Delta rising is the best expansion ever and the players love it.
There was no excessive grinding, any nerfs or un-fair prices to upgrading. What, only a few million dil for some copy-paste text in a 15 min notepad job?
But yeah keep whaling it and do some more neckbeard jokes about the dead queues and your beloved developers hiding from the community in shame.
I hope the dil rate keeps going up, I hope they nerf leveling exp and rewards constantly, I want to seem them continue on the same path and ruin the game for everyone who isn't a straight up desperate star trek fanatic
Typically incoherent ramblings as always I see... At least you're consistent...
The total nerf of everything with DR is a fact, right?
They nerfed rewards, passives, dil, EC but also leveling exp - is it co-herent so far?
Then came "upgrading", in where LoR gave you 13 ships with animations, models and assets, DR was a 15 copy-paste job, that is to say text only, with absolutely zero effort put into it.
The cost of which was several million dil in comparison to the first expansion that was free for something that is essentially the emperor's new clothes - upgrading doesn't exist, it isn't something, it isn't anything.
Upgrading is some numbers moved around in notepad. There are no animations, no models, no assets and no work put into it. Zero.
In so far as the developer behind it even used those exact words himself "it wasn't just copy-pasting text"... we had to actually think about what we were pasting!!!1
So, what that meant was, only neckbeard fanatics left now, those who have to play and will pay 500$ a month happily, 300$ if they are upset.
Then what I say is, do your neckbeard jokes about the dead queues and the quality of the game, the numbers don't lie but the weak gameplay can't be lied away either.
I want all prices to go up, including the dil exchange, so everyone can see what happens Larry
The total nerf of everything with DR is a fact, right?
They nerfed rewards, passives, dil, EC but also leveling exp - is it co-herent so far?
Then came "upgrading", in where LoR gave you 13 ships with animations, models and assets, DR was a 15 copy-paste job, that is to say text only, with absolutely zero effort put into it.
The cost of which was several million dil in comparison to the first expansion that was free for something that is essentially the emperor's new clothes - upgrading doesn't exist, it isn't something, it isn't anything.
Upgrading is some numbers moved around in notepad. There are no animations, no models, no assets and no work put into it. Zero.
In so far as the developer behind it even used those exact words himself "it wasn't just copy-pasting text"... we had to actually think about what we were pasting!!!1
So, what that meant was, only neckbeard fanatics left now, those who have to play and will pay 500$ a month happily, 300$ if they are upset.
Then what I say is, do your neckbeard jokes about the dead queues and the quality of the game, the numbers don't lie but the weak gameplay can't be lied away either.
I want all prices to go up, including the dil exchange, so everyone can see what happens Larry
Do you still play this game?
I ask because you are by far the loudest voice on the forums bashing the game. Don't get me wrong I.don't necessarily disagree with anything you've said, I'm just curious.
They nerfed rewards, passives, dil, EC but also leveling exp - is it co-herent so far?
To be fair to Cryptic, they boosted the XP from queues and added Dil to Mission rewards recently. So not exactly a nerf, but not quite the boost everyone has hoped for. Still, better than before; where running queues gave TRIBBLE XP no matter how new or old it was and Dil was only available from mining and Doffing religiously.
Maybe not very noticeable for those already sitting on piles of it, but DR players have a ticket to easy street upgrading since they have the event-only extra Dil bonus. And will not have much need to buy Dilithium.
Complaining about the cost on a player run and driven market then expect pwe to do something about it. please tell me more.
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"We finally have reasonable dilithium exchange rates!" was my reaction on hearing this news. It makes sense though, dilithium is in high demand again with all the new toons.
The new toons pretty much supply their own dilithium needs... and then some extra.
The smart play, unless I miss my guess, will be to stockpile dilithium and then use crafting to get that stockpile earning for you in the weapons trade.
What was the lowest price for ZEN? So I have a better understanding of the Dilithium dilemma.
The lowest I can remember it ever going is 85. The floor is 25 and the ceiling is 500. It was at 100 for ages, then it moved up to 120-30 range, then up to 160s. This recent jump though to the low 200s is quite something. It will peter out of course and prices will settle again.
