
I'm still confused as to how the exploiters are getting dil; I was under the impression that the Admiral BoBo's Grindfest missions had been denied rewards permanently due to exploitation.
Second they aren't playing those missions.
Foundry Mission Database
Check out my Foundry missions:
Standalone - The Great Escape - The Galaxy's Fair - Purity I: Of Denial - Return to Oblivion
Untitled Series - Duritanium Man - The Improbable Bulk - Commander Rihan
OK...
So how are they doing it, and how righteously angry should I be?
Have you been to Defera in say, the last two years? Or tried using the loadouts 'feature', WITHOUT using PLAYER-FOUND work arounds?
Refer to the first word of the following sentence, and read my first comment above again: