Still down a significant chunk from what it was when nearing the limit. It's still going to take time for the change to have a lasting effect. Now it's time to set the crosshairs on admiralty and reputation marks/elite marks turn ins. We have so many reps it's easy to literally farm dil from that now for little effort as well. I know that's not going to be popular, but it's just given out like candy far too much.
It doesn't look like it had much, if any, impact on the dil exchange. So why this change happened is anybody's guess.
The day after the nerf went live it was down to around 380 dil per zen. Today it's back up to around 405 dil per zen.
So basically, this change was pretty pointless it seems, though it may have an impact over time.
It's as I feared, earning dilithium has been made more difficult for average players while the major farmers just made a slight adjustment and kept right on keeping on. I wonder now if some of the "good idea" voters would change their mind knowing that, if they could?
Yep. 405 dil per zen earlier.
At the time of posting:
9,399 zen for sale at 409, and over 21k for 410. Looks like it's going back up.
The sell zen tab:
Buy order of 73,725 at 400 dil each. This will probably be cancelled little by little and rebid at higher increments if the sell price doesn't come back down.
Edit: Based on my observations for a while now, it seems somebody wants it to stay around 400. If it does get below that it doesn't last long before going back up over 400.
Buy order of 73,725 at 400 dil each means that if it goes back down to 400, it won't go any lower for a while because that's a lot of zen that has to be sold first before it can be sold at 399 or lower.
I think the pricing I linked to who is online as well to be honest. Yesterday during the day (GMT) it was down near 380 most of the time I was online. If it's gone back up again late at night it's probably when other parts of the world are logged in, perhaps certain areas have more people trying to sell dilithium so the price fluctuates as the come online?
Make of that what you will, I'm pretty sure that when certain countries where these farmers live are online the amount of dilithium being poured into the game increases significantly.
It doesn't look like it had much, if any, impact on the dil exchange. So why this change happened is anybody's guess.
The day after the nerf went live it was down to around 380 dil per zen. Today it's back up to around 405 dil per zen.
So basically, this change was pretty pointless it seems, though it may have an impact over time.
It's as I feared, earning dilithium has been made more difficult for average players while the major farmers just made a slight adjustment and kept right on keeping on
I have strong doubts believing that "average" players can log in every 4 hours to turn in their Contraband.
But maybe I am wrong. I am certainly far from average then, though. During my work days, I have a single 1-4 hour window each time I can play. I can rarely even do more than one cycle of Admirality Tasks.
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^ this is how I suspect the vast majority of casual players run things. They were not logging in every 4 hours to farm contraband anyway and I doubt this change has affected them in the least bit. I would usually only turn in the stuff once a day, unless I'm on a day off and playing for more than 4 hours. Even thrn I rarely did so because let's face it I can run STFs to earn well over 2k dilithium and not worry about some time limit or cooldown.
The only people truly affected by this will be those playing non-stop of those trying to bleed the game dry by running everything to some sort of military schedule to squeeze the most profit from it. Those are not casual players, they are the extreme minority or serious farmers.
^ this is how I suspect the vast majority of casual players run things. They were not logging in every 4 hours to farm contraband anyway and I doubt this change has affected them in the least bit.
I would usually only turn in the stuff once a day, unless I'm on a day off and playing for more than 4 hours. Even thrn I rarely did so because let's face it I can run STFs to earn well over 2k dilithium and not worry about some time limit or cooldown.
The only people truly affected by this will be those playing non-stop of those trying to bleed the game dry by running everything to some sort of military schedule to squeeze the most profit from it. Those are not casual players, they are the extreme minority or serious farmers.
Perhaps it's meant to affect farm bots? My theory is there may have been people with lots of alts that used third-party software to automate logging in and turning in contraband every 4 hours. If that's the case, they were probably gold sellers; trade all that dil they get from bot farming 24/7 into zen, then buy keys with the zen, then sell keys on a website for real money, and/or open lock boxes to get ships to sell for real money.
As I've said before, the change doesn't affect me since I didn't do it every 4 hours anyway. But this^ is about the only thing I could think of that would cause Cryptic to make such a change. There may have been some legit players doing it 3 or more times a day, but I doubt there were enough legit players doing it to cause this change.
