There's been a ton of talk about the dilithium economy, as well as preventing dilithium exploits. Personally, I don't mind the changes that have been made so far, but there's been a lot of backlash against anything that makes it take longer to earn your daily dilithium.
My question is this: Would you be willing to accept an account-wide daily dilithium-refining cap if it meant that they could loosen up the restrictions a bit?
What number would you be willing to accept as the limit?
- LTS since shortly before the F2P announcement, and very happy about it.
I believe so, but the people who have bought a bajillion character slots and leveled them would likely rage.
Good point...
What about separate limits? You could have a 2k character limit, plus a 6k account limit (for example, not necessarily those numbers exactly). If you refine 8k with one character, then you can only do 2k with each additional character. This way you can still get some extra dilithium out of your alts, but it won't be balance-breaking if a few ways of getting quick dilithium happen to remain in-game.
- LTS since shortly before the F2P announcement, and very happy about it.
I see this as a fair compromise, seeing as the speed at which you can get ore has been pulled back.
Just raising it 1000 would be a good place to start, the cap was meant as the great balancer in the first place, something to keep the economy in check, but at this point they have gone and reduced the ore gains.
[SIGPIC]InGame - @Darth_Tauri[/SIGPIC]
Joined - 9/2011
"You Best Make Peace With Your Dear & Fluffy Lord" - Malcolm Reynolds
This is a proposal by a PWE employee to further squeeze players for cash. Simple as that.
The very fact such an outrageous proposal is being floated by a sock puppet shows that PWE has already made up their mind to do just this to remove alternatives to buying Zen. They'll do this, in the next few weeks, then point at this post and say "well players demanded it".
Also lol @ sock puppets with single-digit post counts. Do does any real player really think that anyone is going to hop on the forums and out of <10 posts they decide to talk about ways to nerf the economy and squeeze $$$ from players?
This is a proposal by a PWE employee to further squeeze players for cash. Simple as that.
The very fact such an outrageous proposal is being floated by a sock puppet shows that PWE has already made up their mind to do just this to remove alternatives to buying Zen. They'll do this, in the next few weeks, then point at this post and say "well players demanded it".
Also lol @ sock puppets with single-digit post counts. Do does any real player really think that anyone is going to hop on the forums and out of <10 posts they decide to talk about ways to nerf the economy and squeeze $$$ from players?
I sincerely hope its a PWE account, how sad would it be if an actual player was suggesting such nonsense?
Edit: The recent S7 debacles were clearly aimed at reducing Dil in player's hands, so its not out of the question some dev has taken it as his personal crusade to prove that the changes to reduce Dil really ARE somehow supported and that all the backlash was just a handful of crazy forum folks! lol. That's about the only way someone suggesting an account Dil cap would make sense.
People with alts are already raging. They took away the "exploit" of the console clickey missions, and they halved ESTF rewards. Now they even took away the dilithium "daily" mission. Maxing out 3 characters took a big chunk of time in season 6, now it's a full time job. I laid in as big a stockpile of dil as I could before season 7 hit, and once that's gone I kind of doubt I'll ever buy anything with dil again.
They made dil a little easier to get for casual players and utterly annihilated it for hardcore multi-character players. Simple as that.
There are two problems with changing over to an account-based dilithium cap.
1. Dilithium is character-bound, not account-bound. Certainly, it can be 'traded' between characters through the dilithium exchange, but the currency itself is still per-character.
2. There are severe scaling issues with additional characters("alts"). Switching over would effectively butcher the sales of additional character slots - something I'm sure the majority of people who invest in STO do. Currently, dilithium prices in the game are scaled per character, not the entire account. I shudder to think of the community's backlash if this change happened without adjusting the price of every dilithium item in the game..
This. Otherwise the original poster's suggestion has no merit.
this is sort of how it is already......i could careless about having an account wide dilth access because i just transfer it all to my main...where i would convert it all at once to zen points or better yet...support my fleet.....after supporting craptic (until the fix the bugs with s7 this is their name :P) by buying zen points
but i wouldnt mind having a way that doesnt make me feel like im cheating the system.....even though everyone with alts knows about this :P
I find this line of replies sadly hilarious. We put a lot of work into the massive list of fixes/changes above, and ya'll are hung up on the ability to skip our content. =p
This is a proposal by a PWE employee to further squeeze players for cash. Simple as that.
