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Z:D Exchange - trying to interpret numbers.
chikahiro
Member Posts: 35 Arc User
Latest blog ^_^
http://samonmaui.blogspot.com/2012/11/sto-zd-exchange-traffic.html
The long story made short, I'm trying to figure out if traffic volume in the marketplace has significant influence on the price or not. Up until recently? Doesn't seem so. After Season 7, I think one could argue there is, but then the question is why now and not before? Certainly, there are higher volume days, but those don't correlate with a drop in price for Z:D.
Still working on my Excel-fu, and I'm not an economist. But its interesting to theorize ^_^
Thoughts? Ideas? Tell me how to overlay two charts on top of each other?
edit: And to the devs - thank you for the Exchange. It been one of the most fascinating things about the game to me!
edit #2: Chart has been revised, so you've got the volume and price there. Most recent pricing is at http://samonmaui.blogspot.com/2012/11/sto-dilithium-tracking-112112-day-early.html
http://samonmaui.blogspot.com/2012/11/sto-zd-exchange-traffic.html
The long story made short, I'm trying to figure out if traffic volume in the marketplace has significant influence on the price or not. Up until recently? Doesn't seem so. After Season 7, I think one could argue there is, but then the question is why now and not before? Certainly, there are higher volume days, but those don't correlate with a drop in price for Z:D.
Still working on my Excel-fu, and I'm not an economist. But its interesting to theorize ^_^
Thoughts? Ideas? Tell me how to overlay two charts on top of each other?
edit: And to the devs - thank you for the Exchange. It been one of the most fascinating things about the game to me!
edit #2: Chart has been revised, so you've got the volume and price there. Most recent pricing is at http://samonmaui.blogspot.com/2012/11/sto-dilithium-tracking-112112-day-early.html
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.
Post edited by chikahiro on
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Well, if this is right, it's probably wildly profitable.
People are paying more for dilithium and volume is better than it was three months ago.
Well, its more like sports cars and Apple stuff - there's a lower volume being sold, but its at a higher profit. Also, with as little being done right now, I can't tell how much of the Zen is stipend Zen or bought Zen.
Really, we'd need more information to determine if how much more is or isn't being made. Certainly, if volume was higher at current prices that'd be really WOW, but that's not the case right now.
Unless, of course, you can figure this stuff out. Which I can't.
Oh, and the 3 months ago? Sorry, that's when I expanded my tracking ,which makes that early segment unreliable. I just wasn't sure how to handle that in Excel
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.
Well, even if it's stipend ZEN, that's a real liability on the books. It should be, under GAAP anyway.
We would need to compare this to other sales to know if it's cutting into them though. (Ie. if people shifted their buying here, it's not as dramatic of a gain.)
And looking at your chart, the orange line is the important one.
I just looked closer. Looks to have gone from 425k ZEN being sold to 100k. Not nearly as rosy.
Also, I think maybe these numbers don't reflect successful transactions that well.
I'll readily admit the odds of my logic/tracking being flawed are pretty high. I'm working with what I can see, and am hoping to gain some insight based off my observations.
The numbers are the amount of Zen in the top 5 pools. Because the Exchange is live, the #1 and #2 spots for buying/selling change change several times while I'm recording everything. I really do not know how to figure out how to estimate the actual completed sales with the information provided.
I've been tracking:
On Thursdays I update my general graphs/charts, and post them.
I am, frankly, an amateur at this, with a DTP background (ie, not applicable). I'm teaching myself Office, and using this as way to do so. While I started off very simply, I began adding data as my curiosity grew, even though I had little idea of how to use it. Ideas came over time, and this was the latest one I had.
If I could track the volume with the pricing, that'd be perfect.
edit: Trust me - ANY insights on making this better for folks would be greatly appreciated
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.
Ive been a big basher towards Cryptics changes in season 7 and these charts showcase why. I actually want Cryptic and STO to succeed and for them to make more money and improve the game.
Lets look at your numbers.
The important line on your graph is the pink one. This line illustrates what happens when people buy Zen and spend it on dilithium. The 50 day moving average seems to be in the neighborhood of 500,000 dilithium a day at an exchange rate of 150. This suggests that every month people are buying $100,000 of zen which they convert to dilithium and use on products that need dilithium. I actually think your volume numbers are low and its probably a minimum of 2X your charts. At $250,000 a month, the numbers would suggest that $3 million a year is being spent supporting Cryptic and STO by people buying Zen, converting it to dilithium and spending it on virtual products.
