So - stop buying Zen with Dil and the demand will drop. Simple case of economics. It's the ones that can't (IE have little to no patience) that are driving the price per Zen point up.
Formerly known as Armsman from June 2008 to June 20, 2012 PWE ARC Drone says: "Your STO forum community as you have known it is ended...Display names are irrelevant...Any further sense of community is irrelevant...Resistance is futile...You will be assimilated..."
The dil' exchange fluctuates, Zen for cash is more or leas a constant, if I have been apt to buy Zen for cash, the exchange rate has little to do the cash/Zen price, x Cash still buys x Zen. The higher ship tier price escalation has more of an impact, although the length of time between ships purchases at higher levels balances it out.
So - stop buying Zen with Dil and the demand will drop. Simple case of economics. It's the ones that can't (IE have little to no patience) that are driving the price per Zen point up.
Correct, if you never bought zen for dil again, at any rate, the exchange would go down.
If you waited until it got cheaper, then started buying dil for zen, it wouldn't change, it would go right back up to where it is.
Yes, welcome to supply/demand. That said, it wouldn't just automatically skyrocket to it's highpoint instantly; but it would rise (probably at a steady rate) again. I have to be honest though, I don't know what's driving the price up unless it's anticipation for the AoY Packs appearing in the CStore; but if so wow. Dil <->Zen didn't rise that fast in anticipation of any of the previous expansions - and unless there is a fair amount of new AoY content they haven't spoken about, the AoY Expansion is smaller (in regards to overall content added) then both LoR and DR.
Formerly known as Armsman from June 2008 to June 20, 2012 PWE ARC Drone says: "Your STO forum community as you have known it is ended...Display names are irrelevant...Any further sense of community is irrelevant...Resistance is futile...You will be assimilated..."
Until zen prices get back to what I think is reasonable, I will be trying to play this game without it.
Ditto. And as the Dil/Zen prices skyrocket, I just spend Dil on things like blue and purple doffs that I need for doff missions. So the Dil/Zen Exchange will just have to do without my supply of Dil for the foreseeable future (I haven't bought any Zen for more three weeks now). Let the 1% buy/sell to an increasingly smaller group (which will end up mainly themselves). Just like on the non-Dil/non-Zen Exchange, which I rarely use these days. Why? Because I'm not interested in subsidizing avarice.
Some food for thought: If you Sell Zen at a Certain rate you are Stuck with Buying Zen at that rate or Higher for a extended period of time. This would at least end Buy low sell high Zen Players.
The dil' exchange fluctuates, Zen for cash is more or leas a constant, if I have been apt to buy Zen for cash, the exchange rate has little to do the cash/Zen price, x Cash still buys x Zen. The higher ship tier price escalation has more of an impact, although the length of time between ships purchases at higher levels balances it out.
I hope you are right, and that this is only a fluctuation, not a permanent change. With all due respect, my previous comment really had nothing to do with the cash cost of zen. My feeling is that if a free to play game becomes harder to play for free, then I am less likely to spend cash. When I got my first (and only) tier six ship by converting dil to zen, I felt that this game had proven itself to me as a genuine free to play game. That got me thinking about spending cash. But, that was when the dil cost of zen was a little over 300. Now it's around 420 and climbing faster than I can earn dil. Is this a "bait and switch", a "carrot on a stick"? I don't respect those scenarios and I don't support them with cash. One could argue that the recent dil to zen rate is being controlled by the zen sellers and not by Cryptic. I concede that there is some truth to that logic, but Cryptic must have someone on their payroll who understands economics and how markets work. They know how to steer in game markets, like the dil to zen exchange, by offering specials, running events and putting caps on things like dil per mission and dialy dil refining. The rising cost of zen makes it harder to play for free. That, in turn, motivates me to close my wallet. Either Cryptic needs to fix the dil to zen rate, or I need to find other things to do with my dil and give up on the z store completely.