Cheers from Antonio Valerio Cortez III, Half-Celestial Archduke of the Free Marches Confederacy.
you mean everone whining about upgrade costs were over-reacting? on this forum? naaaawww
no way that could happen
More like people realized how insanely expensive getting all their gear to epic would be, and most everyone gave up and choose to use their dil for other things.
A few things I've thought about concerning the recent upswing in Dilithium costs for Zen.
- Since there are now so many more ways to acquire it ingame, does this devalue Dilithium?
- If, as some have alleged, Cryptic is involved in tinkering with the Dilithium Exchange, wouldn't they tend to leave it a a fixed price which benefits selling Zen purchases? Such as a Ratio of 1,000 Dilithium to 1 Zen?
- Since the Dilithium Exchange prices appear to fluctuate up and down based upon the availability of Dilithium in game, is this a sign of normal market processes and pressures?
- Do those who have an interest in complaining about the cost of Zen on the Exchange have difficulties acquiring Dilithium?
A six year old boy and his starship. Living the dream.
Clearly you weren't around when it was 400+ in Season 6...
But was it Zen at that point? -- at some point it was converted to Zen. The monetary unit we has was exchanged at a rate of 1.25, but I dont remember which way. Maybe that was later on.
- If, as some have alleged, Cryptic is involved in tinkering with the Dilithium Exchange, wouldn't they tend to leave it a a fixed price which benefits selling Zen purchases? Such as a Ratio of 1,000 Dilithium to 1 Zen?
I'm going to say no because you still need for there to be a supply of dilithium to make selling Zen viable. If you fix the price at 1k too few people will farm dilithium for the purpose of selling it to offset the increase of dilithium buyers that comes with the increase in zen's perceived value against dilithium. The end result would end up being a dilithium shortage that discourages players to buy.
Now you can alleviate that by having the game's own servers generate the dilithium to fulfill demand, tinfoil hats on, they could be doing that already and we would have no way of knowing. But then you get to problem 2, if you manually set a high exchange price, or artificially flood the market with dilithium, you reduce the amount of real money people need to spend to accomplish their dilithium based goals. And dilithium is a goal based currency like any others, people only need dilithium until they have enough. If the current exchange price is 250/1, rather than 1000/1, then I have to spend 4 times the real world cash to accomplish my goals, if I was hypothetically willing to do that at 250 as well as 1000, then to recoupe the loss of income the higher rate of exchange would need to draw in 3 more customers. And even if it does that, they've given away 4 times as much product just to get the same amount of money.
These things tend to operate on a bell curve where the optimal point of return is not at either extreme. So don't take the lack of extreme market manipulation to be evidence that there is no market manipulation.
The lowest I can remember it ever going is 85. The floor is 25 and the ceiling is 500. It was at 100 for ages, then it moved up to 120-30 range, then up to 160s. This recent jump though to the low 200s is quite something. It will peter out of course and prices will settle again.
Don't count on it any time soon. They have yet to announce the piloting ships. That will put another 20 points pressure on zen.
Well, obviously it's being influenced by the developers. :rolleyes:
It's not rocket science. They just did a Crystalline Entity event, which pushes a glut of dilithium into the system. Greater supply of dil, same supply of zen, zen price rises. Then they release a three-pack of ships that people have been asking for for literally years, and put out incentives to make more toons, which for silver players (maybe golds, too) means buying character slots and sometimes species, meaning people want zen to pay for all these new goodies. Greater demand for zen, zen price rises.
Macroeconomics in action, ladies and germs.
... it isn't actually completely player-run and -driven. If the dil/zen exchange is the US economy, Cryptic is kinda like the Federal Reserve (except the Fed doesn't set the prices of goods).
"Great War! / And I cannot take more! / Great tour! / I keep on marching on / I play the great score / There will be no encore / Great War! / The War to End All Wars"
— Sabaton, "Great War"
It's supply vs demand. Really simple economics. Get used to it. It's not a dev conspiracy or anything.