@monkeybone13 I have no doubt at all that this is aimed at the intensive farmers, and they are highly likely to be gold sellers. These sites are making money off the game so they'd have to have a big supply chain, the best way would be to farm the heck out of it. Cutting one link of that chain should hopefully cut down the potential of the game to be exploited and kill off some of this sellers. But we will have to see.
@monkeybone13 I have no doubt at all that this is aimed at the intensive farmers, and they are highly likely to be gold sellers.
These sites are making money off the game so they'd have to have a big supply chain, the best way would be to farm the heck out of it.
Cutting one link of that chain should hopefully cut down the potential of the game to be exploited and kill off some of this sellers.
But we will have to see.
You know, I have been getting less gold seller spam messages....
And your point?
I haven't seen a single gold seller spam message myself for a while. I use to see at least 1 or 2 every time I went to the Beta quadrant sector space. But this doesn't mean they aren't still around. They could be exploiting the game quietly in some way.
But it doesn't really matter if they were gold sellers bot farming or not. The thing is Cryptic felt the need to make this change and it was probably due to people taking advantage of the system in one way or another. I'm sure it's not something they just suddenly decided to do without reason.
Yeah, I recall seeing a post stating that the exchanged rate drop 50 points within a couple of hours of the Tribble notes release with the nerf to contraband. Later within that same day I saw the exchange rate as low as 383:1 when I got home from work.
The exchange rate recovered a bit over the weekend to around 425:1, but after the nerf was released on Holodeck the rate dropped into the 380:1 to 390:1 range again. Overall, not too big of a deal for me since I do not have the time to max out Dil on all my captains anyway.
it really doesn't matter how much dilithium can be gathered in the game, the refine rate is still the same. So no matter how much is made, it's still going to take that same amount of time to refine the 8000 per day. This change is really pointless when you think about it.
Farmers will always find a way to game the system, the exchange rate will stay the same. Cryptic allowed this much dilithium into the market, and we got used to it as players. Now they're regretting it, and with all of the things that require dilithium in game, it's the players that use it for Fleets, for upgrades and for the occasional purchase that are going to be affected by this, not the farmers.
The only way to cut back on the farmers and not cause players any further stress is to make Dil less of a requirement in game. Which isn't going to happen, because you need time and resource sinks in any game.
Speaking for myself, it has become more difficult to play multiple main characters.
I usually play one character each day and i used to turn in contraband to let my other characters get the daily dilithium.
Usually got 3-4 turnover each day. Together with a single day active play each week that was sufficient to maintain dilithium on each character.
Now the regular dilithium income has been diminished it will become more difficult to play multiple characters.
Currently my chars aren't affected for the daily refine, but it is a matter of time before that happens.
I hope the adjustment is adjusted to 8 or 12 hours.
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it really doesn't matter how much dilithium can be gathered in the game, the refine rate is still the same. So no matter how much is made, it's still going to take that same amount of time to refine the 8000 per day. This change is really pointless when you think about it.
Yeah, but the presumption is that most people do no collect 8k Dil per day to refine. Since the contraband nerf more or less limits people to only collect Dil from the Contraband Doff mission once (2k Dil) in any given span of 24 hours compared to 6 times (12k Dil) within the same time period, it effectively leads to the perception that accumulating Dil will be more difficult.
Similar to how the futures market can have an immediate impact on the cost of commodities based on the perception of any particular shortages / abundance as a result of geo-political events or new discoveries. The commodities themselves can have an effect on cost to produce finished products.
Yeah, I recall seeing a post stating that the exchanged rate drop 50 points within a couple of hours of the Tribble notes release with the nerf to contraband. Later within that same day I saw the exchange rate as low as 383:1 when I got home from work.
The exchange rate recovered a bit over the weekend to around 425:1, but after the nerf was released on Holodeck the rate dropped into the 380:1 to 390:1 range again. Overall, not too big of a deal for me since I do not have the time to max out Dil on all my captains anyway.
Actually it seemed to drop about 50 points in a day. I saw it around 351 one night, but within a couple hours it was back at 400. Then the next day it was around 425-430.
So it didn't crash. It just had a slight hiccup. As someone else pointed out, the price was steadily coming down from 480 before the change to the doff assignment went to tribble. I think it was hovering around the 430 range when the tribble patch hit.