So - stop buying Zen with Dil and the demand will drop. Simple case of economics. It's the ones that can't (IE have little to no patience) that are driving the price per Zen point up.
Demand is demand. Delay it and it'll still impact the price down the road. You have to be assuming that over the long term people pretty much won't want Zen. Something will come along and as a resource it's not going to be as desirable. That may be true in a limited context (things fluctuate) but you're not going to solve economic problems just by gaming the system. It's an individual investor tactic, not a population-level strategy.
That said, is this an economic problem? No, because dilithium is a proxy for time. The more we earn the less valuable it is, because less time has gone into creating that resource. If you try to fix the market by limiting the dil supply (either directly or through more sinks) the core relationship of time to zen will be the same. People will still want to buy their way around grinding or grind to buy their way around money. This core relationship, which sets the directions in price , will be as it is now. Nothing you do to change how time is monetized through dilithium will change the effort required to by a C-store ship. The intermediate currency will just have higher or lower numbers (affecting the accessibility of things like rep gear and fleet projects), except that you'll have risked gunking up a simple commodity market with an imposed desire to see the "right" price range (for no better reason than that's what you remember it being).
But, that was when the dil cost of zen was a little over 300. Now it's around 420 and climbing faster than I can earn dil.
There's an expansion coming up soon (with lots of publicized C-store additions) and the Crystalline Event just ended (with its usual huge payouts of dil.) The recent price jump a short term shock, not hyper-inflation.
Post edited by duncanidaho11 on
Bipedal mammal and senior Foundry author.
Notable missions: Apex [AEI], Gemini [SSF], Trident [AEI], Evolution's Smile [SSF], Transcendence
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Me thinks its time to change strategy, I can't see them releasing the remaining ships i want this year (T6 Sovereign, Nebula,Vor'cha,Kar'fi,K'Tinga,New Orleans,Steamrunner and Norway classes) so nothing else in the C-Store i want or need everything else such as Lockbox ships, Traits, Kit Modules ect are listable on the exchange. EC grinding time.
stop buying zen with dil ? I wish
To play this game past lvl 40 you either must buy zen or trade for it or wait around until they
have an event that gives away a ship...you like.
by design
any ship worth having requires a bunch of cash/zen
lockbox even more so with a drop rate of less than 1%
you might have to burn through 100+ keys or more to get it
10 keys = 1000 zen or $10 or the ship will cost about $100 worth of ZEN
at least the regular T6 ship only cost $35 still...rediculas
so we grind dil and turn it in for ZEN
unless you have money to burn
Not a record, but still way too high. Nothing to fix it right now. That CE event combined with Zen hoarding for the expansion has caused the spike. Without a starbase like dil sink, it will just keep going up.
The Dil/Zen economy was a stupid concept to begin with.
Oh how I miss the pre-F2P days when Respecs and C-Store ships could be earned with pure In-Game currencies at a FIXED price. Yeah it could be a grind, but at least you always knew "exactly" how much grinding would be required of you at any given time.
"Stop bying Zen" isn't even remotely a valid solution, as it will stifle you unless your willing to cough up huge loads of cash for overpriced respecs and ships, etc.
"If you can't take a little bloody nose, maybe you ought to go back home and crawl under your bed. It's not safe out here. It's wondrous, with treasures to satiate desires both subtle and gross. But it's not for the timid." - Q
"Stop bying Zen" isn't even remotely a valid solution, as it will stifle you unless your willing to cough up huge loads of cash for overpriced respecs and ships, etc.
It's a valid solution, just not realistic. If everyone just stopped trading Dilithim for Zen for one week, people would have to lower prices. Of course, while it's a valid answer, it's not really realistic. You would have to get everyone to agree as one big group to not buy Zen for a week, and yeah.. good luck with that.
stop buying zen with dil ? I wish
To play this game past lvl 40 you either must buy zen or trade for it or wait around until they
have an event that gives away a ship...you like.