This. For all the dil added to the game, it hasn't matched that less players are refining less dil overall so it becomes more rare and the price goes up. Econ 101.
The dil sinks *are* atrocious vs. time played and the addition of dil was meant to try and mitigate players leaving. I have news for you folks...adding *another* huge dil sink like a fleet holding will cause the exchange rate to climb even further.
On the positive side for Cryptic and the players, costs going to 230+ will keep money rolling into STO as players have the ability to get great rates on buying dil with cash. The only players this actually hurts are those who haven't been spending any real cash on the game.
But was it Zen at that point? -- at some point it was converted to Zen. The monetary unit we has was exchanged at a rate of 1.25, but I dont remember which way. Maybe that was later on.
That was season 5. The highest I remember then was 450 dil per CP. Season 6 fleet starbases hit and it plummeted. The point im making is, whether its CP or Zen, the exchange used to be much less grind-friendly than it is now.
I wanted to exchange some dil that i been saving went and checked the prices and almost needed a change of drawers cause those prices almost made me TRIBBLE my pants.
So, if dil has a higher price in zen, then each dil will be worth more zen, and each zen will be worth less dil.
For example, if one dil is worth 1/200 zen now, (1z/200dil), and in future, when higher demand and lower supply has raised the price of dil, it becomes worth 1/100z (1z/100dil), then the price of dil will have gone up, with 1z only buying 100 dil instead of 200.
Your mistake was taking the supply and demand for dil and thinking it directly affected the price of zen instead of the price of dil.
The dilex rate isn't the price of dil, it is the price of zen. It is the inverse of the price of dil.
So, if the price of dil goes up, the price of zen goes down. And since the dilex is the price of zen, the dilex goes down.
Told ya it was somewhere good
Doh! Good point.
No, my mistake was forgetting that it isn't just a straight dil price, it's a dil/zen price. Two sides of a coin as it were.
Clearly you weren't around when it was 400+ in Season 6...
It was only that high right after the initial conversion from C-Points to Zen in June '12, when they set the starting price at the max and it rapidly went down in the next week, until balancing out around the 100 Zen mark, rising and dropping a bit, but never moving above 150 Dil/Zen.
... it isn't actually completely player-run and -driven. If the dil/zen exchange is the US economy, Cryptic is kinda like the Federal Reserve (except the Fed doesn't set the prices of goods).
More like cryptic is the stock market exchange. They simply sit there and look pretty while players drive prices up and down.
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It really is just a simple supply & demand thing going on.
We've had month after month of dilithium being poured into the game through event after event after event so the market is flooded with the stuff. Plus most existing players are running out of things to upgrade so the R&D usage of dilithium is dropping.
Then you've had a lot of shiny new toys released to the C-Store (Command ships, iconic ships etc).
Basically there's too many people trying to buy too little zen so the demand for zen has come up and up and up.
If they stopped releasing ships for the rest of the year or introduced a dilithium sink in-game like a fleet holding that would suck the dilithium out of the market.
Simple really: Too much dilithium = price of Zen rises.
I don't know where you studied economics, but higher demand and/or lower supply = higher prices not lower.
Yeah. Some people seem to be incapable of understanding supply-side economics. The best way for dilex prices to drop (meaning less Zen for cash but more Zen per refined dil) is to lower the costs of the dil sinks which Cryptic is clearly unwilling to do. The addition of dil through different means might have stemmed the higher costs (per refined dil) had so many players not moved on to other games.
The bottom line here is the exchange rate for Zen from refinined dil is going to continue to rise and new ships/fleet sinks will only exacerbate the issue at this point. Again, this is actually a boon for paying players, ones who buy Zen and convert to dil. It's going to make it increasingly difficult for those who are not paying and simply refining dil to get Zen. I'm not actually opposed to that happening at all as I can get a nice amount of dil from Zen for 10-20 dollars should I ever decide to spend money on the game again.
I see a lot of talk about when the game went f2p and dil was introduced around 360+. The *reason* for those costs was there was so little in-game dil when the exchange went up and it took time to balance out and for players to start accumulating enough dil to drive the prices down. If there was too much dil in the game, the costs per Zen would be going down, not up and the return rate on buying Zen with cash wouldn't be worth doing.