I think they could go further and allow unrefined Dilithium to be used for Fleet projects. In no way will that change the Dil/Zen exchange, in fact it would only benefit the Fleets that seriously need upgrades.
Reducing the Refinement limit just means the Dil farmers will create more alts- and making it account-based will just mean they'll create more accounts. It's a F2P game, which means they can virtually create an unlimited amount of accounts/alts already. Unless they take more serious steps to reduce the ability to do so, any changes they make to the refinement system won't make a damn bit of difference.
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Unnecessary. It will annoy a lot of people, but I don't believe it will have a huge impact on the exchange rate as the refining cap will remain the same. As a contraband farmer myself I can say this change won't affect me.
Refine cap doesn't even matter when someone has 20 - 40 alts contraband farming.
8000x40 = 320 000 refined dil per day
Dil Exchange @ 450 Dil per Zen =
711 Zen per day for these leeches.
All that dil you refined can be placed on the dil/Zen Ex and then consolidated to one character.
Refine cap has nothing to do with it.
Personally, I'm elated that they're finally shutting down these serial contraband farmers.
They're destroying the exchange rate for regular, non exploitative players.
Sorry but they should've done this years ago.
Agreed with this.
For those who want dilithium, there are still plenty of sources to get it from. If you are prepared to do something for it of course.
Personally I think it's absurd that some Doff assignment pays out more dilithium than an elite queue. Playing the game should always be more rewarding than some assignment and this is therefore a good change.
I think they could go further and allow unrefined Dilithium to be used for Fleet projects. In no way will that change the Dil/Zen exchange, in fact it would only benefit the Fleets that seriously need upgrades.
Yeah this would be a nice change. And we should also get more fleet credits for refined dilithium. The current exchange rate doesn't represent the value of dilithium, not at all.
I think it's pretty ridiculous that a resource (marks) that has no other purpose than being donated pays out 50 times (!) more than a resource that is used for obtaining literally everything in the game.
I think they could go further and allow unrefined Dilithium to be used for Fleet projects. In no way will that change the Dil/Zen exchange, in fact it would only benefit the Fleets that seriously need upgrades.
Yeah this would be a nice change. And we should also get more fleet credits for refined dilithium. The current exchange rate doesn't represent the value of dilithium, not at all.
I think it's pretty ridiculous that a resource (marks) that has no other purpose than being donated pays out 50 times (!) more than a resource that is used for obtaining literally everything in the game.
Yeah, I'm not quite sure why "fleet marks" really even exist, given that there's relatively little they can be used for in comparison to Fleet Credits and other forms of currency in game. I really think they need to introduce something to actually DO with the Fleet Marks, such as a conversion ratio to Fleet Credits for the purchase of ships or gear (say 1 Mark to 100 credits or something) so that it's actually more meaningful and/or a reason to obtain them. Perhaps they should replace the Dil requirement for Fleet gear so that it utilizes Marks instead (combo Marks/Credits)?
I also agree that the "refined" versus "unrefined" should be different in value- or that they should just make it all unrefined for Fleet projects- and perhaps intro a new Dil Refinery to utilize this in tandem with the Dil Mine?
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Being critical doesn't take skill. Being constructively critical- which is providing alternative solutions or suggestions to a demonstrated problem, however, does.
God forbid you want to actually consolidate your earnings after hours of grinding for the items.
Yeah let's pretend there is any effort involved in contraband farming *rolleyes-
I wouldn't mind if they increased dilithium rewards for missions, especially the ones that take longer or if they reduced cooldowns on other stuff like the Dyson battlezone, but clicking some assignments, transferring a few maps and getting a ridiculously high pay out - especially when compared to playing the actual game content - just isn't right in my opinion.
Back up to 430 and climbing. This did nothing but hurt regular players.
The fact is, it's damned hard to get enough dilithium to play the game for a small number of characters without using alts to grind dil with --and those alts grinding for us in the background allow us to, you know, actually play what we want and enjoy it rather than having to do certain things over and over like it's a damned job.
There is currently a 20% off Services and 15% off Master Key sale going on.
They just boosted demand for Zen.