That is actually not true. I have a secondary STO account that is strictly free to play. I have a max level KDF captain playing the story missions and a few of the advanced STFs with a free T5 Vor'cha Battlecruiser that I selected when I reached level 40 and a mix of rare and very rare Mk XII gear that can be purchased from the Exchange. Thanks to some AFKers in the recent CCA event, I actually manage to come in 1st place a few times.
I purchased 6 ultra rare Mk VII / MK VIII disruptor beam array [CrtD]x2 [CrtH] [Pen] and 3 ultra rare Mk IX disruptor tactical consoles for relatively low prices of 700k to 1m EC each on the Exchange. I am in the middle of upgrading them, but I will not install them until I get them up to Mk XIV.
The game is not that difficult on normal difficulty. And if you select a good mix of Boff abilities and gear, then it's possible to play some of the Advanced STFs.
"Stop bying Zen" isn't even remotely a valid solution, as it will stifle you unless your willing to cough up huge loads of cash for overpriced respecs and ships, etc.
It's a valid solution, just not realistic. If everyone just stopped trading Dilithim for Zen for one week, people would have to lower prices. Of course, while it's a valid answer, it's not really realistic. You would have to get everyone to agree as one big group to not buy Zen for a week, and yeah.. good luck with that.
You seem to think that people with zen couldn't choose to not sell at a lower price and also wait for your nerve to break.
Hang on guys, I'll go spend a buck of my Real money to buy up a couple days worth of the greasy residue of your playing a game. That'll help bring the rate down!
If a Cryptic game already does it (limit of currency exchange hit causing disadvantages but nothing done about it) in one of their games you can be pretty sure that it will just run it_s course on STO as well.
Anyway, I'm a dil to zen exchanger and the high prize is of course a downer, but there's also not much worth zen I'd want. When AoY hits I'm going to get one costume which, I hope, is 500 zen and then I have enough still for one T6 ship I'm waiting for but it'll probably not arrive this year. Other than that my dil will go into fleet projects and the like
^ Memory Alpha.org is not canon. It's a open wiki with arbitrary rules. Only what can be cited from an episode is. ^
"No. Men do not roar. Women roar. Then they hurl heavy objects... and claw at you." -Worf, son of Mogh
"A filthy, mangy beast, but in its bony breast beat the heart of a warrior" - "faithful" (...) "but ever-ready to follow the call of the wild." - Martok, about a Targ
"That pig smelled horrid. A sweet-sour, extremely pungent odor. I showered and showered, and it took me a week to get rid of it!" - Robert Justman, appreciating Emmy-Lou
So I put up $10 worth of zeni at 420 dil and it seemed to stem the rising tide about 7 minutes.
Afterward I had to find something to do with 420k dilithium and bought pretty much every purple doff I'd unlocked via the tier 4 Doffing rep store. All and all that seemed useful, so maybe I'll put up another $10 tomorrow .
My sense is even if it spikes all the way to 500, what you need more than new sinks is NEW PLAYERS who haven't bought out the entire individual library of dil-based stuff yet...
Anyway, if the dilex does hit 500, and cryptic doesnt raise the cap, it will cause real problems. People won't be able to make honest exchanges of dil/zen, they will be forced to cheat someone or else be cheated themselves.
It's how neverwinter is, its ghastly.
Again, if they increase the cap, then the entire purpose of that cap (to keep some sort of rein on the economy) is pointless.
And yeah, Neverwinter's economy was a disaster last time I played it. Of course, things were exacerbated over there by 1) the auction house running on refined Dil (which means that overzealous dungeon runners/exploiters could get millions of refined in a short time by selling super-duper-epic dungeon items), and 2) by the various expansion "founder" packs coming with piles of refined Dil as well.
Some food for thought: If you Sell Zen at a Certain rate you are Stuck with Buying Zen at that rate or Higher for a extended period of time. This would at least end Buy low sell high Zen Players.
How about...no. Terrible idea is terrible.
I though a good Idea you don't have to buy if you don't need or want Also I'am so tired of seeing my UN-refine Dill just disappear into a bit bucket.