Simply put, there is either not enough players refining dil as there were or the sinks have outweighed the ability to get enough dil refined to cover it all for the majority of players, hence the sensation of scarcity of the resource and a worsening exchange rate from converting dil gotten by playing for free. It's likely some combination of aspects.
My personal perception is that they have fewer players now (name the reason) and there are far too many high-priced sinks. For now, it's not horrible but I'll wait and see if the dilex continues to rise. In the meantime, Cryptic has designed their sinks and game-gotten dil in a way that will "encourage" people to just outright buy Zen and excahgne for dil, which makes them cash. However, there comes a point where it becomes a runaway train if they can't expand the playerbase beyond what it currently is.
Adding a new dil sink will increase demand for dil and decrease the supply of dil on the dilex.
This will lead to a lower dilex, just exactly like it really did in the past.
This is such a completely flawed perception of how the dil exchange works it's hard to know how to counter your point. The "demand" for dil is created by sinks as you've said but the *supply* of said dil is determined by how many players are actually refining it, i.e. playing STO. I'm sorry to say that a lower dilex in the past had far more to do with how many people were playing than the introduction of any sinks.
It's a balancing act that relies on several factors and one of the factors is a complete unknow to the players and that is the number of people playing/refining dil. If they went from 100k players to 50k (just as an example) and added all sorts of sinks, the price of Zen would rise exponentially and players who weren't putting cash into the game would find it increasingly difficult to meet the requirements of the new sinks without dropping cash.
With all that I've posted on this thread, let me be clear of one thing. Cryptic isn't horsing around with the actual exchange rates. What they *are* doing is manipulating the market through sinks vs. availability of free dilithium, which is their right and their obligation to do. They control the market but not the rate of exchange. *Through* creating that market, they can certainly influence the exchange rates but it ultimately depends on how many people play and refine dil for whatever sinks they deem worthy. The static refinement rate allows them to have a measure of the changes they make in the game and is why it will likely never, ever be increased.
TL;DR
Sinks are only a part of the equation to exchange rates. How many people are playing/refining has a far, far greater impact when it's all said and done.
Comments
Typically incoherent ramblings as always I see... At least you're consistent...
I was Klingon before Klingon was cool.
The total nerf of everything with DR is a fact, right?
They nerfed rewards, passives, dil, EC but also leveling exp - is it co-herent so far?
Then came "upgrading", in where LoR gave you 13 ships with animations, models and assets, DR was a 15 copy-paste job, that is to say text only, with absolutely zero effort put into it.
The cost of which was several million dil in comparison to the first expansion that was free for something that is essentially the emperor's new clothes - upgrading doesn't exist, it isn't something, it isn't anything.
Upgrading is some numbers moved around in notepad. There are no animations, no models, no assets and no work put into it. Zero.
In so far as the developer behind it even used those exact words himself "it wasn't just copy-pasting text"... we had to actually think about what we were pasting!!!1
So, what that meant was, only neckbeard fanatics left now, those who have to play and will pay 500$ a month happily, 300$ if they are upset.
Then what I say is, do your neckbeard jokes about the dead queues and the quality of the game, the numbers don't lie but the weak gameplay can't be lied away either.
I want all prices to go up, including the dil exchange, so everyone can see what happens Larry
Do you still play this game?
I ask because you are by far the loudest voice on the forums bashing the game. Don't get me wrong I.don't necessarily disagree with anything you've said, I'm just curious.
Maybe not very noticeable for those already sitting on piles of it, but DR players have a ticket to easy street upgrading since they have the event-only extra Dil bonus. And will not have much need to buy Dilithium.
I've seen it in the 80s. I don't watch it all that closely though.
doesnt any1 remember when it was 550+??
Star Trek Battles member. Want to roll with a good group of people regardless of fleets and not have to worry about DPS while doing STFs? Come join the channel and join in the fun!
http://forum.arcgames.com/startrekonline/discussion/1145998/star-trek-battles-channel-got-canon/p1
The new toons pretty much supply their own dilithium needs... and then some extra.