Your charts seem to suggest that after season 7 dropped those numbers have dropped 90% to where daily averages are showing 50,000 dilithium per day being sold and at a lower rate.
Despite many of the fan boys screaming that they are making more dilithium than ever and selling it on the exchange, the big picture numbers are suggesting that people are buying far less zen to convert to dilithium.
You are right to point out the stipend factor. We do not know how much Stipend is being converted to dilithium. If people were converting 25,000 worth of zen stipend a day then it was not a big percentage of 500,000 but if they are still converting 25,000 a day its a hefty percentage when you are selling only 50,000 per day.
Its honestly, unfair to suggest that your numbers are dead on and you are the first to admit the fact that they are not. Still, you are tracking the top 5 bids below market and the top 5 asks above the market and its not unreasonable to suggest that with bid/ask contractions that the sharp declines in volume and activity your charts bespeak are noteworthy.
We could talk about why volume and activity is decreasing but thats probably best left for other threads. Your charts are showing what many predicted. Zen would decrease in value and when it did, people would buy less zen as it became obvious to them that they were getting reduced value for their real world money.
Reduced volume is mitigating the damage a bit and slowing the rate of dilithium inflation but its almost inevitable that huge sharp reductions in dilithium have caused the value of dilithium to rise. And its obvious that higher prices for dilithium are impacting sales of zen.
I would say the OPs charts are on the accurate side and probably conservative. Its probably not a bad guess to suggest that dilithium inflation will impact Cryptic Zen sales and reduce their sales, revenues, and profits by about $2,500,000.00 US dollars a year. Its not overly out of line to suggest that if dilithium continues to become more rare that the value of Zen will continue to fall further and Zen sales will slide more.
The OPs charts are showing that as Zen becomes more worthless on the dilithium exchange that customers are not buying more of it to compensate for the staggering decline of value of Zen. Dilithium sales may interest customers and players but Zen sales are what keeps Cryptic in business. And Zen sales for the purpose of dilithium conversion are down sharply. Factoring in stipends, its probably far uglier than most really imagine. People may say "other" people will buy more zen to compensate for poor exchange rates but honestly it aint happening. Ive yet to see a post from someone that admitted they were willing to buy more zen after cryptic destroyed the value of it versus an inflated dilithium exchange rate.
Cryptic needs to sell lots of ships, lockbox keys, and doffin packs to make up for this decline and Im not sure they can do it. This is a fee for service business model and $2 million in lost sales goes right to the bottom line. Im not sure Cryptic and PWE can punt $2 mill a year that hammers the bottom line and not miss it.
Easy money on the dilithium front was good for the company. Going real tight on the dilithium supply really is not. Cryptic pulled the peg for the exchange rate and let the value of zen float via dilithium based inflation. They destroyed the value of the one product they have to sell and volume trends are starting to show it.
We dont know the absolute sales figures for sure.... but these charts are showing some real bad news and I for one think that they may not be perfectly accurate but they are downright relevant and show some noticeable trends that are deserving of notice.
Cryptic needs to put more dilithium in the hands of its players and they need to increase it by 900% or so to get back to flowing purchases of Zen. Even now, it would be hard to undo the damage they have done to themselves if they did reverse course. And of course they wont .... until .....
Biggest thing for me was I really wasn't aware of the Foundry exploit - I was told of it, but ignored it. I want to play the game the way I want to, not necessarily "the most efficient way." But, seems that has had a significant impact on things.
I'm very curious to see how things go in the next few months. Nothing is really set in stone, and costs will be tweaked over time.
Worth noting: purchasing Zen is multi-use, so there's probably been healthy sales from the new ships, for instance. I'm curious to see what else goes on as time goes by.
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.
Good points there. I have noticed among the people I chat with regularly in-game that a sense of need for dil is rising, but nobody seems compelled to grind dil any harder. Also, I note that the sense of need for Zen is pretty low. Added to that I have noted that a lot of the people I know have a pile of Zen now, and they aren't spending it. I think reducing the price of things like keys and doff packs might do a lot to offset this. 275 Zen for a pack that probably won't even grant you a purple doff seems steep. I bought 5 Fleet Support DOff packs for EC and not one had a purple doff in it, let alone an exotic one. I have used stacks of 99 keys in a row and gotten junk. I'm so glad I don't pay Zen for these things or I'd feel horribly cheated. A lower price on those might make it more appealing given the harsh odds for the gambles around here, which of course would move a lot more Zen out of circulation, improving their value.