The very fact such an outrageous proposal is being floated by a sock puppet shows that PWE has already made up their mind to do just this to remove alternatives to buying Zen. They'll do this, in the next few weeks, then point at this post and say "well players demanded it".
Also lol @ sock puppets with single-digit post counts. Do does any real player really think that anyone is going to hop on the forums and out of <10 posts they decide to talk about ways to nerf the economy and squeeze $$$ from players?
I sincerely hope its a PWE account, how sad would it be if an actual player was suggesting such nonsense?
E
Here's a little course in Logic 101.
When you have people manipulating and exploiting a system, it hurts the players who don't manipulate and exploit the system.
In particular, players who game the dilithium system by having a bajillion alts are the reason for things like adding dilithium costs to Doffs, reducing easy dilithium sources, reducing dilithium faucets, increasing dilithium sinks, and the devaluing of dilithium in general .
Now please go back to school and leave the heavy thinking to the folks who can figure out that 2+2=4
2. There are severe scaling issues with additional characters("alts"). Switching over would effectively butcher the sales of additional character slots - something I'm sure the majority of people who invest in STO do. Currently, dilithium prices in the game are scaled per character, not the entire account. I shudder to think of the community's backlash if this change happened without adjusting the price of every dilithium item in the game..
Depends on the cap. You could set it to a point that supports 2-3 characters , which would eliminate the folks who have 6+ characters and are gaming the system.
When you have people manipulating and exploiting a system, it hurts the players who don't manipulate and exploit the system.
In particular, players who game the dilithium system by having a bajillion alts are the reason for things like adding dilithium costs to Doffs, reducing easy dilithium sources, reducing dilithium faucets, increasing dilithium sinks, and the devaluing of dilithium in general .
Now please go back to school and leave the heavy thinking to the folks who can figure out that 2+2=4
Yeah, well here's some common sense. Don't fix what isn't broken.
PWE already got a taste of player rage over the recent dilithium tinkering.
Imagine what will happen if PWE gets all TRIBBLE about it.
NO to ARC RIP KDF and PvP 2014-07-17 Season 9.5 - Death by Dev
I think the OP is right .Make a account limit that way 10000 zen will be 1 dilithium which will be great for small fleets which spend real money on dilithium.
look yourself for a facepalm pic because this trolling thread is not smart enough to make me waste my time looking for one.
I think the OP is right .Make a account limit that way 10000 zen will be 1 dilithium which will be great for small fleets which spend real money on dilithium.
look yourself for a facepalm pic because this trolling thread is not smart enough to make me waste my time looking for one.
If you're okay with killing their character slot sales, and they're also okay with it, I think it's a fine idea. I mean, I'm sure all those alt slots are being bought because they love every single Trek species and they love dressing them up.
But they might be used to farm the tiny little field.
they've effectively already done it. It's an unstated account cap.
I have 9 characters, I tried to play them all just to see. What I could do in around five hours before would take me twelve now. I'm sure the 100% purple doff people can keep a higher rate but I'm not at their level nor care to be. Most people can't play five hours daily, and I won't be able to either shortly with new work schedule.
They've killed the utils from alts. The diminishing returns after the 2nd and 3rd character are too prohibitive. The fact I have to do traelus again as an integral part of the routine kills part of my soul. scan-repair-upgrade-realign-patch-fall asleep in chair for 5 minutes-scan-replace-upgrade-initiate-scan-beam over... fight! pick up-call it in-do it again (many times when I wake up here, I log out)
The most I can stand now is spend five minutes doing lore/doff each character, pick one character to cap, maybe start a second. If I score a borg RA or Mirror I'll take it, otherwise recheck doffs and log. Just knowing how nerfed I am is making me do less grind than before I made all the seven extra characters. They basically followed me around and eliminated everything I did in game.
