Does anyone know if you buy one intel ship are you locked out from buying the delta pack later?
Captain Jean-Luc Picard: "We think we've come so far. Torture of heretics, burning of witches, it's all ancient history. Then - before you can blink an eye - suddenly it threatens to start all over again."
"With the first link, the chain is forged. The first speech censured, the first thought forbidden, the first freedom denied, chains us all irrevocably."
It is a day that happens after American Thanksgiving that occurs in the US and now Canada that has a bunch of sales. This results in a ton of crowded stores, injuries, and great deals.
agreed, i can prove the 180, but never jumped on top of the 180+ quick enough lol
*actually thinking on it, didnt 180+ spikes occur during the start of both the promo pack offers?
I'm pretty sure it was in the 190's or briefly hit 200 after T6 ships were announced.
Captain Jean-Luc Picard: "We think we've come so far. Torture of heretics, burning of witches, it's all ancient history. Then - before you can blink an eye - suddenly it threatens to start all over again."
"With the first link, the chain is forged. The first speech censured, the first thought forbidden, the first freedom denied, chains us all irrevocably."
"Black Friday" is the term for the beginning of the holiday sales season primarily in the US. Originally there was a big sale on all Christmas items starting on the Friday follow Thanksgiving in the US. The sale now extends from Thursday through the weekend.
The original term "Black" Friday was that it was the period of time when retailers went into the black rather then being in the red and losing money earlier in the year - many big retailers count on this period's sales to show profit for the whole year. Thus this sale was the start of the holiday season and the start of them making money through the end of the year.
More recently the term "Black" Friday was a metaphor for the Black Friday of the Great Depression where people ran to banks to get their money out thinking it would be lost. If you see videos of people storming into stores on Black Friday you get the same imagery of people losing all sense of humanity to get to what they want to buy, no matter who they hurt in the process.
STO is about my Liberated Borg Federation Captain with his Breen 1st Officer, Jem'Hadar Tactical Officer, Liberated Borg Engineering Officer, Android Ops Officer, Photonic Science Officer, Gorn Science Officer, and Reman Medical Officer jumping into their Jem'Hadar Carrier and flying off to do missions for the new Romulan Empire. But for some players allowing a T5 Connie to be used breaks the canon in the game.
They did this last year as well. They only 'outstanding' thing is that the new intrepid pack is also discounted. A first for a new release ship.
And the way Cryptic has been going with mistakes of late it could be an accident that the Intrepid was included in the sale.
STO is about my Liberated Borg Federation Captain with his Breen 1st Officer, Jem'Hadar Tactical Officer, Liberated Borg Engineering Officer, Android Ops Officer, Photonic Science Officer, Gorn Science Officer, and Reman Medical Officer jumping into their Jem'Hadar Carrier and flying off to do missions for the new Romulan Empire. But for some players allowing a T5 Connie to be used breaks the canon in the game.
Bah, paranoia just makes people look crazy. Most promotions happen on a schedule; ship sales, lockboxes and C-Store ships happen once every 3 months. Lifetime subs, and CE/MU events run every 6 months or so. Zen sales are run by PWE, not Cryptic, and tend to happen once a quarter as well - usually just before a lockbox release (because that is how they time the lockboxes).
The reason things seem crammed together right now is because the expansion came out in the middle of things, and they ran things a little out of sequence to make up for the fact that the devs were all occupied with DR and couldn't work on other things. They did the same thing when LoR came out.
Of course, that's not going to stop people from making dumb assumptions without looking at history. The next two weeks will be quiet as the ramp up for the Winter Event goes into high gear, and these same DOOOOOOOOM people will call that quiet period as a reason that the game is going under. You can't use logic (like the fact that the economy in game is more stable than any other MMO on the market) to reason with people who are going to hate on something. They live in their own little black fantasy world, and there's no breaking them out of it.
Whatever. Between the MU event dil I exchanged, my stipend, and the Zen sale, I got the Pathfinder 3-ship bundle for $20 in real money. That's by far the best Black Friday savings I made this year, and I am happy about this last-minute sale announcement.
They did this last year as well. They only 'outstanding' thing is that the new intrepid pack is also discounted. A first for a new release ship.
They didn't run a ZEN discount at the same time.