The smart play, unless I miss my guess, will be to stockpile dilithium and then use crafting to get that stockpile earning for you in the weapons trade.
The lowest I can remember it ever going is 85. The floor is 25 and the ceiling is 500. It was at 100 for ages, then it moved up to 120-30 range, then up to 160s. This recent jump though to the low 200s is quite something. It will peter out of course and prices will settle again.
More like people realized how insanely expensive getting all their gear to epic would be, and most everyone gave up and choose to use their dil for other things.
- Since there are now so many more ways to acquire it ingame, does this devalue Dilithium?
- If, as some have alleged, Cryptic is involved in tinkering with the Dilithium Exchange, wouldn't they tend to leave it a a fixed price which benefits selling Zen purchases? Such as a Ratio of 1,000 Dilithium to 1 Zen?
- Since the Dilithium Exchange prices appear to fluctuate up and down based upon the availability of Dilithium in game, is this a sign of normal market processes and pressures?
- Do those who have an interest in complaining about the cost of Zen on the Exchange have difficulties acquiring Dilithium?
Clearly you weren't around when it was 400+ in Season 6...
"Let them eat static!"
But was it Zen at that point? -- at some point it was converted to Zen. The monetary unit we has was exchanged at a rate of 1.25, but I dont remember which way. Maybe that was later on.
I'm going to say no because you still need for there to be a supply of dilithium to make selling Zen viable. If you fix the price at 1k too few people will farm dilithium for the purpose of selling it to offset the increase of dilithium buyers that comes with the increase in zen's perceived value against dilithium. The end result would end up being a dilithium shortage that discourages players to buy.
Now you can alleviate that by having the game's own servers generate the dilithium to fulfill demand, tinfoil hats on, they could be doing that already and we would have no way of knowing. But then you get to problem 2, if you manually set a high exchange price, or artificially flood the market with dilithium, you reduce the amount of real money people need to spend to accomplish their dilithium based goals. And dilithium is a goal based currency like any others, people only need dilithium until they have enough. If the current exchange price is 250/1, rather than 1000/1, then I have to spend 4 times the real world cash to accomplish my goals, if I was hypothetically willing to do that at 250 as well as 1000, then to recoupe the loss of income the higher rate of exchange would need to draw in 3 more customers. And even if it does that, they've given away 4 times as much product just to get the same amount of money.
These things tend to operate on a bell curve where the optimal point of return is not at either extreme. So don't take the lack of extreme market manipulation to be evidence that there is no market manipulation.
Don't count on it any time soon. They have yet to announce the piloting ships. That will put another 20 points pressure on zen.
— Sabaton, "Great War"
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This. For all the dil added to the game, it hasn't matched that less players are refining less dil overall so it becomes more rare and the price goes up. Econ 101.
The dil sinks *are* atrocious vs. time played and the addition of dil was meant to try and mitigate players leaving. I have news for you folks...adding *another* huge dil sink like a fleet holding will cause the exchange rate to climb even further.
On the positive side for Cryptic and the players, costs going to 230+ will keep money rolling into STO as players have the ability to get great rates on buying dil with cash. The only players this actually hurts are those who haven't been spending any real cash on the game.
So less dil will cause the exchange rate to climb? . . . and more dil makes the exchange climb . . .
I don't know where you studied economics, but higher demand and/or lower supply = higher prices not lower.
That was season 5. The highest I remember then was 450 dil per CP. Season 6 fleet starbases hit and it plummeted. The point im making is, whether its CP or Zen, the exchange used to be much less grind-friendly than it is now.
"Let them eat static!"
Way to inflated right now not even worth it imo
Doh! Good point.
No, my mistake was forgetting that it isn't just a straight dil price, it's a dil/zen price. Two sides of a coin as it were.
So where is "somewhere good"? :P
It was only that high right after the initial conversion from C-Points to Zen in June '12, when they set the starting price at the max and it rapidly went down in the next week, until balancing out around the 100 Zen mark, rising and dropping a bit, but never moving above 150 Dil/Zen.