My poor Klingon is just standing around Q'nos exhausting her stack of contraband. I can't be bothered to drag her around sector space hunting freighters.
I spent hours reading the forums today instead of playing. Was more gratifying.
Hrm... if there was an account cap (or rather, a lower one), and it had a noticable impact on the Z|D exchange rate? It'd make Dilithium more valuable, and I could get more Zen for what I do. I'd be perfectly fine with that.
Granted, that's me being selfish. I've only got a small operation running (1 fed, 2 kdf), and seldom hit the per-character refinement cap...
That said, I'm not sure if this would be the best way to do it... certainly, folks spending money on extra character slots, be it to alt or farm like nuts, is money for the game. I like the game, and want it to be too profitable to kill off (unlike COH ).
I'm a little torn. Of course, the inability to see unintended consequences is a big part of that
My blog! Zen|Dilithium tracking on Thursdays http://samonmaui.blogspot.com As a lifetime member of STO, I officially became a financial liability as of April 2012 when compared to a subscriber.
I think it makes sense. You want to have frontloading of rewards, so it is more fun to log in daily and get increased rewards for your char and the longer you play the less rewards you get. (like rested-XP, daily quests, etc)
But this makes the system vulnerable to alt exploits.
So you introduce an account cap to compensate for that. alt still are useful, because you do 10 times the easy things with 10 chars, instead of 10 decreasing things with 1 char.
aestu is just afraid he can no longer extremely exploit it with 20 chars. It's like rich people who don't want to pay higher taxes than everybody else.
This is a proposal by a PWE employee to further squeeze players for cash. Simple as that.
The very fact such an outrageous proposal is being floated by a sock puppet shows that PWE has already made up their mind to do just this to remove alternatives to buying Zen. They'll do this, in the next few weeks, then point at this post and say "well players demanded it".
Also lol @ sock puppets with single-digit post counts. Do does any real player really think that anyone is going to hop on the forums and out of <10 posts they decide to talk about ways to nerf the economy and squeeze $$$ from players?
the OP is asking, would you accept having the per character cap raised to say 10'000 or 12'000 but having a total cap per account of say 20'000 or 30'000. changing the restrictions by giving us something on one end and taking away on the other. its just an idea.
you dont have to agree with the idea (and neither do i) but just because someone suggests an idea does not mean it some pwe employee.
people with less characters (who the Op probably falls under) would benefit but people who have multiple characters or grind a lot would not benefit. if everyone hates the idea then fine, but there is no harm in asking a question of people thoughts. you dont have to go all conspiracy theory on everyone.
I think it makes sense. You want to have frontloading of rewards, so it is more fun to log in daily and get increased rewards for your char and the longer you play the less rewards you get. (like rested-XP, daily quests, etc)
But this makes the system vulnerable to alt exploits.
I think the biggest trick would be addressing that one word: exploit. I'm assuming there's some sort of time vs reward threshold the devs consider acceptable, and going past that is getting into exploit territory. I think it might be better to look at things from that perspective more than anything else.
There was another thread where I mentioned Paragon Studio's MARTy; it was a system meant to basically throttle back rewards if players went past a certain point in a short period of time. So, if you were earning enough XP to get to level 50 in three hours, MARTy would look at that, go "hey, that's too fast," and throttle back your rewards until it normalized. If you were on track to earn 100 million in currency (outside the marketplace), then you got scaled back. So on and so forth.
Something like that for Dilithium might be worth considering. Someone making 8,000k dilithium per character over several characters over several hours? No big deal. Someone making 100,000 dilithium in an hour (or whatever - just making up numbers)? That would need to be addressed/scaled back.
Granted, it was made to deal with exploit-level earnings, not highly-efficient players...
My blog! Zen|Dilithium tracking on Thursdays http://samonmaui.blogspot.com As a lifetime member of STO, I officially became a financial liability as of April 2012 when compared to a subscriber.
i think having huge amount of characters per account, farming dilithium is exploit plain and simple and one big reason why cryptic and pwe made huge fails of trying to cut dilithium from other sources. so i think somekinda cap would be in order.
You're sure putting a lot of energy into championing PWE.