1. How much of the "volume" are speculators buying up Dil to "resell" it if/when the exchange hits 100 per zen? Watching volume of dilithium moving through the market without seeing the volume of that moved dilithium exiting the economy we cannot tell...
2. So far, my only hypothesis about the exchange's prices revolves around the fact that the farmers who supply the market are insisting upon X amount of play = Y Zen, and since their "quick exploits" have dried up, they're driving the price down so that they still make their zen, to heck with the playerbase that's supplying this zen...
To rob a line: [quote: Mariemaia Kushrenada] Forum Posting is much like an endless waltz. The three beats of war, peace and revolution continue on forever. However, opinions will change upon the reading of my post.[/quote]
Truth is there is just less dilith about, some are hoarding but most of us who were hitting our daily caps in S6 are not in S7... this weekend I failed to hit cap at all on any 3 of my chars.
I also play the game a lot less since S7.
#2311#2700#2316#2500
This. There are a lot of folks who have moved on to try f2p in that other game while Cryptic sorts out their economy. Many won't return.
If Starbases are still being advanced, and some are, requirements for dilithium haven't gone away, what has most gone away is the ability to advance starbases with dilithium projects.
I know as a short term solution fleets are spending fleet credit like mad to fill doff based starbase projects. That sucks though because that means a starbase is a self licking ice cream cone- a mechanism to earn fleet credit to advance a starbase so that you can spend fleet credit to advance a starbase.
But that's the state of STO these days.
Great chart and discussion. From my own experience i am moving less than 10% the currency through the exchange per day than I was in season seven, despite the exchange being much more volatile these days with a large margin between high and low on any single day. As STF conversations dry up, I suspect we are still another week or two from the bottom, and 960 dilithium three times a week via reputation xp isn't going to go very far.
Rules of Acquisition at Priority One
If you have a stable market at 157 Dil/zen it's not important for the amount actually being sold how many people are offering to sell zen at 160 and how many people are offering to buy zen at 154 because those offers wont be taken.
Right know we often have a situation were people are offering to sell zen at x+1 (lets say 127) and people are offering to buy at x-1 (125) with a very small amount at x (126) and with x changing quite fast.
Lets put some real numbers on this:
1st snapshot:
50000 zen to sell at 127
0 zen to sell at 126
0 zen to buy at 126
50000 zen to buy at 125
now someone offers to sell 5000 at 126 and 1 second later someone offers to buy that zen at 126.
if we then take our next snapshot it would look excactly like the one before yet 5000 zen have just been sold without us being able to notice.
We would have to take samples extremly fast and make some assumptions about what happens at x (offer might have been taken down intstead of a transaction occuring) if we want to deduce the volume of transactions.
In the end the only one knowing how much zen people are converting to dil is cryptic and they won't be telling us.
No offers that aren't the best offers are allowed to complete.
I can offer to buy at 100 dil per ZEN and you can offer to sell at that rate but from my limited understanding, our offers will not get matched until the bulk of the offers shift that direction.
A shame no one told Cryptic this would happen...
We don't know if they're making more money or less. Among other things, I'm not sure this chart tracks speed of transactions.
Or they've stopped playing altogether and moved on to other games.
I wish I could track actual transactions. As is, I can only see what's currently being offered in each "pool." For all I know there could be tons of successful transactions, but those never show up on the tracker! There's a lot that can happen between numbers being updated, and that's not including stuff happening off the chart (ie, people putting offers "in wait" for a certain rate or storing Dilithium/Zen).
Each "snapshot" I took is just that, a snapshot. Just a moment in time, and only of certain numbers. As said, Cryptic is the one with all the data, and I'd give somebody else's left arm to peek at that stuff, plus their leg to have someone explain it to me.
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.
We have no way to know how much Zen is jut being bought directly from PWE itself to buy CStore items; and also, one thing I think market watchers are forgetting is the amount of Dilithium Ore created inn the pre-season 7 sell of /conversion of old STF items to Dilithium Ore.
In other words, if you have a character with a huge backlog of ore, chances are players aren't continuing to grind for new Dilithium ore all that much; and may actually be doing other content (stuff that gives marks); or taking a break all together as they wait for the announced tweaks, etc.
There is also the fact that SWToR has gone F2P - and some players (as has been said above) may have gone to give it a try (and some doing so again, as they wait for S7 fixes and tweaks.)