More like cryptic is the stock market exchange. They simply sit there and look pretty while players drive prices up and down.
Star Trek Battles member. Want to roll with a good group of people regardless of fleets and not have to worry about DPS while doing STFs? Come join the channel and join in the fun!
http://forum.arcgames.com/startrekonline/discussion/1145998/star-trek-battles-channel-got-canon/p1
We've had month after month of dilithium being poured into the game through event after event after event so the market is flooded with the stuff. Plus most existing players are running out of things to upgrade so the R&D usage of dilithium is dropping.
Then you've had a lot of shiny new toys released to the C-Store (Command ships, iconic ships etc).
Basically there's too many people trying to buy too little zen so the demand for zen has come up and up and up.
If they stopped releasing ships for the rest of the year or introduced a dilithium sink in-game like a fleet holding that would suck the dilithium out of the market.
Simple really: Too much dilithium = price of Zen rises.
Yeah. Some people seem to be incapable of understanding supply-side economics. The best way for dilex prices to drop (meaning less Zen for cash but more Zen per refined dil) is to lower the costs of the dil sinks which Cryptic is clearly unwilling to do. The addition of dil through different means might have stemmed the higher costs (per refined dil) had so many players not moved on to other games.
The bottom line here is the exchange rate for Zen from refinined dil is going to continue to rise and new ships/fleet sinks will only exacerbate the issue at this point. Again, this is actually a boon for paying players, ones who buy Zen and convert to dil. It's going to make it increasingly difficult for those who are not paying and simply refining dil to get Zen. I'm not actually opposed to that happening at all as I can get a nice amount of dil from Zen for 10-20 dollars should I ever decide to spend money on the game again.
I see a lot of talk about when the game went f2p and dil was introduced around 360+. The *reason* for those costs was there was so little in-game dil when the exchange went up and it took time to balance out and for players to start accumulating enough dil to drive the prices down. If there was too much dil in the game, the costs per Zen would be going down, not up and the return rate on buying Zen with cash wouldn't be worth doing.
Simply put, there is either not enough players refining dil as there were or the sinks have outweighed the ability to get enough dil refined to cover it all for the majority of players, hence the sensation of scarcity of the resource and a worsening exchange rate from converting dil gotten by playing for free. It's likely some combination of aspects.
My personal perception is that they have fewer players now (name the reason) and there are far too many high-priced sinks. For now, it's not horrible but I'll wait and see if the dilex continues to rise. In the meantime, Cryptic has designed their sinks and game-gotten dil in a way that will "encourage" people to just outright buy Zen and excahgne for dil, which makes them cash. However, there comes a point where it becomes a runaway train if they can't expand the playerbase beyond what it currently is.
This is such a completely flawed perception of how the dil exchange works it's hard to know how to counter your point. The "demand" for dil is created by sinks as you've said but the *supply* of said dil is determined by how many players are actually refining it, i.e. playing STO. I'm sorry to say that a lower dilex in the past had far more to do with how many people were playing than the introduction of any sinks.
It's a balancing act that relies on several factors and one of the factors is a complete unknow to the players and that is the number of people playing/refining dil. If they went from 100k players to 50k (just as an example) and added all sorts of sinks, the price of Zen would rise exponentially and players who weren't putting cash into the game would find it increasingly difficult to meet the requirements of the new sinks without dropping cash.
With all that I've posted on this thread, let me be clear of one thing. Cryptic isn't horsing around with the actual exchange rates. What they *are* doing is manipulating the market through sinks vs. availability of free dilithium, which is their right and their obligation to do. They control the market but not the rate of exchange. *Through* creating that market, they can certainly influence the exchange rates but it ultimately depends on how many people play and refine dil for whatever sinks they deem worthy. The static refinement rate allows them to have a measure of the changes they make in the game and is why it will likely never, ever be increased.
TL;DR
Sinks are only a part of the equation to exchange rates. How many people are playing/refining has a far, far greater impact when it's all said and done.