EDIT: And I';d wager it has less to do with impending doom and more to do with PWE getting downgraded today by analysts based on last week's Q3 report. A major firm just reclassified PWE from being a market outperforming stock to being a stock that performs at typical market levels. Basically, longterm investors probably aren't too worried but shortterm investors will dump the stock unless PWE can wow them.
Last year they had a 15% Zen bonus purchase event starting on 11/29 and a Ship Sale starting on 11/26.
If I bothered to check I could probably find a thread from last year about those two simultaneous sales where people stated it was an indication of Cryptic desperate for money then too.
STO is about my Liberated Borg Federation Captain with his Breen 1st Officer, Jem'Hadar Tactical Officer, Liberated Borg Engineering Officer, Android Ops Officer, Photonic Science Officer, Gorn Science Officer, and Reman Medical Officer jumping into their Jem'Hadar Carrier and flying off to do missions for the new Romulan Empire. But for some players allowing a T5 Connie to be used breaks the canon in the game.
EDIT: And I';d wager it has less to do with impending doom and more to do with PWE getting downgraded today by analysts based on last week's Q3 report. A major firm just reclassified PWE from being a market outperforming stock to being a stock that performs at typical market levels. Basically, longterm investors probably aren't too worried but shortterm investors will dump the stock unless PWE can wow them.
The Q3 report was nowhere near as damning as news sites are making it out to be; everything is still very much profitable in the PWE portfolio, they just did not meet investor expectations. The main reason the US camp didn't reach it was the extra expenditures for the STO and NW expansions that went live in early Q4 and the Swordsman launch. They expected things in Q4 to be higher than normal based on the Cryptic releases. It's all in the report, people just didn't bother to actually read it beyond what was needed to write their linkbait headlines.
Bah, paranoia just makes people look crazy. Most promotions happen on a schedule; ship sales, lockboxes and C-Store ships happen once every 3 months. Lifetime subs, and CE/MU events run every 6 months or so. Zen sales are run by PWE, not Cryptic, and tend to happen once a quarter as well - usually just before a lockbox release (because that is how they time the lockboxes).
The reason things seem crammed together right now is because the expansion came out in the middle of things, and they ran things a little out of sequence to make up for the fact that the devs were all occupied with DR and couldn't work on other things. They did the same thing when LoR came out.
hehe every year a company I get items from I use their software for cgi things has a 95% off black friday sale and sells a bunch of animations and characters and objects off super cheap. Every year I purchase the bundle even if I have some of the stuff inside because its so cheap that its worth it. Having a blow out sale once and awhile is commonplace and in the case of this company 95% off is insane but every year they do it and every year its well worth spending the pennies on the bundle they have assembled. They are not going out of business and have done this for 6 years now lol.
People see what they want to see though lets just say they are making money off the people who refused to pay the high normal prices there are some thrift minded people out there and they lowered the price of their sto items so that "non-whales" will likely purchase too. This is how one does business. So now they have sold something to everyone including the people who refused to purchase at 50 bucks period (nothing wrong with that)
There is certainly some truth to the timing of everything.
The Mirror Incursion was dropped early - during the second week of the roll-out of DR. This was a step to retain players already frustrated with the sheer number of game-stopping bugs. They have never added a major event like that before, especially without warning.
MI was an attempt to take the 'sting' out of the dilithium nerf.
Same goes for the bonus R&D weekend - hastily added to the schedule.
LaughingTrendy stated this was the most profitable launch per date yesterday. Whether that's spin or truth is immaterial. It seems cryptics goal was in part to reduce the number of F2P that don't pay something. I can surmise the drop in players in queues is a symptom of the changes they have implemented. And before you argue - even i LoR week one there were 500+ players in privates and public queues in the evenings. DR it's less than 100.
They have a new set of issues to deal with. That, and the TRIBBLE-tonne of bugs still to be fixed.
Hmm, discount sale is on...sounds like the perfect time to complain or speculate the game is desperate for money. I'm almost confident that there is another thread around asking why there hasn't been any sales on...they just can't win...