At least there is some good news for those people buying Master Keys from the Exchange. The price of Master Key went down. I listed Key on the Exchange for 6.1m EC, they all sold overnight / while I was at work. But currently keys are selling for 5.5m EC so a little more than a 10% price drop is not shabby.
Now you see why this was changed when it was. A predicted Week Long Global Event providing up to (which was actually hit) a 75% increase in Dilithium Rewards.
Each turn in would award 3,500 Dilithium. Over the course of a week @6 turn-ins a day that is 147,000 Dilithium. With the change it is max 28,000 @every 20 hours.
Forget that this was about the EC, it was always about the Dilithium.
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Still limits on casuals. I could hit cap just by leveling fed alts to 53 then grind free dil from sol all day via admiralty using my giant account unlock collection.
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Comments
Yep. 405 dil per zen earlier.
At the time of posting:
9,399 zen for sale at 409, and over 21k for 410. Looks like it's going back up.
The sell zen tab:
Buy order of 73,725 at 400 dil each. This will probably be cancelled little by little and rebid at higher increments if the sell price doesn't come back down.
Edit: Based on my observations for a while now, it seems somebody wants it to stay around 400. If it does get below that it doesn't last long before going back up over 400.
Buy order of 73,725 at 400 dil each means that if it goes back down to 400, it won't go any lower for a while because that's a lot of zen that has to be sold first before it can be sold at 399 or lower.
Make of that what you will, I'm pretty sure that when certain countries where these farmers live are online the amount of dilithium being poured into the game increases significantly.
But maybe I am wrong. I am certainly far from average then, though. During my work days, I have a single 1-4 hour window each time I can play. I can rarely even do more than one cycle of Admirality Tasks.
I would usually only turn in the stuff once a day, unless I'm on a day off and playing for more than 4 hours. Even thrn I rarely did so because let's face it I can run STFs to earn well over 2k dilithium and not worry about some time limit or cooldown.
The only people truly affected by this will be those playing non-stop of those trying to bleed the game dry by running everything to some sort of military schedule to squeeze the most profit from it. Those are not casual players, they are the extreme minority or serious farmers.
Perhaps it's meant to affect farm bots? My theory is there may have been people with lots of alts that used third-party software to automate logging in and turning in contraband every 4 hours. If that's the case, they were probably gold sellers; trade all that dil they get from bot farming 24/7 into zen, then buy keys with the zen, then sell keys on a website for real money, and/or open lock boxes to get ships to sell for real money.
As I've said before, the change doesn't affect me since I didn't do it every 4 hours anyway. But this^ is about the only thing I could think of that would cause Cryptic to make such a change. There may have been some legit players doing it 3 or more times a day, but I doubt there were enough legit players doing it to cause this change.
These sites are making money off the game so they'd have to have a big supply chain, the best way would be to farm the heck out of it.
Cutting one link of that chain should hopefully cut down the potential of the game to be exploited and kill off some of this sellers.
But we will have to see.
And your point?
I haven't seen a single gold seller spam message myself for a while. I use to see at least 1 or 2 every time I went to the Beta quadrant sector space. But this doesn't mean they aren't still around. They could be exploiting the game quietly in some way.
But it doesn't really matter if they were gold sellers bot farming or not. The thing is Cryptic felt the need to make this change and it was probably due to people taking advantage of the system in one way or another. I'm sure it's not something they just suddenly decided to do without reason.
The exchange rate has been steadily declining since the AOY event. It was accelerated by the upgrade weekend.
At very best, the Contraband change was one of many factors, to say it was the soul cause is ridiculous.
The exchange rate recovered a bit over the weekend to around 425:1, but after the nerf was released on Holodeck the rate dropped into the 380:1 to 390:1 range again. Overall, not too big of a deal for me since I do not have the time to max out Dil on all my captains anyway.
Farmers will always find a way to game the system, the exchange rate will stay the same. Cryptic allowed this much dilithium into the market, and we got used to it as players. Now they're regretting it, and with all of the things that require dilithium in game, it's the players that use it for Fleets, for upgrades and for the occasional purchase that are going to be affected by this, not the farmers.
The only way to cut back on the farmers and not cause players any further stress is to make Dil less of a requirement in game. Which isn't going to happen, because you need time and resource sinks in any game.