I'm just trying to stamp out stupid. I gave you clear and concise reasons as to why not having an account cap hurts the average player, and you blather on about forum conspiracies like a damned nutcase. Which one of us really has an agenda?
Comments
Good point...
What about separate limits? You could have a 2k character limit, plus a 6k account limit (for example, not necessarily those numbers exactly). If you refine 8k with one character, then you can only do 2k with each additional character. This way you can still get some extra dilithium out of your alts, but it won't be balance-breaking if a few ways of getting quick dilithium happen to remain in-game.
Just raising it 1000 would be a good place to start, the cap was meant as the great balancer in the first place, something to keep the economy in check, but at this point they have gone and reduced the ore gains.
Joined - 9/2011
"You Best Make Peace With Your Dear & Fluffy Lord" - Malcolm Reynolds
The very fact such an outrageous proposal is being floated by a sock puppet shows that PWE has already made up their mind to do just this to remove alternatives to buying Zen. They'll do this, in the next few weeks, then point at this post and say "well players demanded it".
Also lol @ sock puppets with single-digit post counts. Do does any real player really think that anyone is going to hop on the forums and out of <10 posts they decide to talk about ways to nerf the economy and squeeze $$$ from players?
I sincerely hope its a PWE account, how sad would it be if an actual player was suggesting such nonsense?
Edit: The recent S7 debacles were clearly aimed at reducing Dil in player's hands, so its not out of the question some dev has taken it as his personal crusade to prove that the changes to reduce Dil really ARE somehow supported and that all the backlash was just a handful of crazy forum folks! lol. That's about the only way someone suggesting an account Dil cap would make sense.
They made dil a little easier to get for casual players and utterly annihilated it for hardcore multi-character players. Simple as that.
I Support Disco | Disco is Love | Disco is Life
"Take my money! Please! All of it!"
This. Otherwise the original poster's suggestion has no merit.
1. Dilithium is character-bound, not account-bound. Certainly, it can be 'traded' between characters through the dilithium exchange, but the currency itself is still per-character.
2. There are severe scaling issues with additional characters("alts"). Switching over would effectively butcher the sales of additional character slots - something I'm sure the majority of people who invest in STO do. Currently, dilithium prices in the game are scaled per character, not the entire account. I shudder to think of the community's backlash if this change happened without adjusting the price of every dilithium item in the game..
this is sort of how it is already......i could careless about having an account wide dilth access because i just transfer it all to my main...where i would convert it all at once to zen points or better yet...support my fleet.....after supporting craptic (until the fix the bugs with s7 this is their name :P) by buying zen points
but i wouldnt mind having a way that doesnt make me feel like im cheating the system.....even though everyone with alts knows about this :P
You are absolutely ridiculous.
Here's a little course in Logic 101.
When you have people manipulating and exploiting a system, it hurts the players who don't manipulate and exploit the system.
In particular, players who game the dilithium system by having a bajillion alts are the reason for things like adding dilithium costs to Doffs, reducing easy dilithium sources, reducing dilithium faucets, increasing dilithium sinks, and the devaluing of dilithium in general .
Now please go back to school and leave the heavy thinking to the folks who can figure out that 2+2=4
Depends on the cap. You could set it to a point that supports 2-3 characters , which would eliminate the folks who have 6+ characters and are gaming the system.
Condescending talk from forum workers because this outrageous PWE cash grab doesn't have a leg to stand on.
Yeah, well here's some common sense.
Don't fix what isn't broken.
PWE already got a taste of player rage over the recent dilithium tinkering.
Imagine what will happen if PWE gets all TRIBBLE about it.
RIP KDF and PvP 2014-07-17 Season 9.5 - Death by Dev
look yourself for a facepalm pic because this trolling thread is not smart enough to make me waste my time looking for one.
It was broken, that's the point.
If you're okay with killing their character slot sales, and they're also okay with it, I think it's a fine idea. I mean, I'm sure all those alt slots are being bought because they love every single Trek species and they love dressing them up.
But they might be used to farm the tiny little field.