Retired. I'm now in search for that perfect space anomaly.
hehe every year a company I get items from I use their software for cgi things has a 95% off black friday sale and sells a bunch of animations and characters and objects off super cheap. Every year I purchase the bundle even if I have some of the stuff inside because its so cheap that its worth it. Having a blow out sale once and awhile is commonplace and in the case of this company 95% off is insane but every year they do it and every year its well worth spending the pennies on the bundle they have assembled. They are not going out of business and have done this for 6 years now lol.
People see what they want to see though lets just say they are making money off the people who refused to pay the high normal prices there are some thrift minded people out there and they lowered the price of their sto items so that "non-whales" will likely purchase too. This is how one does business. So now they have sold something to everyone including the people who refused to purchase at 50 bucks period (nothing wrong with that)
Exactly. I won't be using the Pathfinder for a main ship (and the other two at all), so paying $55 for it wasn't worth it to me. But three ships for $20 (after pooling my resources) with one useful uni console and one a useful ship trait? Different story.
The Q3 report was nowhere near as damning as news sites are making it out to be; everything is still very much profitable in the PWE portfolio, they just did not meet investor expectations. The main reason the US camp didn't reach it was the extra expenditures for the STO and NW expansions that went live in early Q4 and the Swordsman launch. They expected things in Q4 to be higher than normal based on the Cryptic releases. It's all in the report, people just didn't bother to actually read it beyond what was needed to write their linkbait headlines.
Do people look for negativity in my posts when I'm not suggesting negativity?
There's nothing "damning" about what I said. In fact, I've said throughout this and other threads that PWE has basically just hit a bit of turbulence, not that they're spiraling in flames. It has to be possible to say things are not perfect without saying they're doomed, right?
If anything, that is my biggest frustration with the forums. Not that they're a bastion of negativity (some posters are, sure). It's that either everything is terrible and unrecoverable or everything is better than ever and any blip can be easily handwaved. Can we please have a discussion where people refrain from saying "this is the end" or that "things are fine"? Either conclusion would be highly unlikely, anywhere.
Few things in the world spell doom and endings only happen once, usually. Almost nothing, anywhere in the world, is ever "just fine" either.
And also to be clear, Q2 coupled with Q3 are unlikely to be the result of how STO is run (which is a small part of the big picture, even as a share of U.S. operations). But how STO is run is informed by that larger picture, obviously, or the alternative would be that how STO is run is somehow arbitrarily decided.
I'm trying to EXPLAIN developer behavior as a means of building a negotiation and discussion point. We have to construct a theory of what they're doing and why if they don't share one or we have no reference frame for feedback.
Do people look for negativity in my posts when I'm not suggesting negativity?
There's nothing "damning" about what I said. In fact, I've said throughout this and other threads that PWE has basically just hit a bit of turbulence, not that they're spiraling in flames. It has to be possible to say things are not perfect without saying they're doomed, right?
If anything, that is my biggest frustration with the forums. Not that they're a bastion of negativity (some posters are, sure). It's that either everything is terrible and unrecoverable or everything is better than ever and any blip can be easily handwaved. Can we please have a discussion where people refrain from saying "this is the end" or that "things are fine"? Either conclusion would be highly unlikely, anywhere.
Few things in the world spell doom and endings only happen once, usually. Almost nothing, anywhere in the world, is ever "just fine" either.
And also to be clear, Q2 coupled with Q3 are unlikely to be the result of how STO is run (which is a small part of the big picture, even as a share of U.S. operations). But how STO is run is informed by that larger picture, obviously, or the alternative would be that how STO is run is somehow arbitrarily decided.
I'm trying to EXPLAIN developer behavior as a means of building a negotiation and discussion point. We have to construct a theory of what they're doing and why if they don't share one or we have no reference frame for feedback.
Heh - you just did that exact thing to me. I was just pointing out that most of the negative press about the PWE report was overstated in headlines. I wasn't saying your point was wrong.
Heh - you just did that exact thing to me. I was just pointing out that most of the negative press about the PWE report was overstated in headlines. I wasn't saying your point was wrong.
Ha! Fair enough. These forums always feel like a phone call with bad reception.
Probably most of the shouting is about the "static" or lack of successful communication between players or between players and developers.
One interesting thing I have seen on some forums is a push towards positivity threads, negativity threads, and general threads, with moderators pushing both posititivity and negativity out of general discussion.