I usually play one character each day and i used to turn in contraband to let my other characters get the daily dilithium.
Usually got 3-4 turnover each day. Together with a single day active play each week that was sufficient to maintain dilithium on each character.
Now the regular dilithium income has been diminished it will become more difficult to play multiple characters.
Currently my chars aren't affected for the daily refine, but it is a matter of time before that happens.
I hope the adjustment is adjusted to 8 or 12 hours.
Yeah, but the presumption is that most people do no collect 8k Dil per day to refine. Since the contraband nerf more or less limits people to only collect Dil from the Contraband Doff mission once (2k Dil) in any given span of 24 hours compared to 6 times (12k Dil) within the same time period, it effectively leads to the perception that accumulating Dil will be more difficult.
Similar to how the futures market can have an immediate impact on the cost of commodities based on the perception of any particular shortages / abundance as a result of geo-political events or new discoveries. The commodities themselves can have an effect on cost to produce finished products.
Actually it seemed to drop about 50 points in a day. I saw it around 351 one night, but within a couple hours it was back at 400. Then the next day it was around 425-430.
So it didn't crash. It just had a slight hiccup. As someone else pointed out, the price was steadily coming down from 480 before the change to the doff assignment went to tribble. I think it was hovering around the 430 range when the tribble patch hit.
Reducing the Refinement limit just means the Dil farmers will create more alts- and making it account-based will just mean they'll create more accounts. It's a F2P game, which means they can virtually create an unlimited amount of accounts/alts already. Unless they take more serious steps to reduce the ability to do so, any changes they make to the refinement system won't make a damn bit of difference.
Being critical doesn't take skill. Being constructively critical- which is providing alternative solutions or suggestions to a demonstrated problem, however, does.
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Agreed with this.
For those who want dilithium, there are still plenty of sources to get it from. If you are prepared to do something for it of course.
Personally I think it's absurd that some Doff assignment pays out more dilithium than an elite queue. Playing the game should always be more rewarding than some assignment and this is therefore a good change.
Yeah this would be a nice change. And we should also get more fleet credits for refined dilithium. The current exchange rate doesn't represent the value of dilithium, not at all.
I think it's pretty ridiculous that a resource (marks) that has no other purpose than being donated pays out 50 times (!) more than a resource that is used for obtaining literally everything in the game.
Yeah, I'm not quite sure why "fleet marks" really even exist, given that there's relatively little they can be used for in comparison to Fleet Credits and other forms of currency in game. I really think they need to introduce something to actually DO with the Fleet Marks, such as a conversion ratio to Fleet Credits for the purchase of ships or gear (say 1 Mark to 100 credits or something) so that it's actually more meaningful and/or a reason to obtain them. Perhaps they should replace the Dil requirement for Fleet gear so that it utilizes Marks instead (combo Marks/Credits)?
I also agree that the "refined" versus "unrefined" should be different in value- or that they should just make it all unrefined for Fleet projects- and perhaps intro a new Dil Refinery to utilize this in tandem with the Dil Mine?
Being critical doesn't take skill. Being constructively critical- which is providing alternative solutions or suggestions to a demonstrated problem, however, does.
Yeah let's pretend there is any effort involved in contraband farming *rolleyes-
I wouldn't mind if they increased dilithium rewards for missions, especially the ones that take longer or if they reduced cooldowns on other stuff like the Dyson battlezone, but clicking some assignments, transferring a few maps and getting a ridiculously high pay out - especially when compared to playing the actual game content - just isn't right in my opinion.
Good thing they fixed it.
There is currently a 20% off Services and 15% off Master Key sale going on.
They just boosted demand for Zen.
At least there is some good news for those people buying Master Keys from the Exchange. The price of Master Key went down. I listed Key on the Exchange for 6.1m EC, they all sold overnight / while I was at work. But currently keys are selling for 5.5m EC so a little more than a 10% price drop is not shabby.
Each turn in would award 3,500 Dilithium. Over the course of a week @6 turn-ins a day that is 147,000 Dilithium. With the change it is max 28,000 @every 20 hours.
Forget that this was about the EC, it was always about the Dilithium.
l don't know.
l really don't know what l'm about to say, except l have a feeling about it.
That l must repeat the words that come without my knowledge.'
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