Do you actually believe that? I'm just curious if your really that deluded or if you only like the dramatics of it.
I have 9 characters, I tried to play them all just to see. What I could do in around five hours before would take me twelve now. I'm sure the 100% purple doff people can keep a higher rate but I'm not at their level nor care to be. Most people can't play five hours daily, and I won't be able to either shortly with new work schedule.
They've killed the utils from alts. The diminishing returns after the 2nd and 3rd character are too prohibitive. The fact I have to do traelus again as an integral part of the routine kills part of my soul. scan-repair-upgrade-realign-patch-fall asleep in chair for 5 minutes-scan-replace-upgrade-initiate-scan-beam over... fight! pick up-call it in-do it again (many times when I wake up here, I log out)
The most I can stand now is spend five minutes doing lore/doff each character, pick one character to cap, maybe start a second. If I score a borg RA or Mirror I'll take it, otherwise recheck doffs and log. Just knowing how nerfed I am is making me do less grind than before I made all the seven extra characters. They basically followed me around and eliminated everything I did in game.
My poor Klingon is just standing around Q'nos exhausting her stack of contraband. I can't be bothered to drag her around sector space hunting freighters.
I spent hours reading the forums today instead of playing. Was more gratifying.
What's it to you? What's your angle here?
You're sure putting a lot of energy into championing PWE.
/10char
Granted, that's me being selfish. I've only got a small operation running (1 fed, 2 kdf), and seldom hit the per-character refinement cap...
That said, I'm not sure if this would be the best way to do it... certainly, folks spending money on extra character slots, be it to alt or farm like nuts, is money for the game. I like the game, and want it to be too profitable to kill off (unlike COH ).
I'm a little torn. Of course, the inability to see unintended consequences is a big part of that
My blog! Zen|Dilithium tracking on Thursdays
http://samonmaui.blogspot.com
As a lifetime member of STO, I officially became a financial liability as of April 2012 when compared to a subscriber.
But this makes the system vulnerable to alt exploits.
So you introduce an account cap to compensate for that. alt still are useful, because you do 10 times the easy things with 10 chars, instead of 10 decreasing things with 1 char.
aestu is just afraid he can no longer extremely exploit it with 20 chars. It's like rich people who don't want to pay higher taxes than everybody else.
the OP is asking, would you accept having the per character cap raised to say 10'000 or 12'000 but having a total cap per account of say 20'000 or 30'000. changing the restrictions by giving us something on one end and taking away on the other. its just an idea.
you dont have to agree with the idea (and neither do i) but just because someone suggests an idea does not mean it some pwe employee.
people with less characters (who the Op probably falls under) would benefit but people who have multiple characters or grind a lot would not benefit. if everyone hates the idea then fine, but there is no harm in asking a question of people thoughts. you dont have to go all conspiracy theory on everyone.
I think the biggest trick would be addressing that one word: exploit. I'm assuming there's some sort of time vs reward threshold the devs consider acceptable, and going past that is getting into exploit territory. I think it might be better to look at things from that perspective more than anything else.
There was another thread where I mentioned Paragon Studio's MARTy; it was a system meant to basically throttle back rewards if players went past a certain point in a short period of time. So, if you were earning enough XP to get to level 50 in three hours, MARTy would look at that, go "hey, that's too fast," and throttle back your rewards until it normalized. If you were on track to earn 100 million in currency (outside the marketplace), then you got scaled back. So on and so forth.
Something like that for Dilithium might be worth considering. Someone making 8,000k dilithium per character over several characters over several hours? No big deal. Someone making 100,000 dilithium in an hour (or whatever - just making up numbers)? That would need to be addressed/scaled back.
Granted, it was made to deal with exploit-level earnings, not highly-efficient players...
My blog! Zen|Dilithium tracking on Thursdays
http://samonmaui.blogspot.com
As a lifetime member of STO, I officially became a financial liability as of April 2012 when compared to a subscriber.
I'm just trying to stamp out stupid. I gave you clear and concise reasons as to why not having an account cap hurts the average player, and you blather on about forum conspiracies like a damned nutcase. Which one of us really has an agenda?