Gushing gets deposited into an all-gushing zone. Bashing gets deposited into an all-bashing zone. Moderators keep them apart and out of general discussion.
Only looked at the first page replys so apologies if this has been said already.... But, how is this different from any other black friday sale from every other store in the US? Does that mean every other store in the states is "desperate for money" because they have sales today?
Sure, Cryptic is making money today but it is no different that the thousands of other stores doing the same thing.
I know when the Dil exchange was put up, I think you are misunderstanding. You quoted me noting it is at the highest point in 2014 suggesting it was higher than this years ago, missing that I noted the year (which you quoted btw).
Except your first statement was "The value of ZEN in STO has never been higher than it is today." which was not qualified by a year, but by an absolute ("never"). The statement right after that was qualified by the year but could be (and was) taken as a separate statement from the first.
Regardless of that, it's been both higher than 180 in 2014 (this summer, 200+ during the STLV announcement) and lower than 150 in 2014 (earlier in the summer/year), so either way it has been worth both more and less than 1. the current sale spike right now, and 2. the more stable price from the last 2 weeks or so.
This spike doesn't even qualify as an anomaly; spikes always happen during sales and announcements of new, shiny, or speculative things and it's gone as low as 50-60 dil per zen in the past and used to be north of 300. DilEx goes down, DilEx goes up, but it always tends to come back to the same numbers if you wait long enough.
Nitpicking is a time-honored tradition of science fiction. Asking your readers not to worry about the "little things" is like asking a dog not to sniff at people's crotches. If there's something that appears to violate natural laws, then you can expect someone's going to point it out. That's just the way things are.
Except your first statement was "The value of ZEN in STO has never been higher than it is today." which was not qualified by a year, but by an absolute ("never"). The statement right after that was qualified by the year but could be (and was) taken as a separate statement from the first.
Regardless of that, it's been both higher than 180 in 2014 (this summer, 200+ during the STLV announcement) and lower than 150 in 2014 (earlier in the summer/year), so either way it has been worth both more and less than 1. the current sale spike right now, and 2. the more stable price from the last 2 weeks or so.
This spike doesn't even qualify as an anomaly; spikes always happen during sales and announcements of new, shiny, or speculative things and it's gone as low as 50-60 dil per zen in the past and used to be north of 300. DilEx goes down, DilEx goes up, but it always tends to come back to the same numbers if you wait long enough.
*shrug*
Which is one of the few areas that Cryptic is relatively consistent in - their "marketing" as far as sales and the like...or when they release things with their production/release schedule. It allows one to speculate on the market, having a decent idea of when things are going to go up or down.
Yep, it's highly irregular...you know, STO having that 20% Black Friday thing going back to 2010 when the game first launched.
Kind of like all the Cryptic/PWE games having taken part in Black Friday stuff since the dawn of time...
...yep, it's highly irregular. :rolleyes:
When was the last time *everything* in the C-Store was 20% off added to a Zen promo?
No need to answer. It was never.
My point was only to try and clarify what the OP was getting at. Cryptic is throwing everything at the players in as rapid a succession as I've seen playing in all these years. With the release of DR seemingly being a step backwards, it appears they are making moves to mitigate the loss of players. I'm not complaining. I'm not saying "doom". I'm just saying they're hurt or they wouldn't be going through such lengths.
Dilithium weekends are scheduled. Bonus mark weekends are scheduled. Sales are scheduled. The rapid push of every tool they have is telling, however. All in all, I'm actually hoping this has a positive outcome. I'm hoping none of these strategies actually have much of an impact and that Cryptic is pushed into a corner to *have* to revert some of the changes DR brought us. That's the only way things like leveling and rewards may see some relief. The Priority One acknowledgements weren't because of kind hearts at Cryptic. The almost assured minimal "tweaks" are because they pushed beyond bounds of reason and made the game punishing for long time players and near impossible for casuals.
This is a two prong attack by Cryptic/Pwe, make buttloads of cash with a zen "sale" and curry favour for heavy damage control with the 20% sale on everything. Kill one giant bird(whale) with two shiny stones. The whales need to be milked before they migrate.
is all i cant help but think of, with each and every attempt since dr launch.
i dont think they are hurting. maybe a slight joint ache but not hurting. they jsut dont realize how bad some of us are taking it.
hell I even went back to using a E&B Emulator last night and actually had some fun blowing up badies in a 15 year old space game with zero requests spend money .