Some food for thought: If you Sell Zen at a Certain rate you are Stuck with Buying Zen at that rate or Higher for a extended period of time. This would at least end Buy low sell high Zen Players.
How about...no. Terrible idea is terrible.
I though a good Idea you don't have to buy if you don't need or want Also I'am so tired of seeing my UN-refine Dill just disappear into a bit bucket.
Hell, not this nonsense again....
Look we get that you are so space rich that you've maxed out your ore quota, but seriously what is the probem? You just need to keep plugging away at that hoard and you'll never need to work ingame again. You literally have enough dilithium plus whatever you earn for anything in the game.
Just accept it and stop trying to get things changed just to solve your personal wealth crisis.
As long as the amount of people wanting to buy "x" amount of Zen for dil' and the amount of suppliers that are willing to supply y amounts of Zen for dil, the price point will always be "higher". The only ways to make the price "lower"is to; reduce "x" quantity demand and "y" availability stays he same, increase "y" availability and "x" quantity demand does not change, or "x" quantity demeand decreases and "y" availibility also increases.
What I have been seeing, is an increase in the amount of behavior that the game/Zen&cash should be played for free/low amounts of dil$, and the amount of behavior of buying Zen to support first groups behavior has not matched the first parties rate of increase.
Of course the amount of dil needed to buy Zen will go up, its called scarcity of a commodity (in this case Zen)! This is EXACTLY how an ECONOMY or and EXCHANGE works!
All this putting blame/pressure/etc. on the Zen suppliers (especially this ignorant calling of them as the 1%, really?), is childish. The suppliers are actually are (or have in the case of lifetime subscribers, have) paid real-life money to this game, to support it, and to suppliment those buyers who do not want to pay cash for Zen.
Honestly, if I was a player that was considering, for the first time, to sell Zen on the exchange, and I was to read on these forums the attitude that the buyers have, I'd not enter the market and let them have to deal with less supply entering the market because of what is passing a "community" hostile attitude.
In fact, I have been a low volume supplier AND buyer in the exchange (maybe 2k-3k in each direction), and I am feeling very little compasion for the prevailing attitude of the buying side of the market right now, its pretty much an attitude of entitlement when there really is little realistic cause to have it.
I also have a guy feeling that many that are portraying the attitude of entitlement are more than capable of putting down $20-30 dollars, once or twice a year, especially during a sale of Zen to suppliment thier own Zen supplly. Just because someone wants cheap Zen does not mean that its someone elses duty to accomodate them.
I buy the vast majority of my own Zen, and do it not only to buy the things I want, I also do it to support the game I play, which also makes it possible for those who dont pay anything to play able to enjoy the game (which I am fine with) but I have a real issue with in turn having players essentially spit on , and call greedy, other players who are offering an avenue for what is litterally no-cash Zen to the very players who spit upon them.
To those buyers, with the feeling of entitlement, I say, see you at 500 because I am sure I am not the only one who will not be adding some of my Zen to the market in exchange for dilithium that I may/may not have an immediate use for. I will just grind dil' for now.
Comments
PWE ARC Drone says: "Your STO forum community as you have known it is ended...Display names are irrelevant...Any further sense of community is irrelevant...Resistance is futile...You will be assimilated..."
The dil' exchange fluctuates, Zen for cash is more or leas a constant, if I have been apt to buy Zen for cash, the exchange rate has little to do the cash/Zen price, x Cash still buys x Zen. The higher ship tier price escalation has more of an impact, although the length of time between ships purchases at higher levels balances it out.
Yes, welcome to supply/demand. That said, it wouldn't just automatically skyrocket to it's highpoint instantly; but it would rise (probably at a steady rate) again. I have to be honest though, I don't know what's driving the price up unless it's anticipation for the AoY Packs appearing in the CStore; but if so wow. Dil <->Zen didn't rise that fast in anticipation of any of the previous expansions - and unless there is a fair amount of new AoY content they haven't spoken about, the AoY Expansion is smaller (in regards to overall content added) then both LoR and DR.