I honestly don't think the drop of about 200 Dill from Elite STF runs caused all that much volitility. The closing of the 'Officer Reports' Foundry wrapper mission exploit was probably the largest cause - as I really do believe a lot of Dil farmers used to have 10+ alts when they just logged in every day for 5 minutes on each one - got the 1440 + 480 for the SFA lore mission, converted it, combined the refined Dil on one mule character and logged out. Now, if they still use those alts, they're down from 1920 per character per day tom 480 per character per day.
In this situation, the 8K a day refining cap has more effect as well, as, since you actually have to play more of the game (time wise) to get dilithium, combined with the fact you need to Rep up also to get the better gear; instead of logging 10 alts in quickly each day; players are now concentrating on progressing one or two characters, and actually playing the game.
As for the less chat in channels - lets be honest - if you are actually playing and paying attention to the game; and not just alt swtiching and doing a click while standing in front of a console; hyou're not going to be able to type as much as you used to.
At peak play times, I've never had any issues getting a Fleet group together; or puging queues with the new 'Mark' content -m I don't think I've had to wait more than two minute sfor a PvE queue to pop when puging something of late. Also, I still see a lot of player instances in the social zones, so again, there does seem the still be a lot of players in STO. (but that anecdotal, like the majority of the rest of the evidence around here.)
It appears a lot of people dissatisfied with the S7 changes; and the Dil Exchange fluctuations want to immediately call S7 DOA and 'bad for the health of the game'. Problem is, it's too soon to do so, as until we have the full set of changes (like being able to convert Omega Marks to Dilithium at any Tier; the influx of items from the STF conversion boxes being unlocked in the next patch, Dill from the completion of Rep up assignments, etc.); we can't judge a rel positive or negative overall trend yet.
I do think though that as a result you do have more people playing STO - and less bots/farmers clicking for dilithium; and that alone WILL have an effect of the Dil exchange regardless.
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..."
I know people with 10k zen posting them and then removing offers to set them at another price. Of course it's accounted as a sale in your system but no one made a deal. These people are just generating a huge amount of spam in offers and I believe these data aren't accurate at all.
God, lvl 60 CW. 17k.
Trick being is those transactions are effectively invisible to me. In order for 1:25 transactions to be visible, the top rates for selling Zen would have be 1:25, 1:26, 1:27, 1:28, 1:29. The lowest I've seen is around 1:120-something. The market has to move a lot more for those things to be visible.
The Exchange only shows the 5 best rates for Selling Dilithium for Zen and Selling Zen for Dilithium. The rest of them are effectively invisible to a mere mortal like me. I'm well aware of the 1:25 technique, as I use it regularly myself.
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.
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.
Hm i don't know i usually put it on the exchange for 1-2 zen under the max price, it works well for me and i don't bother with the 1:25 rate. And I really think your stats are completely broken by speculators, I'm not sure you can address that.
God, lvl 60 CW. 17k.
Different perspectives, I guess?
Geez, I would love to have more Blue Bartenders, or even a Purple bartender, but then I'm using them a lot for DOFFs and the like (tend to favor diplomatic and development assignments). I generally grind down rather than compact up; if I want upgrades, I do Exchange assignments.
I see your point for Fleet gear, but those were there before Season 7.
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.
Probably not, sadly. Due to my lack of education on the subject, its difficult for me to parse the data, nevermind figure out what I'm lacking or doing wrong. So, well, record record and try anyways! Reading a lot of these posts has been great, so
Given the normal behaviors I've seen? Usually there are pools that seem a bit larger but aren't where "the action is" - I suspect its people who don't want to pay the going price, and are leaving their bids in place for the expected swings.
I was doing more speculation early on; I wouldn't buy Zen above a certain price, and would sell when the price swung at least 5 points the other direction. Sell all the Zen for Dilithium, then sit on it until it swung the other way again. Chances are I'd still be doing that except I've gotten hungry for Lobi
Normally the lows would be on the weekends, with the week's Dilithium high being on Thursdays.
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.
http://samonmaui.blogspot.com/2012/12/sto-dilithium-tracking-12612.html
And I really wish I could find out if people are keeping their dilithium for themselves (ie, not using the exchange), or if dilithium supply is really that bad off right now. Of course, also keeping in mind that the fast foundry missions probably made up far more of the dilithium production than I personally suspected way back when :eek:
Oh, and when does school get out for kids and college folks? I wonder what that'll end up doing to the market.
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.