Trophies for killing FEDS ahh those were the days.
When was the last time *everything* in the C-Store was 20% off added to a Zen promo?
No need to answer. It was never.
Just so we all have a handle here, last year at this time there was a 15% Zen bonus sale with a 15% Ship Sale. This was followed by a 15% Master Key sale, and then a 33% LTS sale. Then in December they had another 15% Zen bonus sale and a 15% Game Card Zen bonus event to go along with the Winter Event. And during all of this they also had a Bird of Prey giveaway; plus they had all the regular Calender Events: bonus Dilithium, Marks events, etc. That takes care of 2013.
Now let us go back to Nov/Dec 2012. On 11/21 they started a 15% Ship sale and a 15% Zen bonus sale. Which lead into a second 15% Zen bonus sale, a Master Key sale, and a Costume sale in December; then going into the Winter Event. Plus all the regular Calender Events - but at that time there were still hourly Events and the like.
The only real difference between 2014 and 2013, and 2012 is that the first sale this year was 20% instead of 15% and it covered everything rather then just Ships and Keys. Not a big deal - at least not in the way many of you are trying to make it seem. There are more things that people want in the C-Store now then there were in 2013 or 2012. In 2012 someone would have laughed at you if you suggested they buy an XP Boost. Now they can be handy in helping you get to 60 if you are a Casual.
STO is about my Liberated Borg Federation Captain with his Breen 1st Officer, Jem'Hadar Tactical Officer, Liberated Borg Engineering Officer, Android Ops Officer, Photonic Science Officer, Gorn Science Officer, and Reman Medical Officer jumping into their Jem'Hadar Carrier and flying off to do missions for the new Romulan Empire. But for some players allowing a T5 Connie to be used breaks the canon in the game.
Just so we all have a handle here, last year at this time there was a 15% Zen bonus sale with a In 2012 someone would have laughed at you if you suggested they buy an XP Boost. Now they can be handy in helping you get to 60 if you are a Casual.
Comments
Think this was the funniest one I've seen while reading about some of the funny sales out there: http://www.uccu.com/home/promotions/blackfriday
"With the first link, the chain is forged. The first speech censured, the first thought forbidden, the first freedom denied, chains us all irrevocably."
It is a day that happens after American Thanksgiving that occurs in the US and now Canada that has a bunch of sales. This results in a ton of crowded stores, injuries, and great deals.
I'm pretty sure it was in the 190's or briefly hit 200 after T6 ships were announced.
"With the first link, the chain is forged. The first speech censured, the first thought forbidden, the first freedom denied, chains us all irrevocably."
The original term "Black" Friday was that it was the period of time when retailers went into the black rather then being in the red and losing money earlier in the year - many big retailers count on this period's sales to show profit for the whole year. Thus this sale was the start of the holiday season and the start of them making money through the end of the year.
More recently the term "Black" Friday was a metaphor for the Black Friday of the Great Depression where people ran to banks to get their money out thinking it would be lost. If you see videos of people storming into stores on Black Friday you get the same imagery of people losing all sense of humanity to get to what they want to buy, no matter who they hurt in the process.
http://www.themaninthemoviehat.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/dawn-of-the-dead-black-friday.jpeg
Pretty much sums it up.
They did this last year as well. They only 'outstanding' thing is that the new intrepid pack is also discounted. A first for a new release ship.
The reason things seem crammed together right now is because the expansion came out in the middle of things, and they ran things a little out of sequence to make up for the fact that the devs were all occupied with DR and couldn't work on other things. They did the same thing when LoR came out.
Of course, that's not going to stop people from making dumb assumptions without looking at history. The next two weeks will be quiet as the ramp up for the Winter Event goes into high gear, and these same DOOOOOOOOM people will call that quiet period as a reason that the game is going under. You can't use logic (like the fact that the economy in game is more stable than any other MMO on the market) to reason with people who are going to hate on something. They live in their own little black fantasy world, and there's no breaking them out of it.