PWE ARC Drone says: "Your STO forum community as you have known it is ended...Display names are irrelevant...Any further sense of community is irrelevant...Resistance is futile...You will be assimilated..."
Ditto. And as the Dil/Zen prices skyrocket, I just spend Dil on things like blue and purple doffs that I need for doff missions. So the Dil/Zen Exchange will just have to do without my supply of Dil for the foreseeable future (I haven't bought any Zen for more three weeks now). Let the 1% buy/sell to an increasingly smaller group (which will end up mainly themselves). Just like on the non-Dil/non-Zen Exchange, which I rarely use these days. Why? Because I'm not interested in subsidizing avarice.
Demand is demand. Delay it and it'll still impact the price down the road. You have to be assuming that over the long term people pretty much won't want Zen. Something will come along and as a resource it's not going to be as desirable. That may be true in a limited context (things fluctuate) but you're not going to solve economic problems just by gaming the system. It's an individual investor tactic, not a population-level strategy.
That said, is this an economic problem? No, because dilithium is a proxy for time. The more we earn the less valuable it is, because less time has gone into creating that resource. If you try to fix the market by limiting the dil supply (either directly or through more sinks) the core relationship of time to zen will be the same. People will still want to buy their way around grinding or grind to buy their way around money. This core relationship, which sets the directions in price , will be as it is now. Nothing you do to change how time is monetized through dilithium will change the effort required to by a C-store ship. The intermediate currency will just have higher or lower numbers (affecting the accessibility of things like rep gear and fleet projects), except that you'll have risked gunking up a simple commodity market with an imposed desire to see the "right" price range (for no better reason than that's what you remember it being).
There's an expansion coming up soon (with lots of publicized C-store additions) and the Crystalline Event just ended (with its usual huge payouts of dil.) The recent price jump a short term shock, not hyper-inflation.
Notable missions: Apex [AEI], Gemini [SSF], Trident [AEI], Evolution's Smile [SSF], Transcendence
Looking for something new to play? I've started building Foundry missions again in visual novel form!
To play this game past lvl 40 you either must buy zen or trade for it or wait around until they
have an event that gives away a ship...you like.
by design
any ship worth having requires a bunch of cash/zen
lockbox even more so with a drop rate of less than 1%
you might have to burn through 100+ keys or more to get it
10 keys = 1000 zen or $10 or the ship will cost about $100 worth of ZEN
at least the regular T6 ship only cost $35 still...rediculas
so we grind dil and turn it in for ZEN
unless you have money to burn
Oh how I miss the pre-F2P days when Respecs and C-Store ships could be earned with pure In-Game currencies at a FIXED price. Yeah it could be a grind, but at least you always knew "exactly" how much grinding would be required of you at any given time.
"Stop bying Zen" isn't even remotely a valid solution, as it will stifle you unless your willing to cough up huge loads of cash for overpriced respecs and ships, etc.
It's a valid solution, just not realistic. If everyone just stopped trading Dilithim for Zen for one week, people would have to lower prices. Of course, while it's a valid answer, it's not really realistic. You would have to get everyone to agree as one big group to not buy Zen for a week, and yeah.. good luck with that.
That is actually not true. I have a secondary STO account that is strictly free to play. I have a max level KDF captain playing the story missions and a few of the advanced STFs with a free T5 Vor'cha Battlecruiser that I selected when I reached level 40 and a mix of rare and very rare Mk XII gear that can be purchased from the Exchange. Thanks to some AFKers in the recent CCA event, I actually manage to come in 1st place a few times.
I purchased 6 ultra rare Mk VII / MK VIII disruptor beam array [CrtD]x2 [CrtH] [Pen] and 3 ultra rare Mk IX disruptor tactical consoles for relatively low prices of 700k to 1m EC each on the Exchange. I am in the middle of upgrading them, but I will not install them until I get them up to Mk XIV.