Whatever. Between the MU event dil I exchanged, my stipend, and the Zen sale, I got the Pathfinder 3-ship bundle for $20 in real money. That's by far the best Black Friday savings I made this year, and I am happy about this last-minute sale announcement.
They didn't run a ZEN discount at the same time.
EDIT: And I';d wager it has less to do with impending doom and more to do with PWE getting downgraded today by analysts based on last week's Q3 report. A major firm just reclassified PWE from being a market outperforming stock to being a stock that performs at typical market levels. Basically, longterm investors probably aren't too worried but shortterm investors will dump the stock unless PWE can wow them.
If I bothered to check I could probably find a thread from last year about those two simultaneous sales where people stated it was an indication of Cryptic desperate for money then too.
The Q3 report was nowhere near as damning as news sites are making it out to be; everything is still very much profitable in the PWE portfolio, they just did not meet investor expectations. The main reason the US camp didn't reach it was the extra expenditures for the STO and NW expansions that went live in early Q4 and the Swordsman launch. They expected things in Q4 to be higher than normal based on the Cryptic releases. It's all in the report, people just didn't bother to actually read it beyond what was needed to write their linkbait headlines.
hehe every year a company I get items from I use their software for cgi things has a 95% off black friday sale and sells a bunch of animations and characters and objects off super cheap. Every year I purchase the bundle even if I have some of the stuff inside because its so cheap that its worth it. Having a blow out sale once and awhile is commonplace and in the case of this company 95% off is insane but every year they do it and every year its well worth spending the pennies on the bundle they have assembled. They are not going out of business and have done this for 6 years now lol.
People see what they want to see though lets just say they are making money off the people who refused to pay the high normal prices there are some thrift minded people out there and they lowered the price of their sto items so that "non-whales" will likely purchase too. This is how one does business. So now they have sold something to everyone including the people who refused to purchase at 50 bucks period (nothing wrong with that)
The Mirror Incursion was dropped early - during the second week of the roll-out of DR. This was a step to retain players already frustrated with the sheer number of game-stopping bugs. They have never added a major event like that before, especially without warning.
MI was an attempt to take the 'sting' out of the dilithium nerf.
Same goes for the bonus R&D weekend - hastily added to the schedule.
LaughingTrendy stated this was the most profitable launch per date yesterday. Whether that's spin or truth is immaterial. It seems cryptics goal was in part to reduce the number of F2P that don't pay something. I can surmise the drop in players in queues is a symptom of the changes they have implemented. And before you argue - even i LoR week one there were 500+ players in privates and public queues in the evenings. DR it's less than 100.
They have a new set of issues to deal with. That, and the TRIBBLE-tonne of bugs still to be fixed.
Exactly. I won't be using the Pathfinder for a main ship (and the other two at all), so paying $55 for it wasn't worth it to me. But three ships for $20 (after pooling my resources) with one useful uni console and one a useful ship trait? Different story.
Do people look for negativity in my posts when I'm not suggesting negativity?
There's nothing "damning" about what I said. In fact, I've said throughout this and other threads that PWE has basically just hit a bit of turbulence, not that they're spiraling in flames. It has to be possible to say things are not perfect without saying they're doomed, right?
If anything, that is my biggest frustration with the forums. Not that they're a bastion of negativity (some posters are, sure). It's that either everything is terrible and unrecoverable or everything is better than ever and any blip can be easily handwaved. Can we please have a discussion where people refrain from saying "this is the end" or that "things are fine"? Either conclusion would be highly unlikely, anywhere.
Few things in the world spell doom and endings only happen once, usually. Almost nothing, anywhere in the world, is ever "just fine" either.
And also to be clear, Q2 coupled with Q3 are unlikely to be the result of how STO is run (which is a small part of the big picture, even as a share of U.S. operations). But how STO is run is informed by that larger picture, obviously, or the alternative would be that how STO is run is somehow arbitrarily decided.
I'm trying to EXPLAIN developer behavior as a means of building a negotiation and discussion point. We have to construct a theory of what they're doing and why if they don't share one or we have no reference frame for feedback.
Heh - you just did that exact thing to me. I was just pointing out that most of the negative press about the PWE report was overstated in headlines. I wasn't saying your point was wrong.