The game is not that difficult on normal difficulty. And if you select a good mix of Boff abilities and gear, then it's possible to play some of the Advanced STFs.
You seem to think that people with zen couldn't choose to not sell at a lower price and also wait for your nerve to break.
If a Cryptic game already does it (limit of currency exchange hit causing disadvantages but nothing done about it) in one of their games you can be pretty sure that it will just run it_s course on STO as well.
Anyway, I'm a dil to zen exchanger and the high prize is of course a downer, but there's also not much worth zen I'd want. When AoY hits I'm going to get one costume which, I hope, is 500 zen and then I have enough still for one T6 ship I'm waiting for but it'll probably not arrive this year. Other than that my dil will go into fleet projects and the like
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Afterward I had to find something to do with 420k dilithium and bought pretty much every purple doff I'd unlocked via the tier 4 Doffing rep store. All and all that seemed useful, so maybe I'll put up another $10 tomorrow
My sense is even if it spikes all the way to 500, what you need more than new sinks is NEW PLAYERS who haven't bought out the entire individual library of dil-based stuff yet...
Again, if they increase the cap, then the entire purpose of that cap (to keep some sort of rein on the economy) is pointless.
And yeah, Neverwinter's economy was a disaster last time I played it. Of course, things were exacerbated over there by 1) the auction house running on refined Dil (which means that overzealous dungeon runners/exploiters could get millions of refined in a short time by selling super-duper-epic dungeon items), and 2) by the various expansion "founder" packs coming with piles of refined Dil as well.
I though a good Idea you don't have to buy if you don't need or want Also I'am so tired of seeing my UN-refine Dill just disappear into a bit bucket.
Hell, not this nonsense again....
Look we get that you are so space rich that you've maxed out your ore quota, but seriously what is the probem? You just need to keep plugging away at that hoard and you'll never need to work ingame again. You literally have enough dilithium plus whatever you earn for anything in the game.
Just accept it and stop trying to get things changed just to solve your personal wealth crisis.
What I have been seeing, is an increase in the amount of behavior that the game/Zen&cash should be played for free/low amounts of dil$, and the amount of behavior of buying Zen to support first groups behavior has not matched the first parties rate of increase.
Of course the amount of dil needed to buy Zen will go up, its called scarcity of a commodity (in this case Zen)! This is EXACTLY how an ECONOMY or and EXCHANGE works!
All this putting blame/pressure/etc. on the Zen suppliers (especially this ignorant calling of them as the 1%, really?), is childish. The suppliers are actually are (or have in the case of lifetime subscribers, have) paid real-life money to this game, to support it, and to suppliment those buyers who do not want to pay cash for Zen.
Honestly, if I was a player that was considering, for the first time, to sell Zen on the exchange, and I was to read on these forums the attitude that the buyers have, I'd not enter the market and let them have to deal with less supply entering the market because of what is passing a "community" hostile attitude.
In fact, I have been a low volume supplier AND buyer in the exchange (maybe 2k-3k in each direction), and I am feeling very little compasion for the prevailing attitude of the buying side of the market right now, its pretty much an attitude of entitlement when there really is little realistic cause to have it.
I also have a guy feeling that many that are portraying the attitude of entitlement are more than capable of putting down $20-30 dollars, once or twice a year, especially during a sale of Zen to suppliment thier own Zen supplly. Just because someone wants cheap Zen does not mean that its someone elses duty to accomodate them.
I buy the vast majority of my own Zen, and do it not only to buy the things I want, I also do it to support the game I play, which also makes it possible for those who dont pay anything to play able to enjoy the game (which I am fine with) but I have a real issue with in turn having players essentially spit on , and call greedy, other players who are offering an avenue for what is litterally no-cash Zen to the very players who spit upon them.
To those buyers, with the feeling of entitlement, I say, see you at 500 because I am sure I am not the only one who will not be adding some of my Zen to the market in exchange for dilithium that I may/may not have an immediate use for. I will just grind dil' for now.