Ha! Fair enough. These forums always feel like a phone call with bad reception.
Probably most of the shouting is about the "static" or lack of successful communication between players or between players and developers.
One interesting thing I have seen on some forums is a push towards positivity threads, negativity threads, and general threads, with moderators pushing both posititivity and negativity out of general discussion.
Gushing gets deposited into an all-gushing zone. Bashing gets deposited into an all-bashing zone. Moderators keep them apart and out of general discussion.
Sure, Cryptic is making money today but it is no different that the thousands of other stores doing the same thing.
Yes I am Grand Poobah of snarkilation and often too quick to use the Runic Keyboard of Snarkening.
Except your first statement was "The value of ZEN in STO has never been higher than it is today." which was not qualified by a year, but by an absolute ("never"). The statement right after that was qualified by the year but could be (and was) taken as a separate statement from the first.
Regardless of that, it's been both higher than 180 in 2014 (this summer, 200+ during the STLV announcement) and lower than 150 in 2014 (earlier in the summer/year), so either way it has been worth both more and less than 1. the current sale spike right now, and 2. the more stable price from the last 2 weeks or so.
This spike doesn't even qualify as an anomaly; spikes always happen during sales and announcements of new, shiny, or speculative things and it's gone as low as 50-60 dil per zen in the past and used to be north of 300. DilEx goes down, DilEx goes up, but it always tends to come back to the same numbers if you wait long enough.
*shrug*
Joined January 2009
Which is one of the few areas that Cryptic is relatively consistent in - their "marketing" as far as sales and the like...or when they release things with their production/release schedule. It allows one to speculate on the market, having a decent idea of when things are going to go up or down.
Riiigghhtt... Australian here too, and I'd be amazed if anyone I knew had not heard of Black Friday.
Also, Steam must be DOOOOMED too. They are having a bunch of sales.
Time for a D'angelo letter about exploits?
When was the last time *everything* in the C-Store was 20% off added to a Zen promo?
No need to answer. It was never.
My point was only to try and clarify what the OP was getting at. Cryptic is throwing everything at the players in as rapid a succession as I've seen playing in all these years. With the release of DR seemingly being a step backwards, it appears they are making moves to mitigate the loss of players. I'm not complaining. I'm not saying "doom". I'm just saying they're hurt or they wouldn't be going through such lengths.
Dilithium weekends are scheduled. Bonus mark weekends are scheduled. Sales are scheduled. The rapid push of every tool they have is telling, however. All in all, I'm actually hoping this has a positive outcome. I'm hoping none of these strategies actually have much of an impact and that Cryptic is pushed into a corner to *have* to revert some of the changes DR brought us. That's the only way things like leveling and rewards may see some relief. The Priority One acknowledgements weren't because of kind hearts at Cryptic. The almost assured minimal "tweaks" are because they pushed beyond bounds of reason and made the game punishing for long time players and near impossible for casuals.
Officially Nerfed In Early 2410
is all i cant help but think of, with each and every attempt since dr launch.
i dont think they are hurting. maybe a slight joint ache but not hurting. they jsut dont realize how bad some of us are taking it.
hell I even went back to using a E&B Emulator last night and actually had some fun blowing up badies in a 15 year old space game with zero requests spend money .
Now let us go back to Nov/Dec 2012. On 11/21 they started a 15% Ship sale and a 15% Zen bonus sale. Which lead into a second 15% Zen bonus sale, a Master Key sale, and a Costume sale in December; then going into the Winter Event. Plus all the regular Calender Events - but at that time there were still hourly Events and the like.
The only real difference between 2014 and 2013, and 2012 is that the first sale this year was 20% instead of 15% and it covered everything rather then just Ships and Keys. Not a big deal - at least not in the way many of you are trying to make it seem. There are more things that people want in the C-Store now then there were in 2013 or 2012. In 2012 someone would have laughed at you if you suggested they buy an XP Boost. Now they can be handy in helping you get to 60 if you are a Casual.
I challenge that claim: http://sto-forum.perfectworld.com/showthread.php?t=1312921
A large XP boost grants you up to 10,000 skill points and costs 975 Zen.
You need more than 10 times as many skill points to earn one specialization point or a level once beyond 50.